The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature Three Volumes 3 volumes

THE GREENWOOD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Latino Literature THE GREENWOOD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Latino Literature Edited by Nicolás ...

Author: Nicolas Kanellos

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THE GREENWOOD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

Latino Literature

THE GREENWOOD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

Latino Literature Edited by

Nicolás Kanellos

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Greenwood encyclopedia of Latino literature / edited by Nicolás Kanellos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33970–7 ((set) : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33971–4 ((vol. 1) : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33972–1 ((vol. 2) : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33973–8 ((vol. 3) : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Hispanic American authors—Encyclopedias. I. Kanellos, Nicolás. II. Title: Encyclopedia of Latino literature. PS153.H56G74 2008 810.9'868073003—dc22 2008018314 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2008 by Nicolás Kanellos All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008018314 ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33970–7 (set) 978–0–313–33971–4 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–33972–1 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–33973–8 (vol. 3) First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and Susan Stevens, because of their confidence in me and their vision for Arte Público Press and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.

CONTENTS List of Entries

ix

Guide to Related Topics

xxi

Preface

xxv

Acknowledgments

xxix

Introduction

xxxi

The Encyclopedia

1

Bibliography

1309

Index

1317

About the Editor

1353

Advisory Board: Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage

1355

Contributors

1357

vii

LIST OF ENTRIES Aboy Benítez, Juan Academia de la Nueva Raza Acosta, Iván Mariano Acosta, Mercedes de Acosta, Oscar Zeta Aesthetic Concepts of Latino Literature African Roots Agosín, Marjorie Agostini de Del Río, Amelia Agüeros, Jack Aguilar Melantzón, Ricardo Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo Alarcón, Alicia Alarcón, Francisco X. Alarcón, Justo Albizu Campos, Pedro Alcalá, Kathleen Alegría, Fernando Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo

Alfaro, Luis Algarín, Miguel Alianza Federal de las Mercedes Alianza Hispano-Americana Allende, Isabel Allo, Lorenzo Alurista Alvarez, Julia Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, José Ambert, Alba Amy, Francisco Javier Anaya, Rudolfo A. Anda, Diane de Anders, Gigi Anzaldúa, Gloria Arce, Julio G. Arce, Miguel (Manuel) Areíto Arellano, Juan Esteban Arenas, Reinaldo

ix

List of Entries

Argüelles, Iván Argueta, Jorge Arias, Arturo Arias, Ron Armand, Octavio Rafael Armiño, Franca de Arroyo, Angel M. Arroyo, Rane Arte Público Press Arteaga, Alfred Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores ASPIRA, Inc. Association of Hispanic Arts Atencio, Tomás Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York Awards Aztlán Azuela, Mariano Baca, Jimmy Santiago Badikian-Gartler, Beatriz Báez, Annecy Báez, Josefina Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents Barela, Casimiro Barquet, Jesús J. Barrio Barrio, Raymund Behar, Ruth Belpré, Pura Beltrán Hernández, Irene Bencastro, Mario Benítez, Sandra Benítez Rojo, Antonio Bernal, Vicente J. x

Bernardo, Anilu Bertrand, Diane Gonzales Betances Jaeger, Clotilde Bildungsroman The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts Bilingual Review/Press Bilingualism in Literature Björkquist, Elena Díaz Blanco, Beatriz Blanco, Richard Bolaños Cacho, Miguel Bolet Peraza, Nicanor Bolio, Dolores Book Fairs and Festivals Bordao, Rafael Border Literature Borderlands Theater Borinsky, Alicia Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina Brammer, Ethriam Cash Braschi, Giannina Braschi, Wilfredo Brinson Curiel, Barbara Brito, Aristeo Brown Berets Bruce-Novoa, Juan Burciaga, José Antonio Burgos, Julia de Burk, Ronnie Byrne, Bonifacio Caballero, Pedro Cabeza de Vaca, Ezequiel Cabeza a de Vaca, Fabiola Cabrera, Lydia Cadilla Ruibal, Carmen Alicia Calaca Press Calleros, Cleofas

List of Entries

Camacho, Simón Camarillo y Roa de Pereyra, María Enriqueta Cambeira, Alan Campa, Arthur León Campo, Rafael Campos, Tito Canales, José T. Canales, Viola Candelaria, Nash Cano, Daniel Cantú, Norma Elia Capetillo, Luisa Caraballo Cruz, Samuel Cárdenas, Isidra T. Cárdenas, Reyes Caro, Brígido Carrasquillo, Pedro Carrero, Jaime Carrillo, Adolfo Carrillo, Eduardo A. Carrillo, Leo La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc. Casal, Lourdes Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia Castañeda, Carlos Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, Omar S. Castellano, Olivia Castellanos, Henry C. Castellón, Pedro Angel Castellot, José Castilla, Julia Mercedes Castillo, Ana Castillo, Gary Catacalos, Rosemary

Catalá, Rafael Ceja, Manuel Central American Literature Central American Refugees Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York Centro Español de Ybor City Cervantes, Lorna Dee Chacón, Daniel Chacón, Eusebio Chacón, Felipe Maximiliano Chacón Gonzales, Herminia Chapa, Francisco Chavarría-Cháirez, Becky Chávez, Angélico Chávez, César Chávez, Denise Chávez Padilla, Ernesto Chicana Liberation Chicano Identity Chicano Literature Chicano Movement Chicano Press Association “Chicano Renaissance” Children’s and Young Adult Literature Chusma House Círculo de Cultura Panamericano Círculo de Tabaqueros Cisneros, Evangelina Cisneros, Sandra Clavijo, Uva Cocco de Filippis, Daisy Cofer, Judith Ortiz Coll y Vidal, Antonio Colón, Jesús Colón López, Joaquín xi

List of Entries

Colón, Miriam Colonial Literature Con Safos Córdova, Rafael J. De Coronel, Antonio Franco Corpi, Lucha Corrales, José Corretjer, Juan Antonio Corridos Cortez, Carlos Cortez, Gregorio Cortez, Sarah Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo Crónicas and Cronistas Crusade for Justice Cruz, Angie Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Migdalia Cruz, Nicky Cruz, Nilo Cruz, Victor Hernández Cuadra, Angel Cuban American Literature Cuban Literature in the United States Cubí y Soler, Mariano Cuchi Coll, Isabel Culture Clash Cumpián, Carlos Cuza Malé, Belkis Décimas Del Monte, Domingo Delgado, Abelardo Delgado, Juan Díaz, Junot xii

Díaz Guerra, Alirio Diego Padró, José I. de Diego Dominican American Literature Dominican Immigration Dorfman, Ariel Duclós Salinas, Adolfo El Eco del Pacífico Ediciones Universal Editorial Quinto Sol Eire, Carlos Elías González, Adalberto Elizondo, Hortensia Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina Elizondo, Sergio Emilio, Luis Fenellosa Enamorado Cuesta, José Engle, Margarita Escalona, Beatriz Escandón, María Amparo Escobar, Elizam Escobar, José Escobedo, Alonso Gregorio Escuelitas Mexicanas Espada, Martín Espaillat, Rhina Polonia Espina, Eduardo Espinosa, Aurelio M. Espinosa, Conrado Espinosa, María Esquenazi Mayo, Roberto Essay Essex, Olga Berrocal Esteves, Sandra María Estevis, Anne Hailey Exile Literature Falquez-Certain, Miguel

List of Entries

Fantasy Heritage Farfán de los Godos, Marcos Federal Theater Project Fernández, Roberta Fernández, Roberto Fernández Fragoso, Víctor Ferré, Rosario Figueroa, José-Angel Figueroa, Sotero Flores, Ángel Flores, Carlos Nicolás Flores, Francisca Flores Magón, Enrique Flores Magón, Ricardo Florit, Eugenio Folk Drama and Performance Folklore and Oral Tradition Folklore-Based Literature Fontes, Monserrat Fornés, María Irene Foronda, Valentín de Franco, Jesús Fusco, Coco Galarza, Ernesto Galiano, Alina Galindo, Mary Sue Gálvez, Wenceslao Gamboa, Harry, Jr. García, Anthony J. García, Cristina García, Lionel G. García, Richard García-Aguilera, Carolina García-Camarillo, Cecilio García Naranjo, Nemesio Gares, Tomás Garza, Beatriz de la

Garza, Catarino Garza, María Luisa Garza, Xavier Gaspar de Alba, Alicia Gay and Lesbian Literature Gil, Lydia M. Gilb, Dagoberto Gillow y Zavalza, Eulogio Girona, Julio Glickman, Nora Goldemberg, Isaac Goldman, Francisco Gómez Peña, Guillermo Gonzales, Ambrose Elliot Gonzales, Oscar Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” González, Celedonio González, Genaro González, José Luis González, Jovita González, Julián S. González, Leopoldo González, Rafael Jesús González, Ray González, Rigoberto González-Cruz, Luis F. González-Viaña, Eduardo Gou Bourgell, José Gráfico Grillo, Evelio Guerra, Pablo de la Guerrero, Eduardo “Lalo” Guitart, Jorge Gutiérrez, José Angel Gutiérrez de Lara, Lázaro Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio Helú, Antonio xiii

List of Entries

El Heraldo de México Heredia y Heredia, José María Hernández, David Hernández, Inés Hernández, Jo Ann Yolanda Hernández, Rafael Herrera, Juan Felipe Hijuelos, Oscar Hinojosa, Federico Allen Hinojosa, Rolando Hispanic Peoples Hispanic Playwrights Project Hospital, Carolina Hostos, Eugenio María de Hoyos, Angela de Huerta, Dolores Huerta, Javier O. Ibáñez, Armando P. Idar, Jovita Immigrant Literature Immigration Narratives Inditas International Arts Relation (INTAR) Irisarri, Antonio José de Islas, Arturo Islas, Maya Jaramillo, Cleofas M. Jíbaro Jiménez, Francisco Jones Act Juárez, Tina Junco de la Vega, Celedonio Kanellos, Nicolás Keller, Gary D. Kozer, José Labarthe, Pedro Juan xiv

Lachtman, Ofelia Dumas Ladino Lama, Pedro de la Land Grants Land in Literature Landestoy, Carmita Language Choice in Literature Lantigua, John Lara, Ana-Maurine Latin American Writers Institute Laviera, Jesús Abraham “Tato” Leal, Luis León, Daniel de Letamendi, Agustín de Levins Morales, Aurora Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana Limón, Graciela Linden Lane Magazine Literatura Cubana en el Exilio Literature, Development of Latino Literature Little Havana Lleras, Lorenzo María La Llorona Loisaida López, José Heriberto López, Josefina Louisiana Purchase Lozano, Ignacio E. Machado, Eduardo La Malinche Manifest Destiny Manrique, Jaime Mares, Ernesto Antonio Mariel Generation Marín, Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marqués, René

List of Entries

Martí, José Martin, Patricia Preciado Martínez, Antonio José Martínez, Demetria Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, Max Martínez, Michele Martínez, Rubén Martínez, Rueben Martínez, Tomás Eloy Marzán, Julio Mas Pozo, María Matas, Julio Mayer, Oliver Mayo, Wendell Mayor Marsán, Maricel McPeek Villatoro, Marcos Medina, Pablo Medina, Rubén Megía, Félix Mena, María Cristina Méndez, Miguel Mestre, Ernesto Mestre, José Manuel Mexican American Movement México de afuera Mireles, Oscar Mistral, Gabriela Moheno, Querido Mohr, Nicholasa Moncaleano, Blanca de Monge-Rafuls, Pedro Montalvo, José Luis Montes Huidobro, Matías Montoya, José Mora, Joseph Jacinto Mora, Pat

Moraga, Cherríe Morales, Alejandro Moreno-Hinojosa, Hernán Morín, Raúl R. Morton, Carlos Motta, Jacob de la Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social Mujica, Barbara El Mulato Muñoz, Elías Miguel Murguía, Alejandro Murrieta, Joaquín El Museo del Barrio Mutual Aid Societies Múzquiz Blanco, Manuel Nadal de Santa Coloma, Juan Najera, Rick National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies National Association of Latino Arts and Culture National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference Native Literature Nativism Nattes, Enrique Nava, Michael Navarro, Gabriel Navarro, José Antonio Niggli, Josephina Niño, Raúl Niza, Fray Marcos de Nombela y Tabarés, Julio Novás Calvo, Lino Novel xv

List of Entries

Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nuyorican Literature Obejas, Achy O’Farrill, Alberto Olivas, Daniel Ollantay Center for the Arts O’Neill, Ana María O’Neill, Gonzalo Oñate, Juan de Operation Bootstrap Operation Peter Pan “Operation Wetback” Orality Oratory Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila Ortiz-Vargas, Alfredo Otero, Miguel A., Jr. Otero Warren, Nina Pachuco Padilla, Benjamín Padilla, Camilo Padilla, Heberto Padilla, Mike Palacios, Mónica A. Pantoja, Antonia Paredes, Américo Parsons, Lucía (Lucy) González Pau-Llosa, Ricardo Pazos Kanki, Vicente Pedreira, Antonio Salvador Pelados, Peladitos PEN Club de Cubanos en el Exilio Peña, Terri de la Perales, Alonso Pereda, Prudencio de Perera, Victor Pérez, Emma xvi

Pérez, Loida Maritza Pérez, Luis Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez, Raymundo “Tigre” Pérez Bonalde, Juan Antonio Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo Pietri, Pedro Pineda, Cecile Pinkola Estés, Clarissa Piñero, Miguel Piñeyro, Enrique Pirrín, Eusebio Plan de Santa Barbara Playwriting Poetry Pompa, Aurelio Pompa, Elías Calixto Ponce, Mary Helen Ponce de León, Nestor Popular Culture Povod, Reinaldo Preciado Martin, Patricia Pregones Theater Prida, Dolores Prison Literature Publishers and Publishing Pursifull, Carmen Quesada, Aníbal Quesada, Roberto Quiñónez, Ernesto Quiñónez, Naomi Quintana, Leroy V. Quintana, Miguel Matías de Quintero, José A. Race Racial Segregation

List of Entries

Ramírez, Francisco P. Ramírez, Sara Estela Ramírez de Arellano, Diana Ramos, José Antonio Ramos, Manuel Ramos Otero, Manuel Rechy, John Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Redondo, Antonio REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking Reid, Marita Religion Rembao, Alberto Repatriation Revista Chicano-Riqueña Reyes, Guillermo A. Reyes, José Ascención Reyes Rivera, Louis Ríos, Alberto Alvaro Risco, Eliazar Rivera, Beatriz Rivera, Carmen Rivera, José Rivera, Marina Rivera, Tomás Rivera-Myrick, Luz Haydée Rivera y Río, José Rivero, Andrés Rivero Muñiz, José Rocafuerte Bejarano, Vicente Rodríguez, Abraham Jr. Rodríguez, José Policarpo Rodríguez, Luis J. Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús

Rodriguez, Richard Rodríguez de Tió, Lola Romano-Vizcarra, Octavio I. Romero, Leo Romero, Levi La Rosa, Pablo Rosario, Nelly Roscio, Juan Germán Ruiz, Ronald L. Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Ruiz-Flores, Lupe Saco, José Antonio Saenz, Bejamin Alire Sagra, Ramón de la Salas, Floyd Sálaz-Márquez, Rubén Salazar, Manuel M. Salazar, Rubén Sales, Francis Salinas, Luis Omar Salinas, Raúl Sánchez, George I. Sánchez, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Ricardo Sánchez, Trinidad V. Sánchez-Boudy, José Sánchez-Scott, Milcha Sandoval, Víctor Sansores, Rosario Santacilia, Pedro Santayana, George Santiago, Esmeralda Santos, John Philip Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno Sellén, Antonio Sellén, Francisco xvii

List of Entries

Selva, Salomón de la Senarens, Luis Sender, Ramón Sephardic Literature Sepúlveda, Luis G. Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti, Emma Serros, Michele Sierra, Rubén Silén, Iván Silva, Beverly Silva de Cintrón, Josefina Sleepy Lagoon Solano, Gustavo Solís, Roberto Ignacio Soto, Gary Soto, Pedro Juan Soto Vásquez, Carmen Soto Vélez, Clemente Spanish–American War Spanish Black Legend Spanish-Language Book Market Spanish-Language Literature Spanish Republican Exiles Stavans, Ilán Stereotypes Suárez, Mario Suárez, Virgil Svich, Caridad Tafolla, Carmen Tafolla, Santiago Tapia, Consuelo Lee Teatro Repertorio Español Tejera, Diego Vicente Tenayuca, Emma TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán) Testimonial Literature xviii

Theater Theater in a Tent, Circus, Tent Shows Third Woman Press Thomas, Piri Tía Chucha Press Tirado, Cándido Tirado, Romualdo Tolón, Miguel Teurbe Toro, Vincent Torres, Edwin (1931–) Torres, Edwin (1965–) Torres, Omar Torres, Steven Torres, Teodoro Jr. Torres Betances de Córdova, Carmen Tórrez, Everardo Torriente-Brau, Pablo de la Trambley, Estela Portillo Transnationalism Travel Writing Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Trejo, Ernesto Treviño, Jesús Salvador Troncoso, Sergio Troyano, Alina Trujillo, Carla Trujillo, Enrique Trujillo Herrera, Rafael Turla, Leopoldo Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel Ulibarrí, Sabine R. Umpierre-Herrera, Luz María Unger, David Uranga, Rodolfo Urrea, Luis Alberto Valdés, Gina

List of Entries

Valdés-Rodríguez, Alisa Valdez, Luis Valenzuela, Luisa Vallbona, Rima de Valle, Adrián del Valle, Carmen Vallejo, Armando Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Platón Vando, Erasmo Vando, Gloria Varela y Morales, Félix Francisco Vargas, Roberto Varona, Enrique José Vásquez, Enriqueta Vásquez, Ignacio G. Vázquez, Lourdes Vásquez, Richard Véa, Alfredo, Jr. Vega, Bernardo Vega, Ed Velásquez, Gloria Velázquez, Loreta Janeta Vélez-Mitchell, Anita Vendido Venegas, Daniel Venegas, Miguel Vigil, Evangelina

Villanueva, Alma Luz Villanueva, Tino Villanueva Collado, Alfredo Villareal, Edit Villareal, Ray Villarreal, José Antonio Villarreal González, Andrea Villaseñor, Victor Villaverde, Cirilo Villegas de Magnón, Leonor Vingut, Francisco Javier Viramontes, Helena María Virgin of Guadalupe War Wilbur-Cruce, Eva Antonia Women Writers Working-Class Literature Yglesias, José Yglesias, Rafael Young Lords Party (YLP) Zamora, Bernice Zavala, Adina de Zavala, Iris Milagros Zavala, Lorenzo de Zenea, Juan Clemente Zepeda, Gwendolyn Zoot Suit Riots Zumeta, César

xix

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS Associations and Organizations Academia de la Nueva Raza Alianza Federal de las Mercedes Alianza Hispano-Americana Areíto Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores ASPIRA, Inc. Association of Hispanic Arts Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts Borderlands Theater Brown Berets La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc. Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York Círculo de Cultura Panamericano

Círculo de Tabaqueros Escuelitas Mexicanas International Arts Relation (INTAR) Latin American Writers Institute Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana Linden Lane Magazine Little Havana La Llorona Mexican American Movement Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social El Museo del Barrio Mutual Aid Societies National Association of Chicana/ Chicano Studies National Association of Latino Arts and Culture National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference xxi


Ollantay Center for the Arts PEN Club de Cubanos en el Exilio Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Redondo, Antonio REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking Young Lords Party (YLP) Concepts Aesthetic Concepts of Latino Literature Barrio Chicano Identity Fantasy Heritage Hispanic Peoples Little Havana Loisaida Manifest Destiny México de afuera Race Spanish Black Legend Stereotypes Transnationalism Ethnic/National Literatures Central American Literature Chicano Literature Cuban American Literature Cuban Literature in the United States Dominican American Literature Ladino Literature, Development of Latino Literature Native Literature Nuyorican Literature Sephardic Literature xxii

Genres Bildungsroman Border Literature Children’s and Young Adult Literature Colonial Literature Corridos Crónicas and Cronistas Décimas Essay Exile Literature Folk Drama and Performance Folklore and Oral Tradition Folklore-Based Literature Gay and Lesbian Literature Hispanic Playwrights Project Immigrant Literature Immigration Narratives Novel Playwriting Poetry Popular Culture Prison Literature Spanish-Language Literature Testimonial Literature Theater Theater in a Tent, Circus, Tent Shows Travel Writing Women Writers Working-Class Literature Historical Events and Topics Dominican Immigration Jones Act Land Grants Louisiana Purchase Manifest Destiny Mariel Generation


Operation Bootstrap Operation Peter Pan “Operation Wetback” Plan de Santa Barbara Racial Segregation Repatriation Sleepy Lagoon Spanish–American War Spanish Republican Exiles Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo War Zoot Suit Riots Movements Chicana Liberation Chicano Movement “Chicano Renaissance” Dominican Immigration Federal Theater Project Mariel Generation Mexican American Movement Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán Nativism Publishers and Magazines Areíto Arte Público Press Bilingual Review/Press Calaca Press Chusma House Con Safos El Eco del Pacífico Ediciones Universal Editorial Quinto Sol Gráfico El Heraldo de México Linden Lane Magazine

Literatura Cubana en el Exilio El Mulato Publishers and Publishing Revista Chicano-Riqueña Third Woman Press Tía Chucha Press Themes and Topics African Roots Awards Aztlán Barrio Bilingualism in Literature Book Fairs and Festivals Central American Refugees Chicano Identity Hispanic Peoples Jíbaro Land Grants Land in Literature Language Choice in Literature Little Havana La Llorona Loisaida La Malinche Orality Pachuco Pelados, Peladitos Race Religion Spanish-Language Book Market Spanish-Language Literature Vendido Virgin of Guadalupe War Women Writers xxiii

PREFACE The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature is a project of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, a program begun in 1990 by an international group of literary historians, critics, librarians, and archivists to reconstitute the literary legacy of Hispanics in the United States from colonial times up to 1960. Elsewhere in these three volumes readers will find a list of the distinguished members of the board of the Recovery program. They hail from diverse Latino backgrounds and represent institutions across the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Spain. In addition to contributing their expertise in their respective fields and their general scholarly wisdom, many of the members have contributed entries for this publication. The Encyclopedia has thus benefited from the research of some of the most respected scholars in their fields, who have listed works of interest to them in the “Further Reading” sections that follow each entry, as well as in the Bibliography at the end of Volume 3. However, the Encyclopedia’s coverage goes far beyond the scope of Recovery, which, properly speaking, does not deal with contemporary literature. In addition to collecting and presenting biographic, bibliographic, and critical information in entries on historical figures going back to the colonial period, the Encyclopedia covers Latino literature to the present day, introducing and discussing even the most recent books published by Latinos. Organized alphabetically by topic, and comprising more than 700 entries written by 60 eminent scholars, the three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature provides the birth and death dates of authors, when available, as well as other relevant biographical, bibliographical, stylistic, and cultural information. In general and thematic articles, most authors are placed within their historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Numerous entries discuss the xxv

Preface

backdrop against which Latino literature developed, including such historical events as, for example, the Louisiana Purchase, the Spanish–American War, and Repatriation. A full list of entry topics appears in the Contents and is divided into broad subject categories in the “Guide to Related Topics,” which allows users of these volumes to easily and quickly trace important concepts and themes throughout the entries. These volumes offer many entries on genres, concepts, and associations of writers and artists. The Encyclopedia aims to be as broad and inclusive as possible, covering all of native Latino literature as well as that created by authors originating in Spain and virtually every country of Spanish America. It also covers writers who prefer to write in English or Spanish, whether or not they belong to a specific Latino movement or proclaim their ethnicity as part of their literary identity. But no matter how broad or inclusive this effort, there are bound to be writers, associations, and topics that are not here included, whether because the editor, contributors, and Recovery board did not consider them sufficiently significant, or because they fell outside our knowledge and experience base. Generally speaking, authors with fewer than two books (not including self-published books) were not included in the Encyclopedia. Furthermore, this encyclopedia restricts itself to dealing with creative writers, omitting discussions of literary critics, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of whom are university professors. Although we do not deny that literary criticism can be creative—even an art—this encyclopedia is limited to the genres commonly understood as “literature,” such as creative essays, novels, plays, short stories, and oral and folk literature. This extensive a selection, therefore, has made it necessary to cross-reference names and topics appearing more than once in entries by directing readers to alphabetical entries by using asterisks. When an author’s name, such as that of Cherrie Moraga,* appears with an asterisk, it means that a full entry can be found for her by looking for the “Moraga, Cherrie” entry in the M section. Other types of cross-referencing appear as “See” or “See also” references within text, at the end of an entry, or within the main entry listing. Because of space considerations, not all Latino authors have their own entries; many are covered in more general entries. For instance, Mireya Robles does not have her own entry, but her life and works are covered extensively in the entry for Cuban Literature. Lack of space also limits what each entry may cover. Thus, each entry concludes with a “Further Reading” section directing readers to books and articles providing greater depth and broader perspective as well as more information on the topic of the entry. To compensate for space limitations, and in hopes that use of the Encyclopedia will lead to greater, more in-depth study, a complete bibliography, consisting largely of books rather than of scholarly articles, is appended at the end of Volume 3. A note is needed here about the selection of “Latino” for the topic of this encyclopedia. It is a term that has gained currency in the last few years to denote Hispanic peoples of the United States. The issue of which is better or more proper is covered in the entry entitled “Hispanic Peoples.” Beyond the general terms “Latina,” “Latino,” and “Hispanic,” used interchangeably xxvi

Preface

throughout the Encyclopedia, the contributors have consistently referred to each author’s specific ethnicity or national origin, such as “Chicano,” “Mexican American,” “Chilean,” “Peruvian,” or “Nuyorican.” To help readers understand such self-designated ethnic identifiers as “Chicano” and “Nuyorican,” specific entries have been included. A final word is required about the alphabetical organization of the Encyclopedia. The entries are listed according to the Library of Congress cataloging rules. The authors are listed according to Spanish/Hispanic cultural custom, in which the patronym comes first and is followed by the matronym. In other words, the last name of the author’s father is followed by the last name of the author’s mother. Thus, an author such as Gustavo Pérez Firmat can be found under “Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo.” This rule holds except for those authors—usually women—who, according to Anglo American custom, have used their father’s surname as their own middle name, such as Estela Portillo Trambley, who can thus be found under her legal, married name, “Trambley, Estela Portillo.” In either case, all authors covered in these three volumes can be found in the detailed general subject index. Because the writing of Latino literature in what came to be the United States goes back more than four centuries, the literature has been written predominantly in Spanish. For the ease of readers who are unfamiliar with Spanish, all literary titles and terms are translated to English in roman type, usually appearing after the date of publication or composition within the parenthesis following the title or term. When an actual published translation of the literary work exists, that translated title will appear in italics in the parenthesis. Common terms, such as mestizo, are repeatedly translated throughout the three volumes.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincerest thanks, in alphabetical order, go out to the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the AT & T Foundation, the Brown Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Meadows Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation for their vision and their major support in making possible the research conducted by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. I also want to express my immense gratitude to the board of the project and to the thousands of scholars, librarians, and archivists who have lent their support or otherwise participated. My undying appreciation goes as well to the many writers, scholars, community members, and corporations who dug into their own pockets to help endow Recovery. Finally, but not least, I am grateful to Carolina Villarroel, Rebeca Reyes, the staff, and the research assistants who have furthered not only this project, but all of our projects.

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INTRODUCTION Back in the early 1970s, when I was one of a cohort of young scholars attempting to establish a place for Latino literature in academia, a bemused senior scholar at a Modern Language Association convention told me, “Here is a literary criticism without a literature!” If and when our sessions were accepted for such meetings as the MLA, we were so marginalized that the sessions would inevitably be scheduled for 8 a.m. on Saturday or 10 p.m. that night. So few, if any, conventioneers would show up to hear our papers that we would inevitably have to form a circle of the four panelists with possibly two “audience” members to read and discuss the papers among ourselves. And now this revered literary critic was stating to my face that we were inventing a literature—that no such thing existed. It was almost the same as what some “linguists” were saying at the time: that we could not speak English or Spanish well enough, that we were not truly bilingual—that we were “a-lingual”! Seemingly, the erasure of Latino presence, history, and cultural development in North America from before the founding of the British colonies into the American Republic had been so complete that even scholars of the literature of Spain and Spanish America could negate our existence. To consider any people on earth bereft of language and literature is one step from declaring them subhuman and consigning them forever to slavery and the menial labor in support of beings with higher intelligence and creativity. But such was the dreadful absence of our presence in universities and the lack of accessibility of our cultural production at that time.

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A LITERARY PAST WORTH RECOVERING As the creation of all empires, the expansion of the American Republic southward and westward was not accompanied by willingness to recognize and incorporate the cultural patrimony of peoples living in the lands conquered or purchased, except for the utilitarian appropriation and even usurpation of such technologies as farming, ranching, and mining. Consequently, much Latino literary tradition and intellectual development was suppressed, has been lost forever, or remains inaccessible to most readers and educators. Even today, in most U.S. intellectual circles, ignorance reigns regarding the earliest and most continuous history of the book in North America, including regions that include the Southeast and the Southwest, following a trajectory of South to North, not East to West. Even today, when Latino literature is flourishing, the major media continue to ignore our literature, rarely reviewing our books, interviewing our writers, or selecting our works for film or television, as if the editors of the media centers themselves—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—where we are most prominent, are purposefully erasing us from the landscape. Of course, these editors, as well as most teachers and the general populace, may not be aware that the roots of Latino literature go deep, even in such areas as New York City (which, when it was still New Amsterdam, received exiled Spanish Jews)—or that the first highly literary book-length description of what eventually became the American South and Southwest was published as early as 1542 in Zamora, Spain: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Account. The first epic poems written in a European language about colonizing these new and exciting lands were written in the late sixteenth century—well before English settlers arrived at Jamestown—in Spanish by men of the pen, cross, and sword. Father Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo wrote La Florida, and Captain Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá wrote La conquista de la Nueva México (The Conquest of New Mexico). Few have considered the really good reasons for identifying works created in Spanish and the Native American languages as the true, authentic beginnings of literature in the United States. Latino literature, a literature created by the people proudly emerging from the fusion of Spanish, Native American, and African cultures, has always been part of the mosaic of the United States. Only recently has there been any attempt to acknowledge the Hispanic past as part of the U.S. national identity and as contributing to the national art and culture. But consider that, when the first English-language minstrels reached California, there were already fullfledged Spanish-language theatrical companies performing the high drama of Spain and the Americas. Spanish was the language of the first printing presses and newspapers in Texas and the Southwest. And from 1808, the publication date of the first Spanish-language newspaper in the United States, the tradition of Spanish-language periodicals publishing serialized novels, poetry, short stories, and essays has survived to the present. In retrospect, we can see that these publications disseminated and preserved an important body of Latino xxxii

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literature that was developing at the same time that the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Poe, Melville, and Twain were becoming the basis for an official “national” literature, one trying to develop a separate identity from that of the “mother country,” England. Unlike the foundational writings of the American “nation,” many Latino works have been lost forever, mainly because writings in languages other than English were ignored or deemed unworthy of preservation or study by librarians, archivists, educators, and academicians. Nor were they preserved or studied by those types of professionals in Spain or Spanish America, for writers who had left the home shores were often no longer seen as members of the nation. Thus, Latino literature has lived in a sort of limbo, embraced neither by the United States nor by the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. The literary expressions of the Latino literate and literarily oriented population of the United States were never collected, preserved, or made accessible to the broader society through schools, libraries, and mainstream publishers—how much less the oral literature! How could the very institutions that were furthering the notion that barbarism existed west of the Mississippi and in the poor Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo further the idea of a thinking, sensitive, creative mestizo or mulatto culture? The racially degraded and impure Spanish–Native American–African cultures were anathema to Anglo Americans. The whole ideology of expansion—the idea of a Manifest Destiny for white Europeans—depended on an uncivilized, barbarous population in the lands colonized by Spain. How could the very same publishing industry that was enriching itself through portrayals of the mongrel, heathen, and immoral Mexican, Hispanic, and darker races invest in a literature that was not supposed to exist in the first place, much less exist in Spanish—a foreign tongue bastardized by racial mixing? The idea that Hispanic residents of the United States could write the King’s English was, of course, even more far-fetched, out of the question, ludicrous—an idea that still strains credulity in many intellectual circles today, as demonstrated by the genuine surprise in reviews across the country that greeted Richard Rodriguez’s elegant prose in Hunger of Memory. LATINO LITERATURE TODAY It took the broad civil rights and student movements of the 1960s, bent on reforming government, politics, and especially education, to begin to awaken the intellectual and literary establishment to the potential of Latino culture— what was called back then the “sleeping giant.” After the establishment in the 1970s of ethnic studies programs and bilingual education, and the massive entry of Latinos into colleges, mainstream presses rushed to publish a plethora of anthologies that spoke to the newsworthy moment of national strikes and boycotts by farm workers, grassroots organizations, and militant political movements, such as the Raza Unida Party, the Brown Berets, and the Young Lords Party. But this interest from publishers and the popular media was as transitory xxxiii

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as the headlines, and once again Latino culture slipped away from the national consciousness. It was really during the 1980s and 1990s, with growing awareness in the media and business communities of burgeoning Hispanic populations, school enrollments, market potential, and voting power, that a demand or “market” was finally identified as clamoring for materials that would better relate to their local constituents. It is true that Latinos have become or are becoming the majority population in the largest school systems and urban centers; and census projections indicate that Latinos will constitute one fourth of the national population by mid-century. As the publishing industry issues more works by Latinos in English and even conducts experiments in Spanish-language publishing, it still lags behind the need in the educational system to be more inclusive and more accurate in its selection of materials for every grade level, even up to graduate school. A consortium of scholars, archivists, and librarians from across the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Spain has since the early 1990s been researching and attempting to reconstitute the literary legacy of Latinos in the United States through the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. To date, it has discovered some 18,000 books and 1,700 periodicals written or published by Hispanics in this country before 1960, has digitized for dissemination on the Internet some 500,000 texts, and has published some 40 recovered books. In addition, Recovery has organized a dozen conferences for scholars to share their research and has underwritten scholarly work issued in some 30 university press books. The study of recovered Latino literature has become a veritable subdiscipline in English and Spanish departments at universities that supports ethnic and women’s studies and many other academic disciplines. Only through the efforts of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project has the compilation of this three-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature been possible. This is truly the first offering of a broad recovered literary past, one that is still being reconstituted but one that, as evidenced, in these volumes is rich, diverse, and worthy of rescue. The idea had never before dawned in academia that at virtually every juncture in American history Latinos were present and contributing to the national conversation in both languages, writing about every topic in American discourse from the meaning and implementation of democratic government to the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, American expansionism and imperialism, and every war from 1776 to the present. Previously, scholars and students had to rely on the scant 20 or 25 years of literary productivity of the recent past. Now, however, thanks to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and this Encyclopedia, centuries of literary expression are made much more accessible. A student or scholar can move immediately from the pages of the Encyclopedia to the library and the Internet, or to the Recovery archives themselves, to obtain texts and information never before available. Along with the Recovery anthologies, Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States and En otra voz: literatura hispana de los xxxiv

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Estados Unidos, and some seven volumes of research articles produced by the project, the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Literature becomes the fundamental tool for understanding the depth and breadth of Latino literature of the past and the present. Welcome to our pages. Join us in recovering, preserving, and enjoying the Latino part of American, Spanish American, and Hemispheric literatures. Nicolás Kanellos

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A Aboy Benítez, Juan (1876–1901). Juan Aboy Benítez was a young Puerto Rican novelist who lost his life in the collision and sinking of a Staten Island ferry boat on June 14, 1901, as reported by The New York Times on June 17, 1901. According to the Times, Aboy came from a notable family in Puerto Rico but was at that time supporting himself. The Times also reported that Aboy Benítez had only been in the city a few months, but this information may be imprecise, given the detail and depth of depiction of the city and the New Jersey coast in Aboy Benítez’s novel, Su primer amor: novela de costumbres (1900, His First Love: A Novel of Customs). While supporting himself as a clerk in Staten Island, Aboy was presumably writing for Spanish-language newspapers in New York City. The Novedades (News) publishing operation published his novel, stating on the title page that the book was to be distributed free as a gift to the subscribers of La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Correspondence), another newspaper likely published by the Novedades company. Su primer amor, though a formulaic and melodramatic story of frustrated young love, reveals Aboy’s close observation and intimate knowledge of middle-class Hispanic life in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Luis, the protagonist—a young, penniless clerk in an import–export business— secretly becomes the sweetheart of the boss’s innocent, protected daughter, Juana. Luis is intelligent, energetic, and highly motivated in business, but Juana’s parents forbid the relationship, doing everything in their power to separate her and Luis from each other, at times sending Juana to the Jersey shore for vacation while Luis labors in the sweltering city. What is interesting about

1

Academia de la Nueva Raza

this domestic melodrama—for Aboy spared no verbiage in exaggerating the paroxysms of frustrated love and feelings of injustice—is that Juana’s father is also a self-made man whose wife has assumed the snobbery of the upper classes despite her humble origins. Splashed among New York City place-names and landmarks, and filling out a detailed knowledge of the boarding houses and culture of the Jersey shore, are Aboy’s colorful young characters, including a Cuban poet who sings and recites political verses in support of his island’s independence (presumably before the war of 1898). This poet is the only reflection of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s recent struggles to emerge from colonialism. In fact, other than condemning the hypocrisy of Juana’s bourgeois parents, Aboy seems to buy into the American Dream lock, stock, and barrel. In no way does Su primer amor follow the patterns of emerging immigrant literature as do some of the essays of Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín and Alirio Díaz Guerra’s novel Lucas Guevara, published in New York in 1914. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction” in Alirio Díaz Guerra, Lucas Guevara, translated by Ethriam Cash Brammer (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Academia de la Nueva Raza. In 1968, at the height of the Chicano Movement,* Tomás Atencio, then a college student majoring in philosophy, joined Facundo Valdez and Father Luis Jaramillo in founding La Academia de Aztlán* (the Aztlán Academy) in Dixon, New Mexico, as a center at which to build a body of Chicano knowledge based on the native wisdom of the Hispanic folk of the Southwest. This was accomplished by using a Socratic-like method of dialogue in a symposium setting, just as Hispanos in days gone by had debated with each other, passing on their wisdom as they sat in the shade of a central building in town. The basic idea was that of decolonizing knowledge and peeling off the layers of imposed European learning to develop and disseminate more authentic indigenous, native thought, history, and culture. The founders thought of this native knowledge as “el oro del barrio,” or barrio gold. The participants and associates thus had the task of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating this traditional knowledge to make the Chicano people more intact and more self-sustaining. Personal experience narratives, oral history, and folklore became central in reconstituting the history and culture of Chicanos. Thus, later emerging literary works associated with this process, such as Juan Estevan Arellano’s* novel Inocencio (1991, Innocent), put this philosophy and perspective into practice. The Academia also explored in depth Indo-Hispanic art and culture and the importance of myth in indigenous arts. Sculpting santos (handwhittled statues of Catholic saints) and native painting traditions were an early focus, as were the religiosity and rituals that supported such artistic traditions. In 1970, Atencio, joined by Arellano, E. A. Mares, and others, expanded the center into La Academia de la Nueva Raza (the Academy of the New People), adding new capacities to the organization, including the publication of the magazine Cuadernos from 1971 to 1976. Over the years, the Academy pub2

Acosta, Iván Mariano

lished various compilations of folk wisdom, literary works, magazine articles, and studies, including Entre verde y seco (1972, Between Green and Dry), La Academia de la Nueva Raza: El Oro del Barrio (1972), and “The Concept of Resolana” (1981). The publications of the Academy were supported financially by the United Presbyterian Church, USA, and the Lutheran Church of America. Further Reading Atencio, Tomás, “Resolana: A Chicano Pathway to Knowledge” (www.ccsre.stanford.edu/ pdfs/3rd_Annula_Lecture_1988.pdf).

Nicolás Kanellos Acosta, Iván Mariano (1943–). Outstanding playwright and filmmaker Iván Mariano Acosta was born in Santiago, Cuba, on November 17, 1943. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. After graduating with a degree in film direction and production from New York University in 1969, he worked as a playwright and director at the Centro Cultural Cubano and the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse in New York City. During this time, he conducted further studies in film and drama studies from the New School for Social Research (1972–1973). His play, El súper (The Building Superintendent), first produced at the Centro Cultural Cubano, is probIván Mariano Acosta. ably the most successful Hispanic play to come out of an ethnic theater house. The award-winning play was not only highly reviewed but was also adapted for the screen by Acosta in a feature film that won twelve awards, including best script and best director. El súper was published in book form in 1982, and four other plays were published in a collection entitled Un cubiche en la luna y otras obras (A Cuban on the Moon and Other Works) in 1989. Acosta’s awards include the Cintas Fellowship (1980), the Ace Award for Best Writer (1980), the Thalia Best Writer Award (1972), and the Ariel Best Writer Award (1971). His cinematography as a director and screenwriter includes El Súper (1979), Amigos (1986, Friends), How to Create a Rumba (1999), and Cándido: Hands of Fire (2006). Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo, Cuban American Theater (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez 3

Acosta, Mercedes de

Acosta, Mercedes de (1893–1968). Mercedes de Acosta, one of the few Hispanic women to develop a successful career as an English-language playwright and screenwriter in New York City and Hollywood, was born in New York to Spanish parents on March 1, 1893. Her orphaned mother, raised in New York from the age of fourteen, claimed relation to the Dukes of Alba. Her father, Ricardo de Acosta, was raised in Cuba and went into exile in New York during the war of independence from Spain. De Acosta was a child prodigy who began writing at the age of twelve and soon became a protégé of a famous Broadway impresario. She published her first book of poems, Moods: Prose Poems, in 1919. De Acosta followed this collection with two others: Archways of Life (1921) and Streets and Shadows (1922). She was the author of two novels, Wind Chaff (1920) and Until the Day Break (1928), as well as an autobiography, Here Lies the Heart (1960). Four of her five plays—the most famous of which was Sandro Botticelli (1923)—were published (though not produced) and paved the way for her transition to Hollywood, where she developed scripts for Paramount and Metro-GoldwynMeyer for films such as East River, Rasputin, Desperate, and Joan of Arc. During her career in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, she became a member of the glitterati and one of actress Greta Garbo’s most notorious lovers. Despite her intense literary creativity, Acosta’s works were not well received, saving her autobiography, which became something of a tell-all sensation during her last years of life. She died penniless in New York City. Further Reading Schanke, Robert A., “That Furious Lesbian”: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta (Theater in the Americas) (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Acosta, Oscar Zeta (1935–1974). Lawyer and writer Oscar Zeta Acosta was born on April 8, 1935, in El Paso, Texas, and was raised in southern California. Acosta served four years in the Air Force and upon discharge moved to San Francisco, where he spent years studying law in night school while working as a copy boy on a San Francisco newspaper during the day. After graduating from law school, he was admitted to the California Bar in 1966 and worked at a legal aid clinic in Oakland in 1966. Soon disenchanted, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became a member of the Con Safos* (loosely: safe, untouchable) literary group, which published the magazine in which his writings first appeared. It was through Con Safos that he became one of the first writers to develop a Chicano aesthetic in literature, going on to establish some of the perspectives and style that later became common especially among the first group of socially committed Chicano authors: identification with the working classes, a biting humor, an interest in promoting ethnic identity, and rejection of the established order. During this time, Acosta continued his social activism and became the lead attorney in a number of landmark cases, including Castro v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, in which he successfully protected the right to free speech of 4

Aesthetic Concepts of Latino Literature

teachers involved in the Los Angeles school walkouts, and Carlos Montez et al v. the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, in which Acosta argued that Spanish-surnamed individuals had been systematically excluded from serving on juries. Acosta’s two books, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and Revolt of the Cockroach People, represent two parts of a fanciful autobiography of the author in which contemporary events and people are the setting for a picaresque, satirical romp of the “Brown Buffalo” alter ego of Acosta in his tongue-in-cheek sallies to fight for the rights of Chicanos. In reality, the books represent a journey of self-discovery in which the main character seeks to establish his ethnic, cultural, and psychological identity. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo charts how this confused main character, addicted to drugs and alcohol and psychotherapy, becomes a committed Chicano activist. In The Revolt of the Cockroach People, the ethOscar Zeta Acosta. nic pride and activism that “Brown Buffalo” achieved at the end of the Autobiography becomes the basis for his involvement in the political upheavals occurring in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. Here the Chicano lawyer Buffalo Zeta Brown raises a series of challenges to the courts, the schools, and the church. Acosta takes the reader into the midst of guerrillamovement politics in Los Angeles, describing the plotting of bombings and political demonstrations. In addition to being an engrossing adventure novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People is the Chicano novel that has best and most closely captured the spirit and detail of the militant phase of the Chicano Movement. For all of his ability and insight, and for all of his irreverence, Acosta became a model to Chicano writers who sought to balance their aesthetics with their social commitment; but he also represented that uniquely Chicano/Mexican propensity for self-deprecation and for not taking oneself too seriously. Further Reading Stavans, Ilan, Bandido: Oscar “Zeta” Acosta and the Chicano Experience (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Aesthetic Concepts of Latino Literature. Today, five hundred years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on American shores, one of the most interesting phenomena on the continent is the Hispanization of the United States. The giant of the North, which once made Rubén Darío fear for the linguistic and cultural integrity of Spanish America, is witnessing the growth of the Hispanic demographic and cultural presence within its own borders. These 5


peoples, who do not form a compact or homogeneous group, are the descendants of America’s indigenous populations and the product of mestizaje (racial mixing), first with Spanish colonizers, and later, with African groups brought to the continent. They are therefore the recipients of a complex, manifold cultural inheritance that in its own way contributes to society in the United States. Some are recent immigrants or children of immigrants; others are descended from those of the original colonists who established themselves in Santa Fe or in Nuevo Santander long before the United States of America existed. Annexed by conquest or incorporated by immigration, all form an indispensable part of contemporary North American society. The history of the Hispanic culture—above all, of the Mexican culture— that exists in present-day U.S. goes back several centuries. From its beginnings, diverse means have served to maintain the constant creation and diffusion of this culture. Among these, the oral tradition and journalism occupy primary importance. In the last three decades, an immense advance has also taken place in the publication of books written by Hispanic authors that enrich and preserve this tradition. The volume and quality of these publications have come to permeate even the almost impenetrable areas of the North American literary establishment, and more and more books written by Hispanics are receiving national—even international—attention. This literary flowering creates a need for establishing and demarcating the aesthetic concepts predominant among Hispanic groups in the United States. This article will point out the principal trends we observe among Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans who reside and write in the United States. For reasons of space, I have limited myself to the contemporary period: from approximately 1960 to the present day. I have limited the citations and references to texts that serve to elucidate the poetics of their authors, whether they be interviews, poetic manifestos, or fragments of literary production. Readers will thus not find in the following pages an exhaustive representation of Hispanic literature in the United States but rather a selection of its principal theoretical expositions. The mention of some authors and the absence of others arises from the need to synthesize the contribution of the most representative authors in such a way as to understand literary creation without prejudice regarding the quality of other literary figures who are omitted. Insofar as is possible, reference will also be made to other, nonliterary artistic forms as well as to the contributions of artistic and literary critics.

Chicano Aesthetic Concepts Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, are the group of Hispanics having the longest presence in what we know today as the United States of America. Their presence in the area that today constitutes the Southwest and West (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, and areas of Utah and Nevada) dates to the colonial period of Spanish rule. The same territories were a part of Mexico after it won its independence from Spain in 1821. After the 6


secession of Texas in 1836 and the war between Mexico and the United States, which came to an end in 1848, these lands and the peoples that inhabited them became part of the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. From the beginning, then, the Chicano population has been a population annexed by conquest. Beginning particularly after 1910, Mexican American communities began to see themselves substantially expanded by immigrants who fled the Revolution in Mexico and served, during all the twentieth century, as a source of cheap labor for the agricultural and industrial needs of the United States. In the cultural sphere, from the time of Spanish colonization to the present, areas of Mexican American settlement have been characterized by continuous, intense theatrical, oral, and journalistic activity. Throughout its history, Chicano literature has embodied a constant resistance against efforts to suppress it. This conquered group, using a language at times different from that of the dominant society, and frequently using that language to denounce its speakers’ conquest, produces texts that remain on the margin of the country’s literary canon of the country. Its form of transmission has been primarily oral, although what written texts exist are gradually being recovered. This form of transmission, together with the regional differentiation and isolation frequently noted by many historians, has greatly hampered cultural unification. In this context, the relative unity that the Chicano Movement offered in the 1960s became an adhesive joining together previously scattered forces, setting in motion a true organized cultural effort to promote and to channel literary creation. The defining of a coherent poetics, and one appropriate to its circumstances, therefore became a necessity of the first order among the new writers. From this knowledge emerged the consciousness of the artist’s responsibility: Humans are actors within culture; they can and do act upon culture consciously. Art is an example of the conscious expression, in aesthetic form, of elements both generative and degenerative of a culture, and it is an expression of people acting upon culture. (Gómez-Quiñones 32)

When Gómez-Quiñones wrote his essay “On Culture” (1977), Chicano literature found itself in a period of reflexive maturity and self-questioning in which the different poetic tendencies that had prevailed up to that point were giving way to new forms of understanding and creativity. It was not a question of abandoning known roads but of extending them further with new contributions that sprang from new environmental, sociopolitical, or cultural necessities. In the center of this reflection arose the question of the artist’s role as an agent of change for an inherited culture—a culture that had been preserved in spite of external aggressions and prohibitions, and (not least) transformed in the process of transmittal from generation to generation. It is not surprising, therefore, that a great part of Chicano literature is, in one way or another, self-referential. A clear desire exists to establish the validity of an experience that has been negated and stereotyped by the dominant culture 7


in the United States. At the same time, a necessity exists to poeticize the very agents of the cultural creation: the writers creating themselves even as they mold their creation. The collective identity and the identity of the creator are at the base of contemporary Chicano literature as a conscious gesture of artistic, cultural, and social legitimization. In the absence of a defined traditional literary canon, these new authors saw themselves as agents for an artistic recovery that would change the perception of the Chicano that had theretofore existed. Motivated in great part by the Chicano Movement (or La Causa), the great profusion of works that have emerged since the mid-1960s have constituted an outburst (called by some a renaissance, or a flowering) that, like a great many of the last century’s cultural revolutions, has been accompanied by all kinds of programs, manifestos, and poetics. The very reclamation of the word Chicano, which previously was considered pejorative and was rejected by many within the community, indicates a desire for aesthetic and political renovation. The term Chicano, once used to refer to recently arrived Mexican immigrants, began to denote with pride the Mexican legacy of groups already settled or born in the United States. It included, moreover, a connotation of political militancy and commitment to La Causa. Beginning with the 1960s, Chicano literature has been influenced not only by the immediate context of the Chicano Movement but also by other, broader environmental factors such as the civil rights movement in the United States, new left-wing ideologies (especially those associated with the struggles in Latin America, whether in Cuba or elsewhere), the student revolts in the late 1960s, and the anti-war movement in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Throughout the southwestern United States, newspapers such as El Malcriado and El Grito del Norte and journals such as El Grito, Con Safos, and Aztlán were founded and converted into vehicles for political and literary communication. The direct link of many of these publications with La Causa explains the dominant poetic of the period, which dealt with the formation of a committed literature that, if not completely in the service of the struggle, was at least of some utility to it. The writers, most of whom belonged to the working class or came from rural or working-class families, were well acquainted with the reality that constituted the daily experience of the majority of Chicanos. A great number of these works, in addition to including major or minor doses of social protest, testified to that experience of suffering and struggle. Perhaps the best-known case—and one of the earliest—of a poetics directed toward social struggle was contained in the proposal advanced by El Teatro Campesino in its “Introduction to the Actos,” created by Luis Valdez,* its founder and director. El Teatro Campesino, founded in 1965 and conceived to support the striking farm workers in Delano, California, synthesizes the aesthetic that inspired its first years: “Chicano theater must be revolutionary in technique as well as content. It must be popular, subject to no other critics except the pueblo itself; but it must also educate the pueblo toward an appreciation of social change, on and offstage” (n.p.). To achieve its objectives, the form developed at the outset of Chicano theatrical activity was the acto, a short 8


piece collectively created and open to a great amount of improvisation. Often of a schematic character, the acto proposes five specific goals: “[I]nspire the audience to social action. Illuminate specific points about social problems. Satirize the opposition. Show or hint a solution. Express what people are feeling” (n.p.). We see in this theatrical manifesto a synthesis of the dominant aesthetic of the moment: a revolutionary attitude relative to literary and social questions accompanied by a decided rootedness in popular culture, as much in its content as in its principal images, a didactic design that inspects the artistic creation from an undeniably utilitarian framework. Actos, songs, poems and other diverse literary forms are often conceived to deal with a specific question and shed light upon it. In accordance with this intention, cultural activity was generated in nontraditional circles: during demonstrations, marches of protest, and gatherings of workers and in magazines and newspapers destined more for the Chicano community than for university circles. Creating an accessible popular culture seemed to be the goal of these authors, in service of which the use of popular language and collective creation became powerful weapons. At the same time, cultural activity understood in this manner also entailed the creation of a new public removed from traditional cultural circles. In the same program’s prologue, Luis Valdez states: “The teatros must never get away from La Raza. . . . If the Raza will not come to the theater, then the theater must go to the Raza. This, in the long run, will determine the shape, style, content, spirit and form of el teatro chicano.” Following El Teatro Campesino’s example, numerous theatrical groups throughout the country began to set forth the problems and joys of their communities on stage. For this, the teatristas (producers of theater) sought their themes (and even their styles) in history, the immediate political reality, in folklore or in religion. The corridor* (ballad), the songs, and the tradition of el teatro de carpa (Theater in a tent*, Tent shows*) provided inestimable cultural wealth for the substantiation of a discussion of current political and economic realities. Since the appearance of the acto, other important dramatic forms, such as the docudrama and musical theater, have emerged. An important example of docudrama is the work Guadalupe (1974), performed by El Teatro de la Esperanza. With a notable influence of Brechtian techniques, Guadalupe unites the narrative exposition of a report about scholastic and social discrimination in a California city by the same name with the most important moments of the resistance struggle undertaken by the parents of that school’s students. Musical theater, on the other hand, consists principally of modified dramatizations of corridos such as Juan Charrasqueado, which in 1973 became El Teatro de la Gente’s version in El corrido de Juan Endrogado (The Ballad of John Drugged/Indebted). The intention of these groups, notwithstanding the form they favored, was to discuss on stage the questions of discrimination, racism, economic subordination, identity, and other key contemporary themes, such as police violence or drug usage. It is not strange, then, that such theatrical representations end with an open discussion with members of the public, who 9


do not always wait until the end to express their opinion. The absence of barriers between the action on stage and the public has been described with great plasticity by the drama critic and director Jorge Huerta, who explains, “Audience members most affected by teatro presentations will sometimes yell at the actors, either reinforcing what has been said, or sometimes trying to negate the message” (1979, 100). In a similar manner to theater, the poetry of the period was oriented toward a direct presentation to the public and was frequently recited aloud. A tone of urgency and an attitude of direct rebellion and radical militancy predominated. Titles such as Abelardo Delgado’s* “Los huelguistas de la Farah” (The Farah Strikers) and “El immigrante” [sic] (The Immigrant), Jesús Maldonado’s “Under a Never Changing Sun,” and José Montoya’s* “El sol y los de abajo” (The Sun and the Underdogs) give an idea of the principal concerns of the poets of the Chicano Movement.* As Cordelia Candelaria noted in Chicano Poetry, the public orientation in an immediate sense (recitation) constituted the essence of these authors’ poetry; as a result, their work acquired certain particular characteristics of oral poetry: the use of rhyme, repetition, and rhythm to facilitate the comprehension of the poem, the use of immediately recognizable images, a defiant tone (for example, in the poem “Stupid America” by Abelardo Delgado) and a narrative style characterized by a clear delineation of the conflicts. The poets of this orientation viewed poetic activity as a way to become the voice of the people and while educating the masses. Thus, Sergio Elizondo* said, in an interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa, “[T]he works I have done are primarily directed at the Chicano people as an educational instrument. . . . My role in literature is only a part of my role as teacher” (1983, 86–87). One of the earliest compositions associated with this aesthetic is the poem “I am Joaquín” (1967) by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales.* An immediate success, its method of transmission was representative of the period: innumerable typewritten copies circulated by hand until the poem’s popularity motivated a large commercially printed edition. The poem in itself, like much of the poetry and narrative of the period, is expressed in dualities and examines in depth the questions of identity with an eye toward the past. The entire history of the Chicano is set forth in a few pages to inspire a feeling of national pride. Joaquín, the archetypical Chicano, is the sum total of all of the historical contradictions endured by the people, a product of conquerors and the conquered, Europeans and native peoples, campesinos (farm workers) and politicians, etc. The personal and the social elements are inextricably united in the work of the Chicano Movement poets. This poetry treats the transcendence of social literature as what poet Tino Villanueva* has defined as committed or engagée literature: “Engagée poetry is a total attitude that requires the poet to go beyond lamentation, beyond the mere act of composing verses from afar; to be engagée requires a direct participation committed to the proletariat” (34). According to this definition of existentialist inspiration, the creators of literature must not limit themselves in their writings to the denunciation of reality; they must also 10


involve themselves personally in the struggle to avoid a separation between art and the people (Olivares). El Teatro Campesino was attempting to do something similar at about the same time. For the defenders of this method of comprehending literature, the fostering of its creation in the heart of the Chicano communities had a very positive effect on the channeling of popular creativity, which up to that time had not found an adequate vehicle for transmission in written form. In the plastic arts, the search for an art form that was popular and accessible to the community materialized into intense muralistic activity throughout the Southwest. Inspired by Mexican muralists, the Chicano artists attempted to create a didactic art at the same time they sought to express a message of ethnic pride and a Chicano cosmovision through their murals. The themes, as varied as they may be, generally revolved around community life, the ancestral past (the motifs taken from indigenous cultures predominate) and the heroes of La Causa. As in literature, the thematics deal with the subversion of the negative stereotyping to which the Chicano culture has seen itself subjected with positive models that are commemorated daily in the streets of the Chicano barrios (neighborhoods) and in the history and experiences of their inhabitants. As is the case with the literature associated with the Chicano Movement, these graphic artists (who frequently collaborated among themselves on a given work) also attempted to reach the greatest possible number of people within a context of open and accessible space. Likewise, documentaries with a didactic or historic intent dominated Chicano cinema of this period. In particular, a cinematographic genre that has held a place of special importance is the docudrama, in which the fact and fiction are combined to narrate a determined story. Among them, we could cite as some of the first: I am Joaquín (1967, based on Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’ poem by the same name), Yo soy Chicano (1972, I am Chicano) and Chicana (1979 by Sylvia Morales). As a consequence of the tendency toward the expression of popular culture, writers and artists from the full spectrum of literary and artistic creation searched for images and symbols that were unique to the Chicano culture, and especially for those that transmitted the notion of resistance and survival. Recurrent figures in the literature of this period include the mother (la jefita), the campesino and the pachuco.* For the same reasons, the fields (labor fields) and the barrio frequently appear, representing space peculiar to the Chicano, at times with a connotation of positive values but always with the duality inherent in threat or destruction. Thus, for example, the barrio is at once a beautiful and dangerous place in Alejandro Morales’* novel, Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975, Old Faces and New Wine, 1981): the sense of community evoked in relation to Christmas time contrasts violently with the lack of economic resources, the threat of drugs, unemployment, and police brutality. In other cases, the barrio sees itself threatened by urban development plans and its destruction or deterioration is re-created in the literature as representative of one more aggression of the system, the threat of disappearance that Chicano writers 11


attempt to counteract through writing and the preservation of memory. We find magnificent examples of this aspect of Chicano literature in the poems “Homing” by Ricardo Sánchez,* “La loma” (The Hill) by Raúl R. Salinas* or “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” by Lorna Dee Cervantes.* The literary re-creation of these and other representative aspects of the Chicano experience (see, for example, Jesús Maldonado’s elemental odes to Chicano food in his poems “Oda al frijol” (Ode to the Bean) and “Oda al molcajete” (Ode to the Molcajete) is a conscious attempt at cultural affirmation; an integrative proposal for a certain cultural model that these authors wanted to develop and from which they laid the foundations of their creation. In this sense, the committed aesthetic is an integral part of the cultural nationalism that characterized this period. The efforts to include popular culture in literature also led to a rediscovery of the oral tradition: songs, folkloric music and declamatory poetry. The desire to establish a relationship with a secular tradition is evident behind this effort, but it is necessary to note that these efforts also deal with defining the origin and destination of the artistic creation: to be of the people and for the people. The oral tradition is seen as the repository of the customs, knowledge, and history of the community and as a result, the incorporation of these materials into the literary work is equivalent to a historical contextualization of the present struggles. In good measure, the literature of the Chicano Movement attempts to link itself to certain traditions and customs and to maintain them in the present. In the figurative arts, there was also a revitalization of traditional handicrafts, especially with regard to those of the New Mexican santeros (carvers of saints’ images). Félix A. López and Luis Tapia excel in the creation of bultos (figures of saints), reredos (altarscreens), carretas de la muerte (death carts) and other forms of religious art engraved in wood. Felipe Archuleta represents this same rebirth of engraving but with a thematics inspired by fauna. We find a didactic concept of literature at the base of another manifestation of cultural nationalism evident in the decade of the 1970s, which has come to be called indigenismo (Indigenism). The poet Alurista* and the dramatist Luis Valdez separately established the principal directions of this aesthetic. Both emphasized the artistic and spiritual contributions of the pre-Hispanic peoples and attempted to develop these contributions in their works. The search for an indigenous or mestizo identity and the recovery of the Amerindian ancestral cultures became the key foundations in the literary and artistic work of a good number of authors, especially in California. The poems of Alurista, beginning with Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), contain a large number of figures, terms and symbols taken from the Mayan and Aztec cultures. The very term floricanto, later used to designate the literary festivals of the 1970s, is of indigenous origin: it recalls the way in which the Aztecs referred to poetry, in xochitl (flor [flower]) in cuicatlcanto [song]). Taking advantage of the transference of native elements to the Chicano’s current reality, Alurista attempts to recover the lost cultural link, inspire pride in his readers and listeners, and teach them about their own history. As do 12


other writers of this tendency, Alurista maintains that the indigenous cultural element is latent in the subconscious of the Chicano and that literature can serve as the effective vehicle by which to raise it to consciousness, and in this way provide a sense of nation and a sense of pride with which to counteract the aggressions suffered in daily life. The role of the poet becomes then, that of the community’s cultural transmitter and educator. In Alurista’s poems, and in those of other poets of this genre, the agonizing immediate reality is transcended through a careful study of the present in light of the past. His poetry contains, moreover, a marked emphasis on the ritual. The poem is conceived as a ritual of communication and communion with the reader, based in large part on its recitation, musicality and rhythm. In fact, Alurista and the poet Juan Felipe Herrera,* among others, carried their interest in the aspects of rhythm and ritual to extra-literary fields with their creation of the group “Servidores del árbol de la vida” (Servants of the Tree of Life), a musical group which plays pre-Hispanic instruments. As a result of this musical recovery, it is common even today that dances and music of Aztec origin are presented at the majority of Chicano celebrations and cultural events. As a consequence of his concentration on the past and his predilection for mythology, some critics attacked the poetry of Alurista and that the other poets of the indigenist style, arguing that it lacked a dialectical sense of history. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the recovery of myths and pre-Hispanic concepts helped to clarify certain essential values that promoted the discussion of ideas and the reevaluation of the cultural and social history of the Chicano. Alurista set forth a defense of his aesthetic in a colloquy entitled “Mitólogos y mitómanos” (Mythologists and Mythomaniacs): “There was a real need for all of us to find a way, a metaphor that would serve as a unifying tool to look at each other as brothers and sisters . . . I did not see myth, and I do not see myth, as a way to return to the past or as a way to protect oneself in the future without bearing and confronting your present” (8). The unifying metaphor to which Alurista alludes in this passage, Aztlán,* came to be one of the most influential concepts in all of Chicano artistic activity. At once symbol and myth, Aztlán is the Aztecs’ place of origin; the place where their descendants would have to return in the era of Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun), that is to say, in our time. Moreover, Aztlán is an internal concept, a way of understanding the reality that is carried in the heart. The concept of Aztlán as the Chicano homeland was the nationalist agglutinant necessary for the channeling of efforts theretofore dispersed. The multitude of compositions, magazines and organizations that incorporated the word “Aztlán” in their titles demonstrates the effectiveness and popularity of the term, just as the manner in which the indigenist aesthetic shaped at least one aspect of all of the subsequent socio-cultural activity. Under the flag of Aztlán, the Chicano’s racial and cultural diversity found the necessary unity that was sought in the use of the term “Chicano.” At the same time, Aztlán provided a political base by allusion to an occupied land. In this sense, the poetry of Alurista indeed carries a marked social accent, given that, as Tomás 13


Ybarra-Frausto notes, “this culturalist attitude implies the notion that a recovery of Mexican cultural heritage will create a positive consciousness leading towards social action” (93). Thus, Alurista was assuming, within his role as writer, the role of a causative agent of change within the culture; a role similar to that which Juan Gómez-Quiñones points out in his essay “On Culture”: “the intellectual’s role in regard to culture is one of clarifying values and introducing ideas to bring about progress by establishing meaningful patterns of historical judgments or relationships” (307). At a time when the concept of internal colonialism predominated within intellectual circles (see the influential Chicano history book, Occupied America, by Rodolfo Acuña), accentuating the Mexican aspect of the cultural inheritance was viewed as a valid component of resistance to domination. Something similar occurred at approximately the same time with the rise of Spanish as a literary language. Alurista is considered to be, moreover, the first author to utilize Spanish and English in the same poem in a systematic manner. This phenomenon, called “bilingualism” or “interlingualism” by critics, became the principal poetic form used to represent the Chicano’s linguistic reality and its usages have been as diverse as the authors who cultivate it. For some poets, such as José Montoya or Alurista, interlingualism is a constant, generally used with the same naturalness with which the phenomenon occurs in the spoken language. Of course, the recourse suffers a certain stylization when used with the unique liberties of poetic language but in the majority of cases the rhythmic cadences of colloquial speech are maintained. Other authors write predominantly in English but reserve their use of Spanish for certain key words or phrases that have come to be called “ethnic markers.” This phenomenon treats the shifts from English to Spanish that are justified by the passing of a particular discourse less burdened by ethnic content to another discourse in which certain values (generally those associated with family or affective life) gather special relevance. Additionally, as poet Tino Villanueva has noted, bilingualism reflects a bisensibility that permits the expression of concepts, feelings, and ideas originating from two different cultures and compels them to stand out as a result of the contrast between languages. Put in a social context, bilingualism results in being a way of exonerating what society condemns as “bad” Spanish or English with the label “Spanglish” and similar epithets. All things considered, as the advocates of this form of expression have noted, bilingualism is not a new phenomenon but is at the root of many national literatures, especially in their moment of formation. Among the examples that could be cited is the Spanish literature itself, in which bilingualism encounters a singular exponent in the Mozarabic jarchas. In theater, the greatest exponent of the indigenist aesthetic is Luis Valdez. In this phase of his dramatic activity, Valdez attempted to transcend the immediate reality reflected in the actos to achieve a religious feeling of life inspired by the pre-Hispanic religions. His works of this period, classified under the name of mito (myth), developed symbolic plots in stylized and poetic forms. The characters themselves are transferences of pre-Hispanic concepts or gods to the modern world, not without certain intermediate filters such as those provided 14


by the Catholic religion (i.e., the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe). This new aesthetic developed by Luis Valdez and defended by him as a logical evolution of the actos also relies on an important poetic manifesto: the long poem Pensamiento serpentino (1973, Serpentine Thought). Using pre-Hispanic imagery, Valdez makes a plea for the recovery of the scientific and moral values of the Mayan such as those embodied in the concept In Iak’ech: “You are me, and if I harm you, I harm myself.” His vision of the Chicano as neo-Mayan implies a synthesis of various religions, a religious syncretism that permits, for example, the comparison of Jesus Christ with Quetzalcóatl or the Virgin Mary with Tonantzin. In the aesthetic sphere, Valdez applied his new ideas to the old concept of the great theater of the world, according to which human beings are actors who carry out a determined role. In the case of the Chicano, coming to know this role is to assume a neo-Mayan religious and cultural identity. The mitos with which Valdez explores these ideas in the theatrical praxis culminate in La gran carpa de los Rascuachi (1973, The Great Tent Show of the Underdogs), one of the dramatist’s principal works, a combination of the acto, the myth, corridos, and teatro de carpa. La carpa (tent show), an artistic fusion of social realities with religious symbolism, brought about one of the first polemics between Luis Valdez and those in favor of producing a theater and a literature more tied to daily reality. The polemic between Valdez and the Colombian theater director Enrique Buenaventura is reflected in a series of articles of international resonance that constitute a chronicle of the confrontation between cultural nationalism and Marxism. Many of the exponents of the indigenist style soon evolved toward a poetry of solidarity on a global level with Third World movements—particularly with those in Central America. Such is the case with Juan Felipe Herrera* or Alejandro Murguía. At the same time, greater contact with other Latinos in the United States provoked, little by little, a new fusion of cultural elements that diversified Chicano literature and that could be observed especially in California and the Midwest (especially in the Chicago area). Popular music in particular was one of the cultural spheres in which Latino artistic syncretism appeared to have achieved major effectiveness; thus the traditional Norteño music of certain areas of the Southwest (Texas, above all) mixed with music forms such as the merengue or the Caribbean guaguancó, cumbia, and salsa in environments where this contact had not taken place before. In another musical sphere, Chicano and Latino rock-and-roll groups placed themselves in the vanguard of their respective styles, thanks to the introduction of bilingualism in their lyrics as well as to the fusion of styles in their music. The growing literary activity of the period that we are analyzing crystallized into a publishing endeavor with specific aesthetic propositions. To reflect the community, to establish ties with their literary tradition, and to challenge the dominant stereotypes became the principal objectives of the Grupo Editorial Quinto Sol.* Through their awards and publications, Quinto Sol promoted in practice a positive image of Chicanos that contrasted with the negative characterization dominant in the mass media. The theme of identity, both individual 15


and collective, became the central theme of many of the works published by this Berkeley publishing house. It was a question of “literarily establishing a community,” to quote Tomás Rivera’s* well-known expression. At the same time, Quinto Sol promoted a plurilingual literature, publishing works in Spanish, English, or a mixture of both. The number of works written in Spanish is remarkable; Spanish was used with the political objective of emphasizing difference and preserving both a particular culture and ethnic pride. Tomás Rivera and Rolando Hinojosa,* among the authors published by Quinto Sol, and Miguel Méndez,* Aristeo Brito,* and Alejandro Morales,* who published with other publishing houses, are some of the principal narrators who adopted Spanish as a literary vehicle. The first two authors mentioned, together with Rudolfo A. Anaya,* were the winners of the first three Quinto Sol literary awards and became, by virtue of editorial selection, the representatives of a Chicano canon in formation (Bruce-Novoa 1986). In the works of these authors is generally encountered the same populist spirit of the dramatists and poets mentioned above. An important change was evident in that many of these works were composed as narratives of the author’s formation; because of this, they offered valuable information about the aesthetic concepts of their creators. In Bless Me, Última (1972), by Anaya, for example, the history of the writer’s formation is linked to the protagonist’s maturation in such a way that the conceptual synthesis offered by Tony (that life is a fusion of contradictions, a liquidation of opposites that creates something new) is at the same time an implicit or explicit literary theory: Chicano literature is a synthesis arising from the traditions that shape it. It is no longer entirely Mexican, but neither is it completely Anglo American. Rather, it is something different—a product of the mixture of the two. In the case of Tomás Rivera, the child-narrator protagonist in his novel . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), wants to be able to recreate the life of his community and avoid having the memory of his experiences disappear. The role of the chronicler that he assumes at the end of the work is the same role embraced by the narrators from the very beginning of Rolando Hinojosa’s novelistic saga. The majority of these novels, moreover, are characterized by the absence of a conclusive ending. Their open structures require an active participation on the part of the reader and, as Ramón Saldívar has noted in his Chicano Narrative (1990), the conflicts in these works have been more privileged than their resolutions. Around the same time, non-Chicano publishing houses in the East began to publish and promote works with a Chicano theme, making known some of the authors whose political and literary agendas differed from those of La Causa. The novel Pocho (1959, 1971) by José Antonio Villarreal,* was reprinted—perhaps the most influential of this group—and others appeared, such as Chicano (1970) by Richard Vásquez or Macho! (1973) by Victor Edmundo Villaseñor,* directed at non-Chicano readers and not very innovative in their literary technique or language. It is necessary to make a very important exception in the case of John Rechy,* whose novels combine the 16


most straightforward description of the sexual exploitation that takes place in cities in the United States with occasionally poetic language. His works, although not centered in Chicano subject matter, constitute an important contribution to Chicano literature because of their almost documental verism—very much in line with what other narrators were doing from a point of view that was more concerned with aspects of social or ethnic relationships (Christian). One can also observe in the narrative of this period a tendency toward the use of myths parallel to that seen in the works of Alurista or Luis Valdez. The novels of two New Mexican authors, Rudolfo A. Anaya and Orlando Romero, are the best exponents of this recovery of myths or legends for the purpose of incorporating them in a current context. Moreover, Anaya, as well as the Texan narrator, Estela Portillo Trambley,* attempt to produce a fusion of mythical and social reality. The short novel Rain of Scorpions (1975) by Portillo (included in a collection of short stories by the same name) and the novel Heart of Aztlán (1976) by Anaya, represent some of the clearest examples of this objective. Nevertheless, the results are debatable; neither of the two authors achieves a reconciliation of a reality observed from the point of view of economic domination with a poetic defense of love and universal harmony. The importance of these works lies in their manner of transcending the social realism of a large part of the Chicano narrative in existence up to that time and in pointing out new tendencies that would shortly be developed by other narrators. In this sense, another narrative trajectory that used some of the essential characteristics of magic realism and the Latin American nueva novela appears to have been more fruitful. The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) by the Californian Ron Arias* is the first example that we have. In its imaginative freedom, its mixture of the real and the marvelous, and its radical use of metaliterary elements, The Road to Tamazunchale creates a viable channel for subsequent novels that contain techniques and methods of magic realism in varying degrees, such as The Rain God (1984), by Arturo Islas* or El sueño de Santa María de las Piedras (1986, The Dream of Santa María de las Piedras), by Miguel Méndez. These are novels in which the more immediate reality is relativized upon coming into contact with other ways of understanding reality that are less rooted in empiricism. There existed, by this time, an aesthetic based on the description of customs, frequently imbued with greater moral than political intent. The best example of this aesthetic is provided by the short stories of Sabine R. Ulibarrí,* in which typical New Mexican traditions and characters appear re-created in scenes commented upon and evaluated by the narrator. A moral reflection is also present in many of Miguel Méndez’s didactic short stories, although Méndez is more inspired by the traditional folkloric style rather than by the direct observation of customs—his stories have antecedents as remote as the collections of medieval apologues. For her part, Carmen Lomas Garza reveals herself as one of the principal painters associated with this tendency in that 17


many of her paintings, almost all of which closely approximate the naïf style, are scenes that represent daily customs or activities and are frequently inspired by the personal memories of the artist. The socially committed novel, meanwhile, continued evolving and passed through a period of expressionist distortion represented chiefly by Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974, Pilgrims from Aztlán) by Miguel Méndez and Caras viejas y vino nuevo (Old Faces and New Wine) by Alejandro Morales.* The first, nearer in style to the fright and humor of the Mexican calaveras (skulls), is a re-creation of life on the border between Mexico and the United States. The frontier is viewed by several characters through the deforming mirror of alcohol or vis-ávis the spent memory of an old revolutionary Yaqui Indian, Loreto Maldonado, who serves as the center of consciousness in the novel. Caras viejas y vino nuevo, for its part, more closely approximates the tremendismo style in its content and the style of the French nouveau roman in its technique and is a fragmented and almost merciless chronicle of life in a barrio. The violent and dismembered images are the most characteristic features of this pessimistic novel. During the second half of the 1960s, the militancy of Chicano writers appeared to undergo a certain crisis at a time when important changes were taking place in the publishing world and in the Chicano Movement. The disappearance of some publications and publishers (Quinto Sol among them) sparked a division in the Chicano literary world that, although diminishing a certain vitality, positively affected the diversification of aesthetic concepts. With the advent of this division, new publishing markets and new audiences were conquered little by little. A younger generation of poets and narrators, molded in the creative writing workshops of various universities (although still of working-class origin), began to publish with presses from the academic world or with mainstream publishing houses. Poetry became less strident and more personal. Instead of being recited at demonstrations or in the workplace, poetic readings were institutionalized in the so-called floricantos, gatherings of authors and critics—generally in a university setting. Within this expansion of the publishing world, an important role was played by the successive anthologies of Chicano literature that were published beginning with the success of El Espejo/The Mirror (1969), the first of its kind, and published by Quinto Sol. In the 1970s, non-Chicano publishers, desirous of taking advantage of the Chicano literary impulse, began to produce their own anthologies. PrenticeHall published Literatura chicana: texto y contexto (1972, Chicano Literature: Text and Context), which was followed in 1973 by We Are Chicanos and in 1974 by Chicano Voices. Representative of this new way of comprehending poetry are Bernice Zamora,* Gary Soto,* Lorna Dee Cervantes,* and Alberto Ríos,* among others. Tino Villanueva* had advanced several years ahead in the trend toward technical control and mastery of the imaginative elements in his poems. These authors cultivate a polished poetry centered on the image, and with a major emphasis on technique. Without neglecting the human aspect of their poetry, 18


they attempted to write well without the sense of urgency that stirred many of their predecessors. As Cordelia Candelaria has noted, these poets introduced the narrative voice, which had been almost absent in Chicano poetry up to that time. It is a private and distanced voice, distinct from the declamatory style of the socially committed poets and in open conflict with the idea of the engagé author. On occasion, as is the case with the works of Gary Soto, their books reveal a great integration that transcends the individuality of each poem and creates sweeping ties between them. These publications, to use the expression of Soto himself in an interview with Ernesto Trejo, tend more toward the integrative concept of a “book of poems” than to the disintegrated concept of “poems in a book.” A greater diversity of themes and points of view is observed among these poets. Likewise, an important turn began to take place in their books with regard to communicative strategies with the reader. Not only did the urgent tone of the oratory disappear, but specifically Chicano cultural references became almost completely absent in their poems. In the majority of cases, sufficient elements remained to establish the ethnic identity of the poet, but these elements existed, at times, only in the background, serving as an accompaniment for other symbols and themes of a more general nature. Hence, these new authors began to be more and more accessible to audiences other than purely Chicano ones, a phenomenon that resulted in their works being published and awarded prizes in literary circles of national scope. To a certain extent, we could say that a similar phenomenon began to be observed in the plastic arts, especially after the creation, for example, of murals destined for non-Chicano public areas whose thematics were devoid of noticeable ethnic content. Additionally, museums and commercial galleries in the United States began to organize exhibitions and sales of Chicano art, thus creating a certain polemic (parallel to that which occurred in literature) between those who considered this new type of art (and its distribution) to be a type of betrayal of their origins and those who defended the creative liberty of the artist and their right to occupy broader markets without compromising their art or their ideological position. Theater also began to reflect an evident institutionalization and estrangement from its rural or community origins. In the 1970s, theater production underwent a progressive transference to the universities with some outstanding incursions in the commercial circuits. As the principal analysts of Chicano theater have noted, although El Teatro Campesino began to commercialize itself, other groups chose a Marxist orientation that alienated them from their popular base (Kanellos 51). This sparked a reduction in the number of active groups but paradoxically favored the emergence of a poetics that differed from those introduced by El Teatro Campesino (acto and mito). Among them, it is necessary to highlight the form of experimentation known as teatropoesía (poetry–theater). Teatropoesía represents a fusion of genres, including poetry, theater, and dance, and is frequently the product of a collective feminine effort. According to Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, the first production conceived from 19


this aesthetic was entitled Chicana (1974), a re-creation of the history of the Indo-Hispanic woman (79). Among the better known productions, Tongues of Fire (1981) focuses on the figure of the female writer in a series of dramatic scenes. Woman of Her Word (1986), for its part, is a dramatization of poems written by women (which had grouped under the same title in a special volume of the Revista Chicano-Riqueña [Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 1983]) with minimal scenography and props but an almost dance-like rhythm suggested by the thematic changes that act almost like movements in a ballet. In like manner, an increase in author-created theater occurred, and with it emerged a greater variety of aesthetic conceptions that frequently depended on the nature and formation of the dramatist in question. Carlos Morton,* for example, bases a great part of his production on humor and parody. Estela Portillo Trambley, for her part, utilizes a more complex symbolism, and her works generally rely on a greater dramatic tension. More recently, Cherrie Moraga* (1986, Giving Up the Ghost) and Denise Chávez* (1987, “Novena Narrativas” [Narrative Novenas]) have offered us works of a feminist orientation that study the roles assigned to women by society as well as investigate the liberating possibilities of conscientious behavior. Institutionalization and rapprochement with the mainstream once again find in Luis Valdez their best representative. In 1978, his work Zoot Suit, based on events connected with the pachucos in Los Angeles during the Second World War and classified by Valdez as “an American play,” premiered in Los Angeles with performances by professional actors. The success garnered in Los Angeles carried the play to Broadway, where its reception was less enthusiastic. This new turn in his theatrical strategy (with indubitable aesthetic consequences) was justified by Valdez on the basis of his initial postulates of taking the theater to the Raza if they did not come to the theater. It is clear, however, that the popular aesthetic—rascuachi (underdog)—of earlier works had now been substituted for a greater level of sophistication in technique and performance. The cinematographic production of Zoot Suit, as with other works by Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, aroused controversy among critics and spectators: the accusations of having “sold out” to the system followed Luis Valdez from then on and were accentuated by his Hollywood direction of La Bamba. Valdez is now far removed, in both form and content, from the revolutionary theatrical aesthetic that he himself advocated at the beginning of his career; the adaptation of his works to aesthetics more closely approximating those of the popular culture in the United States have, however, permitted him to reach a greater number of spectators. Towards the middle of the 1970s, a new aesthetic was emerging that had its origins in an egalitarian thrust in the works of Chicana writers, who, up to that time, had been divided between their adherence to La Causa and the necessity of denouncing discrimination against women in their own Chicano communities. The feminism of many of these authors produced a literary revolution in terms of themes, tone, images, and style. The predominant tone, although one of protest against the abuses institutionalized by society and 20


customs, was frequently one of lucid irony that contributed to the discovery of the artifices of domination. Far from the bombastic shout or the profound lament, Chicana poets like Margarita Cota-Cárdenas* or Miriam BornsteinSomoza seem to prefer sarcasm and a calmer exposition of their themes. Novel images of women appear, as does a reinterpretation of traditional or familiar female mythological figures. Thisbe, Penelope, and Ariadne appear in poems narrating history from a feminine point of view. Woman ceases to be la jefita (the mother figure) or “the warrior’s faithful companion/object of repose.” Now woman is a writer, university student, independent, without dissimulation at the hour of discussing her sexuality. The stereotypical duality, virgin/prostitute, kept alive up to then, is cracked apart in poems like “bitch bitch bitch bitch,” by Alma Villanueva, in which the insulting term appears relativized and free of its negative connotation upon ironically being claimed by the poetic voice. The same thing occurs with the figure of la Malinche, until then an object of condemnation and a symbol of the fall of the Aztec world. The new Chicana poets, particularly after the publication of Adelaida del Castillo’s essay, “Malintzin Tenépal,” vindicate the figure of la Malinche and cease portraying her in negative terms—as the archetype of a traitoress—and endow her with more human qualities, among them that of mothering the first mestizo. The Chicana poets generally cultivate a very direct language, without taboos or euphemisms, and give an uncommon vitality to erotic poetry. Ana Castillo* and María Herrera-Sobek are examples in this respect. In poems such as Castillo’s “Después de probar (la manzana)” (After Trying [the Apple]) or Herrera-Sobek’s “Tomate rojo” (Red Tomato), the images of agricultural products such as the mango, apple, or tomato appear, representing the elemental, sensual pleasure associated with them. These images are no longer used as symbols of labor enslavement as in “Under a Never Changing Sun” by Jesús Maldonado, “Haciendo apenas la recolección” (Just Beginning to Remember) by Tino Villanueva, or “El immigrante” [sic] (The Immigrant) by Abelardo Delgado.* Nor do they symbolize the Chicano’s material and spiritual sustenance as do the tortilla, rice, or bean in the poetry of Alurista or Jesús Maldonado. The tomato, apple, and the mango are chosen not because they are symbolic of daily sustenance—with their implications of the subordinate role of la jefita/woman as cook—but rather for their succulence and their unbounded exuberance. They are symptoms of an eruption of uninhibited liberty characteristic of the poetry of the Chicana poets. In the 1980s, Chicana writers begin to pose these same questions in narrative literature. Isabella Ríos and Estela Portillo Trambley, among a few others, were the pioneers of the 1970s and were succeeded by other short story writers and novelists at a time when Chicano publishing houses began to open their doors wider to the writers, and newly created non-Chicano publishers of a feminist orientation provided a growing field for publication. These writers’ principal objective was to give a voice to the Chicana, literarily recreate her vision of the world and of herself, and explore relationships between the sexes as well 21


as those established among themselves in the women’s community. After observing, as the poets had done, the double marginalization of the Chicana as a woman and as a member of an ethnic minority group, the narrators of this decade dedicated themselves to constructing a feminine subject and endowing her with the power that the narrative voice confers. As a consequence, some of these novels appear to be a literary response to other texts that, by this time, were already being consolidated as an essential part of the canon of contemporary Chicano literature. In this sense, they constituted a feminization of previous thematics, such as the question of the writer’s identity or formation. These feminine narratives came to set forth that which the novels of the male Chicano writers had left aside with their treatment of racial and class relationships but lack of consideration for the social relationships that exist between the sexes. Thus, for example, The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros,* contains many of the structural characteristics of Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra but presents us with a feminine view of society that contrasts with the almost complete lack of the female voice in Rivera’s work. Like the protagonist of . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra, the adolescent female writer of The House on Mango Street wants to symbolically embrace her community, to see it all together, and decides to tell its history in small fragments of narrative prose. But the community is now a barrio in a city where Chicanos and other Latinos live together and the principal characters are imprisoned, beaten, and silenced women to whom the writer wishes to lend her voice. The questions of identity, assimilation, struggle, and the role of the writer continue to be present in Cisneros’s novel but are now inseparable from a feminist vision. Ana Castillo, for her part, explores in her novels the relationships between the sexes as well as the community bonds and emotional ties that can develop between women. Her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), is a temporal and spatial journey toward Mexico and into the past. The act of remembering personal and collective history is the essential basis for understanding the present and cementing within it the foundation of personal and collective liberation. At the same time, Castillo’s novel is a journey in a metaliterary and experimental sense, giving readers various roads to pursue in its reading in a manner similar to that of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela. We observe in the more recent Chicana literature a calculated effort to produce hybrid books in which the traditional divisions between literary genres appear blurred. Such is the case, for example, in Borderlands/La frontera (1987) by Gloria Anzaldúa* or Loving in the War Years (1983) by Cherríe Moraga. In the case of Anzaldúa, her book combines essay, poetry, and narration in harmony with the message that is contained in it. The concept of the crossroads as a place where paths and tendencies converge becomes the organizing trope of the book. Anzaldúa tells us: “I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meaning” (81). To question definitions and traditions, to cross over 22


frontiers—according to the imagery of the work—is the mode of survival for the Chicana lesbian, whose expressiveness has been conditioned and impeded by a literary history dominated by men, whose participation in daily life has been greatly reduced in a patriarchal society, and whose sexuality has been negated by restrictive traditional norms. From the transgression of all of those values and from the creation of other new values emerges, then, the new mestiza, a cultural synthesis “participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (81). These changes that were observed in the poetry and prose of the Chicanas were not at all exclusive to the literary field. In the figurative arts or in cinema, woman’s creative role was also changing. Ancient representations were questioned at a time when new emblematic figures of the feminist movement were proposed. Among them, Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter, seemed to be both the frequent subject and inspiration for the Chicana artists. Thus, Carmen Lomas Garza dedicated to her one of her offertory altars for El Día de los Muertos (All Souls’ Day) in which she combined artistic materials and keepsakes of the Mexican artist, among them a self-portrait of Kahlo that occupies the center of the altar. Esther Hernández, for her part, appears to be one of the artists who has posed, in more radical way, the question of the traditional image of women in painting. Among her better known works, La ofrenda (The Offering) and La Virgen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los chicanos (The Virgin of Guadalupe Defending the Rights of Chicanos) use the emblematic figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring attention to some of the problematics with what tradition assigns to the social role of women. Thus, the passivity associated with the virginal figure of Guadalupe is subverted in the second of her works mentioned above, in which the Virgin appears wearing karate clothing at a moment of struggle in which she literally removes herself from the halo that confines her in customary representations. Another aesthetic tendency that appears to have gained special importance in the 1980s is the historical novel or the novel with a historical setting which has its correlative in a series of films produced around the same time and with similar intent. The most outstanding example in literature is the ambitious novelistic saga by Rolando Hinojosa, twelve volumes grouped under the collective title of the Klail City Death Trip series, whose publication began at the beginning of the 1970s. In Hinojosa’s novel, the intrahistory of the imaginary Belken County (empirically connected to the present-day state of Texas) unfolds before the reader through the pennings of various writer–characters as well as through the voice of an external narrator. Hinojosa’s series, in which the reader must take an active role, combines events and characters of the empirical history with others that are purely novelistic to reconstruct the history of Texas from a Chicano point of view. In the literary sphere, the series is moreover a repository of different genres that reveal a desire to write the total novel. The detective novel, the epistolary novel, interviews, poems, sketches, and costumbrista scenes (having to do with local customs or types) or picaresca 23


(picaresque) appearance are joined together to give different perspectives about the literary universe of Klail City and its environs. Alejandro Morales also appears to move away from the novel of social documentation (the barrio in Caras viejas y vino nuevo), a rural community’s struggle in his second novel, La verdad sin voz (1979, Death of an Anglo, 1988), toward the historical novel in The Brick People (1988). Reto en el paraíso (1983, Challenge in Paradise) begins in one of its narrative lines to unfold the history of California once again from a Chicano perspective. In The Brick People, the author focuses on a microcosm representative of that history: the founding of a brick factory on the outskirts of Los Angeles and, with its foundation, the settlement of Mexican immigrants. In New Mexico, Nash Candelaria* is likewise representative of the novel set in a historical framework, particularly in his Not by the Sword (1982) and Inheritance of Strangers (1985), in which the personal history of the Rafa family serves as a reference for the novelization of the historical transformation of New Mexico. In cinema, films such as Seguín (by Jesús Salvador Treviño*) and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (by Robert Young, produced by Moctezuma Esparza), both filmed in 1982, attempted in equal manner to visually shape outstanding moments of Chicano history and culture. An essential aspect in the aesthetic development of contemporary Chicano literature that merits consideration before the end of this analysis is that of its linguistic evolution and the ideological consequences, marketplace considerations, and questions of its reception that are derived from it. We have already seen that alongside the struggles of the civil rights movement and the promulgation of the idea of Aztlán as the Chicano homeland, there followed a need to define a language that could express the national resurgence. In 1980, Juan Bruce-Novoa raised the question with a prominent group of Chicano authors interviewed in his Chicano Authors. The determination of whether there existed a specific language for Chicano literature was one of the defining aspects of this literature. The majority of the authors interviewed were in agreement in pointing to linguistic diversity as the most significant characteristic of Chicano literature. Some, like Alurista, insisted on the bilingual or interlingual nature of Chicano literature for obvious reasons: the intercalation of languages and different sociolinguistic codes was an original characteristic (although not lacking historical precedent) that reflected the Chicano’s existential situation. Moreover, it permitted great liberty at the time of the recovery or reclamation of other languages in their tradition, such as Náhuati or Maya. In the decade of the 1970s, interlingualism, combined with the use of Spanish as a literary language, became a way of challenging and confronting the system. The use of the Spanish language represented the difference—that part of the Chicano being that had not been altered by the Anglo-Saxon conquest. To write in Spanish was, moreover, to build a bridge toward Latin America, as demonstrated some of this period’s novels’ publication in Mexico (and one novel’s publication in Cuba). Toward the middle of the decade, however, English began to displace Spanish—and even interlingualism. The 24


Anglicized university formation of many of the younger writers, together with a change in the orientation of Chicano publishing houses, favored this evolution, with undeniable and diverse effects on the literary language. On one hand, internal markets expanded considerably, and reviews of Chicano books began to appear in the larger newspapers and magazines in the United States. Writers who had employed Spanish in abundance in their works were beginning more and more to write in English. Alejandro Morales is a prominent example of this tendency. His first novel, Caras viejas y vino nuevo—published in Mexico, as was his following novel—bore the following declaration after the dedication: “Como autor chicano, espero que pronto llegue el día en que no me vea obligado a salir de mi propio país para publicar una novela escrita en español” (As a Chicano author, I hope that the day will soon arrive in which I do not find myself obligated to leave my own country to publish a novel written in Spanish, 7).

After the delivery of his third narrative (the bilingual novel Reto en el paraíso—already published in the United States), the use of English in his production progressively increased in volume until it culminated in The Brick People, which was written entirely in English. Accompanying this shift, other changes were occurring in the field of publishing. The veteran Revista Chicano-Riqueña changed its name to The Americas Review with the intention of attracting more diverse readers and penetrating broader literary circles while at the same time recognizing the contributions of other Hispanic groups in the United States. The volume of books written in Spanish and published by Chicano publishing houses still active at the time was reduced as Chicano literature moved into the decade of the 1980s. Stylistic changes were also reflected in the limited presence of Spanish in those novels written in English. Where the intercalation of isolated phrases in Spanish (whether followed or not by an English translation) was once frequent, the phenomenon that we could call “authorial pre-translation” was now encountered, with irritating results for a good number of bilingual readers. This phenomenon deals with cases, such as the following example, in which the characters’ discourse appears translated and filtered by the narrator who is limited to pointing out in which language a specific conversation is produced: “‘Look at him one more time before we go,’ Maria said to him in Spanish” (Arturo Islas, The Rain God 12). Although the book is made more accessible to an English-speaking public in this manner (it should be pointed out that Islas’s second novel, Migrant Souls [1990] has been published by Morrow, a non-Chicano publisher), the credibility of its characters is weakened. To put it in the terms used by Richard Rodriguez’s* well known autobiography, Hunger of Memory (1981), in the ideological arena, the suppression of Spanish in novels like this carries with it a renunciation of the reclamation of Spanish as a cultural or public language. In a novel like Schoolland by Max Martínez,* written entirely in 25


English, and in which we occasionally encounter examples of authorial translation, the reader discovers on page 64 that supposedly all of the characters are speaking in Spanish. Toward the end of the book, the narrator makes the following reflection upon remembering an episode from his infancy—the first time a book written in Spanish fell into his hands: “I had trouble making the connection that the Spanish we spoke all the time was written, too, just like the English in our textbooks. It had never occurred to me that Spanish was also a written language” (242). That public existence of Spanish, vindicated by the narrators of the early 1970s and negated with such tenacity from Richard Rodriguez’s assimilationist perspective, appears to be one of the burning questions surrounding the definition of the current poetics of Chicano literature. In any case, as Juan Flores and George Yúdice—among others—have noted, the linguistic plurality of Chicanos and Latinos in the United States constitutes one of the essential factors in the creation of an effective multiculturalism and in the legitimization of the different experiences of the so-called mainstream (72–80). The predominance of English—above all in certain publishing circles— should not, however, cause us to consider the possibility of a complete abandonment of the literary creation in Spanish. In fact, in the border area, where the marketplace and the publishing houses are more open to idiomatic diversity, works continue to be written and published in Spanish. Printed on many occasions in Mexican territory, they are distributed on both sides of the border and constitute a continuation of the efforts to preserve Spanish as an inescapable part of the Chicano experience. In the publishing field as well as in the creative sphere, already renowned names such as Ricardo Aguilar* and Sergio Elizondo* join together with other less recognized names such as Marco Antonio Jerez in the task of creation and distribution. The recent penetration of some of these works (such as those of Miguel Méndez) into the large Mexican distribution circuits forecasts an international backing of undeniable importance for the continuation of Chicano literary production written in Spanish. Up to now, we have pointed out some of the principal aesthetic concepts that have given form to the artistic creation of Chicanos in the last three decades. This brief panorama would not, however, be complete without dedicating a few brief reflections to the critics’ contribution to the question of the Chicano aesthetics. Although we have already mentioned some fundamental critical essays, it is necessary to now recall others who, in their particular time, helped to define Chicano literature and Chicano art. All differ among themselves in regard to scope and methodology, the privileged fields of literary criticism being, up to now, Marxist-oriented criticism (Joseph Sommers, Juan Rodríguez, Rosaura Sánchez), structuralism and post-structuralism (Juan Bruce-Novoa), feminist criticism (Tey D. Rebolledo, Marta E. Sánchez, Norma Alarcón), historical revisionism (Luis Leal,* Francisco A. Lomelí, Nicolás Kanellos), and, currently, postmodernism and cultural criticism (Ramón and José David Saldívar, Rosaura Sánchez). Without delving into specific essays, it 26


is important to mention that Marxist criticism reached its apogee during the first years of the 1970s. This literary criticism, in its denunciation of what was considered ahistoric, had evident repercussions on authors like Rudolfo A. Anaya and Rolando Hinojosa, who began to politicize their works a little more as a consequence of the debate that emerged vis-à-vis the social and historical representation of Chicanos. An important resonance was achieved in the essay “The Space of Chicano Literature” (1975) by Juan Bruce-Novoa. Of philosophic intent, this essay proposed a vision of Chicanos and their literature as the space between the words “Mexican” and “American”—and, clearly, between the meanings that these words convey. Thus, contemporary Chicano literature would be a constant expansion of that space, and the constant creation of something new. At the root of this interpretation is the idea of cultural syncretism that also inspired Luis Leal’s essay, “La imagen literaria chicana” (1978, The Chicano Literary Image), in which Leal refers to the bilingual or multicultural image as the most original aspect of Chicano literature, not only for reasons of style and form, but also because it lends itself (as does no other characteristic) to the expression of the conflicts, hopes, and desires of the society that is depicted in the literary works and to which the authors belong. In his “Chicano Intellectual History: Myths and Realities” (1979), Richard A. García concerns himself with the important aspect of the creation of heroic figures within Chicano literature and with the historicity, or lack of historicity, of their respective legends. In short, García focuses on a criticism of the romanticization of the pachuco figure in works such as Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez, making a plea for a literature that more closely approximates history, being less given to poetic liberties. In a broader context, García’s posture must be seen as one of the examples of revisionism or cultural criticism to which the feminist critics also dedicated themselves after the publication of Adelaida del Castillo’s essay mentioned above. In fact, a significant part of later feminist criticism has continued to agree upon the necessity of reevaluating what is historical in the representation of certain feminine figures and what is only a conceptual or ideological construct of these figures, perceived from the point of view of a patriarchal society. Thus, for Norma Alarcón, Chicana literature can be summed up in the title of one of her essays, such as “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A ReVision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” (1981). That is to say that Chicana literature constitutes a search for the woman of flesh and blood that exists beyond that fleshless skeleton into which her figure has been converted by the stereotyping patronized of a culture with a patriarchal tradition. Marta E. Sánchez, for her part, contributes to the study of Chicana poetry, noting from the three points of view that constitute the three axes of her book, Contemporary Chicana Poetry (1985), how this poetry is the expression of the conflict with the dominant society from the points of view of women, Chicanas, and poets. From each one of these images, themes and cultural references are feminized to portray a particular and different vision of the world. 27


For its part, cultural revisionism is also introduced in the work of other critics through the concepts of difference and cultural conflict. At the base of this focus is the pioneering work of Américo Paredes,* who through his studies of the corrido fronterizo (border ballad) documents the importance of folklore for the Chicano culture and, in short, the idea that the differentiating nucleus of Chicano folklore lies in the expression of cultural conflict. One of the scholars most influenced by Paredes and of greatest importance in the United States in recent years is Ramón Saldívar, who has contributed to the conceptualization of a Chicano aesthetic with his concept of the dialectic of difference. In his most recent and extensive formulation, Chicano Narrative, Saldívar warns against the dangers of camouflaging the ideological force of a work with the mask of aesthetics and consequently explores the manner in which Chicano literature operates from a peripheral (marginal) status, acting as a denunciation of the very hegemonistic mechanisms that relegate it to that role. In this sense, Saldívar undertakes the question of the necessary revision of the literary canon in the United States, to which other critics such as Leal, Lomelí, Bruce-Novoa, and Tino Villanueva also contribute through the recovery of lost or forgotten texts. In conclusion, we could say that the principal aesthetic concepts of contemporary Chicano artists have gravitated almost systematically toward popular culture. In an attempt to define and enrich the historical culture of the Chicanos, the majority of the authors have chosen to literarily legitimize the experience of the people. Language, above all, has been one of the pillars of this reclamation. Together with language, the thematics has been inspired on numerous occasions by the more immediate concerns of daily life: survival, resistance, labor abuses, intolerance, recovery of the collective history, and other similar concerns. In more recent years, the reevaluation of the social roles assigned to the two sexes has been the object of attention in literature written by women. First feminine liberation and later sexual liberation have been added to the plethora of already established themes. Likewise, there has been a vindication of the indigenous component, utilized as an articulative focus of cultural nationalism. The active participation of the receiver has been another characteristic element of Chicano literature. In their manner of reaching the reader and in actually constructing an audience theretofore almost nonexistent, Chicano writers have resorted to aesthetics that require the active participation of the reader. Poetry, for example, moved toward recitation or ritual, and theater attempted to remove the barriers with the audience and guarantee their participation through the combined use of familiarization (the use of popular folklore) and distancing techniques. Narrative, for its part, has used techniques of the open-ended work to ensure the complicity of the readers and to engage in as close a communion with them as the written medium permits. In this sense, a characteristic trait has been the prevalence of fragmentary and inconclusive structures. Many of the novels, especially those written during the decade of the 1970s, close without a categorical ending. Combined with the frequent use of fragmentary techniques, this inconclusivity produces a succession of juxtaposed scenes or incidents that oblige the reader to participate in 28


the resolution of the conflicts and in the configuration of a possible interpretation. By empowering the conflicts and avoiding the cathartic endings of the traditional novel, works like Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series exact the active participation of the reader in its final configuration. If contemporary Chicano narrative is didactic in any sense, it is so by educating readers to search for and analyze conflicts, not by offering solutions or doctrines. In theater, Brechtian isolation and the recourse to traditional forms has also guaranteed direct communication with the communal audience. With regard to thematics, all of Chicano literature has treated collectivity more frequently than it has dealt with individuality. The result has been a search for the community on all levels.

Puerto Rican Aesthetic Concepts in the final analysis i am nothing but a historian who took your action and jotted them on paper therefore making you the source, the strength, the base of my inspirations. (Tato Laviera: “para ti, mundo bravo”)

The emergence of Puerto Rican literature in the United States dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when Puerto Rico passed from being a Spanish colony to being a colony of the United States. From that time until approximately the middle of the present century, the majority of Puerto Rican writings were in Spanish and were published in newspapers or by small publishers in New York. For the purposes of this essay, however, it will be of interest to us to concentrate on the period dating from the second half of the 1960s to the present. It is within this period that a clear consciousness among writers of Puerto Rican origin of being Nuyorican,* something distinct from their ancestors on the Island, begins to be observed. Among the new authors, the ways of conceiving the literary task differ, but almost all share an awareness of their roots in the metropolis of New York, from which they take their appellative, Nuyorican. From a sociological point of view, the Nuyorican writers are a product of the massive exodus of Puerto Ricans that began in the 1940s. The majority of these writers, therefore, belonged to the working class instead of being members of the established cultural or social elite that many of the writers on the Island had been. This class identification would play an important role in the language, conflicts, and sources of inspiration of neorriqueña literature. For all of them, the adoption of the term “Nuyorican” or its equivalent, neorriqueño, conveys taking a position in the face of society and is equivalent to the proud reclamation of their traditions without renouncing their distinctiveness from the Puerto Ricans on the Island. 29


In the first texts published during the period of time that interests us here, the reader frequently encounters a strong dose of autobiographical material, given that the distance between the author and narrator or poetic voice appears to be of less importance than the necessity of attesting to real-life events. Adaptation to life in New York, a city in which Puerto Ricans are seen as second-class citizens, becomes the thematic focus of these works, and survival is set forth as its principal organizing trope. Stories of an island paradise told by the older writers remain far away: the immediate reality is one of concrete and steel. We find an extreme example of the documental autobiography in one of the first prose texts of this period: Down These Mean Streets (1967) by Piri Thomas, whose influence on subsequent Nuyorican literature is undeniable. In Thomas’s work, the life of the young boy, Piri Thomas, is the guiding thread through the streets of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), through the world of drugs and delinquency, and, ultimately, through jail and rehabilitation. It is a text framed within the subgenre of the ethnic autobiography and uses sensationalism as one of its principal poetic recourses. We could say that there is almost a sensationalistic costumbrismo in the descriptions of the street life of the protagonist and his family. The most novel characteristic of the work is the use of popular language in the dialogues between characters: although a certain literary stylization results, the dialogues possess a genuine resonance. Later, other writers would continue this tendency toward the use of popular language that would decisively transform Nuyorican literature, but Piri Thomas must be credited as one of the pioneers of its use. In spite of its innovating role, Down These Mean Streets, published by Alfred A. Knopf, turned out to be vulnerable to the manipulation of the publishing market in the United States, to the point of becoming a type of repository for the supposedly “authentic” Puerto Rican experience in this country. Thomas’s raw aesthetic thus became a stylistic model that the large commercial publishing houses wanted to impose on the young writers. Nicholasa Mohr, for example, remembers in an interview with Edna Acosta-Belén having received editorial pressures in this respect. Although Mohr said she admired Thomas’s book, she stressed in this interview that her experience and that of many other women of the barrio was different from the one portrayed by Thomas in his book. To recall that experience was her primordial objective, but the publishers, however, were interested in something else: . . . before Nilda was published by Harper and Row, I showed my manuscript to another publisher who suggested to me to change it to a female version of Down These Mean Streets. This, of course, was completely unacceptable to me since it would have betrayed the intention of my book and the reality that I wanted to portray. (38)

Conscious of this risk, Nicholasa Mohr’s poetics were directed early down a different road. As Eugene Mohr observes in his study The Nuyorican Experience, 30


her narrative work is characterized by a minimization of sensationalism; as a consequence, her works have frequently entered into the publishing market as if they were books for children or adolescents, a situation which in reality distorts her intent and scope (73–74). Beginning with the semi-autographical Nilda (1973), the novels and short stories of Nicholasa Mohr attempt instead to reflect feelings and interpersonal relationships—above all those on the family and community level. Her stories become an intrahistory of Puerto Rican migration to the United States and, in short, of the settling of these immigrants in the barrio, with an emphasis on neorriqueña women. In a subsequent article, Nicholasa Mohr summarizes her aesthetic conceptions in the following manner: From the onset, first as a visual artist early in my career and later as I began to write, I understood that the source of my output had to come from within my community. As a female and a Puerto Rican coming from a long line of strong determined women, I was not going to be a party to the stereotyping that existed. (1990, 82)

In subsequent books, emerging from an already determined Nuyorican consciousness, the street and the barrio continue to constitute the social, cultural, and geographic reality from which the inspiration of the writers is drawn. It is, then, a literature that is in great part testimonial. The poems, short stories, and novels of the neorriqueños become a kind of chronicle of life in the barrio, as Tato Laviera’s* epigraph at the beginning of this section suggests. Miguel Algarín, one of the publishers of the first selection of neorriqueño texts, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), has also recognized this in the theoretical manifesto that serves as an introduction to the same book: “The poet sees his function as a troubadour. He tells the tale of the streets to the streets” (11), later adding: “The power of Nuyorican talk is that it is street rooted. It is the way people talk in the raw before the spirit is molded into ‘standards’” (16). As a result, the task of the Nuyorican poet is that of reporting on the new language and on the new reality that motivates it. In the process, the poets themselves must create a new literary language: If the action is new, so must the words that express it come through as new. Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican. (15)

The Nuyorican language, the only language capable of re-creating in literary form the new reality of the Puerto Ricans in the United States, is a mixture of Spanish and English that has resulted in a greater verbal wealth than either of the other two languages provide by themselves. In the words of Algarín, “[t]he mixture of both languages grows. The interchange between both yields new verbal possibilities, new images to deal with the stresses of living on tar 31


and cement” (15). It is, on a linguistic level, the same thing that is happening with music, above all with the rise of salsa and the so-called jazz-latino, in which the fusion, the mixture, is also the motor of artistic activity. The reality of the neorriqueña community, still remembering a tropical island in the past but faced with the omnipresent reality of concrete and asphalt, determines the language and the posture of its writers. In the process, as Efraín Barradas has observed, the Nuyoricans have to redefine their personal and cultural relationship with the island—which is to say, to demythify it. It is a question of defining their own reality. The island has frequently been represented as a kind of paradise, a place removed from the contradictions of reality in the metropolis. The children and grandchildren of the emigrants have grown up with the embellished recollections of their elders, and the edenic vision of the island has been preserved in their minds until such time as they themselves have had occasion to journey to Puerto Rico. In the poems of Miguel Algarín,* Tato Laviera and Miguel Piñero,* among others, we find examples of subsequent disillusionment upon encountering an island that has been socially and culturally transformed through the influence of the United States, an experience alluded to in “This Is Not the Place Where I Was Born” by Miguel Piñero, as “this slave blessed land/where nuyoricans come in search of spiritual identity/are greeted with profanity” (La Bodega Sold Dreams 14). Thus, to be Nuyorican becomes, according to Barradas, more a state of mind than a geographical distinction. We could add along this same line that, like the concept of Aztlán discussed in the previous section of this essay, to be Nuyorican is something that is carried in the heart, an attitude of self-awareness and cultural resistance. As a result, inspiration is not sought in the cultural myths of the past but rather in present realities. To be of the street and for the street, to create new alternatives between enslaving labor subordination and the pursuit of street culture, to create new relationships in the community—these are the responsibilities of the neorriqueño artists. For Algarín, the social function of the writer is inescapable: “The poet is responsible for inventing the newness. The newness needs words, words never heard or used before. The poet has to invent a new language, a new tradition of communication” (9). Victor Hernández Cruz,* the Puerto Rican poet most accepted by the literary establishment in the United States and one of the poets who does not identify completely with the militancy associated with the term “nuyorican,” is also in agreement about the importance of language as a revolutionary element within the reach of Latino poets in the United States. In his poetry, Hernández Cruz experiments with words, playing with them while searching for unexpected effects and for a dynamic cultural fusion; hence, his work has been classified as multiracial and multicultural, and his poetic language has been celebrated for its precision and novelty. In his theoretical article “Mountains in the North: Hispanic Writing in the U.S.A.,” Hernández Cruz suggests that Hispanic literature in the United States is not only capable of preserving its cultural roots without being assimilated into the “melting pot,” but also that it is even transforming the English language itself. In fact, multiculturalism and 32


plurilingualism are the most current phenomena in the United States, thanks to the creative contribution of Latino and other minority group writers. This process, which Juan Flores and George Yúdice call “transcreation,” is expanding the literary and ethnic frontiers of the country. From this comes the pride of belonging and the hope for a better tomorrow with which Victor Hernández Cruz ends his poem “You Gotta Have Your Tips on Fire”: You never will be in the wrong place For the universe will feel your heat And arrange its dance on your head There will be a Sun/Risa on your lips But You gotta have your tips on fire Carnal. (Snaps 8)

As in the case of the Chicanos, the community in the works of the Nuyoricans becomes a source of inspiration and, at the same time, the addressee of the literary creation. Poetry and music recitals, as well as theatrical performances, are commonly performed in the streets or in other community areas. In Loisaida (Lower East Side, in Manhattan), Algarín founded the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, a cultural center that has come to be one of the principal spots for the poetry readings of up-and-coming poets. At the same time, theater groups such as the Teatro Rodante Puertorriqueño or the Teatro 4 dramatize the daily life of Puerto Ricans in New York (their problems of adaptation, the social struggles and cultural resistance) in street performances or in other locales where the principal concentrations of immigrants and their descendants reside. As a result, the predominant aesthetic favors those elements associated with popular culture, from language to music, vindicating the vitality of a culture frequently classified as inferior. Because it is street-inspired, Nuyorican literary language contains a large dose of orality and ritual. The voices, the expressions and the colloquial rhythms join together to form part of the poems, as is seen in this excerpt from La Bodega Sold Dreams (1980) by Miguel Piñero: la gente que no se quiere pa’ na con la lengua dice que en el lower east side lo malo se pone bueno y que lo bueno se pone malo los sábados por la noche y si te coge la policía ni el médico chino te salva tú sabes así dice la gente que no se quiere pa’ na con la lengua. (“La gente que no se quiere pa’ na con la lengua” 37) (the people that want nothin’ to do with the language say that on the Lower East Side bad becomes good and good becomes bad

33


on Saturday nights and if the police catch you not even the Chinese doctor will save you ya know that’s what the people say that want nothin’ to do with the language.)

In some cases, everyday language becomes stridently militant, as in the poetry of Louis Reyes Rivera, and the apparent chaos of society in the United States motivates some Nuyorican poets’ aesthetic link with marginality, perversity, and insanity. Miguel Piñero, for example, in one of his poems, proclaims himself to be “the philosopher of the criminal mind.” But Iván Silén* and Pedro Pietri* are the names that immediately come to mind when dealing with this aspect of Nuyorican literary language. Pietri, one of the first authors to be published, is known principally for his Puerto Rican Obituary (1973). Pietri conceives of his poetry as action. Humor and imagination abound in his poems and become almost surrealistic elements, as in the famous poem “Suicide Note from a Cockroach in a Low Income Housing Project.” His works represent the artistic attempt to denounce the absurdity of the Puerto Rican’s social reality in New York, basing itself for this purpose in the juxtaposition of unexpected images, the transgression of literary conventions (especially in his prose), and the subversion of the passive role of the reader. In the case of Iván Silén, who divides his time between Puerto Rico and New York, we encounter a poetic reflection about the political and cultural circumstances of Puerto Rico. His poetry evolves from a militancy in the style of social poetry toward an anarchic surrealism of great metaphoric complexity. In the Nuyorican poems of El pájaro loco (1972, Woody Woodpecker), Silén achieves an Orphic descent into the bowels of the accursed city, where existence is somber and meaningless. His poetry is articulated in relation to otherness; to be and not be a citizen, to be Puerto Rican and a citizen of the United States, to speak Spanish and English, to learn and forget the mother tongue, and so on. In the book’s prologue, he calls for the establishment of a neosurrealistic style, defined as “creación automática de metáforas violentas. En el cual se intenta expresar toda la poesía reprimida socialmente que hay en el inconciente [sic]” (the automatic creation of violent metaphors. Within which an attempt is made to express all poetry that exists in the unconscious which has been socially repressed, 12). In his novels, Silén examines in depth this aesthetic concept and makes a plea for what he himself now calls “schizophrenic realism,” whose objective is, as he states in the pamphlet “La imaginación al poder”: “Obligar a que la realidá [sic] se dualice. Obligar a la realidá a que exhiba su ambigüedá política (-poética-) que yace inédita” (Imagination to Power: To force reality to embody duality. To compel reality to exhibit its political [-poetic-] ambiguity that lies hitherto unheard of . . . [6]). Stridency and absurdity characterize a good part of Miguel Piñero’s theatrical production. His best-known play, Short Eyes, was awarded an Obie and the 34


New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play of the 1973–1974 season. Set in prison, Short Eyes presents, in a raw exposition, the violent reality of the prison world. The remainder of his dramatic production is equally populated by marginalized beings and centered in their personal and societal conflicts, language, and way of life. Piñero’s plays seek to startle the spectator or reader, an attitude reflected even in the title of one of his latest theatrical collections: Outrageous One Act Plays (1986). On a less nihilistic level, the social criticism and militancy of some authors leads to an identification with other poets and communities in the United States and in the Third World. This poetry is politicized in a show of solidarity with the struggles of Afro Americans, Chicanos, or the peoples of Latin America or Indochina. Louis Reyes Rivera and Sandra María Esteves* characterize this aspect of Nuyorican poetry, and both of them demonstrate the influence of the Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Sandra María Esteves, for example, reflects upon her relationship with other minority poets in her “Open Letter to Eliana,” which contains a personal history of her poetic evolution as well as a definition of her aesthetic. In the letter, Esteves recalls this influence of her literary activity: “a community poetry reading at the National Black Theater in Harlem, where young and old rose to the podium to recite their creations, poems that were close to their lives and mine. I was moved this first time that I heard nontraditional, non-classical, free-form poetry that addressed itself to the immediate issues of our collective existence” (Breaking Boundaries 118). Miguel Algarín, for his part, constructs a literary bridge toward Chicanos and Native Americans in the section “At the Western Edge” in his book On Call (1980). Special importance is given to identification with African cultures (see African Roots), which are preferred to the Hispanic tradition, and which are also confronted with Anglo American values. The vindication of Négritude that has antecedents in the Afro-Antillean poetry of Luis Palés Matos is not achieved in an immobile or regressive manner but rather because of a consciousness of change. In the poetry of Tato Laviera, for example, the African legacy is manifested at times in the jitanjáforas and other onomatopoeic constructions such as the “trucutú pacutú” that mark the rhythm in the poem “tumbao [drummed/knocked down] (for Eddie Conde)” from La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979, The Oxcart Made a U-Turn). In spite of representing a cultural continuity, the African legacy is demythologized upon finding that Africa also signifies evolution (see, for example, his poem “the africa in pedro morejón,” from the same book). After an evocation of popular music that represents the African bond with the Antilles Islands, the poetic voice reflects as follows: yes, we preserved what was originally African, or have we expanded it? i wonder if we have committed the sin of blending? but i also hear that AFRICANS love electric guitars clearly misunderstanding they are the root, or is it me who is primitive? damn it, it is complicated. (43)

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The African element serves, then, among other things, to emphasize the conviction that the cultural and linguistic synthesis characteristic of the Nuyorican is the essence of a people that are no longer entirely Puerto Rican but who do not accept that fact as the loss of an imaginary cultural purity but rather as the creation of something new. In no place in the works of Laviera is this idea better captured than in the title of one of his most recent poetry collections, AmeRícan (1985), in which the plays on words between “American,” “[I] am a Rican” and “American/Rican” achieves a total synthesis. Within the process of self-realization and the inauguration of solidarity with other marginalized groups, one of the most current poetic movements in Puerto Rican literature deals with the redefinition of the role of the Nuyorican woman. In their creative and critical work, Nicholasa Mohr, Sandra María Esteves, and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera,* among others, reevaluate the presence (or absence) of women in Nuyorican literature. At the base of this revision is the same question posed by the Chicana authors and other female writers of color in the United States: namely, how to struggle for the conservation of a culture threatened and rejected by the dominant culture while simultaneously fighting for the radical transformation of this same culture to eradicate discriminatory abuses against women. The answer seems to be mediated by the social and personal positions of the writers. From a class perspective, the neorriqueña (female Nuyorican) writers began to depict female figures in their works, something previously absent in the literature. As is expected, the thematics of the female writer or artist emerge. Already in Nilda, the young girl protagonist is an artist in formation; the same occurs in other narratives by Mohr, such as the short story “The Artist” from her book, Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985). The unifying thread of all of these representations of the female artist or writer is the conception of their art or writing as a personal and collective liberation, the assumption of the power and the voice with which the silence imposed by the patriarchal tradition is broken. Two poems written by women are especially representative of the change of focus from a culturalist vision of women to a more feminist vision. In the first, “My Name is María Christina” by Sandra María Esteves, woman appears associated with tradition, the home, and household chores: “I do not complain about cooking for my family/because abuela [grandmother] taught me that woman is the master of fire” (Yerbabuena 63). In the poem her strength lies in her acceptance of cultural tradition and in her role as defender and guarantor of that tradition: Our men . . . they call me negra because they love me and in turn I teach them to be strong. I respect their ways inherited from our proud ancestors. (6–7)

The second poem, “In Response,” by Luz María Umpierre-Herrera, is a response to Sandra María Esteves based on a more critical analysis of tradition: 36


Our men . . . they call me pushie for I speak without a forked tongue and I do fix the leaks in all faucets. I don’t accept their ways, shed down from macho ancestors ... I express myself in any voice, in any tone, in any language that conveys my house within. The only way to fight oppression is through resistance: I do complain I will complain. (Y otras desgracias [And Other Misfortunes] 1)

This feminist vision deals with the breaking of cultural molds that have classified women as love objects or as housewives. To this end, the question of the very expression itself becomes an essential requisite for social transformation. Sandra María Esteves joins in with this poetic breach in other compositions such as her poem “From the Common Wealth.” Although we have concentrated for the most part on Puerto Rican literature in the United States, it must be noted that the burst of Nuyorican cultural activity also extends to the plastic arts in which aesthetic concepts similar to those found in the literature direct the efforts of the artists. We have already noted in passing the link that exists between Nicholasa Mohr’s graphic art and the themes and figures of the barrio. The same can be said of other artists, as is exemplified in the photography of Roger Cabán and Evelyn Collazos. In their photographs, both offer us snapshots of characters of the barrio, almost always anonymous and situated in an everyday context whether it be in el subway (the subway), la bodega (the grocery store), at a window, or in the street. For his part, Gregorio Marzán distances himself from New York to evoke, especially with his animal sculptures, the Puerto Rico of his infancy and youth, but still retains, nevertheless, the sensation of everyday familiarity. In the works of other artists, however, the immediate reality is transcended in search of new possibilities of expression. Thus, as in his novels and poems, the paintings of Iván Silén elaborate surrealistic motifs in an attempt to discover another unvoiced reality. Ibsen Espada, in turn, uses the Puerto Rican countryside as a point of departure—Espada was born in New York but grew up on the Island—and personalizes it by a process of colorist abstraction. As Jane Livingston notes, the use of styles similar to Surrealism (particularly via Picasso, Miró, Wilfredo Lam, and other great Hispanic artists), has come to be a characteristic of contemporary Latino art in the United States, particularly among Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Such works represent a type of school that Livingston designates with the term—perhaps not a very fortunate choice— “Picassesque Surrealism,” to which artists such as Arnaldo Roche or Espadas would belong (106). 37


After this review of the principal Nuyorican aesthetic concepts, we can conclude that Nuyorican literature is a literature of collective affirmation. It equates to a reclamation of a particular social and artistic space in the context of an extensive movement toward multicultural affirmation in the United States. The vindication of a new language and a new identity are the basic foundations for neorriqueño writers. The emphasis on popular culture, on the African legacy, and on the re-creation of daily life makes it a literature of communal orientation and inspiration. Frequently, it is also a literature of protest, establishing as its objective the denunciation of the conditions of economic subordination and racial discrimination with which Puerto Ricans are confronted in the United States. The vitality of its cultivators has produced, up to now, a rich and varied corpus of readings that must be taken into account very seriously to understand Hispanic cultures in the United States.

Cuban American Aesthetic Concepts Allí estará a 90 millas de su caimán, se parará en alguna-roca todos los días, y todos los días mirando al mar, tratando de achicar la distancia. 90 millas no son nada compadre; pero son 90 millas que nos separan de todo aquello que dejamos atrás. (There you’ll be 90 miles from your cayman, you’ll stand on some rock every day, and every day, looking at the sea, you’ll try to shorten the distance. Ninety miles are nothing, old friend. But they are 90 miles that separate us from everything we left behind.) Iván Acosta (El súper 69)

Of the three groups of Latinos considered in this essay, the group that made its appearance latest in the United States’ literary panorama was Cuban Americans. It is certain that Cuban writers, the majority of whom were exiled patriots, have been writing in the United States since 1820. The best known of all of them, José Martí, is representative of this group of intellectuals whose writings flourished, for the most part, in newspapers published in Spanish. It was not, however, until the diaspora of 1959 that the human flow of Cubans into the United States became a social phenomenon of notable dimensions. Fleeing from Fidel Castro’s revolution, a large group of professionals, including numerous writers, settled in Florida and, immediately thereafter, in other states in the East, such as New Jersey. Subsequent massive migrations such as the one that departed from the Port of Mariel consolidated and diversified the Cuban population. In the present day, a generation of Cubans born or raised in the United States constitutes a new dimension of this phenomenon, a generation that can without hesitation be called Cuban American. The mindset of the political refugee that accompanied the first waves of Cuban writers and artists to the United States determined, in great measure, 38


their aesthetic and thematics. Theirs is a literature of exile tending toward political propaganda and denunciation of the revolutionary regime. On the other hand, it is also a reflection of the character of already established writers in Cuba who now put their literature at the service of the counterrevolution. Such is the case with Lydia Cabrera,* Matías Montes Huidobro,* or José Sánchez-Boudy,* for example. Nostalgia for the lost island is tinged with patriotic tones: it is not only the loss of a paradise of memories but also the fall of the country and of traditional values. Thus it is not surprising that a large part of this Cuban literature of exile touches on costumbrismo (regional customs) and folklore. It is natural in the case of Lydia Cabrera, given her work as a folklorist in the period before the revolution. After a decade passed without producing a new book, her publications in the United States continued along the trajectory already established in Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940, Black Stories from Cuba) and previous works. The poetics of José Sánchez-Boudy, however, although his career as a writer began in the United States, were born out of his experience as a criminologist in the popular barrios of Havana and from a folkloric taste inherited from his father. Both experiences gave form to his writings, in which he incorporated popular Cuban speech as a series of voices surrounding and coloring the discourse of his narrators. The nostalgia characteristic of these writers—and especially of their poetry—is born from the desire to remember pre-revolutionary Cuba in a literary form. As a consequence of this nostalgia, their present existence appears empty and lacking in feeling. The principal symbols and motives evoke the loneliness and isolation felt by them in a strange country as well as the violent uprooting that exile entails. The image of the abandoned country is blended with that of the exile who feels isolated, as in these verses by Matías Montes Huidobro: Somos islas. El mar parece rodearnos. Tiempo llegará en que entre las olas nos perderemos. (La vaca de los ojos largos) (We are islands. The sea seems to surround us. Time will come when we will lose ourselves among the waves. [The Cow with the Long Eyes])

José Sánchez-Boudy expresses similar sentiments in his poems with a recurrent opposition between the space–time poles of there (Cuba) and here (the United States): “y yo despierto y estoy aquí:/frío país./Y todo esto es un sueño de verano” (I awaken and I am here:/cold country./And everything is a summer dream 55), he tells us in a poem from Tiempo congelado: (Poemario de una isla ausente) (1979, Frozen Time: [A Poem Book from an Absent Island]). The symbolism constitutes the principal axis of the Cuban literature of exile. On occasion, 39


as frequently occurs in Montes Huidobro’s plays, the symbols come to participate in the construction of a theater of the absurd or one of surrealistic inspiration. In the novel, the symbolism appears to be associated with a baroque verbal style characteristic of Cuban literature that serves as a bridge with the younger writers. In this regard, Carolina Hospital* points out the preponderance of the tropical neo-baroque style in the writings of the authors collected in her anthology, Cuban American Writers: Los atrevidos (1988, The Daring). For these young writers, however, the focus of attention has shifted from the Island to the Continent: from recollection to the present. Their primordial source of inspiration is now their own Cuban community in the United States, not the memory of life in Cuba that many of them scarcely came to know. Some authors, such as storywriter and novelist Roberto G. Fernández,* show a desire to write the chronicle of a society that sees itself in the process of disappearing. The tone of urgency that could be seen in politically intended literature is not, however, observed in their works. On the contrary, if anything characterizes the Cuban American authors, it is a certain distance, often tinged with humor and irony. Satire and parody find new life, focusing principally on the language. Together with popular Cuban speech, which had already been incorporated into the literary language by the folkloric writers, these authors poeticize about the bilingualism of the younger generation as well as about the consequences that the contact with the English language will have on the speech of all generations of Cubans. Of course, a significant number of their works are written in English with little or no Spanish presence. All genres are cultivated by the Cuban American writers. Particular vigor is observed in those genres that best lend themselves to the direct incorporation of Cuban speech patterns in the United States. Dramatic works, the novel, and the short story excel in the novelty of their situations as well as in the manner in which they are developed. Above all, experimentation in narrative is accentuated, requiring an active role of the reader. In poetry, the themes of exile still find a wide outlet, as seen in the verses of Omar Torres,* in which loneliness, boredom, dissatisfaction, and alienation predominate, except when these negative sentiments are surmounted by love. Among the prose writers, Celedonio González* perhaps represents the moment of transition between the culture of exile and the culture that is properly denominated Cuban American. The thematics of the revolution are still present in his first works—that is to say, the disenchantment with the new political and social order, as seen in Los primos (1971, The Cousins). However, even in this early work, Cuban culture is blended with North American culture, a reflection of the fact that this disillusionment also applies to the deception that his characters feel is the “American Dream.” In later works, González accentuates narrative experimentation and focuses on the Cuban community in Miami. His second novel, Los cuatro embajadores (1973, The Four Ambassadors), represents this moment in his work. In a more recent novel, El espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver (1978, The Thickness of the Hide of a Cat That is Already a Carcass), the perspective aims toward the future in the form of impossible dreams 40


that shelter his principal characters. According to José B. Fernández, the critic who has dealt most with González’s work, the message of this last novel is clear: “Cuban exiles should give up their dreams of returning to a liberated Cuba and must resign themselves to accept exile as a way of life” (125). We find a similar message in Iván Acosta’s* celebrated play, El Súper (premiered in 1977, adapted for film in 1979, and published in 1982), in which the conflict between the generation of political exiles and the new generation raised in the United States is presented in dramatic form. In the climax of the work, when Roberto and Aurelia decide to return to Miami and reintegrate themselves into the Cuban community after an existence full of hardships and displacement in New York, their daughter, Aurelita, replies to them from the youngest generation’s point of view: Yo no sé qué diablo van a ir a buscar ustedes a Miami. Allí la gente no ha progresado, todavía viven en el 1959, la ‘Cuba de ayer,’ papá, eso es todo . . . yo no sé, yo llevo 18 años oyendo hablar de esa Cuba de ayer. Y acaso estos 18 años no cuentan. No, como si nunca hubieran pasado. I don’t know about you people, man . . . lo que van a hacer es un viaje hacia el pasado. Hagan ustedes sus viajes y déjenme a mí a los míos. Here, here is where the action is. (61–62) (I don’t know what in the devil you are looking for in Miami. The people there haven’t progressed, they still live in 1959, in the Cuba of yesterday,” Papa, that is all . . . I don’t know, I’ve been hearing about that “Cuba of yesterday” for 18 years. And maybe 18 years don’t count. No, like they never went by. I don’t know about you people, man . . . what you’re going to make is a trip into the past. Make your trips and let me make mine. Here, here is where the action is. (61–62).

The generational opposition, delineated in this quote by the switch to English in two crucial moments of Aurelita’s monologue, represents the decisive shift from the consciousness of the exile with its myths of returning to the Island at some undetermined point in the future to the consciousness of a present reality in the adopted country, even if Aurelita’s character is not free from a certain ironic criticism in the work because of her assimilation of United States customs. Satire of the Cuban American community finds its best exponent in the narrative of Roberto G. Fernández. In his novels, Fernández describes the transformation of the exiled community in Miami and the substitution of traditional values and norms for others acquired in the new surroundings in the United States. Thus, the sharp separation between social classes in prerevolutionary Cuba is obscured in the context of the factories and workshops in the United States, where long-time servants and their ladies sit down together side by side. Ancient social rites or ceremonies are transformed by the 41


influence of commercialization, and the same phenomenon occurs with the language. As a linguist, Fernández possesses a magisterial ability for capturing details. In his first novel, La vida es un special (1981, Life is a Special), popular Cuban speech and bilingualism are the dominant notes he uses when portraying the community. The experimental structure of his novels that form a collage of diverse texts further facilitates the introduction of social and regional variants. The journalistic discourse of the society column, the colloquial conversation, the monologues, the speeches, and so on create a marked polyglossia in which traditional orthography is alternated with phonetic writing. The “carnivalizing” of all of society even extends in Fernández’s work to a parody of the novel’s own academic discourse, in a kind of apocryphal prologue to La vida es un special attributed to Manuel De Zequeira, who observes in the novel, among other things, “miles de incongruencias y faltas básicas de ortografía,” “vocablos incomprensibles,” “ficción desorbitada,” “desorganización estructural,” and “falta de desarrollo de los personajes,” (“thousands of incongruities and basic orthographic defects,” “incomprehensible words,” “exaggerated fiction,” “structural disorganization,” and “lack of character development”), although he ends by praising it for “un no sé qué, que aún no he descifrado, lo cual discutiré en mi próximo artículo” (“an I-don’t-know-what—that I still have not deciphered—that I will discuss in my next article” 7). The title of his following work, La montaña rusa (1985, The Roller Coaster), evidently claims for itself the same structural characteristics and, with them, the satirical vision of society that defines the work of Roberto Fernández. In theater, bilingualism is consolidated with the work of Dolores Prida.* Her aesthetic begins with a transforming appropriation of other, earlier works for the purpose of protest. Prida, for example, uses the structure of the musical comedy or renowned theatrical works by authors such as Jacinto Benavente, a strategy that takes advantage of the public’s familiarity with certain forms of theater to transmit messages that are not customarily associated with them. Thus, in her work, Beautiful Señoritas (1977), the musical is put to the service of a feminist theme of which Prida is a pioneer among Cuban Americans. Along the same lines, Coser y cantar (1981, Sewing and Singing) unites the thematic of feminine liberation with the question of exile. In this work, Ella (the Spanish “She”) and She (the North American “She”) are two aspects of one Cuban American woman: Ella speaks in Spanish and She speaks in English. Their scenic monologues, which constitute the entire work, never form a dialogue but present, as José Escarpenter and Linda S. Glaze point out, “two aspects of the split personality of a Cuban immigrant” (253). Humor and farce are essential elements of her creative aesthetic, although in more recent works, such as Savings (1985), Prida seems to lean toward a greater degree of realism and character development. The dramatist Omar Torres has also concerned himself with presenting the life of the Latin American woman on stage. His work Yo dejo mi palabra en el aire sin llaves y sin velos (1978, I Leave My Word in the Air Without Keys and Without Veils), for example, is based on poems written by women, much as the 42


teatropoesía referred to earlier in the section about Chicanos. Other works of this author have to do with describing matters relating to the Cuban community on the East Coast of the United States or are patriotic dramas. Thus, the protagonist in Latinos (1979) is actually a group of young people who tell of their experiences in the big city—the work has the structure of a musical. Abdala-José Martí (1972), however, written in collaboration with Iván Acosta, is a patriotic celebration of the poetry of José Martí. In his narrative work, Omar Torres concentrates on the exploration of Cuban life in the United States and on the patriotic sentiments associated with the independence of Cuba. His first novel, Apenas un bolero (1981, Hardly a Bolero), unfolds in various regions in the United States, and the narrator alternates between the first and third persons in an attempt to embrace the total experience of the Cuban American (without limiting himself to Miami), presenting it from the outside (via third-person narration) as well as from within (first-person). In his most recent novel, Al partir (1986, Upon Leaving), Torres unites his interest in the Latin American woman with the patriotic element of his other works to construct the character of Evangelina Cossío, a heroine of Cuban independence. It is a novel with a historical setting, justified in the dedication as the novelization of the life of Evangelina, “que es a la vez la historia de tantas otras mujeres cubanas” (“that is at once the life of so many other Cuban women”). A large part of the novel is constructed from journalistic material that has a documental intent, but the constant romanticization of characters and situations diminishes a great part of the work’s initial force. In the plastic arts, we have already mentioned the existence of a Latino surrealism especially strong among Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans. Carlos Alfonzo, Paul Sierra, and Pedro Pérez are three of the most outstanding Cuban representatives of this style, one notably influenced by Wilfredo Lam, also a Cuban. In a different way, in the works of Alfonzo, Sierra, and Pérez, the Cuban element has remained as a thematic or symbolic substratum framing the works. It is not, however, a case of nostalgia in the costumbrista vein but rather a new expressivity with roots—something we also observe in the paintings of José María Mijares, whose oneiric figurations recall the paintings of Miró. To conclude these remarks, we have reserved a figure who appears to represent the rapprochement of Cuban American literature with the mainstream, as well as representing success in the mainstream. This is no one other than Oscar Hijuelos,* author of the autobiographical novel of ethnic content (1983, Our House in the Last World), written in the same vein as those of Pin Thomas (Down These Mean Streets) or José Antonio Villarreal (Pocho). The awarding of the famous Pulitzer Prize to his most recent work, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), confirms the literary establishment’s acceptation of Hijuelos as well as the large commercial publishing houses’ interest in cornering the ever-widening market of Latino readers in the United States. In light of this, it is hoped that the literary canon of the United States will be expanded to incorporate other Latino authors, whether they write in Spanish or in English. 43


Cuban American literature, as distinct from Chicano or Puerto Rican literature, springs from a social group that has been displaced by political changes. We have seen how the question of exile influences the poetics of the authors that initiated this literature in the decade of the 1960s. From then on, the progressive erosion of the idea of returning to Cuba and the greater settlement of Cubans in the United States have together brought Cuban American literature nearer to that of other Hispanic groups. The affinities are found principally in the area of linguistics and in a thematics relative to immigrants’ adaptation to a new system of values and a new way of life. In the political sphere, we continue to observe a great difference between the tone of social and leftist militancy that is common among Chicanos and Puerto Ricans and a greater patriotic counterrevolutionary preoccupation among Cubans, with some exceptions. On the whole, the aesthetic concepts of Hispanics in the United States are characterized by their bond with the popular element from which they are formed. They represent a successful attempt at the literary re-creation of a way of life and of a language common to numerous groups of people that have been left on the fringes of official life in the United States. With the exception of Cuban literature of exile, they are revolutionary poetics in both form and content. Because of their thematics, they are linked to the committed literature associated with cultural and political resistance. As a consequence of their style, at the same time as they incorporate the most important technical innovations in twentieth century literature, they also make an important contribution in their acceptance and cultivation of a bilingualism essential for the representation of the Latino experience in the United States. Although different Hispanic groups are involved, we observe a growing mutual influence among them that marks the guidelines of a possible tendency toward a future cultural synthesis. Whatever the case, the literary force and quality that have been achieved by the writers of the three groups discussed in this essay consecrates for them, in itself, an important place in United States, Latino, and universal literature. Further Reading Alarcón, Norma, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983: 182–190). Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero, eds., Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (New York: Morrow, 1975). Anaya, Rudolfo A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds., Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque: El Norte, 1989). Barradas, Efraín, “De lejos en sueños verla . . . : visión mítica de Puerto Rico en la poesía neorrican” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 7, No. 3 (1979): 46–56. Bruce-Novoa, Juan, “Canonical and Non-Canonical Texts” The Americas Review Vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (1986): 119–135. Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).

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Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986). Castillo, Adelaida del, “Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look Into a New Perspective” in Essays on La Mujer (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Center Publications, 1977: 58–73). Flores, Juan, and George Yúdice, “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-formation” Social Text Vol. 24 (1990): 57–84. García, Richard A., “Chicano Intellectual History: Myths and Reality” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 7, No. 2 (1979): 58–62. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, “On Culture” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 5, No. 2 (1977): 29–47. Hernández Cruz, Victor, “Mountains in the North: Hispanic Writing in the U.S.A.” The Americas Review Vol. 14, Nos. 3–4 (1986): 110–114. Herrera-Sobek, María, Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (Binghamton, New York: Bilingual, 1985). Horno-Delgado, Asunción, et al, eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). Huerta, Jorge A., Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1982). Jiménez, Francisco, ed., The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1979). Kanellos, Nicolás, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States: The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Other Hispanic Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989). Kanellos, Nicolás, ed., Mexican American Theatre: Then and Now (Houston: Arte Público, 1983). Lattin, Vernon, ed., Contemporary Chicano Fiction (Binghamton, New York: Bilingual Press, 1986). Leal, Luis et al., eds., A Decade of Chicano Literature (1970–1979): Critical Essays and Bibliography (Santa Barbara: La Causa, 1982). Martínez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985). Mohr, Eugene, The Nuyorican Experience (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982). Mohr, Nicholasa, “Interview with Edna Acosta-Belén” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 8, No. 2 (1980): 35–41. Mohr, Nicholasa, “Journey Toward a Common Ground: Struggle and Identity of Hispanics in the U.S.A.” The Americas Review Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 81–85. Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (Madrid: Betania, 1988). Olivares, Julián, “A Decade Later: Self and Society in Tino Villanueva’s Shaking Off the Dark” Confluencia Vol. 1, No. 2 (1986): 98–110. Rivera, Tomás, Tomás Rivera: The Collected Works, ed. Julián Olivares (Houston: Arte Público, 1992: 359–364). Rodríguez del Pino, Salvador, La novela chicana escrita en español: cinco autores comprometidos (Ypsilanti, Ml: Bilingual, 1982).

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African Roots

Saldívar, Ramón, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Sánchez, Marta Ester, Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Sánchez-Boudy, José, Historia de la literatura cubana (en el exilio) (Miami: Universal, 1975). Sommers, Joseph, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Modern Chicano Writers (New York: Prentice Hall, 1979). Villanueva, Tino, “Apuntes sobre la poesía chicana” Papeles de Son Armadans Vols. 271–273 (1978): 41–70. Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, “Teatropoesía by Chicanas in the Bay Area: Tongues of Fire.” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 11, No. 1 (1983): 78–94. Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás, “The Chicano Movement and the Emergence of a Chicano Poetic Consciousness” New Scholar Vol. 6 (1977): 81–109.

Manuel Martín Rodríguez, translated by Rhonda Osmun Hayworth African Roots. Slaves were imported by the Spanish Empire to most of its New World colonies from the sixteenth century on, but the areas that received the greatest amounts of Africans from diverse backgrounds were the islands of the Caribbean and the coastal areas of the Spanish mainland colonies. The slave populations of Cuba and Venezuela not only rose to exceed the size of the white European populations but eventually to more than double them. Nevertheless, even such inland areas as Mexico City developed very large Africanorigin populations, and when the Southwest of what would become the United States was colonized from Mexico, large African-origin and mulatto populations helped to settle the area as soldiers and citizens. The roots of African-inflected culture, language, religion, and literature have developed throughout Spanish America from colonial times up to the present. Essentially three processes of development have taken place over time: (1) the assimilation of African cultural perspectives, food, and folk and religious practices that have been absorbed into the national cultures of Spanish American societies through the dynamics of mestizaje, or natural cultural blending, including the persistence of Afro-Hispanic cultural enclaves that have often been treated as separate from the mainstream or the “national” identity, (2) a literate, intellectual tradition that developed within the Spanish American nations as soon as slaves, freedmen, and mulattos gained access to literacy, schooling, and publication in the seventeenth century, and (3) a more contemporary process in which the children of the marginalized working classes created their own literature based on their experiences as migrants, their working-class ethos, and popular culture, distinct from the earlier writings of Afro-Hispanic intellectuals following a written tradition consciously adopted from European and Euro American canons. The assimilation of African cultural ways into the national identities of Spanish American culture was often a seamless transition that occurred as 46

African Roots

most countries, from Argentina to Mexico, abolished slavery upon winning their independence or shortly thereafter. Because of this, many of the Africanorigin populations of such countries as Argentina and Mexico have apparently ceased to exist as separate groups, despite leaving obvious vestiges of their culture in such national identifiers as the tango and “La Bamba,” among many other deep culture contributions. But because of the separatist nature of slavery and the intellectual isolation in which many slaves were kept in the regions where Africans often outnumbered Europeans, the transmission of knowledge, including history and religion and myriad other cultural ways, was effected through oral tradition (see Orality). Over the last four centuries, this oral transmission has persisted, as have African-origin population centers, despite or alongside literate transmission, best appreciated in the lyrics of folk songs, folk tales, legends, personal experience narratives, and the practices of santería (a syncretic religion of Catholicism and the Yoruba religion) and vudún (voodoo). It is true that this oral culture has informed and influenced the written literature produced in all of the Spanish American countries with African populations, from such “protectors” of the African slaves as Fray Alonso de Sandoval in the seventeenth century and the abolitionist novelists, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Cirilo Villaverde,* and Anselmo Suárez y Romero, in the early and mid-nineteenth century to the slave narratives and poetry of José Vasconcelos (El Negrito Poeta) in eighteenth-century Mexico and Gabriel de la Concepción Valdez (“Plácido”) and Juan Francisco Manzano in nineteenthcentury Cuba—to the avant-garde and magic realist works of Alejo Caprentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Luis Rafael Sánchez of the late twentieth century. The poets of Poetic Negrism (considered by such scholars as Jackson as “an exploitation of black culture by white writers”), such as Luis Palés Matos and Emilo Ballagas, in the early and mid-twentieth century even became expert ethnographers and folklorist in their observations of Afro-Hispanic dialects, rituals, and oral lore. But from the early abolitionists, such as José Antonio Saco,* to the negristas, such as Palés, theirs was an intellectual outsider posture that often represented Africans stereotypically, following welltreaded romantic, paternalistic, and even exotic depictions never free of stereotypes that rarely recognized Afro-Hispanic struggles for liberation from racial and class oppression. In the late twentieth century, however, such scholars as Paulo de Carvalho Neto have successfully recovered this oral literature of race and class struggle even as more and more Afro-Hispanic voices gained access to literacy, the printing press, and publishers to represent themselves in print. A rich literate tradition in Spanish-language literature has taken the black man as subject, beginning in Spain even before the conquest and colonization of the Americas. Since the time of Bartolomé de Las Casas, one of the ideologues of using slavery to replace enslavement and abuse of the Native Americans, this literature has been most created by white creoles and their descendants who often romanticized or even feared the black man’s uncontrollable, uncivilized, or primitive nature. This is not to say that there were 47

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no creoles who recognized the importance of the African in forging a national identity, especially in such societies as Cuba, where blacks greatly outnumbered whites. In fact, activists for Cuban independence in the middle nineteenth century, such as Carlos de Colins in his newspaper El Mulato* (1854), published in New York, and Diego Vicente Tejera,* in such plays as La muerte de Plácido (1875, The Death of Plácido), called for the forging of a mulatto nation for Cuba. What is more, the figure looked upon as the father of the Cuban nation, José Martí,* worked tirelessly to unite the disparate racial interests among Cubans to obtain independence and establish an autonomous culture representative of all of its constituents. But whites did not have the exclusive word in African culture in Cuba and elsewhere; more and more freedmen and mulattoes gradually began to represent themselves as they gained access to literacy and means of publication, contributing important works to their national cultures as well as to the world’s literature. In the Cuba of today, one might say, the official identity is mulatto as a result of the early twentieth-century promotions of ethnographer and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz and the poetry and cultural leadership of such national figures as the universally celebrated cultivator of mulatto poetry Nicolás Guillén. In Jackson’s words The popular poetry of Guillén, consistently social, revolutionary, and intensely human, is a poetry of mestizaje, integration and racial equality. Throughout his life Guillén has composed poems that drive home his messages of black pride, of the mixtures of races and cultures in Cuba, of the necessity of black and white to join hands. (126)

And even in exile, such writers as Lydia Cabrera* continue to represent the African heritage of all Cubans in their stories, novels and poems. The most interesting development in Hispanic letters in the United States, however, is the rise of Afro-Hispanic intellectuals and writers from the working class to achieve agency in representing themselves in print, where otherwise they would have remained unpublished and without access to intellectual institutions in their respective homelands. Clearly a forerunner of this twentieth-century manifestation is the self-made bibliographer of the African Diaspora, the Puerto Rican–born Arturo Alfonso Schomburg,* who went from conspiring for Puerto Rican independence with José Martí to contributing to the Harlem Renaissance. From the late nineteenth century up to World War II, numerous Afro-Cubans, Afro–Puerto Ricans and Afro-Dominicans migrated to the United States in search of work. Many worked in the tobacco industry of Tampa/Ybor City and Long Island, New York, others in the ship yards of Brooklyn, and many in Northeastern factories. In hitherto unforeseen numbers, beginning with the tobacco workers who had lectores in their employ to read to them during the entire boring work day in the cigar factories, many working-class intellectuals arose to write for, print, and publish their own newspapers, write, act in, and produce 48

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their own plays, and eventually even publish their own books. Latino workers from all backgrounds—Spaniards, Venezuelans, Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and so on—participated in this intellectual ferment, which was often accompanied by (or part of) efforts to unionize workers, and often accompanied by the study of anarchism and socialism in the readings of lectores and the study groups and performances in union halls. Out of this ferment rose not only the union newspapers, such as Tampa’s La Federación (1899, The Federation), but also such independent periodicals as the allimportant Gráfico* (1927, Graphic) and such important community histories as Memorias de Bernardo Vega* (1979, Memories of Bernardo Vega). It is in this milieu of worker solidarity that Afro-Latinos emerge as writers, especially in New York and Tampa, and the likes of Jesús Colón* and Joaquín Colón López* assume the center of Puerto Rican community life, penning crónicas* for as many as a dozen community newspapers. Here also the AfroCuban Alberto O’Farrill* dominates the musical comedy stage as a playwright and actor with his Cuban farces and develops the persona of a picaresque mulatto in his “O’fa” chronicles in Gráfico, and Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo* stages her feminist–anarchist plays and publishes her political tracts in book form. It is the Tampa/Ybor City culture, in fact, that opens the way for Evelio Grillo’s* education and eventual access to the Afro American civil rights movement, as documented in his memoir, Black Cuban, Black American (2000). But the truly transitional figure to arise from this working-class intelligentsia is Jesús Colón,* who, with a high school education attained in New York City, became a community conscience for Hispanic immigrants in his Spanish-language crónicas for decades and then, during the 1940s, not only began to espouse Puerto Ricans taking ownership of their community as citizens in New York but transitioned to English in his columns for the Daily Worker. His book, A Puerto Rican in New York & Other Sketches (1961), a selection of his columns in which for the first time he confronted his own Afro–Puerto Rican identity, became a foundational work for Nuyorican* literature. It is this Nuyorican movement that blazed the path that was followed by Dominican, Cuban, and other Hispanic writers emerging from the urban working classes not only in creating their literature and identities from the economic and political circumstances of their bilingual–bicultural, urban working-class lives, but also, and especially, in taking their inspiration from popular culture and Afro-Hispanic performance and ritual. Although reflecting and responding to such commercial popular-culture media as soap operas, rock and soul music, film, and advertising, the first wave of Nuyorican writers also highly identified and continued the artistic innovations and themes of salsa music, santería religious beliefs and practices, and Latino folklore. In fact, such writers as Victor Hernández Cruz* believed that the highest form attained by poetry was to be found in the music (not the lyrics) of salsa and that the roots of salsa and his own poetry derive ultimately from Africa, with an intermediate sojourn in the Caribbean. Like many salsa composers and musicians, numerous Nuyorican poets and playwrights were santeros; 49

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the verses of Cruz,* Miguel Algarín,* Tato Laviera,* and Sandra María Esteves,* to name just a few, often take the form of prayer to the Seven African Deities and reflect santería rituals and spirituality. Their poems often adopt the musical and call-and-response structures of plenas, bombas, and salsa numbers in what some critics have considered a form of jazz poetry with its onomatopoetic emulation of bongos and congas—very unlike the rhythmic patterns typifying Palés Matos’s earlier rendition. And such plays as Laviera’s and Algarín’s homage to the first Puerto Rican Baseball Hall of Famer, Olú Clemente (Hail Clemente [Roberto Clemente, who lost his life bringing aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua]), take the form of santería apotheosis, complete with choral music and prayers. It is this generation of Afro-Latino writers who openly proclaim and celebrate their African roots and identities. It is this generation, in its open cultural embrace, that also acknowledges its debt to, and identifies with, Afro American culture and literature—from its working- class and racially oppressed base as well. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the prisons became a melting pot of sorts for Afro Americans and Afro-Latinos in accelerating syntheses and fusions that were already operating in the barrios and ghettos. Piri Thomas* and Miguel Piñero,* among many others, emerged from their incarceration as writers steeped in Afro American dialect, popular culture, and militancy to publish works in the tradition of Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Amamu Baraka. Their African identification is doubled by combining the previously separated histories of American and Caribbean racial experiences. It is members of this generation, such as Tato Laviera, who actually travel to Africa and write for their Afro American as well as Afro-Latino communities. Clearly, the works of such Cuban American authors as Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés and Dominican American authors as Loida Maritza Pérez* continue this tradition. Further Reading Dathorne, O. R., Dark Ancestor: the Literature of the Black Man in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). Jackson, Richard L., The Black Image in Latin American Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976). Luis, William, ed., Voices from Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

Nicolás Kanellos Agosín, Marjorie (1955–). Jewish–Latina poet Marjorie Agosín was born in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 15, 1955, to Moses and Frida Agosín. Shortly after her birth, her parents moved to Santiago, Chile, where she was partly raised, until 1971, when her parents moved back to the United States. Agosín has plumbed her diverse background to fill her poems with a humanitarian tenor that revisits the Holocaust as well as Latino and women’s struggles in the United States and Latin America. She graduated with a major in philosophy from the University of Georgia (1976) and a Ph.D. in Spanish from Indiana University (1982). From then on, Agosín proceeded to become one of the most prolific producers of Latino poetry in the United States. Included among her books are Con50

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chali (1980), Brujas y algo más (1984, Witches and Something More), Hogueras/Bonfires (1986), Mujeres de humo/Women of Smoke (1987), Zones of Pain (1988), Sargaso/ Sargasso: Poems (1993), Toward the Splendid City (1994), Noche Estrellada (1996, Starry Night: Poems), An Absence of Shadows (1998), Lluvia en el desierto/Rain in the Desert (1999), The Angel of Memory (2001), At the Threshold of Memory: New & Selected Poems (2003), Poems for Josefina (2004), and The Fullness of Invisible Objects/La plenitude de los objetos invisibles (2007). The majority of her poetry is originally written in Spanish to allow Agosín to preserve her Spanish American identity, an identity also refreshed by her frequent travels to South America and her teaching of Spanish American literature at Wellesley College since 1982. Her preoccupation with the poor and oppressed is continued in many of her essays and short stories, which have appeared in numerous of her books, including La felicidad, cuarto propio (1991, Happiness: Stories, 1993), Sagrada memoria: Reminiscencias de una niña judía en Chile (1994, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile, 1995), Ashes of Revolt: Essays on Human Rights (1996), Women in Disguise: Stories (1996), Las chicas desobedientes (1997, Disobedient Girls), Mujeres melodiosas (1997, Melodious Women), Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father (1998), Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America (1999), and The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000). Further Reading Scott, Nina, “Marjorie Agosín as Latina Writer” in Breaking Boundaries: Latin Writings and Critical Readings, ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 232–235).

Nicolás Kanellos Agostini de Del Río, Amelia (1896–1996). Poet, short-story writer, and literary critic Amelia Agostini de Del Río led a successful life among the elite, mostly Spanish-born, professors of Spanish language and literature at institutions in the Northeast; thus most of the works she penned were works of literary history and criticism. It was not until her retirement and her return to her birth place, Puerto Rico, that she really began producing books of poetry and short fiction. Born in 1896 in Puerto Rico, Agostini (Del Río was the last name of her husband, the famous Spanish scholar Angel del Río) received her early education on the island and a B.A. from Vassar College in 1922. She later completed a master’s degree in Spanish at Columbia University and a Ph.D. at the University of Madrid. Among the long list of institutions where she taught are Barnard College, Vassar, Middlebury, and City College. While she worked producing plays at Barnard and promoting Spanish literature and Hispanic culture in the United States, Agostini penned an occasional play and recited her own poetry. However, it was not until the deaths of her husband and son and her retirement, when she moved back to Puerto Rico, that she began to publish such poetry books as A la sombra del arce (1965, In the Shade of the Maple Tree), Canto a San Juan de Puerto Rico y otros poemas (1974, Song for San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Other Poems), Duerme, hijo (1978, 51

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Sleep, My Son), and Quiero Irme Gozosa (1981, I Want to Depart Joyfully). Her prose fiction includes Viñetas de Puerto Rico (1965, Puerto Rican Vignettes), Puertorriqueños en Nueva York (1975, Puerto Ricans in New York), and the novel Nuestras vidas son los ríos (1974, Our Lives Are Rivers). Most of the awards Agostini received in her life time recognized her work as a scholar, including a key to the city of New York and recognition from the King of Spain, Juan Carlos. She died on December 11, 1996, in New Jersey. Further Reading Laguna, Asela R., “Amalia Agostini de Del Río” in Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature, Vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006: 8–9).

Nicolás Kanellos Agüeros, Jack (1934–). Nuyorican* poet, playwright, and short-story writer Jack Agüeros was born in East Harlem, New York City, in 1934, and was educated in the public schools. In 1964, he earned a B.A. with a major in literature and a minor in speech and theater from Brooklyn College. He went on to graduate study in theater at Hunter College but never finished. Instead, he later earned an M.A. in urban studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Agúeros developed a career as a social worker in New York City while continuing his interest in literature. From 1976 to 1986, he left social work to direct the Museo del Barrio (Barrio Museum) and succeeded in placing it on sound footing before retiring from his position. Agúeros collected his short stories, which he had been publishing in periodicals and anthologies, and issued them in Dominoes & Other Stories from the Puerto Rican (1993) and Lord, Is This a Psalm? (2002). He is also the author of two books of poetry: Sonnets from the Puerto Rican (1996) and Correspondence between Stonehaulers (1991), as well as the translator of Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos (1996). Agüeros also compiled and edited the anthology Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American (1992). Agüeros has had a number of plays produced, including “Kari & The Ice Cream Cone” (1988, coauthored with David W. Smith), “Awoke One” (1992), and “Love Thy Neighbor” (1994). In addition, Agüueros has published essays and commentary in various New York periodicals, including The Voice, Soho News, and New York Newsday. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Aguila, Pancho. See Solís, Roberto Ignacio Aguilar Melantzón, Ricardo (1947–2004). Ricardo Aguilar Melantzón, poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and professor, was born on September 16, 1947, in El Paso, Texas, and spent his formative years in the tri-state border region of Chihuahua, Texas, and New Mexico. He was educated in both Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. He completed his B.A. in 1971 and his M.A. in 1972, 52

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both at the University of Texas El Paso, and earned his Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of New Mexico in 1976. His professional career as a professor of Hispanic literature specializing in Chicano and northern Mexican literature spanned over thirty years that included time spent teaching at the University of Texas El Paso, University of Washington in Seattle, and New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. However, Aguilar did not consider higher education an exclusive privilege for only those who could afford to enroll in university courses on the U.S. side of the border. For this reason, he also taught classes pro bono at the Autonomous University of Juárez, defending the idea that education equals progress. In this sense, he truly personified the notion of not forgetting where one came from, stating “Hay que enseñarles a los nuestros” (“We have to teach our own”). This philosophy earned him several accolades, including a National Research Council/Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (1983), a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for creative writing (1989), and, in particular, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching U.S. Professor of the Year–New Mexico (2003). Some of Aguilar’s scholarly works include Efraín Huerta (1984), Glosario de caló de Ciudad Juárez (1989, Glossary of Caló of Juárez), José Fuentes Mares (1990), Traven para jóvenes (1990, Traven for Young People, coauthored with Rosa María Quevedo), and Lo que el viento a Juárez: testimonios de una ciudad que se obstina (2000, What the Wind Brought Juárez: Testimonies from a City that Persists, coauthored with Socorro Tabuenca). He coedited, with Armando Armengol and Oscar U. Somoza, the literary anthologies Palabra nueva: cuentos chicanos (1984, New Word: Chicano Stories), which won the 1984 Book of the Year Award from the Southwest Regional Library Association, Palabra nueva: poesía chicana (1985, New Word: Chicano Poetry, coedited with Armando Armengol and Sergio D. Elizondo), Palabra nueva: cuentos chicanos II (1987, New Word: Chicano Stories II), El cuento chicano (1991, The Chicano Short Story), and Cuento chicano del siglo XX (1993, Chicano Short Stories of the Twentieth Century). Aguilar also translated a number of significant Chicano narratives, including Luis J. Rodríguez’s La Vida Loca: Always Running (1996, La vida loca: un testimoio de un pandillero en Los Ángeles), Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (2002, El camino a Tamazunchale, cotranslated with Beth Pollack), and Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante (2003, Por el amor de Pedro Infante, cotranslated with Beth Pollack). Aguilar’s passion for literature began at an early age; during his grammar school days in Juárez, renowned author José Vasconcelos served as the Secretary of Education of Mexico, an experience that tremendously influenced Aguilar as he and his classmates read works by Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Rosario Castellanos, and the like. These advanced readings not only instilled in him a passion for teaching literature but also inspired him to begin making sense of the world around him by writing about it. Aguilar’s creative work includes the collections of poetry Caravana enlutada (1975, Funereal Caravan) and En son de lluvia (1980, Rhythm of the Rain), as well as the narratives Madreselvas en flor (1987, Up River, 1994), which examines the lives of fictitious 53

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Mexican residents in El Paso and Juárez as they grow up and live along the border, Aurelia (1990), which delves into the experiences of various individuals and families, and A barlovento (1999, Windward, 2003), personal essays reflecting on life, death, love, and the daily grind of Juárez. In 1988, he received the “Premio Nacional de Literatura José Fuentes Mares” from the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez for Madreselvas en flor. The three narratives were eventually combined to form a border trilogy entitled Que es un soplo la vida: trilogía de la frontera (2003, Life is a Breath: Border Trilogy). Aguilar, as a Chicano scholar, was well aware of the plethora of literary texts presenting the Chicano experience from the U.S. side of the border: with this trilogy it was his intention to write about the Mexican experience along the border and provide a critical vision of border life from the immigrant’s point of view. As Aguilar states, “I wanted to hold a mirror toward the American side of the border so people there could see themselves reflected back from the Mexican side’s perspective. It presents a fresh vision that tells the U.S. audience how people on the Mexican side feel about them.” The trilogy is written in Spanish, as is all of Aguilar’s creative work. Being a product of the border, Aguilar felt that it was necessary to write in Spanish, particularly to demonstrate that the Chicano Spanish voice had not disappeared: “I think it’s important for Chicano literature to have those writers who have not caved in to the ‘American’ market—in other words, those of us who still continue to write in Spanish—to have the opportunity to be read.” Aguilar published works in many periodicals over the decades on both sides of the border, including in The Americas Review, Caracol (Shell), Entorno (Surroundings), Siempre! (Always!), Vista, and La Jornada (The Day’s Journey), also one of a handful of scholars who wrote about the cultural expressions of Chicanos in major Mexican newspapers and literary magazines such as Excelsior and Plural. Further Reading Barquet, Jesús, “Presentación: las hordas del Gran Kahn” in Que es un soplo la vida: trilogía de la frontera (Mexico: Ediciones Eón, 2003: 9–13).

Spencer Herrera Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo (1887–1949). Guillermo Aguirre y Fierro was a poet and journalist who spent many years in exile in the United States in the early twentieth century, during which time he was a prolific poet, especially when it came to crónicas rimadas, long narrative and combative poetry satirizing political figures and other themes of the day. Born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, Aguirre y Fierro was educated in that city at the Seminario Conciliar and at the state-run Instituto Científico y Literario (Scientific and Literary Institute). He wrote for numerous newspapers throughout the Mexican republic and the southwestern United States, often using the pseudonyms of Chantecler, Caifas, A. Cornejo Solís, and Quasimodo. His collection of poetry Sonrisas y Lágrimas (Smiles and Tears), published in Aguas Calientes, Mexico, in 1942, features his most famous poem “El Brindis de un Bohemio” (A Bohemian’s Toast), which touches upon one of Mexico’s most sacred traditions: the adoration of the mother figure. 54

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Aguirre took up exile in San Antonio as a result of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. During his stay in the United States, he wrote for La Revista Mexicana (The Mexican Review) of San Antonio, Texas, La Evolución (The Evolution) of Laredo, Texas, and El Cronista del Valle (The Valley Chronicler). He published chronicles under the pseudonym of Quasimodo when he criticized the Revolution, specifically leaders Álvaro Obregón, Venustiano Carranza, and Woodrow Wilson. Under this pseudonym, he authored a chronicle-drama “Una escena del Tenorio” (A Scene from Tenorio) that depicted Carranza and Francisco Villa as parodies of José Zorrilla’s “Don Juan Tenorio.” Aguirre also parodied the creative work of Latin American modernist author Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. Aguirre also started what he hoped would become a series of chronicles that included a female protagonist in the rhymed chronicles “Mi amiga Remigia” (My Friend Remigia) and “La vuelta de Remigia” (The Return of Remigia). Unfortunately, La Revista Mexicana ceased publication and Aguirre only published two chronicles that introduced a young woman from Coahuila, Mexico, who was to become the firsthand witness on what was happening in Mexico under the guidance of Venustiano Carranza. Aguirre, like many Mexican exiles of that time, eventually returned to Mexico. He died in abject poverty in Mexico City on November 8, 1949. However, he did not die in anonymity; Miguel Alemán, the president of Mexico, ordered his burial in the French cemetery and sent an emissary to his funeral. Further Reading Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo, El brindis de un bohemio: Poemas (Querétaro: [Durán Impressor], 1951). Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo, Sonrisas y lágrimas (Aguascalientes, Mexico: Talleres Pedroza, 1942). Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo, “Prólogo” Minutos íntimos: Versos pasionales (Angel Moya Sarmiento, [Puebla] Mexico: Editorial Angelopolitana, 1941). Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo, El brindis de un bohemio: Monólogo en verso (Mexico: Librería Teatral J. Lechuga, 1928). Lerner, Victoria, “Exiliados de la Revolución Mexicana: El caso de los villistas (1915–1921)” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter 2001): 109–141.

Gabriela Baeza Ventura ¡AHA!. See Association of Hispanic Arts Alarcón, Alicia (1953–). Alicia Alarcón was born on December 20, 1953, in Jocotepec, Jalisco, Mexico, the fifth of nine children. When she was three, her parents moved the family to Mexicali in Baja California, on the border with the United States. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1982 in public administration from the University of Baja California, where she began writing (her first literary work at the university received a prize). After her studies, Alarcón moved to Los Angeles, California, where she began a career as a journalist for the daily newspaper La Opinión (The Opinion), serving both as a reporter and 55

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Alicia Alarcón.

an editor. She later became the West Coast reporter for Univisión television and was contracted by CNN as a Latin American radio correspondent. Alarcón eventually moved into radio, becoming the first woman to host a news and opinion program during prime time with her program, which aired on Radio Unica (1580) in Los Angeles. She currently hosts a talk show, “Pa que lo sepa” (So That You Know), on Thursdays on Los Angeles’s Azteca 45. Alarcón is the author of the very well received collection of documentary stories, La migra me hizo los mandados (2002, published in translation in 2004 as The Border Patrol Ate My Dust), dealing with immigrants who cross the southern U.S. border, whether legally or as undocumented migrants. Critics have called Alarcón’s true-life stories harrowing for their documentation of people crossing the border while clinging to the bottom of freight trains, being raped by coyotes (labor smugglers), being sold into slavery, and being preyed upon not only by the coyotes but also by police, soldiers, bus drivers, and others. Alarcón collected these tales from listeners who called in to share their experiences with her broad audience. Further Reading Monsiváis, George, Hispanic Immigrant Identity: Political Allegiance vs. Cultural Preference (The New Americans) (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004).

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Alarcón, Francisco X. (1954–). Francisco Alarcón was born in Wilmington, California on February 21, 1954. As a child he lived with his family just outside Los Angeles, as well as with his Tarrascan-Indian grandfather in Michoacán and other relatives in Guadalajara, Mexico. Later on his family moved back to California, where he has been living since he was eighteen years old. He is a poet, an educator, and an author of a continuing stream of volumes of poetry, including Quake Poems (1989), Tattoos (1985), and Ya Vas, Carnal (1989, Already Going, Brother), Cuerpo en llamas/Body in Flames (1990), De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love (1990), Loma Prieta (1990, Dark Hill), Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992), Zurdos (1992, Left-Handed Poems), Poemas No Golden Gate for Us (1993), Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes (2001), Igunas in the Snow and Other Winter Poems (2001), and From the Other Side of Night (2002). Alarcón’s parents, cannery workers who did not finish high school, nevertheless made sure their seven children were educated. Francisco completed his undergraduate studies in Spanish and history at California State University, Long Beach (1977), and his doctoral studies at Stanford University. He started writing poetry when he was thirteen. In an early recognition of his work, he won the Rubén Darío Latin American Poetry Prize from the Casa Nicaragua in San Francisco. He is also the winner of the Josephine Miles Literary Award of PEN Oakland, the Pura Belpré* Honor Award, and the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. The themes of most of his poetry evoke Mexican folk songs and reflect Alarcón’s connection with his grandmother and her native Náhuatl language. His grandmother’s roots and Mexican folklore influenced him greatly and led him, years later, to write one of his most important books: Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, published in 1992. Critics believe that some of his poetry evokes an ancient oral tradition that serves as an invocation to ancient powers, serving at the same time as an open-ended dialogue with readers. Alarcón’s work often reflects chaos and political nuances. Even his children’s poems have a political aura, such as one titled “Strawberries: Sweet tender hearts/Oh! left by children working the fields,” in which he alludes to the sadness of the children working in the fields. Alarcón has been an advocate of Spanish education and bilingual children’s literature. He currently teaches literature at the University of California at Davis, where he is the director of UC Davis’s model Spanish for Native Speakers program. He has also published several textbooks for teaching Spanish at the college and high-school levels. Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Alarcón, Justo (1930–). A Spanish academic and creative writer who became involved in the Chicano literary movement,* Justo Alarcón was born in Río Gordo, Málaga, Spain, on March 10, 1930. He received his early schooling and college education and prepared for the priesthood, receiving his master’s in theology from the Seráfica in Santiago. He later received a master’s degree in sociology 57

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from the Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, in 1954 and a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Arizona in 1974. During his doctoral studies, Alarcón taught southwestern culture and Chicano literature at Arizona State University, where he played an important role in starting the Chicano Studies department. After he was well established as a professor at Arizona State University, Alarcón began publishing poetry, short stories, and novels. In 1979, he also founded and edited an important journal in the movement, La Palabra: Revista de Literatura Chicana (The Word: Chicano Literary Review), which was dedicated to publishing original creative works and literary criticism in Spanish, thus somewhat going against the current trend of publishing in English and attempting to influence mainstream culture in the United States. This noteworthy effort, which inspired writers to keep their mother tongue as a creative vehicle, lasted until 1985. Among Alarcón’s books is Chulifeas fronteras: Cuentos (1981, Beautiful/Ugly Border: Stories), made up of stories inspired by real-life incidents along the Arizona–Mexico border. His Crisol: Trilogía (1984, Crucible: Trilogy) takes the university and the barrio as its settings in exploring, often through Socratic dialogs involving his alter-ego “Leñero,” the socioeconomic and educational situation of Chicanos in the United States. Magic realism and fantasy also intervene in the novel as it ends in a type of cataclysm, making philosopher Vasconcelos’s Cosmic Race a reality. In his novel Los siete hijos de la Llorona (1986, The Seven Children of La Llorona), Alarcón appropriated the myth of the Crying Woman to once again attempt to understand the historical and contemporary experiences of Chicano dispossession and exploitation. Alarcón published numerous poems and stories in magazines, but his only volume of poetry is the highly autobiographical Poemas en mí menor (1991, Poems in Mi Minor), which recalls his childhood concern for the welfare of others, something that influenced his social and political activities as well as the politicized poems in the the second and third parts of the book, in which he often adopts the Mexican ballad format, or corrido.* Alarcón’s latest work is a collection of stories, Los dos compadres: Cuentos breves del barrio (1993, The Two Compadres: Brief Stories from the Barrio), whose interrelated tales are framed as conversations between two old-timers who meet in a park. Today, Alarcón is Professor Emeritus of Chicano and Latin American Literature, Arizona State University. Further Reading Chase, Cida S., “Justo S. Alarcón” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Lomelí, Francisco A., and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: The Gale Group, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Alarcón, Norma. See Third Woman Press Albizu Campos, Pedro (1891–1965). To Puerto Ricans who support independence of the island from U.S. rule, Pedro Albizu Campos, born in Tenerías Village, Ponce, on September 12, is considered a hero and martyr. He also has become a frequent subject in Puerto Rican and Nuyorican art and literature. His own liter58

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ary value is based on his eloquence as a speaker and his elegance and logic as a writer of essays. By Albizu Campos’s own admission, his relationship with the United States became estranged after he experienced first-hand racial discrimination in an African American unit during World War I. Albizu Campos joined the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico in 1924 after receiving two degrees from Harvard (B.S. 1916, LL.B. 1923) and was elected president of that organization in 1930. He was imprisoned on the mainland from 1937 to 1943 after being convicted of seeking to overthrow the U.S. government. He returned to Puerto Rico in 1947 and helped orchestrate an unsuccessful campaign in the 1948 elections. He was arrested again in 1950 and sentenced to a fifty-three-year prison term for masterminding an attack on the governor’s mansion in Puerto Rico. Alvizu Campos was also a suspect in an assassination attempt on President Harry S. Truman on October 31, 1950. In Pedro Albizu Campos. 1953, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín offered to pardon Albizu Campos, only to withdraw his offer after Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the U.S. House of Representatives the next year. Albizu Campos spent most of his remaining years imprisoned and in poor health. A year before his death in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, on April 21, 1965, he received another pardon. Further Reading “Welcome to Puerto Rico! Famous Puerto Ricans” (http://welcome.topuertorico.org/ culture/famouspr.shtml).

F. Arturo Rosales Alcalá, Kathleen (1954–). Kathleen Alcalá, whose parents are of Mexican, Native American, and Jewish descent, was born in Compton, California, on August 29, 1954, and grew up in the San Bernardino Valley. Today she lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where she continues to write and to teach creative writing at the University of Washington. Alcalá studied linguistics and psychology at Stanford (1976) and then received an M.A. in English and creative writing from the University of Washington, Seattle. Between 1975 and 1983, Alcalá worked for the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., and worked with a consortium of local governments to bring public television to Western Colorado. She moved with her husband from Colorado to Washington State in 1983 and enrolled in her first writing course at the University of Washington. From this experience emerged her first collection of stories, Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist (1992), which was well received. Her literary influences are many, but two stand out as having made a lasting impression on her work. First, at Stanford she read for the first time One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has affected her writing to the degree that she is considered an American magical realist writer. In turn, Gloria Anzaldúa’s* border theory and use of language helped her understand her multicultural and multilingual heritage. 59

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Alcalá’s major contribution to the American literature lies in the trilogy that explores the disappeared ancestors of her past. The novels, Spirits of the Ordinary (1997), The Flower in the Skull (1998), and Treasures in Heaven (2000), set in nineteenth-century Mexico and the Southwest, are characterized by several elements: the search for identity, hidden pasts, and the inevitable transformation that occurs upon those discoveries. They also are striking because of the role of the landscape in the novels. Alcalá emphasizes the history and sense of place as crucial to different communities—for example, the desert. The landscape in her novels many times mirrors her characters’ transformation, guides them in their spiritual journey, and shapes their identities. The trilogy explores inherited family roots that range from Judaism to the Native American tribes of the southwest. With these novels, Alcalá examines and complicates the cultural heritage of the Mexican identity by adding crypto-Jewish and Opata roots to Mexican identity and history. Spirits of the Ordinary focuses on the struggle to balance a cryptoJewish heritage within the strictures and traditions of a nineteenth-century Mexican home. Alcalá based the novel on her grandfather who, although a minister, still secretly maintained and remembered his Jewish past. The Flower in the Skull, which explores the Opata tribe, was inspired by Alcalá’s great-grandmother, who was an Opata from the Sonoran Desert and who later came to Arizona. The third novel, Treasures in Heaven, focuses more on a woman’s growing awareness of feminism in Mexico. The first of these novels, Spirits of the Ordinary, was produced as a play in Portland, Oregon, by The Miracle Theatre. Her work has been likened to that of Isabel Allende,* and she has been described as an American magical realist writer. Her personal essays, collected in The Desert Remembers My Name: on Family and Writing (2007), demonstrate her wide range of interests. They also return to her constant exploration of family roots and secrets. For this collection, she researched her grandfather’s family journals, which revealed his Jewish roots and his public identity as a Methodist minister. She discovered that, although there was no evidence that he practiced Judaism, he did study Hebrew in a remote part of New Mexico in the 1920s, thus linking him to his hidden Jewish past. As a writer, Alcalá has worked on integrating these mixed roots and their shared landscape: the Mojave Desert, where she grew up, the Sonoran Desert of the Opata, and the Middle Eastern deserts of her Jewish heritage. For Alcalá, a sense of place and the knowledge of one’s identity create power: “People who really understand their background come from a place of power”—able to apply their traditions to the culture at large. Alcalá is active in the community of arts and writing. She is a cofounder of and contributing editor to The Raven Chronicles, a journal of art and literature, and serves on the board of Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, a multicultural space used for theater, poetry, and more. Alcalá remains dedicated to supporting the Latino arts in all their manifestations while reexamining politically and socially active as a writer participating in Writers against the War, among other things. Further Reading Brooks, James, “Served Well by Plunder: La Gran Ladronería and Producers of History Astride the Rio Grande” American Quarterly Vol. 52, No. 1 (March 2000): 23–58.

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Dubrava, Patricia, “Fountains Out of the Roots: A Profile of Kathleen Alcalá” Bloomsbury Review Vol. 20, No. 3 (May–June 2000): 9.

Bridget Kevane Alegría, Fernando (1918–2005). Born in Santiago, Chile, on September 26, 1918, Fernando Alegría was a precocious intellectual who, at the age of eighteen, published his first book, a biography of Luis Emilio Recabarren, the founder of a workers’ movement. Throughout his life, Alegría would be a liberal who defended the causes of minorities, workers, and leftists in Spanish America and the United States. In 1941, Alegría earned a master’s in literature from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and in 1947 a doctorate from the University of California; from that point on he developed an outstanding academic career as a specialist in Spanish American literature. In 1970 he was appointed cultural attaché of Chile by his friend, President Salvador Allende. When Allende was overthrown and assassinated, Alegría became a political exile, unable to freely return to Chile during the rule of General Augusto Pinochet. Alegría was also a renowned creative writer who produced numerous volumes of poetry Fernando Alegría. and fiction, work associated with the boom in Latin American letters and magical realism, a term that was first applied to his collection of stories El poeta que se volvió gusano y otras historias verídicas (1958, The Poet Who Became a Worm and Other True Stories). His My Horse González (1957, Caballo de Copas), a humorous novel about a Chilean jockey who immigrates to the United States, winner of Chile’s Premio Atanea and Premio Municipal, revealed an early interest in studying the lives of Hispanics in the United States. Alegría sympathized with the Chicano Movement and supported the development of Chicano literary criticism. His own novels dealing with life in the United States include Amerika, Amerikka, Amerikkka, manifiestos de Viet Nam (1970, Amerika, Amerikka, Amerikkka, Vietnam Manifestos), Changing Centuries: Elected Poems (1984) and The Funhouse (1986). Living as a persona non grata to Chile, Alegría was also concerned with the literature of exile and founded the magazine, Literatura chilena en el exilio (1974, Chilean Exile Literature), and compiled, with Jorge Rufinelli, an anthology: Paradise Lost or Gained?: The Literature of Hispanic Exile (1990). Further Reading Epple, Juan Armando, Para una fundación imaginaria de Chile. La literatura de Fernando Alegría (Lima: Latinoamericana Editores, 1987). Valenzuela, Víctor, Fernando Alegría: el escritor y su época (Madrid: Artes Gráficas Belzal, 1985).

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Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo

Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo (1884–?). Journalist, poet, and novelist Gustavo Alemán Bolaños was born in Masaya, Nicaragua, where he had his early education. Later, while studying law, he became interested in journalism. From his days as a law student, he was politically active, and soon he was incarcerated for his activism. From that time on, Alemán Bolaños dedicated much of his journalistic work to political reportage and commentary, advocating throughout his life the creation of a Central American federation while opposing dictatorships. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Alemán Bolaños was in constant exile, moving from one country to the next— always able to survive as a journalist. Alemán Bolaños worked for many of the most important Spanish American newspapers of his time: El Diario de Nicaragua (The Nicaragua Daily), Diario de Panamá (The Panama Daily), El Excelsior (Mexico), El Mercurio (Chile, The Mercury), and La Nación (Argentina, The Nation). In the United States, he worked for New York’s La Prensa (The Press) and the Herald Tribune, for the latter as a translator. Between 1916 and 1920, he worked in New York not only as a journalist but in the preparation of a book of poems, Emoción (Emotion), and other creative writing. At odds with the editor of La Prensa, he left the newspaper in 1920 and could only find work in a factory, which led him to write a novel of immigration, La factoría; novela de un américo-hispano en Nueva York (1925, The Factory; A Novel about a Spanish American in New York). After New York, Alemán Bolaños spent some time in New Orleans and then returned to Central America, where he later developed a relationship with the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Augusto Sandino; he later wrote Sandino’s biography (1932). Alemán Bolaños was also the biographer of the famed Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1923?). But his relationship with the press in the United States did not end with his return to Central America: from 1947 until his death, he wrote a column on Central America for The Christian Science Monitor. Of the more than three dozen books that Alemán Bolaños wrote, including biographies of the President of Nicaragua (1916) and of Máximo Hermenegildo Zepeda (1920), published in New York, only his La factoría; novela de un américo-hispano en Nueva York, published in Guatemala in 1925, details Hispanic life in the United States. Documenting the drudgery of factory life and the bleakness of life on the streets of New York, La factoría also reveals the feeling common to Hispanic intellectuals who had to survive in New York without finding work commensurate with their experience and level of education. Throughout the novel, there is a subtle protest against dehumanization and exploitation and a call for defense of workers’ rights. As a novel of immigration, La factoría promotes a return to the homeland and attacks the myth of “the streets of gold” and the American Dream. Further Reading Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo, Memorias de un periodista (Guatemala City: Editorial Diario La Hora, 1848).

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Alfaro, Luis (1961–). Los Angeles Chicano playwright, performance poet, and short-story writer Luis Alfaro, who was born in downtown Los Angeles on October 9, 1961, is the only Latino to date to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (1999), largely because of his playwriting success. Alfaro was a resident artist at Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where he codirected the Latino Theater Initiative during the 1990s, and a visiting artist at such venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His plays have been published in numerous anthologies and staged around the country and abroad. He is also an acknowledged teacher of playwriting at Los Angeles– area institutions of higher learning. In 2002, he was awarded the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays twice, for his plays “Electricidad” (Electricity) and “Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner.” “Electricidad” received its world premiere at the Borderlands Theatre in Tucson and was subsequently produced at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He is the winner of the 1998 National Hispanic Playwriting Competition and the 1997 Midwest Play Labs for his play “Straight as a Line.” Included among his play are a Chicano version of Sophocles’s Electra: “Electricidad”; “Downtown,” which has been produced in places as far away as London and Mexico City; “No Holds Barrio”; “Body of Faith”; “Straight as an Arrow,” which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland and was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the top ten productions of the year; “Black Butterfly”; and “Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner.” In 2000, Alfaro edited Plays from South Coast Repertory: Hispanic Playwrights Project Anthology. Some of Alfaro’s own plays have been published by script services, but at this writing no anthology of his own works has been issued. His short film Chicanismo (Chicano Culture) was nominated for an Emmy award, won Best Experimental Film at the 1998 San Antonio CineFestival, and was featured in San Francisco’s CineAcción ‘98. As for his poetry and spoken-word performances, “The American Dream” poetry Web site has described Alfaro as “a young gay Chicano loudmouth who writes hilarious performance poems to be shouted while dressed in a cheap short black lace slip at all the gods and people wandering the streets.” Alfaro has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Fellowship and a University of California Regents Fellowship. Alfaro is a member of the theater faculty at the California Institute of the Arts and has been an adjunct professor at the School of Theater at the University of Southern California. Further Reading Svich, Caridad, and María Teresa Marrero, eds., Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/ Latino Theatre and Performance (New York: Theatre Communciations Group, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Algarín, Miguel (1941–). Miguel Algarín is a renowned poet and the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, on September 11, 1941, Algarín moved with his working-class parents to New York City in the early 1950s. Algarín is a graduate in English of the University of Wisconsin (B.A., 1963) and Pennsylvania 63

Algarín, Miguel

Miguel Algarín.

State University (M.A., 1965). After teaching English at Brooklyn College and New York University for a while, Algarín went on to Rutgers University, where he taught English and Puerto Rican Studies until his retirement in 2001. Algarín became a spokesman for the Nuyorican* literary movement in the late 1960s and founded a center in which its poets and playwrights could perform their works in a setting reminiscent of the coffee houses of the beat generation. Algarín played an important leadership role in the definition of Nuyorican literature by compiling, with Miguel Piñero,* its first and only anthology, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975). He also founded a short-lived publishing house, the Nuyorican Press, which only issued one book, his own Mongo Affair (1978, Impotent Affair). One year later, he took part in the launching of Arte Público Press, which became the leading publisher of Nuyorican literature, as well as the leading publisher of Chicano and Cuban American literature. Algarín has written plays, screenplays, and short stories but is principally known as a poet. His books include Mongo Affair, On Call (1980), Body Bee Calling from the 21st Century (1982), Time’s Now/Ya es tiempo (1985), Love Is Hard Work: Memorias de Loisaida/Poems (1997, Lower East Side Memories/Poems). He has also published anthologies of works performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café, including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (1994) and, with Bob Holman and Nicole Blackman, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (1997). Algarín’s 64

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poetry runs the gamut from jazz–salsa to the mystical. He is one of the foremost experimenters with English–Spanish bilingualism. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Alianza Federal de las Mercedes. In the 1950s, as New Mexico’s population grew, land competition fostered tension between Hispano farmers and outsider landowners. To stem their economic erosion, Hispano villagers formed the Corporation of Abiquiu. In the 1960s, a Texas evangelist, Reies López Tijerina, took over the new organization just as the U.S. Forest Service had issued stricter codes regulating grazing, wood cutting, and water use on federal lands. The restrictions, combined with López Tijerina’s announcement that the land claims of Hispanos could be legitimized by Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo* provisions, increased the popularity of the fledgling organization. In 1963, the Corporation of Abiquiu’s headquarters moved from Tierra Amarilla to Albuquerque and changed its name to Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (Federal Land Grant Alliance).

Reies López Tijerina leading the Alianza in a protest march.

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To persuade officials to investigate their land claims, Alianza members marched from Albuquerque to the steps of the state capital in Santa Fe in July 1966, only to have their claims rejected. Frustrated, in October 1966 the aliancistas occupied Echo Amphitheater, a National Forest campground, and evicted the forest rangers. Officials arrested López Tijerina and some of his followers but released them shortly thereafter. Members of the group were again arrested in May 1966, when they tried to plan another occupation of San Joaquín del Río de Chama land. López Tijerina and other aliancistas on June 5 attempted to free their comrades from the jail in Río Arriba and wounded two officers in the process. Within hours, the governor mobilized the National Guard and embarked on one of the most massive manhunts in New Mexico history. Eventually, local officials arrested all of the Alianza raiders and charged them with second-degree kidnapping, assault to commit murder, and an unlawful assault on a jail. In his trial, López Tijerina defended himself and obtained a not guilty verdict. At a federal trial, however, López Tijerina and four others present at the Echo Amphitheater confrontation were found guilty on two counts of assault against forest rangers. A federal judge sentenced him to two years in prison. After the courthouse raid, however, extreme violence characterized all activities surrounding the land grant movement, both by and against the aliancistas, a situation that began to erode López Tijerina’s hold on leadership. On June 6, 1969, aliancistas converged on Coyote and set up a tent city on private land to camp out while they held their annual conference. At the conference, López Tijerina clashed physically with Forest Service employees and was charged with a number of felonies. He was sentenced to prison but was released on July 26, 1971. In 1975, he went to prison again. The Alianza movement died on the vine as much of its activities turned to dealing with the personal legal problems besetting López Tijerina. In the 1960s, López Tijerina became an inspiration to many young activists involved in the Chicano Movement, and his influence and activities were documented and extolled in much of the literature and art that emerged from the movement. His name and image were placed on equal standing with the three other movement leaders: César Chávez,* Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* and José Angel Gutiérrez. Further Reading Nabokov, Peter, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1969).

F. Arturo Rosales Alianza Hispano-Americana. The Alianza Hispano-Americana (Hispanic American Alliance) was founded in Tucson, Arizona, in 1894 as a mutual aid society. Its principal founders, Carlos Velasco and Manuel Samaniego, were middle-class immigrants from Sonora. Velasco was the publisher of the important daily newspaper, El Fronterizo (The Frontier Paper). The Alianza HispanoAmericana spread throughout the Southwest and, by the 1920s, had ten 66

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An Alianza Hispano-Americana parade in Tucson, Arizona.

thousand members. Although its main purpose continued to be the providing of social and health benefits to its members, it also accumulated a respectable record in protecting civil rights for Mexicans. La Alianza, as it became known, joined other associations in efforts to save Mexicans condemned to the gallows. During the Great Depression, internal problems beset the organization and its leadership, diminishing its effectiveness. Following World War II, the organization refocused on civil rights issues and education problems. In Arizona, Alianza member and lawyer Ralph Estrada, with the help of local community leaders, argued the 1952 Sheely vs. González case, which abolished segregation in Tolleson, a town near Phoenix. The Alianza continued to exert pressure on segregated schools in Arizona and, in 1954, the Peoria school district caved in and voluntarily ended the segregation of Mexicans—the last hold-out in the state. The initiative foiled the desires of school officials, who stubbornly clung to the idea that Mexican Americans required separation because of their different culture. During this same period, the educator Ralph Guzmán organized a civil rights department within the Alianza, and the organization also began scholarship programs for for Mexican Americans. By the end of the 1950s, internal leadership problems again plagued the organization, leading to its demise. 67

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Further Reading Meier, Matt S., and Feliciano Rivera, A Dictionary of Mexican American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981).

F. Arturo Rosales

Isabel Allende.

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Allende, Isabel (1942–). Born on August 2, 1941, in Lima to Chilean parents, Allende was raised from the age of three by her divorced mother in Santiago, Chile. In Santiago, Allende became a journalist and editor of the magazine Paula and also worked in television. Her family’s work in politics and diplomacy resulted in her exile after Chilean president Salvador Allende, a relative of hers, was assassinated in 1972. Her significant literary career was launched while she resided in exile in Venezuela, where she published her most successful novel, La casa de los espíritus (1980, The House of the Spirits), a book that made her an international literary superstar. Other novels followed—De amor y sombra (1984, Of Love and Shadow), Eva Luna (1988)—in which her credentials as a feminist were underscored. In 1988, she married her second husband, William Gordon, and made a transition to living in the United States. In the San Francisco Bay Area, she has continued her productivity, also making a transition to becoming an immigrant both as an individual and as a writer. Some of her most recent novels relate to California in one way or another: El plan infinito (1991, The Infinite Plan), Hija de la fortuna (2003, The Daughter of Fortune), Retrato en sepia (2000, Portrait in Sepia), and Zorro (2005). Allende is one of the few Spanish American writers to have all of her works translated into English and published in the United States: multiple editions in the original Spanish have been published throughout Spanish America and Spain, and translated editions exist in most Western languages. Allende has published two types of memoirs: a memoir through interviews with her friend Celia Correas de Zapata, Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits (2002), and My Invented Country (2003), in which she explores the role of politics, myth, and magic in shaping her life. In 2008, she published a third, more conventional life story in The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir. During the past decade, Allende has turned her attention to children’s and young adult literature, producing a trilogy for young adult readers: City of the Beasts (2002), Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004), and

Allo, Lorenzo

Forest of the Pygmies (2005), which follows the adventures of a globe-trotting trio from the jungles of the Amazon to the forests of Africa. In her latest novel, Allende returns to historical fiction, basing her book on the life of Doña Inés Suárez (1507–1580), a poor Spanish girl who eventually marries the founder of colonial Chile and hopes to create an egalitarian society: Inés del alma mía: Una novela (2006, Inez of My Soul: A Novel). In 1996, Allende became the first Hispanic writer to win the prestigious Harold Washington Award for Literature, presented in Chicago on May 3, on day before she received an honorary doctorate from Columbia College, also in Chicago. Further Reading Correas de Zapata, Celia, Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002). Hart, Patricia, Narrative Magic in the Fiction of Isabel Allende (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Allo, Lorenzo (?–1854). Writer and revolutionary Lorenzo Allo was educated by the famous theologian and creative writer Félix Varela* at San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary in Havana. The son of Matías Allo and María Ignacio Forcado, he obtained a law degree and practiced law in Havana. In Havana, he married Ana María Bermúdez y Escobar, and they had one daughter, María Secundina de Allo y Bermúdez. Allo was in favor of Cuba’s independence from Spain, and his autonomous ideals prompted him to go into exile in New York in 1851. Unlike José Antonio Saco, he favored the aid of the United States government, including annexation, if it would have assured independence from Spain. However, as he stated in Súplica á la Réplica de d. José Antonio Saco á los anexionistas que han impugnado Sus IDEAS sobre la incorporación de Cuba en los Estados Unidos (1851, Request of the Annexationists Who Have Attacked José Antonio Saco’s Reply Challenging His Ideas on the Incorporation of Cuba to the United States), his ultimate goal was the complete freedom of Cuba. Once in New York, he worked as a teacher and founded the Cuban Democratic Atheneum of New York. In Domestic Slavery in Its Relations with Wealth, a speech that he gave at the Atheneum shortly before his death (it was published posthumously), he argues in favor of both the independence of Cuba and the abolition of slavery. In his point of view, slavery is a detriment to any economy; only a moral society can have a truly rich economy, and abolition should be a gradual process that does not disrupt the economic growth of the country. In New York, he found his former mentor, Father Varela, who had been forced into exile—also because of his views on the independence of Cuba. After some searching, he came across Varela in a dilapidated shack just before his death. Only a couple of years later, in 1854, Allo followed his famous former teacher to the grave. Further Reading Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Craig Denison 69

Alurista

Alurista.

Alurista (1947–). Alurista is considered one of the pioneers of Chicano literature. Alberto Blatazar Urista was born in Mexico City on August 8, 1947, and spent his early years in the states of Morelos and Guerrero. At thirteen years old, he immigrated to the United States with his family, which settled in San Diego, California. He began writing poetry at an early age was a restless and widely read student. He enrolled in Chapman College in 1965 and transferred to San Diego State University, from which he graduated in 1970 with a B.A. in psychology. He later obtained an M.A. from that institution and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California–San Diego in 1983. Around 1966 he began writing poetry seriously for publication and assumed the pen name of Alurista, virtually the only name he uses by this date. He was one of the first poets to support the Chicano Movement through his poetry, as well as the writer and signer of important manifestos of the movement and a founder of the Movimiento Estudiantil de Aztlán* (MEChA, Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán) in 1967, one of the first to establish the concept of Aztlán* in literature, something that forecasts a return to the glories of Aztec civilization by the Chicanos in the mythic homeland of the Aztecs (what today roughly makes up the five southwestern states of the Southwest). Alurista is a prolific and talented poet, a pioneer of bilingualism in Chicano poetry. Throughout his career, his study of the Náhuatl and Mayan languages and mythology have enriched his poetic works and inspired his promotion of the ideology of Aztlán. But it is his bilingualism that has opened new frontiers in poetry, with his free experimentation in combining the sounds, meanings, and graphic representations of Spanish and English in the same poem, quite often achieving surprising and beautiful effects. Alurista has published the following books of poetry: Floricanto en Aztlán (1971, Flowersong in Aztlán), Nationchild Plumaroja, 1967–1972 (1972, Nationchild Redfeather), Timespace Huracán: Poems, 1972–1975 (1976, Timespace Hurricane: Poems), A’nque (1979, Although), Spik in Glyph? (1981), Return: Poems Collected and New (1982), Z Eros (1995), Et Tu . . . Raza (1997, And You, People), and As Our Barrio Turns . . . Who the Yoke Be On? (2000). Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Alvarez, Julia (1950–). Novelist and poet Julia Alvarez was born on March 27, 1950, in New York City, but her parents returned to their native Dominican Republic when she was just three months old. Alvarez’s parents were politically connected to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorial regime, but when her father fell out of favor, he took the family into exile in New York City when she was 70

Alvarez, Julia

ten years old. Alvarez graduated summa cum laude as an English major from Middlebury College in 1971 and in 1975 earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. She went on to develop a career as a poet and fiction writer and became a tenured professor at Middlebury College. Alvarez’s narratives are loosely based on growing up between the two cultures of the United States and the Dominican Republic, although her perspective has always been one of growing up in privilege as the daughter of a successful doctor and politically connected exile. As a creative writer, she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. After publishing poems and stories in literary magazines, she published a book of verse, Homecoming (1984), and her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991). In so doing, she joined a wave of Hispanic writers breaking into mainstream presses with their tales of immigration and growing up within the United States. In 1994, she published the novel In the Time of Butterflies, which was later made into a feature film, and, in 1995, another collection of poems, The Other Side/El Otro Lado. In 1995, Alvarez published the collection of autobiographical essays Something to Declare: Essays. Among Alvarez’s other novels are In the Name of Salomé (2001), Before We Were Free (2002), and Saving the World (2006). In the latter, Alvarez compares and intertwines the lives of two Dominican women separated by a century: one is a nineteenth-century missionary and the other a Dominican female writer in Vermont chronicling the struggle of the former in battling smallpox in the Dominican Republic. In 2002, Alvarez joined many of the leading Hispanic novelists in writing for young readers with the publication of her young adult novel, Before We Were Free, centering on a plot to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, as seen through the eyes of a teenager. Alvarez has also been a productive poet. In 1998, Alvarez penned twenty-four autobiographical essays to answer some of the most frequent questions of her readers: Something to Declare. Among her poetry books are Homecoming: New and Collected Poems (1996) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), a collection of seventy-five autobiographical poems chronicling the major events in her life: love, marriage, divorce, religious, and so on Alvarez’s latest work is a nonfiction study of the quinceañera custom, or “sweet fifteen” celebration for Latinas: Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (2007). For this book, Alvarez worked much like a social scientist, traveling the country and interviewing families, analyzing the costs and financing of the extravagant affairs and recalling some of her own experiences as a teenager. Alvarez’s awards include the Benjamin T. Marshall Prize in Poetry (1968 and 1969), the American Academy of Poetry Prize (1974), the National Book Critics’ Award, and others. Alvarez, who has taught creative writing at Middlebury College for years, was promoted to full professor in 1996. Further Reading 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 (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). Sirias, Silvio, Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).


Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, José

Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, José (1779–1858). One of the most prolific and interesting expatriate writers of the early nineteenth century was José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, a Cuban-born Creole whose liberal ideas were tempered in the Cortes, or parliament, of Spain and in secret Spanish American revolutionary societies in Cadiz, London, and Philadelphia. Alvarez de Toledo was responsible for bringing the first printing press to embattled Texas and for publishing its first newspaper. His pamphleteering, issuing of manifestoes, and filibustering was also the first call for Cuban independence and was indirectly responsible for the first constitution of an independent Texas. As tangled as was the web of intrigue being spun among the major colonial powers in the North America in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Alvarez de Toledo’s actions were even more complex and labyrinthine. Born in Cuba in 1779 to Spanish peninsular parents of noble lineage, Alvarez de Toledo was educated in Spain, rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Spanish royalist navy, and battled against Napoleon’s intervention in Spain, during which time he developed relationships with the English, who were allies with the Spaniards against the French. Alvarez de Toledo had been elected to represent the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo to the Spanish Cortes in royalist-held Cadiz, where he associated himself with the underground lodge of Spanish American revolutionaries Caballeros Racionales (Rational Gentlemen). Despite his plotting with the other representatives from Spanish America, Alvarez de Toledo became frustrated by the Cortes’s rejection of liberal reforms on behalf of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. A leader of the Spanish American protest, Alvarez de Toledo was accused of engaging in a plot with the English. The catalyst for his persecution by authorities and subsequent flight, evidently, was his sending a report to his constituents in Santo Domingo on his disaffection with the Cortes; the report was later published in the United States and circulated in the Caribbean. On June 25, 1811, with the assistance of the American consul in Cádiz, he fled to the United States after a brief stop in London. In Philadelphia, he joined the local chapter of Caballeros and met with such member revolutionaries as the Argentine Vicente Pazos Kanki* and the two Venezuelans Juan Germán Roscio* and Juan Mariano Picornell. He engaged in written polemics, publishing manifestos in newspapers, such as the Aurora, revealing himself to be a liberal propagandizing the two causes of liberation: Spain shucking off Napoleon’s yoke, and independence for the Spanish American colonies. He succeeded in winning the attention of American politicians and was soon on his way to Washington, D.C., to meet with Secretary of State James Madison and President James Monroe. In Washington, he met another freedom fighter, Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, a blacksmith who had made his way to Washington from the Rio Grande Valley in pursuit of American support for the revolutionary movement in Texas, as part of the overall Mexican independence movement launched by Father Miguel de Hidalgo y Costilla. The U.S. government and American businessmen, it seems, encouraged and to some extent funded both men to conduct diverse 72


filibustering activities. An additional outcome of the meetings with Madison was Alvarez de Toledo’s introduction via letter to U.S. agent William Shaler, currently active in Cuba, but soon to join Alvarez de Toledo in Louisiana and become his partner in revolutionizing Texas. Through his proclamations, manifestos, and pamphlets, Alvarez de Toledo actively provided a written ideology for the Spanish American colonies on which to base their independence movements, taking as models the writings of U.S. liberals, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. On December 10, 1811, he published in Philadelphia the eighty-three-page Manifiesto ó satisfacción pundonorosa, a todos los buenos españoles europeos y todos los pueblos de América, por un diputado de las cortes reunidas en Cadiz (Manifesto, or Honorable Satisfaction, To All Good European Spaniards and All of the People of the Americas, by a Representative to the Cortes Assembled in Cadiz), in which he justified his defection from the Spanish Cortes in Cadiz and expressed his liberal ideology for justifying the separation of the Spanish colonies from the fatherland. In his typically fiery rhetoric, Alvarez incited his fellow Spanish Americans to rebellion: Sixteen million inhabitants occupying this delicious Continent are never represented in the eyes of the Government and Rulers in Europe, except as a horde of miserable slaves who must blindly obey whatever they are ordered to, and in profound silence kiss those same chains that they have dragged since the time of Cortés and Pizarro. [my translation]

Embedded in the Manifiesto is a true manifesto that may be seen as a separate document and may have been used as a separate pamphlet or, in a shorter version, as a broadside. It is a call to all Spanish Americans to rise up in rebellion for their independence, basing their mission on the rights of man and language similar to the United States’ declaration of independence: Americans, you who inhabit the Isles and the immense continent conquered by the Ancient Spanish Empire: hear my words exhaled over the bountiful and peaceful shores of the Delaware River, exalted by the saintly love of humanity and the generous zeal for our Fatherland. Work to make happy the peoples of the New World, that it become the admiration and sweet envy of the prideful and tyrannized Europe. . . . It is incumbent upon us to sacrifice it all for the general good; and on the most purest and solid of bases construct an America that will be an immortal and admirable work for all future ages. . . . In the Constitution of the United States you can find beautiful things: select the good and avoid what may be deadly for America some day. [my translation]

Before leaving for his adventures in Louisiana and Texas, among other letters and pamphlets he published a fiery broadside in 1811, Mexicanos, llegado es el tiempo señalado por la Providencia para que sacudáis el yugo bárbaro . . . (Mexicans, The Time Designated by Providence Has Arrived to Shake Off the Barbarous 73


Yoke . . .), calling for Mexican independence, based on the tyranny of the Cortes. Alvarez addresses his call to MEXICANS, in capital letters, possibly using for the first time ever in print that designation for the nationality: Mexicans: the time signaled by Providence has arrived for you to shuck off the barbarous and insulting yoke that the most insolent of despotisms has ignominiously forced upon you for some three hundred years. Now that the Cadiz government has obliged you to continue dragging the same chains used by the kings of Spain to imprison you, those kings who had no authority over you except what you allowed them in governing you . . . I advise you, oh illustrious children of the famous Montezuma, do not sheath your swords until you have established order and gained complete freedom for your country. [my translation] At the end of the document, Alvarez de Toledo included in italics the theme of the Caballeros Racionales secret society: Valor, Unión y Firmeza (Valor, Union and Strength).

It may seem unlikely that Alvarez, or anyone else, for that matter, would be issuing manifestos to Mexicans from as far away as Philadelphia. However, this was precisely the time when Alvarez was conspiring with José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara; there is documentation to show that Gutiérrez actually took copies of the manifesto with him to distribute during his invasion of Texas with a force made up mainly of Anglo American mercenaries and adventurers. Evidence also suggests that Alvarez penned another pamphlet, El Amigo de los hombres (The Friend of Man), printed in Philadelphia by Blocquerst in 1812, that was distributed by Gutiérrez and his forces. El amigo de los hombres, in fact, seems to be a redraft of the call for independence, quoted above, as part of Alvarez’s Manifiesto. When Alvarez finally followed his coconspirator Guitérrez de Lara to Texas, he recruited to join him a Philadelphia printer, Aaron Mowry, and another pamphleteer, the Venezuelan freedom fighter Picornell, conscious of the need to create propaganda that would win hearts and minds to the cause of independence. Although Gutiérrez was actually successful in expelling the Spanish forces from Texas, Alvarez, Shaler, and other American filibusters despaired at Gutiérrez’s poorly drafted constitution, announcing his independence not only of Spain but also of the United States. Alvarez de Toledo and Shaler thus plotted to wrest the newly founded Texas Republic from his grasp and institute a government more favorable to the United States. It was out of this effort that Alvarez and Shaler published Texas’s first newspaper, La Gaceta de Texas (1813, The Texas Gazette), rebaptized El Mexicano in its second number, the first issue having been typeset in Nacogdoches, Texas, but actually printed in 1813 in the safety of U.S. territory just across the border from Texas in Natchitoches, Louisiana. The content of both issues of the periodicals directly attacked Gutiérrez and promised that U.S. support was near for the liberation and protection of an independent Texas. The Gutiérrez-led insurgency in Texas was 74


violently quashed by Spanish royalist troops, and Alvarez assumed the leadership of the movement, actually winning a battle, but ultimately going down in defeat and taking refuge in Louisiana to continue raising funds and armies for the effort. In fact, while in New Orleans, Alvarez issued new proclamations in an effort to recruit an army to move against Tampico by sea. It was during this time that that the José María Morelos–led independence forces actually named Alvarez mariscal or Marshal of the Northern Army; in 1815, they elevated him to full general. In his role of Mexican representative to American government and U.S. business interests, Alvarez counseled the Mexican Congress to issue a declaration of independence and direct it to all the nations of the world, explaining and advertising the causes for their rebellion. In 1815, the Congress actually published such a document, the “Pururán Manifesto.” He also advised the Congress to name an ambassador and other representatives to the United States and to send as much money as possible, given that in the United States only money talks. The newly named Ambassador José Manuel de Herrera brought with him a copy of the Mexican Constitution, drafted at Apatzingán, and had thousands of copies of that constitution printed and distributed in the United States. After the execution of the captured Morelos by the Spaniards, two other revolutionary leaders, Francisco Javier de Mina and José Servando Teresa de Mier, left London and sought to hook up with Alvarez either in Philadelphia or New Orleans. By 1816, however, Alvarez de Toledo had betrayed the cause of Mexican independence, was serving as a double agent and planning with Spanish ambassador Luis de Onís his re-integration into Spanish government. Before actually leaving New Orleans for Spain, Alvarez was once again active, this time with plans to invade Florida with Mina and plant the Mexican flag there in a complex plot involving the Spanish reconquest of Louisiana and protection against United States filibustering in Texas and Mexico. Later in 1819, when the United States was actually accessioning Florida, Alvarez was dispatched to London to see if he could get the British to purchase it from Spain. A long letter in 1818 by Spanish ambassador Onís, in which he reviewed for King Ferdinand VII the whole history of Alvarez and the reasons for his reallegiance to the throne, was intercepted by a rebel corsair and the contents of the letter were published in the Baltimore Patriot. His cover blown, Alvarez went into hiding to escape from an order of execution issued by the Spanish American rebels; he hid for a fortnight in Onís’s home and had no choice but to return to Spain. For all the inside information he reported about the independence movements and the parties involved in filibustering, Alvarez was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Naples. Actually, throughout all of Alvarez de Toledo’s machinations, there were repeated accusations made of his being a spy and collaborator, either in the employ of the Spanish, the French, the English, or all parties at once, seeking personal profit from the highest bidder. Although meetings with ambassador 75

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Onís, as well as with French agents, have been documented, Alvarez’s closest ties seem to have been to U.S. interests; he even fought in Andrew Jackson’s army against the British in the Battle of New Orleans. It was, in fact, to combat some of these accusations that Alvarez penned and published some of his books and pamphlets. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois and Hispanic Publishing in the Early American Republic” Early American Literature Vol. 43, No. 1 (2008): 83–100. Warren, Harris Gaylord, The Sword Was Their Passport: A History of American Filibustering in the Mexican Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943).

Nicolás Kanellos

Alba Ambert.

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Ambert, Alba (1946–). Born on October 10, 1946, and raised in an infamous slum in San Juan, Puerto Rico, novelist and short story writer Alba Ambert was one of those “scholarship” children who through force of will and extraordinary intelligence are able to pull themselves up out of adversity and not only make something of themselves but contribute greatly to humanity. Ambert followed a roundabout route to becoming a barrio teacher in Boston (and later a successful creative writer). She studied philosophy at the University of Puerto Rico, graduating with a B.A. in 1974 with great distinction; thereafter Ambert received M.A. and Ed.D. degrees in psycholinguistics from Harvard University in 1975 and 1980, respectively. Ambert, not only a bilingual teacher, also specialized in teaching of bilingual special education students, in curriculum writing, and in theory. Some of this experience and study is reflected in the scholarly books that she has authored. In 1986, Ambert began teaching and researching in Europe, which also gave her time to devote to her creative writing. Interested in poetry and writing since her childhood, Ambert began publishing her poetry in

Amy, Francisco Javier

Europe and then in the United States. In 1987 she published Porque hay silencio (Because There Is Silence), a highly autobiographical nove1 charting the protagonist’s psychological struggle to resolve her previous life of poverty with her present life as a highly successful woman of letters. The book proved to be a milestone for Ambert, being awarded the Literature Prize of the Institute for Puerto Rican Literature. She later rewrote the book in English as A Perfect Silence, for which became the first Hispanic author to win the first Carey McWilliams Award for Multicultural Literature, presented by the Multicultural Review in 1996. Alba Ambert creates penetrating psychological narrative in fiction, much of which is based on her rise out of abject poverty in Puerto Rico into the highest realms of the academy in the United States and abroad. A poet and scholarly writer as well, Ambert combines lyrical and rhapsodic narrative style with minute attention to detail. In 2004, Ambert published her second novel, The Passion of Maria Magdalena Stein, in which the narrator alternates between the real world of suffering of the main character and her magical dream world. Published in London, where Ambert resides as an author-in-residence at Richmond College, the novel also deals with feelings of exile and alienation. In 1997, Ambert published The Eighth Continent and Other Stories, a collection of nine narratives that run the gamut from the realism of underground Puerto Rican revolutionaries to a gloss on the legend of the Chupacabras. Also published in England is Ambert’s first book of poems, Alphabets of Seeds: Poems by Alba Ambert (2004). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, The Hispanic Literary Companion (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos

The Americas Review. See Arte Público Press Amy, Francisco Javier (1837–1912). Born in the southern sugarproducing town of Arroyo, Puerto Rico, Francisco Javier Amy moved to the United States at the age of fourteen to attend the Episcopal Academy in Cheshire, Connecticut. Within the space of three years, Amy had so mastered English that he began publishing poems and articles in Waverly Magazine, among others. Amy, who was to become enamored of American culture and literature written in English, became a talented translator of the most respected English and American poets. Some time in the late 1850s, he became a citizen of the United States, although he continued to identify with Puerto Ricans and the Hispanic world. While residing in New York, he became the editor of La Gaceta Literaria (The Literary Gazette) and became involved in the Cuban and Puerto Rican struggle for independence from Spain. Nevertheless, he returned to Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1884 and cofounded, with Manuel Zeno Gandía, the literary and scientific magazine, El Estudio (The Study) and published his first collection of poetry, Ecos y notas (1884, Echoes and Notes). Back in New York, he published his second book, Letras de molde: Prosa y verso (1890, Block Letters: Prose and Verse), in the 77

Anaya, Rudolfo A.

Modernist style. It was issued in 1890 by fellow Puerto Rican and printer Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín,* who was also engaged in the independence movement. In New York, Amy also served as the editor of La Gaceta Literaria. After the United States defeated the Spanish in 1898 and added Puerto Rico as an American colony, Amy hoped to hasten Puerto Rico’s Americanization and development of a bilingual culture. In 1903, in San Juan, he published his two-way translation: Musa bilingüe: being a collection of translations from the standard Anglo-American poets, into Spanish, and Spanish, Cuban and Puerto Rican poets into English, with the original text opposite, and biographical poets, especially intended for the use of students. After returning to Puerto Rico, he lamented the resistance of the population to submit to American culture and published his Predicar en el desierto . . . Verdades que no quería oír la actual Francisco Javier Amy. generación, pero que sabrán apreciar las generaciones venideras (1907, Preaching in the Desert . . . Truths That the Present Generation Has Not Wanted to Hear, but That Will Be Appreciated by Future Generations). He died on November 30, 1912. In 1968, an anthology of his translations was published in Puerto Rico: Antología poética (sus bellas traducciones) (Poetry Anthology [His Beautiful Translations]). Further Reading Herdeck, Donald E., ed., Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979). Hill, Mernesba D., and Harold B. Schleifer, eds., Puerto Rican Authors: A Bio-Bibliographic Handbook (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974).

Nicolás Kanellos Anaya, Rudolfo A. (1937–). Novelist Rudolfo A. Anaya was born in the village of Pastura, New Mexico, on October 30, 1937, in surroundings similar to those celebrated in his famous novel about growing up in the rural culture of New Mexico: Bless Me, Ultima. He attended public schools in Santa Rosa and Albuquerque and earned both his B.A. (1963) and his M.A. (1968) in English from the University of New Mexico. In 1972 he also earned an M.A. in guidance counseling from the same university. From 1963 to 1970 he taught 78

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in the public schools, and in 1974 he became a member of the English department of the University of New Mexico. With the success of his writing career, Anaya rose to become the head of the creative writing program at the University of New Mexico. Included among his many awards are an honorary doctorate from the University of Albuquerque, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence, the President’s National Salute to American Poets and Writers in 1980, and the Premio Quinto Sol* in 1972 for his novel, Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya is also a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kellogg Foundations, under whose auspices he has been able to travel to China and other countries for study. Anaya is very much a believer and promoter of a return to pre-Colombian literature and thought through the reflowering of Aztec civilization in Aztlán,* the mythic homeland of the Aztecs, which corresponds to the five states of today’s Southwest. He sees his role in literature as that of the shaman: his task as a storyteller is to heal and re-establish balance and harmony. These ideas are present throughout his works but are most successfully represented in his prizewinning novel, Bless Me Ultima, in which the folk healer Ultima works to reestablish harmony and social order in the life of the Mares family and to bring psychological well-being to Antonio, the protagonist who is struggling to understand the roles of Good and Evil in life. In the rest of his production, Anaya has explored everything from the detective novel to folk legend and broad epic dealing with the development of the Southwest. Anaya’s other books are Heart of Aztlán (1976), Tortuga (1979), The Silence of the Llano (1982), The Legend of La Llorona (1984), The Adventures of Juan Chicaspatas (1985), A Chicano in China (1986), Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcoatl (1987), and his sprawling epic novel Albuquerque (1992). In 1995, the prolific writer began a series of four Sonny Baca mystery novels with Zia Summer (1995), Río Grande Fall (1996), Shamman Winter (1999), and Jemez Spring (2005), which elaborate on all the conventional elements of detective fiction, as well as a mysterious other work in which the forces of Good and Evil battle on the Southwestern landscape. In 2006, Anaya culled through thirty years of short story production to compile The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories. In his later career, Anaya has turned to writing children’s and young adult literature, including The Farolitas of Christmas (1987, The Paper Lanterns of Christmas), Farolitos for Abuelo (1999, Lights for Grandfather), Roadrunner’s Dance (2000), Serafina’s Stories (2004), The Curse of the Chupacabras (2006), and First Tortilla (2007). In 2004, his The Santero’s Miracle: A Bilingual Story was a commended title for the Americas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Further Reading Baeza, Abelardo, Man of Aztlán: A Biography of Rudolfo Anaya (Austin: Eakin Press, 2001). Fernández Olomos, Margarite, Rodolfo A. Anaya: Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).


Anda, Diane de

Anda, Diane de (1943–). Diane de Anda, born on November 27, 1943, into a large Mexican American family in Los Angeles, is the author of a bilingual picture book, Dancing Miranda/Baila, Miranda, baila (2001), and two collections of short stories for young adults: The Immortal Rooster and Other Stories (1999) and The Ice Dove and Other Stories (1997). Schooled locally before going on for a master’s and Ph.D. in social work, de Anda had a distinguished twenty-nine-year career as a university professor. Today, she is an emeritus professor in the department of social welfare at the University of California–Los Angeles and editor of The Journal of Multicultural Social Work and Controversial Issues in Multiculturalism. De Anda has worked with children and teenagers for many years as a teacher and in community agencies. She conducts research and has written numerous articles on adolescent issues, focusing on Latino and multicultural adolescent populations. She is the author of Project Peace, a violence prevention program for middle and high school students. Her stories and poems have been published in a number of journals and magazines, including Ladies Home Journal, Saguaro, and El Grito (The Shout). De Anda is also the editor of three books (Controversial Issues in Multiculturalism, Violence: Diverse Populations and Communities, and Social Work with Multicultural Youth) and has published numerous articles in scholarly journals on issues related to adolescent Cover of Diane de Anda’s Immortal Rooster. development and special problems of adolescent populations. In 2007, de Anda received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Further Reading Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Carmen Peña Abrego Anders, Gigi (1957–). Gigi Anders was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1957. In 1961, her family left Cuba for Miami following Castro’s revolution. Shortly afterward, they settled in Washington, D.C., where Anders grew up and went to school. After Anders graduated from the University of Maryland with degrees in English and art history, she began writing for the Washington Post, for which she still works as a special correspondent. Anders has also written 80

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for—among other publications—Glamour, Allure, Mirabella, Latina, USA Today, and American Journalism Review. Her articles include essays on the importance of Spanish in the newsroom and issues of personal, ethnic, and cultural identity that reporters face as they cover the news. Anders has published two books: a memoir, JUBANA! The Awkwardly True and Dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cubana Goddess (2005), and a collection of nonfiction vignettes, Men May Come and Men May Go but I’ve Still Got My Little Pink Raincoat: Life and Love In and Out of My Wardrobe (2007). The paperback version of JUBANA! was released in 2006 under the title, Be Pretty, Get Married and Always Drink TaB. Anders’ memoir captures the struggles of being Jewish and Cuban in and out of America and represents an emergent voice within the Latino and Latina canon. Anders’s sense of humor and irreverence are matched by a poignant sense of longing and loss that characterize the changing aspects of Jewish–Latino identity. Anders’s grandparents, all Ashkenazi Jews, left their homelands—Poland, Lithuania, and Russia—in the 1920s in search of better lives. Their original destination was New York, but the U.S. government’s immigration laws of 1924 severely restricted the entry of Jews. Hence, like thousands of other European and Russian Jews, Anders’s family immigrated to Cuba. Though often reviewed as “hilarious,” JUBANA! is serious and moving as well, focusing on the challenge of defining and creating a safe space in Cuba and, later, in America. Anders shows us her dual identity as a Jewish Latina by exploring her multiple cultural inheritances. Throughout JUBANA!, mixed messages of what it means to be Cuban–Jewish–American abound. Indeed, the memoir moves back and forth from recognizable traits (Jewish guilt, Latin machismo) to new mixes (brisket with a side of frijoles negros). JUBANA! also describes the historical exile experience of Jews, as well as that of today’s Cubans in Cuba and the United States. Anders’s strength lies in her ability to articulate the cultural paradoxes of being Jewish and Latina in a third homeland, North America. As she notes in her memoir, few people (Latinos included), realize that Jewish Latinos even exist. Little Pink Raincoat, Anders’s second book, is a sexy, lighthearted, funny, fashion-forward look at fashion memory, discontinued lipsticks, great outfits, and the unavailable men who’ve inspired them. Again with her sure wit, Anders explores a number of disappointing love relationships and how the role of clothes, makeup, and accessories—and her delight in them, if not, ultimately, in her men—helps her understand and heal. Anders lives in Hackensack, New Jersey, where she continues to write for the Washington Post, national magazines, and now, scripts for what may become a TV show based on Little Pink Raincoat. Further Reading Bettinger-López, Caroline, Cuban-Jewish Journeys: Searching for Identity, Home, and History in Miami (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2000). Levine, Robert M., Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993).

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Anzaldúa, Gloria

Anzaldúa, Gloria (1942–2004). Born on September 26, 1942, on the Jesús María ranch settlement near Edinburg in South Texas, Gloria Evangela Anzaldúa became a leading figure in Latina feminist and lesbian literature. A member of the seventh generation of her family in Texas, Anzaldúa grew up doing agricultural field work on large farms and ranches. Despite her family’s discouragement, Anzaldúa developed a love of reading and learning. She nevertheless continued supporting herself as a farm worker until she graduated from Pan American University with a B.A. in English in 1969. In 1972, she received an M.A. in English and education from the University of Texas at Austin, after which she worked as a teacher—often for migrant children. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Anzaldúa began teaching at colleges in Texas and California and studying for awhile in the Ph.D. programs at the University of Texas and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she concentrated on feminist theory and cultural studies. Although she was never able to complete these doctoral programs, she nevertheless made her own way as a poet, essayist, and intellectual and taught courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1982 to 1986. Many other university positions were in her future after her pioneering publications and public presentations. In 1981, Anzaldúa teamed up with Cherrie Moraga* to compile the highly influential anthology, This Bridge Called My Back, a landmark in announcing a multicultural feminism and esthetic. Anzaldúa’s own first, highly influential book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), blends literary genres and the English and Spanish languages as well as memoir and feminist analysis. One of the most salient achievements of the book was applying the border (see Border Literature) as a metaphor for gay and lesbian sexuality as well as for Chicano and other Latino culture in the United States. Anzaldúa also published Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990), which won the Lambda Literary Best Small Press Award; it is a compilation of essays engaging diverse topics from sexism and racism to spirituality. In 2000, Anzaldúa compiled a memoir-like collection of interviews, Interviews/Entrevistas and, in 2002, collaborated with Ana Louise Keating in compiling the anthology, This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions of Transformation, a collection of essays, poetry, and artwork directed at promoting societal acceptance of marginalized populations. Anzaldúa has also written children’s books, including Prietita Has a Friend (1991), Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado (1993), and Prietita y La Llorona (1996, The Little Dark One and the Weeping Woman). She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the 1991 Lesbian Rights Award, the 1992 Sappho Award of Distinction, and the American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award. Anzaldúa died on May 15, 2004, from complications of diabetes. Further Reading Keating, Ana Louise, Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

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Arce, Miguel (Manuel)

Keating, Ana Louise, ed., EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Pérez, Emma, “Gloria Anzaldúa, La Gran Nueva Mestiza Theorist, Writer, Activist Scholar” National Women’s Studies Association Journal Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2005): 1–10.

Nicolás Kanellos Arce, Julio G. (1870–1926). Among the cultural elites who disseminated the ideology of “México de afuera”* was one political refugee who, through writing as well as publishing a newspaper, became immensely influential. Julio G. Arce was a newspaper publisher from Guadalajara who took up exile in San Francisco, vowing never to return to Mexico in his disillusionment with the Revolution. In San Francisco, Arce first worked as a laborer, became editor of La Crónica (The Chronicle), and then founded his own newspaper, Mefistófeles. He soon bought La Crónica, which he renamed Hispano América; the newspaper continued publishing until 1934, eight years after Arce’s death. A prolific writer, Arce satirized American culture and how it affected Mexican immigrants. Arce’s series, entitled “Crónicas Diabólicas” (Diabolical Chronicles), published under the pseudonym of Julio G. Arce. “Jorge Ulica,” became the most widely syndicated crónica in the Southwest because of its ability to comment humorously on life in the Mexican immigrant community. By and large, Ulica assumed the elite stance of satirist observing the human comedy as a self-appointed conscience for the community. Ulica’s particular talents lay in caricature, in emulating the colloquialisms and popular culture of the working-class immigrant, and in satirizing the culture conflict and misunderstandings encountered by greenhorn immigrants from the provinces in Mexico. In “The Stenographer,” he is not only scandalized but titillated by the Mexican or Mexican American flapper whom he employs as a stenographer; flappers were seen by cronistas as the most representative figures of American female liberation and loose morality. Hispanic women who adapted their dress and customs were subjected to the harshest censure as men sought to preserve male prerogatives and power. Further Reading Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del “México de Afuera” (Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 2006). Rodríguez, Juan, Crónicas diabólicas de “Jorge Ulica” (San Diego: Maize Press, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos Arce, Miguel (Manuel) (?–?). Mexican poet, novelist, and playwright Miguel (also known as Manuel) Arce was probably a political refugee, persona non grata in Mexico because of his allegiance to one or another faction of the 83

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Revolution. In archived letters and interviews conducted by sociologist Manuel Gamio, he emerges as an unfortunate victim of dislocation, living hand-to-mouth, complaining of the meager royalties he was receiving from Casa Editorial Lozano for his two novels of the Mexican Revolution, both published in San Antonio: Ladrona! (1925, Woman Thief) and Solo tú (1928, Only You). Both his novels re-create the social atmosphere in Mexico before the outbreak of the Revolution and trace how life changed as the Revolution approached. The former was so successful that it merited a second edition (1928) and was the basis of a play produced in Los Angeles. Like many other exiled literary figures of the time, Arce also worked as a journalist, again working for the Lozano establishment as a reporter and columnist for La Opinión (The Opinion). After having little economic success in San Antonio, Arce moved to Kansas City, where he won a monetary prize for literature from El Universal newspaper. He later moved to Los Angeles, where he was able to work in the Mexican consular corps. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos

Areíto. In 1973, a group of young and radical Cuban émigrés, mostly from the New York area, traveled to Cuba at the behest of the Cuban government and returned marveling at what they considered revolutionary accomplishments. In early 1974, they began publishing a magazine entitled Areíto (The dancedrama-poetry of the Caribbean natives) to celebrate the revolution and dispute U.S. propaganda against the Cuban state. They also criticized émigrés for their “bourgeois lifestyles” and the leaders of the Cuban exile community for encouraging political intolerance, racial bigotry, and sexism. In 1978, Areíto members, many who had left Cuba as children and teenagers, claimed in an anthology, Contra viento y marea (Against Wind and Tide), published by Havana’s Casa de las Américas, that they had left only because they were following their parents’ wishes. In 1978, the anthology received the Casa de las Américas Prize from the Cuban government. Areíto encountered a great deal of hostility not only from established exile leaders, but also from other Cuban students and intellectuals in the United States. The editorial staff of Areíto was constantly harassed by conservative émigrés. Areíto survived well into the 1980s, in spite of the opposition it received from fellow Cuban Americans. In keeping with their political beliefs, the editors supported the revolutionary movements of all the Americas, especially the struggles in Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. (See also Casal, Lourdes.) Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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Arellano, Juan Esteban (1947–). A writer celebrated for preserving the New Mexican Spanish dialect and small-town culture in his writing, Juan Estevan Arellano was born on September 17, 1947, the son of farmers in the village of Embudo, New Mexico. Arellano was brought up doing farm chores and studying at rural elementary and high schools. While writing part-time for the Las Cruces Sun News, he studied at New Mexico State University, where he also wrote for the student newspaper. After graduating in 1970, he returned to Embudo and was one of the founders of the Academia de la Nueva Raza (The Academy of the New People), a type of think tank dedicated to studying and preserving the culture of northern New Mexico. He became the editor of the Academia’s journal, Cuaderno (Notebook), which between 1971 and 1976 disseminated New Mexican literature and traditional wisdom. In 1971, Arellano received a one-year fellowship to study at the Washington Journalism Center. Upon his return to Embudo in 1972, he resumed editing Cuaderno and began publishing short stories and poetry in earnest. These short stories laid the basis for his novel, Inocencio: Ni siembra, ni escarda y siempre se come el mejor elote (1991, Inocencio: He Sows Seeds and Does Not Harvest, but Is Always the First to Eat the Corn), a sardonic and humorous narrative much influenced by folklore from the picaresque tradition and completely written in New Mexican rural dialect. In 1984, Arellano published Palabras de la Vista/Retratos de la pluma (Words of View/Portraits from the Pen), a collection of photographs and poems portraying the people of northern New Mexico in a visual–lyrical narrative. Aside from his creative writing, Arellano has for many years published a column, “Crepúsculo” (Twilight) in the Taos News. He was also the editor of a magazine, Resolana (The Sunny Side), whose purpose was to preserve and disseminate the knowledge of aged Hispanos. Further Reading García, Nasario, Platicas: Conversations with Hispano Writers of New Mexico (Lubbuck, TX: Texas Tech University, 2000). Ruiz, Reynaldo, “Juan Estevan Arellano” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomeli and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 17–20).

Nicolás Kanellos Arenas, Reinaldo (1943–1990). Cuban novelist, poet, and memoirist Reinaldo Arenas is most known as a severely persecuted writer under the Fidel Castro regime who became an exile in the United States and eventually died of AIDS. Born in rural Oriente Province, Arenas was raised in poverty by his mother and a succession of other women. He nevertheless became a poet in childhood and at age nineteen won a scholarship to the University of Havana. While there, he published his first novel, Celestino antes del alba (1967, Singing from the Well, 1987). When his award-winning biography of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier was refused publication by government authorities, Arenas began sending his works abroad to avoid state-sponsored censorship. After publishing two books in Mexico, his international reputation 85

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began to increase and in 1969, critics in France named him the best foreign novelist. Arenas was continuously persecuted by Cuban authorities for his homosexuality and his literary work. In 1970, Arenas was sent to a sugar plantation for forced labor. While there he wrote a poem about the sugar mill; the poem was smuggled out of the country to be published in Spain. His next novel, Otra vez el mar (Again the Sea), went through two editions (1969, 1971) in Cuba, both of which were taken out of circulation by authorities. It was eventually republished in 1982 and translated to English as Farewell to the Sea in 1986. From 1974 to 1976, Arenas was imprisoned on moral charges; he was not allowed to leave prison until confessing to having conducted counter-revolutionary activities and swearing to write only “optimistic” novels. In 1980, Arenas went into exile in the United States, eventually ending up in New York, where he was able to publish new work freely and reissue some of his previously proscribed writing. Arenas’s writing was supported in 1982 by a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1987 by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. In 1993, Arenas published Asalto (Assault), a passionate attack on Fidel Castro and post-revolutionary Cuba. Arenas’s most-known work, probably because it was made into an award-winning movie in 2000, was his posthumously published autobiography, Antes que anochezca (1993, Before Night Falls, 1994), which documented not only his trials in Cuba but his continued unhappiness in the United States. The book also announced his imminent suicide. Another posthumously published book, Hallucinations: or, The IllFated Peregrinations of Fray Servando (2001), published first in Mexico as El mundo halucinante, features an unforgettable literary creation in Fray Servando, a priest, blasphemer, dueler of monsters, lover, and prophet whose adventures take place in eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas. An activist leader in Cuban exile literary circles, Arenas was a member of the editorial board of Linden Lane* literary magazine and founded, in 1983, the magazine Mariel. Further Reading Browning, Richard L., Childhood and the Nation in Latin American Literature: Allende, Reinaldo Arenas, Bosch, Bryce Echenique, Cortázar, Manuel Galván, Federico Gamboa, S. Ocampo, Peri Rossi, Salarrué (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2001). Ocasio, Rafael, Cuba’s Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Argüelles, Iván (1939–). A prolific and accomplished poet, Iván Argüelles was born in Rochester, Minnesota, to a Mexican artist father, Enrique Argüelles, and an American mother, Ethel Meyer Argüelles, on January 24, 1939. After giving birth, his mother returned with her two sons to Mexico City, where they resided until 1944, when they relocated to Mexicali—and shortly thereafter to Los Angeles. After his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the family again relocated to Minnesota, where she recovered in a 86

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sanatorium; thus Iván completed most of elementary school and all of high school in Rochester. He went on to attend the University of Minnesota but finished his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, where he received his B.A. in classics (1961). Later he studied a year at New York University (1962) and studied for and received his master’s in library science from Vanderbilt University (1967–1968). Argüelles has worked as bookstore manager in Chicago (1962–1966), as a Berlitz teacher in Macerata, Italy (1967), and as a professional librarian for the New York Public Library (1968–1978) and the University of California, Berkeley (1978–2001). He is now retired and lives in Berkeley. Argüelles started writing poetry during high school and received a national award for a poem he wrote in the eleventh grade. Although he continued his interest in writing in college, it was not until about 1970 that he turned seriously to writing poetry. At about the same time, he became conscious of the Chicano Movement* and the work of César Chávez.* Thus much of his early poetry is infused both with the surrealistic style he then adopted and with themes relating to his own Mexican background. Many of these poems appeared later in such venues as Revista Chicano-Riqueña and De Colores. His first poetry collection, Instamatic Reconditioning (1978), was followed swiftly by his much applauded The Invention of Spain (1978). During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Argüelles’s poems were frequently and widely published in many small press and poetry journals in the United States. This early period of his writing culminated in the book Looking for Mary Lou, which received the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (Judge, June Jordan). Beginning in 1990, Argüelles turned from writing what he refers to as “the daily poem” and instead explored writing the long poem: the epic. He also founded, with Andrew Joron, Pantograph Press, which in 1992 published the first volume of his epic, “That” Goddess. Argüelles continued exploring this long, heroic form for the next ten years, a period which culminated in the twovolume, 867-page poem, Madonna Septet (2000). Among his works of note published since then is the collaboration with John M. Bennett, Chac Prostibulario (Whorehouse Chac), a multilingual experimental work. Argüelles’s other books include: Captive of the Vision of Paradise (1982), Tattooed Heart of the Drunken Sailor (1983), Manicomio (1984, Crazy House), What Are They Doing to My Animal? (1984), Nailed to the Coffin of Life (1986), Pieces of the Bone Text Still There (1987), Baudelaire’s Brain (1988), (Rad) (1992), Hapax Legomenon (1993), Enigma & Variations (1995), Purisima Sex Addict II (1997, with Jake Berry), Dead/Requiem (1998, with Jack Foley), Saint James (1998, with Jack Foley), Madonna, a Poem (1998), Daya Karo (1999), City of Angels (1999), Cosmic Karma Raga (2000, with Peter Ganick), Tri Loka (2001) and Inferno (2005). Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).


Argueta, Jorge

Argueta, Jorge (1981–). While growing up in El Salvador, Jorge Argueta listened to the fascinating tales of truck drivers frequenting his family’s restaurant. By middle school, he was already composing his own stories. In 1980, Argueta and his family escaped from the civil war in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States to settle in San Francisco, where he soon met and associated with Chicano* writers in the Chicano Renaissance.* There he began reading his poetry at workshops, cafes, and public events, and his poems began appearing in local newspapers and magazines. But the transition to the United States was not easy, and Argueta fell prey to depression and alcoholism. After publishing some chapbooks, including Del ocaso a la alborada/From Sundown to Dawn and La puerta del diablo/The Devil’s Gate, and his first complete collection of poems, Corazón del barrio (1994, Heart of the Barrio), he became a member of writers-in-the-schools programs and found his way to a healthier and more rewarding path for himself in his new land. He began writing children’s stories, some based on the immigrant experience and others on the lore and culture passed on to him as a child by his Nahua grandmother. The indigenous way of life has since become a major theme in his children’s writing; in fact, it was a Native American church in San Francisco that assisted him in his spiritual recovery. Argueta published his first bilingual children’s book Una película en mi almohada/A Movie in My Pillow in 2001; this first experiment won the America’s Book Award for Latin American Literature, the IPPY Award for Multicultural Fiction—Juvenile/Young Adults, and the Skipping Stones Honor Award for Multicultural & International Books, which encouraged him to hone his writing for children and dedicate himself wholeheartedly to the genre. In 2003, Argueta published three more titles: Los árboles están colgando el cielo/Trees are Hanging from the Sky; El Zipitio/Zipitio, and Xochitl la nina de las flores/Xochitl and the Flowers. The latter was an Américas Award Commended Title and a 2004 Independent Publishers Award Finalist. In 2005, a book inspired in his daughter Luna, Looney Luna/Luna, Lunita Lunera, was awarded the Nappa Gold Award. Argueta’s other books include La fiesta de las tortillas/The Fiesta of the Tortillas (2005), La Gallinita en la Ciudad/The Little Hen in the City (2006), Talking with Mother Earth/Hablando con Madre Tierra: Poems/Poemas (2006), and Alfredito regresa volando a su casa (2007, Alfredito Flies Home). Further Reading Córdova, Carlos B., The Salvadoran Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Arias, Arturo (1950–). Born in Guatemala City in 1950, Arturo Arias is director of Latin American studies at the University of Redlands. Cowriter for the screenplay for El Norte (1984), he is the author of six novels in Spanish— Después de las bombas (1979, After the Bombs, 1990), Itzam Na (1981), Jaguar

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en Llamas (1989, Jaguar on Fire), Los caminos de Paxil (1991, The Roads of Paxil), Cascabel (1998, Rattlesnake, 2003), and Sopa de caracol (2002, Snail Soup)—winner of the Anna Seghers Prize and twice the recipient of the Casa de las Americas Prize. Itzam Na, named after a Mayan deity and the winner of the Américas Award, deals with a group of young rebels in Guatemala who struggle to launch an effective movement against the bourgeoisie and their nation’s conservative and corrupt government. In such works as After the Bombs, Arias explores revolutionary history and culture in Central America, in this case through the tale of an ex-revolutionary who invites friends to a dinner where, through the technique of magic realism, he will be the main course. In Rattlesnake, Arias changed direction and explored a more popular genre— the thriller. Here he spins the tale of a CIA intrigue in Guatemala, kidnappings by guerrillas, and romance. Arias is a specialist on ethnic issues and subaltern identity, a subject that is a central theme in both his fiction and his academic work. He is one of the very few writers to have won the Casa de las Américas Award not only for creative writing but also for scholarship, with his Ideologías, literatura y sociedad durante la revolución guatemalteca 1944–1954 (1979, Ideologies, Literature and Society during the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944–1954). In 1998 he published two books of literary criticism, one on Guatemalan twentieth-century fiction—La identidad de la palabra: narratova guatemalateca a la luz del siglo nuevo (The Identity of the Word: Guatemalan Narrative in the Light of the New Century)—and another on contemporary Central American fiction: Gestos ceremoniales (Ceremonial Gestures). In 2001, Arias published a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mulata and The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, dealing with the polemic about Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial writing. In 2007, he charted the development of Central America’s literature of liberation struggles during the 1970s and 1980s in Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. He has served as president of the Latin American Studies Association (2001–2003). Working in another medium, Arias coscripted the film El Norte (1986, The North), which was nominated for an Academy Award. Further Reading Menton, Seymour, “Los Senores Presidentes y Los Guerrilleros: The New and the Old Guatemalan Novel (1976–1982)” Latin American Research Review Vol. 19, No. 2 (1984): 93–117. Mondragón, Amelia, Cambios estéticos y nuevos proyectos culturales en Centro América (Washington, D.C.: Literal Books, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Arias, Ron (1941–). Born on November 30, 1941, in Los Angeles, California, Ron Arias was raised principally by his maternal grandmother, his parents constantly on the move because of his father’s military career. After becoming interested in journalism in high school, Arias furthered his study of that field

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at universities in the United States, Argentina, and Spain. He finally earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of California–Berkeley in 1967. In 1968, he earned his master’s in journalism from the University of California–Los Angeles. Sent to Argentina with an Inter-American Press Association scholarship, Arias began publishing important series of articles in the Buenos Aires Herald and the Caracas Daily Journal. After a stint in Peru with the Peace Corps, in 1967 Arias returned to California to continue his education and write for several newspapers. Throughout the 1970s, Arias published short stories in magazines throughout the United States and emerged as an important Chicano author. In 1975, he published his magic realist novel The Road to Tamazunchale, nominated for a National Book Award. During the 1980s and 1990s, Arias concentrated on his journalism, his senior editorship of People magazine, and nonfiction writing. In 1989, he authored a nonfiction documentary, Five against the Sea, about a group of castaways. In 2002, he published Moving Target, an autobiography that begins with a detailed history of his parents and follows his development as a writer. Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Armand, Octavio Rafael (1946–). Born in Guantánamo, Cuba, on May 10, 1960, poet Octavio Rafael Armand went with his family into exile twice: in 1958 under dictator Fulgencio Batista and again in 1961 under Fidel Castro. Because of this, his secondary education took place in New York. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees in Hispanic literature, earning his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1975. He has made a career of teaching at universities, including Bennington in Vermont. He maintained an apartment in New York City until he relocated in 1991 to Caracas, Venezuela. In 1978, Armand was the recipient of a Cintas Foundation fellowship. From 1978 on, he was the founding editor of Escandalar (Scandal Sheet), a literary magazine. Among his books are Horizonte no es siempre lejanía (1970, The Horizon Is Not Always Far Off), Entre testigos, 1971–1973 (1974, Among Witnesses), Cosas pasan (1977, Things Happen), Superficies (1980, Superfices), Origami (1987), Refractions (1994, poems translated by Carol Maier), and El pez volador (1997, The Flying Fish). Armand sees his poetry as a means of retaining his identity, especially through the retention of the Spanish language. He is, in fact, a vanguardist language poet who experiments with all of the varied dimensions of sound and sense in the Spanish language. Further Reading Morales, Leandro, “Octavio Armand ¿Qué Tal Esa Vanguardia?” (http://cubaencuentro. com/es/content/download/17559/134389/version/1/file/361m231.pdf).


Arroyo, Angel M.

Armiño, Franca de (?–?). Radical journalist and playwright Franca de Armiño was born in Puerto Rico and became active in organizing workers. She rose to lead the Asociación Popular Feminista (People’s Feminist Association) in 1920. She later relocated to New York City, where she continued her organizing activity, wrote columns in such community newspapers as Gráfico* (Graphic), and emerged as a respected playwright. Her major work, Los Hipócritas (The Hypocrites), produced beginning from 1933 on New York’s Hispanic stages by the Compañía Manuel Santigosa, is a melodrama that follows the organizing efforts of workers in a shoe factory who organize for a strike and to dispossess the rich; the plot forms the backdrop to a romance of the factory owner’s daughter and the son of one of the workers, who is the lead organizer. As is obvious from the play and from her columns, Armiño was a committed socialist who saw theater as a way to raise the level of consciousness of the masses. Armiño dedicated this social drama in four acts and eight scenes to the oppressed of the world and to those who work for social renovation. With much Marxist rhetoric, the play reveals the hypocrisy not only of the wealthy but also of the Church and the political structure. In the published version of Los hipócritas, other literary works by Armiño are listed: a play, Tragedia puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Tragedy), a collection of essays, Aspectos de la vida (Aspects of Life), and a collection of poems, Luz de tinieblas (Shadow Light), all three of which are missing. Further Reading Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Arroyo, Angel M. (?–1999). Very little is known about Angel Arroyo, one of the post–World War II leaders of the Puerto Rican literary community. Born in Arecibo, Angel Manuel Arroyo migrated to New York City some time before or during the war. Arroyo became a permanent presence in support of all Puerto Rican community and artistic events and served for more than twenty years as president of New York’s Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores* (Puerto Rican Association of Writers). In fact, he had been one of its founders in 1945, along with Gonzalo O’Neill* and Erasmo Vando.* In 1958, he was also one of the founders of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Perhaps as important was his membership on the committee that lobbied the New York City board of education to commemorate Puerto Rican Discovery Week, which eventually led to New York State’s designation of November as Puerto Rican Heritage Month. Among the other members of that committee, which became the board overseeing activities for these commemorations, were poet Diana Ramírez de Arellano* and playwright Dolores Prida.* The following are the known volumes of Arroyo’s verse, which is reminiscent of symbolist poetry: Láminas de mi infinito (1961, Prints of My Infinity), Sinfonía 91

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en colores, poemas (1969, Symphony in Colors, Poems), and Burbujas del sol y agua: antología poética (1982, Bubbles of Sun and Water: Poetry Anthology). The latter two books were published by the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores. Arroyo was also a frequent contributor of his poetry and essays to New York’s Spanish-language periodicals, such as Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters). Further Reading Santiago Valiente, Wilfredo, “El Boricua. Un Poco de Todo” (http://www.elboricua.com/ MiradorPuertorriquenoArchives.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Arroyo, Rane (1954–). Rane Arroyo was born in Chicago to parents who had emigrated separately from Puerto Rico. He grew up in Lincoln Park and elsewhere on the north side of the city, and in the western suburbs. He completed a B.A. in English at Elmhurst College and a Ph.D. in English at the University of Pittsburgh in 1994, with a dissertation comparing contemporary Latino literature to the Chicano Renaissance. Since 1997, he has taught at the University of Toledo, where he is a full professor of creative writing. Best known as a poet, Arroyo has published eight books of poetry: Columbus’s Orphan (1993), The Singing Shark (1996), Pale Ramón (1998), Home Movies of Narcissus (2002), The Portable Famine (2005), The Roswell Poems (2008), The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems (2008), and The Sky’s Weight (forthcoming in 2009). Arroyo’s poetry is highly allusive, referring frequently to both literary and popular culture, developing such themes as pan-Caribbean consciousness and cultural survival. His first book of stories, How to Name a Hurricane (2005), depicts a range of gay Latino characters in a number of forms, such as monologue and verse. Arroyo has also written several plays, which have been produced in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, including The Amateur Virgin (1993), winner of the George Houston Bass Award, Buddha and the Señorita (1992), Anita Frank (1996), and the one-act “A Lesson in Writing Love Letters” (2007). His awards include the Carl Sandburg Prize in Poetry, the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, and an Ohio Excellence Artist Award. He serves on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Board of Directors. Further Reading DeGuzmán, María, “The Already Browned Skin of ‘American’ Modernism: Rane Arroyo’s Pale Ramón” Midwestern Miscellany Vol. 30 (Fall 2002): 15–26. Sandlin, Betsy, “‘Poetry Always Demands My Ghosts’: The Haunted and Haunting Poetry of Rane Arroyo” Centro Journal (Spring 2007): 162–177.

William Barillas Arte Público Press. From its beginnings in the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement to its current status as the oldest and most accomplished publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors, Arte Público Press and its imprint, Piñata Books, have become a showcase for Hispanic literary creativity, arts, and culture. In the early 1970s, Hispanic writers 92

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Gaspar de Alba (center) with Arte Público Press staff: Georgina Baeza, Marina Tristán, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, and Carolina Villarroel.

were not being published by the mainstream presses even though their production was increasing. To address this need, Nicolás Kanellos* and Luis Dávila, literature professors at Indiana University Northwest and Indiana University–Bloomington, respectively, founded the Revista Chicano-Riqueña (Chicano-Rican Review), which published its first and subsequent issues in Gary, Indiana, in 1973. This quarterly magazine eventually evolved into The Americas Review, which received praise and prestigious awards nationwide. After twenty-five years of launching the careers of numerous Latino authors, the publication of The Americas Review ceased in 1998. The legacy left by this literary magazine, however, provided the foundation for Arte Público Press, which Kanellos inaugurated in 1979. The press provided an even more important national forum for Hispanic literature. When Kanellos was offered a position at the University of Houston in 1980, he was invited to bring the magazine and the press with him. During the first decade at the University of Houston, Arte Público was able to launch prose fiction and memoir books that made the transition into mainstream commercial publishing for such authors as Ana Castillo,* Sandra Cisneros,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Gary Soto,* and Helena María Viramontes,* among many others. But it was not until 1994, with Victor Villaseñor’s Rain of Gold, that Arte Público registered its first best seller. The book was successfully auctioned off for paperback rights 93

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Arte Público Press publisher Nicolás Kanellos with writers Nicholasa Mohr and Ed Vega at a reading in Houston, Texas.

to the largest U.S. publisher at that time, Bantam Doubleday Dell, and destined to eventually become the basis for a ten-part HBO series. Since those heady days, Arte Público Press has diversified, going into nonfiction, reference, and children’s publishing, among other things. In the early twenty-first century, Arte Público also launched an extensive series of books on the history of Latino civil rights struggles since the nineteenth century. Included among the titles are biographies of such leaders as Héctor P. García, César Chávez,* Antonia Pantoja,* and Willie Velásquez. The series also documents and studies important court cases, such as Hernández v. Texas, as well as such perennial issues as farm labor abuses and the history of such organizations as the American G.I. Forum. As part of the ongoing efforts to bring Hispanic literature to schools at every level of the curriculum, as well as to mainstream audiences, Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project in 1992. The ten-year recovery project represents the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index, and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960. 94

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The notion of an imprint dedicated to the publication of literature for children and young adults was Arte Público’s response to an urgent public demand for books that accurately portray U.S. Hispanic culture. In 1994, a grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed Arte Público Press to transform the dream into a reality. With its bilingual books for children and its entertaining novels for young adults, Piñata Books has made giant strides toward filling the void in the literary market created by an increased awareness of diverse cultures. Further Reading Arte Público Press (http://artepublicopress.com). Smith, Katherine Capshaw, and Margaret R. Higonnet, “Bilingual Books for Children: An Interview of with Nicolás Kanellos, Director of Piñata Press” MELUS Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2002): 218–224. Tollet, Eileen, “Press Profile: Arte Público Press” Translation Review (2002): 48–53.

F. Arturo Rosales Arteaga, Alfred (1950–). A poet who blends languages, space, and time in his verse, Alfred Arteaga was born in East Los Angeles on May 2, 1950, but was raised in Whittier, California. Interested in reading and literature from childhood, Arteaga went on to earn a master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of California–Santa Cruz as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. He edited La Raza from 1974 to 1975 and Quarry West while he was at UC–Santa Cruz. As an academic, Arteaga taught English at the University of Houston from 1987 to 1990 and at the University of California–Berkeley from 1990 to 1998. Arteaga’s poetry draws heavily from Náhuatl and other pre-Colombian literatures and mythologies, blending the languages of the past with English and Spanish, challenging readers to decode all the referents and varying linguistic systems (a style that has been called “heterotextual”). His books include Cantos (1991), An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (1994), Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997), House with the Blue Bed (1997), Love in the Time of Aftershocks (1998), and Red (2000). Further Reading Martínez Wood, Jamie, Latino Writers and Journalists (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos

Artes y Letras. See Silva de Cintrón, Josefina Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores. The Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores (The Puerto Rican Association of Writers) is one of the oldest still-active Puerto Rican literary and cultural organizations. Founded in 1945 by poets Angel M. Arroyo,* Erasmo Vando,* and Gonzalo O’Neill* and newspapermen Antonio J. Colorado and Rafael Torres Mazzorana, among others, the organization was led for more than twenty years by poet Angel M. Arroyo and afterward by Luz H. Rivera Myrick for a long tenure. Since its founding, the association has promoted and supported Puerto Rican literary 95

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creativity through conferences, recitals, and communications. During the tenure of Luz H. Rivera Myrick, the organization sponsored numerous events, including conferences by Puerto Rican novelist Enrique Laguerre, poet and professor Dr. Adelaida Lugo-Guarnelli of Baruch College, poet Dr. Mordecai Rubin of Teachers College, and Professor Eloísa Rivera Rivera of Brooklyn College. Among the recitals held were those of poets Juan Avilés, Dr. Diana Ramírez de Arellano,* Anita Vélez-Mitchell,* and Antonio Porpetta. The Asociación also sponsored music recitals, notably of such Puerto Rican opera stars as Ana María Martínez and Mercedes Alicea. Traditionally, the association’s events have taken place in the old Horace Mann Auditorium located on Broadway and 120th Street, Teachers College, Columbia University. Further Reading Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). Santiago Valiente, Wilfredo, El mirador puertorriqueño (http://www.elboricua.com/ MiradorPuertorriquenoArchives.html).

Nicolás Kanellos ASPIRA, Inc. Since its formation in 1958, ASPIRA has developed from a small nonprofit agency in New York City specializing in counseling Puerto Rican youth to a national association with offices in five states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. ASPIRA has greatly influenced education reform in New York City. Central to its founding was the role played by educator and social worker Antonia Pantoja* and the Puerto Rican Forum, Inc., the oldest and largest Puerto Rican social service agency in the country. A lawsuit initiated against the New York City Board of Education in 1974 by ASPIRA led to a landmark Consent Decree that ensured that Spanishspeaking and other non-English-speaking students in the city would have access to bilingual education until they achieved an English-language proficiency that facilitated equal access to education. Working closely with the board of education and the Latino Roundtable on Educational Reform, ASPIRA has been an effective advocate for the educational needs of Latino children without compromising the educational success of all children. According to one statistic, ninety percent of high school seniors who undergo ASPIRA orientation graduate and go on to college. In addition, the ASPIRA program has been essential to helping bridge the cultural and linguistic gap between Puerto Rican/Latino parents and the New York City educational facilities. It is now a national organization based in Washington, D.C., and although it still primarily serves the Puerto Rican community, other Latinos now receive the benefits of the ASPIRA programmatic agenda, such as sponsorship of cultural events, school programs, and scholarship and student loan programs. Further Reading Tardiff, Joseph C., and L. Mpho Mabunda, eds., Dictionary of Hispanic Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996).


Association of Hispanic Arts

An ASPIRA, Inc., meeting.

Association of Hispanic Arts (¡AHA!). Founded in 1975 in New York City, the Association of Hispanic Arts, Inc. (¡AHA!) is a nonprofit arts service organization serving the Latino arts and cultural community. ¡AHA!’s primary mission has been to promote and advance Latino arts organizations and artists, including writers and literary organizations, by developing audiences for them and creating new opportunities for exposure. It accomplishes this by publishing a newsletter, lists of artists and organizations and a managing a clearinghouse of information about them. ¡AHA! also received funding to offer training to enhance the management and professional skills of Latino arts organizations and individual artists in order to foster their growth and development and create the conditions for success in their respective disciplines. The three principal services rendered by ¡AHA! are advocacy for the arts and artists, technical assistance, and the provision of funding through re-granting. The regranting program, in particular, provides financial support for the creation of new works. Further Reading “¡AHA! Association of Hispanic Arts” (http://www.latinoarts. org/who.html).


Atencio, Tomás

Atencio, Tomás (1932–). A native of Dixon, New Mexico (1932), and a Korean War veteran who studied philosophy in California and then worked in various organizing efforts in California and Texas, Atencio returned to New Mexico in the late 1960s. By then, he had acquired a great amount of Chicano Movement influence outside that state. Once back, he organized La Academia de La Nueva Raza (The Academy of the New Culture) in Santa Fe. This grassroots institute emphasized gathering knowledge from village elders through a process called La Resolona—informal discussions held by elders in village plazas warmed by the sun. The knowledge that Atencio and his group collected was called oro del barrio (barrio gold). Atencio’s project demonstrated that New Mexico Chicano intellectuals could use grassroots and regional knowledge to promote cultural identity. Atencio is now president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Institute, an organization designed to promote self awareness among Mexican Americans, as well as to foster and preserve their traditions and culture. Throughout most of his life, Atencio has written about his ideas in numerous books and articles. Further Reading http://chicano.nlcc.com/rcastro.html. Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York. Founded in 1963 by professorpoet Diana Ramírez de Arellano* and other Puerto Rican artists and intellectuals in New York City, the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York (Puerto Rican Atheneum of New York) was modeled on a similar intellectual institution in San Juan in fostering the cultural and intellectual life of the Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Ramírez de Arellano, a professor at City College of the City University of New York, set it firmly on its course of becoming the most important intellectual and cultural center for Puerto Ricans in the city; the Ateneo sponsored art exhibitions, conferences, poetry, and literary recitals and generally had the mission of bringing artists and intellectuals together for exchange. In addition, the Ateneo recognized outstanding contributors to the arts and scholarship by bestowing medals on them. Such honorees included the poets Josefina Romo and Clemente Soto Vélez.* The Ateneo also sponsored poetry contests, or juegos florales, to promote the work of new writers. Puerto Rican patriots, artists, and literary figures were also commemorated by conferences and special programs. Further Reading Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

Nicolás Kanellos Awards. When confronted with closed doors, segregation, and discrimination, African Americans and Latinos have often responded by creating their own institutions to recognize their achievements and progress. With the publishing 98

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industry not even recognizing Latinos as a reading public in the United States, much less producers of writers, most major awards, fellowships, and prestigious teaching positions have been off-limits to Latinos, controlled overwhelmingly by the white Euro-centric establishment erected at the same time that the United States was expanding its territories southward and westward and, under the ideology of Manifest Destiny,* denying or ignoring Latino cultural achievements—in many cases superior Latino arts and cultural achievements in the lands the United States conquered or purchased. Awards in art and literature serve a variety of purposes, but none more important than constructing and solidifying the national identity via a set of canons that really come down to codifying who is American and who is not. In capitalist countries, awards are also tools for marketing, especially for distinguishing products for mass consumption. Thus Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, and university chairs in creative writing have traditionally been reserved for the writers selected by powerful institutional leaders as the best models of “American” writing. Needless to say, writing in Spanish and other languages does not count, and, until recently, even though Latinos have resided in what became the United States since before the arrival of the Pilgrims, Latinos were not recognized as Americans. In addition, many of the prizes and awards for literature are actually restricted by the mainstream publishers to the writers that they alone publish; this is accomplished by only permitting membership to the councils and committees of members from their own businesses and affiliated academies, as well as charging high membership fees to join, as in the case of the Children’s Book Council trade group and its relationship with the American Library Association, which awards some of the highest medals in children’s and young adult literature. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when contemporary Latino publishing houses were founded, new awards solely for Latino literature were created, a tradition that has prevailed to this day despite the growing— although still sparse—recognition of Latinos in literature, driven again mostly by the same commercial establishment and academy that bars the majority of Latino writers from print and from consideration for major awards. The Editorial Quinto Sol,* wishing to attract new manuscripts from Mexican Americans for its newly founded publishing house and wishing to create a canon for Chicano* literature, established the Premio Quinto Sol in 1970. For a period of some seven or eight years, it became the major prize in Latino literature, awarding $1,000 in cash and publication of the winning manuscript. To a great extent, the prize did canonize Chicano literature and created a cultural identity for Chicanos, even identifying Chicanos as a nation within the American nation, through the example of the winning manuscripts. The awards for the first novels—to . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987) by Tomás Rivera,* Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya,* and Estampas del Valle y Otras Obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works) by Rolando Hinojosa*—during the first three years of the prize 99

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helped identify Chicano writing and the Chicano nation as bilingual–bicultural, small-town, and rural in the Southwest, struggling with economic and political oppression as well as with Catholicism and its relationship to Hispanic culture. Not included, of course, in these first prizes were women or the urban reality of Mexican Americans, a reality that in truth was the majority experience for Mexican Americans. The power of this award and its attendant marketing has secured a place for these three novels as the foundational works of contemporary Chicano literature, and they still represent a beginning point for teachers of the literature at all levels. The American Book Awards of the Before Columbus Foundation was established in 1978 to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. The purpose of the awards is to acknowledge the excellence and multicultural diversity of American writing. It functions as a way to distinguish and promote the independent publishing of minority literature as well as books by mainstream presses that deal with diversity and multiculturalism. The Before Columbus Foundation (BCF) was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature. Inherent in the BCF’s approach is the view that a true “American” literature will encompass and embrace all writing, regardless of writers’ language or ethnicity or gender, as part of the national culture, not just those products produced by commercial publishing that traditionally screened out diversity. BCF’s description of the mission of its American Book Award was to “. . . for the first time, respect and honor excellence in American literature without restriction or bias with regard to race, sex, creed, cultural origin, size of press or ad budget, or even genre. There would be no requirements, restrictions, limitations, or second places. There would be no categories (i.e., no ‘best’ novel or only one ‘best’ of anything). The winners would not be selected by any set quota for diversity (nor would ‘mainstream white Anglo male’ authors be excluded), because diversity happens naturally. Finally, there would be no losers, only winners. The only criteria would be outstanding contribution to American literature in the opinion of the judges.” The American Book Award became essential in launching the careers of many Latino authors, including Miguel Algarín,* Sandra Cisneros,* Graciela Limón,* and Tato Laviera* at a time when the Quinto Sol and other Latino awards had ceased to exist or were waning. Still in existence today, the winning selections are announced annually at the most important publishing trade show in the United States, the American Booksellers Association BookExpoAmerica. There are no cash prizes, only a plaque; but more importantly, resources are dedicated to promoting the winning works, to introducing them to the media and to mainstream publishers as examples of what they should be publishing. Founded in 1993, the Américas Award is given by the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Unlike the awards mentioned above, the focus of the award is on the authentic portrayal 100

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of Latin American and Latino culture in children’s and young adult books. The Center selects the winning titles each year, makes the awards at a ceremony at the Library of Congress in the nation’s capital during Hispanic Heritage Month, and provides curriculum guides, bibliographies, and other educational aids to aid the use of the winning books in schools. The Americas Award recognizes U.S. works of fiction, poetry, and folklore, as well as some nonfiction books published in English or Spanish that “authentically and engagingly portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States.” By combining both and linking the Americas, the award reaches beyond geographic borders, as well as multicultural–international boundaries, focusing instead upon cultural heritages within the hemisphere. The award is sponsored by the national Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs. Criteria for the award include literary quality, cultural context, integration of text and design, and potential for classroom use. Among the winners have been such recognized writers as Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Juan Felipe Herrera,* Pat Mora,* and Benjamin Alire Saenz.* Another award for children’s and young adult literature is the Pura Belpré Award. Founded in 1996, it is presented to those writers and illustrators who best portray and celebrate Latino culture each year. The award is cosponsored by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC)—a division of the American Library Association (ALA)—and the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking (REFORMA), an ALA affiliate. The award is named after Pura Belpré,* the first Latina librarian from the New York Public Library. Belpré was a famed storyteller for children as well as the author of highly regarded children’s picture books based on Puerto Rican folklore; she also authored a noted young adult novel, Firefly Summer (1997), which was published posthumously. Among the winners of the award have been such writers Alma Flor Ada, Francisco X. Alarcón,* Julia Alvarez,* Judith Ortiz Cofer, Juan Felipe Herrera, Floyd Martínez, and Gary Soto.* The Latino Literary Hall of Fame was founded in 1999 to promote literacy and literary excellence in Latino communities. Its primary function is the awarding of a series of book awards on annual basis, usually during the meeting of the American Booksellers Association. The Latino Literary Hall of Fame is affiliated with the Latino Book and Family Festival (see Book Fairs and Festivals) and conducts several projects to inform communities about literature, cultural issues, arts, and the publication process. Among the winners of the award are Diane Gonzales Bertrand,* Pat Mora,* Graciela Limón,* and many others. In recent years, one of the foundational writers of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya,* along with his wife Patricia, have given an award specifically for Chicano literature: the Premio Aztlán.* The award has recognized books by Denise Chávez,* Alicia Gaspar de Alba,* Wendall Mayo,* Pat Mora, Sergio Troncoso,* Ronald Ruiz,* and various others. There are three university-based awards given annually. The Tomás Rivera* Award for Mexican American Children’s Literature was established in 1995 by 101

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the Texas State University Department of Education in honor of the deceased writer who had received his B.A. and M.A. at that institution in San Marcos, Texas. An important criterion for the award is the accurate portrayal of Mexican Americans without stereotypes. Among the winners have been Pat Mora, Carmen Lomas Garza, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Francisco Jiménez.* For more than thirty years, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California–Irvine has sponsored the annual Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. It is one of the most valued awards and, today, includes publication of the firstplace winner by Arte Público Press.* Over a four-year period, the award rotates by genre: one year each for poetry, novel, short story, and drama. The firstplace award is $1,000; the second and third place winners receive $500 and $250, respectively. Founded in 2002 by the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival to recognize an accomplished writer of the Chicano/Latino experience, the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature is named in honor of Luis Leal,* a professor of Chicano Studies at UCSB and a pioneer in promoting the merit of Mexican, Chicano, and Latin American literary and cultural traditions. Included among the awardees of the $1,500 prize have been such writers as Pulitzer-Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos* and Denise Chávez.* Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature Theory and History (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990). Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, “30th Annual Latin American Film Series 2008” (http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CLACS/outreach/pastwinners.html). “Previous Winners of the American Book Award” (http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/IEW/ BeforeColumbus/previous.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Aztlán. Aztlán is the mythical place of origin of the Aztec peoples. In Chicano literature and folklore, Aztlán often references the name of the portion of Mexico that was lost to the United States through the Mexican–American War of 1846. Its use in literature has a strong foundation in the Chicano Movement,* which solidified the concept of Aztlán through the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (Spiritual Plan of Aztlán) at the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, in 1969. Participants of the movement, specifically Alberto Urista (Alurista*) and Oscar Zeta Acosta,* who subscribed to a nationalist position, incorporated Aztec mythology in their works to reinforce the belief that Chicanas and Chicanos had a stronger claim to the land they inhabited, maintaining that before America was divided into the United States and Mexico, America was a continent belonging to indigenous tribes, the direct ancestors of Chicanos and Chicanas. In addition, many Chicano writers, dramatists, and visual artists interpreted Aztec mythology to situate the origin of the the Aztec peoples in what became these southwestern states, a land from which they migrated southward. They used the Aztec millennial vision of a sequence of suns to forecast a Renaissance of Aztec culture 102

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Warrior Circle Dance performed at Barrios Unidos alternative education program in California.

as occurring during the fifth sun (Quinto Sol); this flowering would be in the form of Chicano literature, art, and culture. Thus, the major Chicano publishing house was named Editorial Quinto Sol,* and numerous murals, easel art, and literary works incorporated Aztec and even Mayan themes, symbols, and at times worldview. In the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, this claim symbolically represented the search for a lost land and a sense of place, serving as a tool to oppose exploitation and racism, as perceived in the poem “I Am Joaquín” by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* and as in the work of Alurista in his various publications, especially Nationchild Plumaroja (Nationchild Redfeather)—as well as in other poets, such as Raúl Salinas* and Tino Villanueva.* Chicana poets also elaborated the concept of Aztlán in fighting oppression from their Chicano brothers; the writing of Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Ana Castillo,* Pat Mora,* Alma Villanueva,* and Bernice Zamora,* among others, reveals this use. Chicano novelists such as Tomás Rivera,* Rudolfo Anaya,* Ron Arias,* and Miguel Méndez,* among others, employed the myth of Aztlán. The latter, in his acclaimed novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims in Aztlán, 1993), describes the life of Chalito, a child who lives on the border and suffers the oppression of the social and political systems that govern the nation where he exists. Chalito is representative of the rest of the Chicano and Chicana community that toils in the United States in search of the promised future, a promised land that will 103

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change their status from second-class citizenship to full citizenship in the United States. Playwright Luis Valdez,* in several of his actos and plays, makes use of the symbolism of Aztlán to promote a national identity that would demand rights for Chicanos and Chicanas in the United States. Essayist and poet, Gloria Anzaldúa* in her Borderlands/La Frontera presents Aztlán as an in-between space that coincides with the border between Mexico and the United States, thus conceptualizing the symbol in complex terms no longer limited to space. This also occurs with the literary work of contemporary generations, who no longer must discover or define a physical place to belong; many are writing beyond or after Aztlán, as represented in the plays of Cherríe Moraga,* in which she beckons a union between space and women where Aztlán is decolonized as a male-centered space that allows its “queering.” Further Reading Anaya, Rudolfo, and Francisco Lomelí, Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Arrizon, Alicia, “Mythical Performativity: Relocating Aztlan in Chicana Feminist Cultural Productions” Theatre Journal Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000): 23–49.

Gabriela Baeza Ventura Azuela, Mariano (1873–1952). Mariano Azuela, one of Mexico’s greatest novelists and chroniclers of the Mexican Revolution, was born on January 1, 1873, in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico. Educated as a physician (University of Guadalajara M.D., 1898), Azuela actually developed his career as a writer while practicing medicine until his death of a heart attack on March 1, 1952. Azuela’s early career as a writer, in fact, was developed while participating in the Revolution first-hand as a physician in the army of Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Azuela wrote more than forty novels, most of them based on Mexico’s political life from the point of view of a skeptic and critic bent on reforming social and political life in his native land. In many of his works, he documents the loss or corruption of the ideals that were fought for during the Revolution. True to his immediate appreciation of social reality, Azuela’s keen ear for dialog and deft appropriation of characters from social reality contributed to a recognition of grassroots Mexican culture that had not really appeared in Mexican letters before, especially within the context of political analysis through literature. True to a tradition of Hispanic literature in exile, Azuela’s greatest and most renowned novel, Los de abajo (The Underdogs), was written while he was a fugitive in El Paso, Texas. Published in 1915, Los de abajo was the first and most important in a long line of novels of revolution published in exile and is also an important work in the history of Hispanic exile literature. In the novel, Azuela examines the Revolution through the eyes of a common soldier and comes to condemn the uncontrollable whirlwind of violence that the Revolution had become. But Azuela’s condemnation was a pointed indictment of the forces of corruption and greed in converting the Revolution into the murderer 104

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of those it was meant to protect and vindicate, such as the rural, grassroots protagonist, who is ultimately killed on the very spot where his involvement in the struggle began. Throughout his career Azuela was a productive novelist. His other works include María Luisa (1907), Los fracasados (1908, The Failures), Mala yerba (1909, Bad Weed), Andrés Pérez (1911), Sin amor (1912, Without Love), Los caciques (1917, The Bosses), and many others. Further Reading Martínez, Eliud, The Art of Mariano Azuela: Modernism in La Malhora, El Desquite, La Luciérnaga (Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1981).

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B Baca, Jimmy Santiago (1952–). Jimmy Santiago Baca is one of the most successful Chicano poets to come out of the oral tradition, tempered by prison experiences and the Chicano Movement; in this and other aspects, his background is similar to that of Ricardo Sánchez.* Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on January 5, 1952, to Mexican and Apache–Yaqui parents who abandoned him to be raised by his Indian grandparents; he was later raised in an orphanage. In 1973, Baca was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for narcotics possession. In a maximum-security prison in Arizona, Baca taught himself to read and write and earned his GED. In prison, Baca discovered poetry and began penning his first compositions. While still serving time, his book Immigrants in Our Own Land had been accepted for publication by the prestigious Louisiana State University Press, which issued the book in 1979, the same year Baca was released from prison. Baca’s poems were highly polished but naturalistic and met with immediate critical approval; the accolades from mainstream critics expanded with his next books: Swords of Darkness (1981), What’s Happening (1982), Poems Taken from My Yard (1986), Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), and Black Mesa Poems (1989). During this publishing flurry, Baca was able to earn a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico. In 1992, Baca also published a book of autobiographical essays, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet in the Barrio, and, in 1993, wrote a screenplay for a film, Bound by Honor, which was released by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures. In his award-winning memoir, A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet (2001), Baca traces his life from rural upbringing to incarceration for dealing drugs and his learning to

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read and write in prison, which led to his transformation and salvation through pursuing the written word. Baca continued to produce volumes of well-received poetry, including Healing Earthquakes: A Love Story in Poems (2001) and Winter Poems along the Rio Grande (2004). Baca began publishing short stories in the new millennium, his efforts include C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans: Dream Boy’s Story (2002), gritty, realist tales of of a brutal world of addiction and crime and injustice, and The Importance of a Piece of Paper (2004), which populates the southwestern landscape with drug dealers, convicts, and other unsavory characters while also offering hope for redemption. Both books illustrate how far the American Dream is from the Mexican American underclass. With Black Mesa Poems, Baca became the first Hispanic poet to win the important Wallace Stevens Poetry Award. He is also winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Before Columbus American Book Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Southwest Book Award, the Vogelstein Foundation Award, and other honors. Baca has served as a poet in residence at Yale University and the University of California–Berkeley and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico. Further Reading “Jimmy Santiago Baca” (www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/ jimmy-santiago-baca). Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Badikian-Gartler, Beatriz (1951–). Poet, essayist, and novelist Beatriz Badikian-Gartler is distinctly internationalist in her life experience and outlook. Her Armenian father and Greek mother emigrated in 1949 from Europe to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the future writer was born. The family immigrated again in 1970, this time to the United States. They made a home in Chicago, where Badikian-Gartler has since lived and worked, first as a translator and then as an educator. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she participated in readings and workshops with other young Chicago writers, such as Sandra Cisneros* and Ana Castillo.* She earned a Ph.D. in English in 1994 at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has taught literature, creative writing, and women’s studies at Roosevelt University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Newberry Library, and Northwestern University. Her writing stresses themes of exile, multilingualism, and women’s experience. Badikian-Gartler’s poetry is collected in Akewa Is a Woman (1983; second edition, Akewa Is a Woman and Other Poems, 1989) and Mapmaker Revisited: New and Selected Poems (1999). She also coedited Naming the Daytime Moon (1988), an anthology of Chicago women writers. Her novel Old Gloves: A 20th-Century Saga (2005) adapts the story of her family’s migrations from Turkey to Greece, Argentina, and the United States. Her essays, which have dealt with travel, translation, film theory, and other topics, include “A Necessary Evil: My Love/Hate Relationship with Translation” in 108

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The Metropolitan Review and “Discovering the Land Left Behind” in the New York Times Travel Section, dealing with a return trip to Argentina. Further Reading Betts, Tara, and Catherine Cucinella, “Beatriz Badikian-Gartler” in Contemporary American Women Poets, ed. Catherine Cucinella (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002: 23–27).

William Barillas Báez, Annecy (?–). Award-winning fiction writer and accomplished poet Annecy Báez came to the United States as a child and grew up primarily in New York City, where she received her education. A trained clinical social worker, she holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pace University, a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College, and a doctorate from the New York University School of Social Work. She has served on the faculty of New York University and has published scholarly research on spirituality in the Latino community, on substance abuse, on the mental health of Dominicans, and on experiential approaches to teaching substance abuse in social work education programs. She has provided individual, family, and group psychotherapy for over twenty years. In 2005, she left the faculty of New York University to become the director of the counseling center at Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, where she oversees the clinical and administrative functioning of her division. Báez has sustained her commitment to fiction and poetry throughout her academic career and her professional development, participating in numerous readings as a longtime member of a women writers group for many years and contributing work to several publication venues—most recently to Brújula/Compass, the publication of the Latin American Writers Institute* at the City University of New York, and to Callaoo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters. Her poems and short stories have appeared in several collections, including Tertuliando/Hanging Out, a bilingual anthology edited by Daisy Cocco de Filippis,* and Vinyl Donuts, a volume sponsored by the National Book Foundation. Báez has maintained her literary interests along a line running parallel to her professional career, clearly investing more of her time in the latter. The turn her academic research has taken since she moved to Lehman, focusing on the mental health of college students as well as on creative forms of healing such as art and writing, suggests an evolving intersection between her literary creativity and her scholarly practice. The publication by Curbstone Press of Baez’s first book-length publication, My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories, the result of a competition in which her manuscript won the 2007 Miguel Mármol Award, has marked a clear turning point in her literary trajectory. The volume collects fourteen interlaced stories about young Dominican women living in the Bronx as they face the challenges inherent in the experience of growing up female in the midst of an often hostile environment exacerbated by the intercultural conflicts that emanate from the different socializations of immigrant parents and their New York-bred children. Spanning three decades beginning in the 1970s, the stories evoke the 109

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problem of intergenerational communication in the family, child abuse, loss of innocence, pain, and healing. Already the book has garnered celebratory appraisals from reviewers in various publications, including Publishers Weekly, El Paso Times, and Kirkus Review. A passage from the statement by Benjamin A. Saenz* justifying his vote to award the 2007 Mármol prize to Baez says: “Spending time reading these stories is to enter a universe of human disappointment and longing. As the stories build, moving from 1972 to the present, the reader becomes aware that the stories form episodes to an entire universe and they accomplish exactly what a novel accomplishes. I closed the book and knew I had taken the loveliest of journeys.” With the remarkable quality of her published collection of short fiction, there is little doubt that Annecy Báez has entered the terrain of Latino literature as a distinct voice and a commanding presence. Further Reading Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández, The Dominican Americans, The New Americans Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

Silvio Torres-Saillant Báez, Josefina (1960–). Poet, playwright, actress, and dancer Josefina Báez was born in 1960 in La Romana, Dominican Republic, and arrived in the United States in 1972. After her secondary education in the public schools of New York City, the city where she grew up, Báez began to pursue training in dance, attending the American Dance School for eight years. She then studied modern and jazz dance at the New York Dance Troupe while also receiving training in Indian dance forms under masters established both in New Delhi and New York. Her formal study of drama began when she spent seven years working with the distinguished dance teacher Flora Lauten of the Buendía Theater Group in Cuba. During the 1990s, Báez focused on perfecting the techniques associated with “theatrical biomechanics” developed by Russian master Gennady Bogdanov, who invited her to perform in Russia in 1997. In addition to her trips to India, Cuba, and Russia, Báez has traveled widely as an actress and dancer to such countries as Brazil, Finland, France, Mexico, and Spain. The literary works Báez has produced emanate from her involvement with the stage and began to appear after she attended the Latino Playwright Lab at the Public Theater in New York City. Workshops in writing for the stage led to several dramatic pieces. Among these, she wrote “It’s a New York Thang; You Will Understand,” which was first presented as a stage reading at the Public Theater in 1994. Among her best-known plays, “Lo mío es mío” (What’s Mine is Mine, 1994) has had the largest number of public performances. Resulting from a collaboration with director Claudio Mir, the play tells the story of the Dominican people from their beginnings at home to their immigrant and diasporic experience in the United States. Báez tells her story through various renderings of well-known children’s games and relies heavily on kathak, an Indian dance form, as well as on traditional Dominican songs and carnival traditions to scrutinize objectionable political practices and their 110

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harmful legacy to Dominican society. The play interlaces the exploration of homeland issues with the problem of migratory uprooting followed by settlement in the United States. Báez has published several poems that have earned inclusion in journals and edited collections, including Forward Motion (1996), Scholastic Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers (1992), Brújula/Compass (1998), Caribbean Connections: Moving North (1998), and Caribbean Connections: The Dominican Republic (2005). A distinguishing characteristic of her craft is a discernible desire to find a form that faithfully represents the complexity of the subjects she is interested in investigating through her art. Her first book-length publication, Dominicanish (2000), a collection of poems (or “performance texts,” as she prefers to call them), radically explores an alternative Dominicanness devoid of protocols of exclusion. The pieces therein included draw on African American music and the cultural forms she encountered in Andhara Pradesh in southeastern India, chiefly kuchipudi dance, to gloss the immigrant experience of a young Dominican woman who attends underserved public school classrooms and rides the subway in New York City. Báez thus seeks to articulate a cross-national space within which to locate her own identity as a Dominican New Yorker attentive to the diverse stimuli that in myriad ways mirror the complexity of her personal culture. A black woman whose ancestral line links her directly to the Africandescended sugarcane workers in the bateyes of La Romana, Báez has much at stake in destabilizing conventional notions of Dominicanness. She draws on the transformations set in motion by migration to launch a critique of some exclusionary cultural myths enshrined by the nationalist discourse on Dominican identity. Showing little patience for negrophobia, conservatism, misogyny, homophobia, upper-class bias, and Eurocentrism, her texts celebrate the cultural hybridity that diasporic uprooting accentuates for Dominicans even while lyrically and comically denouncing the structures of exclusion and oppression in American society. Further Reading Arrizón, Alicia, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006). Rivera-Servera, Ramón, “A Dominican in Andhra” in Caribbean Dance from Abakúa to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity, ed. Susanna Sloat (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández, The Dominican Americans, The New Americans Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

Silvio Torres-Saillant Bancroft testimonios or dictations. See Testimonial literature Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents. Established at California State University at San Marcos and endowed by the Barahona family, the Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents is an academic 111

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center that promotes literacy in English and Spanish. The Center endeavors to inform current and future educational decision-makers about books centered on Latino people and culture and about books in Spanish and their value in educating English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children and adolescents. Directed by Spanish children’s literature specialist Mexican-born Isabel Schon since its founding in 1989, the center offers workshops to educators and librarians on all facets of Hispanic children’s literature. It also is actively engaged in rating and evaluating books targeted at Hispanic children, especially those written by authors who write in Spanish-speaking countries and in the United States. Its greatest effectiveness, however, is in dealing with texts produced in Spain and Latin America. In addition, its director Isabel Schon provides a review of the books for the Multicultural Review, published periodically by Greenwood Press of Westport, Connecticut. Her work at the center has also included publishing annual bibliographies of Hispanic children’s books for such reference publishers as Scarecrow Press and Greenwood Press. Further Reading Barahona Center (http://www.csusm.edu/csb/).

Nicolás Kanellos Barela, Casimiro (1847–1920). Born in Embudo, New Mexico, on March 4, 1847, Casimiro Barela was a political and business figure who left his mark of leadership on Colorado for more than four decades. Barela’s family moved in 1867 to southern Colorado, where Barela became a farmer, cattleman, and politician. In 1875, he was the only Hispanic delegate to the state constitutional convention of Colorado. Barela secured a provision in the state constitution protecting the civil rights of the Spanish-speaking citizens in addition to a rule providing for the publication of laws in Spanish, English, and German. The state constitution was written and published in both English and Spanish. This was consonant with Barela’s ownership of two Spanish-language newspaper, which received a subsidy from the state for publishing the laws in Spanish: Las Dos Repúblicas (The Two Republics) and El Progreso (Progress), the former serving Denver and the latter Las Animas County. Both newspapers were important in informing the Hispanic community of news and opinion as well as preserving the language and culture and publishing literary items. Elected to the state senate in 1876, Barela served seven consecutive terms until 1916. Barela held various other elected posts before becoming a state senator. While serving in politics, he kept up his interests in banking and other businesses and became one of the wealthiest men in the state. He died on December 18, 1920. Further Reading Campa, Arthur León, Hispanic Culture in the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Barquet, Jesús J. (1953–). Jesús Barquet, poet, literary critic, editor, poetry translator, and professor of Hispanic Literature, was born and raised in 112

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Havana, Cuba. He received his B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literatures in 1976 from the University of Havana. In 1980, he immigrated to the United States as part of the controversial and tumultuous event known as the Mariel Boatlift. Barquet, like other Marielitos, found success in the United States. In 1983, he received his M.A. in Spanish from Tulane University and in 1990 he completed his Ph.D. in Spanish, also at Tulane. The following year he began teaching as a professor of Spanish at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Aside from teaching, Barquet has earned a strong reputation as a prolific poet. His books of poetry include Sin decir el mar (1981, Without Saying the Sea), Sagradas herejías (1985, Sacred Heresies), El libro del desterrado (1994, The Book of the Exile), Un no rompido sueño (1994, An Unbroken Dream), which won second prize in Chicano/Latino Poetry, University of California–Irvine, Naufragios: transacciones de fin de siglo (1989–1997) (1998), which was also published as a bilingual edition with the English title Shipwrecks: Turn of the Century Transactions (1989–1997) in Puerto del sol magazine (Spring 2001), and Sin fecha de extinción: diario y manual de guerra y resurrección (2000–2004) (2004, Without Expiration Date: War and Resurrection Diary and Manual). He has also published three poetry chapbooks Ícaro (1985, Icarus), El libro de los héroes (1994, The Book of Heroes), and Jardín Imprevisible (1997, Unforeseen Garden). Numerous other poems have appeared in various anthologies. As an essayist, he won the Letras de Oro (Golden Letters) award for Consagración de La Habana (1992, Consecrating Havana) and the “Lourdes Casal de Crítica Literaria” award in 1998 for Escrituras poéticas de una nación: Dulce María Loynaz, Juana Rosa Pita y Carlota Caulfield (1999, Poetic Writings of a Nation: Dulce María Loynaz, Juana Rosa Pita and Carlota Caulfield), published in Havana. Naufragios and Sin fecha de extinción are his most critically acclaimed creative works, the former garnering Honorable Mention in the 3rd Frontera Ford Pellicer-Frost Poetry Prize in 1998. Echoing the spirit behind Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s epic colonial chronicles, Barquet begins Naufragios with the reflective question: “Did I arrive or shipwreck?” This theme of immigration and exile is what drives the poetry in Naufragios. However, Barquet, unlike other nostalgic Cubans, does not reminisce about a paradisiacal Cuba; the reality with which he wrestles is his new home in the New Mexican desert near the U.S./Mexican border. His poetry thus becomes much more reflective of his present condition: not simply how he arrived, but, more important, where he is going. His poetry in Naufragios can thus be described as the constant transactions between everyday life and (artificial) identity construction. In Sin fecha de extinción, Barquet examines one of the unfortunate traditions across all of society and time: man’s ability to wage war. The heavy influence of several writers is present throughout the work, evidenced by the epilogues placed throughout the text in which Barquet quotes famous writers such as José Martí,* Samuel Taylor Coleridge, José Lezama Lima, and even canonical religious texts such as the Quran and the Bible. The final piece in this work is a fictitious letter by Walt Whitman addressed to the author in response to Barquet’s book. The connection to Whitman, however, runs much deeper as 113

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Barquet’s poems paint the intense camaraderie that is often forged between men in war, which Whitman witnessed first hand during his tenure as a reporter and nurse on the front lines of the U.S. Civil War, fueling his notions on the convergence of homosexuality and democracy. Building on Whitman’s ideas, Sin fecha de extinción is a direct criticism of how heterosexist societies repress homosexuality. Through his poetic images, Barquet illustrates how war creates an artificial space in which it is acceptable for men to develop a masculine camaraderie that becomes intimate to the point of bordering homoerotic behavior, but only during the act of killing other men. In contrast, however, homosexuals are condemned and persecuted for expressing this same camaraderie openly, but without the need to kill others as justification for their behavior or homoerotic sensations. Barquet masterfully uses poetry to make his readers question, examine, and create dialogue, in the end rethinking war’s connection to masculinity and how it creates an accepted homosocial space in a repressive heterosexist society. Barquet found other aspects of communist Cuba repressive than sexuality, for certain literature was not always easily accessible to the public. For this reason, reading censored authors like Alan Ginsberg was not only dangerous but also erotic—in the sense that it created a relationship between writers and thinkers who found in language and poetry a certain independence that transcended governments and borders. Barquet’s poetry thus places him firmly in the tradition of artists who can be defined as writers first. Although Barquet’s Cuban identity is inextricably tied to his writing, his poetry also reflects the migrant experience with which many readers can empathize. But, perhaps most important, Barquet’s writing also speaks of the individual experiences that defy socially accepted classifications and thus make his poetry universally accessible as part of the human experience. Further Reading Barquet, Jesús, “An Erotic (Con)Quest” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews Vol. 10, No. 2 (1997): 13–14.

Spencer Herrera Barrio. The term “barrio” in Spanish means “neighborhood,” with all of the denotations and connotations of the word in English. In sociology and popular culture in the English-speaking United States, “barrio” has often been used as a synonym of “ghetto,” the Latino version of that old-world Jewish social phenomenon. But the term “barrio” as used by Latinos in literature and life is a positive term denoting a geographic space as well as the cultural and spiritual matrix of Latino life in the United States. For a neighborhood to be called a “barrio” means that it has a history and permanence and that Latino natives have been born or grew up there, relating to it as the locus of family and culture. This is in opposition to the term “colonia,” used by immigrants from the Spanish-speaking world. “Colonia” is the port of entry for these immigrants and connotes a temporary or transitional status in which immigrants attempt to duplicate their homeland on foreign soil. For these immigrants, the cultural 114

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matrix is the homeland, to which they hope to return some day. In fact, the term “barrio” is more likely to be used by bilingual–bicultural Latinos, whereas Spanish-speaking immigrants have historically (and to the present day) talked more of “colonia” than of “barrio.” Since the 1960s, Chicanos,* Nuyoricans,* and Cuban Americans have struggled to maintain their Latino or Hispanic identities in the midst of pressures to acculturate and conform to U. S. national culture by elevating the barrio to almost mythic stature as the locus of their values and traditions. In fact, such places as today’s East L.A., San Antonio’s West Side, Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, New York City’s El Barrio and Loisaida* (Lower East Side), and Miami’s Souhuesera (Southwest Side), differ as reference points for literature and culture from the Little Mexicos, Spanish Harlem, and Little Havanas of yesterday. Where in the “little” versions of the homeland it was taken for granted that the authentic and true culture resided in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain or Cuba, the “barrio” stands out as a place of origin and identity, a piece of turf and incubator of bilingualism, biculturalism, and a sense of belonging to the United States without having to give up one’s language or ethnicity. Where once the colonias resulted from discrimination, segregation, and the need for mutual protection, the barrios stand for a piece of American turf conquered and ruled by the Latino residents, where their cultural blending is the style and their values are not challenged or negated. It is no wonder, then, that the literature that emerges from the barrio, the literature that is closest to the grassroots and often ignored by publishers, is confidently bilingual, vernacular, politicized, polemical, and unstudied. Where as such poets and playwrights as Jorge Brandon, Tato Laviera,* Abelardo Delgado,* Miguel Piñero,* Ricardo Sánchez,* and others have emerged from and represent the barrio ethos, there are other studied or educated writers of Latino literature, such as Miguel Algarín,* Alurista,* at times Tino Villanueva,* Tomás Rivera,* and others who assume an ideological stand identifying with the people and taking their language, culture, and worldview into the academy and onto the printed page as an ultimate goal (see Orality). For Chicano letters, Alurista’s poetry in particular blazed a path to not only seeing the barrio as the storehouse of knowledge and culture going back to the Aztecs and Mayas but also pioneered bilingual—and at times trilingual—writing. Tomás Rivera was the first to really capture in prose fiction the voice and accent of the farm workers on the road and in their barrios. But the ultimate, epic singer of barrio life has been Tato Laviera, who, through his continuing series of short, poetic biographies, has captured the dialects, archetypal personalities, music, and cityscapes that make up Puerto Rican barrios in New York and, in so doing, has concretized the myth not only in oral performance—to be sure, the most direct and authentic representation—but also on the printed page, as no other writer has been able to do. A city like New York can be taken and its image traced as it has evolved in Latino literature from the late nineteenth century, when José Martí and Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín pictured it as devouring the Hispanic immigrants in its vortex of industrialization and attendant materialism, on to 115

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Alirio Díaz Guerra’s* 1914 depiction of the city as a den of iniquity and an inferno where Latinos who stayed would perish physically or spiritually. As Latinos and Puerto Ricans began to carve out their space, beyond the colonias (as depicted by Joaquín Colón, for instance), they began to transform their environment and stake a claim on United States land and culture (a kind of reverse colonization of the American empire) in such works as Gullermo Cotto-Thorner’s* Trópico en Manhattan. Although René Marqués in his La Carreta (The Oxcart) insisted on continuing the early stereotype of the cold, industrial monster that devours Latinos, a scant decade and a half later Nuyoricans,* such as Victor Hernandez Cruz,* were proclaiming the total tropicalization of the city and claiming their rights as citizens, not immigrants, and Tato Lavera was proclaiming the birth of the new Puerto Rican or Nuyorican in Loisaida in his poem “Doña Cisa y Su Anafre” (Doña Cisa and Her Brasier) in La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979). In their respective barrios, the Latino writers of today all proclaim their new identity—that of bilingual–bicultural creators of their own culture. Further Reading Dávila, Arlene, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos Barrio, Raymund (1921–1996). Chicano author Raymund Barrio is remembered primarily for his autobiographical novel, the Plum Plum Pickers (1969), an early contribution to the Chicano Movement. Barrio, who was born in New Jersey but raised in California, where he participated in migrant field labor, studied at the City College of New York, the University of Southern California, and Yale, earning two B.A.s: one in humanities and the other in fine arts. After returning from his East Coast education, Barrio taught art in colleges in Southern California. He began writing and publishing stories and essays in periodicals. His first and only novel dramatizes the exploitation of farm labor in California in an exposé almost reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s classic, The Jungle. In fact, Bilingual Press reissued the novel in its Chicano Classics series in 1984. Barrio also published books on and of art, including Mexico’s Art and Chicano Artists (1975) and The devil’s apple corps (1976), a sixty-one-page fictional trial of Howard Hughes with Gore Vidal as his defense attorney; the book includes Barrio’s monochrome sketches. During the early 1970s, The Plum Plum Pickers was one of the few contemporary Chicano novels available and became a perennial selection for Chicano literature course syllabi. Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Behar, Ruth (1956–). Born in Havana to a Polish Jewish mother and a Sephardic father from Turkey, Jewish Cuban American anthropologist and 116

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writer Ruth Behar moved to New York with her family in 1962. Her higher education consisted of a B.A. in letters from Wesleyan University (1977) and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton (1980 and 1983, respectively). Behar went from publishing anthropological studies—such as her The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte (1986) and Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993)—to publishing literary works, such as her bilingual collections of poetry, Poemas que vuelven a Cuba/Poems Returned to Cuba (1995) and Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé (2001), which reveal a sense of loss and the longing for her place of birth. Although much of her anthropological work reveals autobiographical themes and concerns, her most recent work falls along the lines of literary memoir, such as Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, which combines personal essays, poetry, short fiction, painting, interviews, performance pieces, and images of nationalism, transnationalism, and homeland, and An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (2007), which narrates her journey back to Cuba in search of the new Jewish community that has developed since Castro’s takeover. Behar is also a prolific writer of essays, stories and poems, many of which have been published in periodicals and anthologies of Jewish American, Latina and Latino, and feminist literatures. Behar is also the director and producer of Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic Journey (2001), a feature film about the search for identity and memory among Sephardic Cuban Jews living in Cuba, Miami, and New York. Translated Woman was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for 1993. Behar’s awards include her 1999 lauding by Latina magazine as one of fifty Latinas who made history in the twentieth century. She is the recipient of MacArthur (1988), John Simon Guggenheim (1995), and Fulbright (2007) scholarships. She is a full professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she is also affiliated with the women’s and Latino studies programs. Further Reading Pipher, Mary, Writing to Change the World (New York: Riverhead, 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Belpré, Pura (c. 1901–1982). Born in Cidra, Puerto Rico, on February 2, 1899, 1901, or 1903 (all three dates have been attributed), Belpré became a pioneering children’s librarian in New York City, where she also established a successful career as the author of children’s books. In her writing, she often adopted Puerto Rican folk tales to English-language children’s books, always highlighting the moralistic values to be learned from these tales. Belpré came to the United States in 1920 and studied library science at the New York Public Library School and at Columbia University. As a librarian, she began telling stories to children, often illustrating them through puppet shows. She eventually began writing down her stories and published more than a dozen children’s books, first with a small press, Warne, and later with many of the mainstream commercial publishers of children’s literature. Her full-length young adult 117

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Pura Belpré at story hour at the library.

novel, Firefly Summer, which recreates life and culture in Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century, was not published during her lifetime, having been written during World War II’s shortage of paper and subsequent cutback in publishing; it was first issued some fifty years later in 1997 by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.* Among the best-known children’s books are Perez and Martina (1932), The Tiger and the Rabbit (1946), and Juan Bobo and the Queen’s Necklace: A Puerto Rican Folk Tale (1962). Belpré also had a rewarding career in translating English-language children’s books to Spanish for major publishing houses. She died in 1982, the same year that she won the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture. REFORMA,* the organization of librarians serving Hispanic communities, annually confers an award for children’s literature in her honor.

Further Reading Sánchez González, Lisa, Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos Beltrán Hernández, Irene (1945–). Born on April 4, 1945, into a family of eight children in Texas, Irene Beltrán Hernández is an author of young adult novels. After receiving her B.A. in sociology from North Texas State University (1970), Beltrán Hernández pursued a career in social work from which she retired in 1997. During her career in Dallas, she began writing and producing the majority of her novels, often based on the troubled lives of teenagers she had encountered in her work. Unable to stop work and study creative writing, she took a correspondence course, which provided guidance in the writing of her first novel, for which she received forty-one rejection letters. Nevertheless, Across the Great River, a tale of the adventurous crossing of the Rio Grande and subsequent separation of family members, was published in 1989 to excellent reviews. Her Heartbeat-Drumbeat (1992) successfully explored Mexican and Navajo heritage but suffered from “second novel syn118

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drome,” unable to measure up to her first, glorious production. In 1995, back on track again, Beltrán Hernández explored life in the barrio for a talented young artist and his ex-con brother who must fend for themselves on the dangerous streets in The Secret of Two Brothers. In Woman Soldier/La Soldadera (1998), Beltrán Hernández once again explored the challenges facing a barrio teenager who attempts to unravel the mystery of her mother’s death while guided by the spirits of the women soldiers from the Mexican Revolution; part of the key to finding her mother and herself also relates to the choice she must make between a young gang leader and her R.O.T.C. tutor. Eltrán Hernández’s latest work is a total departure from the previous novels in exploring the myth of the Amazon women; it transpires among the all-female tribe inhabiting the lost regions of the Amazon River and explores their culture and social organization: The Amazon Queen and the Lady and the Tiger (2003). Further Reading Grider, Sylvia Ann, and Lou Halsell Rodenberger, Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos Bencastro, Mario (1949–). Born in Ahuacapán, El Salvador, Mario Bencastro has become the leading novelist of Salvadoran immigration to the United States. Initially trained as a painter, Bencastro gave up his brushes and canvas when he found them incapable of recording and expressing the tragedy of civil wars in his country. He began writing stories about the wars and immigrated to the United States in 1978, the same year he experienced his greatest success as a painter in El Salvador as the National Exposition Hall presented twenty-five of his paintings. From 1979 on, Bencastro has concentrated on writing to reflect the social and political life of his communities both in El Salvador and in the United States. In 1989, his first novel, Disparo en la catedral (Shot in the Cathedral), was a finalist in the Novedades-Diana International Literary Prize and was published in the original Spanish in Mexico. His short fiction collection, Arbol de la vida: historias Mario Bencastro. de la guerra civil (Tree of Life: Stories from the Civil War), was published in Spanish in El Salvador in 1993, after which some of the stories were transformed into plays and staged, and others were chosen for various anthologies. Both books were translated into English and published in the United States (in 1996 and 1997, respectively). His best-known novel, Odisea del Norte (Odyssey to the North, 2000), published in 1999 and in English translation the following year, is a classical novel of immigration, following economic and political refugees from their homes in Central America and Mexico into poor-paying, hazardous jobs in the Washington, D.C., area. Kirkus Reviews called it “a heartfelt story of political oppression and exile . . . credible and quite moving.” 119

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In 2005, Bencastro developed a young adult book based on his engaging Salvadoran youngsters in high schools in Los Angeles and Houston. In their name he produced Viaje a la tierra del abuelo (2004, A Promise to Keep, 2005), a novel that focuses on the challenges faced by Salvadoran youths in high school and the relationship they have with their parents’ country. In this adventure novel and novel of immigration, the lead character encounters all kinds of natural and man-made disasters on his mission to take his grandfather’s remains for burial in the homeland. All four of Bencastro’s books have been translated to English and published in the United States; three have also benefited from U.S. Spanish-language editions. A prolific short story writer, Bencastro’s work has been published in numerous anthologies, including Where Angels Glide at Dawn: New Stories from Latin America (1990), Texto y vida: introducción a la literatura hispanoamericana (1992, Text and Life: Introduction to Spanish American Literature), Turning Points (1993), and Vistas: voces del mundo hispánico (1995, Vistas: Voices from the Hispanic World). A number of his short stories have been rewritten for the stage. Bencastro currently resides in Florida, but he maintains strong ties with his native land, spending a portion of each year there. El Salvador remains his principle source of artistic inspiration. Further Reading Cristal, Efraín, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Miller-Lachman, Lyn, Our Family, Our Friends, Our World: An Annotated Guide to Significant Multicultural Books for Children and Teenagers (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Benítez, Sandra (1941–). Sandra Benítez was born Sandra Jeanette Ables on March 26, 1941, in Washington, D.C. She claims American Midwestern and Puerto Rican descent (her father, James Ables, was a diplomat from the American Midwest, and her mother, Marta Benítez, was Puerto Rican) but spent ten years of her childhood in El Salvador, where her father was a diplomat. When she was fourteen, Benítez was sent back to the United States to become “Americanized”; she went to high school and college in Missouri, where she received B.S. (1962) and M.A. (1974) degrees from Northeast Missouri State University. Benítez did not start writing until she was thirty-nine, when she began attending creative writing courses. The writings of Sandra Benítez focus on the civil war in El Salvador, which she examines by writing about the everyday life of people of different classes and by writing from the perspective of common folk and their suffering. Her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers (1993), which covers five decades of life in El Salvador, received the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the Minnesota Book Award. Her second novel, Bitter Grounds (1997), which analyzes life in El Salvador from the perspectives of both the oppressor and the oppressed, was awarded the American Book Award. Her next novels, The Weight of All Things (2000) and Night of the 120

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Radishes (2004), were not as highly acclaimed but nevertheless explored the differences between Hispanic and Anglo cultures; in The Night of the Radishes, the protagonist leaves Minnesota to look for her brother in Oaxaca, Mexico. All of Benítez’s books have been translated to Spanish. In 2006, Benítez was selected for one of the first fifty United States Artists fellows. Benítez has had visiting professorships and lectureships at various universities, the most important being the Knapp Chair in Humanities that she held at the University of San Diego in 2001. Further Reading Fister, Barbara, Third World Women’s Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995). Swanson, Philip, Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Benítez Rojo, Antonio (1931–). Born in Havana on March 14, 1931, novelist, essayist, and literary critic Antonio Benítez Rojo received most of his schooling in Havana but also studied labor economics at the American University in Washington, D.C. After the Cuban Revolution, he ascended to important administrative positions in the cultural bureaucracy of Cuba, including vice director of the national department for Theater and Dance (1965–1966), director of Theater House (1966–1967), publications director, and other positions in the Casa de las Américas (1970–1979, House of the Americas). In 1967, he was awarded the Casa de las Américas international prize for his short story collection Tute de reyes (1967, All Kings [as in a card game]). His second collection followed soon thereafter: El escudo de hojas secas (1969, The Shield of Dried Leaves), putting his literary career on a solid path. After his wife left Cuba to obtain medical care for their daughter, and because Benítez Rojo was not an openly declared supporter of Fidel Castro, he was denied publication after El escudo for some seven years. In ten years, apparently back in the good graces of the Castro administration, he was able to resume publishing and saw his short story collection Heroica (1976, Heroic), short novel Los inquilinos (1976, The Tenants), story collection Fruta verde (1978, Green Fruit), historical novel El mar de las lentejas (1979, Sea of Lentils), and adventure novel El enigma de los Esterlines (1980, The Enigma of the Sterlings) in print. Of these, Sea of Lentils is his most famous, featuring four separate plots encompassing Spain, the Canary Islands, Florida, and Hispaniola. In 1980, he successfully left Cuba via the Mariel Boatlift* and has since worked as a professor in various universities, eventually achieving an endowed chair at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Among his books of creative literature are Tierra y cielo (1978, Land and Sky), Estatuas sepultada y otros relatos (1984, Buried Statues and Other Stories), Piratas y galeones (1985, Pirates and Galleons), Antología personal Antonio Benítez Rojo (1997, Personal Anthology, Antonio Benítez Rojo), El paso de los vientos (1999, The Passing of the Winds), and Mujer en traje de batalla (2005, Woman in Battle 121

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Uniform—made up of the fictional memoirs of Henriette Faber [1791–?] and transpiring in various European countries as well as in Cuba and the United States). Various of his novels and collections of stories have been translated to English, including A View from the Mangrove (1989, stories), The Magic Dog and Other Stories (1990), and the historical novel Sea of Lentils (1991). Benítez Rojo is also the editor of the widely hailed The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1989), a collection of essays bringing new understanding to the writers and culture of the Caribbean islands. In Repeating Islands, Benítez Rojo examines colonialism, piracy, slavery, revolutions, and other such matters, concluding that the Caribbean island culture is a system that encompasses the entire world. “The phenomenon of the slaveholding plantation, which for me is the womb of the Caribbean, is an inseparable part of the history of capitalism and its expansion through Europe, America, Africa and Asia,” he stated in an interview for Bomb. Further Reading Antoni, Robert, “Antonio Benítez Rojo” in Bomb (http://www.bombsite.com/rojo/ rojo7.html). Corticelli, María Rita, El Caribe Universal: La Obra De Antonio Benítez Rojo (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Bernal, Vicente J. (1888–1915). Born in Costilla near Taos, New Mexico, Vicente Bernal took over the administration of his grandparents’ farm when he was twelve years old but nevertheless attended the Presbyterian mission school in Costilla and, in 1907, continued his studies in Albuquerque. From 1910 until his death from a brain hemorrhage, he attended Dubuque German College in Iowa in preparation for a vocation as a Presbyterian minister. Bernal wrote poetry and ten brief prose pieces using both English and Spanish. These works were published in book form posthumously by the Dubuque Telegraph in 1916. As would be expected of a poet raised as a sheep herder and farmer, Bernal’s verse was resplendent with rural imagery and a love for nature. This reverence for creation led him to pursue a religious education, and his writing also reflects his deep religiosity. Nevertheless, his lyric poems also include a number of love poems dedicated to young women. One of his poems was set to music and became the Dubuque school’s anthem. Today, Bernal’s writing is considered of great historical value not only because it represents a bilingualism that separated Spanish poems from English poems but also because his creative labors were undertaken in a foreign English-speaking land before New Mexico became a state. Further Reading Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, “Vicente J. Bernal” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 82 (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Bernardo, Anilú (1949–). The young girl wanted to disappear when the nun asked her to stand in front of her new American classmates to introduce 122

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herself. It was Anilú Bernardo’s first day of school in Flushing, New York. Having recently arrived with her family to this country, Bernardo spoke little English—and her classmates spoke no Spanish. But the experience has served her well. Born on December 1, 1949, in Cuba, Bernardo became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1973. She was educated in Florida, graduating from Coral Gables High School (1967), Florida State University (with a major in Spanish, 1971) and an M.A. in communication (1980). Having fled the island with her family after Castro’s takeover, she is now resolved to use her bicultural perspective to lend a compelling voice to the Cuban exile community. Bernardo uses her background to add texture to her writing, a craft she has been honing from an early age. Although her first Anilú Bernardo. attempts were poems in Spanish, she has since transferred her talents to fiction for young adults. Her first novel, Jumping Off to Freedom (1996), which chronicles a young Cuban boy’s heroic attempt to reach the United States and his hoped-for American Dream on a homemade raft, was named to the American Library Association’s annual list of Recommended Reading for Reluctant Young Readers, Quick Picks 1997. Jumping Off to Freedom has also been named to numerous recommended reading lists for middleschool children across the country. Her second work, Fitting In (1996), is a collection of short stories about Cuban American teenagers straddling two cultures in South Florida. It was the winner of the 1997 Skipping Stones Award and The Paterson Prize for Young Adult Literature. Fitting In also found a place in the middle-school curriculum. In 2006, the award-winning short story collection was translated into Spanish as Quedando Bien (2006). Bernardo’s next novel, Loves Me, Loves Me Not (1998), which explores the ins and outs of the young adult dating game, was included in The New York Public Library’s annual list of recommended reading for young adults. Loves Me, Loves Me Not was also named to the American Library Association’s 2000 YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults. Her latest work, Un día con mis tías/A Day with My Aunts (2006), is a colorful, bilingual picture book exploring loving family relationships. Bernardo spent her adolescent years in Miami and attended Florida State University, where she earned a B.A. in Spanish (1971) and a master’s Book cover for Anilú Bernardo’s Fitting In. 123

Bertrand, Diane Gonzales

degree in communications (1980). As the director of public information for a large organization, she honed her skills writing media releases and internal communications but turned to writing books in 1995. She currently lives in Plantation, Florida, with her husband and two daughters. Although her married name is Ann Reynold, Bernardo has chosen to write under her maiden name. Further Reading Blohm, Judith L., and Terri Lapinsky, Voices of the Immigrant Experience (Boston: Intercultural Press, 2006). Strouf, Judie L. F., The Literature Teacher’s Book of Lists (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Carmen Peña Abrego Bertrand, Diane Gonzales (1956–). Bertrand is the most prolific author of Hispanic children’s literature, producing books for three age groups: children learning to read, middle readers, and young adults. Born on March 12, 1956, in San Antonio, Texas, Bertrand began writing at an early age as a means of establishing her identity. During high school, she began developing her skills as a poetry reader, won a variety of debate competitions, and soon began writing her own verses. Both her writing and speaking skills were challenged during her years at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She won the Battle of Flowers Oratorical Contest with a speech she wrote about José Antonio Navarro, which she performed at the annual Battle of Flowers Fiesta Luncheon. “We were supposed to talk about an individual who personified the spirit of Texas. Navarro was only one of two Mexican men to sign the independence document, and I wanted everyone to know his story. That speech is one of my most prized pieces of writing.” Bertrand earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio (1978) and began her career in education, teaching at schools in the same neighborhoods where she was raised from 1979 to 1988. It was during this time that her passion for writing took a new direction. Realizing the important connection between self-esteem and an ability to communicate, especially among Mexican American students, she wanted to learn more about teaching writing, so she enrolled in the graduate English program at Our Lady of the Lake University in 1989, from which she received her master’s in English in 1992. Bertrand was informed on the first day of class that a “good writing teacher is a writer herself.” Ultimately, those words led Diane Diane Gonzales Bertrand. toward writing for publication.

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Graduate school was not only a creative and intellectual challenge but also an economic challenge. Determined to complete her education, Diane wrote a variety of scholarship essays to help with her tuition and not only received assistance from the American Association of University Women and the San Antonio Women’s Club but also won a National Hispanic Scholarship Award. During graduate school, Diane wrote and published three novels with Avalon Books, a small publishing house in New York City. The main characters were Mexican Americans, something new in popular romantic fiction: “When I couldn’t find any romances with Mexican American characters, I decided to write my own. Mexican American people, the young women especially, need to see us reflected in a positive way in books. My lead characters are always educated, they are creative in solving their problems, and they always have a sense of humor.” These characteristics are found in most of her novels, including Sweet Fifteen (1995), Alicia’s Treasures (1996), Lessons of the Game (1998), Trino’s Choice (1999), Trino’s Time (2001), and Close to the Heart (2002). Her children’s picture books include Sip Slurp Soup Soup (1997), Family, Familia (1999), The Last Doll (2000), Uncle Chente’s Picnic/El Picnic de Tío Chente (2001), The Empanadas that Abuela Baked (2003, winner of the 2004 Latino Literary Award), My Pal, Victor/Mi Amigo, Victor (2004, winner of the Schneider Family Picture Book Award), and We Are Cousins/Somos Primos (2007). Gonzales Bertrand has also produced books for middle readers, including Alicia’s Treasures (1996), Upside Down and Backwards/De cabeza y al revés (2004)—which received Special Mention of the Patterson Prize for Young People—and The Ruiz Street Kids/Los Muchachos de la Calle Ruiz (2006). Bertrand creates characters and plots grounded in Latino barrio life and culture, always in a positive light that empowers readers to believe in their ability to control life forces and achieve their goals in a multicultural society. Bertrand’s two novels written specifically for middle school boys who are reluctant readers have been extremely successful, garnering both critical acclaim and sales. Trino’s Choice (1999) was named to the 2001–2002 Texas Lone Star Reading List, was named “Best Book of the Year,” in the young adult category by ForeWord Magazine, and won the Austin Writer’s League Teddy Award for Best Children’s Book. Its sequel, Trino’s Time (2001), has been equally heralded, being named to the New York Public Library’s recommended reading list, Books for the Teen Age, and named Best Book of the Year in the young adult fiction category by the National Latino Literary Hall of Fame. Both novels have been translated into Spanish and published as El dilema de Trino (2005) and El momento de Trino (2006), respectively. Bertrand is writer in residence at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, where she teaches creative writing. Further Reading Blohm, Judith L., and Terri Lapinsky, Voices of the Immigrant Experience (Boston: Intercultural Press, 2006). Strouf, Judie L. F., The Literature Teacher’s Book of Lists (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

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Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Betances Jaeger, Clotilde (1890–197?). Clotilde Betances Jaeger was one of the most important Puerto Rican feminist intellectuals and a minority advocate living and publishing in New York during the mid–twentieth century. Born in San Sebastián del Pepino to a Spanish mother and Puerto Rican father, Clotilde Betances Jaeger honored her great patriot uncle, Ramón Emeterio Betances, with a committed defense of Hispanic women’s rights and minority children’s education in New York’s growing Hispanic community. Betances’s early education took place in Mayagüez and Santurce; after high school, she left the island in 1912 to study natural science at Cornell University, where she was awarded a bachelor’s degree in 1916. In addition to her studies at Cornell, she also enrolled in summer classes in Puerto Rico, studying Spanish language and literature under the direction of Felipe Janer and Luis Saliva. Upon completing her degree and during the following seven years, Betances taught in the public schools of Naguabo, Quebradillas, Santurce, and Río Piedras. In 1923, she moved to New York, where she was to stay for the rest of her life, working as a teacher, journalist, writer, and educational advocate. Married to Frank Jaeger, an American of German background, Betances Jaeger also earned an M.S. in religious study from Butler College, Indianapolis, in 1949, with her thesis entitled Organizing a Program of Weekday Religious Education in the Bronx Community. Of all her writing during the years, her journalistic writing remains the most accessible, having been published not only in popular Hispanic newspapers and cultural magazines of New York City—such as Gráfico* (Graphic), Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters), Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), Nueva York al Día (New York to Date), Unión. Revista Bolivariana (Union: Bolivarian Magazine), and Ebenezer. Iglesia Discípulos de Cristo de Habla Española de Nueva York (Ebenezer: Disciples of Christ Church for the Spanish-Speaking in New York)—but also in magazines and newspapers published in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and Europe, such as the Spanish anarchist magazines Estudios. Revista Ecléctica (Studies: Eclectic Review), Iniciales (Initials), and Al Margen (On the Margin). During her lifetime, Betances was compared to renowned women of the feminist avant-garde such as Federica de Montseny and Violeta Miqueli y Ángela Graupera and also shared public recognition for her defense of Hispanic women in the writings of the Cuban feminist Mariblanca Sabás Alomá. Betances was well known in the Hispanic intellectual community in New York City; Bernardo Vega’s* Memoirs mentioned her as one of the members of Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas Puertorriqueños (Association of Puerto Rican Writers and Journalists) established in New York at the end of the 1930s; she was also the Puerto Rican representative for the Unión de Mujeres Americanas (American Women’s Union). As a regular contributor to Artes y Letras, Betances Jaeger also belonged to the Círculo Cultural Cervantes 126


(Cervantes Cultural Circle) and participated in its cultural gatherings, where she often made presentations. Betances Jaeger gave public lectures for other Hispanic civic and cultural organizations in New York City, including the following two: “La Tragedia Social del Hombre” (The Social Tragedy of Man), on March 24, 1933, for the Hispano America Lodge No. 233 literary festival, and another on Julia de Burgos’ poetry, given on April 18, 1940, for the Fraternidad Estudiantil Hispanoamericana (Spanish American Student Fraternity). Betances Jaeger’s career as a writer and journalist dates back to 1921, when her essay entitled “Amor y servicio” (Love and Service) won an award from the Ateneo Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Atheneum). Later, in 1924, she addressed her writing to the middle- and upper-class Puerto Rican women readers of the San Juan newspaper Heraldo de Puerto Rico (The Puerto Rico Herald), with her column entitled “Lectura para las damas. Deporte y literatura” (Readings for Ladies: Sport and Literature). In this newspaper, Betances Jaeger (who bylined as Clotilde H. Betances) began to practice one of her first journalistic beats as a reporter and mediator of the women’s beauty and fashion. The democratization of culture and education in the early twentieth century played an important role in Betances Jaeger’s development, helping her get a foothold in media dominated by men, even only on the pages of women’s beauty and fashion. Her role as “beauty messenger” not only meant that she was sheltered as an intellectual in her position of power in mass media, but also signified her acknowledgment that women’s images were of symbolic value for their progress and insertion into modernity. In fact, only a few months later, Betances Jaeger was put in charge of the Information Department of the newspaper, which had an educational function aimed at informing its readers about the educational system in Puerto Rico and in the United States, as well as at creating a forum for questions and discussions concerning education. However, her journalistic writing and career were to blossom and to shape her feminist discourse in her later writings for New York’s Gráfico. Owned and edited by tobacco workers, writers, and theater actors, such as Alberto O’Farrill* and Bernardo Vega,* Grafico’s popularity has traditionally been attributed to, among other things, its conservative position vis-à-vis Hispanic women’s role in society, as well as its misogynist images and representations of the Anglo American women. Because of this, Betances Jaeger’s feminist chronicles and articles in Gráfico constitute an important contribution to our knowledge about the mid–twentieth century Hispanic and Puerto Rican communities in New York: her writing, along with Emma Barea’s and María Mas Pozo’s, reconfigured the traditional women’s column “Charlas Femeninas” (Feminine Chats) as an open space for feminist dialogues and discussions. She wrote more than fifty articles for Gráfico between 1929 and 1930 that chronicled her experiences and opinions about the new role demanded of Hispanic women in the United States according to the discourse of American modernity and the New Woman. Her articles also advocated for greater participation of Hispanic women in the economy and in opposition to war. Politically committed to women’s and family issues, Betances Jaeger’s articles lead us to rethink the 127


patriarchal structures that informed Puerto Rican intellectualism during the 1930s; her focus on the children’s needs and Hispanic women’s rights set a new discourse from and about the Hispanic community in the mainland. She embodied the performativity of the New Woman, and her writing was infused with her feminist beliefs. Her article “La mujer nueva” (May 18, 1929, The New Woman) was written in response to one by María Mas Pozo and caused an open dispute regarding the subject of feminism. Clotilde Betances pointed out her position respecting the new place and role of women in society: professionalism, women’s control over their own bodies and thought, the use of contraceptives, and the resignification of women’s place in the job market and public as well as in private spaces. “Matrimonio y mortaja del cielo bajan” (January 20, 1929, Marriage and Mummification Descend from the Heavens) is one example of her combative essays in which she advocates the right to divorce and questions the power of the Church and men over women. This questioning goes hand in hand with her defense against physical abuse, infidelity, and man’s concept of women as a property. “Hay que respetar a la mujer” (Women Must Be Respected) is the title of another of her commentaries (Sep. 21, 1929), in which she seeks to awake Hispanic women’s consciousness for their rights and intellectual capacities. In spite of her liberal position regarding Hispanic women’s role in U.S. society, Betances Jaeger was opposed to North American imperialism and interests in Latin American nations; she was a supporter of Pan Hispanist ideology and was opposed to the colonization and “civilization” task of the United States in Puerto Rico and Latin America. Her article “La unión constituye la fuerza” (October 12 and 19, 1929, In Unity There Is Power) is an excellent example of her writing in support to Pan Hispanism. Her articles in Gráfico were also a turf for the building of a Hispanic women’s genealogy that, in addition to functioning as models of identification, supported her feminist discourse, focusing on the life and writing of the Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou, Puerto Rican physician Marta Robert de Romeo, Cuban writer Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta, Spanish writer Concha Espina, and Cuban feminist Mariblanca Sabás Alomá, all of whom were among the most liberal and progressive Hispanic women of her time. As important as her writing in Gráfico was, Betances Jaeger’s contribution to Artes y Letras granted her membership in New York’s Hispanic literary and cultural intelligentsia. Informed with a more sociological perspective, her articles found in education and women’s genealogy a common ground of what remained her community interests: the survival and consolidation of the Hispanic community in New York. She criticizes racism not just in her correspondence with an almost centenary Enrique José Varona* between 1928 and 1930 but also in one of her articles published in the important Puerto Rican cultural magazine Puerto Rico Ilustrado (Puerto Rico Illustrated), “El derecho divino de los blancos” (Sep. 30, 1939, The Divine Right of the Whites), celebrating Ramón Emeterio Betances’s emancipation struggles while acknowledging children’s education as one of the weapons to face the social remnants of racial slavery. In support of the educational reforms that were tak128

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ing place in Puerto Rico, beginning with her contributions to Artes y Letras and at least until the 1950s, she dedicated her efforts and commitment not just to feminism but also to the education of the Hispanic minority children in New York City; in this her Protestant religion and system of belief seemed to have been of great influence and to have informed her community activities. Deeply concerned with issues of race discrimination, injustice, poor living conditions, and a lack of educational rights for Puerto Rican children in New York, Betances Jaeger states in the introduction to her master’s thesis in religious studies that “[t]wo things had to be done: Keep alive in the breast of Puerto Ricans the passion of their Spanish cultural inheritance . . . and plant in them the spirit of God.” In the Ebenezer edition of April–June 1950, Clotilde Betances’s “Educo a mi hijo” (I Educate My Son) is a biblical interpretation of David’s selfishness and paternal irresponsibility, which seeks to be a lesson of the importance of family in the education of the children but also a message for the union and integration of the family through the divine word. As an intellectual, Betances Jaeger used religious thought as a basis for intervention in the social, political, and economical lives of Puerto Ricans living in New York—seeking not just to improve their social condition but also to build a sense of community from the preservation of the Spanish heritage and its bond to Christianity. Further Reading Acosta-Belén, Edna, “Betances Jaeger, Clotilde” in Latinas in the United States: a Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). Reyes Bermúdez, José, “Puertorriqueñas ilustres. Clotilde Betances” Puerto Rico Ilustrado (May 1939): 19ff. Rivera Álvarez, Josefina, “Betances Jaeger, Clotilde” in Diccionario de Literatura Puertorriqueña, Vol. 1 (San Juan, PR: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1974). Vega, Bernardo, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: a Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, trans. Juan Flores, ed. César Andréu Iglesias (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).

María Teresa Vera-Rojas

Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman is defined as the coming of age novel or the novel of education. Its literary roots are German, the term bildung relating to education and formation and the term roman meaning “novel.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (1796, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) is generally considered the first prototypical example of this genre. There are two distinct approaches to defining the Bildungsroman. The first is strongly patriarchal, focusing on a young man’s struggle to overcome life’s challenges. This is evidenced by the classical German definition, which centers on two main ideas: that this quest for harmony is exclusively male and that the goal is extremely challenging and equally rewarding. With such a strong foundation in male rites of passage and deeds, it is apparent that this genre did not 129

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develop as a new, uninfluenced literary movement but was rather a natural progression from the classic epic (Moretti 3). This is clear when we examine the crux of the male Bildungsroman, which centers on heroic deeds and actions. The second approach to the Bildungsroman represents a more philosophical application toward life. Jerome Buckley, in his analysis in Seasons of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (1974), describes how the Victorian Bildungsroman alludes to the philosophical issues that the young protagonists confront within their comings of age. Most of these young protagonists are restrained by a sense of entrapment that hinders their personal and intellectual growth. Many of the constraints that the young protagonists suffer stem from their relationships with their families, especially with fathers who attempt to squash the protagonists’ creative instincts. It is the repressive atmosphere of the home that forces young protagonists to leave their small towns and move to the city, where they begins their real educations in life. Randolf Shaffner, in The Apprenticeship Novel (1984), emphasizes the philosophical roots of the Bildungsroman and significance beyond the heroic rite of passage, which he bases on five essential elements. First of all, living is an art that the apprentice must learn. Second, a young person can become adept in the art of life. Third, the protagonist must possess the potential to develop into a master. Fourth, the key idea of choice must be present. Fifth, the protagonist must display an affirmative attitude toward life as a whole (16). For Shaffner, the notion of choice is the most important component. It is the freedom and ability to choose a direction in life and to pursue mastery of a life’s work that represents an idealistic perspective personifying more of the artistic search for oneself rather than a conventional, more simplified boy-to-man maturation process. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Tey Diana Rebolledo, two prominent Chicana scholars, address the coming-of-age story through their critical analysis of Tomás Rivera’s* . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . and the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987) and Sandra Cisneros’s* The House on Mango Street (1984). In their investigation, they identify several predominant characteristics found in the Bildungsroman. First, the male hero leaves home or goes to school, subsequently undergoing a trial by his peers, overcoming adversity to eventually succeed by completing or somewhat successfully completing a heroic act. Through this process, he discovers who he is as a man and as a member of society. Perhaps most important, by the end of the novel, he integrates his consciousness, achieves self-determination, and is ready to deal with the world on his own terms (Gonzales-Berry and Rebolledo 110). Although one of the primary texts that Gonzales-Berry and Rebolledo examine in connection to the Chicano and Chicana Bildungsroman is written by a Chicana, it is evident that they characterize this genre as highly patriarchal. Most of these characteristics that describe the Bildungsroman are prevalent in the Chicano Bildungsroman, particularly in José Antonio Villarreal’s* Pocho (1959), . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra, and Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972). Many Chicano scholars consider these three novels cornerstones of 130

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Chicano letters, a judgment substantiated by the large body of critical work dealing with them, much of it focusing on their Bildungsroman qualities. Pocho in many respects represents the prototypical Bildungsroman. It narrates the life of Richard Rubio, a young Mexican American growing up during World War II who is desperately searching for his identity and for the answers to life’s greatest questions. Richard struggles with a number of issues, but most of all with his search for identity as a Mexican American and with finding his purpose in life. For Richard, this crisis goes beyond a regular maturation process; as he grows older, he finds it increasingly difficult to accept life as it is, to believe everything he has been taught, and, most important, to submit to a defined role within society. Richard, like any intelligent, ambitious, young man, yearns to explore the world and understand life and knows that to do so on his terms, he must eventually leave home. One principal characteristic that distinguishes Pocho and other Chicano Bildungsromans from the traditional Bildungsroman genre is the key notion of choice. For young Chicano protagonists, the power to choose is often difficult to attain and exercise. Decisions are usually made for them, and traditions are difficult to change, as is the case for Richard. Because he is Catholic, he feels obliged to accept what the priest and his mother tell him about God. Because he is Mexican, he must one day marry and start his own family, repeating the cycle that society imposes. But because he is Mexican American, he must somehow take it upon himself to help his own people. And because he is a man, it is his responsibility to provide for his family and become the head of the household after his father leaves his mother for a younger, more obedient, traditional Mexican wife. Richard is indeed afforded few choices in his life; consequently, his story does not represent the traditional development of a young man who chooses his path into adulthood. The nameless protagonist in . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra experiences a similar upbringing in regards to the scarcity of choices. He and his family follow the crops and live in a cycle of poverty that appears almost unbreakable but is to a point tolerable because they have become accustomed to such a way of life. . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra adheres to the general Bildungsroman definition by describing a boy’s coming of age as the protagonist integrates into society by recovering lost memories that symbolize his growth and maturity. However, in specific terms, according to the definitions previously outlined, it does not completely or substantially resemble a Bildungsroman. The two main Bildungsroman characteristics that are consistent with the definition are the sense of entrapment and the development into adulthood and becoming a member of society. However, the entrapment in this case is not so much personal or intellectual as socioeconomic. And although his cultural and religious beliefs teach him that the meek shall inherit the earth, for now it is the earth that is keeping him and his family tied to their social and economic destitution. Here again, in one of the earliest and most important Chicano narratives, the key notion of choice that exists in the traditional Bildungsroman eludes the young Chicano protagonist. In another example, Bless Me, Ultima broadly narrates a Bildungsroman, relating the story of an adolescent boy, Antonio, and his coming of age in 131

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northern New Mexico. The principal dilemma for Antonio is to decide upon which family tradition to pursue: that of his father’s family, Los Márez, becoming a rancher, living and working on the llano estacado, or that of his mother’s family, Los Luna, nurturing the land as a farmer? At first, it appears that the notion of choice distinguishes Bless Me, Ultima from the other two Chicano narratives. But as the novel progresses, it is clear that Antonio is left without choices to much the same degree as Richard and the young protagonist in . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra, because, as his spirit guide, Ultima, teaches him, Antonio cannot resist fate; he must live the life for which he was destined. Aside from The House on Mango Street, other Chicana narratives that demonstrate the Chicana Bildungsroman are Denise Chávez’s* Face of an Angel (1994), Norma Elia Cantú’s* Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), and Pat Mora’s* House of Houses (1997). Although the Chicana version of the Bildungsroman shares many characteristics with its male counterpart, there are also several differences that distinguish it. First, young Chicanas want a space of their own and, because their place has traditionally been in the home, they have learned to recreate the home as a metaphor for poetic space. Many Chicanas, despite their desire to have the same freedom as men, have also realized that they do not have to look outside the home for experience or inspiration when there is much to write about within the home. The home, traditionally a symbol for a woman’s vocation, now becomes a blueprint for writing. Raising children, cooking, cleaning, healing, nurturing, the call to service—as Chávez describes it in Face of an Angel—have traditionally been viewed as monotonous, insignificant, and unadventurous work-related themes not meriting analysis or discussion, but in the Chicana Bildungsroman narratives they are honored for their often overlooked and underappreciated value. The second distinction between the Chicano and Chicana Bildungsroman is that Chicana writers look to recover family history and stories by honoring their ancestors—particularly strong and resilient matriarchs. It is no accident that both Face of an Angel and House of Houses introduce the narratives with family trees as they strive to recover the lost voices of the aunts, mothers, and grandmothers who often go unnoticed in male-authored texts. The third manner that distinguishes the Chicana Bildungsroman is the use of meta-texts that many Chicana artist-protagonists establish within the primary narrative. Aside from the physical service that many Chicanas are schooled to perform, Chicana writers also serve through the written word. Cisneros and Chávez author the novels the readers read, but within the texts the Chicana protagonists also write. In Face of an Angel writing the Book of Service is a clear sign that the protagonist Soveida is not only a waitress but also a developing writer. The desire to create manifested by the protagonist leads to another branch of the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, which describes the development of the artist—or, in this case, the writer. As is evident, many Chicano narratives are strongly influenced by the Bildungsroman genre. The coming of age motif is popular across most cultures, but in U.S. Latino literature this personal development takes on extra signif132

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icance as young protagonists also deal with cultural, linguistic, and identity issues. For this reason, the Bildungsroman genre is also employed by Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American writers as well. Two excellent examples of this are Nicholasa Mohr’s* El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories (1975) and Junot Díaz’s* Drown (1997). El Bronx Remembered is in many ways similar to Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street but relates the young protagonist’s experiences growing up Puerto Rican in the Bronx. Drown, however, deals with the coming of age of a young Dominican who remembers his days in the Dominican Republic, relating how he struggles to adapt to life in New Jersey. In addition to narrating the traditional coming-of-age story along with the cultural identity negotiation process, Díaz also describes a sexual and ethnic process of maturation that paints a vivid picture of the clash between the U.S. and Dominican cultures. Over the years the Bildungsroman has evolved to become inclusive of many different experiences and broadened its scope to describe a much more diverse coming of age story. Further Reading Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, Seasons of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, and Tey Diana Rebolledo, “Growing Up Chicano: Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 13, Nos. 3–4 (1985): 109–119. Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000). Shaffner, Randolf P., The Apprenticeship Novel (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).

Spencer Herrera The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts. The Bilingual Foundation of the Arts was founded in 1973 by Latino actors led by Carmen Zapata. Originally it existed as an itinerate theater company performing in various venues throughout Los Angeles, California, but in 1980 the troupe established a permanent home in Lincoln Heights and has since mounted humorous productions. Since its founding, the Foundation has reached more than one million

Carmen Zapata, actress and director of the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, in the role of Queen Isabela.

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children and teenagers through its touring theater-in-education programs while still maintaining a permanent stable of adult patrons. The productions of the Foundation, which maintains the only professional bilingual theater company on the West Coast, are partially funded by box-office receipts, but most of its expenses are met by private donations and by grants. In addition to showcasing Latino actors, directors and theater technicians, the Foundation has served as a workshop for playwrights, such as Carlos Morton,* who, after going through the process with his play The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales, subsequently won the New York Shakespeare Festival Latino Playwrights competition for that production. Further Reading “Bilingual Foundation for the Arts” (http://www.bfatheatre.org).

F. Arturo Rosales Bilingual Review/Press. Bilingual Review/Press began publishing the works of Hispanic writers in 1974, at a time when few outlets existed in the mainstream press for the rising need prompted by an artistic renaissance among Latinos in the United States. The press has averaged the publication of eight to ten titles a year and usually keeps about 100 titles on its backlist. Most of its books are in English and are by or about U.S. Hispanics; the press has also published bilingual and Spanish-only titles. Since its founding by Dr. Gary Keller,* then a professor at York College, the press has pursued a publication agenda that foregoes purely commercial entertainment and focuses instead on works treating serious issues that are socially relevant to the large Hispanic population in the United States. Noteworthily, although the Bilingual Review/Press publishes works by both established and emerging writers, it also keeps alive important Mexican American works that have gone out of print since the 1960s in its Clásicos Chicanos/Chicano Classics series. The press moved to Arizona State University in 1987 when Professor Keller was offered a job at that institution. Further Reading “Bilingual Review Press” (http://www.asu.edu/brp/brp.html).

F. Arturo Rosales Bilingualism in Literature. Hispanics have the highest retention rate of their ancestral language than any other group in the United States. The reasons for this retention are hotly debated in linguistic circles as well as among the general populace. One of the reasons put forth is that Hispanics who were incorporated into the United States when their lands were conquered or purchased by the United States (for example, Mexicans in the Southwest and Puerto Ricans on the island) did not have to give up their language or identity to become residents or citizens. Another explanation is that, because of the closeness of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, travel to and from these locations has resulted not only in the preservation but also the renewal

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of the Spanish language as contact with home countries reinforced and renewed its use in the United States. There is also considerable evidence that the minority status and marginalization of Hispanics in the United States has contributed to their isolation and, therefore, to the preservation of their language. There is certainly no doubt that for more than a century and a half, U.S. industries have targeted workers from the Hispanic world as cheap labor, first to replace the liberated slaves and later to alleviate manpower shortages during wars and economic expansions; this industrial and economic policy (supported by the government) has also contributed to isolation of the Spanish-speaking working class, a class that often has been denied education and upward mobility in industry labor camps. Despite so many reasons for retaining the Spanish language in the United States, English has never been totally absent from the Hispanic community; in fact, it has been pervasive in work, education, and the public sphere. In primary and secondary education, in fact, for many years only English was emphasized, and Spanish use was dissuaded. This led not to the eradication of Spanish but to high drop-out rates among Hispanics. Since the nineteenth century, most Spanish-speaking communities in the United States have been bilingual or have been evolving a bilingual–bicultural existence. Today, it is not uncommon for members of the same household to be dominant in either Spanish or English, or for them to express themselves in a blend of both languages—what linguists call “code-switching” and laymen often call “Spanglish,” an originally derogatory term that denoted inability to speak either language well. Many linguists have endeavored to unravel the formulas in Spanish-language code-switching, and many critics have attempted to understand code-switching in literature. Despite so much research and appreciation by linguists and other scholars, mixing both languages has often been the target of derision by purists who defend the use of only a pure, educated English or Spanish. There also seem to be some class differences operating when middle- and upper-class or educated speakers become embarrassed at what they think of as bastardized expression. Spanish teachers in particular have long fought losing battles to separate the two languages in their Hispanic students. The literature of Hispanics in the United States has since the late nineteenth century reflected the blending as well as the competition of the Spanish and English linguistic systems that exists in Hispanic communities. Research of Hispanic publications in the nineteenth century reveals that code-switching was already taking place in poetry, stories, and essays for publication, especially in New Mexico. Even before English–Spanish blending in literature, poems and songs of the Southwest reveal a blending of the Spanish and indigenous languages. In the early twentieth century, almost all immigrant newspapers published poetry that incorporated English into the base of its verses. In exile literature beginning in the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for editors to publish essays side-by-side in English and

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Spanish versions, or to translate books to English, in an effort to influence U.S. popular opinion and government action. Furthermore, some Hispanic authors (such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton) published their creative literature in Spanish from the nineteenth century on, a trend that has culminated today in a vast array of English-dominant writers only writing and publishing their works in English and using a Spanish word here and there for flavor or emphasis. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, the Chicano and Nuyorican literary movements emphasized code-switching, especially in poetry and theater (because prose writers were often too physically removed from their audiences, and too mediated by editors and publishers, to code-switch extensively, unlike labor theaters and poets, who performed directly for their communities). Code-switching in theater was especially popularized by Luis Valdez* and El Teatro Campesino, which toured nationally and inspired a whole improvisational theater movement whose ideology was to create a theater from folklore and popular culture; one of Valdez’s famous dictums was, “If the barrio can not go to the theater, then the theater must go to the barrio.” Through example, El Teatro Campesino demonstrated exactly how a grassroots theater could reflect the code-switching common in Hispanic communities. Of course, this led literary critics to assume that the only modus for code-switching in Latino literature was reflecting common everyday speech. But this was a simplification that never really applied to Valdez or most of the successful bilingual writers of poetry and drama. All of these artists were just as creative with code-switching and barrio dialects as they were with plot, structure, characterization, and ideology. One of the first widely recognized bilingual poets was also one who raised code-switching to the highest level of poetic experimentation: Alurista.* Showcased in the canonizing anthology El Espejo/The Mirror in 1969, from the beginning, even in his most politically engaged poems, Alurista did not attempt to reproduce everyday speech or dialect in his code-switching; instead he exhibited a highly idiosyncratic style that imaginatively combined the English and Spanish languages in his poems. As a student of pre-Colombian literature, Alurista took code-switching a step further by incorporating Náhuatl words and Aztec referents in his now-trilingual poetry, as evident in Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), which takes its title from the Aztec concept of poetry (flowers and songs) and Nationchild Plumaroja (1972). Alurista culminated his code-switching experiment with the publication of Spik in glyph? (1981), when he experimented with using English graphemes to sound out Spanish words and Spanish graphemes to sound out English ones, effectively creating an interlingual language reminiscent of e. e. cummings’s experiments with English-language syntax. Another writer, Ricardo Sánchez,* not as academically grounded as Alurista, preserved the feeling of common speech in English and Spanish but nevertheless juxtaposed surprising combinations of words from both languages and freely invented words and phrases

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by language blending. His long, rambling verse was often baroque in its sensibility, syntax, and meaning and very far indeed from daily language usage in the barrios. His famous poem “Entequila” took the philosophical concept of entelechy and elaborated an ars poetica that decried how barrio society misunderstands and withholds its support to artists; he created this within that elaborate code-switching, rambling framework of neologisms that typify his poems. Another poet whose stance is very close to the common folk, Tato Laviera,* also experiments with the juxtaposition of Spanish and English for esthetic effect and not just to capture the ideolect of his characters, such as Juana Bochisme. In “The Song of an Oppressor,” for example, Laviera incorporates the theme song from a soap opera “Simplemente María” (Simply María) and uses it as an ironic leitmotif to emphasize the exploitation of mothers and working people in the barrio.* He also incorporates signs from store fronts, such as “TRABAJO CHIPE/PISS WORK UN CHAVO POR CADA VEINTE TRAJES” (PIECE WORK CHEAP A PENNY FOR EACH TWENTY DRESSES) with the common Spanish adoptions for “cheap” and “piece work,” and other such appropriations of the people’s language turned against them to exploit them. In other works, Laviera incorporates and builds on the language of santería, the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion, to create a syncretic Hispanic–Anglo–African text. But Laviera’s Africanisms in his santería poems come from lived experience, whereas Alurista’s pre-Colombianinspired verses are imaginative glosses on an imagined literary past. Miguel Piñero* and Pedro Pietri* also recover the Spanish that has been manipulated commercially in the barrio, and Victor Hernández Cruz and Sandra María Esteves explore Africanisms from within the context of salsa performance—as does Laviera. Thus these writers and others use bilingualism and code-switching in poetry as gateways to the exploration of the multiculturalism (more than the bilingualism) of Latino life and art. One of the few experiments in code-switching in a novel is Rolando Hinojosa’s* Mi querida Rafa (1981, Dear Rafe, 1985). Through his alter ego P. Galindo’s introduction to the novel, we learn that it will be narrated, or constructed, using speech patterns as they actually exist in the Rio Grande Valley. Thus, letters, monologues, and dialogues, as well as editorial comment, are compiled by Galindo in a sort of collage of evidence to solve the central mystery of the book. The full gamut of discourse is represented in the book by characters who only speak Spanish, others who only speak English, and others who code-switch—and this regardless of their ethnicity, for it seems that in the Valley some Anglos speak good Spanish and some Mexican Americans prefer English. Of course, this is all Hinojosa’s elaborate subterfuge, for each and every word is a creative rendition by him in ironic, tongue-in-cheek novel that undermines all the protestations of veracity given by narrator Galindo. Hinojosa’s sophisticated ruse about culture and language really speaks to the question of bilingualism in literature: it is not a

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tape recording of actual speech but a creative representation of biculturalism— perhaps of multiculturalism. Further Reading Keller, Gary D., and Randall G. Keller, “The Literary Language of United States Hispanics” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993). Lipski, John, Linguistic Aspects of Spanish-English Language Switching (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1985).

Nicolás Kanellos Björkquist, Elena Díaz (1943–). How do you keep on the map a town that no longer exists? If you are Elena Díaz Björkquist, you write about it. The small copper-mining town of Morenci, Arizona, where Björkquist was born on April 14, 1943, and where she was subsequently raised, as had been three generations of her family who toiled in the mines, was razed to the ground by the Phelps Dodge Corporation to expand the mines in the 1960s. Björkquist has since been haunted by a sense of rootlessness and of the loss of the mostly Mexican American town. She has nevertheless been able to bring Morenci, as well as her relatives and friends, back to life in her collection of short stories, Suffer Smoke (1996). Having earned a degree from Sonoma State University (1973), Björkquist administered the CETA program in Sonoma County, California. She moved into the field of teaching and recently retired after having taught English as a second language, Spanish, and U.S. history at Mendocino High School and Sonoma States University. Although she had been writing since childhood, Elena Díaz Björkquist. Björkquist did not seriously take it up until after her retirement. In 1993 and 1994, she won awards for short stories from the Federation of Women’s Clubs Creative Writing Contests. In addition to Suffer Smoke, she has also published a collection of poetry titled Rediscovering My Spirit. Her latest book, Water from the Moon (2002), is a collection of stories for young adults, once again set in the community of Morenci. In addition, she has published individual stories in such periodicals as The Americas Review and The Bilingual Review. In 2002, she coedited an anthology of poems and stories by women writers: Sowing Seeds, una cosecha de recuerdos (Sowing Seeds: a Harvest of Memories). Björkquist is also a successful professional painter and sculptor. In 1999, Björkquist and her husband returned to live in Arizona, where the Arizona Humanities Council funded her creation of an 138

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oral history Web site about Mexican Americans in Morenci during the Great Depression and World War II. Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Blanco, Beatriz (?–?). Mexican immigrant Beatriz Blanco was one of the very few women to ascend to the editorial boards of the male-dominated newspapers in the Hispanic community, becoming a board member of the largest Hispanic newspaper of its time, Ignacio Lozano’s La Prensa (The Press) in San Antonio during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, Blanco edited the woman’s page, “Página del Hogar y de las Damas” (Home and Women’s Page). Her essays, short stories, and poetry occasionally appeared in La Prensa and other periodicals; in these she supported the dominant themes of Mexican immigrant culture, including that of preserving language, culture, and religion for a future return to the homeland. Beyond the newspaper, she served as the president of the Club Mexicano de Bellas Artes (Mexican Fine Arts Club), in which she and other women could express themselves freely through artistic recitals, poetry readings, and performances. In 1940, she returned to Mexico. Further Reading Lawhn, Juanita Luna, The Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/ online/articles/BB/fblcw.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Blanco, Richard (1960–). A poet of broad vision, perhaps because of his grounding in science and engineering, Richard Blanco was born in Madrid almost immediately after his parents took refuge there from the Cuban Revolution. Forty-five days after his birth, his family resettled in Miami, where he grew up. Along the way, he studied literature, architecture, and design but earned a B.S. in civil engineering (1991) and a master’s in creative writing (1997) from Florida International University. He has since taught creative writing at universities and has published poetry widely in major magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2000, The Breadloaf Anthology of New American Poets, The Nation, Ploughshares, American Poetry, and many others. His first book, City of a Hundred Fires (1998), which explores his biculturalism as a Cuban American, won the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005) also develops themes of home, place, and identity. However, in this latter book, Blanco goes beyond his Cuban cultural identity to explore these themes in broader, more cosmopolitan terms. Further Reading Richard Blanco (http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1332). Kanellos, Nicolás, “An Overview of Latino Poetry: The Iceberg below the Surface” American Book Review (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 5, 10.


Bolaños, Gustavo Alemán

Bolaños, Gustavo Alemán. See Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo Bolaños Cacho, Miguel (1869–1928). As a writer and former government official, Miguel Bolaños Cacho was a prominent figure in the Mexican exile community of the Southwest. Born in the City of Oaxaca on February 9, 1869, into a family of means and social standing, Bolaños Cacho was able to study at the prestigious Science and Art Institute. While studying law, he copublished with a classmate La Voz de la Juventud (The Voice of Youth) and then La Palabra (The Word). From 1885 to 1888, he edited Renacimiento (Renaissance) in Oaxaca and, from 1885 to 1888, directed the Boletín Oficial de la Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (The Official Bulletin of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics). He obtained his license to practice law in 1889, the same year that he published his collected poems as Ritmos (Rhythms). In 1902, his long poem “Homenaje a Juárez y a Ignacio Manuel Altamirano” (Homage to Juaírez and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano) won first prize in the annual Puebla poetic competition. In the early 1900s, he wrote a number of important legal papers and monographs, which were published; his Derechos del hombre (1909, The Rights of Men), in two volumes, was one of the masterful monographs that cemented his reputation as an outstanding legal scholar. Among the government positions Bolaños Cacho held were Oaxacan secretary of the state, interim governor (1902), two-term congressional representative (1902–?), supreme court justice (1904–?), senator (1906–1908), governor of Oaxaca (1912–1914), from which position he was deposed by rebels during the Revolution of 1910. Bolaños Cacho took refuge in the United States in 1914 or 1915 but continued serving as a lawyer for cases in northern Mexico through 1927. In 1915, with Querido Moheno,* Federico Gamboa, and others, he established in the United States a futile “Peace Assembly” under the leadership of Victoriano Huerta and Pascual Orozco, intended to put an end to the war in Mexico. With this failure in mind, in 1917 he published a manifesto, Orientaciones Pacíficas (Peaceful Orientations), in which he begged all Mexicans to pledge allegiance to the new political order. Throughout his life, Bolaños Cacho cultivated his literary muse, writing novels, short stories, poems, and essays. In the United States, he was associated with San Diego newspapers and printers and published many of his literary works in periodical pages as well as in separate volumes. Among his works written and published in the United States were his satirical novel of the Mexican Revolution, Sembradores de viento (1928, Sewers of the Wind), and his second collection of poems, Sonatas y sonetos (1921, Sonatas and Sonnets). In addition, Bolaños Cacho wrote numerous works that were never published, including his collection of short stories entitled En el exilio (In Exile). Miguel Bolaños Cacho died in San Diego, California, on May 19, 1928. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–454.


Bolio, Dolores

Bolet Peraza, Nicanor (1838–1906). Writer and diplomat Nicanor Bolet Peraza was born in Caracas, Venezuela, where he began his career in the Army. Because of his active participation in the political fights of Venezuela, he obtained the rank of general and became a member of the Liberal Party. From 1870 to 1878, he served in a number of offices, including those of interior minister, attorney general, and congressman. In 1880 he moved to New York City, where he founded and edited the Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (Illustrated Review of New York) and Las Tres Américas (The Three Americas), both publications directed at middle-class Hispanics in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. Bolet Peraza did not limit himself to writing creatively in these two magazines but also published opinion pieces in the Latin American press, as well as three books: Cartas Gredalenses (1900, Letters to Gredal), El valor cívico. A la juventud hispano-americana (1901, Civic Valor: for Spanish American Youths), and Impresiones de viaje (1906, Impressions of a Voyage). Like the Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York and Las Tres Américas, these books served to establish cultural ties between Hispanic America and the United States. It is worth mentioning that Cartas Gredalenses had a special impact in Latin America, as an example of immigrant literature; the individual crónicas (newspaper local-color chronicles) in the form of letters continued to be reprinted even after the death of the author. Bolet Peraza never left his political life; by the end of 1889, he became the delegate of Venezuela to the Conference of the American Republics in Washington, D.C. He was also general consul of the Republic of El Salvador in New York and the representative of the Greater Republic of Central America in the same city. In 1897, nine years before his death, he was a representative at the Universal Postal Congress in Washington, D.C., while still editing Las Tres Américas. Further Reading “Bolet Peraza, Nicanor,” Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada Eueropeo Americana (Barcelona, Spain: Espasa Calpe, 1926). Schulam, Ivan A., and Vernon A. Chamberlain, La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York: History, Anthology, and Index of Literary Selections (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976).

Amira Plascencia-Vela Bolio, Dolores (1880–1950). Dolores Bolio Cantarell de Peón was born in Mérida, Yucatán, in 1880. The daughter of Rafael Bolio y Rivas and María del Carmen Margarita Castarell y Castillo, she was born into a wealthy family and raised among intellectualism, travel, and luxury. Despite her traditional education, her independence and inquiring mind made her different from the women of her social status and time. She married Manuel José Peón Aznar, a landowner dedicated to the cultivation and processing of henequen. Bolio, friends with some of the most important intellectuals of her time, was able to travel and live for a time in Cuba, Europe, the United States, France, Spain, and Mexico City. She was an orator at the Universidad Popular (Popular University) and participated in many writers’ groups. In her long career, 141

Book Fairs and Festivals

Bolio published poetry, novels, articles, children’s literature, and short stories, as well as reviews in newspapers in Mexico. Two of the pseudonyms she employed were Carmen Castillo and Luis Avellaneda. Bolio’s writing preserved the local flavor and customs of Yucatán with influences from the Modernism and Romantic literary movements, as is evident in her poem “Flor de Yucatán” (Yucatan Flower). Her work was published in several newspapers in the United States, writings that reflect themes of exile and of the position of women in society (Bolio was always concerned with the political situation of Mexico, the United States, and the world). Among her publications are A tu oído (1917, For Your Ears Only), De mi intimidad (1917, From My Intimacy), Aroma tropical (1917, Tropical Aroma, published in New York under the pseudonym Luis Avellaneda), Yerba de olor (1924, Fragrant Herb), Primera comunión, y Capitular de Fray Kempis (1936, First Communion and Brother Kempis’s Chapter), En silencio (1936, In Silence), Un solo amor, confidencias de un poeta (1937, Only One Love: Secrets of a Poet), La cruz del maya (1941, The Mayan Cross), Luciérnaga (1945?, Firefly), and Una hoja del pasado (1920, A Page from the Past). Further Reading Domenella, Ana Rosa, and Nora Pasternac, Las voces olvidadas: antología crítica de narradoras mexicanas nacidas en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1991). Robles, Martha, La sombra fugitiva (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1885).

Carolina Villarroel Book Fairs and Festivals. Just as there are very few Latino bookstores in the United States, there are as yet only a few Latino book fairs and literary festivals. The main reason for this dearth of ancillary book activity is the insufficient response of the publishing industry to Latino literature and its writers. That a people numbering more than forty million could see so few books published only attests to the marginality of Latino culture in the United States. (There are in fact thousands of Latino writers; Arte Público Press alone receives more than two thousand manuscripts each year.) Minimization of Latinos in the major national and local media—except for stories of Latino criminality, negative views of immigration, and perpetuation of stereotypes—is the rule of thumb in the print and electronic domains. Even more outrageous is that the Latino population is most concentrated in the city where the publishing industry is headquartered (New York) and in the region where the broadcast and film production industries are located (Southern California). Yet, publishing and promoting Latino literature has been left to the very few small, independent Latino presses that have survived a twenty-five-year process of industry consolidation. Although in the early 1970s these presses and magazines were burgeoning, including well over fifty outlets (not counting the grassroots and community newspapers that printed so much Latino literature), today less than a handful of presses issues together no more than fifty books yearly. The most productive are Arte Público Press, Bilingual Review Press, and Curbstone Press. 142


Although large commercial enterprises have begun to publish some Latinos, their preference is for highly commercial nonfiction books and memoirs written by television anchors and other celebrities, as well as for Latin American and Spanish best-sellers (by nonLatinos) and for self-help and how-to books. Publishers also pick up from small Latino presses writers that small presses introduced and helped to develop and promote, such as Ana Castillo,* Sandra Cisneros,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Dagoberto Gilb,* Gary Soto,* and others. Under these limits and constraints, it is no wonder that the few book fair and festival venues that do exist pander to the celebrity venue created by television and the large publishers who capitalize on small presses, often squeezing out authentic Latino literature in the same way that major entities keep their doors nearly closed to high-quality, authentic Latino literature. Sandra María Esteves reading at the first National Latino Book Fair The first Latino book fairs and in Chicago in 1979. writers festivals were quite a different affair, made up mostly of small presses and marginalized writers. The first National Latino Book Fair and Writers Festival was organized by Arte Público Press* in November 1979 at the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle. It featured writers as yet “undiscovered” by the major, commercial houses, such as Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, as well as the stalwarts who have to this day been published by the small independent presses, such as Miguel Algarín,* Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Abelardo Delgado,* Rolando Hinojosa,* and Tato Laviera.* The Second National Latino Book Fair and Writers Festival was held two years later in Houston, Texas, where Arte Público Press had relocated. It again featured Castillo and her chapbooks, Cervantes and her Mango magazine and chapbook series, Juan Rodríguez and his Relámpago Press, José Antonio Burciaga* and his Diseños Literarios (Literary Designs) publishing enterprise, Victor Hernández Cruz* and his Pocho Che publications, and Miguel Algarín, Ron Arias,* Evangelina Vigil,* Rolando Hinojosa, Tato Laviera, Gary Soto,* and 143


Gary Soto and Evangelina Vigil at the second National Latino Book Fair in Houston in 1981.

many others. In 1987, Arte Público Press once again held a book fair, this time in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which sought to create outreach for its national exhibition, “Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors.” This exhibition was part of a turning point in the evolution of Latino culture in the United States; the nineties would see a marked crossover to commercial media and growing national interest in Latinos. A similar evolution was marked by the Latino-organized literary festivals, which also started out as community-based affairs that attracted Latino writers from around the country, paying their own way to attend and read their works to the public, hawk their own books and run their own workshops. (For information on theater festivals, see TENAZ.) The first such large gathering was mainly a Chicano event, the Festival de Flor y Canto, which was held on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles in 1973, featuring some thirty-two writers, many from the Quinto Sol* and Con Safos* groups. The second and third Flor y Canto festivals took place in Austin in March 1975 and in San Antonio in June 1976. As a result of the latter, an anthology was published of the works of the participants; this became a tradition for the subsequent festivals, which changed their name to Canto al Pueblo and broadened their scope to include visual artists, muralists, musicians, and many other cultural workers. Ricardo Sánchez* became the prime mover of the first such festival to be held in the Midwest: the 1977 Canto al Pueblo held in Milwaukee,

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Wisconsin. That festival initiated the tradition of painting a mural during the festival as a permanent gift to the community. In the Corpus Christi Canto al Pueblo in 1978, the Nuyorican presence was particularly felt for the first time in the participation of Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero,* and Lucky Cienfuegos, in addition to their editor, Nicolás Kanellos.* There were subsequent Cantos al Pueblo, but by the early 1980s they had died out. In all, four Canto al Pueblo anthologies were published. On occasion, the names Flor y Canto and Canto al Pueblo are revived for one or another festival, symposium, or event, but no regularly scheduled or yearly event has continued or has replaced this spontaneous, self-organized literary and artistic celebration. In 2003, upon being named poet laureate of Sacramento, poet José Montoya* revived the Flor y Canto festival as a two-day event in which writers and artists of all cultures, bookstores, and cultural organizations took part. Likewise, universities and cultural organizations around the country organize or sponsor individual festivals today on an intermittent basis. One festival that is held each year is the Border Book Festival, founded and administered by Denise Chávez* in Mesilla, New Mexico. The Border Book Festival gained nonprofit status in 1995 and has since brought writers together—mostly from the United States, but also from northern Mexico. More a writers’ festival than a book fair, during the event the Premio Fronterizo (Border Prize) is awarded to a writer. Among the winners have been Rudolfo Anaya,* Tony Hillerman, Byrd Baylor, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Martín Espada.* Begun as the Texas Small Press Book Fair in 1984 and organized by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, the fair grew into the San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair and is a major cultural event for the city. Where once the event was a major venue for small, alternative presses, many of them Latino, today the Inter-American Book Fair features as the major draw the writers that large, New York commercial houses have on tour. Where once the book fair was held in the Guadalupe Center auditorium, today it takes place at Hemisfair Park in the heart of the downtown and at the center of tourism. Like the Inter-American Book Fair, which at one point saw itself as a cultural link to Latin America and as the major showcase for Latino writers, the Miami Book Fair International similarly started as a bilingual–bicultural event that showcased Latino writers. Founded in 1984 as Books by the Bay, a fair held in the streets of Miami, it evolved into the largest book fair in the country. Although Tom Wolfe has exaggerated somewhat by stating that the “Miami Book Fair international is the literary Mecca of the Western World,” it is, however, a major event where large commercial publishers showcase their authors, most of whom are non-Latino and who write in English or other European languages, as well as Latin American or Spanish authors whose works are translated to English. The fair still runs a section entitled “IberoAmerican Authors Program,” in which Spanish-speaking authors read from their works and participate on panels. Today, the book fair is a program of the

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Florida Center for the Literary Arts of Miami-Dade College and lasts a full eight days. One of the most interesting of the book fairs and festivals has been the recently founded Edward James Olmos Book and Family Festival, started in Los Angeles in 1999 by the eponymous actor. Olmos’s intention was to reinforce literacy among Latino families by drawing them out to a book fair that offered many other services and entertainments for the whole family. Thus, in all of its venues, the Book and Family Festival assembles booths of commercial and nonprofit organizations offering all types of services, including health, education, and social services, as well as commercial product producers, alongside booths run by presses and book stores. In the midst of singers, dancers, entertainers and education figures, writers read from their works and participate on panels with other literary and book industry people. The floor of the fair itself is broken down into distinct “villages”: the Book Village, the Health Village, the Culture Village, the Education Village, and the Children’s Village. In hopes that the Book and Family Festival would become a national event, Olmos spearheaded new chapters in Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and elsewhere. But only in Chicago and Houston, where there was both a vibrant Latino literary culture and an organization to take it on, did the fair not only catch on but eclipse its Los Angeles headquarters. Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, a grassroots literary organization founded and directed by novelist Tony Díaz, has run the fair for five years, drawing more than 20,000 people—mostly Latinos—to the George R. Brown Convention Center, where various stages and discussion rooms house the literary performances and discussions. Although the festival of some forty writers still programs local and national Latino writers, the Book and Family Festival, like the other national venues, devotes its main stage and most of its advertising to the television personalities and other writers promoted by the large commercial presses. Nuestra Palabra, which is a full-range literary organization sponsoring readings year-round, as well as workshops for school children and a literary talk show on Houston’s KPFT radio, has the promotional ability to make a success of the book fair and festival each year. The major cities where Latinos live, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all hold large book fairs. Unfortunately, all of these venues make no effort to include and highlight the Latino writers that reside in those cities; tokenism is the rule of the day. Thus, there is not only a need for more Latinorun venues that do not get co-opted by the power and wealth of the major media but also for a major effort to integrate these large fairs. Further Reading “Miami Book Fair International” (http://www.miamibookfair.com). “Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say” (http://www.nuestrapalabra.org).

Nicolás Kanellos Bordao, Rafael (1951–). Poet, editor, and scholar Rafael Bordao was born in Havana in 1951 but came to the United Status as part of the Mariel 146

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Boatlift.* After settling in New York City, he became one of the chief exponents of exile* poetry. He also studied for and received a Ph.D. in Spanish American literature from Columbia University in 2000 after defending his dissertation on the writings of Reinaldo Arenas.* In addition to editing such literary magazines as Sinalefa (Sinalepha) and La Nuez: Revista de Arte y Literature (The Nut: A Review of Art and Literature), Bordao published various collections of poetry, including Proyectura (1986, Projecture), Acrobacia del Abandono (1988, Acrobatics of Abandonment), Escurriduras de la soledad (Scurrying Solitude), El libro de las interferencias (The Book of Interferences), in a bilingual edition, Propinas para la libertad (Gratuities for Freedom), El lenguaje del ausente (The Language of the Absentee), Los descosidos labios del silencio (The Unstitched Lips of Silence), and Los despojos del sueño (The Spoils of Sleep), in a bilingual edition. Further Reading Piña Rosales, Gerardo, “Escurriduras de la soledad y El libro de las interferencias, de Rafael Bordao” Círculo. Revista de Cultura Vol. 28 (1998): 135–142.

Nicolás Kanellos Border Literature. Border literature is considered a fairly recent literary phenomenon resulting from greater interest in and study of immigration, global politics, cultural hybridization, and overall border life. Specifically, “border literature” refers to the U.S.–Mexican border as the geographical fringe extending two thousand miles that coalesced after the Mexican–American War in 1848. Such a boundary line embodies consistent contact and sometimes clashes where the two cultures merge or confront each other. It marks the point where they paradoxically face, on a daily basis, their distinct otherness as well as palpable similarities. As Charles C. Chester accurately points out, In North America, the phrase “border literature” evokes images of a harsh desert landscape split by markers, fences, culture, and language. Even for those whose interests lay single-mindedly on the Western United States, the plethora of commentary on the U.S.–Mexican border constitutes at minimum a persistent blinking light on their radar screen. It is enough to make one think that the North American continent has just one border. (Chester, 337)

Nonetheless, various concepts persist when discussing such a topic. Some cultural studies critics, philosophers, writers, and historians either emphasize a metaphorical border (a construct of diasporic movement) or a real one comprised of flesh-and-blood people where the First World and Third World meet. For example, Homi Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, and Ian Chambers, in Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity, focus on the former while not writing from the border, at the same time as Oscar Martínez, in Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez, Since 1848, and Luis Alberto Urrea,* in most of his narrative works, concentrate on the latter while writing on the border itself. A significant sector of Chicano critics and writers prefer the term “borderlands” as more 147

Border Literature

encompassing, such as Gloria Anzaldúa* in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies on Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, and Harry Polkinhorn, José Manuel Di-Bella, and Rogelio Reyes in Borderlands Literature: Towards an Integrated Perspective. Still others prefer the Spanish term fronteriza or literatura fronteriza to suggest a broader space while eluding geopolitical specificity. María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba and Debra A. Castillo, for instance, in Border Women: Writing from la Frontera, expand the term to include writings from both sides of the border by not privileging one side over the other because they consider the region a totality from both sides of the border. In effect, she reaffirms what Francisco A. Lomelí proposes in “En torno a la literature de la frontera: ¿convergencia o divergencia?”: that the region may more aptly be said to represent a third culture or zone of transculturation influenced by but distinct from the two respective national mainstream cultures. At the same time, “frontier literature” must not be confused with “border literature,” because the former alludes to a territory conquered by Anglo America and inhabited by Indians, Mexicans, and early Hispanic peoples. Its contentious nature is in part a result of the concept and theory of border, which tends to provoke perpetual controversies in its application and its attributes. Its essence of in-betweenness defies simple classification, inviting multiplicity, admixtures, and hybridity because of the fluidity and change that are fundamental factors in its makeup. As Juan Bruce-Novoa* observes, border discourse is characterized by “infinite crossing and recrossing” (52), making it a highly dynamic space of constant negotiations and borrowings where things and people seldom remain the same for long. The border, then, implies becoming or being in constant flux, because cultural syncretism is viewed as an endless process. More often than not, border literature in the United States involves the creative expression by Chicanos in dealing with their unique situation of a dual cultural background, including the topics of concern that stem from assimilation, acculturation, and identity, plus their modes of resistance to these circumstances. However, before the First Festival of Literatura Fronteriza in Tijuana in 1981, border literature was not even a category, although Américo Paredes,* in his famous 1958 study titled “With His Pistol in His Hand,” was one of the first to refer to a border corrido* (ballad) when he recreated the various versions of “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.” In the publication as a result of the festival in Tijuana, Litertura fronteriza: antología del Primer Festival San DiegoTijuana, Mayo 1981 (1982, Border Literature: Anthology of the First San Diego–Tijuana Festival, May 1981), the editors raise a series of questions: “¿qué entendemos por literatura fronteriza?, ¿se puede hablar de literatura fronteriza de la misma manera que se habla de literatura fantástica, social o literatura popular? Es decir, ¿tiene la literatura fronteriza características propias que la diferencian o asemejan a otras literaturas?” (What do we understand as fronteriza literature? Can we speak of fronteriza literature in the same way we speak of fan-

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tastic, social, or popular literature? That is, does fronteriza literature have its own characteristics that differentiate it or make it resemble other literatures? [Alurista 11]). Since 1981, the category has spawned a considerable body of work on the American side, although critics such as Tabuenca Córdoba and Debra Castillo claim that a sizeable volume of works has also been produced on the Mexican side to complement this transborder phenomenon. Notwithstanding such a perspective, it is safe to assert that Mexicans away from the border tend to reject borderism as a legitimate manifestation of Mexican culture at the same time that Chicanos sense that they cannot escape or deny it. For Mexicans, it is generally a place to ignore, but to Chicanos it represents a place they can’t afford to forget as a reminder of their origins. Thus border literature as a category depends in part on the eyes of the beholder; but it is clear that Chicanos have developed and embraced it more fully as a central trope and motif of their sociohistorical experience comprised of bisensibilities. The border tends to appear as a protagonist instead of simply operating as a backdrop, because the concomitant relationship between characters and the border is inherently symbiotic. They do not merely appear and function within a spatial arena but rather find their actions and worldview intimately tied, in great measure, to the binational environment in which they live. In contrast, Mexican writers tend to describe the border region as a major obstacle plagued by problems to overcome, as, for example, in Luis Spota’s Murieron a mitad del río (They Died in the Middle of the River), where the border is characterized as the end of the “cultural world.” The characters here face insurmountable odds of survival as death lurks around every curve of the vicious Rio Grande River. In other words, border stereotypes persist in central Mexico “. . . from the felt urgency of creating a strong and impenetrable sense of Mexicanness in the face of the national trauma of having lost half of its territory in the war with the United States” (Tabuenca Córdoba and Castillo 60). Mexican border writers such as Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Rosina Conde, Rosario Sanmiguel, and others resemble Chicano writers in their ability to capture the complicated social dynamics of the region but tend to portray their subject almost exclusively in Spanish while acknowledging that they are working against the grain of Mexican literature. Since the 1980s, border literature has taken a more central stage in terms of its importance and magnitude, partly fueled by the controversy of immigration and its impact in a national debate regarding the American social fabric. In Rethinking Borders, John C. Welchman points out how the theme of the border has proliferated in a number of venues, noting that a convincing critical framework has yet to be formulated. Chicanos have subsequently explored this category as a means to adequately qualify their dual cultural experience and the complicated nature of such a relationship. For Harry Polkinhorn, for example, this kind of literary expression is subversive because of its focus on examining otherness in a consistent way (“Alambrada” 31). He partially underestimates the differences between the kinds of expression

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found on both sides of the border by insisting that the two peoples find themselves in comparable deplorable conditions of marginality, poverty and disempowerment. In other words, he emphasizes the similarities in their situation while minimizing any differences. From this position has emerged a borderlands perspective, or what Rolando Romero terms a “Chicano Eden, the original paradise” (Romero 37), except that other Latinos have also embraced the concept to address broader issues such as class, ethnic, and gender differences. In most cases, however, border literature has become a thematic or theoretical subcategory couched within the overall framework of Chicano and Chicana literature. It should be stated that not all works in Chicano and Chicana literature are necessarily part of the border experience, although the latter has generally influenced it, shaped it, and been inflected by it in one form or another. Not all Chicanos are border dwellers; neither do they all derive recently from, or relate to, all that is Mexican. It is a matter of degree and affiliation, and sometimes self-identification. In addition, it can also be an issue of language choice or of language and dialectic choices. The most obvious examples consist of works that mention the border, take place within it, or directly depend upon its ambivalences, its capabilities for fusion and hybridities. Meanwhile, there are also works that contain elements from the border imagination without being grounded in that space per se. Every possible combination can be found in literary expression that is border literature or that has traces of it. What is undeniable is that Chicano and Chicana literature offers numerous examples as clear manifestations of border expression while presenting some subtle renderings. One of the first contemporary works, Pocho (1959), by José Antonio Villarreal,* introduced the conflict of divisions and affiliation between generations in a poignant way. Juan Rubio, the ex-revolutionary, flees Mexico after killing a man and eventually settles in northern California. That is, he crossed one physical border, but a series of borders unfolded before him that became magnified through his son Richard, who then grappled with his dual background. Although Juan simply transplanted his family from one space to another, Richard experienced greater changes, thanks to the internal borders he faced of identity, ethnicity, national label, generation, culture, and tradition. Even though the family moved north, their many borders followed them—most of the story involves reconciling differences. Dilemmas and contradictions haunt the family, but Richard is the only one who attempts to fuse his influences into a pocho (generally understood as a “white-washed Mexican”) mentality, although in his case he does not seek singular affiliations but ambivalence, tolerance, and flexibility. That is his ultimate answer for his borders. Such borders, then, serve as the larger context in this classic work. The border as a concept gained a new significance in 1968 when Alurista* proposed the resurgence of the myth of Aztlán,* which to many Chicanos became equivalent to the borderlands region of Southwestern U.S. from California to Texas. The contours of such a border took the shape of the states

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within that region to link them to ancient Aztec mythology as a means of proving lineage and origins. Almost immediately, borders for Chicanos multiplied into language and discourse, dual systems of symbolism, historical constructs, cultural models, and, most of all, mestizaje. Aztlán definitely impacted all aspects of Chicano life by overriding and undermining the notions of ahistoricity, segregation, inferiority, and a lack of agency and identity. In other words, a larger border was conceptualized as a way to erase or interrogate other borders. Alurista partly achieved all these goals in his canonic work Floricanto en Aztlán (1971), which revolutionized Spanglish as a viable form of expression thanks in part to an indigenously inspired poetics of Aztec antecedents. Certain border literature did not truly galvanize until the early 1970s, when Chicano writers—particularly novelists—set out to map epic paradigms of communities along the physical border. Ernesto Galarza* in Barrio Boy (1971) and Víctor Villaseñor* in Macho! (1973) retrace some of the steps of Pocho through the immigration pattern in which the protagonists are overwhelmed because of their confusion about how to conquer borders and cultural differences. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith,* with his Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973), Klail City y sus alrededores (1976), and Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery (1985), created an imaginary region based on the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas next to the Mexican border, where Anglos had coexisted with Mexicans for centuries. His invented Belken County is much like William Faulkner’s mythic Yoknatawpha, populated by a vast gallery of characters from all walks of life. The effect is one of a large, vital, dynamic community that indulges in its sociohistorical and cultural quirks. Another author, Miguel Méndez,* contributed to the mythification of the region through his Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974) by expanding the geographical arena into northwestern Mexico, thus appropriating symbolically a Chicano space. The border here operates as a landscape of exploitation and suffering, where the characters have to find their way out, much like figuring out how to escape from a labyrinth. Although entrapped, characters such as the protagonist Loreto Maldonado realize that their own escape route is found within. In that sense, they hold the answer to their greatest existential dilemma. In 1976, Aristeo Brito* in El diablo en Texas proposed a new way of depicting the border as a political binary that defies simplification because of its dual nature. The two towns on both sides of the border, Presidio and Ojinaga, appear as separate entities, but they are inextricably tied in every way possible like two sides of a mirror. Time is static, and history is a phantasmagoric purgatory of prolonged sameness through the cyclical periods of 1883, 1942, and 1970. The central message entails an acknowledgement that borders are man-made and perpetuated to promote political hegemony and power. In all these works, the border stands out as the main protagonist that drives the action and conditions the characters’ ways of being. By the 1980s, border literature assumed greater and more sophisticated representations, particularly when Chicana writers internalized the phenomenon

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in ways unlike male writers. The microcultural perspective suddenly took on new portrayals by exploring gender and other female-related borders in terms of what Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana Rivero call “infinite divisions” (Rebolledo and Rivero 4). Family, intrahistorical views, sexuality, class, and a more nuanced sense of identity emerged with considerable vigor and originality. Without a doubt, the most outstanding proponent of the border region, both theoretical and poetic, emerged with Gloria Anzaldúa* in her landmark work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which defined a mestiza consciousness. In fact, she suggests that mestizas represent the maximum expression of borderness: [La mestiza] has discovered she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid borders. The borders or wall that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. (Anzaldúa 79)

Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking work mixes essay with poetry, mythology with folklore, sexuality with psychology, history with politics, ethnography with anthropology, and identity with manifesto, producing a complex amalgamation of critical perspectives about her person as a border dweller. She openly embraces opposites and promotes syncretism even as she implores change for the historical victims of discrimination, alluding to women as those who have suffered the greatest abuse. The border is both her central trope and her mantra as she claims that difference can be celebrated as something that encases simultaneity, such as the various linguistic codes that mingle and acknowledge the construction of new meanings. Two other works of the 1980s that expanded the concept of border are Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985) by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas* and Irene Beltrán Hernández’s* Across the Great River (1989). The former functions as a repertoire of bilingual experimentation to show how two languages coexist naturally to create a plurivalent work of multiple connotations, and the latter represents the border as a physical battlefield of social problems contrasted with the internal female experience of family pressures and dysfunctionality, tribulations of immigration, and in-betweenness. But the physical border continued to exercise considerable influence in the 1990s among Chicanas, especially in and Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), in which both sides of the border figure almost indistinguishable as characters slip back and forth with ease as if it is all

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one common space. Within this region emerge issues of coming of age and humdrum details of ordinary lives. Cantú presents a highly experimental interplay between a fictional (auto)biography, a regional ethnography, and a series of photographs that appear to document the maturation of the young narrator. The technique serves well to metaphorize borders by representing divisions of different types consistently throughout the story. For example, the photographs of an album are like slippery Pandora’s boxes of endless narrations, suggesting that an image is worth a thousand words. Multiple borders appear beyond the bridge that the protagonist crosses as an inconsequential act—textual, visual, generational—but the world basically appears the same on both sides instead of different. Both fact and fiction about border life become central players of ambiguity, thus effectively expanding the notion generally held about the U.S.–Mexican border. One of the most controversial authors and performers is Guillermo Gómez Peña* in Warrior from Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (1993), The New World: Prophecies, Poems and Loqueras for the End of the Century (1996), particularly Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (1998), and others. His wacky creativeness stands out for its outrageous qualities where he mixes genres like a blender for the sake of demonstrating how border expression is more than synthesis and syncretism: it is about infinite admixtures and where the disparate takes on new forms of unpredictable expressions. As Tabuenca Córdoba and Castillo note, “The U.S.-Mexican ‘border’ popularized by Gómez-Peña displaces the actual physical border and all it contains” (Tabuenca Córdoba and Castillo 12). In other words, the border here takes on the personality of Gómez-Peña himself as a poet, pseudo-anthropologist, quasi-sociologist, poet, and nomadic voice as he turns himself into a living, breathing border. That he came from Mexico City at a mature age brings to bear what a border voice can be and, to some, what it should be. Either way, he provides a self-portrait of his search for borders and fabricates a new sense of borderness. More recently, authors such as Rubén Martínez* in The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico and Beyond (1992), Alicia Gaspar de Alba* in Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005), and Luis Alberto Urrea* in Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993) and The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004) deal with the more complex representations of borders, partly showing that convergence and difference are constant motifs. Martínez, for instance, concentrates on showing how borders, a breeding ground of future cultural forms, are becoming conflated as moving targets in a globalized world, while Gaspar de Alba and Urrea focus on the gruesome violence found within borders and how extreme suffering and criminality fall through the cracks between the two nations. Border literature has evolved considerably, but it is clear that it continues returning to some of its stereotypical representations. The main advancement is in terms of cultural concepts and sophisticated critical approaches that permit the development of a

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new discourse in an attempt to capture borders in a dynamic, interrelated way within the interbreeding forces of globalization. Further Reading Alurista, et al., Literatura fronteriza: antología del Primer Festival San Diego-Tijuana, Mayo 1981 (San Diego: Maize Press, 1982). Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987). Bruce Novoa, Juan, “The U.S.-Mexican Border in Chicano Testimonial Writing: A Topological Approach to Four Hundred and Fifty Years of Writing the Border” Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture Vol. 18, Nos. 1–2 (1995–1996): 32–53. Chester, Charles C., “Review of The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the Forty-Ninth Parallel” Oregon Historical Quarterly Vol. 108, No. 2 (Summer 2007): 337. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (Santa Clara, CA: Moving Parts Press, 1998). Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, Warrior from Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts, and Poetry (St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1993). Lomelí, Francisco A., “En torno a la literatura de la frontera: ¿convergencia o divergencia” Plural Vols. 15–16, No. 179 (Aug. 1986): 24–32. Lomelí, Francisco A., “The Border as a Moving Tortilla Curtain: Media and Chicano Literary Representation” in The Open World: Multicultural Discourse and Intercultural Communications, ed. Tatiana V. Voronchenko (Chita, Russia: The Zabaikalsky State University Press, 2007: 181–187). Polkinhorn, Harry, “Alambrada: hacia una teoría de la escritura fronteriza” in Borderlands Literature: Towards an Integrated Perspective, eds. Harry Polkinhorn, José Manuel Di-Bella, and Rogelio Reyes (San Diego: Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, 1990: 29–36). Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana S. Rivero, Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). Romero, Rolando, “Border of Fear, Border of Desire” Borderlines Vol. 1, No. 1 (1993): 36–70. Saldívar, José David, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Tabuenca Córdoba, María Socorro, and Debra A. Castillo, eds., Border Women: Writing from la Frontera (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). Urrea, Luis Alberto, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1993). Welchman, John C., “The Philosophical Brothel” in Rethinking Borders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Francisco A. Lomelí Borderlands Theater. Tucson’s Borderlands Theater was founded in 1986 by a board and small staff with experience in community based theater. Barklay Goldsmith has served as its founding director, a position he has maintained since serving as the director of Tucson’s Teatro Libertad, an 154

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activist Chicano theater that evolved into the Borderlands Theater. Borderlands programs grew from three productions to six in 1997. Borderlands has produced the works of such playwrights as Edit Villarreal, Bernardo Solano, Silviana Wood, Toni Press-Coffman, Elaine Romero, Luis Alfaro,* Joan Holden, and Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda. Since 1988, the company has administered the Border Playwrights Project, which commissions and develops plays through workshops and readings and subsequently produces them in world premieres. More than fifty scripts have been developed to date. One or two play productions per year result from this process. Recently, the Borderlands Theater has opened its programming to the works of Mexican playwrights. Borderlands first occupied the Teatro Carmen as its first home, but in 1990 relocated downtown at the Centro Cultural de Las Americas and has used the state of the art facilities at Pima Community College for staging its plays. Further Reading http://www.borderlandstheater.org/index.html.

Nicolás Kanellos Borge, Jorge. See López, José Heriberto Borinsky, Alicia (1946–). Buenos Aires–born poet and novelist Alicia Borinsky grew up speaking both Spanish and English; she came to the United States in 1967, fleeing the dictatorial regime in her homeland the same year she graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1967 with a degree in literature and philosophy. Borinsky writes in Spanish and English and has garnered a number of awards, including the 1996 Latino Literature Award for Fiction for her novel Sueños del seductor abandonado (1996, Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer, 1998). Her other books include La ventrílocua y otras canciones (1975, The Female Ventriloquist and Other Songs), Mujeres tímidas y la Venus de China (1987, Timorous Women, 1992), Mina cruel (1989, Mean Woman, 1993), La pareja desmontable (1994, The Collapsible Couple, 1999), Madres alquiladas (1997, Rented Mothers), Cine continuado (1997, All-Night Movie, 2002), and Las ciudades perdidas van al paraíso (2003, Lost Cities Go to Paradise). Borinsky has had the good fortune to have had each of her books published in English translation either in the United States or in Great Britain. Borinsky is also the author of a book of creative microfictions set in Buenos Aires, Golpes bajos/Low Blows/Instantáneas/Snapshots (2006). Probably Borinsky’s most daring fiction is her picaresque novel set in postdictatorial Argentina: Cine continuado is a baroque mélange of popular culture, tango, movies, and feminism. Her latest work is a bilingual volume of poetry, Frivolous Women and Other Sinners/Frívolas y pecadoras (2008). Borinsky’s works have been anthologized and published in numerous venues, including The Massachusetts Review, Confluencia, The American Voice, Under the Pomegranate Tree, New American Writing, Tameme, and Beacons, among others. A U.S. citizen, she has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2002) and a lecturer at various universities. 155

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Currently Borinsky directs the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. She is also Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature and Director of Latin American Studies at Boston University. Borinsky received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish American literature at the University of Pittsburgh in 1968 and 1971, respectively, and is also a renowned literary critic. Further Reading Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina (1950–). Chicana* poet Miriam Mijalina Bornstein, who first signed her works as Miriam Bornstein-Somoza, was born on February 19, 1950, in Puebla, Mexico, to a Mexican mother and a Polish–Jewish father. Bornstein immigrated to the United States in 1964 and eventually became a naturalized citizen. Perhaps continuing her father’s interest in writing, Bornstein began writing poetry at an early age and continued throughout her college and professional life. She earned all of her degrees, B.A. (1973), M.A. (1976), and Ph.D. (1982), in Spanish at the University of Arizona and went on to become a teacher, and later a professor. While still in graduate school, Bronstein began publishing poetry in periodicals and anthologies, an activity that continued almost to the new millennium; today she has been concentrating on her academic publishing. During the 1970s, Bornstein became one of a few Chicana writers to publish a book: Bajo cubierta (Under Cover) (1976), and she was one of the few Chicanos of either genre to prefer writing exclusively in Spanish. On the whole, her poems here deal with the limits placed upon women’s creativity and aspirations by the patriarchy. It was not until 1993 that Bornstein published her second book of poems, Donde empieza la historia (Where History Begins), made up of fifty-four poems that reveal a mature feminism inspired in the theories of such authors as Gloria Anzaldúa and capable of representing women’s epic struggle for empowerment. The book does not just indict the patriarchy but reaches out to men to join in the struggle; similarly, it not only concentrates on Chicano liberation but also looks to the Third World. Further Reading Rodríguez, Alfonso, “Miriam Bornstein” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 14–19).

Nicolás Kanellos Bornstein-Somoza, Miriam. See Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina Brammer, Ethriam Cash (1971–). Ethriam Cash Brammer is a Chicano writer, born on April 14, 1971, and raised in the border community of El Centro, California. He completed his B.A. degree in literature and creative writing at the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and his master’s in creative writing at 156

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San Francisco State University in 1996 and did some work on a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Houston. While studying at UCSD, Brammer worked under the tutelage of Quincy Troupe and Fanny Howe, as well as of prominent Chicano literary scholars such as George Mariscal and Rosaura Sánchez. In 1993, he was awarded the Steward Prize in Poetry from the Department of English at UCSD and was later nominated Poet Laureate of the University of California system during his senior year. At San Francisco State University, he worked closely with fellow Chicano writers Alejandro Murguía and Juan Felipe Herrera.* At Houston, he worked with Nicolás Kanellos on the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage* program and began studying literary translation. While still living in the Bay Area, he won the Mother Tongue Award in 1996. Ethriam Cash Brammer. Brammer has gone on to publish widely in poetry, fiction, children’s writing, and literary translation. His work can be found in various national magazines and journals, such as The Americas Review, The Bayou Review, and Razateca, as well as in numerous anthologies, such as Cantos al Sexto Sol (Songs to the Sixth Sun), Herencia (Heritage), and Latino Heretics. His book-length literary translations include a number of significant works of early Latino literature, including The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, by Daniel Venegas* (2000), Lucas Guevara, by Alirio Díaz Guerra* (2003), The Border Patrol Ate My Dust, edited by Alicia Alarcón* (2004), and The Texas Sun, by Conrado Espinosa* (2007). Children’s books written by Ethriam Cash Brammer include My Tata’s Guitar/La guitarra de mi tata (2003), and The Rowdy, Rowdy Ranch/Allá en El Rancho Grande (2004), which was awarded Special Recognition by the judges of the 2005 Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Brammer’s other awards include the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s annual award in fiction (1996), the Mother Tongue Award at San Francisco State (1996), and a poetry prize awarded by the University of California, San Diego (1993). He is currently living in Detroit with his wife Sandra and son Julian and is a member of the faculty of Wayne State University. Further Reading Tatum, Charles M., Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

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Brandon, Jorge. See Orality Braschi, Giannina (1953–). Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican experimental author who champions the use of code-switching in literature, the frequent move from one language to another (in this case from English to Spanish and vice versa). Her book Empire of Dreams (1994) is her most representative work. Braschi was born to a well-to-do family in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on February 5, 1953. She traveled throughout Europe, moving to New York City when she was twenty-two years old. At the age of twenty-seven, she earned a Ph.D. from the State University of New York and by the time she was thirty, she was gathering scholarly and literary laurels: a grant from Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana (Institute for Ibero-American Cooperation) in Madrid (1980), the publication of her first book of poetry, Asalto al tiempo (1981, Assault on Time), and of a book of criticism, La poesía de Bécquer (1982, The Poetry of Bécquer), and an appointment as minority faculty at Rutgers University (1983). After two more books—La comedia profana (1985, The Profane Comedy) and Libro de payasos y bufones (1987, Book of Clowns and Buffoons)— she published her best-known work, El imperio de los sueños (Empire of Dreams), consisting of poems and a short novel, in 1988. A book about New York City and the lives of immigrants who live there, the three-part volume examines the intricacies of the English language, the vitality of street life in Manhattan, and newcomers’ attempts to become part of the city—even to possess it. The book, which proved popular in Spain and in Latin America, was translated into English in 1994 as Empire of Dreams. In 1998, Braschi published Yo-Yo-Boing. Once again, the novel consisted of three parts: “Close-Up,” about woman evaluating her emotional and intellectual capabilities, “Blow-Up,” a Spanish–English conversation about life, and “Black-Out,” where the author includes herself in the narrative. According to comments reviewer Carolyn Kuebler, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (1995), “Braschi writes with a strong poetic tradition behind her, and from her erudite standpoint she forges an odd mixture of poetry, prose, drama, and a little of what could be considered music. She imbues her text with jollity . . . She uses words for their rhythms and image-making, rather than to tell a story or to describe a fixed object or idea” (168). Braschi’s writings have been translated into several languages, including French, Russian, and Serbian. She is currently working on a series of essays on the effects of the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, on New Yorkers, especially those who, like her, had lived near the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan, and experienced misplacement. Further Reading Kuebler, Carolyn, “Empire of Dreams” The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 1995): 168–170.

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Braschi, Wilfredo (1918–1995). Wilfredo Braschi was a Puerto Rican essayist and short story writer. His profiles of Puerto Rican actors and writers appeared in numerous journals and popular newspapers, such as El Mundo (The World). Born in New York City in 1918 (according to some sources, 1919), Braschi was raised in Puerto Rico, where he received his B.A. and M.A. from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in 1949 and 1952, respectively. After working for many years as a teacher and journalist, writing for such newspapers as La Democracia (Democracy) and El Mundo (The World), he earned a Ph.D. in literature from the Universidad de Madrid in 1953. He then taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras and also worked as an editorial writer and commentator for newspaper, radio, and television on the Island. In 1958 and 1961, the Institute for Puerto Rican Literature presented him with awards for his journalism. Braschi was interested in theater and wrote extensively on the subject. He also wrote short stories that depicted Puerto Rican characters and local settings. His collections of stories include: Cuatro caminos: Crónicas de un viaje (1963, Tour Roads: Chronicles of Travel), which won a literary prize from the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Literature Institute), Metrópoli (1968, Metropolis), and La primera piedra (1977, The First Stone). His essays on theater were published as Apuntes sobre el teatro puertorriqueño (1970, Notes on Puerto Rican Theater). Through his writings, Braschi treasured Puerto Rican talent while also promoting Puerto Rican culture and traditions. Braschi was also the director of the School of Communication of the Universidad de Puerto Rico. By the time of his death in 1995, Braschi was considered one of Puerto Rico’s most gifted short story writers. Further Reading “Wilfredo Braschi” in Enciclopedia Puertorriqueña: Siglo XXI, Vol. 1 (Santurce, PR: Caribe Grolier, 1998: 249).

Nicolás Kanellos Brinson Curiel, Barbara (1956–). Chicana poetic stylist Barbara Brinson Curiel was born on December 11, 1956, in San Francisco and raised among the diverse Latin peoples in the Mission District of that city. The child of an Anglo American and Mexican American working-class family, she received her primary education in Catholic schools, where she began writing poetry by age eight. It was a high school teacher, poet Paul Shuttleworth, who stimulated her reading and growth as a poet. Brinson Curiel went on to double-major in English and Spanish at Mills College (B.A., 1979) and graduated with an M.A. in Spanish from Stanford University (1981) and a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of California–Santa Cruz (1995). While still an undergraduate, she began publishing poems and writing staged plays: “Guadalupe” (1978) and “Tongues of Fire” (1981). Her first book of poems, Nocturno (1978, Somber), explored themes common to the era in ethnic poetry: the search for identity, both ethnic and

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poetic, made more acute by her experience growing up in an ethnically mixed family. Brinson Curiel’s chapbook, Vocabulary of the Dead (1984), was more introspective and spiritual than the poems in her first book. In 1989, she published the collection Speak to Me from Dreams, poems exploring the conflict between pain and beauty in life. The collection also evinces Brinson Curiel’s significant readings in Spanish and Spanish American literature as well as in Aztec and Mayan mythology and verse and is a model of Spanish–English code switching. Brinson Curiel’s distinctions include the Ina Coolbridge Circle award for poetry (1979) and Third Woman Poetry Prize (1986). While raising two children and embarking on an academic career, Brinson Curiel has suffered hiatuses in her creative writing. Barbara Brinson Curiel is director of ethnic studies and a professor of English and women’s studies at Humboldt State University. Further Reading Quintana, Alvina E., Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Sánchez, Ramón, “Barbara Brinson Curiel” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 61–64).

Nicolás Kanellos Brito, Aristeo (1942–). A writer of fiction and novels during the early Chicano Movement, when most creative writing was dominated by poets, Aristeo Brito was also an anomaly in that his preferred language was Spanish— and that he was a stylistic innovator in that language. Born in Ojinaga, Mexico, on October 20, 1942, Brito was raised in Presidio, Texas, where he labored in the fields with his family up through high school. He went on to college and received a B.A. in English in 1965 from Sul Ross State University, in Alpine, Texas, and a Ph.D. in Spanish in from the University of Arizona in 1978. After that, he went on to a career teaching Spanish and Chicano literature at Pima Community College in Tucson. In addition to publishing stories in periodicals, in 1974 Brito published eight short stories and seventeen poems in Spanish dealing with such diverse themes as cultural identity, religiosity, and death in his first book, Cuentos i poemas (Stories and Poems). This was followed by his best-known work, the novel El diablo en Texas (1976, The Devil in Texas), which explores the history of the border towns of Presidio and Ojinaga, which, before the imposition of a border, were a single town: Ojinaga, Mexico. The novel thus examines the growing imposition of Anglo American culture on the residents. Brito constructs a mythical town, likened to Hell not only because it represents the hottest climate in the United States but because of the the labor camps where agricultural workers are exploited. In 1990, the novel was reissued in a bilingual edition, The Devil in Texas/El diablo en Texas, and won the Western States Arts Federation’s award for best novel.

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Further Reading Gutiérrez-Castillo, Dina, “Aristeo Brito” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 34–39). O’Connell, Patrick, “El diablo en Texas: un discurso chicano frente a una lectura posmoderna (novela del autor Aristeo Brito)” Explicación de Textos Vol. 30, Nos. 1–2 (2001): 35–47.

Nicolás Kanellos Brown Berets. The Brown Berets were a militant civil rights organization that produced thousands of poems, essays, and street theater actos during the Chicano Movement.* Very little of their writings, often read out loud at protest meetings and marches or published in community newspapers, have been collected or studied. The genesis of the Los Angeles Brown Berets was at Camp Hess Kramer, a 400-acre spread in the rolling hills just east of Malibu, California. In April 1966, in an effort to address such problems as gangs, school drop-out rates, and access to college education among Mexican American youths, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Council and community leaders met with some 200 teenagers from various backgrounds in round-table discussions. The next year, many of the same young people attended a follow-up meeting at the camp. Here the leadership qualities of David Sánchez (a youth worker for the Episcopalian Church of the Epiphany under Father John Luce) stood out, and he earned a place on the Mayor’s Youth Council, which then elected him chairman. Aware from first-hand experience of the tension existing between the police and Mexicans in Los Angeles, Sánchez tried to bring up the issue to the youth council, but was rebuffed. This experience showed him that working through the system was often cumbersome and ineffective. In the summer of 1967, age seventeen and still working for Father Luce, Sánchez wrote a successful proposal to the Southern California Council of Churches for funding to start the Piranya coffee house—envisioned as a hangout to keep teens out of trouble. Sánchez invited friends from Camp Hess Kramer to form the Young Citizens for Community Action (YCCA). Initially, the group tried to work within the system, but the social ferment that characterized East Los Angeles during this time radicalized the YCCA. The Los Angeles Police often harassed the group because of its criticism of law enforcement tactics, and the young Mexican Americans in turn became more alienated from the officials. In March 1968, the group attracted national attention when it helped organize a walkout of East Los Angeles high school students in protest inadequate education conditions. Then, in early June, Los Angeles County officers arrested thirteen persons (the LA Thirteen), some of them members of the YCCA, for organizing the walkouts. By now the group became known as the Brown Berets, a moniker stemming from the color of the headgear the young Chicanos had begun to wear as part of their paramilitary uniform. Many militant organizations sported berets

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during this era, most famously the Black Panther Party, made up of Marxismspouting activists whose antics Sánchez and his cohorts saw first-hand in California. After much legal maneuvering, the county dropped charges against the LA Thirteen. By 1971, internal dissension led to the erosion of the organization. Although later that year Sánchez began La Caravana de le Reconquista (The Reconquest Caravan), a tour of the Southwest designed to proliferate Brown Beret ideas, this tactic did not stem their continuing decline. In an attempt to dramatize their cause, twenty-six Brown Berets occupied Santa Catalina Island in August 1972, arguing that the Channel Islands were not ceded in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. After a twenty-four-hour occupation, the sheriff’s department forced the Brown Berets back to the California mainland. Immediately after this event, Sánchez disbanded the organization. At one point, the Brown Beret leadership exceeded five thousand, but its collapse probably reflected the inability of the group to create an ideological base able to resonate among the general Mexican American community. Further Reading Marín, Marguerite V., Social Protest in An Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1966–1974 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).

F. Arturo Rosales Bruce-Novoa, Juan (1944–). Perpetually in search of the illusive form, Juan Bruce-Novoa sees himself as the product of constant movement— geographical, intellectual, and artistic. He was born on June 20, 1944, in San José, Costa Rica, to an American father and a Hispanic mother. A year after his birth, his family moved to San Antonio, Texas, and then, in 1948, to Denver, Colorado, where Bruce-Novoa received his primary and secondary education in Catholic schools. He went on to receive a B.A. from Regis College (1966), as well as an M.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1974) in Spanish American literature from the University of Colorado. Bruce-Novoa went on to become a prominent literary critic and professor of Chicano literature at such institutions as Yale University, Trinity University, the University of California–Irvine, and Universität Mainz and Universität Erlangen–Nurnberg in Germany. At the start of the 1990s, finding himself alone in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, with time before classes began, Bruce-Novoa took up a short story he had been slowly grooming for publication and began to work on it. Within a few days, he found himself working around the clock, fully possessed by the characters: a self-conscious narrator as well as the subject and object of his own obsession: the ever present, ever-illusive Ann Marisse. “I had no idea where it was going, but that only made it more intense,” Bruce-Novoa says. “My only interest in writing it was pleasure.” That passion, that obsession, the source for his inspiration, gave birth to Bruce-Novoa’s first novel, Only the Good Times (1995). It is the story of one artist whose first love fosters an obsession that becomes his muse and the foundation for his successful cinematographic career. 162

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While at Yale, teaching Chicano literature from 1974 to 1983, Bruce-Novoa was part of a prolific creative writing group. It was at that time he published his only book of poetry, Inocencia Perversa/Perverse Innocence (1976), and began publishing short stories. He also edited a literary journal there, Cambios Phideo (Noodle Changes) that had a decent circulation and impact on Chicano academic writing. He remembers that during those years his creative writing seemed as voluminous as his critical writing, yet it was the latter that found its way into print in a more visible way. The critical writing, in effect, defined him as a critic—something he claims he never intended nor actually wanted to become. He has nevertheless been awarded Mexico’s Plural Prize for Literary Criticism (1989), the José Fuentes Mares Prize for Literature (1989), and a Fulbright Fellowship to teach in Juan Bruce-Novoa. Germany (1983–1984, 1990). In 1978, Bruce-Novoa wrote a novel that he says he had the good sense not to publish. On the other hand, his first two books on Chicano literature attracted much attention, sealing his fate, in a sense, as an academic writer. However, he always felt somewhat uncomfortable within the general field of ethnic letters. He felt that much of that writing focused too narrowly on exterior social concerns, ignoring the intimate life of emotion, passion, and eroticism. His stories and poetry, mostly written in Spanish, seemed the opposite of what critics and readers expected of Chicano writing. Once, at an early reading of the manuscript of Only the Good Times at Harvard, when asked by a student about the difference between writing criticism and fiction, Bruce-Novoa responded that when he feels best about critical writing, the two are virtually the same. “One pursues a good piece of reading to relive it and never lose the feeling of discovery and encounter,” Bruce-Novoa says. “And one’s purpose in critical writing is the same as in the novel. In both cases readers should be able to dispense with the author and enjoy the reading directly, fall in 163

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love with it, and in the end, remember the reading, not the author.” Bruce-Novoa is the award-winning author of various articles and books, including: RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature (1990), Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (1960), and Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (1982). Currently he is a professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California at Irvine. Further Reading Lawhn, Juanita Luna, “Juan Bruce-Novoa” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, First Series, Vol. 82, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989: 55–58).

Carmen Peña Abrego Burciaga, José Antonio (1940–1996). Chicano poet, fiction writer, muralist, and graphic artist José Antonio Burciaga was a pioneer in bilingual writing as well as one of the few poets involved in the Chicano Movement to cultivate humor and satire in his works, which usually had a political content. Born in El Paso on August 23, 1940, into a family so poor that it resided in the basement of a synagogue, he nevertheless benefited from a home where reading and literature were valued, his mother having been a schoolteacher in Mexico. Burciaga spent four years in the Air Force—three of them in Zaragoza, Spain—and upon returning home, earned a B.A. in fine arts at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1968. He then pursued a career as a graphic artist in Mineral Wells, Texas, all the while writing poetry, stories, and nonfiction journalism. It was while residing in California in 1974 that Burciaga began publishing columns in newspapers and magazines, some of which were distributed through the Hispanic Link news service, while others were published in such venues as the San Jose Mercury News. Burciaga published most of his poems, short stories, and other literary pieces in Latino small-press magazines such as Mango, Revista Chicano-Riqueña (The Chicano-Rican Review), and Grito del Sol (Shout of the Sun) and was considered a leader in the Chicano literary movement. His works were also anthologized widely, and his participation in book fairs and literary festivals was constant. In Menlo Park, California, Burciaga founded a publishing company, Diseños Literarios (Literary Designs), through which he marketed his own greeting cards. It was through Diseños Literarios that he published his first anthology of poems, issued as a coanthology with Bernice Zamora: Restless Serpents (1976). The collection features twenty-nine poems and short prose pieces by Burciaga, including romantic and idealistic works as well as social criticism and satire in Burciaga’s patented bilingual style. In this volume, Burciaga took particular aim with his biting irony at the nation’s hypocritical bicentennial celebration. In 1979, Burciaga continued the satirical note in his outrageously funny satire of American culture and its symbols in Drink Cultura, which was issued by Lorna Dee Cervantes’s* Mango Publications. In 1981, he issued his more lyrical collection Versos para Centroamérica (Verses for Central America), which was also a shared anthology with Guatemalan American poet Amy López, published through Diseños Literarios. In 1988, the short-lived Pan American University 164

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Press published his tongue-in-cheek commentary as Weedee Peepo: A Collection of Essays. His book of poetry and drawings, Undocumented Love (1992), won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Burciaga’s outrageous humor found an additional venue in the performing arts. He was a founding member of the nationally recognized improvisational comedy troupe Culture Clash,* for which he performed from 1984 to 1988. Before he died of stomach cancer on October 7, 1996, Burciaga was able to see new editions of some of his work as well as another new book published: Spilling the Beans: Lotería Chicana (1995, Spilling the Beans: Chicano Bingo). Burciaga was able to compile a collection of Latino wit and wisdom before he died, although it was published posthumously: In Few Words/En Pocas Palabras: A Compendium of Latino Folklore and Wit (1997). In 2008, novelist Daniel Chacón* published a compilation of Burciaga’s works under the title The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, issued by the University of Arizona Press. Burciaga’s contribution to literature was recognized in 1992 with the National Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. Burciaga was also honored by induction into the El Paso Hall of Fame. Further Reading De La Fuente, Patricia, “José Antonio Burciaga” in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Chicano Writers, Vol. 82 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989: 59–64). Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G., “The Humanity and the Literature of José Antonio Burciaga” Aztlán Vol. 22, No. 2 (1997): 207–227.

Nicolás Kanellos Burgos, Julia de (1914–1953). The most recognized and respected female poet in Puerto Rican history, Julia de Burgos was born on February 17, 1914, in Santa Cruz, Puerto Rico, into an economically disadvantaged family that, despite its poverty, encouraged and supported Julia’s education. In 1935, she received her degree in education from the University of Puerto Rico and became a teacher in rural Puerto Rico, where her love of nature influenced her writing. Here, and later in San Juan, she wrote many of her memorable poems celebrating the Puerto Rican countryside. Inspired by the movement for independence of Puerto Rico, she published her first book, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Exact Poems to Myself), in 1937 and wrote children’s plays while living and working in San Juan. Also in San Juan in 1938, she published one of her most successful books, Poemas en veinte surcos (Poems in Twenty Rows). In 1939, she was awarded the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture poetry prize for Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth). In 1939, Julia de Burgos moved to New York City, where she became active in the Puerto Rican nationalist movement and was associated with the Juan Antonio Corretjer’s liberationist newspaper Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), in which she published many of her most famous poems. She spent somewhat more than a year in Cuba and then returned to New York in 1942, where she lived in isolation, depression, and alcoholism for the next eleven years. In 165

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1946 she received the prize for journalism from the Puerto Rican Literature Institute for an editorial she wrote in Pueblos Hispanos. In 1953, her body was found on a New York City street without any identification. Today she is celebrated for her elegant lyricism and her commitment to freedom, women, and her country. De Burgos’s works have been published posthumously as her fame has increased through the decades: El mar y tú, y otros peomas (1954, The Sea and You, and Other Poems) and Obra poética (1961, The Poetic Works). Various collections of poems have been translated to English and published as Roses in the Mirror (1961) and Song of the Simple Truth (1995).

Julia de Burgos.

Further Reading Martínez Masdeu, Edgar, ed., Actas del Congreso Internacional Julia de Burgos (San Juan, PR: Ateneo Puertorriqueño, 1993). Rivera, Carmen, Julia de Burgos: Child of Water (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos Burk, Ronnie (1955–2003). Poet Ronnie Burk is one of the most indiviudalistic and innovative writers to come out of the Chicano* poetry movement. A gay, hippie nomad—both geographically and creatively—Burk has wondered throughout the United States and abroad, studying and affiliating himself with the 1970s Chicano writers in the San Francisco Bay Area and the early 1980s writers assembled around the Nuyorican* Poets Café in New York City, and, later, with Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse collective in New Orleans, with New York poets from the Beat Generation, with performers in the Living Theater, and with the Act-Up movement in San Francisco—when not studying Buddhism at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, or traveling in Mexico or the Hawaiian Islands to participate in native peoples’ movements. Burk has cast his lot with the downtrodden of the Earth and has placed his eclectic pen at their service, dipping into the inkwell of blues, Buddhism, French surrealism, and Chicano and Puerto Rican bilingual poetry—his sources and inspiration defy analysis and enumeration. Born on April 1, 1995, 166

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in the town of Sinton, south Texas, to an Anglo sharecropper father and a Mexican American farmworker mother, Burk came out of the closet as a homosexual in high school. He soon dropped out of school, let his hair grow, and became a target for the open racism and homophobia rampant at that time in south Texas, in part because of his apparent hippy attire and habits. Burk left his hometown and practically never stopped moving as he pursued his career as a poet, supporting himself with scores of menial jobs. His single-minded pursuit of the poetic art not only resulted in his wandering but also in the uninterrupted flow of poems that he published in scores of periodicals. Along the way, Burk also published a rich array of chapbooks, including En el jardín de los nopales: Poems 1976–1977 (1979, In the Garden of Nopales, revised in 1983), The Single Hand Alphabet Collage Poem (1981), Father of Reason, Daughter of Doubt (1996), Scrolls of White Cabbage (1997), Mutations (1998), Indios Verdes (1998, Green Indians), Man-of-War (1999), Mandrágora (1999, Mandrake Root) and The History of America (1999). Burk died in San Francisco on March 12, 2003. Further Reading Hernández-Avila, Inés, “Ronnie Burk” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 20–28).

Nicolás Kanellos Burton, María Amparo Ruiz de. See Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Byrne, Bonifacio (1861–1936). Famed patriot in the war for Cuban independence and author of the most famous poem to the Cuban flag Bonifacio Byrne was born in Matanzas, Cuba. Byrne was a writer from an early age; when he was sixteen, he published his first poem and his first collection in book form in 1893. But he made his living as a journalist, and founded the newspapers La Mañana (The Morning) and La Juventud Liberal (Liberal Youth) in 1890. As an activist in the cause of independence, he was forced into exile in the United States in 1896, where in Tampa he founded the Club Revolucionario (Revolutionary Club). While making his living as a lector (reader) in tobacco factories, he wrote articles for many of the political newspapers issuing from New York, including José Martí’s Patria (Homeland). He and Wenceslao Gálvez* were coeditors of New York’s satirical political newspaper Cacarajícara: Batalla seminal contra España (Cacarajícara: Weekly Battle against Spain). He also published his poems in these periodicals and, in 1897 in Philadelphia, published a collection of some of his most patriotic verse, Efigies (Effigies), which may be seen as an apotheosis of the figures that would constitute the Cuban national pantheon: the indigenous rebel leader Hatuey, José Martí,* Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and so on. Despite its heroic tone, his poetry here and in most of his publications was firmly in the Modernist tradition. After the war with Spain was over, he returned to Cuba and served in various governmental capacities, including 167

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that of superintendent of provincial schools. He continued his literary and journalist life and during the remainder of his days was treated as a national hero and celebrated poet. Further Reading Lazo, Raimundo, “Bonifacio Byrne a los cien años” Universidad de la Habana (July–Dec. 1961).

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C Caballero, Pedro (1894–?). Born in Caguas, Puerto Rico, Pedro Caballero was a writer, journalist, and educator. His name was well known among the growing artistic and intellectual Hispanic community gathered in New York City during the 1930s not just because of his work as the editor of Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters), but also because of his achievements as writer and educator. According to his biography, published in Artes y Letras, Caballero was the graduate of a normal school, completed his education between the University of Puerto Rico and Columbia University, and taught in Caguas and Vega Baja. Once in New York City, he fulfilled duties as secretary and treasurer of the local chapter of the Association of Teachers of Spanish and worked as a Spanish teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. He also published in various newspapers and magazines in Puerto Rico and in the United States as well, including the Bulletin of High Points. His connection to Puerto Rico was always represented in his writing, and he was always considered a writer of the island by other writers and intellectuals such as the Puerto Rican poet and writer Trinidad Padilla de Sanz (also known as la Hija del Caribe), who wrote about him in prestigious magazines, such as Puerto Rico Ilustrado (Puerto Rico Illustrated). His novels, Paca Antillana. Novela Pedagógica Puertorriqueña (1931, Paca of the Antilles: A Puerto Rican Pedagogical Novel) and Enfermeras de Amor. Una Novela de las Antillas (1935, Nurses of Love: A Novel of the Antilles)—both published in New York City—demonstrate his ideological position within the emerging discursive field of Puerto Rican writing in New York: showing Puerto Rican culture but

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above all proving that Puerto Ricans, and Hispanics in general, had an estimable culture and tradition that “eradicate the Spanish Black Legend,”* a task that he assigned to Spanish teachers in foreign lands, expecting them not just to teach Spanish language but culture as well. Even beyond their aesthetic accomplishments, these two novels are important because they show that a modern, artistic, intellectual, literary, and academic community was taking shape as a result of the communication and cultural exchange among New York, Puerto Rico, Latin America, and Spain. Paca Antillana is the narrative of how two Puerto Ricans, Paca and Rozafel, succeed in foreign lands; its subtitles state what ought to be our inclinations towards the reading: it is a “Pedagogic Puerto Rican novel” and a “descriptive oeuvre,” characteristics that are later confirmed by the plot. In its dedication, Pedro Caballero pointed out that he wanted to write a pedagogical novel because that was a literary genre that had not been developed in Puerto Rico; therefore, this text follows the precepts of a buildungsroman, building and developing the personalities of its two main characters throughout the narrative from their beginnings in Caguas to their success in New York, their travels and adventures in Europe, and their final settlement in Puerto Rico. What is most important about these two characters is that they represent Caballero’s perspective on culture, education, and arts. Rozabel Mirabela becomes a Spanish High School teacher in New York, and Paca grows to be the Antillean Josephine Baker, both of them manifestations of the Puerto Rican culture that Caballero sought to emphasize in his career as a teacher as well as in his journalistic and literary writing. The uses of chronicles to represent pictures—in the tradition of cuadros costumbristas—of the journeys in foreign lands made by Rozabel or Paca are also evident in his second text, Enfermeras de Amor. This novel is a geographic, cultural, literary, and artistic travel log of Tom Bernstein’s and Nellie Williamson’s trips to Europe, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Its plot hinges on the relationship between the officer Bernstein and his nurse, Williamson; their romance begins when Bernstein is hospitalized for an inexplicable depression that is successfully cured by his nurse Williamson. Enfermeras de Amor is meant to be an easy text, as stated on its first page; it was addressed to Caballeros’ American students to be an easy reader that would not require using the dictionary to understand it. This also explains why its pages are filled with descriptions of artists, writers, places and spectacles whose main purpose is to portray the culture of Puerto Ricans and Hispanic people not just in the island but in New York as well. In spite of Caballero’s celebration of American values, such as education, progress, and modernity, both novels follow a traditional perspective regarding women and their place in society. Despite Paca’s and Nellie’s professional achievements, their futures seem to be confined to the home, raising children and taking care of their husbands. The same has to be said about Caballero’s perspective on race: his sympathy for black Puerto Ricans came from the awareness of the discrimination they faced in Puerto Rico and the 170

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United States, which prevented them from being better citizens. However, he did not identify with them either racially or culturally. The fact that Paca was black allowed Caballero to show that black Puerto Ricans can also be educated and that they also belong to the Hispanic culture, tradition, and race. Although Paca comes from a rural family and is a fatherless girl forced to survive shining shoes while living with her mother under the protection of her godmother and her teacher, Rozafel, she succeeds in her wishes to be white and beautiful: she embodies the personification of culture and progress. Paca evolves from the black stereotype of a wild black girl into a modern flapper and businesswoman in the Hispanic community of New York; she gains and education and becomes a famous actress in Paris. Here was one of the ideological peculiarities that distinguished many of the Puerto Rican intellectuals in New York City, including Pedro Caballero: they were supportive of Puerto Rican independence and honored their Spanish heritage but at the same time found privileges in the American colonization and modernization of Puerto Rico. Pedro Caballero’s work, writing, and ideological position on immigration and education were representative of Hispanic intellectual elites in the city. His role in society was to write as well as to educate and serve as a mediator for modernity, as stated in several of his articles published in Artes y Letras from 1934 to 1936. Even if different in many ways from Jesús Colón’s early crónicas,* Caballero’s editorials similarly tried to defeat social stereotypes about Hispanic people and culture. His editorials focused on the interests and problems of the Hispanic colonia in New York City, and although he was concerned about the bad image Americans were propagating of this community, he also contested the wider opinion that Hispanics lacked educational and cultural background. Although he addressed more heterogeneous—American and Hispanic—and middle- to upper-class readers, his editorials emphasized the need for speaking a proper Spanish versus a corrupted American slang, criticized the existence of bilingual education in Puerto Rico and emphasized the need for learning English. He denounced the discrimination that Puerto Ricans and Hispanic children in general were facing in the schools when being evaluated and measured by the same tools as native English-speakers, and he also encouraged the cultural and artistic endeavors of Hispanic people and American functionaries in Spanish Harlem. The recovery and support of good manners and sociability were among his concerns, as was the preservation of Hispanic traditions. His editorials approached the issue of mestizaje and constantly invoked Hispanic countries, cultures, and legacies. His editorials, as much as the rest of the collaborations of the magazine, denounced the European wars, and—although Artes y Letras published renowned pro-independence figures such as José Enamorado Cuesta, and although Caballero himself supported Puerto Rican independence—his editorials criticized the riots and protests taking place in Puerto Rico during these years. Taken with illness, he retired to his native Caguas in July 1936 contributing from Puerto Rico only news and brief essays about cultural life in the island. 171

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Further Reading La Hija del Caribe, “Enfermeras de Amor. Del Insigne profesor D. Pedro Caballero” Artes y Letras (May 1935): 6. “Pedro Caballero. Pedagogo puertorriqueño,” Artes y Letras (May 1934): 1. Silva de Cintrón, Josefina, “Hace 25 años.” Artes y Letras (May 1925): 5.

María Teresa Vera-Rojas Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. See Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, Ezequiel (1864–1917). Born near Las Vegas, New Mexico, on April 11, 1864, Ezequiel Cabeza de Vaca received his college degree from the Jesuit St. Regis College, taught school for a while, and then worked on the railroad until 1891. That year, he began his journalistic career with the leading Spanish-language newspaper, La Voz del Pueblo (The Voice of the People), published by Félix Mártinez (an originator of Partido del Pueblo Unido, an affiliate of the national Populist Party). After helping organize the party, Cabeza de Vaca became the editor of La Voz del Pueblo in 1900, a position that allowed him to enter the orbit of political power in New Mexico. In Las Vegas, he became an active member of the Sociedad Literaria y de Ayuda Mutua (Literary and Mutual Aid Society*), an association of intellectuals whose main purpose was to raise funds for the education of poor children. Cabeza de Vaca became a notable debater of literary issues—political speech was forbidden—and a contributor to the outstanding library the Society developed, which, although amassing works by American, English, French, and German authors, among others, only had their works in Spanish translation. In his last years, Cabeza de Vaca served as the Society’s librarian. Throughout his career and in addition to his literary activities, Cabeza de Vaca was also a theater enthusiast and actor in the La Sociedad Dramática Hispano-Americana (The Spanish American Dramatic Society) and the Club Dramático de Las Vegas (Las Vegas Drama Club). At the state constitutional convention in 1910, Cabeza de Vaca fought for provisions to protect the rights of Mexicans. Cabeza de Vaca was elected Lieutenant Governor in the state’s first elections in 1911 and governor in 1916. He died on December 30, 1916, only two months after he began his term as governor. Many New Mexicans believe that had he lived, Cabeza de Vaca would have fought for universal educational and civil rights. Further Reading Arellano, Anselmo F., “Governor Don Ezequiel C. de Vaca” (http://perso.orange.fr/ rancho.pancho/Governor.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Cabeza a de Vaca, Fabiola (1894–1991). Fabiola Cabeza a de Vaca was born on May 16, 1894, into a New Mexico ranch family. She received her teaching degree from New Mexico Normal School in 1921 and, later, a degree in Home Economics from New Mexico State University. She became a renowned nutritionist, working on Indian reservations, and, in 1950, for the 172

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United Nations in Mexico; in the 1960s, she worked as a consultant for the Peace Corps. It is possible that Cabeza de Baca was the first Mexican American nutritionist. Cabeza de Vaca took pen in hand to record the culinary heritage of New Mexico, a mission that she accomplished with various unconventional cookbooks that included Historic Cooking (1942) and The Good Life (1949), in which she provided stories and descriptions of folk life and ritual in addition to recipes; she thus memorialized the almost-forgotten and fast-disappearing culture of the Nuevomexicanos and the role that women played in this culture. In We Fed Them Cactus (1954), Cabeza de Vaca recreated the life and customs of the first Hispanics to settle on the New Mexico plains and documented how much was lost with the coming of the Anglo Americans. All three books have enjoyed recent reprintings. Abiola Cabeza de Vaca died on October 14, 1991. Further Reading Padilla, Genaro M., “Recovering Mexican American Autobiography,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, eds. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro M. Padilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 153–178). Ponce, Merrihelen, The Life and Works of Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, New Mexican Woman Writer: A Contextual Biography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Cabrera, Lydia (1899–1999). Short-story writer and folklorist Lydia Cabrera was born on May 20, 1899, in Havana, Cuba. Home-schooled because of illness, Cabrera eventually earned a college degree and became one of Cuba’s preeminent scholars of Afro-Cuban folklore and religion. Born into a family of means—her father was a judge and historian—she was educated in Paris, where she lived for eleven years and where she published her first book of AfroCuban tales: Cones negres de Cuba (1936, Black Tales from Cuba). Returned to Cuba since 1938, she conducted anthropological and folkloric studies of the Afro-Cuban populations with roots in Yoruba and published a foundational text in its study: El Monte (1964, The Forests). She immigrated to the United States in 1960 after the Cuban Revolution triumphed. Throughout her career both in Cuba and in Miami, where she resided since 1960, Cabrera collected, studied, and published Afro-Cuban legends and tales. She also studied and documented Náñigo secret societies and other manifestations of African and Catholic religious syncretism. Most of Cabrera’s fiction is also based on the Afro-Cuban folklore that surrounded her during her childhood. Her narrative style is direct and owes much to the modes of oral performance and delivery of Afro-Cuban folklore. In both Cuba and the United States, Cabrera’s work has had an enriching impact on literature by introducing the themes and culture of a previously ignored and misunderstood base of Cuban and Caribbean literature and culture. Her first, most groundbreaking collection, Cuentos negros de Cuba (Black Tales from Cuba) was published in Havana in 1940, although it was written and circulated as early as 1936. Among her most important fictional works are Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea (1971, Ayapá: Turtle Stories), Francisco y Francisca: Chascarillos de 173

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negros viejos (1976, Francisco y Francisca: The Spicey Anecdotes of Old Black Folk), Cuentos para adultos, niños y retrasados mentales (1983, Stories for Grown-Ups, Children and the Mentally Retarded), and Cuentos negros de Cuba (1993). In 1987, Cabrera was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Miami. Further Reading “The Life and Times of Lydia Cabrera: An Interview with Mariela A. Gutiérrez,” University of Waterloo (http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/arts/gutoerrez.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Cadilla Ruibal, Carmen Alicia (1908–1994). Poet and journalist Carmen Cadilla Ruibal is considered one of the most important representatives of Puerto Rican romanticism. She is considered one of the components of the trio of poets, along with Julia de Burgos* and Clara Lair, who established a modern women’s esthetic in Puerto Rican poetry. Nevertheless, her works are more introspective and less dramatic and combative than are the verses of the other two women. On July 27, 1908, Carmen Alicia Cadilla was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Her attraction to writing, coupled with her poetic ability, allowed her to study under Gabriela Mistral at the University of Puerto Rico. At the age of eleven, Carmen traveled to New York, for reasons unknown. Cadilla studied Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1937, she traveled to Havana, where she studied journalism and married William Ruibal. At the beginning of her career, she belonged to the Atalayismo literary group and published her poems in magazines and newspapers throughout Puerto Rico. Later, she became director of the magazine Alma Latina (Latin Soul) and worked in educational magazines for the Puerto Rico’s Public Instruction Department. In her first published book, Los silencios diáfanos (1931, The Diafanous Silences), Cadilla established the features that would characterize her entire poetic output: pure lyricism, intimate sincerity, and rejection of excess and stridency. She remained true to this style in her thirteen books of poetry. Her first collections of poetry were all published in Puerto Rico during the years of 1933–1939. In 1938 she formed part of a commemoration of the massacre of Ponce for which she wrote the poem I, published in a special edition along with Francisco Matos Paoli and Josemilio González. During the 1930s, Carmen participated in literary and patriotic social gatherings with the group Musarañilandia (Faraway Land), and her poetry was published in the New York magazine Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters). Before leaving the island for Cuba, where she would develop the rest of her career as a poet, Cadilla was honored at the Escuela Superior de Humacao with a presentation that analyzed the style, rhythm and overall poetic structure of her works. In Cuba, she studied journalism and wrote another collection of poetry, Voz de las islas íntimas: poemas de viaje (Voice of the Intimate Islands: Travel Poems). She also published Ala y ancla (Wing and Anchor) in Havana, but the exact dates of her stay in Cuba are unknown and are not clarified by her sub174

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sequent publication by Cuban publishing houses. Some of the magazines in which her works can be found are Puerto Rico Ilustrado (Puerto Rico Illustrated), Alma Latina (Latin Soul), and Asomante (Emerging). Carmen Alicia continued to publish her poetry until 1969, when she published her last collection, Tierras del alma (poemas de amor) (Soul Lands [Love Poems]). After this, she moved to New York and started her work with children’s literature in conjunction with the Northeast Regional Curriculum Adaptation Center and National Assessment and Dissemination Center for Bilingual Education. Her work during this last period of her life encompasses children’s literature and a few prologues she wrote before her death in New York in 1994. Unlike her poetry, these works try to preserve Puerto Rican culture in the environment of the U.S. continent, emphasizing Puerto Rican national values in young readers’ minds. Carmen Alicia was honored with several awards—Certamen Literario Panamericano (Panamerican Literary Prize), Buenos Aires’ Revista Americana literary prize (1936, Review of the Americas), and an award from the Círculo de Escritores y Poetas Iberoamericanos (Spanish American Writers and Poets Circle). Cadilla was not only an admired and celebrated Puerto Rican poet of the 1930s but also one of the first persons to produce bilingual literature for Puerto Rican children in the United States. Further Reading Acevedo, Ramón Luis, Ellas también: poetas puertorriqueñas de ayer y de siempre (San Juan, PR: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2002). Ferrer Canales, José, Presentación de Carmen Alicia Cadilla ante el Círculo José A. Balseiro de la Escuela Superior de Humacao (Humacao, PR: n.p., 1938).

María Arnedo and Luziris Pineda Calaca Press. Founded in 1997 by former members of the Unión del Barrio community activist organization, Calaca Press of San Diego is a family-owned publishing house dedicated to publishing emerging and progressive writers. Committed to social justice and human rights, Calaca Press strives to bring about change through the literary arts. From poetry and the spoken word to fiction and creative nonfiction, Calaca Press showcases authors from a community that has been marginalized and pushed to the side in literary circles, as well as in the real world, for far too long. Recognizing the need for more publishers of Chicano and Latino literature, Calaca Press also actively encourages and assists individuals in self-publishing or starting their own presses. Understanding the need for historical continuation, Calaca Press is committed to continuing the tradition of the Chicano and Latino presses and publishing houses of the 1960s and 1970s that flourished because of community support and the need to have previously untold stories told. To date, Calaca Press and its imprint, Red Calaca Arts Publications, have published nine chapbooks, including works by Alejandra Ibarra, Leticia Hernández-Linares and Rod Ricardo-Livingstone, spoken-word CDs by such poets as Guillermo Gómez-Peña,* Raúl Salinas,* Elba Rosario Sánchez and 175

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Olga Angelina García Echavarría, and eleven books that include titles by Alurista,* Tatiana de la Tierra, and Manuel J. Vélez. Further Reading www.calacapress.com.

Nicolás Kanellos Calleros, Cleofas (1896–1973). Community leader and popular historian Cleofas Calleros was born on April 9, 1896, in Río Florido, Chihuahua, Mexico, and immigrated to El Paso, Texas, with his family in 1906. Calleros obtained his education in El Paso, including a degree from Draughton Business College. He served in the Army in World War I and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1918. As well as working for the Catholic Church in various capacities, Calleros developed a career as a columnist for El Paso newspapers, most importantly researching and writing articles about the history of El Paso and its surrounding region. In this capacity, he won numerous awards, including the Daliet Award, 1925–1928, and the award of the American Association for State and Local History (1952). In 1954, he co-authored a book with Marjorie F. Graham based on his newspaper columns: El Paso—Then and Now; in 1953 he published another co-authored book with Angel Alcázar de Velasco: Historia del Templo de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (History of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe). Calleros was also awarded honorary degrees in fine arts and history from New Mexico State University and the University of New Mexico, respectively. Further Reading “Calleros, Cleofas,” The Handbook of Texas Online (www.lib.utexas.edu/online/articles/ view/CC/fcadb.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Camacho, Simón (1821–1883). The Venezuelan poet, essayist, and newspaper columnist Simón Camacho, the nephew of the famed South American liberator Simón Bolívar, lived first as a diplomat in New York and later as a political exile from his native land from the late 1850s until his death in 1883 in Washington D.C., where he was representing Venezuela as a diplomat. After studying law in Caracas, Camacho served as secretary to the national congress until his exile. His travels took him to Peru, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the United States, but it was in New York that he found employment and writing opportunities with Spanish-language newspapers and publishing houses. Often writing under the pseudonym of “Nazareno” (The Nazarene), Camacho wrote about life in New York City and the United States in general, often for periodicals in Cuba and other Spanish American countries. These crónicas* were gathered and published as Cosas de Estados Unidos (Things about the United States) in 1864. The columns document in detail, at times with humor or satire, such American customs as weddings, superstitions, social relations and general customs, as well as such serious themes as the American Civil War. 176

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In these crónicas, Camacho was one of the first commentators to describe the life of Hispanics living in the United States and, at that early date, to note the process of assimilation to American customs that was taking place in the Hispanic community. He was also one of the first to comment on the customs of American women and contrast them with those of Spanish America, a theme that would become constant in the literature of immigration. In New York in 1883, he also published a collection of stories, Los cuentos de mi abuela (My Grandmother’s Stories), in which he includes episodes in the life of Simón Bolívar narrated to him by his grandmother. Camacho also signed his numerous poems with the same pseudonym; again they were widely published in periodicals in the United States and Spanish America. Following his interest in folklore and English-language authors, he collaborated with Jean Roemer in 1855 in the compilation of an anthology of oral lore, Nuevo Tesoro de chistes, máximas, proverbios, reflexiones morales, historias, cuentos, leyendas, extractadas de las obras de Byron, Walter Scott, Washington Irving . . . (New Treasury of Jokes, Maxims, Proverbs, Moral Reflections, Histories, Stories, Legends, Taken from the Works of Byron, Walter Scott, Washington Irving . . .). In 1858, Camacho published a documentary about Venezuelan political affairs, La vuelta del general J. A. Páez á Venezuela (The Return of General Páez to Venezuela). Camacho’s command of English was considerable, and he published various translations to Spanish, including young adult novels. In Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Lima, Camacho published other books of a historical and literary nature. Further Reading Machado, J. E., Escarceos bibliográficos (Caracas: Bol. B.N., 1925). Nuñez, Eduardo, Juan Vicente y Simón Camacho en Perú (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1963).

Catalina Castillón Camarillo y Roa de Pereyra, María Enriqueta (1872–1968). Born on January 19, 1872, in Coatepec, Veracruz, writer María Enriqueta Camarillo y Roa de Pereyra created an extensive body of literary works. She was the daughter of Alejo Camarillo Rebolledo and Dolores Roa Bárcena de Camarillo, who was the sister of writer José María Roa Bárcena. In 1870, the family relocated to Mexico City, where María Enriqueta was able to study at the Conservatorio Nacional (National Conservatory), from which she graduated as a piano teacher in 1895. That same year, the family moved to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, where her father was appointed to a political position. Three years later, María Enriqueta returned to Mexico City upon her marriage to the historian Carlos Pereyra on May 7, 1898. Her first trip outside of Mexico was in 1910, when her husband was named First Secretary in the Mexican Embassy in Havana, Cuba. After that, she traveled to the United States, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Italy, and France. Under the pseudonym of María Enriqueta, she wrote prose, poetry, children’s literature, and travel journals, as well as articles for several newspapers. Her writings were translated to Portuguese and French. As part of the Porfirio Díaz 177

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regime, her writings were influenced by her education under the dictator’s rules of order and progress. Her writing is traditional, conservative, and didactic, avoiding completely the inclusion of the historical moments in which she lived, including the Mexican Revolution. Influenced by romanticism and modernism, she is considered by critics not to belong strictly to either of these movements but to fluctuate between them. She was a member of the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of the Young), where she was surrounded by the most important intellectuals of her time, including her close friend Gabriela Mistral.* Her writings appeared in Revista Azul (Blue Review), El Mundo Ilustrado (The Illustrated World), El Espectador (The Spectator) and Crónica (Chronicle). She also wrote for La Prensa (The Press) in San Antonio, Texas, and La Opinión (The Opinion) in Los Angeles, among other newspapers. María Enriqueta lived in Spain for thirty-two years (1916–1948), where she produced most of her writings and where she was regarded as an important poet and writer of her time. In 1927, she was awarded the title of Correspondent to Cádiz’s Spanish American Royal Academy for Science and Art. In 1948, she received the Isabel la Católica award and the Cross of Alfonso el Sabio. Although she only lived for a short time in the United States, her influence in this country was well marked by the continuous publication of her writings in exile newspapers. Her texts reflected the ideals of México de afuera* ideology, emphasizing the importance of the preservation of morality and culture. Included among her books are Las consecuencias de un sueño (1902, The Consequences of a Dream); Rumores de mi huerto (1908, Rumors from My Garden); Rosas de la infancia (Roses from Infancy), a series of five anthologies of readings for student of primary school; Mirlitón (1918); Jirón del mundo (1919, A Piece of the World), El Secreto (1922, The Secret), Sorpresas de la vida (1921, Surprises in Life); Entre el polvo de un Castillo (1924, In the Dust of a Castle); El misterio de su muerte (1926, The Mystery of His Death); Enigma y símbolo (1926, Enigma and Symbol); Álbum sentimental (1926, Sentimental Album); Lo irremediable (1927, The Irremediable); Cuentecillos de cristal (1928, Little Crystal Stories); El arca de colores (1929, The Chest of Colors); Del tapiz de mi vida (1931, From the Tapestry of My Life); Fantasía y realidad (1933, Fantasy and Reality); and Hojas dispersas (1950, Scattered Pages). She died c. 1968 in Mexico City. Further Reading Domenella, Ana Rosa, and Nora Pasternac, Las voces olvidadas: antología crítica de narradoras mexicanas nacidas en el siglo XIX (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1991). Robles, Martha, La sombra fugitiva (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1885).

Carolina Villarroel Cambeira, Alan (1941–). Alan Cambeira, a fiction writer and author of overviews of Dominican culture, was born in Samaná, the Dominican Republic, and came to the United States as a child in the 1940s, after his family lived for some time in the Caribbean island of Barbados. He spent his adolescent years in Philadelphia and New York, where the greater part of his education took place 178

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from secondary through graduate school. Cambeira earned a bachelors degree in Spanish from Pennsylvania State University in 1962. Subsequently, he completed a master’s degree in latin american literatures and cultures at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1970, after which he began a teaching career serving as an adjunct instructor of Spanish language and Latin American culture for various campuses of the City University of New York throughout the first half of the 1970s. University-level teaching, instructional supervision, and administration occupied Cambeira for much of the following period of his life, during which he also traveled in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, enlarging his knowledge of the human family, his awareness of cultural diversity, and his sensitivity to questions of difference. Apart from English, the language of his schooling, he perfected his native Spanish and acquired significant knowledge of Portuguese and French while living overseas. In the second half of the 1980s, Cambeira worked in his native country as a field investigator for a rural community–development support team operating in the cities of Neiba and Barahona through the Centro Dominicano de Estudios de la Educación (Dominican Center for Educational Studies), a nongovernmental organization focusing on the educational advancement of the peasantry. His first book, La fobia antihaitiana en la cultura dominicana (1987, Anti-Haitian Phobia in Dominican Culture), which he wrote in Spanish, may have been triggered by his experience upon returning to his native land. Back in the United States, Cambeira resumed his teaching career by a five-year long affiliation with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after which he taught at the Community College of Philadelphia as a Visiting Lecturer in Caribbean Cultures during the 1993–1994 academic year. Finally, in 1994, he began a long association with several of the colleges that comprise the Atlanta University Center consortium in Atlanta, Georgia, including Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, and Morris Brown College, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literatures and Cultures, also serving as Chairperson of the Department of World Languages. Cambeira’s Atlanta years correspond with a period of scholarly and literary productivity. At that time, he authored his best-known nonfiction book, Quisqueya La Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (1997), an oft-cited historical overview of Dominican heritage that focuses on political developments, national identity, and cultural traditions. In 2001, Cambeira published Azúcar! The Story of Sugar, the first part of a trilogy of novels that explores the stifling existence of sugar cane workers, focusing on the life of the protagonist, a thirteen-year-old girl named Azúcar who grows up without knowing about her biological parents and whose only source of protection in her unkind surroundings is her aging grandmother, Doña Fela. The following year, Cambeira’s second book about Dominican society came out, ¿Quiénes son los dominicanos? Caleidoscopio turbulento de la identidad dominicana (2002) (Who Are the Dominicans? The Turbulent Kaleidoscope of Dominican Identity), another overview of Dominican heritage written in Spanish and intended for a general readership unfamiliar with the basics of the country’s history and culture. 179

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Since 2003, when he ended his association with the Atlanta University Center, Cambeira has devoted himself primarily to his writing, and especially to fiction. The second volume of the trilogy, Azúcar’s Sweet Hope, and the third, Tattered Paradise, appeared in 2004 and 2007, respectively. In the former, Azúcar’s experience in Canada, where she has attained an advanced academic degree, leads to her employment as regional director of a luxury tourism complex back in her homeland; in the latter, she sees her hopes for conducting company business in a way respecting the dignity of her people—reducing their exploitation and improving the quality of their lives—miserably defeated by the voracity of corporate capitalism in the era of globalization. A remarkable turn in Cambeira’s biography has been his decision to go back permanently to his native land, resettling in his hometown of Samaná, where he has lived since 2005, a return that points to the possible permanence of the idea of home as land of origin for someone who has lived outside of his country of birth for over half a century. Indeed, the fact that while in the United States he never published anything dealing with life in the receiving society may suggest that, mentally, he never left Samaná. Further Reading Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernandez, The New Americans: The Dominican Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998: 118–120).

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Campa, Arthur León (1905–1978). Born on February 20, 1905, in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico, to American parents (his father was a Methodist minister killed during the Mexican Revolution by Francisco Villa), folklorist and scholar Arthur León Campa was raised in El Paso, Texas. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of New Mexico in 1928 and 1930, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1940. From 1933 to 1942, Campa rose from the position of instructor to become a full professor at the University of New Mexico. From 1942 to 1945, he served in World War II as a combat intelligence officer, suffering a back injury and winning a Bronze Star. After the war, he returned to the University of New Mexico and also served as a Department of State Lecturer in Spain (1953) and a cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Lima, Peru. During the 1960s, he served as a language coordinator for the Peace Corps

Campo, Rafael

and directed Peace Corps training programs in Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. He was named to the national academies of scholars in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Spain. In the United States, his work in collecting and studying the folklore of New Mexico and the Southwest served as a basis for Chicano scholarship, and especially for the study of folklore and literature that blossomed in the 1970s. Campa served as the regional editor of Western Folklore as well as on various other editorial boards. Campa won many awards for his numerous books, most of them pioneering collections and analyses of Hispanic folklore of the Southwest. His last, all-embracing vision is represented by his book, Hispanic Culture in the Southwest. Further Reading Campa, Arthur L., Hispanic Culture in the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Campo, Rafael (1964–). Born in Dover, New Jersey, to an Italian American mother and a Cuban father, Rafael Campo attained a prestigious and privileged education, not only earning the degree of medical doctor from Harvard Medical School (1992) but also serving as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (1986). Since graduating from Harvard, he has served as a researcher and working doctor in Boston-area hospitals. His career as a poet began as an undergraduate at Amherst College, where he created a collection of poems as a creative writing honors thesis while also majoring in neuroscience. From then on, his career has been replete with writing awards, including a George Starbuck Writing Fellowship to Boston University (1990), the Agni Poetry Prize (1991) and The Kenyon Review Writer of the Year award (1992). Campo has published his poems and belles lettres in numerous magazines, including The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, and Prairie Schooner. His first collection of poems, The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1990), explored Latino ethnicity, gay identity, the responsibility of doctors in the age of AIDS, and the meaning of family. His work is as formalistically elegant and uniformly well crafted as it is concerned with deep human values. It won the National Poetry Series 1994 Rafael Campo. 181

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Open Competition and was also a finalist for the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award (1995), among others. Campo’s other poetry collections include What the Body Told (1996), a Lambda Literary Award winner; Diva (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize; Landscape with Human Figure (2002), which won the Gold Medal from ForeWord; The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry (2003); and The Enemy (2007). His latest work, The Enemy, conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, takes on some of the most tendentious issues in American cultural life, including the “War on Terrorism,” AIDS, feminism, gay marriage, and immigration. The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (1997) was also a Lambda Award winner. In addition, Campos’ poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies—including Best American Poetry 1995, Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1996), Gay Men at the Millennium (1997)—and periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Washington Post Book World. Further Reading Rendell, Joanne, “Drag acts: performativity, subversion and the AIDS poetry of Rafael Campo and Mark Doty” Critical Survey Vol. 14, No. 2 (May 1, 2002): 89–103.

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Campos, Tito (1967–). Tito Campos was born on April 9, 1967, in Los Angeles, California. His father, Leopoldo, had left his birthplace of Chihuahua, Mexico in search of a better life. Campos’ mother, Josefina, was born in El Paso, Texas and her father moved the family to Los Angeles in the 1950s. Eventually, Josefina and Leopoldo met while roller-skating in East Los Angeles and married soon thereafter. The couple had three children: Paul, Priscilla, and “the baby,” Campos. Growing up in Los Angeles introduced Campos to many different cultures. Leopoldo, a Baptist minister, founded Iglesia Bautista de Redentor (Baptist Church of the Redeemer)—a church for Spanish speakers in South Central Los Angeles. Del Redentor shared the church grounds with an African American congregation, and Campos has vivid memories of worshipping with them once a month. “I’d go to East L.A.,” recalls Campos, “and describe the rituals that the African Americans had practiced during Sunday service. All my friends would be enthralled as I told them about the gospel music and people fainting in the aisles. I think they thought I was making everything up.” Because the Campos family did not have much money in those days, Leopoldo would take the family to any event that was free. “We’d go to Native American Pow Wows, Chinese New Year Celebrations, and Jewish festivals. I think I was the only kid in East L.A. who wore a yarmulke,” said Campos. Growing up in East L.A. also meant developing a deep sense of pride in his own raza. Campos recalls seeing a young Edward James Olmos in the title role of Luis Valez’s* Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum. “I was in the fourth grade 182

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and wanted to go see the play with my dad and older brother,” recalls Campos. “They didn’t want to take me, but I cried so loud that they changed their minds. I’m so glad that I cried my eyes out because that night was magical. I can still remember the huge switchblade cutting through the newspaper in the opening scene. That night began a loving relationship between the theater and me, which has only gotten stronger over the years.” Campos also remembers going to rallies in support of the United Farm Workers. Today, Tito supports up-and-coming Latino artists in the Los Angeles area. Going through the Los Angeles public school system as a student, Campos later returned to LAUSD as a teacher. He taught at some of the same schools that his mother attended when she first moved to Los Angeles from El Paso. Most recently, Campos has worked in LAUSD’s Central Offices in a special program that helps support paraeducators in their quest to become teachers. “My mom was a paraeducator for over twenty-five years. She wanted to become a teacher but it was difficult. She made sure my sister and I became teachers. When I help another paraeducator become a teacher, I feel like I’m accomplishing my mother’s dream,” says Tito. Campos received his B.A. and M.Ed. at California State University, Los Angeles in 1995 and 1998, respectively. In 1999, he received the César Chávez Humanitarian Award. Currently, he is assistant principal at an elementary school in Los Angeles. He continues to serve as an adjunct professor in the Charter College of Education at California State University, Los Angeles. Campos’ first children’s book, The Muffler Man/El hombre mofle (2001) promptly became a finalist for the Tomás Rivera* Mexican American Children’s Book Award. The book ingeniously focuses its tale of immigration and cultural adaptation on the son of a folk sculptor of figures made out of old car mufflers. Campos continues to write new pieces. “There’s so much more that I want to say. Writing helps me understand myself, my people and society, my world and my universe a little bit better.” Further Reading Schon, Isabel, The Best of Latino Heritage, 1996–2002: A Guide to the Best Juvenile Books about Latino People (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 2003).

Carmen Peña Abrego Canales, José T. (1877–1976). José T. Canales was born in Nueces County, Texas, on March 7, 1877. He served in the Texas State Legislature, representing south Texas from 1912 to 1928. In 1910, Canales married Annie Wheeler of Houston. On January 31, 1918, at special hearings motivated by the severity of Texas Ranger brutality, numerous Texas officials, including State Representative José T. Canales, called for curtailment of their authority. As Canales put it in a letter to C. H. Pease, a legislator who opposed his efforts, “I want to clear out a gang of lawless men and thugs from being placed . . . in the character of peace officers to enforce our laws.” Such mounting public criticism tarnished the Rangers’ romantic image. Canales was elected county judge in 1914 and served in that capacity until he returned to the state legislature 183

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in 1917. His desire to help his people led him to become a civil rights activist. Judge Canales drafted the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Constitution in Corpus Christi in 1929 and then served one term as the fourth president of LULAC. Elected at the height of the Great Depression, in 1932, Canales saw education as the best hope for Hispanic Americans and promoted the establishment of the LULAC Scholarship Fund, providing young persons an opportunity for higher education. As a civil rights pioneer, Canales was a prolific writer of opinion pieces and letters to the editor for newspapers. He was also an essayist and revisionist historian who tried to rescue Mexican American contributions to Texas and United States history in such books and pamphlets as Juan N. Cortina Presents His Motion for a New Trial (1951), A Tragic Quadrangle (1957), La Guerra de Texas (1959), and Bits of Texas History in the Melting Pot of America (1950–1959). A devout Catholic, he considered Catholicism a fundamental part of Hispanic culture in Sobre la fe de nuestros padres (1950, also published in English: On the Faith of Our Fathers) and he penned the biographies of saints in Builders of Character and Leaders of Men (1957), Builders of Character and Leaders of Men, Second Series (1959) and Joan of Arc, Maid of Orleans (1959). Further Reading Larralde, Carlos, “J.T. Canales and the Texas Rangers,” The Journal of South Texas History Vol. 10 (1997): 38–68.

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Canales, Viola (1959–). After starting school in McAllen, Texas, her place of birth, Viola Canales learned English and became such a model student that she went on to college at Harvard University, from which she graduated in 1986, and Harvard Law School, from which she received her J.D. in 1989. Despite her successful career as a lawyer practicing in a Los Angeles firm and serving in the Small Business Administration under President Clinton, Canales decided to return to her early love of writing, which she had cultivated as a means of remembering and retaining her life on the border when she was a scholarship student in an Episcopal boarding school in Austin, Texas. In 2001, she published her first collection of stories dealing with border lore and culture, Orange Candy Slices and Other Secret Tales. This was followed by her novel, The Tequila Worm (2005), a highly autobiographical young-adult narrative whose protagonist, like Canales, writes narratives about the folk culture, rituals and traditions of her home town while away at a boarding school. The coming-of-age tale features a traditional storyteller, curanderas (healers), and other picturesque characters and practices of the informal underground culture of

Candelaria, Nash

poor people on the border. The Tequila Worm was awarded the 2006 PEN “Best in the West” and the Pur Belpré Award and was also an honorable mention for the Americas Award. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Candelaria, Nash (1928–). Nash Candelaria is one of the most enduring U.S. Hispanic writers. Although born in Los Angeles (on May 7, 1928), he has traced the Candelaria branch of his extended family to 1636 in what is now northern New Mexico. Candelaria enrolled in UCLA in 1944, when only very few Latinos attended that institution. After a hiatus spent in the Air Force during World War II, he returned and graduated from UCLA in 1948. He covers the experience in “Educated in Gringoland: UCLA 1944–1948,” which was published in Aztlán (2005). After a successful career as a technical writer, he turned to creative writing later in life. His literary output has been significant, beginning with the novel Memories of the Alhambra (1977), which he selfpublished—as did Aristeo Brito,* Ana Castillo,* Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* and Miguel Méndez* during the years when Chicana and Chicano authors had Herculean obstacles to overcome when attempting to publish at commercial, university, and even mainstream presses. Memories (a novel not without controversy because, in typical New Mexican fashion, it traces the Mexican American experience not only to Mexico but to Spain itself) has attained canonical status in the three decades since its publication. Not surprisingly, not only has Candelaria been an enduring writer, but his oeuvre is inextricably tied to the struggle to sustain the Hispanic culture in the face of countless adversities. His novels reflect historical themes, beginning with the initial encounters and then hostilities between the Mexican settlers and Anglo newcomers that led to the Mexican War and concluded with the Treaty of Guadalupe (1848) and the annexation of the Southwest by the United States. In 1982, Candelaria began his affiliation with the Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe* marked by the publication of his novel Not by the Sword. In 1991, he completed his tetralogy of historical novels that included the aforementioned two as well as Inheritance of Strangers (1985) and Leonor Park (1991). The Nash Candelaria literary cycle also includes anthologies of short stories, such as The Day That the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne and Other Stories and Uncivil Rights and Other Stories and major literary recognitions that include the 1983 American Book Award (Not by the Sword), recognition as a finalist for 1982 Best Western Historical Novel by the Western Writers of America (Not by the Sword), and recognition as a finalist for 1992 Best Short Fiction by the Western Writers of America (“The Dancing School”). He has in press two additional books; his gripping memoir, Second Communion, will be published in 2008, and 2009 will see the publication of A Daughter’s a Daughter, a novel about family loyalty, intrigue, and startling revelations set in an evolving New Mexico over a period 185

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of decades. His work is always fresh, and his most recent works cascade into the post-millennial environment where the Latino youths of California and elsewhere do not necessarily identify themselves as Chicano, but as mejicano, particularly when low-riding outside of the groves and ivory towers of academia. Further Reading Keller, Gary D., “Nash Candelaria in the Round,” in Second Communion, Nash Candelaria (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2008).

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Cano, Daniel (1947–). The legacy of an oral tradition passed on from relatives and friends drives Daniel Cano’s storytelling pen. His recollections of growing up are laced with the tales of semi-literate but highly verbal uncles regaling the extended family with stories for hours after funerals, weddings, and other family gatherings. Cano recalls the stories told by his mother of rural Mexico—stories told by her mother and then her mother before her, mythic tales that aroused his imagination and created a new reality, altering forever his perception of the world. Cano was born in Santa Monica, California, on August 1, 1947, the child of a construction worker and a homemaker. After high school, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Vietnam, an experience that left an indelible mark on his psyche, forming the basis of his future writing. After returning home at the age of twenty-one, he enrolled in Santa Monica College; in 1985, he received his bachelor’s degree in English from the school where two decades later he would become a faculty member. In college, he discovered the literary canon and began to emulate the writing styles of John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Herman Hesse. To support himself and his three children, of whom he had custody, Cano worked as a truck driver and a gardener and held various other jobs until finally becoming a college administrator at a number of Los Angeles–area universities. Cano began writing fiction in 1970, one year after completing his military service. During his early writ-

Cantú, Norma Elia

ing years, two subjects dominated his thinking—the Mexican American community and the Vietnam War. He was intent on one day exploring both with his fiction. “It’s our responsibility to tell our own stories. No one will tell our stories for us,” Cano says. “Unless we write and create our versions of Latinos in the U.S., we will continue to either be ignored or portrayed as stereotypes.” First, he thoroughly researched the community in which he had grown up and recalled the tales his grandparents had told him of how they came to the United States with the great outpouring of Mexican laborers who were displaced by the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, Cano’s first novel, Pepe Ríos (1991), deals with that social upheaval in Mexico and follows the eponymous protagonist, who is modeled after Cano’s grandfather, through the thick of battle to the United States border. Cano next turned his attention to the war in which he had himself participated; in 1995, he published his second novel, Shifting Loyalties, which is made up of a series of vignettes woven together into a tapestry of one ethnic generation’s reality of the Vietnam War. Re-working various stories he had already published, Cano not only constructed a novel about the Vietnam War itself but also explored the impact of that war on the Chicano community. “I didn’t want to make an indictment or pass judgment on the war,” Cano says. “I have observed, though, that of the hundreds of movies and books released that deal with Vietnam, the Latino community, particularly Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, has been ignored. It’s as if nobody even knew that Latinos served in Vietnam . . . They served wherever the military needed them, in every capacity conceivable. Yet now, looking back on those years, through literature, film art and other media, it’s as if we didn’t even exist. Our sacrifices seem to have no merit on society at large.” Today, Cano is a tenured Associate Professor of English at Santa Monica College. Further Reading Bustamente, Nuria, “Daniel Cano” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 29–33). Olguín, Ben V., “Sangre Mexicana/Corazon Americano: Identity, Ambiguity, and Critique in Mexican-American War Narratives” American Literary History Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2002): 83–114.

Carman Peña Abrego Cantú, Norma Elia (1947–). Born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, on January 3, 1947, Norma Cantú was raised in Laredo, Texas, where she was able to mediate the conflicts and synergies of life on both sides of the border. An early love of writing poetry in elementary school inspired Cantú to pursue a career in education as a teacher of literature; in 1973, she earned a B.S. in English and Education and, in 1976, a Master’s degree in English from Texas A&M University—Kingsville. In 1980, she began teaching at Texas A&M International University in Laredo and later studied for and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1982. After serving at the National Endowment for 187

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the Arts from 1993 to 1995, Cantú returned to Texas A&M and, in 2000, became a tenured full professor at the University of Texas–San Antonio. In addition to her scholarly writing on ethnography and folklore, Cantú is known for writing personal essays, memoirs, and poetry. When writing about such subjects as the quinceañera (a girl’s fifteenth birthday ritual), she often draws upon experiences from her own life. Her most widely known and respected work by far is her memoir, Canícula: Snapshots of a Childhood en la frontera (1995), where she elaborates on her personal experience from the 1940s to the 1960s of the environment, culture, and (especially) women’s perspective on life between the two societies, countries, and cultures that the border represents. Unlike many memoirs, which profess to narrate the complete “truth,” Cantú undermines the strict representation of truth by overtly blending fact and fiction in her work and often recalling events and rituals as both ethnographer and creative writer. In 2000, her memoir was translated to Spanish as Canícula: Imágenes de una niñez fronteriza. Cantú has also experimented with the code-switching of English and Spanish in her poetry and short stories, as in her 1998 short story “El luto” (The Mourning). Cantú’s essays, stories, and poems have often been published in reviews and anthologies. Canícula won the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize in 1996. Further Reading McCracken, Ellen, “Norma Elia Cantú” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: The Gale Group, 1999: 34–39).

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Capetillo, Luisa (1879–1922). Puerto Rican labor leader and feminist Luisa Capetillo was born on October 28, 1879, in Arecibo, where she received her early education in a private school and won prizes in grammar, history, and geography. Shortly after graduating, she worked in the needle trade and in tobacco factories, becoming a lector for the cigar rollers; thereafter she expanded her interests to writing for Spanish-language newspapers and to organizing workers. In Puerto Rico, she worked for the Federación de Trabajadores Libres (Free Workers’ Federation) union and wrote for Unión Obrera (Workers’ Union). In 1912, she lived in New York City and, in 1913, she moved to Ybor City/Tampa, Florida, to organize cigar workers. From 1914 to 1915, she lived in Cuba, presumably continuing her organizing among cigar workers. In Havana, during this time, she was arrested for wearing men’s clothes in public. While in New York, she wrote for the anarchist newspaper Cultura Obrera (Workers’ Culture). Thereafter, she returned to Puerto Rico and became involved in the labor and feminist movements as a socialist. She was particularly outstanding in

Caraballo Cruz, Samuel

militating for women’s suffrage. She is known as the first woman in Puerto Rico to dress in pants in public, as an exterior sign of her rebellion. She advocated free love, had children out of wedlock, and worked to bring about a society without social classes. She was the founder and editor of the magazine La mujer (Women) and authored various books detailing her philosophy: Ensayos libertarios (1909, Libertarian Essays), in which she details her anarchist ideology; La humanidad en el futuro (1910, Humanity in the Future), which she published to raise funds for her magazine; Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes e la mujer (1911, My Opinion on the Liberties, Rights and Duties of Women), in which she details her feminism and argues for the education of women; and Influencia de las ideas modernas (1916, The Influence of Modern Ideas), which includes many of her more literary works, including theatrical pieces performed in union halls. In 2005, Mi opinión . . . was translated to English and published in a bilingual edition. Included in the book are essays, poems, and plays published in Hispanic labor newspapers; the plays were presumably performed at labor and political organizations. She died of tuberculosis in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1922. Further Reading Matos Rodríguez, Félix V., “Introduction,” A Nation of Women: An Early Feminist Speaks Out/Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005). Sanchez González, Lisa, Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Valle Ferrer, Norma, Luisa Capetillo. Historia de una mujer proscrita (San Juan: Editorial Cultural, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Caraballo Cruz, Samuel (1961–). Born on March 6, 1961, in Puerto Rico, Samuel Caraballo Cruz has been a public servant for many years. He has dedicated a great many of those years to teaching and sharing his language with students, teachers, and parents living in the communities he has served in the United States. He has volunteered his time to helping college students improve their foreign language skills and has also served as an interpreter in court cases involving Hispanics. Caraballo states, “Whatever I do for my fellow man, whether significant or not, I do because of the ideas and spirit of fellowship passed on to me by my parents and members of my wonderful community.” His dedication and hard work have earned him recognition, including the Award for Distinguished Service, presented to him by the Virginia Congress of Parents and Teachers in 2001. Caraballo’s belief in the power of education is evident in a verse of the alma mater he wrote for the students of a rural school in his native

Samuel Caraballo Cruz.

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Vieques, Puerto Rico: “We love you,” he wrote, referring to the school, “and we’ll forever love you, for you have been, and will always be, where the nobility of mankind is cultivated, an eternal lamp where the thought receives its source of light!” Caraballo is the author of Mis Papitos: Héroes de la cosecha (2005, My Parents: Heroes of the Harvest), Mis abuelos y yo (2004, My Grandparents and I) and Estrellita se despide de su isla (2002, Estrellita Says Good-bye to Her Island), which is Caraballo’s first children’s book and winner of the 2002 “Reading with Energy” Hispanic Children’s Book Award. It is both a personal account of his childhood experiences and a tribute to immigrants around the world. This tender tale is written to comfort and help young readers, especially those who have experienced separation from their loved ones by time or distance. Samuel lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with his wife and family. Further Reading Strouf, Judie L. F., The Literature Teacher’s Book of Lists (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).

Carmen Peña Abrego Cárdenas, Isidra T. (1891–). Born in Hidalgo County, south Texas, to rancher Francisco Villarreal and his wife Juana Flores, Isidra T. de Cárdenas became part of the Mexican Liberal Party founded by the Flores Magón* brothers and worked for the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Díaz at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1907, Cárdenas founded the magonista (followers of Ricardo Flores Magón*) newspaper, La Voz de la Mujer (The Woman’s Voice) in El Paso, Texas, whose mission it was to educate women for the new world to be established once anarchism had triumphed. She, of course, attempted to enlist her readers in the struggle to overthrow the Mexican dictator. All of the articles in the newspaper were unsigned and it is difficult today to discern their authorship, especially because very few issues of La Voz de la Mujer have been found. Moreover, this lack of individual authorship was part of the message of the newspaper: the periodical represented the collective voice of Mexican and Mexican American women, which, as represented by the newspaper, was just as virile as that of the voice of the male leaders of the revolution. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Lomas, Clara, “The Articulation of Gender in the Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century” Frontiers Vol. 24 (2003): 51–74.

Nicolás Kanellos Cárdenas, Reyes (1948–). A pioneering Chicano* poet and member of the group participating in the San Antonio literary magazine Caracol (Shell), Reyes Cárdenas was born on January 6, 1948, in Seguin, Texas, a rural oasis that, despite being named after a founding father of the Texas Republic, Juan Seguín, was a wellspring of racism during Cárdenas’s upbringing. It is reaction 190

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to this racism and monoculturalism that informs much of his poetry, which highlights the deep roots of Chicano culture while reaching out to other traditions and esthetic forms. Were there a Chicano avant-garde, Cárdenas would have been at his head at a time when most Chicano poetry was engaged in nationalist pursuits and sociopolitical protest—for his experimentation with unconventional grammar, concrete poetic forms, dry humor and satire, and fearless criticism of the Chicano movement itself. Long bouts of tuberculosis and primitive treatment, poverty, segregated education, and the loss of his mother at a young age all left indelible marks on his poetry, which began issuing forth in 1974 in the historically important Chicano magazine El Grito (The Shout) and in Caracol, where he collaborated with Cecilio García-Camarillo* and Carmen Tafolla,* with whom he also worked on such projects as the poetry chapbook Get Your Tortillas Together (1976), in which the trio published their poems. His first solo book, however, was the highly autobiographical Chicano Territory (1975), followed soon after by the collaborative Get Your Tortillas Together and, in the same year, his Anti-Bicicleta Haiku (1976), the most experimental of his works. But Cárdenas’s most mature work came after a hiatus of five years, during which time he suffered a major operation and had to work fifty hours a week in a freezer at a chicken processing plant to make ends meet and pay off his debts. In Survivors of the Chicano Titanic (1981), Cárdenas went beyond the autobiographical and the playful of his previous works to move from the concerns of the barrio to confront oppression in Latin America and its struggles for liberation and social justice. In his I Never Was a Chicano Militant (1986), Cárdenas shucked off any categorization of his poetry and ideology to pronounce his individualism and particular pursuit of wisdom; the book received the Austin Book Award, a type of recognition never envisioned by this avantgarde artist. Further Reading Tafolla, Carmen, “Reyes Cárdenas,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 209: Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 52–60).

Nicolás Kanellos

Carpa. See Theater in a Tent Caro, Brígido (1858–1940). Born in Alamos, Sonora, Mexico, on May 12, 1858, Brígido Caro was a journalist and playwright who brought current events and history to the stage. In 1873, he began his journalistic career writing for El Fantasma (The Phantom), a political newspaper. He had to leave his native Sonora when his play Heraclio Bernal, o el Rey de los Bandidos (Heraclio Bernal, or the King of Bandits), caused him problems with the Durango authorities—the play debuted in 1888 and was published in 1894 in the newspaper El Sonorense (The Sonoran), which Caro had founded in 1893 and was editing at the time, a paper that supported dictator Porfirio Díaz. He resettled in Zacatecas, where he edited El Amigo de la Verdad (The Friend of Truth) 191

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newspaper, and after that moved to Guadalajara, where he was imprisoned for his journalistic activities. Later in the 1890s, he edited El Eco de Sonora (The Sonora Echo) and Evolución (Evolution). He became a strident opponent of President Francisco Madero and, on November 20, 1911, participants in a popular uprising dragged him out of his house and placed him on a train to the border. He later received amnesty and returned to Sonora to publish El Mutualista (Mutual Aid) but in 1914 was again expelled. In Nogales, Arizona, he published El Día (The Day), a political tabloid, and in 1920 he became a member of the staff of El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald) in Los Angeles; he later became its editor-in-chief. He later rose to become editor of this important daily and often used it as a platform from which to attack President Plutarco Elías Calles of Mexico. In Los Angeles, he published a book, Plutarco Elías Calles, dictador bolchevique de México (Plutarco Elías Calles, Bolshevik Dictator of Mexico) to continue his attack. He died on January 27, 1940, in Los Angeles. Caro’s Heraclio Bernal was produced on the Los Angeles and southwestern stages numerous times; the play about the Robin Hood-type social rebel served as a forum for Caro’s political and social criticism. Two of his plays written and produced in Los Angeles were México y Estados Unidos (1927, Mexico and the United States) and Joaquín Murrieta* (1926), which was about the infamous, mid–nineteenth century social bandit of California. In 1928, Caro also wrote and staged El Niño Fidencio (Child Fidencio), a revista (review) based on the discredited folk healer of northern Mexico. México y Estados Unidos was inspired by certain anti-Mexican sentiments expressed by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge in 1927. México y Estados Unidos surely expressed a defense of Mexico, especially in light of Caro’s service as president of the Liga Protectira Latina (Latin Protection League) at the time. In Joaquín Murrieta, Caro explored the life of the social bandit who struck out violently against Anglo American racism and took revenge on his oppressors, a theme that resonated with the sentiments of his Mexican/Mexican American audiences. The play was so popular that it was not only produced on commercial stages but was staged in amateur productions throughout the Southwest by civil rights organizations such as the Alianza Hispano Americana (Hispanic American Alliance) and the Liga Protectora Latina (Latin Protective League), among others. Caro’s association with the Alianza Hispano Americana must have been close, because he often appeared at its headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, to stage patriotic allegories he himself authored. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Carrasquillo, Pedro (1910–1963). One of the most famous literary interpreters of the décima folk song, Pedro Carrasquillo was born in rural Utuado, Puerto Rico, where until the age of twenty he experienced coun192

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try life first-hand. In 1930, he moved to San Juan and became associated with avant-garde literary groups, most importantly the Atalaya de los Dioses (The Shield of the Gods), directed by Clemente Soto Vélez and Miranda Archilla. From his early newspaper articles and poetry, he concentrated on the life of the jíbaro, the Puerto Rican highlander. After moving to New York some time after World War II, he adapted his poetry written in décimas to depicting the hopes and frustrations of Puerto Rican immigrants, always emphasizing their dream of return to the patria (homeland). In 1958, his collection of original décimas, entiPedro Carrasquillo. tled Requinto, poemas jíbaros (Puerto Rican Guitar, Jíbaro* Poems), was awarded the first prize in the annual contest held by the Círculo de Escritores y Poetas Iberoamericanos de Nueva York (New York Circle of Spanish American Writers and Poets). His second book of poems, Quirindongo (untranslatable), was published posthumously in 1973. In his first volume, Requinto (Small Guitar), Carrasquillo represented and described, using the jíbaro dialect, the complete worldview and physical environment of the jíbaro archetypal figure of Puerto Rico. Quirindongo narrates the life of the eponymous campesino, exploring the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions of his culture even as he suffers exploitation and injustice. Numerous poetic compositions by Carrasquillo have as yet not been collected or published in book form because of his penchant for sharing them with the community at public events and publishing them in community newspapers. Some of his uncollected poetry relates to the civil rights struggles of Puerto Ricans in New York, especially as relates to his support of Comité Hispano Americano del Bronx (the Spanish American Committee of the Bronx). Further Reading Llorens, Washington, El humorismo, el epigrama y la sátira en la literature puertorriqueña (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1960). Zapata Acosta, Ramón, “Carrasquillo, Pedro. Requinto, poemas jíbaros” Horizontes Vol. 2, No. 4 (Apr. 1959): 135.

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Carrero, Jaime (1931–). Playwright, novelist, and painter Jaime Carrero is a figure who serves as a bridge between the cultures of the island of Puerto Rico and the Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Born in Mayagüez on June 16, 1931, Carrero studied art on the island, in New York City, and in Florence, Italy. From 1950 to 1953, Carrero served in the Korean War, a tour of duty reflected in his play “Flag Inside,” as well as in other of his works. He received a B.A. from the Inter-American university in San Germán in 1956 and a master’s degree from New York’s Pratt Institute in 1957, took graduate courses at Columbia University, spent a few more years in New York, and married a Nuyorican* woman. Carrero became integrated into the Puerto Rican community of New York and was one of the first to actually recognize the development of a new hybrid identity for Puerto Ricans living on the continent, which he called “Neo-Rican” in his bilingual chapbook “Jet NeoRiqueño/Neo-Rican Jetliner” (1964). His first book published was actually a collection of poems Aquí, los ángeles (1960, Here, the Angels), but his most prolific literary work is in drama. Carrero wrote plays produced in the open air in the barrios by Miriam Colón’s* Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. Included among these were “Pio Subway No Sabe Reír” (1972, Pipo Subway Doesn’t Know How to Laugh), a lyrical but dark drama of immigration that explores the erosion of human values among Puerto Ricans in the dehumanizing, capitalist, concrete jungle of New York City. Another was an equally dark satire of life in the barrio, “Noo Jork” (1972, Nu Jail, a play on the name of New York). Carrero wrote other plays and poems before returning to Puerto Rico to teach art at the Inter-American University at San Germán. He nevertheless continued writing while his oil paintings came more and more into demand, so much so that they have been collected by museums on the island and the continent. In his novel Raquelo tiene un mensaje (1970, Raquelo Has a Message), he became the first writer to explore the maladjustment of Nuyoricans returning to the island. (In fact, Carrero experienced alienation and was never accepted into the literary culture of the island, although he won numerous awards for his writings). In his second novel—as in his play “Flag Inside” (1967)—Carrero dealt with the problem of Puerto Ricans in the Korean War, their return to family either in a coffin or out-ofsync and alienated. His third novel, El hombre que no sudaba (1982, The Man Who Didn’t Sweat) returned to the theme of Nuyorican maladjustment on the island. All three of these works won awards from the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. Another novel, Ojos de sol o la señora doble fea (1985, The Eyes of the Sun, or the Doubly Ugly Woman), did not receive much attention from the critics. Among his other works are Tiranosauro rey amén, amén (1963, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Amen, Amen) and Las computadoras del sol (1970, Computers of the Sun). However, it is in his plays that Carrero achieved the greatest success, many of them produced on the island and the recipients of awards, including a play set in a New York barrio liquor store, “La Caja de Caudales” (1976, The FM Safe), which was also produced by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in 1978, and “Betances,” a biographical play about the Puerto Rican patriot, also 194

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produced by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in 1981. Most of Carrero’s plays have been published in anthologies and magazines. In 1983, Carrero published two of his plays in Teatro Jaime Carrero: Isla Linda, La Caja de Caudales (Jaime Carrero Theater: Pretty Island, FM Safe). (Previously, Teatro (1973), a pirated anthology containing four of his plays, had been well read in Puerto Rico and the United States.) Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Jorge Huerta, eds., Nuevos Pasos: Chicano and Puerto Rican Drama (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1979) (www.lexjuris.com/biografias/buscar/ search.asp?rec_id=185).

Nicolás Kanellos Carrillo, Adolfo (1855–1926). Born in Sinaloa, Mexico, in July 1855, Adolfo Carrillo entered a Catholic seminary in Guadalajara after receiving his early education. While studying in the seminary, he became interested in journalism and, in 1877, began publishing he newspaper La picota (Pictish) and, in 1978, La Union Mercantil (The Mercantile Union). He soon had to leave Guadalajara for Mexico City because of his published attacks on the local government. He continued to be a political critic as editor of El correo del lunes (1885, The Monday Mail) in Mexico City, which led in 1886 to his incarceration for sedition and defamation of the authorities by the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. After four and a half months he was freed and went into exile, first in Havana, then in New York City, Brownsville, Madrid, San Francisco (where he founded and edited La República [The Republic]), and— finally—in Los Angeles, where he founded and edited México Libre (1914, Free Mexico) from his own print shop and spent most of the remainder of his life there. When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, he supported various factions and at one point served as the Mexican consul in Los Angeles. By then, however, Carrillo had become a Californian and, in 1922, published a collection of stories based on Californian legends and history, Cuentos californianos (California Tales). In Brownsville, Carrillo anonymously published Memorias inéditas del Lic. Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada (1889, The Unpublished Memoir of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada), in honor of the deposed Mexican president who held his loyalty, and in opposition to Porfirio Díaz. The book was immediately successful, especially among the exiled Hispanic population, and was accorded a number of reprint editions by Texan Spanish-language presses. Another creative literary text was Carrillo’s novel, Memorias del Marqués de San Basilisco (the Memoir of the Marquis of Saint Basilisco), which he published under the pseudonym of Jorge Carmona, the actual picaresque antihero who ascends from poverty to royalty during the reign of MaxCover of Adolfo Carrillo’s short imilian I in Mexico. In addition to printing his journalistic story collection. 195

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writings, numerous newspapers and magazines published his stories, essays, and commentary under his own name and that of Carmona. Further Reading Leal, Luis, “Adolfo Carrillo” in Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 122 (1992): 53–55. Ross, Stanley, “Prólogo a un Prólogo,” Historia Mexicana Vol. 10, No. 1 (July–Sept. 1960): 110–116.

Nicolás Kanellos Carrillo, Eduardo A. (?–?). A native of Veracruz, Mexico, Eduardo A. Carrillo came to Los Angeles as an actor in 1922 in the theatrical company of María Teresa Montoya. In the early twenties, he made Los Angeles his base and took on many of the serious leading-man roles that were available, at times also forming his own companies and taking them on tour through California and the Southwest. He even operated a small vaudeville circuit in Arizona. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—his active career as an actor and company director, Carrillo was also a prolific playwright and one of the main luminaries of the Los Angeles stage in the 1920s. What characterizes his writing is his persistence in developing Mexican national and expatriate themes: in “Los Hombres Desnudos” (1922, The Nude Men), in which he explored machismo; in the tale of the Mexican Robin Hood, “Heraclio Bernal, o el Rayo de Sinaloa” (1923, Heraclio Bernal, or the Sinaloan Flash); in “El Zarco” (1924), based on a novel by Ignacio Manuel Altamirano about the eponymous blue-eyed bandit; in “El Proceso de Aurelio Pompa” (1924, The Trial of Aurelio Pompa*), a drama based on the real-life drama of an innocent Mexican immigrant’s trial for murder (the drama script kept evolving along with a change in title as the trial proceeded to a death sentence and execution); and in Patria y Honor (1924, Homeland and Honor). In addition, Carrillo also wrote plays dealing with modern social problems: the four-act comedy “Un Crimen Más” (1938, One more Crime) and “Ley—Escena de la Vida Real” (1938, Law—A Real-Life Scene). By far, Carrillo’s most important contribution to the serious dramatic literature of the Southwest was his “El proceso de Aurelio Pompa.” The play won itself a place in the repertoire of many of the Spanish-language companies performing throughout the Southwest and was even taken up by amateur groups conscious of prejudice against Mexicans. The play itself bridged the gap from art to reality and was used in numerous fundraisers, first for the defense of Pompa himself and later to raise money for his widow. So popular had the play become with audiences and impresarios that one theater critic in 1925 pleaded with the impresarios to let the dead rest. Carrillo also wrote in a lighter vein, creating zarzuelas (Spanish-style operettas) and revistas (musical comedy revues), often in collaboration with Gabriel Navarro.* He Eduardo A. Carrillo.

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often composed his own music for his musical comedies. His 1922 revue, Los Angeles al Día, with Navarro, lived on to see numerous performances throughout the decade. Other popular musical comedy one-acts were “Malditos Sean los Hombres” (1924, Men Be Damned), a parody of the popular “Malditas Sean las Mujeres” (Women Be Damned); “Su Majestad la Carne” (1924, Her Majesty the Flesh), with Navarro; “Eva Tirunfadora” (1925, Triumphant Eve); and “En las Puertas del Infierno” (1925, At the Gates of Hell). In one of the few of Carrillo’s scripts to be located, “Fotos de Actualidad” (1937, Current Snapshots), he depicts Los Angeles landmarks and satirizes the bilingualism* of Mexicans in the city, as well as their adoption of the dress and customs of Americans. It is not known whether he returned to Mexico. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Carrillo, Leo (1818–1961). Cinema and television actor Leo Carrillo was born in Los Angeles into a family that traced its roots back to the earliest Hispanic settlers of upper California—the Californios. After beginning his career on stage and in early talking films, Carrillo reached the apex of his fame in a television serial of the 1950s portraying “Pancho,” the sidekick of the O’Henry-created hero the Cisco Kid (acted by Duncan Reynaldo). Carrillo’s depiction of Pancho as a comic buffoon reinforced stereotypes about Mexicans, especially as contrasted with the more genteel and intelligent “Spanish” or “Californio” character of Cisco and, in fact, led to or reinforced the denigration of Mexican and Latino men by applying the name “Pancho” to them as an epithet. Carrillo was a public figure who appeared at festivals, rodeos, and fairs and rode in parades dressed in nineteenth-century “Californio” attire. He was a popularizer of the “Fantasy Heritage,”* a term coined by Carey McWilliams in his book North from Mexico (1949); this imagined heritage was a supposed genteel and educated pure “Spanish” way of life that existed in the Southwest before the coming of the Anglos; this fantasy, however, was created by the Hispano-Indio natives as a self-defense mechanism to counter the racist ideology of Manifest Destiny* with a myth that argued that Hispanic ancestors introduced civilization to the West and Southwest long before the arrival of the Anglos and that the Hispanics could also claim a European cultural and racial heritage. In addition to his public incarnation of the Californio, Carrillo also published an autobiographical work highlighting the early Californio history and lore, The California I Love (1961). Further Reading Carrillo, Leo, The California I Love (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961). McWilliams, Carey, North from Mexico: the Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968).

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La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc.

La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc. Founded in 1981, La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc. (The Puerto Rican Cultural Heritage House) is a nonprofit, community-based organization dedicated to the promotion of Puerto Rican culture in New York City. Founded by the late New York assemblyman Luis Nive, of the Bronx, and led by its first director, Otilio Díaz, for more than twenty-five years, La Casa has been headquartered in East Harlem, where it sponsors numerous musical, theatrical, folkloric, and literary events. Among its active board members have been literary figures such as Anita Vélez-Mitchell.* La Casa has served as a resource regarding Puerto Rican culture not only for New York but for educational institutions across the country. With more than 15,000 volumes, microfilm resources and journals, La Casa’s library is its richest resource, serving as a center for research. Further Reading La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña (www.lacasapr.org/Docs/about_e.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Casal, Lourdes (1938–1981). Born in Havana, Cuba, on April 5, 1938, to a family of European, Chinese, and African descent, Lourdes Casal became an award-winning poet, short-story writer, and political activist who was originally critical of the Cuban Revolution—the reason for which she left the island—but then became a supporter of the revolutionary regime. Representative of the exile experience, Casal’s poetry reflects an individual caught between two worlds: revolutionary Cuba and exile. Casal began her political activism as a student attending the University of Santo Tomás Aquino, when she joined an underground movement fighting against dictator Fulgencio Batista. When Fidel Castro took over the government in 1959, she opposed him also. In 1962, she went into exile in New York City, where she earned a master’s degree and later a Ph.D. from the New School of Social Research (1975). She then taught at several universities, including the City University of New York and Rutgers. Casal was one of the founders of the journal Areíto (a Taíno word meaning dance–drama–narrative–song), which viewed the Cuban experience on the island and the United States from a liberal perspective, organized trips to Cuba, and fostered dialog between Cubans on and off the island. As a scholar, Casal wrote about the anti-Castro novel and the development of Cuban American literature. In 1971, she was the first scholar to document the controversial Padilla case, in which Cuban poet Heberto Padilla* was jailed for writing poetry deemed critical of the revolution: El caso Padilla; literatura y revolución en Cuba: documentos (The Padilla Case; Literature and Revolution: Documents). In 1978, Casal edited Contra viento y marea (Against the Wind and the Tide), a unique account of the experiences of young, middle-class Cubans in the United States. Published in Cuba, the volume received a special award from the Casa de las Américas. In 1973, she published Los fundadores: Alfonso y otros cuentos (The Founders: Alfonso and Other Stories), a collection of autobiographical short stories. Her last major cre-

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ative work was Palabras junta revolución (Words Join Revolution), a collection of poems that won the Casa de las Américas Award (House of the Americas Award). Further Reading Behar, Ruth, Bridges to Cuba: Puentes a Cuba (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Casal, Lourdes, Itinerario ideológico: antología (Miami FL: Instituto de Estudios Cubanos, 1982).

D. H. Figueredo Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia (1832–1897). Devoting herself to activism on behalf of Cuban independence, Emilia Casanova left a body of letters that shows how the epistolary form was an integral dimension of her political activities. Casanova was born in the Matanzas region of Cuba to a slave-owning family that resettled in the United States in 1854. Her early years were influenced by a political awakening that fed nationalist histories of the island. As told in various accounts, Casanova witnessed the landing of the filibuster Narciso López in Cárdenas in 1850 and fell in love with the pendant that would go on to become the flag of Cuba. According to a short biography, the flag episode prompted a commitment to liberty and independence for Cuba. “All of her preferences, her thoughts, even her pleasures focused on that seminal idea, which came to be the religion of her soul, gave her new energy, conferred on her a new character and ushered her into a new life,” wrote her husband, Cirilo Villaverde. She carried this love of the patria to her new home in the United States. In the late 1860s and 1870s, as the Ten Years’ War raged on the island, Casanova made her way regularly from the Bronx to Manhattan to drum up support for the military front in Cuba. She served as secretary of La Liga de las Hijas de Cuba (The League of Daughters of Cuba) and helped organize a concert to raise money for arms. On several occasions, she made her way to Washington, D.C., to lobby members of Congress and the President in hopes of their recognition of Cuban revolutionaries. During this period, she carried out what she described as a “protracted correspondence” with international leaders, other Cubans living in the United States, and generals on the battlefield in Cuba. Her letters written between 1869 and 1876 were collected and published with her biography as Apuntes Biográficos de Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (Biographical Notes of Emilia Casanova de Villaverde). The letters show a range in rhetorical approach, sometimes pleading for support from little-known exiles and at other times requesting recognition from prominent figures. Addressing men who might be skeptical of women’s participation in the independence movement, she was adamant that women could play an important role in the revolution. In one letter, she wrote to Giuseppe Garibaldi expressing surprise that he had not spoken out on behalf of Cuban revolutionaries. “We began the revolution by liberating our slaves, arming them and including them in the patriotic columns, and you should take this minor point to understand that our goal is universal

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liberty,” she informed Garibaldi. Garibaldi responded with a note expressing his support for Cuban revolutionaries. Casanova’s strong opposition to slavery marks a change from a period in the 1850s, when Cubans in New York debated whether it was wise to support abolition in Cuba while the United States continued to hold its own slaves in bondage. While other Cubans in the United States at times experimented with annexation or negotiations with the Spanish Crown, Casanova maintained a steady position as a fervent supporter of independence. Leopolo Horrego Estuch has written that as a result of her activities in the United States, Casanova became notorious in the pro-Spanish press on the island, and at one point she was burned in effigy in public. Although the various failures to achieve independence demoralized Casanova, she continued to support the cause into the final years of her life. In her 70s, she sent a letter to José Martí* encouraging him in his movement. Casanova’s work as a bilingual political activist and epistolary master make her the most important woman in the history of Cuban exile in the United States and, more generally, an important figure in the transnational history of women. Further Reading Horrego Estuch, Leopoldo, Emilia Casanova: La vehemencia del separatismo (Havana: Imprenta del Siglo XX, 1951). Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Villaverde, Cirilo [Un Contemporáneo, pseud.], Apuntes biográficos de Emilia Casanova de Villaverde (New York: n.p., 1874).

Rodrigo Lazo Castañeda, Carlos (1925?–1998). The many questions surrounding the world-famous writer best known by his published pseudonym, Carlos Castañeda, begin with such vital information as his date and place of birth, his name, and the exact date of his death. Although his life is shrouded in mystery, his books have been stunning successes beginning with the first, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). Many social commentators and cultural studies scholars have praised or excoriated—depending upon their perspective—The Teachings of Don Juan for starting the New Age pop culture movement in self-development through cosmic awareness. The book’s surprising popularity was followed by even greater recognition for its author after the publication of its equally fascinating sequels, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971) and Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1972). His nearly instant celebrity led to a Time Magazine cover story in March 1973 that in time led to more questions about Castañeda. However, as with other renowned personages with enigmatic biographies (including Shakespeare, Columbus, Sor Juana, and Van Gogh), the questions and uncertainties about the man have not detracted from Castañeda’s success or from the acclaim bestowed on his work by certain critics and millions of readers. In many respects he is not unlike other twentieth-century media-constructed pop 200

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culture icons (e.g., Frida Kahlo, Elvis Presley, Madonna) whose work cannot be separated from a created persona consciously marketed as such by the artist, agents, and mass distributors. Time Magazine reports that the future writer’s given name at birth was César Arana, also spelled “Aranha,” according to United States immigration records. He is believed to have been born on December 25, 1925, to jeweler and goldsmith César Arana Burungaray and his wife Susan Castañeda Navoa in Cajamarca, Peru, an ancient Inca community in the country’s northern mining region. However, other published accounts based on interviews with the writer after he became famous report his birth date as 1931 and his birthplace as Brazil. Diligent efforts by scholars, journalists, and fans to trace his biography tend to favor the Peruvian birth and date. His family eventually moved to the capital, Lima, where young César is believed to have attended and graduated from the Colegio Nacional de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (National College of Our Lady of Guadalupe) and also to have later studied art in Peru’s National School of Fine Arts. Castañeda’s account of his past, however, begins with his claim of birth to an Italian-origin family in São Paulo, Brazil, where he grew up in the Brazilian countryside, reared by maternal grandparents who later sent him to school in Argentina. Sources also vary as to when he immigrated to the United States—some say he was a teenager, and others that he was older—or younger. In one version he is reported to have been placed with foster parents in Los Angeles, to have graduated from Hollywood High School, and to have then gone on to study parapsychology at Los Angeles City College in 1955. In 1959 the enigmatic celebrity, who steadfastly avoided being photographed or interviewed, had another important year. Records show that he enrolled at the University of California in Los Angeles to begin his now famous studies in anthropology and that he also became a naturalized American citizen, taking his mother’s surname, Castañeda, as his own. Shortly thereafter, some accounts report that in 1960 he married an American woman fourteen years his senior, a marriage that lasted only a few months before ending in divorce. Introduced in the 1970s to American Florinda Donner, Castañeda began a long friendship with her that resulted in their marriage in 1993. It took place after the publication of Donner’s book, Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer’s World (1991), about her friendship with the reclusive writer. Carlos Castañeda’s legacy to literature and popular culture* appears solid, despite the variety of interpretations as to its ultimate meaning and even value. Frequently identified as the father of the late twentieth century New Age movement in America, which continues to thrive on a global scale, Castañeda began research for his first book, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), while working on his Ph.D. in anthropology at UCLA. He claims to have met a Yaqui shaman, whom he called Don Juan Matus, in the late 1960s in Arizona. He wrote that the elder became his teacher and began to enlighten him into the spiritual, chemical (drug), and physical manipulation of consciousness, space, 201

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and time. This experience was the basis for his graduate research and first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, an underground success and later a global bestseller. After publishing two more best-selling Don Juan books, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlán, its author was awarded his Ph.D. in 1973. Despite their engaging eloquence and compelling plots, the books often are valued more as fictional than as factual memoirs largely because no one other than Castañeda has ever met or even seen Don Juan Matus. Others point out that the lack of Yaqui language terms and names or other specifically local Arizona evidence weakens the credibility of his writings as documentaries of field ethnography. Nevertheless, the almost immediate international success of his books is indisputable. It is often attributed to the convergence of the free-speech and antiwar movements, as well as to a growing consciousness among élites of the power of indigenous ethnopoetics, which also helped propel magic realism into international prominence. Subsequent to his remarkable fame as a published writer and achievement of his doctor of philosophy degree, Castañeda became even more enigmatic and reclusive. In an interview he stated that he believed any verification of his life by statistics would be like attempting to use science to validate magic. He also was greatly burdened by his fame and constant hounding by what he described as very weird followers who pushed the shy man into a hermit’s life. In other books he wrote about another American Indian teacher, Genaro Flores, of the Mazatec tribe and later about Don Juan’s female disciples and guides. Titles include Tales of Power (1974); The Second Ring of Power (1978); The Eagle’s Gift (1981); The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of Don Juan (1987); The Art of Dreaming (1993); Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico (1998); and The Active Side of Infinity (1999). Carlos Castañeda died on April 27, 1998, a victim of liver cancer, in his Westwood, California, home, and his cremated ashes were reportedly taken to México. In keeping with the mystery that surrounded his life, his death did not become known until about two months after he died. Further Reading Brunner, C. Cryss, Principles of Power: Women Superintendents and the Riddle of the Heart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). De Mille, Richard, The Don Juan Papers: Further Castañeda Controversies (Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erikson, 1980). De Mille, Richard, Castañeda’s Journey: the Power and the Allegory, 2nd rev. ed. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1976). Noel, Daniel C., Seeing Castañeda: Reactions to the “Don Juan” Writings of Carlos Castañeda (New York: Putnam, 1976). Silverman, David, Reading Castañeda: a Prologue to the Social Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). Wallace, Amy, Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castañeda (Berkeley: Frog Press, distributed by North Atlantic Books, 2003).

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Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo (1896–1958). Born on November 11, 1896, in Ciudad Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, Carlos Eduardo Castañeda became one of Texas’s foremost historians and professors. He moved to Brownsville, Texas, in 1906 with his parents, Timoteo and Elisa (Leroux), and with his numerous siblings. After distinguishing himself in high school, Castañeda received an A.B. in 1921 from the University of Texas and taught high school Spanish. After obtaining his M.A. in 1923, also from the University of Texas, he was hired as an associate professor by the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Returning to Austin in 1927, Castañeda became librarian of the García Collection at the University of Texas and worked on his Ph.D., which he earned in 1932. He continued in his position as librarian but also served as an associate professor of history. Castañeda took a leave of absence during World War and worked as the regional director of the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice from 1939 to 1946, an executive unit that investigated workplace discrimination. In 1946, he returned to the University of Texas as a full professor of Latin American history, a position he held until he passed away in 1958. As a historian, Castañeda pioneered scholarly research on the Catholic Church in Texas and the Spanish Borderlands. Castañeda received many honors for his voluminous contributions in history, but more importantly, his personal perseverance made him a role model for Mexican Americans hungering for professional recognition and status. As a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Professor Castañeda also became committed to civil rights and worked with the organization to confront such issues as school segregation and work place discrimination. It was his prominence in this role that led to his appointment to the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice during World War II. Although Castañeda made his mark as a civil rights pioneer, his legacy is most accessible today in the numerous articles he published in journals and the various books he wrote, including the massive, seven-volume Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519–1936 (1936–1958), considered by some scholars to be the best history of the three centuries of Spanish and Mexican Texas. Another rigorously documented book that sought to revise the image of Mexicans in Texas was his The Mexican Side of the Texas Revolution (1928). Further Reading Almaraz, Félix D., Jr., Knight without Armor: Carlos Eduardo Castañeda 1896–1958 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999).

F. Arturo Rosales Castañeda, Omar S. (1954–1997). Born in Guatemala City, the son of a university professor who moved his family to Bloomington, Indiana, to teach at the state university, Castañeda became a citizen of the United States in 1986. After graduating with a degree in English from Indiana University, Castañeda taught at universities in Florida and the state of Washington while developing his writing career. While a graduate student at Indiana University, 203

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he edited the Latino student magazine Chiricú (an invented word combining the first syllables of Chicano, Rican, and Cuban) from 1979 to 1982. Highly influenced by the anthropological studies of his brother, a university professor of anthropology, Cunuman (1987), Castañeda’s first novel, is set in Guatemala and incorporates Mayan legends and Magic Realism. In Remembering to Say “Mouth” or “Face” (1993), which won the Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction, Castañeda developed a series of stories based on the Mayan Popol Vuh (a Mayan mythological text) to highlight the conflict of Mayan culture with Hispanic and Anglo American cultures from Guatemala to Mexico to New York City. Noteworthy is Castañeda’s combination of magic realism and social realism in this often gritty and challenging text. His next work for adult readers, Naranjo the Muse: A Collection of Stories (1997), compiled highly literary narratives that experimented with language and the short story genre itself in a series of interconnected tales related to a main character, a professor, and his musings. All the rest of his works were written for children and young adults. Castañeda’s Omar S. Castañeda. young adult novel, Among the Volcanoes (1993), follows the life of a young Mayan teenager, Isabel, in Guatemala, where she copes with poverty, social upheaval, and family illness. In the book’s sequel, Imagining Isabel (1994), Castañeda describes Isabel’s marriage at age fifteen and her struggles to become a teacher; again Isabel is drawn into the military conflicts in Guatemala while trying to adjust to the sophistication of life in the city where she is studying. Castañeda’s children’s picture book Abuela’s Weave (1995) celebrates the indigenous social patterns in Central America as a young girl learns how to operate her grandmother’s loom. Castañeda’s very promising career was cut short by his suicide in 1997. Further Reading Thomas, Rebecca L., Connecting Cultures: A Guide to Multicultural Literature for Children (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 1996).


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Castellano, Olivia (1944–). Born on July 25, 1944, into a family of farm workers in Del Río, Texas, Olivia Castellano has created literature out of the paradox of her life: her struggle to escape the circle of poverty through education and her desire to create art out of that same past of deprivation amid a beautiful but rugged countryside. First in high school, and then in college (where she majored in French), she sought escape in her studies and in European models for her writing. Later, however, she embraced her native Spanish and the environment of her early childhood. Castellano graduated with a B.A. in French from Sacramento State College in 1966; in 1968, she obtained a master’s degree in a program that led her to discover her own Mexican American culture. She went on to obtain a Ph.D. from Stanford University. By 1972, Castellano was teaching Chicano literature at her alma mater, now renamed California State University, Sacramento. The study of the literature and the inviting of Chicano poets into her classroom helped nurture her own writing. By 1977, her poems were appearing in periodicals and, by 1980, she had published her first book, Blue Mandolin, Yellow Field, which evoked that Texas landscape of her childhood. In The Blue Horse of Madness (1983), Castellano once again returns to Texas; now the narrator is an adolescent looking back on childhood and dealing with creativity, consciously forging a poetic language and images out of the remembrances of family and environment. In Spaces that Time Missed (1986), Castellano’s most mature voice emerges and her confident command of her craft is evident. The narrator is now and adult, but the environment is the same as in her previous books; however, the tone is more philosophical and the attitude of the narrator more relaxed, as if she is enjoying the poetic process. Castellano continued her teaching career, becoming a full professor of Ethnic Studies and English; today she is Professor Emeritus at California State University, Sacramento. Further Reading López, Tiffany Ann, “Olivia Castellano” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 122: Chicano Writers, Second Series, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 36–61).

Nicolás Kanellos Castellanos, Henry C. (1827–1896). Born in New Orleans, the son of one Spanish soldier and of the daughter of another, Henry C. Castellanos was raised about one block from the French Market, where he absorbed the cultural blending of the port city, which had recently belonged to Spain and France, respectively. In 1841 he went to Washington, D.C., for his college education at Georgetown College, later transferring to Sulpican College of St. Mary in Baltimore, whence he graduated in 1847. After returning to New Orleans, he attended and graduated from the Law School of the University of Louisiana. During his life, Castellanos worked as a lawyer, journalist, editor, and teacher. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and became an important political figure in his hometown. In 1892, Castellanos began publishing a series of some 120 nostalgic, local color columns for the Times-Democrat in which he 205

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evoked the period from 1820 to 1860 during which he had lived, reminiscing about the French and Spanish heritage of the port city. In 1895, he published a selection of these as New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life. The book is a lively compilation of romanticized events and themes that include voodoo, duels, political intrigues, and rare occurrences. Further Reading Huber, Leonard V., “New Orleans as It Was, by Henry C. Castellanos” Louisiana History Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 1980): 119–120. Schafer, Judith Kelleher, “Introduction,” Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Castellón, Pedro Angel (1820–1856). Pedro Angel Castellón y Lavette, one of the lesser-known poets included in El laúd del desterrado (1858, The Lute of the Exiled), the historically important first anthology of exile literature, was born in Cuba to a French mother and a Spanish father. Somewhat of a journalist and a novice poet, he wrote in Cuba for El Faro Industrial de la Habana (The Industrial Lighthouse of Havana), La Revista Literaria (The Literary Review), and El Artista (The Artist). Castellón continued as a journalist and poet when he went into exile in the United States with his associates Juan Clemente Zenea,* Miguel Teurbe Tolón,* and José Agustín Quintero.* By 1852, he was in New Orleans with his wife and child, working in the food trade and writing for El faro de Cuba (The Lighthouse of Cuba) and El Filibustero (The Filibuster), in which he also published poems. It was during his time in New Orleans that the Spanish authorities in Cuba sentenced him in absentia to ten years in prison. Castellón’s poetry was combative in its protest of the Spanish oppression of Cuba; it also eulogized the martyrs of the independence movement and made Félix Varela* a hero of the revolution. Like Varela, Castellón died in exile—the former in St. Augustine and the latter in New Orleans. Further Reading Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Montes Huidobro, Matías, “Pero Angel Castellón” in El laúde del desterrado (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995: 159–162).

Nicolás Kanellos Castellot, José (1856–1938). Born in the state and city of Campeche, Mexico, where in 1902 he would become governor, José Castellot was a lifelong banker who occasionally became involved in politics, journalism, and creative writing. He served as executive for a number of important banks in various Mexican cities. In 1898, he was elected to the Mexican Senate, and in 1902 he was elected president of the Senate. This was all possible, of course, because he was a member of the Circle of Friends of Dictator Porfirio Díaz. Castellot was also elected to the Supreme Council of the Order of the Masons of Mexico. Castellot’s political career fell apart when the dictatorship was over206

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turned. Most of Castellot’s creative writing was published in Mexico, including his poetry books Brumas (1895, Mist), Fulgor y sombra (1895, Light and Shadow), La cuna de piedra (1903, Stone Cradle), and La eterna historia (1910, The Eternal History). His last two known publications were issued while in exile in New York: a translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1918) and his ninepage Visión del desterrado: Noche Buena de 1915 (View of the Exiled: Christmas Eve 1915), a melancholic descripCaricature of José Castellot, 1916. tion of life in exile and of nostalgia for his homeland. Much of Castellot’s highly romantic poetry was published in Spanish-language newspapers and magazines throughout the Southwest during the first half of the twentieth century and was especially welcomed by the exiled supporters of Dictator Porfirio Díaz. Castellot died in Mexico City on Apri1 7, 1938. Further Reading Camp, Roderic A., ed., Mexican Political Biographies, 1884–1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México, 6th ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1960).

Nicolás Kanellos Castilla, Julia Mercedes (?–). Colombian Julia Mercedes Castilla writes books for children and adults. Born and educated through high school in Bogotá, Colombia, she received her university education in the United States, majoring in English. She has lived in the United States for over twenty-five years. Houston has been home on two occasions, the first time for nine years, and the second since August of 1991. Her novel, Aventuras de un Niño de la Calle (Adventures of a Street Child), issued in Bogotá by a leading publishing house, has sold more than 125,000 copies in its twenty-three printings and has become required reading in some schools in Latin America. Aventuras follows the ups and downs of Armando, a street urchin in Bogotá, as he struggles to find food and shelter while being pursued by gangs, police, and the authorities of an orphanage. Her second young adult novel, Emilio (1991), chronicles the struggles of a boy from Central America to accommodate to life in Houston. Translated and published in English in 1999, Emilio (1999) has been included in the U.S. Department of Education’s Recommended Reading List. Castilla’s other books in Spanish include Luisa viaja en tren (2001, Luisa Takes a Trip by Train), El tesoro de la pordiosera (2002, The Beggar’s Treasure), and Nadie se llama Perucho Corchuelo (2004, Nobody Is Named Perucho Corchuelo). In English, she has published Pirinolo the Street Master (1997). Castilla has been associated with Arte Público Press,* which published Emilio in English, as a professional translator of books for children and young adults. Castilla has been active among the community of educated immigrant writers in the United States, speaking 207

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at conferences and book fairs. She is also a board member of the Círculo Panamericano de Lectores (Pan American Writers Circle). Further Reading Leonard, Kathy S., Bibliographic Guide to Chicana and Latina Narrative (New York: Praeger Publishers, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Castillo, Ana (1953–). Born in Chicago on June 15, 1953, to working-class Mexican American parents, Castillo earned a B.A. from Northern Illinois University in 1975 and began teaching while developing her writing career. In 1979, she earned a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Chicago. Castillo made her way into print during the 1970s as a Chicana feminist poet, first in such magazines as Revista ChicanoRiqueña (Chicano-Puerto Rican Review) and later by self-publishing her own chapbooks, Oro Canto (1977, Another Song) and The Invitation (1979). In 1984, Castillo published her first full-length collection of poems, Women Are Not Roses, with Arte Público Press, which launched her soon-to-be extensive touring career. From the late 1980s up to the present, Castillo has become a respected fiction writer, publishing novels with the independent small press, Bilingual Review Press, and later with W. W. Norton: The Mixquihuala Letters (1986), So Far from God (1993), Sapogonia: An Anti-romance in 3/8 Meter (1994), and Peel My Love like an Onion (2000). Castillo’s latest novel, The Guardians (2007), follows the trials and tribulations of a Mexican immigrant family, using the voices of the various family members to narrate the story. In 1991 and 1995, respectively, Ana Castillo reading at the National Latino Book Fair in 1979. 208

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Castillo published two feminist tracts, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma and The Sexuality of Latins (with Cherrie Moraga and Norma Alarcón), which are often cited, along with her work on the Spanish version of This Bridge Called My Back, as standard texts on Chicana literary theory. Other works in various genres include My Father Was a Toltec and Selected Poems (poetry, 1995), Ask the Impossible (poetry, 2001), Goddess of the Americas/ La Diosa de las Américas (essays, 1996), and Loverboys (short stories, 1996). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Castillo taught courses at various universities, toured extensively, and published poetry, stories, and essays in numerous periodicals and anthologies. From 1989 to 1992, she worked as a writing instructor at the University of New Mexico. During this time, she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Bremen in Germany (1991). Today, Castillo holds a chair in creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago. Further Reading Alarcon, Norma, “The Sardonic Powers of the Erotic in the Work of Ana Castillo” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (Amherst, MA: Amherst University Press, 1989). Mills, Fiona, “Creating a Resistant Chicana Aesthetic: The Queer Performativity of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God” CLA Journal Vol. 46, No. 3 (2003 Mar): 312–336.

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Castillo, Gary (?–). It seems that Gary Castillo has always had a desire to write. Since his early childhood, he could never pass by a blank piece of paper without putting something on it. His parents found his little stories everywhere and showed them to family and friends. Eventually he began writing songs and was recorded enough to join the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers at an early age. He signed with MGM studios as a Demo Recording Artist at the age of seventeen. By this time, he was enrolled at Pepperdine University near Malibu, studying to be a musician. This combined experience put him in touch with some of the greatest artists, musicians, actors, and writers of that time. Castillo moved back to Stockton, California, where he began to study opera at the University of the Pacific. He won the Los Angeles Division and was a Western Region Finalist of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions. He began performing in regional theater all around the country and in some performances in Europe. Later he began to settle down, marrying and returning to school. He attended California State University at Los Angeles, where he completed his Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees and began teaching voice and performing arts as an Associate Professor of Music at the same university. His music writing branched out to lyric-writing for songs and complete books for musicals. Time after time, he found himself returning to storytelling. He found himself writing plays, short stories, and then novels. The subject matter of these stories varied, but most were influenced by his Hispanic upbringing. On his first outing it took him about three months to publish his first book, Quesadilla Moon (2007). Although this young adult novel is about a 209

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Hispanic boy who wants to grow up to be a singer, it is fiction. As Castillo’s other stories, it is a way to show the common desire for love, friendship, and success. Castillo and his wife Marilyn live in West Covina, California. They have two married daughters and three grandchildren. Castillo teaches for the Covina Unified School District, where he primarily works with deaf children. He serves on the City of Covina Cultural Arts Commission and works as a committee chairman for the Boy Scouts of America. Further Reading Schon, Isabel, The Best of Latino Heritage, 1996-2002: A Guide to the Best Juvenile Books about Latino People (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 2003).

Carmen Peña Abrego Catacalos, Rosemary (1944–). San Antonio native and poet Rosemary Catacalos, born March 18, 1944, writes works that combine Greek mythology and Mexican American folklore. Her well-crafted poetry, a paean to her Greek and Mexican American ancestry, is evident in her books Again for the First Time (1984) and As Long as It Takes (1984), which evoke the works of Rosario Castellanos and Alfonsina Storni. A primary goal of Catacalos’s has been to bring poetry to the schools and Chicano communities of Texas. In 1985, she cochaired the City of San Antonio’s first Arts and Cultural Advisory Committee, was instrumental in designing and implementing the city’s metropolitan arts funding process, and as cochair, reviewed grant applications for the Texas and Arizona Arts Commissions and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served as a panelist for the NEA Literature, Arts-in-Education, and Expansion Arts Programs, and in the aftermath of Mexico’s 1985 earthquake, designed and produced mailers featuring student poetry and drawings as gifts for the children of that country, a work that was later exhibited at the United Nations offices in Mexico City and featured in the 1986 San Antonio Festival. Catacalos received the 1985 Texas Institute of Letters poetry prize and the Dobie Paisano 1985 Fellowship, awarded jointly by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, and in 1986 she was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. The recipient of a 1985 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, she was also the recipient of the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1989–1991). She went home to San Antonio to care for her aging parents and then returned as an affiliated scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. In 1987, she initiated and organized the San Antonio Inter-American Book Fair, a major literary event that has attracted national and international attention because of its cultural exchange program. From 1986 to 1989, Catacalos served as director for the Literature Program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a multi-disciplinary Latino arts group in San Antonio that has included writers Isabel Allende,* Alice Walker, and Carlos Fuentes. At the 210

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international level, Rosemary Catacalos took part in the Tercer Encuentro de Poetas del Mundo Latino (Third Conference of Latin World Poets) held in Mexico City, an international festival sponsored by Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations, the National Fine Arts Institute, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 2003, she left the Bay Area for San Antonio; she is the Executive Director of Geminink, a nonprofit organization that began as a reading series and today works within Texas community and schools. Her most recent work combines poetry and jazz. She collaborated with Li-Young Lee in a presentation for Poetry in the Round and the James Dick Foundation for the Performing Arts. “Rosemary Catacalos is a poet who can see beyond the simple event . . . and comes into her own as a spokeswoman for the ‘daily returns’ of a life that through her writing offers in itself mythic relations to worlds past, present, and future,” writes David Oliphant about Again for the First Time. Catacalos fuses elements of classical myth with life in the San Antonio barrio. Woven into sixty-eight pages is a series of poems wherein the poet takes on the character of different women, from Ariadne/Penelope to La Llorona. Oliphant claims that “Catacalos, whether writing of her Mexican or Greek side, is concerned throughout her book with ‘old ties.’ Indeed, the ties between writer and community are most evident in the first part of Again, which reflects Chicanismo, the Mexican side of Catacalos; the second alludes to her Greek ancestry as well as to Greek gods and goddesses.” Further Reading Milligan, Bryce, “Striking Intellect, Emotion Mark ‘Again for the First Time’” San Antonio Light, June 3, 1984. Oliphant, Dave, “Three San Antonio Poets” Cedar Rock (Winter 1985: 6–8); Whitaker, James, “Tangled Lines/Books,” Texas Monthly Vol. 12, No. 9 (Sep. 1984): 184–188.

Mary Helen Ponce Catalá, Rafael (?–). Cuban-born pet and essayist Rafael Catalá, though an exile from his homeland, has become famous not for developing a poetry of exile but for his search for the meeting ground between science and literature. Thus for more than two decades, he has cultivated what he has named “ciencia poesía” (poetry science), along with its meta-language of arts and sciences. Some of his work has been ground-breaking in developing a scientific language for poetry; he especially works with the vocabulary of particle physics. Just as in some interpretations of quantum physics a particle can be in two places at the same time, ciencia poesía develops the concept of “both/and” for fields that have previously been treated as opposites. Among his poetry books are Caminos (1973, Roads), Círculo cuadrado (1974, The Circle Squared), Ojo sencillo/ Triqui-traque (1975, Simple Eye/Clickety-clack), Copulantes (1981, Couplings), and Cienciapoesía (1985). His poetry has also been published widely in periodicals ranging The New York Times to Puntos de Contacto (Contact Points). Catalá’s essays, many of them about ciencia poesía, have appeared in 211

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such important cultural magazines as Mexico’s Plural and the University of Minnesota’s Ideologies & Literature. Further Reading Jiménez, Luis A., Rafael Catalá: Del Círculo Cuadrado a la Ciencia Poesía (Kent, WA: Omoteca Institute, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Ceja, Manuel (1920–?). Manuel Ceja helped organize the Mexican American Movement (MAM),* which emerged in southern California during the 1930s under the auspices of the YMCA. The members were made up of upwardly mobile youth, mostly college students who had committed themselves “to improve our conditions among our Mexican American and Mexican people living in the United States” and to pursue “citizenship, higher education . . . and a more active participation in civic and cultural activities by those of our national descent.” A model of MAM’s professed ideals, Ceja was born in Los Angeles in 1920 of immigrant parents. He attended Compton Jr. College and graduated from the Spanish American Institute, a leadership tank for Mexican Americans. He was also a volunteer coach at the local chapter of the Mexican American Pioneer Club, a boys club within the MAM. In a July 1938 issue of the Mexican Voice, a newsletter published by MAM, Manuel Ceja wrote a piece entitled, “Are We Proud of Being Mexicans?” that came very close to the rhetoric of identity used by Chicanos in the 1960s. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Central American Literature. Although writers of Central American origin have individually produced literary works in the United States since the mid–nineteenth century, no consistent corpus of work could be identified as Central American until the last two or three decades, when large waves of political and economic refugees settled in the United States as a result of the disruptions caused by civil wars (and by U.S. involvement in these wars) in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The majority of the literature produced to date has been of immigrant and exile character, as exemplified by the novels of Mario Bencastro,* who documented the wars in his native El Salvador before writing novels dealing with Central American immigrants who come to the United States, the economic privation they suffer, and the problems they have in adjusting to metropolitan life. The works of Sandra Benítez,* who, though not a Central American, spent part of her childhood in El Salvador, depict the wars in El Salvador from the point of view of common folk. Of all the Central American writers creating literature in the United States, however, Honduran novelist Roberto Quesada* is the most accomplished creator of an immigrant esthetic. Writing his satirical works in Spanish and concentrating on the inability of the immigrants to 212

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adjust to life in their adopted country, Quesada has developed a series of lovable misfits who encounter one humorous cultural conflict after another. Guatemalan-born Victor Perera* and David Unger* explore life growing up as Jews in Guatemala but do not make the transition to writing about their experiences as Latino or Central American Jews in the United States. Francisco Goldman,* the son of a Guatemalan mother and a Jewish American father, has set his novels in CenRené Colato Laínez. tral America in an effort to explore the magically real culture that has so enchanted American readers over the last half century. Other writers, such as Omar Castañeda* and Arturo Arias,* concentrate on indigenous myth and culture in Central America. There is even an emergent children’s literature, as represented in the books of René Colato Láinez, who writes stories to facilitate the accommodation of Central American children to life in the United States. Probably the most influential Central American writer in the last few decades has been Nicaraguan poet Roberto Vargas,* who participated extensively in the Chicano Movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The beginnings of a native literature among the children of immigrants is even evident, as in the case of Marcos McPeek Villatoro,* who writes about his generation, raised in the United States; but there clearly a larger corpus of works will emerge in the coming decades. Further Reading Beverley, John, and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Craft, Nancy J., Novels of Testimony and Resistance from Central America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos Central American Refugees. The most recent source of Hispanic exile* culture in the United States is represented by the refugees from the Central American civil wars that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. More than 500,000 Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans entered the United States in search of political asylum between 1979 and 1985. Although many legitimately sought political asylum from local repression, probably just as many sought economic security in the United States, for their home countries were extremely poor—a situation that only worsened with political turmoil. In consequence, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused them asylum on political 213

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grounds and classified them as economic refugees. Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees (but not Nicaraguans) were escaping countries whose governments were supported by the United States; admitting large numbers of Salvadoran and Guatemalan political refugees would contradict U.S. foreign policy. The political instability that created the diaspora stemmed from civil war in El Salvador, insurgency in Guatemala, and a U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary war in Nicaragua. The United States was not the only destination for refugees. To escape these political conditions, refugees went anywhere that would be safer than their homelands. By the end of 1982, 70,000 Salvadorans had fled to Guatemala, 120,000 to Mexico, 30,000 to Honduras, and 22,000 to Nicaragua. Thousands of others found their way to Costa Rica, Panama, and Belize. The war caused internal displacement within El Salvador as well; one estimate puts this number at greater than 200,000. The primary cause of this monumental outflow of Central American refugees has been the violent repression perpetrated by authoritarian governments backed by the United States. El Salvador and Honduras, for example, between 1979 and 1990 received more than $2 billion in military aid from the United States. Under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, aid to Guatemala was resumed after President Jimmy Carter had cut it off in 1977, when Amnesty International declared the Guatemalan government as one of the most repressive in the world. In addition, Reagan’s administration, with congressional approval, supported the Contras, the rebel army trying to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Nicaraguans seeking political asylum because they fled persecution from the Sandinistas presented U.S. immigration authorities with a thorny problem. Although the administration had financed the Contras, the Nicaraguan government still had diplomatic relations with the United States and was not a communist nation—else Nicaraguan refugees could have more easily claimed asylum. The U.S. Congress in 1985 approved $27 million to continue efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government but failed to pass immigration reform. As a consequence, more than 500,000 Central American refugees in the United States found themselves in an ambiguous immigration status, a situation that had been clarified over the years. The struggles of the Central American refugees in the United States have been documented in the literature of Mario Bencastro* and Roberto Quesada, among other Central American immigrant* writers. Further Reading Masud-Piloto, Félix, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995).

F. Arturo Rosales Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York. The Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York (Cuban Cultural Center of New York) is a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation, advancement, and dissemination of Cuban 214

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and Cuban American culture. Founded in March 1997 by a group of Cuban exile artists, professionals, scholars, and writers, it has been an important institution in fostering literary creativity and performance. In addition to offering a forum for writers, the Centro sponsors conferences, art exhibits, concerts and other musical, artistic, cinematic, intellectual, and literary events. Its mission also includes maintaining an inventory of all cultural and artistic productivity of the Cuban exile* community to ensure that it will always remain as part of Cuban national heritage. As an exile institution, its mission emphasizes denouncing all violations of the intellectual and artistic freedom and human rights of Cuban artists and writers, as well as supporting dissidents in Cuba. Among the writers the Centro has sponsored for public discussion and whose literary works it has presented over the years are Nilo Cruz,* Maya Islas,* Pablo Medina,* Ricardo Pau-Llosa,* Gustavo Pérez-Firmat* and Uva de Aragón. The Centro also offers theatrical performances, such as Adrián Rodríguez’s trilogy, “An Intimate History of Exile, The Union City Plays.” Further Reading Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York (www.centroculturalcubano. org/search.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Centro Español de Ybor City. A portion of the cigar industry was transferred to Florida when Ybor City was founded in the swamps just outside Tampa in 1866. The factory workers and owners soon constructed mutual aid societies* to serve the transplanted cigar-making community. The societies were the first Hispanic mutual aid societies to house theaters* in their buildings and to run full-range theatrical programs by and for the workers as well as to house professional companies on tour from Cuba, Spain, and later New York and other parts of the United States. The first of these societies to open was the Centro Español in 1891. The Centro Español’s original building included a theater hall used for dramatic and musical comedy productions as well as for dances and other community events. A new building proudly erected in 1912 included a first-rate theater with a stage twenty-eight by thirty-five feet and a proscenium arch twenty-four feet high, an orchestra pit, box seats, 231 seats in the balcony and 465 in the orchestra. Over the years, Ybor City became a Hispanic theatrical center that launched the careers of many professional theatrical people as well as of entire companies. During the Depression, it was the only community to support a Hispanic Federal Theater Project company as part of the Works Progress Administration. The project was housed not at the Centro Español but at the superior theater of the Centro Asturiano. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).


Cervantes, Lorna Dee

Cervantes, Lorna Dee (1954–). In 1992, Mexican American poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger, made her the first Hispanic writer to win the prestigious Paterson Poetry Prize. Her book was also awarded the Latin American Writers Institute Award that same year. Cervantes is the most celebrated Hispanic female poet of the United States. Although she is the author of only three books (the output of more than thirty years of work), Cervantes’ poems about Mexican American and women’s culture are so finely crafted that they are reprinted in anthologies and textbooks more than those of any other Hispanic woman writer. Of Mexican and Amerindian ancestry, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes was born on August 6, 1954, into a very poor family in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. Despite this poverty, she was able to discover the world of books at a very early age. Lorna began writing poetry when she was six years old, and poems written when she was fourteen were eventually published in a magazine after she had established her career as a writer. In 1990, she left her Ph.D. studies in philosoLorna Dee Cervantes. phy and esthetics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before finishing her dissertation. She then went on to teach creative writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she is a tenured professor today. Cervantes’ early career as a poet achieved recognition in 1974 when her work was published in Revista Chicano-Riqueña. She was one of the first Chicana poets to achieve publication and quickly assumed leadership in the literary movement by founding and editing a literary magazine, Mango, out of San Jose. Her work was quickly circulated throughout 216

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the Chicano literary movement and soon began to appear in anthologies and textbooks nationwide. Many of these early movement poems, dealing with identity and roots, became part of Emplumada (1981, Plumed), Cervantes’s first collection of poems, published by the prestigious University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series. The predominant themes include cultural conflict, oppression of women and minorities, and alienation from one’s roots. Cervantes’s poetry is very well crafted and uses highly lyrical language while simultaneously being direct and powerful. Cervantes’s second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger, very much the work of a mature poet, deals with great themes of life, death, social conflict, and poverty. In 2006, Cervantes published a very large volume of selected works covering a twenty-five year span: Drive: The First Quartet. Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). Sánchez, Marta Ester, Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Chacón, Daniel (1962–). Daniel Chacón was born on September 13, 1962, and grew up in Fresno, California, the last of three children. He lived with one foot in the city and one in rural Fresno County, fig orchards, cow pastures, and low-flying crop dusters outside the window of his living room. All he had to do was cross the highway and he was in the city: brick walls, concrete curbs, streetlights, stray dogs, billboards, neon signs, and bearded homeless men who walked around the parking lots of strip malls looking for money. His brother and sister were too preoccupied with discovering their teen years to pay him much attention, so he used his imagination—sometimes too much. He remembers his mother telling him, “Daniel, you think too much. Stop it.” When he was a child, everything around him took on meaning in his imagination. A homeless man walking through the field near his house was a kidnapper or a warlock, the plane flying low overhead a Russian bomber, and a strangely shaped cloud the spirit of death. Writing became a place where he could retreat. Chacón earned a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in English at California State University, Fresno, in 1989 and 1991, respectively. He received an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Oregon in 1994. Now, from his home on a hill overlooking downtown El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, he writes with the same urgency. Like Malamud’s character in The Tenants, he wakes up every morning, puts on his cold pants and says to himself, “I must write. Otherwise there is no peace.” Somewhere, somehow, between high school and his first years of college, Chacón convinced himself that he should be a lawyer. He majored in political science and was active in the Chicano Student Movement. The year before his graduation, he took fiction writing, and his instructors, poet Connie Hales and 217

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Daniel Chacón.

fiction writer Steve Yarborough, encouraged him to keep writing. Along with his B.A. in political science, he left Fresno State with a master’s in English. Then he went on to get an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Oregon. Chacón published his first book, Chicano, Chicanery, in 2000. According to The New York Times, “Although a collection of short stories, [it] is really a ‘Portrait of the Chicano Artist as a Young Man.’” The stories run the gamut from his entrance into fiction writing to stories he got published in some of the country’s leading literary journals, such as ZYZZYVA, The New England Review, Callaloo, and The Colorado Review. “Spring Break,” a story about three Chicano boys who steal a cow and end up not knowing what to do with it, Chacón wrote as a graduate student at Fresno State. It was his first publication, having appeared in The Bilingual Review under the title “Bovine Inspiration.” Daniel Chacón’s first novel, And the Shadows Took Him, for young adults, was published in 2005. The young adult novel centers on Joey, an aspiring actor who falls into gang membership when he becomes uprooted and alienated after his family has to move to Oregon for work-related reasons—the opportunity to become middle class. As a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, Chacón has also written about Chicano literature. In 2008, Chacón compiled and edited The Last Supper of Chicano Heros: The Selected Works of Jose Antonio Burciaga* for the University of Arizona Press. Chacón taught for five years at Maricopa Junior College, where he was cocoordinator of the Puente Program, 218

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which brings Chicana and Chicano literature to the community college writing class. He taught for a year at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. Since 2000, he has taught in the MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. When he’s not in class, he’s on a hill in his home overlooking the twin cities, El Paso and Juárez, and he’s writing. Further Reading Blohm, Judith M., Kids like Me: Voices of the Immigrant Experience (Boston: Intercultural Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Chacón, Eusebio (1869–1948). Journalist, poet, and civic leader Eusebio Chacón was known as a great orator, especially when it came to defending the language and cultural rights of the native New Mexicans. Born in Peñasco, New Mexico, on December 16, 1869, Chacón was the descendant of Spanish pioneers who had colonized this part of New Mexico. Shortly after his birth, the Chacón family settled in Trinidad, Colorado. He returned to New Mexico to study at the Jesuit Las Vegas College; in 1889, he received a degree in law from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. After graduation, Chacon began teaching English at Colegio Guadalupano (Guadalupe College) in Durango, Mexico. In 1891, he returned to Trinidad, Colorado, where he was admitted to the Colorado bar, began his law practice, and was named deputy district attorney of Las Animas County, Colorado. In 1898, Chacon joined José Escobar to edit and write for the Spanish-language newspaper El Progreso (Progress), in Trinidad, Colorado. Chacón, as a journalist, spoke out against anti-Hispanic prejudices in the Southwest. He is the author of two of the earliest Spanish-language novels to be written by native a New Mexican: El Hijo de la tempestad (Son of the Tempest) and Tras la tormenta la calma (Calm after the Storm), both published in 1892 by the newspaper El Boletín Popular (The People’s Bulletin). The first deals with a realistic portrait of a bandit, whose crimes seem to be insignificant when compared to those of politicians. The second is a romantic novel about a pair of lovers. The novels have a pastoral setting, perhaps reminding the reader of idyllic life before the coming of the Anglo Americans to the New Mexico territory.

El hijo de la tempestad, by Eusebio Chacón.

Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, Pasó por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos

Eusebio Chacón.

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Chacón, Felipe Maximiliano

Chacón, Felipe Maximiliano (1873–19?). Born into a wealthy and powerful New Mexico family, Chacón was the son of Urbano Chacón, the New Mexico Superintendent of Schools and journalist. Felipe was educated in Santa Fe public schools and at the College of St. Michael and was a poet, essayist, and prose writer. From 1911 to 1914, he was the associate editor of the Las Vegas, New Mexico, La Voz del Pueblo (The Voice of the People), after which he founded El Faro del Río Grande (1914, The Rio Grande Light) and later served as editor of El Independiente (The Independent), El Eco del Norte (The Northern Echo), and La Bandera Americana (The American Flag). In 1924, Chacón published his Obras de Felipe Maximiliano Chacón, El cantor neomexicano: poesía y prosa (The Works of Felipe Maximiliano Chacón, The New Mexican Bard: Poetry and Prose), which represents a selection of his works spanning a period of forty years. The first part of Obras contains fifty-six original poems and seven poems translated from English and American poets. The second part contains two stories and a short novel. His works are thematically diverse, running the gamut from love to religion to politics. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, Pasó por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Chacón Gonzales, Herminia (1903–2003). Herminia Chacón Gonzales was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 17, 1903, to a family of New Mexican journalists and writers. Her father, Felipe Maximiliano Chacón,* was a wellknown poet, and her mother, Otila Cristina Domínguez, was from a prominent family in Chihuahua, Mexico. Chacón was educated in parochial schools. In 1921, she graduated from Immaculate Conception High School in Las Vegas, New Mexico. At the time, a high school diploma was qualification enough to teach in the government schools of the state, and Chacón was sent to teach in Maes, New Mexico, a small agricultural community. In 1922, Chacón’s father was hired to edit La Bandera Americana (The American Flag) in Albuquerque, and she interrupted her teaching to assist her father in this work. Chacón’s ancestors figured prominently in public life, and much of Herminia’s lifework was given over to keeping this knowledge alive. She wrote for publications specializing in regional history and shared her knowledge with scholars whenever possible. Her grandfather, Urbano Chacón, founded El Explorador (The Exporter) in Trinidad, Colorado, in the late 1860s and was superintendent of schools in Santa Fe at the time of his sudden death in 1886. Herminia’s uncle, Rafael Chacón (1833–1925), reached the rank of major in the U.S. Cavalry and served at the Civil War Battle of Valverde. His memoirs detailing his early education as a military cadet in Mexico and his adjustment to life under American rule were published in English in 1986. Her father’s first cousin, Eusebio Chacón* (1873–1949), was an accomplished orator, interpreter, poet, historian, and novelist who some consider the first Nuevomexicano professional writer. 220

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A writer of considerable talent, Herminia contributed short cultural notes to La Bandera Americana in Albuquerque and later to El Independiente (The Independent) in Las Vegas. Her columns were brief, various in subject, and usually imparted a moral lesson. From this period is Chacón’s “La noche Buena de Samuel” (Samuel’s Christmas Eve), a story recovered in Hispanic American Christmas Stories. As Kanellos notes, the story might have appeared in any newspaper in the country. It tells of Samuel, a laborer who is evicted from his boardinghouse. Once on the street, a shop owner employs him to play Santa Claus. Unable to play a convincing Santa to some demanding customers, Samuel is dismissed and heads back to his old haunts, toy sack in hand. Once there, he is set upon by the children of the poorer classes, who are more than pleased to receive whatever this Santa has for them. In 1977, Chacón submitted “The Spies” to “Historical Memories Contest” in Password, the El Paso Historical Society’s quarterly. “The Spies,” told tongue-in-cheek, describes Herminia’s job with the U.S. Censorship Office in El Paso during World War II. On occasions, she crosses the international bridge to Juárez to eat and shop; there she frequents a restaurant run by German immigrants. Spurred on by the climate of those years—“the war was dominating all our lives”—Herminia gets it into her mind that the restaurant’s clientele are Nazi spies who know that she works for the U. S. government and wish to do her harm. Chacón continued to write well into her nineties and from time to time submitted historical and cultural notes to La Herencia del Norte (Northern Heritage), a monthly magazine on Hispanic New Mexico that continues to be published in Santa Fe. Further Reading Chacón Gonzales, Herminia, “The Spies” in Password Vol. 23., No. 3 (Fall, 1978): 104–107. Kanellos, Nicolás, La Noche Buena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Meketa, Jacqueline Dorgan, Legacy of Honor: The Life of Rafaél Chacón, a Nineteenth Century New Mexican (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). Meléndez, A. Gabriel, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).

Gabriel Meléndez Chapa, Francisco (1870–1924). Francisco Chapa, the editor of San Antonio’s El Imparcial de Texas (The Texas Impartial) from the early 1900s until his death in 1924, nurtured relationships with Anglos in Texas and helped immigrants settle. The Matamoros-born publisher came to Texas as a young businessman in the 1890s and integrated himself into San Antonio civic and political life. He became an advisor to Governor Colquitt in 1910 and Governor Ferguson in 1918. Furthermore, his newspaper encouraged the Mexican vote, prompted readers to involve themselves in civil rights issues, and praised Mexican American veterans of World War I. Appalled by the negative images of Mexicans in the cinema, Chapa used El Imparcial de Texas to 221

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voice his concern over the degrading images. He took a delegation to the Texas governor to protest the showing of such films. The Texas governor, W. P. Hobby, then banned screening movies that portrayed Mexicans poorly. His association with Anglos helped Chapa accomplish many of his goals. Further Reading Christian, Carole, “Joining the American Mainstream: Texas’s Mexican Americans during World War I” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Vol. 92 (Apr. 1989): 559–595.

F. Arturo Rosales Chavarría-Cháirez, Becky (?–). Becky Chavarría-Cháirez has dedicated her career to helping her fellow Americans understand and appreciate her Mexican American heritage. As a child in her native San Antonio, she was exposed to many cultures and languages, and she spoke Spanish before she spoke English. “My parents gave me an incredible gift, and I want to share the wonders of my family and culture with everyone.” Throughout her professional career, she has aired her observations, opinions, and viewpoints on Hispanic life and multicultural interaction in the Americas both in print and on the air, as a radio commentator on the Dallas National Public Radio affiliate. In 1993, she was the recipient of the Vivian Castleberry Award for Radio Commentary. Her work has been published in several major publications, including the Atlanta JournalConstitution, Dallas Business Journal, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Express-News, San Francisco Chronicle, and Hispanic Magazine. Chavarría-Cháirez heads Chameleon Creek Press, a literary arts communications group based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Chameleon Creek incorporates CATCHPHRASES PR and The Arts Coach, the Hispanic media relations and arts consulting Becky Chavarría-Cháirez. 222

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firms she owned and operated in Dallas, Texas. Chameleon Creek Press specializes in literary arts project development and promotion, advocacy, and implementation of strategic media/outreach services for individual writers and arts organizations in the Southwest. Chavarría-Cháirez has recently adapted her first children’s picture book, Magda’s Tortilla’s/Las tortillas de Magda (2000), for children’s theater. The very successful bilingual children’s picture book, named to Laura Bush’s Recommended Reading List, deals with a young Mexican American girl, Magda Madrigal, learning from her grandmother to make tortillas; the passing-on of traditions, especially culinary ones, are common experiences that children and adults can identify with. With the publication of her second children’s picture book, Magda’s Piñata Magic/Magda y la piñata mágica (2001), Becky Chavarría-Cháirez continues the adventures of Magda, this time adapting the traditional piñata-making craft and game to modern times. Both books serve to reaffirm her lifelong involvement in cross-cultural communication. “Magda was born over a long Christmas holiday when I was away from home and longing for just one more Christmas at my grandmother’s house. I wanted to keep the memory of those times at ‘buelita’s alive for my daughters.” Chavarría-Cháirez continues to write about the Mexican American culture she knows and loves and lives in New Mexico with her husband and two daughters. Further Reading Schon, Isabel, Contemporary Spanish-Speaking Writers and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Carmen Peña Abrego Chávez, Angélico (1910–1996). The greatest religious poet among Hispanics in the United States, Brother Angélico Chávez was born on April 10, 1910, in Wagonmound, New Mexico. He was raised in Mora and attended St. Francis Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and colleges in the Midwest. Chávez was the author of some nineteen books and was also a historian of his order and of the Catholic Church in New Mexico. What unifies Chávez’s large output as a poet and historian is his interest in New Mexico’s past and in his own Catholicism. Beginning as a religious poet, he later took an interest in historical fiction and, eventually, in the history of the region itself, as in his most famous historical essay, My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico (1947). Chávez’s reputation as a creative writer rests upon an important body of poetic works that include Clothed with the Sun (1939), Eleven Lady Lyrics and Other Poems (1945), The Single Rose; The Rose Unica and Commentary of Fray Manuel de Santa Clara (1948), and The Virgin of

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Port Lligat (1959). Although Chávez’s poetry and all of his works are grounded in New Mexican Catholicism, his poems are not local color pieces celebrating New Mexico’s picturesque landscape; instead they depict Chávez’s inner life. Chávez died on March 18, 1996. Further Reading McCracken, Ellen, “Meditations, Sermons, and Plays: The Early Religious Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez” in Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practie in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Chávez, César (1927–1993). No figure has been celebrated more in Latin literature or popular culture than has labor leader César Chávez, who, in addition to lighting the spark of the Mexican American civil rights movement, was also the catalyst for the Chicano literary and artistic movement when he invited Luis Valdez* to form a farm-worker theater and also invited poets and writers to join the struggle to organize farm workers in California. Scholars take the year 1965 as the beginning of the Chicano Movement,* in which there was

César Chávez, member of the Community Service Organization.

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a flowering of literary and artistic production by Mexican Americans. The date is directly related to the founding of the United Farm Workers by Chávez. Chávez was born in Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927. After his father, Librado, lost a farmstead that his own father had homesteaded in the 1880s, the Chávez family was forced to join the California migrant stream as workers. In 1938, the family wound up in California’s San Joaquin Valley suffering the desperate poverty endemic among farm workers in the area. As the family followed the crops, César and his brothers and sisters attended more than thirty schools. César dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help support his family, but at the end of World War II in 1945, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific. Discharged in 1948, he married Helen Fabela and rented a house in Sal Si Puedes (Get Out if You Can), a poor Mexican neighborhood in San Jose. As a young husband with a growing family to support, Chávez had no choice but to pick fruit in area orchards. But in 1952, the idealistic farm worker went to work as an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO) at the behest of Fred Ross, a recruiter for the organization. Founded on the principles established by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, the CSO used neighborhood canvassing techniques to persuade families to register to vote and to battle racial and economic discrimination. Showing remarkable organizing ability, CSO leaders soon dispatched Chávez throughout Arizona and California, where he spurred local community action. While still in the CSO, Chávez joined forces with the United Packing House Workers of America in a drive to organize packing shed workers; but, remembering his own background, his heart lay in organizing the field workers. By 1958, his talents had earned him the national directorship of the CSO. Now he could fulfill his dream of organizing farm workers, but other CSO leaders resisted. Chávez then resigned in 1962 and convinced other CSO organizers, Gil Padilla and Dolores Huerta, as well as his wife Helen and brother Manuel, to bring the “dream” to life. By 1965, the fledgling union, called the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) boasted more than a thousand members. That year, the struggle began against California growers that would last throughout Chávez’s life. Inspired by the methods African American civil rights activists in the South, the ex-farm worker injected the strategy into his own movement. In April 1966, Chávez led a march from Delano to the state capital of Sacramento, demanding social justice for farm workers. The event drew much national attention and sympathy, a development that was not lost on Chávez and his followers. Gaining public support seemed more effective than coercing employers through work stoppages and became the union’s main weapon. Because of this, Chávez called on numerous occasions for marches and other publicity efforts designed to reveal the plight of poor farm workers. A national boycott against all California grapes, for example, resulted in contracts from farmers who had successfully resisted every other union tactic. On more than one occasion, Chávez fasted to bring attention to the workers’ cause. 225

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By the late 1970s, internal dissent had weakened the California-based UFWA, and the rank and file began to challenge the leadership’s decisionmaking process. Many accused Chávez of becoming too authoritarian. A third grape boycott was issued in 1984, largely to protest pesticide use as harmful to workers. By now, Chávez’s Gandhi-like approach did not resonate as it had in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, the farm worker movement lost much of its symbolic appeal for Chicanos, and from then until César Chávez’s tragic death on April 23, 1993, at the age of sixty-five, the struggle was less public than it had been in previous years. The degree to which the farm worker movement succeeded is not the most important measurement of Chávez’s place in history. His legacy transcends his life’s work of organizing at the grass root level, and especially of organizing farm workers. More than that of any other personality in this century, Mexican Americans evoke the name and memory of this soft-spoken labor organizer when they commemorate past civil rights struggles, advocate for contemporary social reform, or seek a heroic symbol with which to identify themselves. Few Mexican Americans sacrificed and suffered as much as Chávez to help their people. Further Reading Castillo, Richard Griswold del, and Richard A. García, César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). Rosales, F. Arturo, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican-American Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

F. Arturo Rosales Chávez, Denise (1948–). Denise Chávez is a talented actress and a prolific playwright, but it is as a novelist that she has gained her deserved place in Chicano literature. Born on August 15, 1948, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Chávez was raised principally by her mother, Delphina, a teacher—her father had abandoned the family while she was still young. After attending schools and colleges in Las Cruces, Chávez obtained a master’s degree in theater arts from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974 and a master’s in creative writing from the University of New Mexico in 1984. As a playwright and fiction writer, Chávez has written numerous plays and received various fellowships, including the Steele Jones Fiction Award in 1986, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1981 and 1982, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1984. Despite Chávez’s high productivity as a playwright, it is her works of fiction that have garnered the most attention. Chávez has published short stories in magazines and three novels: The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), Face of an Angel (1993), and Loving Pedro Infante (2001). For Chávez, literature is very much the art of writing about lives and individuals and the stories they have to tell. Her three novels present a series of lives, or characters, talking for themselves in the idiosyncratic Southwestern dialects, within a loose biographical structure. In the case of her first novel, the unifying structure is the life of Rocío Esquivel, who, during a series of interconnected stories, gains maturity by rebelling against the social roles created for her. Face of 226

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an Angel, on the other hand, centers on the life of Soveida Dosamantes, a waitress, and the unfortunate and tragicomic amorous relationships that she has with men; in the midst of the narration are brought in various types of unlikely elements, such as a manual on how to become a good waitress that the protagonist is writing. In Loving Pedro Infante, her emphasis, again, is on small people and their prosaic lives—this time Teresina Avila, a thirtyish working woman who loves the wrong man, and her group of friends. Among Chávez’s plays, including plays for children, are “Novitates” (1973), “The Mask of November” (1975), “The Flying Tortilla Man” (1975), “Elevators” (1977), “The Adobe Rabbit” (1980), “Nacimiento” (1980, Birth), “How Junior Got Throwed in the Joint” (1981), “Hecho en Mexico” (1983, Made in Mexico), “Plague-Time” (1985), “Novena Narrativa” (1987, Narrative Novena), “Language of Vision” (1988), and “Women in the State of Denise Chávez. Grace” (1989). In all of her work, Chávez balances herself on the fine line between celebrating Southwestern Mexican traditions and challenging their patriarchal underpinnings. In 2006, Chávez explored a new genre in her memoir with cooking recipes, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture. Further Reading Calderón, Hector, and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Heard, Martha E., “The Theatre of Denise Chávez” The Americas Review Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer 1988): 83–91. Quintana, Alvina E., Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Chávez Padilla, Ernesto (1944–). Poet, novelist, and editor Ernesto Chávez Padilla was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the sixth of seven children, but he was raised in the San Joaquin Valley in California by his migrant farm worker parents, who were based out of the town of Tulare. Chávez Padilla received his B.A. in English from Sacramento State College in 1968. During 227

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his undergraduate studies, he began writing poetry, some of which was later published. Assisted by a Ford Foundation fellowship, Chávez Padilla was able to go on to graduate school; in 1986, he received his Ph.D. in English. Throughout his academic career, Chávez Padilla has continued to write poetry and short fiction, principally about growing up Chicano and facing culture conflict. Probably more important than his writing to the development of Mexican American literature has been Chávez Padilla’s founding and directing of Lalo Press, a small publishing house that issues works by many primary and new voices. The lack of financial rewards or even viability in publishing poetry have in particular reduced the opportunities for Chicanos and Latinos to see their works in print. Nevertheless, Lalo Press has made possible the publication and circulation of books by such important writers as Alurista,* Juan Felipe Herrera,* Carmen Tafolla,* and Tino Villanueva, among many others. Chávez Padilla teaches English at California State University in Bakersfield. Further Reading Barton, Edwin John, “Ernesto Chávez Padilla” in Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Press, 2005) (www.bookrags.com/biography/ernesto-chavezpadilla-dlb/).

Nicolás Kanellos Chicana Liberation. The term Chicana is the feminine form of the Spanish noun Chicano. Scholars today agree that although much of the overt leadership of the Chicano Movement* was dominated by males, Chicanas also played leadership roles and pushed the movement towards heightening the consciousness of the plight of women in Mexican and Mexican American culture. Because the Chicano civil rights struggle was so male-oriented, issues crucial to Chicanas were relegated to the backburner or ignored completely. At the First Chicano Youth Liberation conference held in Denver in 1969, for example, Chicanas in attendance insisted on addressing their oppression by males, many of whom asserted that the priority of the Chicano Movement was to liberate the males first. The women delegates held an impromptu workshop that issued a statement condemning chauvinism within the Chicano Movement. Many Chicanas, needless to say, were not to be deterred from pursuing the issue, and soon Chicana liberation organizations began to multiply and flourish. Similarly, from this beginning of the struggle emerged a rich literature that erupted in poetry readings by Chicanas, theatrical companies (such as San Francisco’s Las Cucarachas (The Cockroaches), and even publishing houses (such as Lorna Dee Cervantes’* Mango) and magazines (such as Third Woman). In 1970, California Chicanas founded the Comisión Femenil Nacional (National Feminist Commission) to promote the formulation of public policies to address the specific needs of Chicanas. This organization’s emphasis on developing leadership roles and organizational skills among its members provided a model for subsequent organizing efforts. In the early 1970s, issues of gender equality within La Raza Unida Party (The United People’s Party) prompted Marta Cotera and other Chicanas to demand a greater voice in the party and to 228

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organize the first Chicano feminist meetings, in Houston during 1971 and 1972. These types of initiative put Chicanas in the forefront of the international feminist movement and led to the creation of such groups as the Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA), founded in 1974. MANA succeeded in advancing Chicanas from all socioeconomic backgrounds and political ideologies by means of leadership training and network communication at the national level. Although MANA emerged in Washington, D.C., soon after its founding, its membership extended into sixteen states; by the 1980s, MANA regional chapters existed throughout the United States. MANA continues to sponsor an annual convention in different cities of the United States to discuss issues affecting Mexican American women. From its Washington, D.C., headquarters, MANA publishes a monthly newsletter devoted to the same purpose. The organization has expanded to include a diverse group of Latinas in all areas of political, social, and professional life and is the single largest pan-Latina organization in the United States. In the 1970s, pioneer Chicana activist Francisca Flores created the California League of Mexican American Women, a Los Angeles–based organization striving for women’s rights in southern California. Also in the 1970s, Alicia Escalante founded the Chicana National Welfare Rights Organization, the same decade joining with Francisca Flores to establish the Chicana Service Action Center. These groups served to develop organizing and leadership skills in Chicanas by means of workshops, conferences, and community activities addressing crucial thematic issues including education, immigration, childcare, and reproductive rights. Each of these social and political organizations included cultural and literary performances and, at times, publications. In 1981, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social* (MALCS: Women Active in Letters and Social Change) came into being in Santa Clara, California, because of the efforts of Chicana academicians. MALCS sought to restructure the recruitment and retention policies of universities to increase the number of Chicana faculty and students. It also provided guidelines on revising curricula and conducting academic research that contributed directly to the advancement of Chicanas in the United States. MALCS also published a journal in which original Chicana literature and literary criticism were issued. Affiliated with MALCS were such creative writers and feminist theoreticians as Emma Pérez* and Norma Alarcón (the founder and editor of the Latina literary journal Third Woman* and its affiliated press). The current prevalence of feminism among Chicanas and Latinas can be attributed to the level of awareness raised by the Chicana liberation movement. In the 1970s, the National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS) began to promote activism in Chicano applied scholarship, but by the mid-1980s it underwent a critical transition, motivated primarily by a debate over gender in Chicano society; reflecting this orientation, it is now entitled the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS). Since the national conference in Austin, Texas, in 1985, at which writers Ana Castillo,* Sandra 229

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Cisneros,* Pat Mora,* and Evangelina Vigil* presented their new works in performance, NACS/NACCS has been a major forum for Chicano/Chicana literary criticism and literary performance and presentation. Further Reading Gonzales, Deena, and Susana Oboler, Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Chicano Identity. In the 1960s, the word Chicano was elevated from its 1920s denotation of working-class Mexican immigrant—and from the slang of the 1940s and 1950s, when it substituted for Mexicano—to symbolize the realization of a newfound and unique identity. Chicanos proudly proclaimed an IndoHispanic heritage and accused older Mexican Americans of pathologically denying their racial and ethnic reality because of an inferiority complex. In the 1930s and 1940s, middle class–aspiring Mexican Americans looked with disdain at their brothers and sisters who did not transcend the working-class Mexican identity that persisted beyond the first generation. Significantly, the Mexican American middle classes applied the word Chicano pejoratively to the lower classes. Some of the lexicon used in the Chicano Movement* has survived to this day, although mainly in circles that have an unbroken tie to the movement such as those consisting of university students, artists, intellectuals, scholars, and so on. The most apparent legacy is the word Chicano itself. Outside the intellectual environment, however, the term is met with indifference, and among Mexican immigrants it is scorned. But the struggle over its use no longer draws the same heat that it did when activists first proposed Chicano in the 1960s, when the term was associated with militancy. During this era, both sides constructed elaborate etymologies for the term. To those who wished for the word to represent the movement, Chicano derived from the ancient Náhuatl word “mexicano” with the “x” being pronounced as “sh.” Among the many etymologies that detractors used to disqualify the term was its origination from chicas patas (“small feet”), an extremely pejorative reference used to denote new arrivals from Mexico. During the Los Angeles school walkouts in the spring of 1968, Lincoln High School teacher Carmen Terrazas, an opponent of the strike, wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times condemning the word Chicano as demeaning to Mexican Americans. Soon, there appeared in La Raza newspaper a “La Adelita Letter to La Malinche.” La Adelita was a name for female camp followers and soldiers during the Mexican Revolution, and La Malinche was the consort of Hernán Cortés, who betrayed her people. “As for the term Chicano,” wrote La Adelita, “I suggest Terrazas do some research into its origin. We have always referred to ourselves as Chicanos. . . . We gave it to ourselves, the Anglo did not. . . . Terrazas insists on referring to herself as an American of Mexican descent . . . she suffers from an inferiority complex for which I pity her.” 230

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Further Reading Ignacio M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Chicano Literature. The term Chicano* is probably derived from a word indicating Mexican nationality, “Mechicano,” the x was pronounced by Spaniards as the English sh. The abbreviated term for “Mexican” was used by the folk, it now seems, at least for two centuries. However, it did not really appear in written form in newspapers until the late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, an immigrant literature had emerged in the Southwest that identified its readers as Chicanos, or Mexican immigrant workers. The term was somewhat negative, however, when used by middle- and upper-class Mexicans, who were embarrassed by the poverty and lack of schooling of their lower-class immigrant compatriots. The term really gained prominence in the 1960s, however, when the children of Mexican immigrants and long-standing Mexican American communities became involved in a widespread civil rights movement. They resuscitated the term Chicano and applied it to themselves and their working-class educational and political movement: the Chicano Movement.* Scholars agree that the Chicano Movement began with César Chávez’s organization of farm workers in 1965 and spread into other areas of worker and community life, as well as into the schools. As a result of the Great Society programs of presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the largest enrollment of Latino students ever at universities throughout the country. These students would carry the movement into all corners of academia for the next two decades. The first writers of Chicano literature in the 1960s committed their voices to political, economic, and Con Safos, one of the earliest Chicano literary magazines. 231

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Reception in Mexico City for Chicano writers: Ricardo Sánchez, Alejandro Morales, Salvador Rodríguez del Pino, and Victor Villaseñor (the four central figures).

educational struggles. Their works were frequently used to inspire social and political action as poets read their verses at organizing meetings, at boycotts, and before and after protest marches. Of necessity, many of the first writers to gain prominence in the movement were the poets who could tap into an oral tradition of recitation and declamation, such as Abelardo Delgado,* Ricardo Sánchez,* and Alurista,* creating works written for oral performance before groups of students and workers in hopes of inspiring them and raising their level of consciousness of the problem. Although the first works of Chicano literature appeared with the performances of El Teatro Campesino in 1965 and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s* epic poem I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín in 1967, a type of Chicano literary canon began solidifying with the awards given books published by Editorial Quinto Sol* beginning in 1970. From 1971 to 1973, Quinto Sol awarded prizes to— and published three of the foundational novels of—Chicano Literature, publishing Tomás Rivera’s* . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Rolando Hinojosa’s* Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973, Sketches of the Valley and Other Works). It also published a magazine, El grito (The Shout), and issued editions of an anthology, El espejo (The Mirror), that featured some of the models that would become part of the cultural nationalist canon it was 232

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First generation of Chicana writers: Ana Castillo, Evangelina Vigil, Sandra Cisneros, and Pat Mora.

constructing: a canon that emphasized the indigenous past of Aztec and Mayan roots, rural culture, bilingualism and code-switching, and working-class culture and resistance to Anglo domination. Both directors of Quinto Sol, Octavio Romano and Herminio Ríos, consistently used these criteria in selecting works to be published and through their choices constructed a masculine, phallocentric ideal that retarded the appearance of women authors during the early years of Chicano literature. The growing number of Chicano students and professors in the academy helped spread the canon in the courses they created, in the ethnic studies departments, and in the academic associations where literature was studied. The success of integrating literature in the academy was also caused in part by the large number of writers who also were or became university professors, including Alurista, Anaya, Hinojosa, Rivera, and scores of others. Finally, in the mid-1970s, by means of magazines such as Revista ChicanoRiqueña* (later The Americas Review), Bilingual Review,* and Caracol, and later through such magazines as Mango and Third Woman,* which were edited by women, Chicanas began to gain access to publishing. By the early 1980s, a whole wave of women writers had become prominent in Chicano literature, including Ana Castillo,* Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Sandra Cisneros,* Pat Mora,* Evangelina Vigil,* and others who for the most part were being published by Arte Público Press.* In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cisneros and Castillo led 233

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the way into commercial, mainstream publishing as their established works were reprinted and their new works were issued by large, commercial publishers. During the 1990s, not only Chicano literature but the rest of Hispanic ethnic literature, including male literature, began making inroads into mainstream commercial publishing. During this decade, as more and more Hispanics of all backgrounds became part of the national scene, and as more and more Mexican Americans took art in professional life and culture (going beyond the culture of ethnicity and protest), the term Chicano began to pass from currency, giving way to such terms as “Hispanic,” “Latino,” and “multicultural” literature. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Chicano Movement. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of intellectual ferment and rebellion in the United States. Caught up in the unrest, young Mexican Americans throughout the country sought a new identity while struggling for the same civil rights of previous generations. This activism became known as the “Chicano Movement.” The word Chicano* was elevated from its use in the 1920s to denote working-class Mexican immigrants, and from the slang of the 1940s and 1950s, when it substituted for Mexicano, to symbolize the realization of a newfound, unique identity. Chicanos proudly proclaimed an Indo-Hispanic heritage and accused older Mexican Americans of pathologically denying their racial and ethnic reality because of an inferiority complex. In the movement, an attempt was made to use some of the same symbols of their immigrant grandfathers, but with a few added touches. Tapping several intellectual traditions, attempts were made to define true ethnic character. Allusions were made to factual and mythical pasts. For example, the concept of Aztlán,* the mythical Aztec place of origin, became the Chicano Movement’s name for the Southwest as many Chicanos aspired to re-conquer the Southwest, if only culturally. In addition, participants in the movement differed from the previous Mexican American generation in that they did not care if they were acceptable to the mainstream, rejecting assimilation. Many of the Strategizing: Jesús Salvador Treviño on the floor, José Angel Gutirérrez to images they constructed his left, and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales on the bed. 234

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reflected their alienation as they blended pachuco* cultural modes, pinto (prison)* savvy, and preColumbian motifs and myths with a burning conviction that Chicanos were deliberately subordinated by a racist American society. Much of this interpretation and ideology was developed in the poetry and grassroots theater productions created by student and community activists. Among the priJosé Angel Gutiérrez speaking during the Crystal City school walkouts. mary exponents of Chicano literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s were Alurista,* Ricardo Sánchez,* Luis Valdez,* Abelardo Delgado,* Lorna Dee Cervantes* and Bernice Zamora.* The Con Safos (Safety Zone)* and El grito (The Shout)* magazines, along with the latter’s affiliated publishing house, Editorial Quinto Sol,* were very much in the vanguard of establishing a Chicano literary canon. In the wake of this cultural effervescence, community newspapers and magazines sprang up throughout the Southwest and published the works of thousands of writers from their local communities. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, moreover, the political and social struggles, including the movement against the war in Vietnam, took precedence over literary, theatrical, and visual arts in the movement; these arts were supposed to illustrate and support the movement by spreading activist messages and the Chicano identity. It was only from the late 1970s on that these arts came into their own as more and more universities began studying their productivity and incorporating their works into the curriculum for Chicano Studies departments, among others. Further Reading Muñoz, Rosalío, Youth Identity and Power: The Chicano Movement (New York: Verso Books, 1989).

F. Arturo Rosales Chicano Press Association. At its apogee, the Chicano Press Association (CPA), established in 1969, had twenty-three members across the country, most located in California. The publications, almost always printed in rather primitive facilities even by 1960s standards, always contained polemical views of events and issues that affected Chicanos. They also served as the primary space in which to publish Chicano literature, in light of the reticence of conventional publishing houses and other outlets to do so. 235

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Although the publications reflected the unique ideological positions of the organizations that sponsored them and the communities that read them, the publishers did reach consensus about the political purpose of the CPA. The CPA’s founding document states the following: The CPA is a confederation of community newspapers dedicated to promoting the movement of La Raza for self-determination and unity among our people. The CPA affirms that the time has come for the liberation of the Chicano and other oppressed people. We want the existing social order to dissolve. We want a new social order. The CPA supports the struggle against exploitation and all forms of oppression with the goal of building a new society in which human dignity, justice and brotherhood will prevail.

The publications that belonged to the Chicano Press Association in 1969 were the following: El Papel (The Paper), Albuquerque, NM El Chicano, San Bernardino, CA El Degüello (The Beheading), San Antonio, TX The Forumeer, San Jose, CA La Voz Mexicana (The Mexican Voice), Wautoma, WI Carta Editorial (Editorial Letter), Los Angeles, CA La Revolución (The Revolution), Uvalde, TX El Grito del Norte (The Northern Shout), Española, NM El Yaqui (The Yaqui), Houston, TX Bronze, San Jose, CA Chicano Student Movement, Los Angeles, CA Lado (Side), Chicago, IL La Raza (The People), Los Angeles, CA Infierno (Hell), San Antonio, TX El Malcriado (the Brat), Delano, CA La Raza Nueva (The New People), San Antonio, TX Inside Eastside, Los Angeles, CA El Gallo (The Rooster), Denver, CO Compass, Houston, TX La Verdad (The Truth), San Diego, CA Nuestra Lucha (Our Struggle), Delray Beach, FL Coraje (Courage), Tucson, AZ Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales “Chicano Renaissance.” The period of artistic, literary, and political activism known as the “Chicano Renaissance” flourished in the 1960s and 1970s primarily in the United States, although some of its key figures also received important recognition in Europe. Literary and cultural studies schol236


ars credit the groundbreaking work of playwright Luis Valdez* and El Teatro Campesino, of Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s* I Am Joaquín (1968), and of Alurista’s* poetry (such as Floricanto en Aztlán (1971, FlowerSong in Aztlán*) and literary activism with helping to inaugurate this era. These Chicano-identified writers made important contributions to the common language of cultural pride and political solidarity in the face of ongoing inequities against peoples of Mexican origin living in the United States. Some social historians also emphasize that the farm worker–organizing work of César Chávez* and the period’s local partisan politics in the Southwest galvanized an advocacy movement that encouraged the burst of creativity among Mexican Americans. They cite such activities as the Viva Kennedy voter-registration clubs, the founding of PASO (the Political Association of SpanishSpeaking Organizations) in Texas, the organizing in New Mexico of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Confederate Alliance of Land Grants) by Reies López Tijerina, and the formation of the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado, by “Corky” Gonzales. Still other observers and participants in the period’s Chicano Movement* underscore the role of student activism in creating a social context of collective energy for the period’s renaissance in art and literature. Groups such as MAYO (Mexican American Youth Organization) in Texas, UMAS (United Mexican Americans) in Colorado and California, the Brown Berets in Los Angeles, MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán,* [Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán]) nationally, MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund), the National Council de la Raza, and others emerged to address urgent social concerns by exerting public pressure, conducting intense advocacy, and focusing media attention. First described as a “Chicano Renaissance” by literary scholar Felipe Ortego de Gasca in an essay published in 1971, the period, like other eras of flourishing creativity (e.g., the American Renaissance of the 1850s and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s), was better understood and appreciated in hindsight. During the time itself, many participants were writing, reading, performing, and organizing to a prolific extent separately throughout the country in independent coalitions; indeed, some individuals at first worked in relative isolation. The Chicano Renaissance was noteworthy for the emergence of bilingual English/Spanish publications such as the landmark periodicals Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research (Los Angeles, 1967–), El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican American Thought (Berkeley, 1967–1974), Agenda: A Journal of Hispanic Thought (Washington, D.C., 1970–1979), and many ephemera from other alternative presses throughout the country. Some of these small presses expanded into significant publishing houses—notably the Houston-based Arte Público Press* and the Tempe, Arizona, Bilingual Review Press*—continue to have a major effect on Latina and Latino arts and letters in the twenty-first century. The era was also marked by gatherings of committed activists at local and regional meetings, demonstrations, national conferences, literary festivals, mural paintings, art exhibitions, and college and community organization 237


projects. For example, University of New Mexico students working for radio station KUNM-FM covered the 1966 Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid by Reies López Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres (Federal Alliance of Free Communities) and were able to relay alternative accounts, albeit to small audiences, to counter the hostile press coverage and the demagoguery of some politicians. Eventually New Mexico’s Governor David Cargo ordered National Guard troops and tanks to arrest Tijerina and his small group of local followers in what was to be one of the earliest state actions against Chicano Movement free-speech activities. Three years later, Corky Gonzales organized a different kind of gathering—the Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, which produced the 1969 Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), which opens with Alurista’s poetic call of all Mexican Americans in AmericAztlán to collective action. Out of these, and myriad other activities and energies, sprouted the germinal cultural production that converged into the Chicano Renaissance. Certain scholars believe that in many ways the period was both influenced and buoyed by the Latin American literary explosion called “the Boom,” which came to be associated with the themes and styles of magic realism. Also in the 1960s, the Boom revitalized interest worldwide in the diverse arts and popular cultures of all of Latin America—and Chicano literature and art benefited from that interest. Before long, French and German scholars, students, writers, artists, and others began writing about the Chicano Movement in the U.S., and European scholars invited El Teatro Campesino, Alurista, and others to perform in their countries. Like novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, and other well-known Latin Americans, most of the Chicano Renaissance writers offered innovative representations of their individual and collective cultural identities through the thematic lenses of conquest, colonialism, and race* and ethnicity in the Americas. Perhaps the era’s major legacy was the emergence of an explicitly Chicanoidentified framework of ethnic and political identity that rejected the perceived accommodationism of the previous generation of “Mexican American” and “Spanish-speaking” people. Scholars generally agree that a pivotal transitional link between “Mexican American” and “Chicano” literature—and, hence, the pre- and postRenaissance eras—is José Antonio Villareal’s* important novel, Pocho, published in 1959, which describes a young Mexican American trapped in the cultural hyphen between his father’s strong Mexican roots and his mother’s evolving U.S. American assimilation. Pocho functions as a landmark in Latina and Latino literature and popular culture because of its compelling plot and intriguingly developed protagonist and, very importantly, because it was recuperated from oblivion in the 1970s by Chicano studies researchers who were doing the first research and retrievals of historical sources about the Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano experience in order to chronicle the U.S. American heritage accurately. In addition to Alurista and Valdez, other important writers associated with the early years of the Chicano Renaissance 238


include attorney activist Oscar Zeta Acosta,* author of two of the popular narratives of the period, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1970) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), prolific New Mexican Rudolfo A. Anaya,* who wrote the era’s first best-selling (now classic) novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), journalist and fiction writer Ron Arias,* whose novel The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) was acclaimed for its effective use of magic realism, Colorado poet Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado,* whose memorable poem of resistance, “stupid america,” captures the angst, anger, and activism fueling the Chicano Movement, Texas fiction writer Rolando Hinojosa,* the first Chicano recipient of the prestigious Premio Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas Award) literary honor for his novel Klail City y sus alrededores (1976, Klail City and Its Surroundings), and Estela Portillo Trambley,* respected feminist playwright (e.g., The Day of the Swallows [1976]) and fiction writer (e.g., Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings [1975]). Equally important to the flourishing of the era were three scholars and writers—Dr. Tomás Rivera* (1935–1984), Chancellor of the University of California at Riverside and author of one of the Chicano literary classics, “. . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra” (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), recipient of Editorial Quinto Sol’s* first Quinto Sol Literary Prize, awarded by El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican American Thought in 1970; Dr. Ernesto Galarza* (1905–1984), labor sociologist and author of the autobiographical novel Barrio Boy (1971) and numerous social scientific studies, including Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970); and New Mexican–born Dr. Sabine Ulibarrí (1919–2003),* a Spanish language and literature scholar, poet, essayist, and fiction writer who published two early volumes of poetry, Al cielo se sube a pie (1966, You Walk to Heaven on Foot) and Amor y Ecuador (1966, Love and Ecuador) as well as the volume of regionalist sketches, Mi abuela fumaba puros y otros cuentos de Tierra Amarilla (1977, My Grandmother Smoked Cigars and Other Tierra Amarilla Tales). Other writers critical to the vibrant energy of the period were Luis Omar Salinas* (1937–) of Texas, who wrote such striking and inspiring verse collections as Crazy Gypsy (1970), I Go Dreaming Serenades (1979), and Prelude to Darkness (1981), as well as editing the important collection Entrance: 4 Chicano Poets (1975); Ricardo Sánchez* (1941–1995), another Tejano, whose Canto y grito mi liberación (1971, I Sing and Shout My Liberation) was one of the first examples of prison poetry to gain notice and, eventually, acclaim and who also managed to earn a Ph.D. after his release from prison; California journalist and novelist Richard Vásquez* (1928–1990), whose novel Chicano (1970) received positive critical review and who succeeded Chicano martyr Rubén Salazar* at the Los Angeles Times; poet and subsequently fiction author Alma Villanueva* (1944–), also from California, whose Bloodroot (1977) was one of the first chapbooks published by a Chicana; and another Californian, Gary Soto* (1952–), one of the first Mexican Americans to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (in 1978) and whose mentorship under poet Phillip Levine helped him gain a crossover readership and national publishers at a time when the primary outlet for Chicana and Chicano publishing was in alternative and small presses. 239

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Also contributing to the Chicano Renaissance legacy of an emergent, explicitly Chicano identity were writers Floyd Salas* (Tattoo the Wicked Cross, 1967), Raymond Barrio* (The Plum Plum Pickers, 1969), Sergio Elizondo* (Perros y antiperros, 1972 [Dogs v. Anti-Dogs]), Nephtalí de León (5 Plays, 1972), José Montoya* (El sol y los de abajo, 1972 [The Sun and Those Below]), Tino Villanueva* (Hay Otro Voz Poems, 1972 [There Is Another Voice]), Raymund Pérez (The Secret Meaning of Death, 1972), Richard García (Selected Poetry, 1973), Raúl Salinas* (Viaje, 1973 [Trip]); Rose Mary Roybal (From La Llorona to Envidia, 1973), Victor Edmund Villaseñor* (Macho!, 1973), Juan F. Herrera* (Rebozos of Love, 1974), Sylvia Gonzales (La chicana piensa, 1974 [Chicanas Think]), Miguel Méndez* (Peregrinos de Aztlán, 1974 [Pilgrims in Aztlán, 1993]), Alejandro Morales* (Caras viejas y vino nuevo, 1975 [Old Faces and New Wine, 1981]), Orlando Romero (Nambé—Year One, 1976), Bernice Zamora* (Restless Serpents, 1976), Aristeo Brito* (El diablo en Texas, 1976 [The Devil in Texas]), Angela de Hoyos* (Selecciones, 1976 [Selections]), Isabella Ríos (Victuum, 1976 [Victim]), Ana Castillo* (I Close My Eyes, 1976), Nash Candelaria* (Memories of the Alhambra, 1977), Inés Hernández* (Con razón corazón, 1977 [That’s the Reason, Heart]), Marina Rivera* (Mestiza, 1977 [Mestizo Woman]), José Antonio Burciaga* (Cultura, 1979 [Culture]), Cordelia Candelaria (Ojo de la Cueva [selected by Alurista], 1980 [Cave Spring]); Lucha Corpi* (Palabras de Mediodía, 1980 [Midday Words]), and other significant voices and viewpoints that produced the brilliant and lasting taproot of contemporary Chicana and Chicano art, literature, aesthetics, cultural criticism, and philosophy. Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia Chávez, Chicano Poetry, A Critical Introduction (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986). Hernández-Gutiérrez, Manuel de Jesús, and David William Foster, eds., Literatura chicana, 1965–1995: An Anthology in Spanish, English, and Caló (New York & London: Garland, 1997). Maciel, David R., Isidro D. Ortiz, and María Herrera-Sobek, eds., Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). Martínez, Julio A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). Ortego de Gasca, Felipe, “The Chicano Renaissance” in Social Casework Vol. 52, No. 5 (May 1971): 295–307.

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Children’s and Young Adult Literature. The writing of literature for Hispanic children of the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although from the nineteenth century until World War II, Spanish-language newspapers in the United States occasionally published such stories and rhymes for children (newspapers published by Protestant denominations were more likely to do so) there were very few books published targeting young readers. Two early exceptions were Father Félix Varela,* who published Catholic religious magazines for children for decades in the mid–nineteenth century, 240


and José Martí,* who published a magazine for children, La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age), in the 1890s. From the 1930s through the 1960s, a New York City librarian, Puerto Rican Pura Belpré,* expanded her children’s reading hours by writing stories for her young audiences. She became the most prolific author of children’s stories, most of them based on Puerto Rican folklore, and even wrote a young adult novel, Firefly Summer (written during World War II, but published posthumously in 1997). It was during the establishment and promotion of bilingual education in the late 1960s and early 1970s that a need was identified for books in Spanish and English to assist Latino children in learning to read. At first, the teachers and librarians imported children’s books from Spain and Spanish America. However, it soon became apparent that the dialects employed in these national literatures, as well as the characters, sociophysical environment, and particular cultural referents were not easily recognizable or relevant to Latinos growing up as minorities in the United States. To remedy this, numerous educational publishers had American children’s literature translated to Spanish for the classroom, but once again this literature failed to represent the lives of Hispanic children and— worse—was often riddled with stereotypes. Valiant efforts were made by early Chicano writers, such as Ernesto Galarza,* who penned many stories and rhymes

In the Barrios Unidos young people’s education program, teenagers read and create Y/A literature.

The bilingual picture book Benito’s Bizcochitos.

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directed at children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds; his talent, however, lay in writing social scientific work for adults and in his memoir of growing up, Barrio Boy, which was very successful in reaching young adult readers. Four other writers of the 1970s had adult audiences in mind when they wrote their books about growing up Latino in the United States, but teachers and librarians subsequently found their works very appropriate for young The bilingual picture book Delicious Hullabaloo. adult and high school audiences. In fact, today this young audience is a substantial readership of the culture conflict and growing pains of the young adult protagonists in Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Sandra Cisneros’s* The House on Mango Street (1984), Nicholasa Mohr’s* Nilda (1973), and Tomás Rivera’s* . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987). Later in the 1980s and early 1990s, such “adult” authors as Gary Soto* began to specifically address the young adult audiences via autobiographical novels and pure fiction. Beginning in the 1990s, Hispanic authors began to address on a large scale the need for a literature based on the language, culture, and environment of Hispanic children in the United States. A number of leading adult writers began to write picture books for preschool and beginning readers: Francisco Alarcón,* Sandra Cisneros,* Gary Soto,* Nicholasa Mohr,* and Pat Mora* among them. Recently, best-selling authors Julia Alvarez* and Victor Villaseñor* have also addressed this need. Probably the most interesting children’s and young adult authors are those who almost exclusively and consistently address young readers. Ofelia Dumas Lachtman,* for instance, has created a spunky young protagonist, Pepita, for a continuing series of picturebook adventures based on actual dilemmas in the lives of Latino children, such as always having to translate for monolingual adults at home, in school, and in the neighborhood, as exemplified by Pepita Talks Twice/Pepita habla dos veces (1995). The Pepita series is merely one of the Piñata Books, published by Arte Público Press, that function as bridges from the home culture to the schools and that have the distinctive format of having the text translated on the same page. Another successful author, Diane Gonzales Bertrand,* 242

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explores the life of Latino children and teenagers in the inner city by depicting deep culture as represented by cooking in the family context, as in her picture book, Sip Slurp Soup Soup Caldo Caldo Caldo (1997), as well as the quinceañera, or fifteenth-year coming-out ritual, in The Last Doll (2000), and struggling to maintain family values while fighting pressure to join gangs in the young adult fiction series that includes Trino’s Choice (1999) and Trino’s Time (2001). Today the field of children’s literature among Hispanic authors and readers is growing by leaps and bounds, as is the size of the young population of Latinos, who make up more than fifty percent of the public school enrollment of America’s largest cities. There are literally scores of Latino writers creating books for children and young adults to help them forge confident and secure personalities, able to speak two languages and to relate to most of the cultures of the Americas. Further Reading Schon, Isabel, Contemporary Spanish-Speaking Writers and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Chusma House. Chusma House is a Chicano* small press that issues works that mainstream houses will not publish. It began in 1990 by Charley Trujillo as a means of publishing and marketing his own book, Soldados: Chicanos in Viet Nam, a collection of nineteen narratives by Chicano Vietnam veterans from Corcoran, California. The press now publishes a variety of literary works by well-known or beginning authors. The word chusma in Spanish is used as a derogatory term for low-class people, but for the editor of Chusma House, it means the “common people,” a sort of reaffirmation that common, everyday people can write and create art. Chusma has issued the works of such poets as José Antonio Burciaga,* José Montoya,* Alfredo Arteaga, and Gloria Velásquez,* as well as those of Samantha Lé and Victor Martinez. Among the novelists published by Chusma are Irma García, Alejandro Morales,* and Charley Trujillo himself. Chusma has also issued a collection of short stories by Ramón Sánchez and a collection of essays by Rafaela G. Castro. Further Reading Chusma House (www.chusmahouse.com/about_us.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Círculo de Cultura Panamericano. The Círculo de Cultura Panamericano (Pan American Cultural Circle) is an independent, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to the study and promotion of the Hispanic culture of Latin America and the United States. It is governed by a national board of directors selected by its members in annual elections. Its membership is mainly composed of writers, educators, artists, and historians. The CCP was founded in 1963 in New York by Dr. Carlos M. Raggi, Professor at Russell Sage College in New York, with the help of mostly Cuban exiles. During the formative years, 243

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intellectuals from other Latin American cultures joined the group, taking it to a broader dimension that led to the formation of regional chapters as well as to biennial conventions, several monographic publications, and two serial publications. In 1970, the CCP published the first issue of Círculo: Revista de Cultura (Circle: Review of Culture), an annual publication that includes articles on literature, the arts, and history as well as reviews and news articles. In 1971, the first issue of Círculo poético (Poetic Circle), a journal dedicated exclusively to the genre of poetry, was published. Círculo is indexed in the Handbook of Latin American Studies. In 1983, the CCP obtained membership in the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals. Occasionally, the CCP publishes monographic and bibliographic works, among them Congreso Cultural de Verano del CCP y la Universidad de Miami (Summer Cultural Congress of the CCPP and the University of Maryland), Elio Alba-Buffill’s José Martí ante la crítica actual (en el centenario del Ismaelillo): memoria del II Congreso Cultural de Verano del CCP y la Universidad de Miami (1983, José Martí* and Today’s Criticism (on the Centennial of the Publication of Ismaellillo): Papers of the Second Summer Cultural Congress of CCP and the University of Miami), Nostalgia de Cuba: en conmemoración del centenario de la instauración de la República de Cuba (2002, Nostalgia for Cuba: Commemorating the Centennial of the Installation of the of the Cuban Republic), Mariela A. Gutiérrez’s Bibliografía de Lydia Cabrera (2007, Lydia Cabrera* Bibliography), and Eduardo Lolo’s Bibliografía martiana (2007, José Martí Bibliography). The CCP has chapters in Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Miami, Florida; and New Jersey. These chapters hold numerous activities during the year, including art exhibits, theater and dance performances, poetry readings, and classical and popular music concerts. The Houston chapter sponsors an annual book fair in which publications by members of the association are presented to the public. The CCP also holds several literary contests during the year to encourage the writing of fiction, literary criticism, and poetry. Among these contests are the Concurso Literario Internacional (International Literary Contest), Concurso Internacional de Poesía (International Poetry Contest), and Concurso Internacional de Cuentos (International Short Story Contest). It also holds two annual meetings, one in summer and another in fall, during which artistic performances, concerts, literary contest awards, and publications are presented to the members and to the general public. The CCP’s official Web page features general information about the national organization and its chapters, announcements of literary contests, the full text of the bibliographic series, and the table of contents of its periodical publications. Further Reading Círculo de Cultura Panamericano (www.circulodeculturapanamericano.org/archivio_ sub_pgs/actividades_congr_otra_old.html).

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Círculo de Tabaqueros. The Círculo de Tabaqueros (Cigarworkers Circle) originated in Brooklyn in the early 1900s and served as a meeting center for Hispanics—mainly Puerto Rican tobacco workers and their families. The group consisted of a mixture of social organizations and philosophical forums. Some members favored progressive or radical ideas such as syndical anarchism, socialism, and other left-wing ideologies. But just as important was the role the headquarters of this association played in providing members an opportunity for social and recreational activities, such as chess and dominoes, discussions of current events, and the planning of cultural and intellectual projects. Sunday afternoons, for example, were reserved for theatrical performances in Spanish and for lectures and workshops on the politics of social and economic change. Like many other immigrant labor organizations, the Círculo de Tabaqueros became a hotbed of radical labor organizing. Many of the Círculo study circles discussed the history of Puerto Rico’s labor union movement and, as such, contributed to the founding of the Federación Libre de Trabajadores Free Workers’ Federation, one of Puerto Rico’s most important trade unions. Part of the workers’ education process was the employing of a reader during their many hours rolling cigars; the lectores read from newspapers, fiction and nonfiction books, and political tracts and became an important means of raising their consciousness of their social class and status as laborers, as well as of developing a taste for literature. Further Reading Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

F. Arturo Rosales Cisneros, Evangelina (Evangelina Betancourt Cosío y Cisneros) (1879–?). Evangelina Cisneros was born in Cuba in 1879. She was still very young when she lost her mother, and her father took care of her and her sisters’ education with the aid of a governess. Her father, a renowned military official, was also a political activist who supported the Cuban uprising against Spain and, in the process, converted his house into a secret meeting place for the Cuban Revolutionary Party. On June 22, 1895, the Cuban cavalry surprised one of those meetings arresting all the men and taking them off to prison. Evangelina Cisneros’ father was sentenced to death, but Evangelina fought to impede the execution of her father. Because of her intervention, her father was forgiven and his death sentence was not carried out but commuted to life imprisonment. Evangelina decided to follow him and lived voluntarily in jail, where she remained for a long time, even after her father was murdered. The history of Evangelina Cisneros took a new course when the American press denounced her case. This was the Evangelina Cisneros. 245

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period of yellow journalism, when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, publishers of sensationalist newspapers, stoked the fires in pursuit of war with Spain. It is not clear to this date whether the ensuing events really occurred or were manufactured for the process of enflaming anti-Spanish and U.S. interventionist sentiments. What is clear is that the episodes surrounding Evangelina Cisneros became part of Cuban national myth and, for a time, American popular culture. According to accounts published in these newspapers and later taking book form, Karl Decker, a New York journalist in the employ of Hearst, went to Cuba to rescue Evangelina. The story of the rescue and escape to the United States was detailed in the press and led to a ticker-tape parade and reception down Fifth Avenue in New York when Decker and Cisneros arrived in the city. Later, Evangelina Cisneros supposedly wrote or dictated her book, published in translation as The Story of Evangelina Cisneros (1898), which contains various sources of information such as personal memories, missives, sociopolitical analyses, and journalistic notes. Although Evangelina Cisneros stayed in the United States for a while, after the war with Spain she went back to Cuba, where it is presumed that her death took place. The history of Evangelina Cisneros has served as inspiration for numerous stories, poems, essays and novels, including Al partir (1986, Upon Departing), by Omar Torres, and White Rose (2000), by Amy Ephron. Further Reading Brown, Charles, The Correspondents’ War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961). Roggenkamp, Karen, “The Evangelina Cisneros Romance, Medievalist Fiction, and the Journalism that Acts” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures Vol. 23 (2000): 25–37.

Amira Plascencia-Vela Cisneros, Sandra (1954–). Mexican American poet Sandra Cisneros was the first Hispanic writer to win the prestigious MacArthur Award (1995). Cisneros is the short-story writer, essayist, and poet who has brought Chicana* writing into the mainstream of literary feminism. She is also the first Chicana writer to be published and promoted by mainstream commercial publishing houses. Born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago into a Mexican American working-class family, Cisneros nevertheless benefited from a private education, graduating with a B.A. in English from Loyola University (1976) and later with an M.F.A. in creative writing from the prestigious Iowa Workshop (1978). Cisneros’s first and only novel, The House on Mango Street (1983), remains her most important contribution in its capturing of the hopes, desires, and disillusionment of a young female writer growing up in the city. In Mango Street, Esperanza Cordero functions in a similar manner to the unidentified narrator in Tomás Rivera’s* classic . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra. (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), observing the behavior and attitudes of the people who populate her environment. In Esperanza’s urban Chicago world, children naïvely internalize the attitudes about gender and class held by their adult Latino models, but, somehow, the spirit of independence and creativity grows in 246

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Esperanza, leading her to escape the barrio in search of a house of her own— of her own personality and identity (presumably through literature). Mango Street earned Cisneros the American Book Award (1985), and she began touring college campuses to give readings. Her other awards include a Dobie–Paisano Fellowship (1986) and National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowships in Fiction and Poetry (1982, 1990). In 1987, Cisneros published her first full-length collection of poems, My Wicked Wicked Ways, with a Hispanic feminist press, Third Woman Press, of Berkeley, California. It was not until 1994 that she followed it up, with Loose Woman: Poems. In 1991, publishing giant Random House issued Cisneros’s collection of essays and short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, which did not surpass the critical acclaim of Mango Street, a novel that had assumed a secure place in college and high school curricula. In 2002, Cisneros pubSandra Cisneros. lished her long-awaited generational novel of Mexican immigration and accommodation in the United States, Caramelo. Using a woven Mexican shawl as a trope, Cisneros weaves the intricate tale of the various members of the Reyes family and their generational journey from Mexico City to the United States. In recent years, Cisneros has turned her hand to writing for children. Her first such work was the bilingual picture book Hairs–Pelitos (1997), which elaborates on the many types of hairs in a girl’s family. Cisneros has published excerpts from The House on Mango Street and numerous works of short fiction and personal essays in such diverse magazines as Glamour, Ms., and The Progressive. Her works are among the most anthologized of any Hispanic writer. In 2004, a selection of her prose and poetic works was issued as Vintage Cisneros. Cisneros resides in San Antonio, Texas. Further Reading Barbato, Joseph, “Latino Writers in the American Market” Publishers Weekly Vol. 1 (Feb. 1991): 17–21. Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).


Clavijo, Uva

Uva Clavijo.

Clavijo, Uva (1944–). Uva A. Clavijo (also known as Uva de Aragón) was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1944. Having left Cuba with her refugee parents, she resided in Washington, D.C., from 1959 to 1978. Clavijo received a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Miami. For many years after publishing her first article in The Diario de las Américas (The Americas Daily) at the age of seventeen, she made her reputation as a journalist for just such exile newspapers. She also published poetry and essays widely in the Cuban exile press and books in Spanish in the United States and abroad, including Eternidad (1972, Eternity), Ni verdad ni mentira y otros cuentos (1976, Not Truth Nor Fiction and Other Stories) No puedo más y otros cuentos (1989, I Can’t Any More and Other Stories), and Memoria del silencio (2002, Memory of Silence). Her poetry books include Entresemáforos (1980, Between Stoplights) and Los nombres del amor (1996, The Names of Love). Her books of essays include El caimán ante el espejo. Un ensayo de interpretación de lo cubano (1993, The Gator in the Mirror: An Essay Interpreting Cubanness) and Alfonso Hernández Catá. Un escritor cubano, salmantino y universal (1996, Alfonso Hernández Catá” A Cuban, Salamancan, and Universal Writer). Clavijo also teaches at Florida International University, where she is the adjunct director of the Cuban Research Institute. Among the many awards Clavijo has won are the Premio de Poesía de Federico García Lorca (Federico García Lorca Award), Premio Simón Bolívar (Simón Bolívar Award) essay prize, the Alfonso Hernández-Catá short-story prize, and the Sergio Carbó journalism award. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Cocco de Filippis, Daisy (1949–). A promoter of Dominican culture in the United States, Cocco de Filippis is an intellectual, literary investigator, anthologist, and essayist who has unveiled the works of little-known women writers from the Dominican Republic. An educator and activist, Cocco de Filippis is also known as a literary mentor and the host of tertulias (literary discussions groups), literary salons, where Latina writers and professors from the New York area meet to discuss feminist writers from the Caribbean. 248

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Cocco de Filippis was born on February 25, 1949, in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. In 1962, she moved to New York City, where she attended public school. In 1975, she graduated from the City University of New York, and three years later she earned a master’s degree in Hispanic literature from Queens College; in 1984 she received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature. She taught literature at York College, was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the Instítuto de Estudios Dominicanos (Dominic Studies Institute) of the City University of New York, and was provost and vice president of Academic Affairs at Hostos Community College, the first Dominican in the United States to hold such a high and prestigious position. Early in her career, Cocco de Filippis realized that half of the literary production in the Dominican Republic—the half written by women—was not well known in that country and completely unknown outside the Dominican Republic. It became her mission to rescue these writers from oblivion. She wrote in the prologue to This Thing Called Home: Of Diaspora and Books (2004), “I have endeavored to ‘do the right thing’ and the ‘kind thing’ . . . by giving voice . . . to authors who are not heard enough; whose writings are left out from publications by colleagues here and there.” With such objectives in mind, she edited numerous anthologies, often translating the selections herself, including Sin otro profeta que su canto: Antología de poesía escrita por dominicanas (1998, Without Any Other Prophet than Her Song: Anthology of Poetry Written by Dominican Women), Combatidas, combativas y combatientes: Antología de cuentos escritos por mujeres dominicanas (1992, Combated, Combative, and Combatants: Anthology of Short Stories Written by Dominican Women), Tertuliando/Hanging Out: Compilación bilingüe de escritoras dominicanas en los Estados Unidos (1997, Tertuliando/Hanging Out: Bilingual Compilation of Dominican Women Writers in the United States), and Para que no se olviden: The Lives of Women in Dominican History (2000, So That They Are Not Forgotten: The Lives of Women in Dominican History). To identify and secure the poems and stories in these anthologies, Cocco de Filippis visited private libraries and searched library holdings of major universities in the New York area and in the Dominican Republic. Cocco de Filippis has written numerous essays and articles about Dominican writers and literature. Although she visits the Dominican Republic quite often, she, like many Caribbean authors, is a person who lives between two worlds and two cultures but chooses to remain in the United States. She writes in This Thing Called Home that it is from the United States that she must “write . . . and build . . . [and] be a part of a community of kindred spirits who toil to create a space for those . . . searching for answers.” Further Reading Luis, William, Dance Between Two Cultures (Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997: 236–237). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernandez, The New Americans: The Dominican Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998: 118–120).

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Cofer, Judith Ortiz (1952–). Puerto Rican novelist, short-story writer, and poet Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, on February 24, 1952, into a family that was destined to move back and forth between Puerto Rico and Patterson, New Jersey, because of her father’s career in the Navy. Upon her father’s retirement from the Navy, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia, where Cofer attended high school and eventually enrolled in Augusta College. After college, Cofer pursued further studies, obtaining an M.A. from Florida International University and receiving a fellowship for graduate work at Oxford University in England. Throughout her education, Cofer was a writer; in 1980, she began to receive recognition for her work, first by a fellowship from the Florida Arts Council and then by awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference (1981) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1989). Cofer became the first Hispanic writer to receive a Special Citation from the PEN Martha Albrand Award for Silent Dancing: A Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), which is a collection of autobiographical essays and poems. The book was also awarded the Pushcart Prize in the essay category Judith Ortiz Cofer. and the New York Public Library System List of Best Books for the Teen Age; its title essay was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays (1991). Cofer was also the first U.S. Hispanic to win the O. Henry Prize (1994) for a short story. In 1994, she also won the Anisfield–Wolf Award in Race Relations for her novel The Latin Deli. Cofer’s two major works of poetry are Reaching for the Mainland and Terms of Survival, both published in 1987. Her well-crafted poetry reflects her struggle as a writer to create a history for herself out of the cultural ambiguity of a childhood lived between two lands, two cultures, and two languages. Through her poetry and her essays, such as those in Silent Dancing, she also explores from a feminist perspective her relationships with her father, mother, and grandmother while considering the

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differing expectations for males and females of Anglo American and Hispanic cultures. Her novel Line of the Sun (1990) is based on her family’s gradual immigration to the United States and chronicles the years from the Great Depression to the 1960s. Her young adult story collection, The Year of Our Revolution (1999), picks up where Silent Dancing left off, examining a young Latina’s coming of age in Patterson and the beginnings of her rebellion against the old ways of her Hispanic family. Her most recent works include Call Me Maria (2004), Riding Low on the Streets of Gold: Latino Literature for Young Adults, a young adult anthology edited by Cofer (2004), The Meaning of Consuelo (2003), and Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000). In 2005, Call Me Maria was selected as one of two texts to receive an honorable mention in the competition for the Americas Award, sponsored by the National Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs for U.S.-published titles that authentically and engagingly portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States. The Meaning of Consuelo, which chronicles the childhood and young adulthood of Consuelo, a bookish girl growing up in a San Juan suburb in the 1950s, was selected as one of two winners of the 2003 Americas Award. Cofer’s work has been selected for the Syndicated Fiction Project. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Witter Bynner Foundation for poetry. Her collection of short stories, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995) was named a Best Book of the Year, 1995–1996, by the American Library Association and was also awarded the first Pura Belpré* medal by the ALA-affiliated REFORMA* in 1996. In 1999, The Year of Our Revolution was awarded a Paterson Book Prize by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College and was also named to The New York Public Library’s 1999 Book for the Teen Age. She is the 1998 recipient of the Christ–Janner Award in Creative Research from the University of Georgia. The Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a residency at the Bellagio, Italy, Conference Center in 1999. She was awarded the Georgia Author of the Year Prize in 2001 for her book of essays and poems Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer. In spring 2001, she was Vanderbilt University’s Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writer in Residence. Judith Ortiz Cofer is currently the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Further Reading Rivera, Carmen S., Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994). Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Coll y Vidal, Antonio (1898–1983). Born in Lares, Puerto Rico, Antonio Coll y Vidal was nurtured on the Island, where he participated in a number of vanguardist poetry groups. Notably, in 1924, he was the founding editor

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of Los Seis (The Six), a monthly magazine whose mission it was to renovate Puerto Rican letters by emphasizing contemporary European models. Coll y Vidal spent many years in New York City, where he participated in the literary culture among such Puerto Rican writers as Julia de Burgos,* Juan Antonio Corretjer,* and Erasmo Vando.* His poetry often appeared in Spanish periodicals published in the city, including Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters), and he was often on the program of terturlias, or literary suares, reciting his works alongside other major poets. In 1940, the Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas Hispanos de Nueva York (The Association of Spanish American Writers and Journalists) held an homage in his and Julia de Burgos’s honor. Further Reading Babín, María Teresa, Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña (New York: Las Américas Publishing Co., 1958).

Nicolás Kanellos Colón, Jesús (1901–1974). Jesús Colón was one of the most important Hispanic columnists and intellectuals in the New York Hispanic community for more than fifty years. He was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, on January 20, 1901, shortly after the United States annexed the island as a territory. He stowed away on a ship to New York in 1917, the year U.S. citizenship was granted to Puerto Ricans. Originally from the tobacco-growing and manufac-

Jesús Colón.

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turing region of Puerto Rico, where he had already labored among the cigar rollers, he was able to attend the Central Grammar School in San Juan, where he edited the school newspaper, Adelante (Forward). Upon his arrival in New York City, he became involved in numerous community and labor organizations, as well as the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Colón dedicated himself assiduously to reading and learning as much as he could. After graduating from the Boys’ High Evening School in Brooklyn, Colón became the quintessential autodidact and strove to exercise his learning through journalism and commentary in Spanish-language newspapers. It is estimated that, during the course of his career, he produced more than four hundred published items in some thirty newspapers and periodicals. He also served as an officer for numerous community organizations and even ran for Controller of the City of New York on the Communist Party ticket. Coming from a modest background, and having been socialized among tobacco workers and union organizers, Colón became the voice of the working class. His trajectory through labor and Hispanic community newspapers was consistent in its ideological focus, although he did at first assume the guise required by the conventions of Spanish-language cronista (columnist). As best as can be gleaned from the incomplete historical record, Colón began his formal journalistic career in 1923 as a correspondent for Puerto Rico’s Justicia (Justice), the official newspaper of the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers). His writings appeared consistently in Gráfico* (Graphic) beginning in 1927 under his own name and the pseudonyms Miquis Tiquis and Pericles Espada. He later made the transition to English commentary as a columnist for the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of America. Colón also founded and operated a publishing house, Hispanic Publishers (Editorial Hispánica), which issued history and literary books as well as political information in Spanish. In 1952 and 1969, Colón ran for public office on the Communist Party ticket but was unsuccessful. Colón published a selection of his newspaper columns and essays in 1961 in book form under the title of A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. Two other collections have been published posthumously: The Way It Was and Other Sketches (1993) and Lo que el pueblo me dice (2001, What the People Tell Me). In these essays, or sketches, as Colón preferred to call them, his major themes are (1) the creation and development of a political consciousness, (2) the development of Puerto Rican nationalism, (3) advocacy for the working-class poor, and (4) the injustices of capitalist society in which racial and class discrimination are all too frequent and individual worth seemingly nonexistent. The collections are richly expressive of a socially conscious and humanistic point of view. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

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Padilla, Edwin, “Introducción,” Jesús Colón, Lo que el pueblo me dice (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos Colón López, Joaquín (1896–1964). Joaquín Colón López was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, the son of a baker who also owned a small hotel in his hometown. He graduated from high school in Puerto Rico and became the first in his family to immigrate to New York after Puerto Ricans were granted American citizenship via the Jones Act (1917). After facing financial ruin, Colón’s family followed him to New York. Joaquín Colón dreamed of a career as a lawyer and enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but his goal of practicing law was never accomplished because of financial issues. Joaquín Colón was not only proud to be Puerto Rican was also proud to be a black Puerto Rican. He had a real thirst for knowledge and spent a great deal of time studying and preparing himself. Much of what he read prompted him to shape his own ideology. He called himself a liberal walking between right and left. In Puerto Rican affairs, he pleaded for the community to leave behind traditional divisions rooting back to the island to become more unified and develop a national identity. He attacked the racial and social class divisions among Puerto Rican organizations in New York. His brother Jesús Colón was also a well known activist in the New York community and a member of the Communist Party. Because of his brother’s involvement in communism, Joaquín suffered political persecution during the McCarthy Era, although he had no actual connection to the Communist Party. Consequently, he was deemed a risk to National Joaquín Colón López.

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Security and lost his job of thirty-six years with the Postal Service in 1955. He engaged in a series of legal battles with the government (1955–1958) in which he eventually cleared his name, but he was advised to eliminate all ties to his brother. Despite the warnings, Joaquín refused to cut himself off from Jesús. Joaquín Colón considered the immigration to the United States that followed the Jones Act (1917) to be heroic. This immigration created a social, economic, and humanitarian platform of opportunities for newcomers, inspiring him to write his memoirs in Pioneros puertorriqueños en Nueva York (Puerto Rican Pioneers in New York) after returning to, and retiring on, his beloved island. Joaquín’s primary motivation for writing Pioneros puertorriqueños was to recognize the contributions of Puerto Rican men and women during these difficult years. He shows appreciation for these community leaders by highlighting who they were and explaining how they survived through the Depression without consulates or embassies to defend them as others nationalities had. His memoirs counter the stereotype of the docile Puerto Rican in literature. Colón also identified himself with other minority struggles, including feminist movements, and paid a special tribute to all the active women who fought to improve the quality of life for Porto Ricans. During the late twenties and thirties, Joaquín Colón wrote crónicas* in Spanish-language periodicals under the pseudonyms of Tello Casiano, Momo, and Farañón. The use of these monikers allowed him to more freely voice his indignation for the injustices and prejudice against the Puerto Rican community. He named enemies and attacked them with all his venom. For example, La Prensa (The Press), a daily newspaper run by Spaniards, became one of his main targets because of its paternalistic writings prejudiced against Puerto Ricans. Furthermore, he defended and commended a few boliteros (numbers gamblers), also known as outlaws to La Prensa, for their generous contributions to Puerto Rican organizations. Some of these organizations assisted Puerto Rican families through tough times, and the boliteros became the only way to keep these clubs operating. In the end, he blamed Puerto Rican politicians on the Island for abandoning them in the Big Babel. Joaquín Colón was vice president of the Porto Rican Democratic Club, president of the Eugenio María de Hostos and Agüeybana Club, vice president of La Liga Puertorriqueña (The Puerto Rican League), president of the Porto Rican Hurricane Relief Committee, and a founder of the Hispanic Section of the International Worker Order. He married María Aponte Vázquez, with whom he had three children. Further Reading Colón López, Joaquín, Pioneros puertorriqueños en Nueva York (1917–1947), ed. Edwin K. Padilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Edwin K. Padilla Colón, Miriam (1936–). Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1936, Miriam Colón became a pioneer of the Hispanic theater movement in New York City.

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Colón’s mother was a seamstress and her father a salesman when she started acting as a teenager in school plays in Puerto Rico. Colón was studying theater at the University of Puerto Rico when she received a scholarship to study at the Dramatic Workshop and Technical Institute in New York. She was the first Puerto Rican admitted to the Actors’ Studio of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Colón performed extensively on Broadway, in films, and on television and still found time to promote the recognition of, and opportunities for, Hispanics in the performing arts. In 1967, she cofounded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, which for many years staged open-air neighborhood performances. Today it is still active, but in an Off-Broadway theater house.

Miriam Colón.

Further Reading Fernández, Mayra, Miriam Colón: Actor and Theatre Founder (Columbus: Modern Curriculum Press, 1994).

F. Arturo Rosales Colonial Literature. Near the end of the fifteenth century, the nations of Europe began to explore the newly discovered Americas. The glory of discovering, exploring, conquering, and colonizing this vast mass of land fell for more than a century and a half almost entirely to one nation: Spain. The Hispanic heritage of what is now the United States began in 1513 when the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León landed on the coast of Florida, ninety-four years before the British arrival at Jamestown. Although La Florida—the territory that extended from Florida northward to the Chesapeake and westward to Texas—was lacking in gold and silver, it was no cause for Spain to abandon its presence in this area. Daring Spanish subjects explored and colonized this territory, even expanding the Spanish domains as far west as California. Their observations, experiences, and deeds were recorded in prose, poetry, and drama. Spanish colonial literature produced in what became the United States resembles the literature of the other Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. During the early literary period—covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—plays, ballads, and even epic poetry were produced. Yet the

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period was dominated by relaciones (narratives), memoriales (memoirs), and cartas (letters) written as official reports to the authorities that concerned incidents, results of reconnaissance outings, official acts of inspection tours, or the state and nature of the inhabitants of particular regions. Most of the literature of this early colonial period is simple, utilitarian, and practical, but its contents reflect the exotic American scenery with its inhabitants, flora, and fauna. It is not a literature for the sake of literature, but a literature providing information. The literature encompassing the eighteenth century and the first twentyone years of the nineteenth century contains its share of chronicles and memoriales but offers a more varied panorama, being rich in plays, ballads, lyric poetry, songs, short stories, alabados (songs of praise/morning songs), pastorelas (shepherds plays), posadas (community Christmas pageants), and folk tales. Most of these were in oral form but were collected and appear in publications such as Arthur L. Campa’s* Spanish Folk Poetry in New Mexico, Aurelio M. Espinosa’s* Romancero nuevomejicano (New Mexico Ballad Book), and Juan B. Rael’s Cuentos españoles de Colorado y de Nuevo México (Spanish Tales from Colorado and New Mexico). Unfortunately, American writers and literary historians have tended to minimize and even reject this Spanish colonial literature as part of the literary history of the United States, primarily because it was written in Spanish. But, as Professor Thomas Pearce stated in his “American Traditions and Our Histories of Literature,” “Language does not seem to be a logical bar to recognition of non-English material as literature of the United States” (280).

Frederic Remington’s depiction of Coronado’s trek across the area that became the American Southwest. (Library of Congress)

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Judging by Pearce’s statement, Spanish colonial literature is indeed significant and worthy of study as part of the literature of the United States. Still, the few times that Spanish colonial literature appears in American literature textbooks, it appears as part of a foreign enterprise rather than as part and parcel of our American heritage. In spite of America’s linguistic exclusivity, attempts were made to extricate Spanish colonial literature from its desolate state. In 1929, for example, George P. Hammond, Frederick W. Hodge, and Henry R. Wagner organized The Quivira Society for the purpose of a documentary publication series on the Spanish Southwest. Between 1929 and 1958, thirteen translations of Spanish colonial works and the impressive bibliography The Spanish Southwest 1542–1795 were published by the society. But the series was inadequately financed; the editors received no compensation and generally contributed compilations solely on what they were interested in, which often related to secondary works they had written. Selecting the colonial works deserving of editing, reissue, and study is not an easy task, and mapping out the territory chronologically and geographically is also difficult. Spanish colonial literature of the United States includes various literary genres that can be studied either chronologically or topically. Regardless of how the material is organized, it can help today’s readers understand the life of early Spanish settlers and provide an authentic panorama of the Spanish colonial heritage of the United States. The following is an annotated list of significant Spanish colonial literature of the United States: 1. Acuña, Juan de, Reglamento para todos los presidios de las provincias internas de esta Gobernación, con el Número de oficiales y soldados que unos y otros habrán de gozar Ordenanzas para el mejor gobierno, y disciplina militar de gobernadores, oficiales y soldados. Prevenciones para los que en ellas se comprenden: precios de los víveres, y vestuarios, con que a los soldados se les asiste y se les habrá de continuar Hecho por El Excmo. Señor Marqués de Casa-Fuerte, Virrey, Gobernador y Capitán General de estos Reinos (México: Imprenta de la Viuda de Miguel de Rivera Calderón, 1729). A comprehensive set of regulations issued by Juan de Acuña, Marquis of Casa-Fuerte and Viceroy of New Spain, to the Spanish garrisons north of the Rio Grande. The manuscript is the first series of regulations issued to the garrisons. It provides valuable information regarding the everyday life of the Spanish soldiers in the Southwest. It also contains interesting information about interaction between Spanish soldiers and Indians. 2. Ascensión, Antonio de la, Relación de la jornada que hizo el general Sebastián Vizcaíno al descubrimiento de las Californias en el año de 1602, por mandado del Excmo. Sr Conde de Monterey, Virrey que era de Nueva España (1603). One of several accounts written by Antonio de la Ascensión concerning the second expedition of Sebastián de Vizcaíno to California in 1602 and 1603. Although superficial in terms of information concerning the inhabitants of California, it is a moving account of the vicissitudes of the Spaniards. The original manuscript is in the Newberry Library in Chicago.

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3. “Auto de la aparición de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe” in Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest, ed. Aurora Lucero-White Lea (San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1953). A religious Spanish play that has been presented in New Mexico since Spanish colonial days. Written in octosyllabic verse, the play centers on the apparition of the Virgin Mary to the Indian Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. 4. Benavides, Fray Alonso de, Memorial que Fray Juan de Santander de la Orden de San Francisco, Comisario General de Indias, presenta a la Majestad Católica del Rey, don Felipe Cuarto Nuestro Señor Hecho Por el Padre Fray Alonso de Benavides, Comisario del Santo Oficio y Custodio que ha sido de las provincias y conversiones del Nuevo-México (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1630). A simple and utilitarian account of Franciscan missionary efforts in New Mexico. The Memorial gives an interesting portrait of the Pueblos and their relations with the Spanish colonizers. It also provides some of the early folktales of the Southwest. An original copy of the Memorial is in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. 5. Castañeda de Nágera, Pedro de, Relación de la jornada de Cíbola compuesta por Pedro de Castañeda de Nágera, donde se trata de todos aquellos poblados y ritos y costumbres, la cual fue en el año de 1540 (Sevilla, 1596). A graphic account of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition to the Southwest (1540–1542) and a valuable source of information about the social, political, economic, and cultural organization of the Amerindians of the Southwest. The original manuscript is in the Lenox Branch of the New York Public Library. 6. Castellanos, Juan de, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (Madrid, 1584). A collection of octaves praising the deeds of the Spanish conquistadores. The poems offer a panoramic view of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The “Canto Séptimo” concentrates on the deeds of Juan Ponce de León, discoverer of Florida. 7. “Coloquio de los pastores” in Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest, ed. Aurora Lucero White-Lea (San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1953). Probably the most popular Nativity play in New Mexico, its plot is as follows: A group of shepherds are going to visit the Child Jesus in Bethlehem, but Lucifer tries to prevent the visit. The Archangel Michael appears and defeats Lucifer. After Lucifer’s defeat, the shepherds continue their trek to Bethlehem, bearing gifts to the newborn child. The play is rich in coplas, the most popular verse form of the Spanish Southwest. The play was probably brought to New Mexico by Spanish colonists during the eighteenth century. 8. Dávila Padilla, Fray Agustín, Historia de la fundación y discurso de la provincia de Santiago de México de la Orden de Predicadores, por las vidas de sus varones insignes y casos notables de Nueva España (Valladolid, 1596). Written in 1596 by the personal preacher of King Philip II, the Historia narrates the ill-fated voyage of Father Luis Cáncer de Barbastro and four other Dominican missionaries to Florida in 1549. The missionaries were killed by the Indians shortly after their arrival. Dávila Padilla, however, forgives the Indians and denounces the conquistadores as abusers. The Historia is a worthy example of the use of irony in Spanish colonial literature of the United States. 9. Domínguez, Fray Francisco Atanasio, and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, Diario y derrotero de los R.R.P.P Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez y Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante para descubrir el camino desde el Presidio de Santa Fe del Nuevo México, al de Monterey en la California Septentrional (1776). A diary of the expedition of Fathers Domínguez and Escalante from Santa Fe to Monterey in 1776, it is one of the most interesting accounts of Spanish exploration

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10.

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of the Inter-mountain Basin and is a tale of true adventure. It contains interesting observations about what is now the state of Colorado. A copy of the original is in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. Escalante Fontaneda, Hernando de, Memorial de las cosas, costa e indios de la Florida. Tomo 5 de la Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de América y Oceanía, 42 tomos (Madrid, 1864–1884). Although not as thorough as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s* La Relación, the Memorial of Escalante Fontaneda contains notable observations about the inhabitants of Florida. Shipwrecked in 1551 at the age of thirteen, Escalante Fontaneda lived for seventeen years with the legendary Indian chieftain Carlos of southern Florida. He wrote the Memorial in 1567 after he was rescued by Spanish soldiers. Escobedo*, Fray Alonso de, La Florida (Madrid, c. 1609). Probably written in 1609, La Florida is considered to be Florida’s first epic poem. Some even consider it to be America’s first epic poem, although the specific date of composition casts a doubt on the claim. The 449-page original manuscript is in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain. The poem narrates the Christianizing efforts of twelve Franciscan missionaries who came to Florida in 1587. It is worthy of study not only as a historical document but also as an extraordinary piece of literature. Espejo, Antonio de, Relación del viaje, que yo, Antonio Espejo, ciudadano de la ciudad de México, natural de Córdoba, hice con catorce soldados y un religioso de la orden de San Francisco, a las provincias y poblaciones de la Nueva México, a quien puse por nombre la Nueva Andalucía, a contemplación de mi patria, en fin del año mil quinientosochenta y dos (México, 1584). An account of the expedition led by Fray Bernardino Beltrán and Antonio de Espejo that went to New Mexico to rescue a number of Franciscan friars who remained behind after participating in the expedition of Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado in 1581. The expedition failed to accomplish its goal, the friars having been killed by the natives prior to Beltrán and Espejo’s arrival. Espejo’s account started the myth of the Golden Lake in western Arizona. Farfán de los Godos*, Marcos, “Los Moros y Cristianos” in Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest, ed. Aurora Lucero White-Lea (San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1953). Composed in 1598 by a captain in Juan de Oñate’s expedition to New Mexico, the play was performed in the neighborhood of present-day El Paso. The play commemorates the victory of the Spaniards over the Moors during the Reconquest from the Moors. Captain Farfán, however, connected the subject matter with the conquest of New Mexico. Some consider it the first play in United States literary history. Flores, Bartolomé de, “Obra nuevamente compuesta en la cual se cuenta la feliz victoria que Dios por su infinita bondad y misericordia fue servido de dar al ilustre señor Pedro Menéndez, Almirante y Capitán de la Gobernación de la Florida, contra Juan Ribao de nación francesa, con otros mil luteranos, a los cuales pasó a filo de espada. Con otras curiosidades que pone el autor de las viviendas de los indios de la Florida, y sus naturales facciones” in Biblioteca Hispanoamericana, ed. José Toribio Medina (Santiago de Chile: Impreso y grabado en casa del autor, 1898). A lengthy and rather bombastic poem lauding Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’s victory over the French Huguenots in Florida in 1565. Although the poem contains more fiction than fact, it remains a colorful picture of the conquest of Florida.

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15. Gallegos, Hernán, Relación y conclusión del viaje y suceso que Francisco Sánchez Chamuscado con ocho soldados, sus compañeros, hizo en el descubrimiento del Nuevo México en junio de 1581. An account of the journey of the Agustín Rodríguez–Franciso Chamuscado expedition to conduct missionary activities in New Mexico. Although the expedition never realized its objective, the account helped to maintain interest in the exploration of New Mexico. A copy of the original manuscript is located in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. 16. Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, La Florida del Inca. Historia del Adelantado Hernando de Soto, Gobernador y Capitán General del Reino de la Florida, y de otros heroicos caballeros españoles e indios (Lisboa: Pedro Craasbeck, 1605). La Florida del Inca is the lengthiest chronicle of Hernando de Soto’s expedition to Florida and the Southeastern United States (1539–1542). Historians have questioned the chronicle’s historical reliability, for Garcilaso was neither part of Hernando de Soto’s expedition nor ever in Florida. However, critics regard it as a literary masterpiece reminiscent of the contemporary romances of chivalry. Garcilaso, the first mestizo writer of the Americas, illustrates the bravery of both the Spanish conquistadores and the Indians of Florida. 17. González de Barcia, Andrés, Ensayo cronológico para La historia general de La Florida (Madrid: Nicolás Rodríguez Franco, 1723). A chronological work detailing the Spanish, French, and British colonial periods in North America with emphasis on the conquest of Florida by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. The Ensayo also covers the expeditions of Pánfilo de Narváez, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and Hernando de Soto. 18. Kino, Eusebio Francisco, Favores celestiales de Jesús y de María Santísima y del gloriosísimo Apóstol de las Indias S. Francisco Xavier, experimentados en las nuevas conquistas y nuevas conversiones del Nuevo Reino de la Nueva Navarra de esta América Septentrional e incógnita, y paso por tierra a la California en 35 grados de altura, 1699–1710. A personal account of Father Kino’s missionary works among the Pimas of Arizona and of his vision for spreading the Catholic faith. It is a document of the deep personal and spiritual development of the priest who spent twenty-four years with the Indians. A copy of the manuscript is in the Archivo de México. 19. León, Alonso de, “Historia de Nuevo León con noticias sobre Coahuila, Tejas y Nuevo México, por el capitán Alonso de León, un autor anónimo, y el general Fernando Sánchez de Zamora” in Documentos Inéditos o muy Raros para la Historia de México, ed. Genaro García (Mexico, 1902). A curious account dealing with Alonso de Leon’s five expeditions to Texas (1686–1690), this is a valuable source of information regarding Franco–Spanish rivalry in the borderlands. 20. Los Comanches, ed. Aurelio Espinosa University of New Mexico Bulletin, Language Series, Vol. 1 (1907). Composed of some 600 lines of octosyllabic verse, Los Comanches is a secular play that depicts the Spanish victory over the Comanche tribe in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the eighteenth century. The play glorifies both the Spanish victors and the vanquished Comanches. In addition, it offers interesting insights into the life of the Spanish colonists and their relationship with the marauding Comanches. The play was written in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but the text first appeared in 1907. 21. Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro, De Orbe Novo (Alcalá de Henares, 1530). Known in Spain as Pedro Mártir de Anglería, the author is considered to be the first historian of the Americas. Although written in Latin, his collection of decades contains a wealth of information on the Americas. Of special interest is

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the treatment of Ponce de León, the mythical Fountain of Youth, and the expedition of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón to present-day South Carolina in 1520. The first edition of De Orbe Novo in Spanish did not appear until 1892. Montoya, Juan de, Relación del descubimiento del Nuevo México, y de otras muchas provincias halladas de nuevo. Venida de las Indias a España, y de allí mandada a Roma (Roma: Bartolomé Bonfadino, 1602). Although abundant in digressions, Montaya’s Relación is the first published account of Juan de Oñate’s expedition to New Mexico. It also contains the Relación de las provincias descubiertas en el año 1598, written by Juan de Oñate himself. Niza, Fray Marcos de, “Relación del Descubrimiento de las siete ciudades por el P. Fr. Marcos de Niza.” Tomo 3 de la Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista, y colonización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de América y Oceanía, 42 tomos (Madrid, 1864–1884). An account of Fray Marcos de Niza’s expedition to New Mexico in 1537 that was given to the authorities in Mexico in 1539. Niza’s sighting of the mythical and gold-laden Seven Cities of Cíbola is still a subject of controversy. The original manuscript is located in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca*, Alvar, La relación que dio Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaecido en las Indias en la armada donde iba por gobernador Pánfilo de Narváez desde el año de veinte y siete hasta de treinta y seis que volvió a Sevilla con tres de su compañía (Zamora, 1542). An account of the ill-fated expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida in 1528 and of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s wanderings on the North American continent (1528–1536). The Relación is a narrative of considerable literary merit and the prototype of the genre of true adventure. It provides excellent information on the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of Florida and the present-day American Southwest. Three copies of the original edition are in existence at the Lenox Branch of the New York Public Library, the British Museum, and the John Carter Brown Library. Palao, Francisco, Relación histórica de la vida y apostólicas tareas del venerable Padre Fray Junípero Serra, y de las misiones que fundó en la California Septentrional, y nuevo establecimiento de Monterey (Mexico: Imprenta de don Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1787). An account of the life and works of Father Junípero Serra, founder of the California Mission Trail, it is a moving biography and a document of value for those interested in the California missions. Pérez de Villagrá*, Gaspar, Historia de la Nueva México, del capitán Gaspar de Villagrá. Dirigida al Rey D. Felipe Nuestro Señor Tercero de este nombre (Alcalá de Henares: Impreso por Luis Martínez Grande, 1610). A poem of more than 12,000 hendecasyllable lines, Historia de la Nueva México is one of the most striking works of Spanish colonial literature of the United States and is probably America’s first epic poem. The poem begins with Oñate’s march into New Mexico from Mexico City in 1596 and concludes with the storming of the Acoma Pueblo by the Spaniards in 1599. The whereabouts of the original manuscript are unknown, but a facsimile reprint was published in Mexico City in 1900 by the Museo Nacional de México. Pino, Pedro Bautista, Exposición succinta y sencilla del Nuevo México (Cádiz, 1812). An interesting report written by the first New Mexican representative to the Spanish Court in order to acquaint the Spaniards with New Mexico. The

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Exposición calls for the Court to initiate a reform program in New Mexico. It depicts Spanish life in New Mexico and speaks well of the Navajos and Comanches. Ranjel, Rodrigo, “Diario” in Historia general y natural de las Indias, Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Océano, ed. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (Madrid, 1557). A diary of Hernando de Soto’s expedition, written by de Soto’s personal secretary. It contains interesting descriptions of the land as well as of the characters of the inhabitants. The Diario is characterized by Ranjel’s scathing criticism of de Soto’s cruel treatment of the natives. Sáenz de San Antonio, Matías, Señor, si el pastor no escucha el quejido de la oveja, si el padre no oye el llanto de sus hijos, si el Señor no atiende al ay de sus vasallos, no podrá compadecerse su obligación amorosa en las necesidades (Madrid, 1724). A witty and exhilarating plea by a missionary in northeastern Texas begging the Spanish officials to send colonists to Texas. The author portrays Texas as an Arcadia. An original copy is located in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain. San Miguel, Fray Andrés de, “Relación de los trabajos que la gente de una nave llamada Nuestra Señora de la Merced padeció, y de algunas cosas que en aquella flota sucedieron” in Dos antiguas relaciones de la Florida, ed. Genaro García (Mexico: J. Aguilar Vera y Cía., 1902). An adventure-filled account of a sinking Spanish ship off the coast of Florida and its survivors. The Relación narrates the Spaniards’ ordeal and their lives among the natives of Florida’s east coast. Although the event happened in the late sixteenth century, the account was not published until 1902. Solís de Merás, Gonzalo, “Memorial que hizo el Dr. Gonzalo Solís de Merás, de todas las jornadas y sucesos del Adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, su cuñado, y de la conquista de la Florida, y justicia que hizo en Juan Ribao y otros franceses” in La Florida, su conquista y colonización por Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, ed. Eugenio Ruidíaz y Caravia (Madrid: Hijos de J. A. García, 1893). Written in 1567 by Menéndez’s brother-in-law, the Memorial is a personal but evaluating account of Menéndez’s conquest of Florida. The chronicler is thorough and meticulous, and the Memorial is considered to be Menéndez’s best biography. Torquemada, Fray Juan de, Primera parte de Los veinte y un libros rituales y monarquía indiana con el origen y guerras de los indios occidentales, y de sus poblaciones, descubrimiento, conquista, conversión y otras cosas maravillosas de la misma tierra. Distribuidos en tres tomos compuestos por Fray Juan de Torquemada, Ministro Provincial de la Orden de Nuestro Seráfico Padre S. Francisco en la Provincia del Santo Evangelio de México en la Nueva España (Sevilla: Matías Clavijo, 1615). Although the majority of the Monarquía indiana is concentrated on providing information on the natives of Mexico, the book gives the accounts of the expeditions of Coronado, Oñate, Vizcaíno, Rodríguez and Chamuscado. Parts of the book narrate the Franciscan missionary activities in Florida as well as the colonizing efforts of Tristán de Luna and Andrés de Villafañe in Florida and presentday South Carolina, prior to Menéndez’s arrival. Venegas, Miguel, Noticia de la California y de su conquista temporal y espiritual hasta el tiempo presente, sacada de la historia manuscrita formada en México, año de 1739, por el Padre Miguel Venegas de la Compañía de Jesús (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Manuel Fernández y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisición, 1757). This scholarly treatise depicts the works of the Jesuits in California during the first half of the eighteenth century, providing a physical description of

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California as well as an account of the various Spanish attempts to settle California until the arrival of the Jesuit Order. Further Reading Beers, Henry Putney, Spanish and Mexican Records of the American Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979). Campa, Arthur L., Spanish Folk Poetry in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946). Jackson, W. R., Early Florida through Spanish Eyes (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1954). Pearce, Thomas, “American Traditions and Our Histories of Literature” in American Literature Vol. 14 No. 3 (Nov. 1942): 277–284. Rael, Juan B., Cuentos españoles de Colorado y de Nuevo México, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971). Wagner, Henry R., The Spanish Southwest, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Quivira, 1937).

José B. Fernández

Con Safos. Taking its name from the C/S, which means “a safety zone” or “with an area of respect” and is placed by barrio graffiti artists on their wall art, the magazine Con Safos: Reflections of Life in the Barrio, promoted a male-dominated urban Chicano esthetic. Founded in Los Angeles in 1967, Con Safos presented quite the opposite perspective from Editorial Quinto Sol’s* El grito (The Shout), which was more academic in orientation and consciously sought to create and manage the whole Chicano literary movement. Taking the urban types of the pachuco* and the cholo as archetypes and models, the magazine featured stories, poems, and artwork by ingenious writers and artists who were adept at translating their urban pastoral to print in what we would today call a “funky” or “hip” style. The open identification with the pachuco was essentially part and parcel of Con Safos’s anti-establishment stand. Con Safos worked more as a collective than a hierarchical publishing business; its founding board consisted of R. L. Urbina-Grijalva, Arturo Flores, Rudy Salinas, Frank Sifuentes, Tony Gómez, John Figueroa, Gilbert González, Pete Fernández, Art Camargo, Sergio Hernández, and George “Chapo” Meneses. Art Flores was elected editor-in-chief, but he and the board operated under the principle of “not taking themselves too seriously.” In 1969, the soon-to-befamous Gildert “Magu” Luján became the Art Director. According to the Con Safos Web page, its mission was as follows: The cause of CON SAFOS, if we must have a cause, has no ideology. It is rather an attempt at expressing the entire spectrum of feelings that are the soul of the barrio. The cause of CON SAFOS needs the hatred and agony, as well as the love and the joy. It needs the humility of the Indio peón as well as the arrogant pride of the macho. It needs the looseness of the cholo [modern version of pachuco], as well as the discipline of the priest; and it needs the orgies of the puta [whore], as well as the asceticism of the nun. It must be [as] drunk as Saturday,

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and as sober as Sunday. It must be as sturdy as Sequoias, and as frail as ferns. It must be poverty and richness. It must be big and small; city hall, the war on poverty, politics, and the government’s millions, together with the simple chante [house], the hard earned wage, la familia y la tortilla de cada día [the family and the daily tortilla]. Thus, if CON SAFOS is to be, it must be the entire barrio. And subsequently, it needs the entire barrio to feed into its veins to give it life. CON SAFOS is faith.

Of the many writers who were featured in and/or associated with Con Safos, probably the most renowned was the irreverent and larger-than-life Oscar Zeta Acosta, the “Brown Buffalo,” a lawyer who went on to write two hit autobiographical and picaresque novels before suddenly disappearing, never to be seen again. Further Reading Con Safos (www.consafos-magazine.com/blog/2006/02/brief-history-of-con-safos-magazine. html).

Nicolás Kanellos Córdova, Rafael J. De (1824–1908). A Sephardic humorist and essayist born in Jamaica and educated in England, and through his father linked to various noble lineages in Spain, Rafael J. De Córdova moved to the United States and became a celebrated humorist, essayist, and public speaker. While still in England, De Córdova began his writing career as editor of The Gleaner newspaper. By 1848, he was in New York City writing for the New York Daily Times. By 1890, he had developed a reputation as a humorist with a large following, traveling around the country to entertain large crowds with his anecdotes and satire, often for very large fees. Many of his most popular humorous stories and essays were published in newspapers and in such magazines as Harper’s. A collection of his humorous lectures from 1857 to 1890 was edited by his son Julian and published under the title of The Wit and Humor of the 70’s (1939). His best-known book is Mrs. Fizzlebury’s New Girl: A Truly Domestic Story, which satirizes the excesses of the American bourgeoisie. Another popular book was his The Prince’s Visit: a humorous description of the tour of His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, throughout the United States of America, in 1860 (1861), a fanciful account of democratic Americans scraping and humiliating themselves in admiration of English royalty. Some of De Córdova’s speeches were issued in pamphlets, such as A lecture on war, foreign and civil, and the blessings of union and peace, which he delivered at the Temple Emanuel in New York, on December 8, 1860. Further Reading Cohen, Martin A., and Abraham J. Peck, eds., Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). Matza, Diane, ed., Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1997).


Coronel, Antonio Franco

Coronel, Antonio Franco (1817–1894). Born in Mexico City, Antonio Franco Coronel moved to Alta California with his parents in 1834. Coronel lived through some of the most unsettling and turbulent times in the history of California, experiencing first-hand the transition from Spanish rule to Mexican and then American conquest and statehood. As an intellectual and cultural entrepreneur, Coronel was situated precisely where cultures clashed. Under Mexican rule, Coronel was privileged to be named to a series of public offices, including that of judge; under American statehood, he continued to work in the public interest as county assessor (1850–1852) and in 1853 was elected mayor of Los Angeles. After that, he served on the city council (1854–1857) and as state treasurer (1866–1870). Coronel was a very literate man, a poet, schoolteacher, theater impresario, letter-writer, and public figure used to writing reports. Hubert H. Bancroft employed Thomas Savage in 1877 to take Coronel’s dictation of his version of California history, a document that is known as Cosas de California (California Things) and which forms the basis of numerous stories and oral literature that have been translated to English and published under Coronel’s name. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the format and transcription process imposed by

Antonio Coronel, late in life, surrounded by his possessions and mementos.

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Bancroft and Savage were a form of cultural imperialism in that they served as a filter of the true thoughts and opinions of Coronel and did not accord him the dignity of writing down his own narrative as a literate intellectual. In his dictated Spanish narrative, Coronel describes in ample detail the history of California, in which he served as a central figure. Particular detailed are his descriptions of mining, missions, indigenous groups, government organization, and the coming of the Anglo Americans. Despite the obvious imposition of his interviewer and translator, what does come through in Coronel’s account is his disillusionment with the new order, as well as his lament over the dispossession of lands and rights suffered by the Californios. Many literary manuscripts, as well as his library and documents relating to the Teatro Carmen, a theater he owned and operated, are included in his archives, which have not yet been studied. He died on April 17, 1894. Further Reading Padilla, Genaro, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Sánchez, Rosaura, Telling Identities: The California Testimonies (University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Corpi, Lucha (1945–). Born in the small tropical village of Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, on April 13, 1945, Lucha Corpi married young and moved with her husband to Berkeley, California, when he began his studies at the University of California. At the time of their emotional divorce in 1970, Corpi, too, was a student at the university and was heavily involved in the Free Speech Movement and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. Corpi has remained politically active since, something evident in much of her creative writing. She eventually earned both a B.A. and an M.A. in comparative literature and has since 1977 been a tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Programs, where she specializes in adult education. She is also a founding member of the cultural center, Aztlan Cultural, which later merged with a center for writers, Centro Chicano de Escritores. During the 1970s, Corpi began publishing Spanish poetry in small magazines, luxuriant, sensual poems reminiscent of her tropical upbringing. In 1976, a group of her poems, along with those of two other poets, were issued in book form in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets. By 1980 Corpi’s collected poems were published in her first book, Palabras de mediodía (Noon Words), along with translations by Catherine Rodríguez-Nieto. In 1990, Corpi published a third collection, Variaciones sobre una tempestad (Variations on a Storm), again with translations of her poems by Rodríguez-Nieto. In the early 1980s, Corpi made the transition to prose and to writing in English with the publication of various short stories in magazines. In 1984, she published her first novel, Delia’s Song, based on her involvement in the Chicano Movement and campus politics at the University of California. Delia’s

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Lucha Corpi.

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Song is one of the very few novels that deal with that historical period, so important in the making of the modern Chicano. It was not until 1992 that Corpi’s writing career took another turn with her creation of an ongoing series of detective novels. In Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Corpi introduced the astute Chicana detective, Gloria Damasco, who unravels the mysterious assassination of a young boy during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War. Described as a feminist detective novel, Eulogy is fast-paced, suspenseful, and packed with an assortment of interesting characters. Her feminist protagonist, Gloria Damasco, is somewhat of a clairvoyant who is able to use more than reason and logic in solving a puzzling crime. Eulogy was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Best Book of Fiction award. In 1995, Gloria Damasco returned in Cactus Blood, a mystery set against the background of the United Farm Workers Movement in California. Cactus Blood opens with a flashback to the 1970s when a young Gloria Damasco’s investigation into their disappearance of a young woman begins with the 1973 United Farm Workers Strike and Boycott in the San Joaquin Valley and continues to an old Native American ghost-dancing site in the Valley of the Moon. Historic settings, California panoramas, and Hispanic culture give texture to this suspenseful search for a ritualistic assassin. In 1999, Corpi continued with the series in Black Widow’s Wardrobe, a mystery inspired by the Mexican rituals of the Day of the Dead, which leads Gloria Damasco once again into the historical past and on a trip to Cuernavaca Mexico and indigenous culture. In Crimson Moon (2004) Corpi expanded her focus to include two detective associate of Damasco on the hunt of an FBI infiltrator of the Chicano Movement who may have committed a rape. In 2006, in Death at Solstice, Gloria Damasco was at it again in full force, investigating a murder and a kidnapping in California’s historic gold country, where the ghost of Joaquín Murrieta*

Corrales, José

has been seeming to reappear. Lucha Corpi’s bilingual artistry has manifested itself differently from other writers who either use Spanish– English code-switching or create two, separate versions of their works (one in Spanish, the other in English). Throughout the body of her highly symbolic, intimate poetry and in her short fiction for children, Corpi uses the language of her early upbringing and education in Mexico: Spanish. Her prose fiction, on the other hand, is written in the language of her professional life and education in California: English. Further Reading Flys Jonquera, Carmen, “Murder with an Ecological Message: Rudolfo Anaya and Lucha Corpi’s Detective Fiction” in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses Vol. 42 (2001): 341–357. Pearson, Carol, “Writing from the Outside in: Constructs of Memory and Chicanas as Private Eyes in Three Detective Novels by Lucha Corpi” in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory Vol. 4, No. 1 (Fall 2002): 38–51.

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Corrales, José (1937–2002). Exiled poet and playwright José Corrales was born in Guanabacoa, Cuba, on October 20, 1937. He was unable to finish his university studies in Cuba, because the University of Havana was shut down by dictator Fulgencio Batista. He also studied acting at the municipal academy of theater arts in Havana. After the success of the Cuban Revolution, Corrales worked as an editor of children’s theater books and penned articles for the weekly Bohemia magazine from 1963 to 1964. He subsequently went into exile in Mexico in 1964 and settled in New York City in 1965, where he became associated with the Dumé Spanish Theater and completed his university education at Mercy College (1975). After that, he became associated with the Centro Cultural Cubano in New York. During the 1970s, many of his plays were staged in the Spanish-language theater houses of New York, among them “Farramalla” (1971), “El Espíritu de Navidad” (1974, The Christmas Spirit), “Spics, Spices, Gringos y Gracejo” (1976, Spics, Spices, Gringos, and Ungraciousness), “Juana Machete, la muerte en bicicleta” (1978, Juana Machete and Death on a Bicycle), and “The Butterfly Cazador” (1978, The Butterfly Hunter). Corrales is also a prolific poet and has published No tenemos nada en común, with Mario Peña (1974, We Have Nothing in Common), Razones y amarguras: Poemas del que llega a los cuarenta (1978, Reasons and Bitterness: Poems from One Who Arrives at Forty Years Old), and Los trabajos de Gerión (1980, The Labors of Gerión). Both Corrales’ poetry and drama, often expressed bilingually, deal with the concept of time in philosophical and abstract terms, but, more concretely, with lost homeland and exile. Especially in Razones y amarguras, his condition of displacement from Cuba and his alienation in the United States come to bear as the persona in these poems vacillates between suicide and resignation. Likewise, although Los trabajos de Gerión glosses love relationships, the poems nevertheless consider lost homeland once again.

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Corrales was the author of some twenty works for the stage, many of which were never performed or published because of the limited resources and facilities available to him in exile. Corrales’ plays are quite lighter and are often inspired freely by Cuban farce as well as theater of the absurd and more classical Spanish drama. His children’s musical play, “The Butterfly Cazador,” is a whimsical fable incorporating actors, puppets, and animals. Such plays as “Farramalla” and “Spics, spices . . .” exhibit a humor derived from bilingual word play as well as a sense of vaudeville. The play he wrote in 1977 with Manuel Pereira, Las heitarias habaneras (The Courtesans of Havana) and published in 1988, on the other hand, is quite serious, being a re-creation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women. In 2001, Corrales was awarded Palma Espinada Award by the Cuban American Cultural Institute in California, thus becoming recognized as one of the most distinguished writers of the Cuban expatriate community. Further Reading Escarpenter, José, “José Corrales” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989: 69–75).

Nicolás Kanellos Corretjer, Juan Antonio (1908–1985). Born in Ciales, Puerto Rico, on March 3, 1908, poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer went no further than high school in his education but became one of Puerto Rico’s leading poets and intellectuals. As early as 1923, he became politically active, founding the Sociedad José Gautier Benítez pro-independence group. Throughout his subsequent work as a poet and political figure, the theme of Puerto Rican nationhood would dominate. Admired for his devotion to Puerto Rican independence and his loyalty to Puerto Rican patriot Pedro Albizu Campus, Juan Antonio Correjter wrote poetry that celebrated the island’s Amerindian and African heritage. Although he spent many years in prison in the United States after being convicted for plotting political violence against the American government, he managed to write more than a dozen books. Corretjer was born on March 3, 1908, in Ciales, Puerto Rico, the descendant of patriots who had participated in an insurrection against Spain in 1898. During his childhood, his parents often took him to political rallies and discussions, instilling in him an early sense of nationalism and pride in Puerto Rico. Corretjer started to write poetry at the age of twelve and published his first poem, “De otoño” (About Autumn), when he was sixteen years old. During his teen years he was inspired by Puerto Rico’s landscape but from 1927 on, when he moved to San Juan, he espoused Marxist ideology in his writings. In 1928, Corretjer relocated to New York City, where he supported revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and protested against American military presence in Haiti. Two years later, he returned to Puerto Rico, where he met and befriended the nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos (1893–1965). Joining the Partido Nacionalista (Nationalist Party)—of which Albizu Campos was the leader—he participated in numerous anti-American and pro-independence

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activities, even traveling to Cuba to seek support for the Puerto Rican cause. Yet, during the 1930s, he published several books of poetry, including Agüeybana, named after a famous Taíno Indian Chief (1932), Ulises (1933, Ulysses), Amor de Puerto Rico (1937, Love of Puerto Rico). In 1936, Corretjer was accused of conspiring to overthrow the American government. He, Albizu Campos, and a group of writers, including Clemente Soto Vélez,* were sent to prison in Atlanta, Georgia. Released in 1942, he was not allowed to return to Puerto Rico. Settling in New York City, he founded the newspaper Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), a weekly newspaper that reported on nationalist struggles throughout the Americas and around the world. Under his editorship, such distinguished writers as Julia de Burgos,* Jesús Colón,* and Erasmo Vando,* among many others, published literary works and columns. He also wrote his patriotic poem, El Leñero: poema de la revoluJuan Antonio Corretjer. ción de Lares (1944, The Wood Cutter: Poem on the Lares Revolution), a celebration of the insurrection of the Grito de Lares, which took place in Puerto Rico against Spanish rule in 1868. The publication received the Poetry Prize from the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican Literary Institute). In addition, he wrote several essays on patriotic and nationalistic themes, including La lucha por la independencia de Puerto Rico (1949, The Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence). He continued his political labor inspired by Consuelo Lee Tapia, a Marxist intellectual with whom he fell in love and with whom he spent the rest of his life. Back in Puerto Rico, Corretjer was accused in 1950 of inciting a political revolt known as the Revuelta Nacionalista (Nationalist Revolt) when members of the Partido Nacionalista led an uprising against the American government in several towns. Again, he was imprisoned and during this time, he wrote Los Primeros Años (1950, The First Years) and Tierra Nativa (1951, Native Land), both patriotic poems. In Puerto Rico, Corretjer wrote some of

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his most renowned books, including Alabanza en la torre de Ciales (1953, Uplifting Praise at the Ciales Tower), Yerba bruja (1957, Witches Weed), and Pausa para el amor (1967, Pause for Love). His historical and political writings are represented by various books, including La revolución de Lares (1947, The Lares Revolution), La lucha para la independencia de Puerto Rico (1949, The Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence), Hostos y Alvizu Campos, named after the Puerto Rican patriots (1965), Alvizu Campos, hombre histórico (1966, Alvizu Campos, Historic Man), and Semblanza polémica de Pedro Alvizu Campos (1973, A Polemical Portrait of Pedro Alvizu Campos). The themes he addressed in these volumes were love of country, celebration of the life and struggle of the Puerto Rican peasant, and solidarity with poor people and the oppressed, in addition to creating a place for Alvizu Campos as a national hero. In 1959, he visited Cuba, where he became friends with revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967) and then toured several Latin American nations, including Mexico and Venezuela, seeking support for the independence of Puerto Rico. In 1962, he returned to Puerto Rico to organize the Liga Socialista (Socialist League) and to oppose the draft. In 1970, there was an assassination attempt on Corretjer and Consuelo Lee. A year later, accused of plotting the violent overthrow of the United States, Corretjer and Lee were briefly incarcerated. During the 1970s, Corretjer delivered a series of talks on radio and at Puerto Rican universities and libraries. He also edited the journal El Correo de la Quincena (The Fortnightly Mail) and continued publishing books of poetry, including Mujer boricua (1997, Puerto Rican Woman), which he co-wrote and co-published with his beloved Consuelo. In 1978, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña collected his works in the volume Obras Completas (Complete Works). Corrjeter died on January 19, 1985. Even to the end of his life, he remained involved in the political struggle for Puerto Rican independence, supported revolutionary causes in Latin America—including the Cuban revolution— and wrote poetry. A few months before his death, he recorded poems about his hometown, Vivo: Ciales en dos tiempos (Alive: Ciales in Two Periods of Time), expressing his undying love for his island. Further Reading Meléndes, Joserramón, Juan Antonio Corretjer, o, La poesía inevitable (Río Piedras, PR: qeAse, 1996).

D. H. Figueredo

Corridos. The corrido, or Mexican folk ballad, is an important document of oral literature and history. Its roots trace back to the medieval epic poems in Spain that were composed by minstrels and performed everywhere from the public square to the castles of nobility. Its music and performance styles, as well as some narrative tendencies, are also related to the heroic epic songs and dance drama of pre-Colombian peoples in New Spain. In Spain, the long, epic songs of the minstrels fragmented into shorter narratives in the late Middle Ages as the pop-

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Musical ensemble in historic Californio attire.

ulace demanded that minstrels repeatedly sing favorite passages of longer epics. These “romances,” or early Spanish ballads, soon became an independent genre and led minstrels to compose these shorter pieces rather than longer epics. By the time soldiers and missionaries reached the Americas seeking the conquest, colonization, and Christianization of the natives, these romances were very popular and, as the missionaries recognized that the natives had their own epic songs, the missionaries employed the romances as a prime vehicle for evangelization. The soldiers, however, spurred on by the heroic deeds and clash of civilizations and religions among Christians and Moors in Spain’s previous six centuries, repeatedly sang romances that coincided with their own military and heroic missions. From the first contacts of Christians and indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century in what later became New Spain and, still later, the Southwest United States, the romance and Native American songs blended to produce a mestizo (blended European and Native American) ballad that came to be known as the corrido—perhaps derived from the ballad known in Spain’s Andalusia as the romance corrido, meaning “running narrative”).

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One of the first scholars to analyze the literary structure of the corrido was Vicente Mendoza, who provided the following definition, which highlights both its relationship to rural and uneducated masses as a medium of spreading sensational news and its structural flexibility and adaptability to various musical composition structures: In essence, the Mexican corrido is lyric-narrative poetry which relates in simple form (a musical phrase composed of four members) those events which strongly impress the sensibility of the masses: extravagant crimes, violent deaths, tales of banditry, catastrophes, wars, battles, humorous stories, verses of love, hate or satire.

He further states that corridos can be sung to music played in 3/8, 6/8, 9/8, or 2/4 time and that, although the four-verse strophe is the most common, a corrido can also be structured in six- and eight-verse strophes. Narcisco Martínez and Santiago Almeida duet, Texas. (Lomax Most important for literary analysis, Collection, Library of Congress) the corrido, running from twenty to thirty strophes, is structured according to six formulae: (1) the call to attention at the beginning, (2) a statement of the name, date, and place of the central character or event narrated, (3) the plot itself, which takes up the largest portion of the song, (4) the message, which is repeated explicitly and symbolically various times, (5) the formulaic farewell of the central character in the song, and (6) the farewell of the song’s composer, also in formulaic or conventional terms. Most corridos have come down to us in fragmented form, often having lost at least one of the farewells and some of the strophes of the plot. There have been a number of theories as to the genesis of the corrido in New Spain/Mexico, such scholars as Aurelio* and Manuel Espinosa highlighting the Spanish origins of the ballad, Vicente Mendoza and Arthur Campa* favoring the central Mexican origins and its diffusion northward, and Américo Paredes* providing ample documentation for his thesis that the corrido was developed in northern New Spain/Mexico, including the areas that would

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become part of the United States. Paredes also furthers the idea that the rise of the corrido was also related to the development of Mexican identity as a response to contact with Anglo Americans. In support of Paredes’ theory is the fact that most of the oldest corridos recovered have been from areas of northern New Spain/Mexico that became part of the Southwest United States after the war with Mexico (1846–1848). Songs in transition from romance to corrido were found in Independence, New Mexico (1808, Corrido de Carlos IV), Santa Barbara, California (1824, La batalla de Tulares [The Battle of Tulares]), and El Pino, New Mexico (1832, El condenado a muerte [The Man Condemned to Death]. In the 1840s and 1850s, proto-corridos were composed in Brownsville, Texas (1841, Corrido de Leandro Rivera), Arizona (1857, Corrido de los filibusteros [Corrido of the Filibusters]), and California (c. 1850, Corrido de Joaquín Murieta). From the 1860s and 1870s on, the true corridor arose and, during the Mexican Revolution, begun in 1910, flourished as a living oral history of the personages and battles of the revolution as well as a history of the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States up through the Depression and mass repatriation of Mexicans to their “homeland.” During and after World

Texas rangers displaying cadavers of slain Mexican “bandits.”

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War II, the corrido became commercialized as recording companies and the film industry capitalized on its popularity with the masses. However, the corridor continues to function today as an alternative medium to commercial print and electronic news and entertainment. According to Simmons in his landmark book, The Mexican Corrido, the historical value and import of the corrido is as follows: Whether as a showman of the marketplace or as a soldier turned singer, the corridista performed, and still performs, an important educative function. He is . . . a kind of roving chronicler of past and current events for a society without news organs; and even today, although newscasts are currently making inroads into popular consciousness, the balladeer still imparts to his chronicles an excitement, a breadth of life, an attention to striking detail and dramatic effect which formalized news reports cannot match. . . . Like the class to which he belongs, the singer of ballads is of the national scene but always slightly detached from it, so he characteristically adopts the attitude of an interested observer, absorbed in evaluating A depiction of Joaquín Murrieta from the Police Gazette. the national life but aware that neither he nor his listeners can hope to exert much influence upon policy. From this circumstance stems the sardonic skepticism and pessimism which are almost endemic to the corridista. (35–36)

A subgenre of the corrido, identified by Paredes as the “border ballad,” narrates the exploits of social bandits, the heroes of the folk who represent their anxieties and frustrations as a class and strike back in defiance against authorities or the dominant population. Despite these heroes being considered bandits by established society, their heroic deeds are celebrated in the songs of the marginalized populace—in this case the Mexican American citizens of the

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Southwest who through these songs give vent to their frustration and their resistance to oppression. Typically, the border ballad’s plot charts the exploit of the hero, the chase given by the authorities (often Texas Rangers or “rinches”), their fight, and the hero’s escape; at times the ballads reflect real-life outcomes, such as the capture of a bandit via the aid of a treacherous informer, or the surrender of the hero. Often at the heart of these corridos fronterizos (a name taken from the romances composed on the border between Christian and Moslem Spain) is a boast by the hero proclaiming macho pride and listing his exploits as a brave Mexican; thus the theme of national identity and pride become part of the overt message in this song of intercultural conflict. What remains of one of Newspaper advertisement promoting the exhibit of Joaquín the earliest corridos, El Corrido de Murrieta’s supposed decapitated head. Joaquín Murieta, is essentially the boast, in which he brags about pursuing and killing the rapists of his wife and murderers of his brother, his coming from Mexico with his pistol in his hand, and even his slaying of lions in Africa. Some of the most famous border ballads follow these patterns, such as those that narrate the exploits of Gregorio Cortez,* Juan Nepomuceno Cortina,* and Jacinto Treviño. The other subgenre of the corrido that is important to the study of Latino literature is the corrido that narrates the trials and misadventures of Mexican immigrants to the United States. One of the earliest of such ballads was El Corrido de Kiansis (Kansas), which narrated the exploits of Mexican cowboys driving their cattle up to the railhead in Kansas in the 1860s; it set the model of narrating the occurrences along the migrant trail. However, the immigration corridos that followed during the mass exodus during the Mexican Revolution often focused not only on the happenings and adventures but also on the misfortunes, racism, and exploitation faced by the migrants who came to work in the United States. In addition, they frequently satirize the strange customs of the gringos and protest oppressive and inhuman treatment by gringo and, sometimes, Mexican American (pocho) foremen and bosses. There are many examples of these ballads, which

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narrate the physical and emotional journey from central and northern Mexico to such places as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Dallas, Texas; and Indiana, bearing such titles as El Corrido de Pennsylvania, El Corrido de los Enganchados (The Corrido of the Hooked [those recruited for labor]), El Corrido del Lavaplatos (The Corrido of the Dishwasher), and El Corrido de la Discriminación (The Corrido of Discrimination). When Mexicans were “repatriated” during the Depression, such ballads as El Corrido de los Deportados were composed and popularized. Today, the migrant stream continues and the ballads sing not only of the suffering and tribulations of the workers coming north but of escaping the nets of the Border Patrol and the Naturalization and Immigration Service; and they continue expressing anxiety at culture conflict and labor exploitation. The corrido has not only become a document for students of literature and history but has also informed much literature, including novels of immigration such as Daniel Venegas’s* Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (1928, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000), and much of Chicano literature, from the poetry of Evangelina Vigil Piñón to the novels of Rolando Hinojosa,* Tomás Rivera,* and Américo Paredes himself. (See also Folklore and Oral Tradition.) Further Reading Paredes, Américo, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Paredes, Américo, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1976). Paredes, Américo, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). Mendoza, Vicente, El corridor mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974). Simmons, Merle, The Mexican Corrido as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico, 1870–1950 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1957).

Nicolás Kanellos Cortez, Carlos (1923–2005). Carlos Cortez was born in Milwaukee in 1923, the son of a Mexican Indian father and a German mother. He moved to Chicago in 1965, where he became a fixture in the city’s Latino cultural life as a graphic artist and poet. Cortez had a limited formal education, but his background and self-study led him to an artistic style that joined the grotesque humanism of Käthe Kollwitz and the German expressionists with the cartoonish gallows humor work of José Guadalupe Posada, José Clemente Orozco, and other Mexican artists. Although Cortez will be remembered more for his linocut and woodcut graphics than for his verse, he exhibits some of the same virtues in all media, and it may indeed be said that Cortez translates radical Mexican traditions (including graphics) into populist verse. All of his works are part of his unique place in the Chicano world as the most overt follower of an anarchosyndicalist tradition that became best known through the writings of the Flores Magón* brothers.

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Cortez was an artist whose whole life’s orientation made his work a means of political and humanistic communication. His graphics speak in a strikingly direct manner, often helped by words. Bold, caricatured images ridicule corruption and exploitation and hail the struggle against these forces. The same holds for his many poems. “I write poetry because [it is] . . . another form of communication,” he wrote. “The social forces of repression and the consequent forces of rebellion have long influenced my writing as well as [my] . . . other forms of expression,” he said in 1988. Parental influence and early experience during the Depression and World War II led Cortez to join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). As he noted in 1988, the IWW was “the initial force motivating my expression, and participation in any other type of movements were but a logical extension of that.” In spite of clear continuities between Mexican radical traditions and Cortez’s contributions, his initial orientations were not specifically Latino; and he himself saw his Chicano/Latino, as well as Indianist and other, identifications as overlays on his basic “Wobbly humanist populism.” It was with this base that Cortez was to enter the stream of Chicano arts and letters in the context of Chicago’s Latino community and the emergence of the city’s Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH, Chicano Artistic Movement), with which Cortez would be identified from the mid-1960s on. As a popular working class Wobbly poet, Cortez was not without a certain recognition, even prior to his connection with MARCH. His “Outa Work Blues,” included in the IWW’s Little Red Song Book and distributed to the more than fifty IWW chapters throughout the world, was reprinted in Walter Lowenfels’ Poets of Today (1964). His most comprehensive poem, “Where are the Voices?” is a hymn to oppressed Indians, Mexicans, Swedish labor organizers, tyrannized Jews, Haymarket Germans, and brutalized U.S. and Caribbean Blacks. First published for the 1960 May Day issue of The Industrial Worker, the poem only later appeared in one of the major Chicano publications, El Grito del Sol (Shout of the Sun), and then in the First Canto Al Pueblo Anthology (Song to the People). Cover of Revista Chicano-Requeña featuring a woodcut by The reverse process occurred with one of Carlos Cortez.

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his most important expressions of Indian roots, “This Is the Land,” published in an issue of Abrazo (Embrace), MARCH’s publishing organ, and later reprinted in Scott Foresman’s high school textbook, United States in Literature (1979). These and many other of his early poems were anthologized in two collections published by the IWW publishing house Charles H. Kerr (1990 and 1997). But his later poetry, including many of his more specifically “Chicano” works, also appeared in non-Wobbly multicultural and general anthologies, as well as in Latino journals, including Revista Chicano-Riqueña (The ChicanoRican Revue) and, finally, in his collection for MARCH/Abrazo Press (1992). Cortez’s poetry is simple and direct and true to the Wobbly aesthetic he espoused. Over the years, however, he became best known as a quintessential caricaturist of U.S. politics, as well as of Chicano and Latino social struggles. With his young disciple, Carlos Cumpián,* Cortez led MARCH to continue its work of expressing Chicano concerns in Chicago. In addition, he joined the Mexican Taller del Grabado (Graphics Workshop) and worked with groups of young artists throughout the city. Even as his Mexican identification deepened, Cortez retained elements of his German background and a connection with Greece through his wife, Mariana; he also cultivated an indigenous identity, assuming the name of Koyokuikatl and sometimes signing himself by that name or with a drawing of a coyote. As he grew older, he became known in many Mexican communities and was invited to show his graphic works in festivals and exhibits; he also held writing and arts workshops in various schools, museums, and universities. By the time of his death in 2005, he was heralded as a father of Latino and Mexican cultural production and was the subject of countless homages and retrospectives, an iconic figure for Chicago’s National Mexican Fine Arts Museum, to which he bequeathed all his graphic blocks on the condition that his reprints be sold at popular prices. A grassroots Mexican arts group, Taller Cultural Mestizarte (Mestizo Art Cultural Workshop), changed the organization’s name to Taller Cultural Mestizarte Carlos Cortez and placed a picture of him on the front door of their 18th Street location in the heart of Chicago’s best-known Mexican neighborhood, Pilsen. Among the books published by Cortez are Crystal-Gazing the Amber Fluid and Other Wobbly Poems (1990), De Kansas a Califas & Back to Chicago: Poems and Art (1992), and Where are the Voices? & Other Wobbly Poems (1997). Further Reading Sorell, Victor, ed., Carlos Cortez Koyokuikatl: Soapbox Artist & Poet: A Catalog (Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts Museum, 2002). Zimmerman, Marc, “Carlos Cortez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 209: Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc. 1999: 45–51).

Marc Zimmerman Cortez, Gregorio (1875–1916). The memory of Gregorio Cortez was preserved as lore in South Texas mainly by Mexican American border dwellers 280

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until the Chicano folklorist, Américo Paredes,* immortalized his story in With a Pistol in His Hand (1958). Since then, Cortez has become a symbol of resistance against the Anglo domination of the Southwest. The story begins on June 12, 1901, when Sheriff W. T. Morris of Karnes County was killed by Cortez. The sheriff and a deputy went to the Mexican immigrant’s ranch to inquire about a stolen horse. Because of a language misunderstanding, Morris pulled his gun to arrest Cortez, and Cortez shot Morris in self-defense. Cortez then began his flight toward the Mexican border, and the ten-day chase that followed became one of the most publicized manhunts in Texas history. The fugitive did not make it to the border, but because of his bravery and his ability to elude capture, he gained legendary status among Mexicans and Anglos alike. It took a number of trials over a period of four years before Cortez was finally hauled off to serve a life sentence at Huntsville prison. Significantly, Cortez was not jailed for the shooting of Morris, which the jury considered selfdefense, but for the killing of Sheriff G. Glover, who surprised him hiding out at the house of another Texas rancher in González County two days after he had fled the Karnes debacle. Although many Anglos howled for his head— lynching threats abounded—Mexicans launched a massive effort in support of Cortez. During the next few years, thousands of dollars were raised to pay B. R. Abernathy, who, with a team of four lawyers, mounted a formidable defense. Even after Cortez was sentenced and imprisoned, supporters continued to clamor for clemency, and in 1915, Governor Oscar Colquitt pardoned Cortez. He died a year later. Further Reading Paredes, Américo, “With his Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). Rosales, F. Arturo, ¡Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

F. Arturo Rosales Cortez, Sarah (1950–). Sarah Cortez is a renowned poet born and raised in Houston, Texas. She is one of the few Latino artists to combine writing with a career in law enforcement. Born in Houston, Texas, on February 11, 1950, Cortez had a Catholic-school elementary and secondary education. She went on to receive her B.A. in psychology and religion from Rice University in 1972, worked at a variety of jobs, including employment as an tax accountant and as a Latin teacher, and then went on to become a police officer, receiving her certification from the University of Houston in 1993. Along the way, she also earned an M.A. in classical studies from the University of Texas in 1979 and an M.S. in accountancy from the University of Houston in 1981. From 1987 on, she took various creative writing workshop courses around Texas and the United States, studying with such notables as Ed Hirsch and Naomi Shihab Nye. From 1998 on, Cortez taught various types of writing courses at the University of Houston and other Houston-area institutions. As a result of courses she 281

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taught on memoir writing beginning in 2000, she was able to compile a well-received anthology of young peoples’ personal stories, Windows into My World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives (2007). She was also the compiler and editor of Urban-Speak: Poetry of the City (2001). But, by far, her most important publication is her book of poems, How to Undress a Cop (2000), which won the PEN Texas literary award in poetry. The highly autobiographical poems included in the collection draw on her experiences as a beat cop and are highly erotic and menacing while at the same time supple and lyrical. Cortez’s poetry has been published in reviews and anthologies across the United States. She has also had a half-dozen personal essays, as well as short stories, published in periodicals and anthologies. From 1984 on, she has frequently read her works in public settings, book fairs, and recitals.

Sarah Cortez.

Further Reading Gwynn, R. S., “Get a Life” in The Hudson Review (Summer 2001): 6–7.

Nicolás Kanellos Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno (1824–1894). Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, the subject of many corridos,* legend and lore, was born into a wealthy Mexican family in Camargo, Tamaulipas, a community just south of the Rio Grande River. By 1859, he had witnessed numerous instances of Anglo abuse and mistreatment of Mexicans. Inharmonious race relations already existed throughout the entire Southwest, in particular in California, where symbolic figures such as Joaquín Murrieta* and Tiburcio Vásquez had championed the struggle for social justice and civil rights in the eyes of many Mexicans. On July 13, 1859, Cortina observed one of his former employees being harassed by a law enforcement official in Brownsville, Texas. The marshal had

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arrested and mistreated the worker. Cortina shot the officer and declared that war between the Anglos and Los Tejanos had begun. On September 28, 1859, Cortina and his men seized control of Brownsville, seeking the men he considered to be the most notorious persecutors of Mexicans, only to find that they had fled. Local officials appealed to Mexican authorities to persuade Cortina to evacuate Brownsville, which he did, leaving for his family ranch in Tamaulipas. On September 30, he issued a poetically eloquent proclamation declaring the rights of Mexicans to their heritage, pride, dignity, land, and self-preservation. In the meantime, Brownsville officials captured one of his men, Tomás Cabrera, and sentenced him to hang. Simultaneously, a posse of Americans and Texan Mexicans failed in an attempt to dislodge Cortina from his family estate on the Mexican side of the border. To save Cabrera, Cortina again threatened to invade Brownsville, and on November 23, 1859, he issued a second proclamation outlining the complaints of Mexicans against their Anglo oppressors. Finally, in December, Texas Rangers, aided by U.S. Army regulars, fought Cortina and his men, forcing his retreat into the Burgos Mountains south of Matamoros, where he remained in hiding for a year. When Texas joined the Confederacy during the American Civil War, Cortina’s army, in support of the Union cause, invaded Zapata County in May 1861, starting the Second Cortina War. Defeated by the Texan Mexican Santos Benavides, a captain in the Confederacy, Cortina again retreated into Mexico. During the French Intervention, which began in 1862, Cortina fought on the side of the Republican troops of Benito Juárez, declared himself governor of Coahuila in 1863, and was promoted to general of the Mexican Army of the North. Eventually Juárez persuaded Cortina to relinquish the governorship post just a few months after he had vanquished the army of the imposed Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian in 1867. Cortina retired to his ranch near Matamoros; in 1870, influential citizens in Texas unsuccessfully attempted to obtain a reprieve for Cortina in recognition of his services to the Union cause. After the rebuff, Texas ranchers accused the Juan Nepomuceno Cortina.

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veteran fighter of continuing to raid and steal cattle. The Mexican government caved in to diplomatic pressure from the United States and, in 1875, put Cortina under arrest in Mexico City, where he died on October 30, 1894. Regardless of his checkered career, Cortina became a legend among border Mexicans because of his struggle for social justice and civil rights of people of Mexican descent. Further Reading Larralde, Carlos, and José Rodolfo Jacobo, Juan N. Cortina and the Struggle for Justice in Texas (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2000). Thompson, Jerry, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). Thompson, Jerry, “Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno” in Handbook of Texas Online (www.tsha. utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/CC/fco73.html).

F. Arturo Rosales Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita (1941–). Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, Chicana* poet, novelist, and professor emeritus at Arizona State University, was born on November 10, 1941, in Heber, California, to a Nuevomexicana mother, Margarita Cárdenas, from the Mesilla Valley near Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a Mexican father, Jesús Cota, from Cócorit, Sonora, in northern Mexico. Cota-Cárdenas spent her formative years in the Imperial Valley of California, living in a bicultural and bilingual environment, a setting that would inspire much of her literary work. Similar to many Chicana writers—particularly those of her generation— Cota-Cárdenas did not begin her university studies immediately after high school. It was not until after the birth of her second child that she enrolled in Modesto Junior College and later California State College, Stanislaus, where she earned her B.A. in 1966, majoring in Spanish and minoring in English. Inspired by her love for literature, she completed her M.A. at the University of California, Davis, in 1968 and her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in 1980. Cota-Cárdenas’s first collection of poetry to be published was Noches despertando in Conciencias (1975, Waking Up Nights Unconsciously), published by Scorpion Press, which she cofounded with Cuban poet Eliana Rivero. By creating Scorpion Press, they met the need of bilingual Latina writers who had previously faced limited options for publishing their works. In her second book of poetry, Marchitas de mayo (1989, Withered in May), Cota-Cárdenas focused on multiple societal oppressions. Like the majority of her work, both of these texts are written primarily in Spanish, an unusual practice for modern Chicano writers. Despite being completely bilingual, Spanish is her first language, and her poetic voice is more natural in Spanish. However, writing in Spanish is also a political choice to defy the authoritative figures who forbade her to speak Spanish in school as a child. But writing in Spanish, in addition to representing a resistance to the hegemony, is also the language in which she can best convey the emotions that can only be expressed through one’s mother tongue. Other poems have been anthologized in Siete poetas (1978, Seven Poets), The Third Woman: Minority Women

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Writers of the United States (1980), Chicanos: Antología histórica y literaria (1980, Chicanos: Historical and Literary Anthology), Flor y Canto IV and V: An Anthology of Chicano Literature (1980, (Flower and Song IV and V: An Anthology of Chicano Literature), and Infinite Divisions (1993), among others. Even though Noches despertando in Conciencias was her first major work, in it one can find the basis for the novella Puppet (1985), her most outstanding work to date. With the poem “Lápida para Puppet” (Head Stone for Puppet), CotaCárdenas creates the beginnings of Puppet, a complex narrative that has established itself as significant contribution to Chicano letters, in particular as part of the development of Chicana writers who have flourished since the 1980s. The novel took ten years to complete and was originally published in Spanish; today it is also available in a bilingual edition. Puppet is a complex and innovative text that clearly demonstrates Cota-Cárdenas’ talent as a writer and reflects her connection as a student of literature as well. The traditional linear plot is quickly replaced by fragmented thoughts and voices that echo the style of Juan Rulfo in Pedro Páramo (1955). Cota-Cárdenas’ use of multiple meta-narratives in Puppet also resonates with the technique of another Mexican master, Carlos Fuentes, and his classic The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). In a similar fashion to Fuentes’ use of different narrative voices, Cota-Cárdenas dialogues with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, William Shakespeare, Rosario Castellanos, and others. The work is fictional but is based on a series of true events. The main story line follows Petra (Pat) Leyva, a professor of Spanish, and how she comes to terms with the murder of Puppet, a Chicano youth, who was unjustly shot by the police, who then proceeded to cover up their crime. The unfortunate incident serves as a social and political awakening for Petra, whose internal reflection moves her to write a book about Puppet and vindicate him though he is dead. In line with revisionist Chicano history, Cota-Cárdenas reinforces the fact that there exists more than one version of the truth by also including contemporary newspaper accounts of Puppet’s death and oral narratives from Puppet’s friends. Throughout the narrative the leitmotif of the “briinng” of the telephone grounds Petra and places her back into the present; but it also serves to awaken her and the reader to confront the social and political reality of the Chicano community. In the end, Puppet is a call to the Chicano community to awaken from its slumber and to demand social justice. Cota-Cárdenas also uses Petra Leyva as her main character in her most recent bilingual novella, Sanctuaries of the Heart/Santuarios del Corazón (2005). The night that Petra begins the process of writing a novel about the Sanctuary Movement, she hears that her widowed, womanizing father has set fire to his house in a drunken rage. This emotional event leads her to explore what “sanctuary” really means to Chicanas. Not unlike Puppet, Sanctuaries of the Heart also depicts some complex issues as characters struggle with family matters, abuse, and loss. To this end, Cota-Cárdenas continues her success as writer who accurately portrays the complexity of life itself. Cota-Cárdenas’ contribution to Chicano literature is significant not solely for the quality of

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her work, but also because she continues to write in Spanish as one of the few accomplished Chicano writers who has successfully maintained a Chicano Spanish voice. Further Reading Rebolledo, Tey Diana, “Foreword” to Puppet, 1985 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000: xiii-xxii).

Spencer Herrera Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo (1916–1983). Born in Juncos, Puerto Rico, Guillermo Cotto-Thorner came to New York City in the 1930s to study at Columbia University. After finishing his studies at Columbia and at the University of Texas, he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1942. He subsequently became well-known in Hispanic communities in Milwaukee and East Harlem in New York City through his social work among Latinos; however, his religious writings in Protestant periodicals were reprinted throughout the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States and Latin America. During this time, he also published numerous articles in Baptist and nonsectarian Spanish-language newspapers around the United States. His first work, the full-length book Camino de Victoria (1945, The Road to Victory) was also religious in nature. His next work was a pamphlet railing against the Catholic Church, Conspiración romana contra la democracia (1948, The Roman Conspiracy against Democracy) was published by the Baptist publishing house in El Paso for distribution throughout North and South America. Beyond his openly religious texts, Cotto-Thorner contributed cultural and political essays to such New York newspapers as Liberación (Liberation) and Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), in which he supported Puerto Rican independence and other liberal causes, basing himself on a Christian ethic and determinism. It was his firm belief that Christianity promoted democracy, and this he argued repeatedly in his books and articles. He also compared the colonial situation of Puerto Rico to the Roman enslavement of the Jews in biblical times. In the course of his ministry, nevertheless, Cotto-Thorner continued to produce apparently secular writing, such as his Trópico en Manhattan (1951, The Tropics in Manhattan), a novel exploring life in Spanish Harlem that supports the idea that Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics can Latinize the city and fully develop their American Dream there rather than necessarily returning to the island. Trópico en Manhattan is an almost fully realized novel of immigration, except for its Protestant/democratic ethic of envisioning success in the United States as the reward for hard work and perseverance; it is the lazy and petty criminals in the Puerto Rican community who ultimately fail to realize the American Dream. However, those who remain true to their Puerto Rican culture and Christian values ultimately prevail. Among his other books, CottoThorner also published a collection of sermons, Camino de Victoria (1945, Road to Victory) and Gambeta (1971), the latter a novel that examines the influx of Americans to the island of Puerto Rico and its effects on the poor people (including the novel’s eponymous protagonist) living there. 286

Crónicas and Cronistas

Further Reading Flores, Juan, Divided Arrivals: Narratives of the Puerto Rican Migration 1920–1950 (New York: Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 1986).

Nicolás Kanellos

Crónicas and Cronistas. Among the various types of writing published in the Mexican immigrant newspapers, has been a genre more traditionally identified with and central to Hispanic newspapers everywhere, essential to forming and reinforcing community attitudes. The crónica, or chronicle, a short, weekly column that humorously and satirically comments on current topics and social habits in the local community, rife with local color and inspired by oral lore of the immigrants, owes its origins to Addison and Steel in England and arrived in Spain via France. The leading costumbristas (chroniclers of customs) were Ramón de Mesonero Romanos and José Mariano de Larra in Spain, and costumbristas and cronistas existed in Mexico since the writings of Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. In Mexico, the crónica was cultivated extensively and evolved further. There, the crónica helped to define and develop Mexican identity over the course of the nineteenth century. According to Monsiváis, From the beginning of the nineteenth century to almost our time, the role of the crónica was that of verifying or consecrating change and social habits and describing daily life, elevating it to the level of the idiosyncratic (without which Mexicans would be, for example, Paraguayans). In the transition from a colonial mentality to one of independence . . . a small collective, unsure of its accomplishments, unsure of its nationalism, saw in the crónica the shining (ideal) mirror of its transformations and fixations. To write is to populate. Over a long period of time, the profuse details provided by the cronistas served a central purpose to contribute to the forging of nationhood, describing it and, as much as possible, moralizing for it. . . . The writers of the nineteenth century wrote crónicas to document and, what is more important, to promote a lifestyle, one that repeated the customs of the authentic civic rituals. The cronistas are powerful nationalists because they desire independence and the greatness of the country as a whole . . . or because they wished for an identity that would help them, individualize them, liberate them and eliminate the anxiety and their greatest fear: being the privileged witnesses of things of no importance, of narrating the process of formation of this society which no one was observing. . . . it is necessary to strengthen the Nation, investing pride in her and describing her local and regional pride, representing in literature the most ostensibly “Mexican” ways of living and emphasizing their disdain for imitation of the French and nostalgia for the Hispanic. (26–27)

In the Southwest, the crónica came to serve purposes never imagined in Mexico or Spain. From Los Angeles to San Antonio and even up to Chicago, Mexican moralists assumed pseudonyms (in keeping with the tradition of the crónica) and, from this masked perspective, commented satirically in the first 287


person. As witnesses to the customs and behavior of the colony whose very existence was seen as threatened by the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, they were very influenced by popular jokes, anecdotes, and speech, and in general, their columns became a real mirror of the surrounding social environment. It was the cronista’s job to fan the flames of nationalism and to enforce the ideology of México de afuera.* Cronistas had to battle the influence of Anglo-Saxon immorality and Protestantism to protect against the erosion of the Spanish language and Mexican culture with equally religious fervor. This was done not from the bully pulpit but through sly humor and a burlesque of fictional characters who represented general ignorance or who were adopting Anglo ways as superior to those of the Hispanics. Using such pseudonyms as El Malcriado (The Brat, real name Daniel Venegas*), Kaskabel (Rattlesnake, pseudonym for Benjamín Padilla*), Loreley (María Luisa Garza*), Az.T.K. (The Aztec), and Chicote (The Whip), the cronistas were literally whipping and stinging the community into conformity, commenting on and poking fun at the common folks’ mixing of Spanish and English (seen as contaminating the purity of Cervantes’s beautiful language) and over-admiration of Yankee ingenuity and technology. They identified the two ways of life as being in direct conflict, even down to the food that was consumed, the clothes worn, and the furniture placed in homes. The worst transgressors were labeled agringados and renegados, that is, gringo-ized and renegades (originally, the term renegade referred to those who denied Christ). And Mexican Americans, who were seen as traitors beyond hope, were called these epithets, as well as the derogatory pocho, a term all their own that meant, in effect, non-Mexican. As cronista Daniel Venegas exclaimed in his novel Las aventuras de don Chipote (The Adventures of Don Chipote), “¿Podrá haber mas maldad que la de estos malditos, que por pasar por gringos, se niegan a hablar su proprio idioma renegando hasta del país donde nacieron? Creo que no.” (“Can there be any greater evil than that of these damned souls who, to pass as Gringos, refuse to speak their own language, reneging even their country of birth? I don’t think so.”) Among the cultural elites who disseminated the ideology of México de afuera was one political refugee who through publishing a newspaper and writing a widely syndicated crónica became immensely influential. Julio G. Arce* was a newspaper publisher from Guadalajara who was so disillusioned with the Revolution that he took up exile in San Francisco, vowing never to return to Mexico. In San Francisco, Arce first worked as a laborer for the American Can Company but soon became associated with La Crónica (The Chronicle), an immigrant newspaper published by Spaniard J. C. Castro. In 1919, Arce was able to buy La Crónica and rebaptize it Hispano América (Spanish America). While writing for La Crónica in 1918, Arce had taken up the pseudonym of “Jorge Ulica,” which he had previously used in Guadalajara, and launched a weekly column that he would continue in Hispano América. Eventually the

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Ulica column, entitled “Crónicas Diabólicas” (Diabolical Chronicles), became the most widely syndicated crónica in the Southwest because of its ability to reflect the life in the Mexican immigrant community. As was the convention in such local color columns, his pseudonymous alter ego would report weekly on his own adventures and observations in the local community, often satirizing humorously the errant customs that were becoming all too common in the colonia, such as Mexicans only remembering they are Mexicans during the celebration of Mexican Independence Day, or Mexicans calling themselves Spaniards to assume greater social prestige and to avoid the barbs of discrimination. By and large, Ulica assumed the elite stance of satirist, observing the human comedy as a self-appointed conscience for the Mexican immigrant community. As a purveyor of the ideology of México de afuera, like many other educated commentators, he revealed his upper class and bourgeois resentment of working-class Mexican immigrants who, on the one hand, were fascinated by Yankee technology, know-how and economic power, and on the other hand were poor, ignorant representatives of Mexican national culture, all of which he forcefully illustrated in his crónicas. Ulica’s particular talents lay in caricature, in emulating the colloquialisms and popular culture of the working-class immigrant, and in satirizing the cultural conflict and misunderstandings encountered by greenhorn immigrants from the provinces of Mexico. Although his message was rarely subtle, his language and imagery were so richly reflective of common immigrant humor and folk anecdotes that they are worthy of study as a literature arising directly from the immigrant experience and its folklore (see Immigrant Literature). By far, Ulica’s favorite, and probably most popular, target was the poor Mexican woman who had emigrated from the interior provinces, such as the imaginary “Palos Bonchis” (Bunch of Sticks) in his story “Por No Hablar ‘English’” (Because of Not Speaking English). It was this poor, uneducated female who consistently received the brunt of Ulica’s attempts to stem the tide of acculturation and support the survival of the Hispanic family and its culture in an alien environment. In his story, “Inacio y Mengilda” (country bumpkin–sounding proper names truncated into common rural dialect), Ulica warned Mexican men not to bring their wives to the United States: If married men don’t want to become less happy . . . they should not come with their companions to the United States. . . . Because things are going very poorly here, as the masculine gender is losing in giant steps its “sacred prerogatives and inalienable rights,” it sickens my soul to see unfortunate husbands subjected to a dog’s life, to a dog’s future, and to a tragic end. (my translation)

After this introduction slightly satirizing the U.S. Bill of Rights, Ulica goes on to narrate the apocryphal tale of a Mexican immigrant woman who defenestrated her husband and was acquitted by the courts. Ulica has her testifying in court, using the most provincial and uneducated Spanish, explaining that

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she was so frustrated that her husband was “encevelizado” (uncivilized) and “impropio” (an Anglicism meaning improper). According to her testimony, Mengilda went to all lengths to dress and eat stylishly, as is called for here in the United States, but her husband would resist tooth and nail. He commits such sins as taking his shoes off on arriving home and going barefoot; he wouldn’t get his hair cut in ese rape aristocrático que se usa por acá (that very aristocratic shaved style that is used here), and for food, he would only consume “cosas inominiosas” (“ignominious things,” mispronounced as a sign of her using big words in an ineffectual attempt to put on airs). Included in the “ignominius things” were such “low-class” Mexican foods as chicharrones, chorizos, sopes, tostadas, frijoles, and menudo y pozole. It was just impossible to get him to eat clam chowder, bacon, liver and onions, beef stew, or hot dogs—supposedly high-class American fare. It turns out that Inacio came home one Saturday with his fingernails so unkempt (he was a working stiff, after all) that she insisted on hiring a girl to give him a manicure. But he just locked himself in his room and refused to cooperate. Mengilda then became so frustrated and enraged that she threw him out the window and then, if that wasn’t enough, threw a monkey wrench at him, splitting his skull. The poor man expired on the street below. After an eloquent defense by her lawyer, who insisted that she was just a poor foreigner struggling to better herself and become cultured in the United States, she was exonerated by unanimous decision. After this, narrator Ulica breaks in to emphasize to the reader that this is just one of a legion of incidents that happen every day in the United States, and that as soon as pretty compatriot women arrive, they find out that they are the bosses here, and their husbands must remain shy of heart, short on words and with still hands (meaning that they cannot beat their wives anymore). Ulica concludes that that is why it is so common to see the husband carrying the baby in public, along with packages from the store and grocery bags, ambling along sad, meditative, crestfallen, and depressed, as if he feared possible sentencing to San Quentin or execution for rebelling against his wife. It seems that no matter where Ulica turns, he encounters the deflated remains of what were once proud and independent Mexican men. A general of the Mexican Revolution, now a waiter in a third-rate restaurant, bemoans his fate to Ulica as follows: In this country, women do as they damn well please. My wife, who used to be so obedient, so faithful and such a little mouse in Ojinaga, has become “fireworks” here. She does not heed me, she locks herself up with male friends to play bridge and who knows what else, and when I call her on it, she curses me out. Back home, I could knock her teeth out for less, but here, if you do that, they hang you in San Quentin. (my translation)

In “Arriba las Faldas” (Up with the Skirts), after affirming that it is the women who wear the pants in this country, Ulica attests that, contrary to what 290


happens in other countries, after dinner here, it is the wife who tells the husband, “Hijito, voy al cine; lava los platos, acuesta los niños y dale un limón al W.C. Después, si tú quieres, te acuestas.” (Baby, I’m going to the movies, so wash the plates, put the children to sleep, and clean the bathroom. After that, you can go to bed, if you want to.) In “Como Hacer Surprise Parties” (How to Give a Surprise Party), Doña Lola Flores is another uneducated denizen of the colonia who is enamored of everything American. She, too, attempts to adopt all of the customs here and rid herself of the trappings of the homeland. Doña Lola Flores and her daughters seem to go to the extreme of changing their names: she from Dolores Flores to Pains Flowers and her daughters Esperanza and Eva to Hope and Ivy. She changes her husband’s name from Ambrosio to Hungrious Flowers, and even their dog Violeta has been rebaptized Vay-o-let. One of the customs most attractive to Mrs. Pains Flowers is that of the surprise party, and so she plots with her daughters and their Anglo boyfriends to arrange for one on Pains’s saint’s day; they prepare even for the exact minute when everyone should surprise her yelling, “Olé, Hurrah, Hello!” So the mother and the daughters and their Anglo boyfriends spend the whole day decorating, making sandwiches and punch, when finally Hungrious shows up full of moonshine. However, he is lucid enough to inform her that there is no reason to party—it is not her saint’s day. She replies that, yes, it is Viernes de Dolores—Saint Dolores’s Friday. But Hungrious is quick to have the last word when he reminds her that she is Mrs. Pains Flowers now, not Dolores! Plus, no matter how hard he looks at the American calendar, he cannot find any date that is called Pains’s Friday. The episode ends with Pains dragging Hungrious into the bathroom to give him a sound beating. If these women are so anxious to shuck off their Hispanic culture, their loyalty to the mother tongue is even more suspect, as Ulica ably demonstrates in the types of letters he receives at the newspaper from the likes of Mrs. Pellejón, who changed her name to “Skinny-hon.” The letter is replete with Anglicisms, malapropisms, regionalisms, poor grammar, misspellings, and so on. And when it comes to the entry of women into the work place, more specifically the office domain of men, Ulica is even more agitated. In “La Estenógrafa” (The Stenographer), he is not only scandalized but titillated by the Mexican or Mexican American flapper whom he employs as a stenographer. Ulica relates that he had the misfortune of employing Miss Pink, a comely young lady who not only Anglicized her last name (Rosa), but insists that she is “Spanish.” Despite her having graduated from “grammar school,” “high school,” and “Spanish class,” Miss Pink makes horribly embarrassing typing errors. However, the main problem for Ulica is that even after Miss Pink has found out that Ulica is married, she compromises his modesty. She removes her hose in front of him and changes out of her street shoes, leaving hose and shoes in back of his chair. She tells him that she hopes he is not like other bosses who like to pick up her stockings and smell and kiss them. Eventually, Ulica becomes so intrigued and tempted that he does just that in one of the few examples of self-deprecating humor to be found in Arce’s crónicas. 291


When Ulica confronts the stenographer about her typing errors, she quits, complaining that he is the worst boss she has ever had, because the married Ulica never even invited her to a show or to dinner. In another of Ulica’s crónicas, “Repatriación Gratuita” (Free Repatriation), it becomes clear that one of the main motives for these efforts to control and isolate Mexican/Hispanic women is the fear of exogamy. In this outrageous story, Ulica creates Mrs. Blackberry, a Mexican woman who has just married an Anglo after having divorced her Mexican husband because he refused to wash his face with gasoline to whiten it: “Lo dejé por prieto, por viejo y porque no tenía olor en los dientes como los americanos fines” (I left him, because he was dark, old, and his teeth didn’t smell nice like those of refined Americans). In this anecdote, greater freedom for women, higher class aspirations through association with the white race, and American materialism all come together to entice the vain and ambitious Mexican woman to abandon both her ethnic culture and her husband. Although Ulica was without a doubt expressing a bourgeois sensibility in censuring Mexican women for adopting supposed Anglo American customs and especially identifying the flapper as the most representative figure in this acculturation, his point of view was by no means exclusive to his social class. Another immigrant journalist and creative writer, who identified himself as a working-class Mexican immigrant, Daniel Venegas,* expressed similar views in his satirical newspaper, El Malcriado (The Brat), and in his picaresque novel of immigration, Las aventuras de Don Chipote o cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed). In Venegas’s humorfilled novel, he displays little sympathy for women, depicting them almost exclusively as prostitutes, gold-digging flappers, and vaudeville actresses with little morality. The one exception is Don Chipote’s wife, who typically represents home and hearth and the nuclear family; she has no name of her own but Doña Chipota, thus being an extension of her husband’s identity. Doña Chipota serves to restore order in bringing the novel to its resolution by rescuing her errant husband who has been beguiled by the incarnation of Gringo corruption of Mexican femininity: the flapper. The message of the novel is that Mexicans should not be deceived by the glitter of the United States, for Mexicans will no sooner become rich in the United States than parrots will suckle their young. Mexicans only serve as beasts of burden in the U.S. and as lambs to be fleeced by both corrupt institutions and individuals. It is even more ironic that Venegas, who identified so strongly with workingclass immigrants, would not make common cause with working-class women. This is amply seen in his weekly newspaper, El Malcriado, which he singlehandedly wrote, illustrated, and typeset. In the April 17, 1927, edition, Venegas drew a caricature of a poor waitress with her toe protruding from her huarache (sandal) and satirized waitresses delivering food orders trafficking up and down Main Street of Los Angeles in dirty, broken-down shoes, smelling up the sidewalk to the extent of overcoming the fragrance of the food on their

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trays. On the front page of the same issue of this tabloid, Venegas drew a scene of two flirtatious Mexican flappers getting their hair bobbed in a men’s barber shop under the banner headline of “¡Cómo Gozan los Barberos Rapando las Guapetonas!/Se Pasan los Días Enteros Papachando a las Pelonas.” (The Barbers Love to Cut the Hair of These Beauties!/They Spend the Entire Day Caressing Flappers). Beneath the cartoon, Venegas placed the following satirical verse: To get their hair done, two flappers went to the barber Don Simón. That night, both chickees were going out to party and have a good time. “Please finish me in a hurry,” said Julieta while her neck was shaved, “and then Enriqueta’s turn will come, and I’ll give you both a kiss.” The barber then worked so fast that he did Juliet before a minute passed, but he wasn’t given what was promised to him, not even after finishing with Enriqueta. (my translation)

Mexican immigrant writers were by no means the only Latinos to satirize the dangers of assimilation, cultural annihilation, and exogamy. Hispanic immigrant newspapers in New York, catering to a diverse community of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Spanish, and others, also used the crónicas in a similar fashion to the Southwest papers. But although the ideas expressed in these crónicas and their host newspapers did not coalesce into as strong an ideology as the México de afuera was, Gráfico (Graphic), like many other Hispanic newspapers of New York, promoted a pan-Hispanism that united the Hispanics in the metropolis with all of Latin America. Home-country nationalism could not develop as strongly in an environment of such diverse Hispanic ethnicity, but, standing on their Hispanic cultural background, the predominantly male journalists and cronistas quite often did attempt to influence the community into tightening the already tight reins on Hispanic women. New York’s Gráfico,* published by a consortium of tobacco workers, writers and theatrical artists, was first edited by Alberto O’Farrill,* an AfroCuban actor and playwright who was very popular for depicting the stereotyped Cuban farce role of Negrito (Blackie) in black face. In addition to editing Gráfico, he served as its chief cartoonist and also as a frequent cronista who signed his column as “Ofa,” the name of the mulatto narrator whose main preoccupation is finding work and keeping life and limb together. Almost every issue during the first year of publication of Gráfico displayed an O’Farrill cartoon satirizing American flappers. But more than the satire and censure, the cartoons also make apparent the sexual attraction that Latino men felt for these women of supposedly looser morals than Latin women. Almost all are displayed with flesh peeking out of lingerie or from under their short dresses because the flappers have raised their legs too high. At least two of the cartoons have purposefully ambiguous legends with double entendres designed to titillate. In one (July 3, 1927), a flapper is reclined in an unladylike position on an overstuffed chair, holding a basket of flowers

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in her lap; the legend reads, “Lector ¿No te da el olor?” (Reader, doesn’t the smell hit you?) One is left wondering whether the alluded to fragrance is coming from the flowers. In another (March 27, 1927), a flapper is raising the skirt of her dress while a man is reclining with a cigarette lighter at her feet and in front of a parked car. The legend reads, “Buscando el Fallo” (Looking for the Problem). But the man’s eyes are clearly looking under the woman’s dress. O’Farrill published a series of signed and unsigned columns in Gráfico. It was in the “Pegas Suaves” (Easy Jobs) crónicas that he signed “Ofa,” where he developed the running story of the mulatto immigrant trying to survive in the big city. In the unsigned ones, O’Farrill poked fun at local customs, which more often than not dealt with the relationship of viejos verdes (dirty old men), machos, and flappers. On the page above the unsigned ones, he usually placed a cartoon illustration of the crónica below. Again, flappers were a frequent preoccupation in these whimsical pieces. In “El Misterio de Washinbay” (Mystery on Washinbay; June 5, 1927), O’Farrill depicts three American flappers who abandon their customary Broadway cabarets in an attempt to attract publicity and rich husbands by establishing a three-woman colony of abstention and deprivation in a rural location. In “El Emboque” (The Maw; 8 May 1927), O’Farrill goes at length to describe how Latin men position themselves strategically at the street-level entrance down to the subway to ogle the flappers as they descend to their trains: “contemplando las líneas curvas que más derecho entran por su vista” (observing the curves that come straight into their view). The sight of two flappers, who the narrator compares to merchant ships, is depicted as so enticing that even the Gráfico photographer, who supposedly provided the above illustration, could not steady his hands, he was so filled with jealousy of the two oglers. O’Farrill states that the custom has become so popular that it has become a true plague, and he closes the column with a warning to potential oglers that the police have on occasion used their blackjacks on the oglers. A much more serious note on the subject of Hispanic women adapting the American flapper dress and personality was sounded by Jesús Colón,* one of the most important Hispanic columnists and intellectuals in the New York Hispanic community for more than fifty years. Colón also began his career as a cronista in Gráfico and other Spanish-language newspapers in the area. Over the years, he would write for Puerto Rico’s labor union newspaper Justicia (Justice) in the 1920s and later for New York’s Gráfico (1926–1931), Pueblos Hispanos (1943–1944), Liberación (1946–1949, Liberation), and The Daily Worker (1924–1958), among various others. A cigar worker who was an autodidact and one of the most politicized members of the community of cultural workers and union organizers, Colón made the transition to writing in English and in the mid-1950s became the first Puerto Rican columnist for The Daily Worker, the newspaper published by the Communist Party of America. Colón was a lifelong progressive thinker and in the 1950s even penned feminist-type

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essays long before such thinking became “politically correct.” However, upon assuming the convention of cronista and taking on the moralistic persona of his pseudonym “Miquis Tiquis,” which he used in Gráfico in 1927 and 1928, Colón nevertheless joined his colleagues in attacking Hispanic women for assimilating to the loose morality of American women represented by flapper dress and attitudes: Reader, if you would like to see the caricature of a flapper, you only have to look at a Latina who aspires to be one. The Yanqui flapper always makes sure that her ensemble of exaggerations looks chic, as they say in German [sic]. They also possess that divine jewel of finely imitated frigidity. That disdainful arching of their eyes that upon crossing their legs almost to . . . to . . . it seems not important to them that they are being watched. Seeming frigidity, that’s the phrase. That would be Latin flapper likes to be looked at and, to attract attention, paints her face into a mask: two poorly placed splashes of rouge on the cheeks and four really noticeable piles of lipstick on the lips. They criticize new fads; then they adapt them, to the extreme of exaggeration. (my translation)

Colón’s further preoccupation with the flapper is also seen in a poem, “The Flapper,” which he published in Gráfico, characterizing her as follows: The ‘flapper’ agitates the air with her affected struts. Her dress, a futurist version of the latest style, is a thousand times suggestive with its divine silk. That men should look her over as she walks is her supreme desire. If someone should mention marriage, her answer is a loud laugh that cuts the most sublime illusion. Assassinating laugh! Expert queen of the latest dangerous dance jump, makeupstreaked, superficial, fickle girl, like a liberated slave entering a new life. (my translation)

In summary, the graphic and written records of community moralists and satirists not only amply illustrate the preservation of home-country moral attitudes that were promoted by these immigrant newspapers but also how those attitudes applied pressure on families to conform to old gender roles and resist the social change that the new American host culture was making imminent. The pressure placed on women in this conflict of cultural roles and mores was probably greater than was ever felt in the homeland. These commentators perceived greater competition for Latinas than existed back home, there being fewer of them in the immigrant community. More importantly, these writers also perceived that American women enjoyed greater freedom of movement and self-determination. While the Roaring Twenties saw the liberalization of women’s roles and their entrance into the work place in the United States, it was also the period of massive immigration of very conservative segments of the Mexican population—as many as a million economic and political refugees entering the United States before 1930. The first reaction of the

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immigrant writers was not to liberalize but to resist the liberal influence and example by tightening men’s control over women. Hispanic male writers on the east coast, while not as severe as the Mexican writers in the Southwest, also censured women for Americanizing and, perhaps less moralistically, allowed themselves to be titillated by the perceptibly freer American sex roles, openly displaying this behavior in their cartoons and crónicas. Of course, in both groups—the Mexicans in the Southwest and the Latinos in the Northeast—Hispanic women were seen as the center of the family and the key to survival of the group, culture, and language. Of course, it was men doing the seeing, and they controlled the media: publishing houses, newspapers, theaters, and so on. It was these very men who saw themselves as the self-appointed conscience of the community in the crónicas that were so popular in the immigrant communities. Further Reading Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del México de afuera (Ciudad Juárez: UNAM, 2005). Bruce-Novoa, Juan, “La Prensa and the Chicano Community.” Americas Review Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4 (Winter 1989): 150–156. Lomas, Clara, “Resistencia cultural o apropriación ideológica: Visión de los años 20 en los cuadros costumbristas de Jorge Ulica” in Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 6, No. 4 (Fall 1978): 44–49. Monsiváis, Carlos, A ustedes les consta: Antología de la crónica en México (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1980).

Nicolás Kanellos Crusade for Justice. The Crusade for Justice (CFJ) was founded in Denver, Colorado, in 1966 and, for a short time, became the most successful organization in the Chicano Movement. The CFJ was led by poet Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* a former professional boxer, bail bondsman, Democratic Party leader, and major protagonist in Denver’s War on Poverty. Gonzales had become disenchanted with mainstream politics by 1966 and, with a group called Los Voluntarios (The Volunteers) that he had formed in 1963, he began protesting Denver’s policy toward its impoverished Mexican American population. The name of the organization came from a 1966 speech in which Gonzales declared “that on this day a new crusade for justice has been born.” The name stuck. In 1968, Gonzales and his group bought a building and named it the Center for the Crusade for Justice; it became a place where the Mexican American community could gather for a variety of services. It contained a five-hundred-seat auditorium, a ballroom, a dining room, a kitchen, a Mexican gift shop, a gymnasium, a nursery, an art gallery, a library, and classrooms. The CFJ became involved in educational reform in the late 1960s, seeking to end discrimination in the Denver Public Schools. In November, 1968, the CFJ presented a list of demands at a school board meeting, and the following spring, Gonzales led a walkout at West Side High School, calling for the removal of a

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The Crusade for Justice headquarters in Denver, Colorado.

teacher who had made racist remarks in the classroom. The walkout lasted three days, during which riots broke out and several confrontations with the police ensued. The police jailed twenty-five protesters, including Gonzales. The CFJ achieved prominence after Gonzales cochaired, with Reis López Tijerina, the Mexican American contingent of the Poor People’s March in the spring of 1968. The Poor People’s March and efforts by blacks to gain civil rights and achieve self-sufficiency, greatly impressed Gonzales, who then sought to achieve self-sufficiency for his community in Denver. The CFJ became so well-known that in 1969 it sponsored the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference to bring together and unify Mexican American young people from around the country. The conference focused on cultural identity and social revolution, emphasizing ethnic nationalism and cultural pride. An estimated 1500 youths attended, including young, artists, poets, and filmmakers such as Alurista* and Jesús Treviño.* During the conference, those in attendance drafted El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, a manifesto that articulated the growing feelings of nationalism and desire for self-determination among the Mexican Americans of the Southwest. It also asserted the need for Mexican Americans to control their communities. In short, the Plan de Aztlán stressed the movement’s commitment to developing justice and independence. The group then took on the issue of police brutality and earned the enmity of Denver’s law enforcement establishment—and with it constant police harassment. On March 17, 1973, Denver police clashed with CFJ members; in the fracas, a policeman and a Crusade member were wounded, and twenty-

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year-old Louis Martínez was killed. This outbreak, which led to the almost complete dissolution of the CFJ, was indirectly provoked by incessant police vigilance regarding CFJ activities in Denver. Further Reading Marín, Christine, A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement: Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Fight for Chicano Liberation, 1966–1972 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1977). Meier, Matt, and Feliciano Rivera, Dictionary of Mexican American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981: 111–113).

F. Arturo Rosales Cruz, Angie (1972–). Born and raised in New York City’s Washington heights, Dominican American novelist Angie Cruz is one of the most productive and promising Latino fiction writers. Already the author of three successful novels dealing with immigrant life and growing up Latino in the United States, Cruz has received a half-dozen prestigious fellowships, including the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, the Camargo Foundation Fellowship, the Lapoule Foundation Fellowship (France), and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has also won residencies at writers’ colonies such as Yaddo, McDowell, and Millay. Having started her college education as a fashion design student, when in 1993 four of her stories were selected by BET’s “Story Porch,” she switched to studying literature, receiving her B.A. in English from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1996 and her M.F.A. in fiction from New York University in 1999. Cruz has had stories published in Latinastyle Magazine, Callaloo, and The New York Times, but it is her two novels that have established her reputation as a fresh and incisive voice in Latino literature, leading Junot Díaz* to call her a “revelation.” Her first novel, Soledad (2002), explores the psychology of two generations of a Dominican family, centering on the young Soledad but narrated by the varying voices of the individual family members. Let It Rain Coffee (2005) follows the trials and tribulations of a Dominican family in Washington Heights, providing historical background concerning the political movements in the Dominican Republic and economic pressures to immigrate to the United States; Publisher’s Weekly called it a “sentimental American Dream story.” Further Reading Moraga, Cherrie, Daisy Hernández, and Bushra Rehman, eds., Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Live Girls) (New York: Seal Press, 2002). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, Diasporic Disquisitions: Dominicanists, Transnationalism, and the Community (New York: City College of New York Dominican Studies Institute, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la (1648–1695). Born in Nepantla, México, in the second century after the Spanish Conquest, Juana de Asbaje was a child 298

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prodigy who in the eighteenth century became known as the preeminent Spanish poet of the colonial era throughout New Spain in the Americas, as well as in Spain and other European countries. She was acclaimed as the “New World Muse” for her prolific sacred poetry and religious dramas, many of which were written before she was twenty. In the late twentieth century, she was reclaimed by Chicanas and other contemporary Latinas as a native-born feminist precursor who, like La Malinche,* provide the oldest documented American source for the principles of gender equality and the importance of America’s bilingual biculturality. The known facts of her life include her birth to an unmarried mother and rearing by her grandparents, learning to read her grandfather’s books when she was only three. She began writing verse soon thereafter and composed her first lyric play for a church procession when she was eight. Despite her acknowledged brilliance, because of her female sex she was denied access to formal education and eventually chose the convent and the life of a nun as a means of gaining access to literary and scientific knowledge through church libraries. She entered the convent of San Jerónimo in 1669 and remained there until her death. Other than her extensive poetry, her most famous writings are the essays, “Athenagoric Letter” (1690) and “Response to Sor Filotea” (1691), both arguing passionately and with methodical logic for women’s rights to formal schooling. These two writings explain Sor Juana’s status as a feminist precursor who, although acknowledged by traditional scholars as a major colonial poet, was slighted as a political thinker until rediscovered in the late twentieth century by women throughout the world. Her amazing intelligence, creativity, curiosity, and courage in challenging the patriarchal status quo, even at the cost of personal freedom, provide a predecessor voice in the Americas for such other feminist trailblazers as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Twentieth-century writers as diverse as Estela Portillo Trambley,* Octavio Paz, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba* have written major treatments of Sor Juana’s remarkable and enigmatic life. Further Reading Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, Sor Juana’s Second Dream (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Paz, Octavio, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, Las trampas de la fe, 3rd ed. (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983). Peden, Margaret Sayers, A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 2nd ed. (Salisbury, CT: Lime Rock Press, 1987). Portillo Trambley, Estela, Sor Juana and Other Plays (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1983).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Cruz, Migdalia (1958–). Nuyorican* playwright Migdalia Cruz has been involved in the theater since her father constructed a playhouse for her puppets, allowing her to entertain her family and friends. Born on November 8, 1958, and raised in the Bronx, Cruz’s education consisted of beginning college as a math major before discovering the stage and writing. In addition to 299

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earning a B.A. in fine arts from Lake Erie College (1980) and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Columbia University (1984), Cruz is a graduate of the playwriting laboratory run by that seminal figure of the Latino stage, María Irene Fornés.* She has been a playwright in residence at Latino Chicago Theatre (1985–1988) and associated with the New Dramatists. Cruz’s plays, which have been produced around the country and abroad, emerge from her life and experience in the South Bronx, touching on themes of violence and sex as well as of the search for identity and fulfillment. Among her three dozen produced plays are Telling Tales (1990), a group of eleven monologs; Miriam’s Flowers (1991), Fur (1999), included in the groundbreaking anthology compiled by Caridad Svich* and María Teresa Marrero, Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance, produced at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London; Kitchen Dog (1999); Another Part of the House (1997), a reworking of Federico García Lorca’s classic La Casa de Bernarda Alba: The Have-Little (2001), which deals with a young girl maturing too fast in the South Bronx; and Yellow Eyes (2007), which deals with the legacy of slavery among Puerto Ricans. Cruz’s awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Theater Communications Group Workshop Residency; the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, a Connecticut Commission for the Arts Fellowship, and a McKnight/Playwrights Fellowship. In 2006, Cruz was named a Distinguished Alumna of Lake Erie College. In 2007, her play, “The Have-Little,” was runner-up for the Prize for Plays by Women. Further Reading Lopez, Tiffany Ana, “Violent Inscriptions: Writing the Body and Making Community in Four Plays by Migdalia Cruz” Theatre Journal Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar. 2000): 51–66. Taylor, Diana, and Juan Villegas, eds., Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Cruz, Nicky (1941–). Puerto Rican–born Nicky Cruz has sold more books than any other contemporary U.S. Hispanic author. His coauthored Protestant conversion narrative, Run, Nicky, Run (1968), has seen more than thirty editions, been translated into some seventy languages, and spun off at least a halfdozen sequels. Almost all of the books in Cruz’s extended autobiographical writing corpus have been coauthored by various Christian biography specialists. Run, Nicky, Run is the gripping, violence-filled account of how Nicky, when a child in Puerto Rico, was considered by his mother to be the Devil incarnate—and how the family shipped him off at age fifteen to New York, where he became the leader of an infamous street gang, the Mau-Maus. At the height of his involvement in crime, drugs and violence, Cruz met an evangelist, David Wilkerson (who later co-authored various of Cruz’s books) and discovered Christ. He enrolled in Bible college at La Puente, California,

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and upon graduation became the director of Teen Challenge in Brooklyn, New York, evangelizing among gangs and drug addicts. Subsequent to the publication of Run, Nicky, Run, Cruz became a star among charismatic Christians, developed a national—and even international—following and a rigorous lecture schedule. Among his other books that either continue the saga of his conversion from underworld street crime to life as a minister, along with stories of people he helped to bring to Christ, are Satan on the Loose (1973), The Magnificent Three (1976), Lonely But Never Alone (1981), Where Were You When I Was Hurting? (1986), How to Fight Back: The Christian Street Warrior’s Guide to Turning the Other Cheek (1991), One Holy Fire (2003), and Soul Obsession (2006). Further Reading Maxwell, Joe, “Street Gang Evangelists” www.christianitytoday.com/tc/8r5/8r5020.html. Owen, R. J., The Killer Who Cried: the Story of Nicky Cruz (Exeter, UK: Religious Education Press, 1980).

Nicolás Kanellos Cruz, Nilo (1964–). Nilo Cruz is the first Latino to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1964, he fled with his family into exile in Miami in 1970. He moved to New York City in 1990 to study with María Irene Fornés* and then to Brown University to work with Paula Vogel. Although Cruz does not think of himself as a political writer, he develops themes of exile and alienation in many of his plays. Before receiving his Pulitzer, Cruz became a seasoned playwright in regional theater, working with such organizations as the New Theater in Coral Gables, Florida, and the Southcoast Repertory Theater in Orange County, California. Cruz is the author of more than ten produced plays. His Night Train to Bolina (1994) follows two children caught up in a civil war in a Latin American country, skirting a line between fantasy and reality. In Dancing on Her Knees (1996), Cruz deals with transvestism and AIDS. Two Sisters and a Piano (1998) is set in the 1999 Pan American Games in Havana as the Russians are abandoning Cuba; two sisters, a pianist and a novelist, are under house arrest, and their military guard falls in love with one of them. In A Bicycle Country (1999), three Cuban exiles brave the perilous open journey in their escape towards freedom. Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (world premiere at New Theatre 2001) explores the theme of the [Operation] Peter Pan GeneraNilo Cruz receives the Pulitzer Prize from the tion:* a brother and a sister return to Havana in president of Columbia University.

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search of healing for their past many years after their parents sent them to be raised in the United States far from Communist influence. Beauty of the Father (2004) deals with a triangle involving a bisexual father, his daughter, and the father’s ex-lover. In the play, Cruz also resuscitates as a character one of his greatest models: Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca. Cruz, who is gay, does not develop gay themes per se or as part of his identity; however, he has said, “I’m interested in investigating sexuality in the same way Tennessee Williams was. Artists look at the world in a different way than other people— on the outside looking in, observing human behavior. I take that into consideration more than my sexuality or my gender.” Cruz has also translated works by García Lorca: Doña Rosita the Spinster and The House of Bernarda Alba. Cruz’s other plays include Lorca in a Green Dress (2003) and A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (2002). Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Anna in the Tropics is set in 1929, as Cruz has explained that he wanted audiences to appreciate that Cuban culture in the United States is not new or only related to exiles of the Revolution. Based on the historical community of Cuban cigar rollers in Tampa, the play is highly literary, exploring numerous background texts and their ability to influence the real life of the plot. Anna in the Tropics tells the story of a family of cigar workers whose lives are irrevocably changed by the arrival of a new lector, Juan Julian, who reads Anna Karenina to the workers; in the course of the drama, Tolstoy’s novel of love and betrayal comes to life in the interactions of the male and female cigar workers. Throughout there is a sense of impending doom, in light of the Depression’s role in bringing about the demise of hand-rolling cigars in favor of machine twisters and rollers. A way of life was ending, and the Cuban/Cuban American community of Tampa was soon to join the Great Depression. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Anna in the Tropics, Cruz has received two NEA/TCG National Theatre Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, San Francisco’s W. Alton Jones award, and a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award. Cruz now resides in New York City and teaches playwriting at Yale University. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo J., “History and Development of Cuban American Literature: A Survey” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61). www.bombsite.com/cruz/cruz2.html.

Nicolás Kanellos Cruz, Victor Hernández (1949–). Victor Hernández Cruz is the Nuyorican* poet who was discovered as a precocious street poet while still in high school in New York; he has become the most recognized and acclaimed Hispanic poet by the mainstream. Despite his early acceptance into creative writing circles, culminating with Life magazine’s canonization of him in 1981 as one of the twenty-five best American poets, Hernández Cruz has resisted estheticism and academic writing to remain very much an oral poet, jazz poet, poet of the 302

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people and popular traditions, bilingual poet—a poet of intuition and tremendous insight. Victor Hernández Cruz was born on February 6, 1949, in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. He moved with his family to New York’s Spanish Harlem at the age of five. Cruz attended Benjamin Franklin High School, where he began writing poetry. In the years after his graduation, his poetry began to appear in Evergreen Review, New York Review of Books, and in many other magazines. Beginning in 1970, he worked with poetry-in-the-schools programs in New York, including the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. In 1973, Cruz left New York and took up residence in San Francisco, where he worked for the U.S. Postal Service and served as a visiting poet at area colleges. From 1973 to 1975, he took up the life of the travVictor Hernández Cruz reading at the second National Latino Book Fair in eling troubadour, covering Houston, Texas, in 1981. the full expanse of the United States from Alaska and Hawaii to Puerto Rico, reading and performing his works while also continuing to write. Thereafter, he alternated living in San Francisco and Puerto Rico, dedicating himself mostly to writing and accepting engagements nationally to read from his works. Hernández Cruz received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation in 1980 and 1991, respectively. His poetry books include Papo Got His Gun (1966), Snaps (1969), Mainland (1973), Tropicalization (1976), By Lingual Wholes (1982), Rhythm, Content and Flavor (1989) Red Beans (1994), Panoramas (1997) and Maraca: New and Selected Poems, 1965–2000 (2001). Hernández Cruz’s latest effort, The Mountain in the Sea (2006), extends his biculturalism and bilingualism to include words and 303

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phrases in Arabic and North African culture in an exploration of the deepest roots of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican identity. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “An Overview of Latino Poetry: The Iceberg below the Surface” in American Book Review (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 5, 10. Kanellos, Nicolás, “Puerto Rican Literature from the Diaspora to the Mainstream” in The American Book Review Vol. 7, No. 1 (Nov.–Dec. 1984): 16–17.

Nicolás Kanellos Cuadra, Angel (1931–). Angel Cuadra, a poet, scholar, and leader of the exile literary community, was born in Havana on August 29, 1931. He studied law and dramatic arts at the University of Havana and emerged as a successful writer in pre-Communist Cuba. In 1959, he published his first book of poems, Peldaño (Step in a Ladder), which was later translated into Russian, and he was on his way to becoming a poet celebrated by the state. Nevertheless, he felt the Revolution had betrayed him and his group of revolutionary intellectuals, and he fell afoul of the Communist regime; by 1964, Cuadra was not allowed to travel to Spain, where he had been invited as a poet by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (Hispanic Culture Institute). In April 1967, he was declared an enemy of the People’s Government and condemned to fifteen years of imprisonment. He spent more than twelve years of confinement, some of it in torture. The deprivation of his human rights became a cause célèbre in the United States and Europe, and Amnesty International took up his case, as well as those of other Cuban dissidents. While in prison and labor camps, he was able to write poetry on toilet paper, roll it into balls, and have it smuggled out for publication abroad. He was eventually released and immigrated to the United States in 1985. In Miami, he received a master’s degree in Spanish from Florida International University and began teaching locally. He served as president of the PEN Club de Cubanos en el Exilio* (PEN Club of Cubans in Exile) and a founder of the Miami Book Fair. In addition to writing a column for the Diario de las Américas (The Americas Daily), Cuadra is the author of various collections of poetry, including La voz inevitable (1994, The Inevitable Voice), Impromptus (1977), Tiempo del hombre (1977, Man’s Time), Poemas en correspondencia (1979, Poems in Correspondence), Esa tristeza que nos anunda (1985, That Sorrow That Floods Us), Fantasía para el viernes (1985, Fantasy for Friday), Réquiem violento por Jan Palach (1989, Violent Requiem for Jan Palach), Diez sonetos ocultos (2000, Ten Hidden Sonnets), De los resúmenes y el tiempo (2003, Of Resumés and Time), and Las señales y los sueños (1988, Signs and Dreams). Among his awards are the Amantes de Teruel Prize (1988) and the José María Heredia Prize (1994). Further Reading Cuadra, Angel, La literatura cubana del exilio (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2001). Cuadra, Angel, Angel Cuadra: The Poet in Socialist Cuba, ed. Warren Hampton (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).


Cuban American Literature

Cuban American Literature. Cuban culture and literature in the United States dates back to the nineteenth century, when such exiled writers as Félix Varela penned on these shores literary works attacking Spanish colonialism and smuggled them back into Cuba. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, longstanding Cuban immigrant communities, such as those of the tobacco workers in Tampa, also produced a literature of immigration. But as early as the American Civil War, Cubans such as Federico L. Cavada and Ambrose Gonzales* wrote in English from the perspective of U.S. citizens. However, the largest source of Cuban American literature—that is, a native American literature written by people born or raised in the United States and identifying themselves as Cuban Americans—is the expression of the children of Cuban exiles from the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Since the beginning of the post-Revolution exodus, young writers have developed who are no longer preoccupied with exile or with their parents’ past in Cuba; instead, they look forward to participating in the English-language mainstream or to creating a literary and cultural expression for the U.S. Cuban and Hispanic communities. Thus has developed a definite separation of purpose and aesthetics between the younger writers—Iván Acosta,* Roberto Fernández,* Cristina García,* Oscar Hijuelos* (a child of pre-Revolution immigration), Gustavo Pérez-Firmat,* Dolores Prida,* and Virgil Suárez*—and the older writers of exile—Lydia Cabrera,* Matías Montes Huidobro,* José Sánchez-Boudy,* and so on. An influx also continues of exiled writers disaffected by Cuban communism, such as Heberto Padilla,* who are young but continue the exile tradition. A middle ground has also arisen among the exiled writers of producing a highly abstract literature devoid of direct political reference, as in the works of acclaimed playwright María Irene Fornés,* who writes in English for a mainstream audience, but whose works can hardly be recognized as Cuban, Cuban American, or exile literature. The literature of the exiled writers almost predominantly attacked the Cuban Revolution, Castro, and Marxism. The novel and the theater of exile, especially the popular farces on Miami stages, became weapons in the struggle. Following the first anti-Revolution novel, Enterrado Vivo (Buried Alive), published in Mexico in 1960, were a host of others published in the United States and abroad by minor writers such as Emilio Fernández Camus, Orlando Núñez, Manuel Cobo Souza, Raúl A. Fowler, Luis Ricardo Alonso. Such novels, when not openly propagandistic and rhetorical, were nostalgic for the homeland— to the point of idealization. For the most part, poetry and drama followed the same course. Later, political verse would come to form a special genre of its own that has been called by critic Hortesnia Ruiz del Viso prison poetry (“poesía del presidio politico”), as in the works of Angel Cuadra, Heberto Padilla, and Armando Valladares. A key figure in providing a new direction for Cuban literature in the United States has been Celedonio González,* who, beginning with Los primos (1971, The Cousins), changed the focus from the Marxist homeland to concentrate on Cuban life and culture in the United States. Later, in Los cuatro embajadores 305


(1973, The Four Embassadors) and El espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver (1978, The Thickness of Skin on a Cat Already a Corpse), he not only examined culture shock between Cubans and Americans but also treated a very taboo topic among Cuban exiles: criticism of the U.S. economic system, especially in its exploitation of Cuban workers. González depicts Cubans who do not consider themselves Americans but who are also conscious that Cuba is no longer theirs. A transitional figure is the playwright Iván Acosta,* whose Spanishlanguage play El Super details the struggles and humor of adjusting to life in New York City and documents the culture clash of the exiles with their Americanized children, the parents nevertheless accepting the reality that a return to Cuba is impossible for them and instead choosing the middle ground—or compromise—of moving to that Havana within the United States: Miami. Together with the Americanization of the younger generation, the play seems to announce the birth of Cuban American culture and the forging of a permanent place for it in U.S. society. Ironically, one of the most important writers in forging a Cuban American identity and in breaking new ground in the use of the English language is a professor of Spanish, Roberto Fernández. Through his novels, Fernández not only satirizes all the taboo subjects in the Cuban community of Miami—the counterrevolutionary movement, racism, acculturation, assimilation, and so forth— but also helps the community to take them less seriously and to laugh at itself. In his four open-form mosaic-type novels—La vida es un special (1982, Life Is On Sale), La montaña rusa (1985, The Roller Coaster), Raining Backwards (1988), and Holy Radishes! (1995)—Fernández presents a biting but loving satire of a community transformed by the materialism and popular culture of the United States. He nevertheless indicts the community for being paralyzed by nostalgia for Cuba and the political obsession with its communist government. Fernández style includes bilingual and bicultural humor, in which the dissonance and irony of intersecting parallel customs are calculated to shock, surprise, and intrigue readers. Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, on the other hand, has served in his essays, poetry, and novels as a theorist of the Cuban American condition. Pérez-Firmat theorizes that the dual perspective of Cuban Americans born on the island but raised in the United States is “transitional”; they are cultural mediators who are constantly translating not only language but also the differences between the Anglo American and Cuban/Cuban American worldviews. Having the unique ability to communicate with and understand both cultures, these Cuban Americans have taken on the role of translator not only for themselves but for society at large. In his groundbreaking book-length essay, Life on the Hyphen: the Cuban American Way (1993), Pérez-Firmat maintains, however, that the next generation will follow a path similar to that of the children of European immigrants, who are simply considered ethnic Americans and are more American than anything else. Themes of biculturalism are ever-present in Perez-Firmat’s poetry, which is full of code-switching and bilingual–bicultural double entendres and 306


playfulness. In his book-length memoir, Next Year in Cuba (1995), Pérez-Firmat documents the tension the members of his generation feel between identifying with other Americans their age and identifying with their parents, who always looked forward to returning to Cuba. Anything but Love (2000), Pérez-Firmat’s latest novel, is a tour de force of culture conflict revolving around love, marriage and sex roles, all articulated with that inimitable rhapsodic excess that is the author’s trademark. Linden Lane,* one of the most influential literary magazines of Cuban literature in the United States, was published in Spanish by Heberto Padilla and edited by Belkis Cuza Malé* and accommodated the expression of both groups: the exiles and the Cuban Americans. In 1990, the magazine formally announced the advent of a Cuban American literature with its publication of an anthology containing works in both English and Spanish. Entitled Los Atrevidos: Cuban American Literature, the entries were selected and edited by Miami poet Carolina Hospital.* In 1991, Arte Público Press* published the first anthology of Cuban American Theater, edited by critic Rodolfo Cortina. Both collections drew upon writers dispersed throughout the United States, not just from the Miami- and New York–area communities. Among the new generation of Cuban American writers growing up in the United States are a substantial number who have gone through university creative-writing programs and have had access to mainstream publishing. A graduate of the important master’s in creative writing program at Louisiana State University, Virgil Suárez has had novels and anthologies published by large, commercial houses. His first novel, Latin Jazz (1989), is a somewhat different ethnic biographical novel that portrays a whole Cuban family through alternate chapters devoted to the individual family members. His most recent novel, Going Under (1996), however, is a tour de force about the difficulty of assimilation and American-style economic success for Cuban Americans. His volumes of belles lettres, including Spared Angola: Memories from a CubanAmerican Childhood (1997) and Infinite Exile (2002), are collections of highly autobiographical stories, essays, and poems that ponder the themes of family, rootlessness, identity, and cultural exile. Probably the most important of the Cuban American writers to come out of the creative writing schools is Oscar Hijuelos, the son not of political refugees from the Cuban Revolution but of earlier immigrants (economic refugees) to New York City. Hijuelos’s first offering, Our House in the Last World (1983), is a typical ethnic autobiography and may be seen as a symbol of Cuban assimilation in that it is one of the few novels that negatively portrays the island culture, personified by an alcoholic, macho father, while developing the common theme of the American Dream. His novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990) made history by being the first novel by a Hispanic writer of the United States to win the Pulitzer Prize. It also marked the first instance that a major publishing house—Simon and Shuster— invested heavily in a novel by a Hispanic writer, bringing it out at the top of its list and promoting the book very heavily. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of 307

Cuban Literature in the United States

Love is the story of two musician brothers during the height of the mambo dance music craze in the 1950s. The novel thus has a historical background that lends it a rich texture, allowing readers to see a portion of American popular culture history through the eyes of two performers very wrapped up in the euphoria of the times, and then the waning of things Latino in the United States. The story of the tragic ending of the duo is very touching but offers hope for the potential of Hispanic culture to influence the mainstream. In fact, Hijuelos’s book itself directly influenced popular culture when it was made into a Hollywood feature film. Following Hijuelos, other Cuban writers have experienced commercial success. Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban was awarded the National Book Award in 1992. Also a child who accompanied her parents into exile in the United States, García studied journalism in college and maintained an interest in politics that led her into the world of writing and into the examination of her Cuban American circumstances. Her highly acclaimed Dreaming in Cuban was the first novel authored by a Cuban American woman to provide insight into the psychology of the generation of Cubans born or raised in the United States who grew up under the looming myth of the splendors of the island in the past and the evils of Castro in the present, a generation that never really had first-hand knowledge of its parents’ homeland. The novel closely examines women’s perspectives on the dilemma of living between two cultures, chronicling three generations of women in the Pino family and in so doing comparing the lives of those who live in Cuba to those living in the United States. The same themes are also revisited in her second novel, The Agüero Sisters (1997), which compares the lives of two sisters growing up separately in Cuba and the United States, each acclimated to their respective political and economic cultures. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo J., “History and Development of Cuban American Literature: A Survey” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61). Souza, Raymond D., “Exile in the Cuban Literary Experience” in Escritores de la diáspora cubana, Manual biobibliográfica/Cuban Exile Writers: A Biliographic Handbook, eds. Daniel C. Maratos and Mamesba D. Hill (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1986: 1–11).

Nicolás Kanellos Cuban Literature in the United States. Cuban literature of the United States may appear as a contradiction in terms, because Cuba, despite its many problems of sovereignty, is an island nation, and American literature has not traditionally included literature by and about Hispanics—especially when written in Spanish. But Cuban refugees have lived in the United States since the late eighteenth century, their exile the result of many different immigrations caused by political circumstances on the island from the time when it was a colony of Spain, aspiring to the independent status of nation-state, to the 308


present day. The literature produced by these expatriated Cubans therefore constitutes a literary corpus that can be easily labeled Cuban exile literature. Likewise, when the political cause of the exiles finally triumphs or loses completely—as was the case of abolitionist literature in the former or annexationist literature in the latter—that literary corpus may end up as Cuban literature. The case of Villaverde’s* Cecilia Valdés for abolitionist literature in exile is interesting because it is a key novel of Cuban literature. El laúd del desterrado (The Exile’s Lute) Fidel Castro. also makes the case for annexationist poetry, which is mentioned by most, if not all, Cuban literary histories of the twentieth century. An important article on this point is R. D. Souza’s “Exile in the Cuban Literary Experience.” Cuban literature, Cuban exile literature, Cuban American literature— where does one end and the other begin, and the other end and the next begin? It is amid these thorny questions that the issue of definitions arises. This has been discussed by, among others, Maida Watson, in her paper on “Ethnicity and the Hispanic American Stage: The Cuban Experience.” In the case of other United States Hispanic literatures such as Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano literature, the demarcations are more clearly observed, though there were moments in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that exile Mexican literature entered the United States. This has been carefully studied by Luis Leal in his article “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective,” which provides readers with a periodization of Chicano literature. Traditionally, Cuban literature has been written both on the island and abroad. The cases of Heredia,* Avellaneda, Casal,* Merlin, Martí,* Florit,* Carpentier, Sarduy, and Arenas* are but a few examples of this phenomenon. So, then: if Cuban literature has often been written in exile, is there a difference between the two? The answer, of course, is no— so long as the writer is considered both as a national author and as an exile after his or her death. Cuban American literature, on the other hand, requires other considerations. For instance, the very nature of the context makes it difficult to make perfect analogies with other United States Hispanic literatures. Should Cuban 309


American authors be born in the United States? Should they write only in English, or, at least, in alternating codes? Should they write only about their immigrant experience? To some degree, these questions, though legitimate, are not so much irrelevant as they are impertinent. It seems that if José Martí lived in New York for fifteen years, he was to an extent a Cuban writer, an exile writer, but also a Cuban American writer. There is no law that forbids literary historians from including the same figure in several categories, or even in distinct groupings based on nationalist definitions, when the author lives a transnational reality. I prefer to view Cuban American authors as those who live and write in the United States, addressing in their writing whatever topics may interest them (home country; new country; other places, peoples, or things), and I place them in generational cohorts for ease of classification. Hence it is better to group authors in the following schema: Cover of Little Havana Blues anthology of Cuban American a Neoclassic generation (roughly literature, edited by Virgil Suárez and Delia Poey. covering the years 1800–1825), a Romantic generation (1825–1850), a Realist–Naturalist generation (1850–1880), an impressionist generation (corresponding to Modernismo: 1880–1910), an Avant-Garde generation (1910–1940), an Existentialist generation (1940–1960), a Revolutionary generation (1960–1985), and a Postmodern generation (1985–). These groupings correspond, roughly, with the nineteenth century (the first three), the turn of the century (the next one), and the twentieth century (the final four). Their only purpose is to organize the literary material into periods, not to impose any external demands on the texts mentioned below. This general classificatory schema also serves another very useful purpose: besides creating a mechanism for ordering the facts that we now know about the Cuban American writers 310


whose persons and works have received some attention, it prepares the way for other newly researched facts to fit into the outline, or to demand changes in it.

Theater The study of Cuban theater raises problems of genre that demand our attention. Perhaps some of the best work on Cuban theater history as regards genre has been the most groundbreaking classification to be introduced since Aristotle’s Poetics divided tragedy from comedy. This has been done by Rine Leal in his books on Cuban theater. The very nature of classifying across this gulf marked by laughter and tears is not in itself a problem; the notable exception is that theater that is not funny becomes serious and, therefore, more important. This obviously has more to do with class prejudice than with anything else: the lords act tragically, but the servants comically. From these considerations of dramatic genre definition, it is possible to classify Cuban theater as follows: serious theater, comedy, teatro frívolo (frivolous theater), and teatro bufo (comic theater), the latter two being gradations of comedic drama. But what appears logical in the deductive realm is contradicted by an investigation of historical experience. The origins of Cuban American theater are intimately tied to a tradition of theater in Cuba that marked Cuban theatrical tastes, dramatic possibilities, and artistic aspirations for actors, artists, playwrights, and entrepreneurs, as has been remarked by Rine Leal in his Breve historia del teatro cubano (Brief History of Cuban Theater). They are also inextricably connected to the dimension of exile literature that brings together the twin preoccupations with the homeland as a lost paradise and the new land as an alien place, as has been observed by Maida Watson Espener in her forthcoming book, Cuban Exile Theater. For Cuban American theater, therefore, the major themes will cluster around the political and the social lives of the exile and immigrant communities respectively. But these are not the only divisions, as we have been discussing above. Like as not, Cuban American theater will tend to follow the dichotomy imposed by a similar dramatic schizophrenia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Cuban theater separated the popular slapstick from the elite dramaturgy. According to Rine Leal, Spanish colonial censorship forbade the serious treatment of Cuban nationalist themes in the theater. This led playwrights who preferred working the serious side of the stage to imitate Spanish drama. Thus, serious Cuban colonial theater became a servile imitator of the Spanish stage. This took place not only in Havana but also in Tampa, the exile capital of Cuban independence patriots, where, according to Kanellos’s History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940, theater flourished. The only authentic Cuban themes were left to the genres of comedy and farce. So much so is this the case that a general division has included a range of subgenres of comedy exemplified by this long list provided by Perrier in his Bibliografía dramática cubana (Cuban Drama Bibliography): 311


juguete (skit), juguete cómico de costumbres (comic sketch of manners), juguete histórico-dramático (historical–dramatical skit), alta comedia (high comedy), a propósito (a by-the-way), sainete (one-act farce), sainete provincial (provincial one-act farce), pieza cómica (comic piece), comedia mundana (mundane comedy), ajiaco bufo-lírico bailable (danceable farcical–lyrical stew), pasillo cómicolírico (little comical–lyrical curtain-raiser), disparate cómico (comic nonsense), disparate bufo-lírico (farcical–lyrical nonsense), pasatiempo cómico (comic pasttime), paso de comedia (comedic curtain-raiser), película cómica (comic film), capricho cómico (comic whim), humorada lírica (lyrical–epigrammatical whim), episodio lírico-cómico (lyrical–comical episode), esperpento cómico-bufo (comical– farcical folly), descarrilamento cómico (comic derailment), zarzuela bufa (farcical musical comedy), and disparate catedrático (professorial nonsense). With a few exceptions that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when labor and other social topics were introduced to the stage, this division has remained true practically to this day, as has been pointed out by Kanellos. The Cuban American serious theatrical experience during the Revolutionary period has been, for the first twenty-five years, a struggle. Meanwhile, comic theater has continued to blossom in Miami and in other areas of the United States, as has been indicated by Kanellos in his article on “Hispanic Theater.” Another important circumstance that affected Cuban and Cuban American theater, as it has most theaters, was the advent and growth of the radio, film, and television industries, according to Leal. These technological innovations have made theater an art of the masses in new ways but have left traditional stagecraft a more marginal enterprise. Entrepreneurs have, therefore, catered to the mass appeal of comedy—and, to some extent, to musical comedy. This is the case today in Miami, New York, and Tampa, where serious drama continues to lose ground to comedy.

History Though the first Cuban newspaper published in the United States, according to Gerald Poyo, was Félix Varela’s* El Habanero (1824, The Havanan: Philadelphia), printed some sixteen years after the first United States Hispanic periodical (1808, El Misisipí: New Orleans), it was during the latter part of the 1820s that New York boasted two Spanish-language newspapers, El Mensajero Semanal (The Weekly Messenger) and El Mercurio de Nueva York (The New York Mercury). These publications carried news as well as literary artifacts (Kanellos 1990). Editorial content consisted mainly of poetry and stories, but in their pages already appeared actual dramatic literature from Spain. By the second half of the century, the Hispanic publishing industry was including drama among its titles that dealt with all manner of subjects. Some books, such as Francisco Javier Balmaseda’s Los confinados a Fernando Poo (Those Confined to Fernando Poo), issued in 1869, were political tracts written by authors who took advantage of the venue for free expression, submitting their creative work to be published in their homeland. But others who had either fled permanently or happened to have a passing connec312


tion with the United States did entrust their work to stateside publishers. Kanellos (1990) makes reference to Orman Tu-Caes (which he suspects is a pen name) as having had his play El hermano generoso (The Generous Brother) published by the Granja firm. It is undoubtedly a pseudonym used to hide the author’s name because the four-act prose work probably contained unflattering allusions to the Spanish government. Others, like José Francisco Broche, were not so lucky. Broche had one drama, Mendoza, refused for publication in 1841 by Spanish colonial authorities. In 1842, he managed to get another one in print in Havana, El Juglar (The Jongleur), a prose and verse five-act ponderous piece. The government forbade its distribution immediately. This was also the case with Nicolás Cárdenas y Rodríguez, whose historical four-act prose drama Diego Velázquez was denied publication, and Isaac Carrillo O’Farrill, whose sonnet addressed to Isabel II earned him prison time. Orman Tu-Caes established a trend that Broche’s obstinacy confirmed: the publication of political works abroad. Besides those obviously political works, there were others that dealt with just plain nationalist themes. This in itself was offensive to the colonial establishment and made it easier for some to avoid the tortured language necessary to escape censorship. In this category we can place some of the Realist theater of manners following the more political Romantic dramas, among them Justo Eleboro’s El rico y el pobre (The Rich and the Poor), a three-act play that appeared in New York in 1864. Two other important literary figures of the time had their plays published in New York: (1) José María Heredia, whose Abufar o la familia árabe (Abufar, or the Arabian Family) premiered in 1854, although it had been written in 1826 and staged in 1833; and (2) Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, whose play Baltasar, which had been published both in Madrid and Bogotá in 1858, was reissued in New York in 1908 as one of the early Hispanist versions for the Hispanophiles of the time. The New York version contained an introduction, notes, and vocabulary by Carlos Bransby, making this biblical four-act verse drama an important title for the American Book Co. Other Cuban American plays of the time include José Jacinto Milanés’s Obras (Works), reissued by Juan F. Trow y Cía in one volume in New York in 1865, Luis García Pérez’s El grito de Yara (The Cry of Yara), published in New York by Hallet & Breen in 1879, Diego Tejera’s La muerte de Plácido (Placido’s Death), a dramatic play on the death of the celebrated Cuban Romantic poet, which appeared in New York under the imprint of Ponce de León in 1875, and Adolfo Pierra’s The Cuban Patriots: A Drama of the Struggle for Independence Actually Going on in the Gem of the Antilles, in three acts, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1873 with a text which indicated that the piece was “written in English by a native Cuban.” Meanwhile, in Key West, Félix R. Zahonet saw his two-act zarzuela printed by Revista Popular in 1890 under the title of Los amores de Eloísa o heroicidades de una madre (Eloísa’s Loves, or the Heroic Deeds of a Mother). Two plays by Francisco Sellén also saw the light in New York: Hatuey, a 147-page, five-act dramatic poem published by A. Da Costa Gómez in 1891 and Las apuestas de Zuleika (Zuleika’s Bets), a thirty-three-page, oneact prose piece offered by M.M. Hernández in 1901. In 1892, G. Gómez y 313


Arroyo saw a one-act satirical, burlesque, comical, lyrical skit titled Polilla regional (Regional Moth) released by Conner in New York. Desiderio Fajardo Ortiz’s La fuga de Evangelina (Evangelina’s Escape), a one-act sketch in four scenes written to celebrate Evangelina Cisneros’s* sensational escape from Spanish political imprisonment in Havana, was dated in 1898 by Howes upon publication in New York. Mario F. Sorondo’s Locura repentina (Sudden Madness), published by The Speranto [sic] Student in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1909 brings the nineteenth century to a close. The history of twentieth-century Cuban American theater is no less rich, but information is just as scanty and documentation is no less spotty. José Luis Perrier and Nicolás Kanellos have providing some understanding of Cuban theater in the urban United States in the early part of the century, and Matías Montes Huidobro,* Maida Watson Espener, and José Escarpenter have studied the theater of the last three decades. In Perrier’s Bibliografía dramática cubana (Cuban Dramatic Bibliography), he provides an account of Cuban and Cuban American dramatic publishing and production, as well as of Puerto Rican and Santo Dominguan. But Perrier’s information is offered within the context of abundant periodical commentary by newspapers and magazines of the time in New York. Much of this material is lost or in recondite collections difficult for most to access. What Kanellos has done in his History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 is to painstakingly unearth some of that lost history. In two key chapters of his book (4 and 5, dealing with New York and Tampa, respectively), he carefully reconstructs the context of the times by looking in old newspapers and magazines for theater chronicles, reviews, announcements, and advertisements. This task was made more difficult for him because of a most peculiar characteristic: in Tampa and in New York, the Hispanic communities were exactly that—Hispanic. They consisted of Spaniards and Cubans (in Tampa), as well as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Argentines, Venezuelans, Dominicans, and more, in New York. It is sometimes difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish a particular writer’s background. Here Perrier is invaluable, and Kanellos, relying both on Perrier and periodical materials, is able to detail some of that history. The twentieth century may be divided as follows for the purpose of ordering the available facts: 1898–1925, 1926–1940, 1941–1960, and 1961–1991. These dates correspond roughly with the aforementioned generational schema (Impressionist, Avant-Garde, Existentialist, and Revolutionary). These labels are not meant to characterize (we know too little of the actual content and style of much of the production of those earlier years) but merely to orient ourselves in terms of the broader categories of literary history. The first years are well set in Tampa, where the institutions of the Hispanic (primarily Spanish and Cuban, though to some extent Italian) community were able to sustain a nonprofit theater activity that had two interesting characteristics, leaving a legacy that persists to this day. In Tampa, the children and grandchildren of the theater crowd of that time have continued, in a somewhat diminished way, a theatrical tradition. Furthermore, such activity has the 314


distinct historical quirk of being the only Spanish-language Federal Theater Project supported by the government during the Depression, as Robert Mardis has observed. Tampa’s tobacco workers and their families were able to group together into seven mutual aid societies: the Centro Español (Spanish Center), the Centro Asturiano (Asturian Center), the Centro Español de West Tampa (Spanish Center of West Tampa), the Círculo Cubano (Cuban Circle), the Unión Martí-Maceo (Martí-Maceo Union), the Centro Obrero (Center for Workers), and L’Unione Italiana (Italian Union). Each of these societies had a show committee in charge of events as well as an amateur group and a theater. The presentations ranged from light musical operettas (zarzuelas) at the Centro Español, the most conservative society, to more liberal fare at the Centro Asturiano. The latter, without giving up zarzuelas, added the ever-present bufos cubanos (Cuban farcical plays), including the negrito and the gallego (literally, Blackie and the Galician, which referred to a traditional farcical couple: a picaresque Afro-Cuban and a dim-witted Spaniard) with the participation of directors such as Manuel Aparicio and Rafael Arango, playwrights such as Cristino R. Inclán, and actors and actresses who included Bolito (Roberto Gutiérrez), Alicia Rico, and Luis Guerra, all veterans of the Cuban and Cuban American stage in Havana and New York. At the Círculo Cubano and the Unión Martí-Maceo it was easier to find the bufos, and at the Centro Obrero more socially progressive protest plays and political satires could be enjoyed. Typical offerings might include La viuda alegre (The Merry Widow) at the Español, Bodas de Papá Montero (Papa Montero’s Wedding) at the Asturiano, the Círculo, or the Unión, and Justicia humana (Human justice) at the Obrero. Tampa–Ybor City audiences may have been in the working class, but they were not untutored. Via the institution of lectores or readers, cigar workers listened to great literature while toiling in the factories. They also alternated amateur performances with those of professional traveling troupes that they invited to their theaters. According to Kanellos, this made Tampa theater better than could otherwise be reasonably expected at first glance. Cuban American theater has thus always had a very good home there. The New York scene, made much more complex by its lack throughout this period of the clearly established Cuban or Hispanic theatrical centers that Tampa had, acquired a firmer foothold in the later part of the Roaring Twenties. From 1926 to 1940, New York Cuban American theater history becomes a bit clearer. The first years of the century had seen some activity by groups like the Club Lírico Dramático Cubano (Cuban Lyrical–Dramatical Club) and, later, the Companía de Bufos Cubanos (Cuban Company of Farcical Players and Singers), but until theaters like the Dalys, the Apollo, the San José (later Variedades), and the Campoamor (later Cervantes and, still later, Hispano) provided solidity to the varied theatrical boom of the period, Cuban American theater could not take hold in the Big Apple. In addition to the establishments themselves there appeared an important group of playwrights and actors. Among the playwrights are several mentioned by Perrier, including Alberto O’Farrill, editor of El Gráfico (The Graphic), a newspaper devoted to the 315


theater and entertainment world that went into publication in 1927. O’Farrill, a well-known blackface actor of Cuban farce, penned such plays as Los misterios de Changó (Dr. Changó’s Mysteries), Un doctor accidental (An Accidental Doctor), Un negro en Andalucía (A Black Man in Andalusia), Kid Chocolate, and La viuda como no hay dos (A Widow Like No Other), all presented at the Apollo during 1926. Another dramatist was Juan C. Rivera, also an actor who played gallego roles opposite O’Farrill’s negritos and authored Terremoto en Harlem (Earthquake in Harlem) and Cosas que pasan (Things That Happen), two zarzuelas bufas (farcical musical comedies) also presented at the Apollo in the same year. The most prolific of these playwrights was the famous AfroCuban singer Arquímides Pous, who created over 200 obras bufas cubanas (Cuban farcical works), among which were Pobre Papá Montero (Poor Papa Montero) or Las mulatas de Bombay (Bombay’s Mulatto Women). Other authors, such as Guillermo J. Moreno (Bronca en España [Wrangle in Spain], De Cuba a Puerto Rico [From Cuba to Puerto Rico], both of which premiered at the Apollo in 1927), had works produced at the Teatro Campoamor (such as De la gloria al infierno [From Heaven to Hell]) as late as 1936. The Cuba Bella (Beautiful Cuba) revue, presented at the Teatro Hispano, dates to 1937; but, with few exceptions, Cuban American theater appears to go from a strong river to a smaller stream in the next period. The 1950s were the province of one very important playwright who, practically on her own, made New York hospitable to Cuban American theater again. She spanned the late 1950s to the 1970s, serving in her different capacities as model playwright, perspicacious commentator, generous teacher, and ardent advocate of Cuban American, Hispanic, and women’s causes in the theater. But María Irene Fornés* served it best by being the best. In her Cuban Exile Theater, Watson Espener points out that Fornés received critical acclaim in 1977 for her play Fefu and Her Friends, in which eight women join each other for a weekend retreat during which they reveal their hopes, aspirations, frustrations, regrets, and—most of all—innermost selves. Her varied repertoire includes Promenade, a light musical piece; Mud, an examination of dire poverty; The Conduct of Life, a consideration of the cruelties of a tyrannical dictator; and Sarita, set in the South Bronx from 1939–1947, in which she follows the life of her protagonist from age thirteen to twenty-one, when she enters a mental hospital. Though her work has merited her six OBIE awards (literally, O.B., for the Off-Broadway prize for exceptional achievement), she does not enjoy mass popularity today as she did in the past. Nevertheless, Fornés stands alone in the United States during a critical period for the Cuban American stage. The Revolutionary period of the last thirty years or so has brought many changes to the Cuban American theatrical experience. According to Watson Espener, who prefers to separate the exile from the immigrant, an incipient immigrant theater now exists next to a dominant exile enterprise. Pottlitzer, in her report to the Ford Foundation on Hispanic Theater in the United States and Puerto Rico dating from 1988, notes that Miami has not been easy on serious 316


theater, the first wave of Cuban exiles having not really been exposed to serious drama at home, but only vaudeville and comedy revues. But a careful look at the facts makes it clear that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, several Cuban American/Hispanic theatrical institutions came into being in various parts of the country. In New York, Cuban refugees first became involved in the theater during the 1960s. In 1968, for example, Gilberto Zaldívar and René Buch founded the Teatro Repertorio Español.* Buch had studied theater at Yale University and never returned to Cuba. Zaldívar was a Castro refugee who arrived in the United States in 1961. INTAR* (International Arts Relations) was founded as ADAL (Latin American Dramatic Association) in 1966 (and its name changed in 1972), the product of seven Cuban Americans and Puerto Ricans interested in the theater, among whom was their current director, Max Ferrá. Their main contributions have been the development of new playwrights who write in English and the production of new material. One of their programs, sponsored by the Ford Foundation under the direction of María Irene Fornés, was the INTAR Playwrights in Residence Laboratory. Among the first interns was the late René Alomá, one of the bright lights of Cuban American theater, who resided both in Canada and in the United States. In Los Angeles, Margarita Galbán, a Cuban American, was one of the three founders of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts (BFA) in 1973. Leopoldo Hernández’s Martínez was produced by the BFA in Los Angeles. In Miami, Teresa María Rojas founded Teatro Prometeo at Miami Dade Community College in 1972. By 1973 Mario Ernesto Sánchez had founded Teatro Avante. In the late 1960s, Salvador Ugarte and Alfonso Cremata opened two small theaters named Las Máscaras (The Masks) that saw financial success by dealing with topics of adaptation within the genre of comedy known as comedia bufa. Plays like Enriqueta se ha puesto a dieta (Enriqueta Has Gone on a Diet), for instance, addresses the ideal of feminine beauty in both cultural realms (Cuban and American) and explores the problems of culturally derived models of behavior. Of all of these groups, only the Cremata/Ugarte partnership performs comedy consistently, and even they both confess that when they started, they produced serious theater. The political dimension of theater in Miami has not so much to do with the content of the plays but with the views of the playwright on issues alien to the stage. Such was the case with Dolores Prida* (Coser y cantar [Sewing and Singing], Beautiful Señoritas, Savings, Pantalla [Screen]) and her brush with censorship in Miami in 1986—or Rafael de Acha’s New Theater, whose county funds were jeopardized because of questions, similarly alien to the stage, of local politics. While Tampa continues the Spanish Lyric Theatre, begun in 1959 and now under the direction of René González, Miami has seen other theaters and theater groups flourish: Mirella González’s Teatro Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Theater), Pepe Carril’s Teatro Guiñol (Puppet Theater), the Hispanic Program at the Coconut Grove Playhouse directed by Judith Delgado, Pili de la Rosa’s Pro Arte Grateli (Grateli Pro Arts), Marta Llovios’ Chicos, Inc. (Little Ones, Inc.), María Malgrat’s M.A.R.I.A., Ernesto Capote’s Capote 317


Enterprises, Inc., and Jordana Webster’s Andromaca in Hollywood, Florida, within the Greater Miami area. Among new playwrights, one deserves mention in particular: Iván Acosta,* whose play El súper (The Superintendent) has not only been well received by the critical establishment but has seen mass distribution under the guise of León Ichaso’s film. In English, Julio Matas* has distinguished himself by Penelope Inside Out, though he is better classified with those authors who were educated in Cuba and who came to the United States already having a literary profile. Also important in English (and some in Spanish) is Manuel Martín, whose Swallows and Union City Thanksgiving are very interesting plays. Of the younger generation, Omar Torres’s If You Dance the Rhumba (still unpublished), and Achy Obejas’s Brisas de Marianao (Marianao Breezes) bear watching. Of the masters who were accomplished playwrights in Cuba, Matías Montes Huidobro’s work is of special importance, as is that of Leopoldo Hernández. Montes Huidobro is also important because of his editorial efforts in promoting Cuban and Cuban American theater through his Editorial Persona, which has allowed several authors to see their work in print. Also worth mentioning are several exile writers such as José Sánchez-Boudy* (La soledad de la playa larga [The Solitude of the Long Beach]), René Ariza (El hijo pródigo [The Prodigal Son]), Tomás Travieso (Prometeo desencadenado [Prometheus Unchained]), Celedonio González* (José Pérez candidato a la alcadía [José Pérez, Mayoral Candidate]), Carlos Felipe (Un réquiem por Yarini [A Requiem for Yarini]), José Brene (El gallo de San Isidro [San Isidro’s Rooster]), and Raúl de Cárdenas (Recuerdos de familia, Los gatos [Family Memories, The Cats]).

Novel It is possible that the first Cuban novel published in the United States during the nineteenth century was the work of a philosopher writing about the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. The novel is Jicoténcal and the author, as proposed by Luis Leal’s (1960) powerful arguments, is none other than Father Félix Varela,* the Cuban patriot whose early advocacy for independence was predicated on his philosophical readings of the eighteenth-century liberal thinkers. Should Leal’s case hold through the next thirty years as it has the last thirty, Jicoténcal will be recognized as not only the first Cuban American novel but also the first historical novel in the New World, as has been indicated by several other scholars of renown. Beyond speculations regarding Varela, the Cuban novel in the United States is represented in the nineteenth century by two writers whose subject, the abolition of slavery, was very popular both in Cuba and in the United States. For Cubans, as later for Puerto Ricans vis-à-vis the United States, the identification of the slavery of Africans with the imperialist hold of Spain over the colony had been the subject of Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés o la loma del ángel (Cecilia Valdés, or The Angel’s Hill). The novel’s first part appeared in 1839 in the Cuban periodical La Siempreviva (The Everlasting), but the publication of the 318


combined first and second parts only took place in New York. Villaverde himself was born in San Diego de Pinar del Río in 1812 and died in New York in 1894. He founded several newspapers in the United States, and he published another novel, El penitente (The Penitent), in New York in 1889, a work—like Cecilia Valdés—rooted in the folkloric costumbrismo (literature of manners) so popular with the prose writers of the Romantic period. In it he tells the story of a young woman’s tragedy. She, an orphaned mulatto, falls in love with the young scion of a powerful slave-trading family and bears him a girl. She accepts her social position and is prepared to be only his mistress, but when the young man decides to marry, she kills him after the wedding. The descriptions of people, places, and customs are rich in detail and full of color. Dances, walks, festivals, ceremonies, plantations, sugar mills, plazas, temples, and neighborhoods all enrich the texture of the narrative by serving as backdrops. As described by Juan J. Remos, Villaverde moves with ease in rural as well as urban settings, accumulating punctiliously every important detail. Also in the nineteenth century, the novel Francisco, by Anselmo Suárez y Romero, although written in 1838, was published posthumously in New York in 1880. Suárez y Romero is even more Romantic than Villaverde as he narrates the story of Dorotea and Francisco, two slaves whose love for each other makes them defy the master’s prohibition for them to marry. They have a little girl and, with the consent of the master’s mother, marry. But the master makes life impossible for Francisco, driving him to commit suicide by hanging. This happens both because of and in spite of Dorotea’s sexual surrender to her master. But Francisco’s death is too much, and she does not survive him for long. Again, the allegorical instrumentalization of slavery for political readings is evident in this novel. The human note lies in the novelist’s use of romantic passion in the person of two slaves. The novelist follows the Rousseau convention and thus attacks the depersonalization of slaves and their inhuman treatment, as has been noted by Remos and studied by Jorge and Isabel Castellanos (1988). Little is known about the subsequent activities of Cuban-background novelists in the United States until 1959. Much research needs to be done in the early period, in the nineteenth century, and in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. The Castro revolution brought three distinct groups of novelists to the United States. The first group was constituted by those authors who came to the United States as adults, who wrote in Spanish and whose main, though not only, preoccupation lay in their testimony, attack, and condemnation—if not outright vilification—of the Castro regime; among them is Carlos Alberto Montaner. This group has been the subject of study by Seymour Menton in his Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution. Those who constitute the second group, the 1980 Mariel* Boatlift authors, are the subject of study in books and journals, such as, for example, Reinaldo Arenas.* The third group, for the most part contemporary with the Mariel authors, is constituted by young writers born and raised in the United States or raised in the United States after arriving as 319


teenagers or young children. Coincidental are writers whose families migrated to the United States well prior to Castro and who chanced to write at about the same time as the others. Such is the case of Oscar Hijuelos.* There is one exception: José Yglesias,* whose novels, written and published in the 1960s, deal with reminiscences of his youth in Tampa of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These novels are a testimony to Key West and Tampa Cuban life during that period. They include A Wake in Ybor City (1963), An Orderly Life (1968), and The Truth About Them (1971). This last novel is useful for gauging the feelings and attitudes of Tampa Cubans toward Miami Cuban refugees during the 1960s and 1970s. The negative perception of later exiles by Key West and Tampa communities was caused in part by the working-class genesis of those early communities into anarchic and leftist labor enclaves in the United States. Meanwhile, the Castro refugees saw themselves as part of the elite classes. The Revolution was the answer to the dreams and aspirations of the early émigré communities, but for later refugee groups it was the worst nightmare of their lives. In any case, because the novel genre is, in a very real sense, a genre whose organization of reality challenges by its very being the societal order established under governmental rules, it is a threat to society, which then bans it as it itself seeks to criticize society. This has been so since the birth of the novel, which coincides with that of the nation-state. This explains how the social order known as nation-state and the literary order known as novel are both children of modernity and exist side by side—as well as why there was no novel in the New World until independence movements begin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. This has much to say about how the three groups noted above position their narrative vis-à-vis the state. Those whose position is critical of the Cuban state can be labeled exile novelists. Those who aim their criticism at American society are easily named Cuban American novelists. But there is a middle group of authors whose perspective is critical of the Cuban communities (principally Miami, Union City, and so forth) where they reside or used to reside in the United States, without conceding anything to the Cuban government. This group defines itself within the bounds of American society but is not characteristically a defender of all things Cuban—rather merely of the right to a Cuban/Cuban American space in the midst of American society. Belonging to the exile novelists are several authors whose work is primarily in Spanish and who, therefore, publish mostly abroad, though they reside in the United States. Among them are authors who began writing novels as early as 1960 and who continued writing, at least until 1980. Menton’s copious documentation for these decades, just as his study, is concentrated only upon the novel of the Revolution. Novels written in Miami or New York that deal with topics other than revolutionary themes he sets aside. It is important, therefore, for the student of Cuban narrative in the United States during the revolutionary period to also look elsewhere. The Roberto* and José Fernández Bibliographic Index of Cuban Authors, although incomplete, is an excellent guide for 320


the period from 1959 to 1980. The Mariel Boatlift of 1980 changed the character of the Cuban presence in the United States, but in 1980 some works came to light that had been submitted to publishers in 1979. A cut-off of 1980 for the decade therefore seems appropriate. The year not only brought a new wave of refugees to the United States but permanently altered the sensibilities of the Cuban exile population. It would be useful, therefore, to take a general look at the bibliography of the novel of this particular period. First of all, it would be wise to separate some writers who are well-known, and whom we mention for the sake of context, but who do not reside in the United States. Among them are Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who lives in London, Eduardo Manet, Juan Arcocha, and Severo Sarduy, who live in Paris, and Julieta Campos, who makes her home in Mexico. The exile writers noted for their writing during the twenty-year period from 1960 to 1980 have been studied by several critics, who have observed certain obvious characteristics. Menton, for example, seeks to find thematic features such as anti-Communism (e.g., in Salvador Díaz-Versón, René J. Landa, Raoul Fowler, Miguel F. Márquez y de la Cerra, Luis Ricardo Alonso, and Hilda Perera) manifested in the events such as the disillusionment of Communist agents (Alvaro de Villa, Celedonio González, Angel S. Castro), the torture and imprisonment of individuals (Márquez y de la Cerra), animosity toward the family by the Cuban regime (Orlando Núñez Pérez, Fowler, de Villa, Díaz-Versón), and the problem of racism both before and after the Revolution (Díaz-Versón, Núñez-Pérez, Fowler, Castro). Some novels deal with dramatic escapes from Cuba to freedom (Eugenio Sánchez Torrentó, Celedonio González, Ramiro Gómez Kemp, Núñez-Pérez) and others with the refugee experience in the United States (Gómez-Kemp, Márquez, González). Menton picks Luis Ricardo Alonso, José Sánchez-Boudy, and Carlos Alberto Montaner as the three authors whose novels attempt to universalize the Cuban experience of pain. In particular, Menton selects Los dioses ajenos (The Gods of Others, Alonso), Los cruzados de la aurora (The Crusaders of Dawn, Sánchez-Boudy), and Perromundo (Dogworld, Montaner) to make the point that this new moment represents an incorporation of the exile novel into the Spanish American novel. Menton sees these experiments, together with a less strident anti-Communist stance, as providing literary artifacts on par with the rest of Latin American literature. The classification made by Antonio A. Fernández Vázquez in his La novelística cubana de la revolución, for which he chose twenty-six novels written outside Cuba from 1959–1975, is as follows: testimoniales, evocativas, and figurativas. In the third group he centers attention on the most aesthetically worthy of the novels (José Sánchez Boudy’s Los cruzados de la aurora, Carlos Alberto Montaner’s Perromundo, and Hilda Perera’s El sitio de nadie [Nobody’s Place]). Fernández Vázquez coincides with Menton on two of his three choices and spends a little more space on Perera to justify his selection. His study is very useful because it considers the novels more from the perspective of exile literature than from the anti-Revolutionary stance taken by Menton’s book. 321


Nevertheless, both critics still see this literature as novels of the Revolution (pro or con) rather than centering their attention on other features. The testimoniales group, eleven novels, includes Andrés Rivero Collado’s Enterrado vivo (1960, Buried Alive), Enrique C. Henríquez’s ¡Patria o muerte! (1974, Homeland or Death!), Manuel Cobo Sausa’s El cielo será nuestro (1965, Heaven Shall Be Ours), Humberto J. Peña’s El viaje más largo (1974, The Longest Journey), Salvador Díaz-Versón’s Ya el mundo oscurece (1961, Already the World Darkens), Emilio Fernández Camus’ Camino lleno de borrascas (1962, Stormy Roads), Orlando Núñez-Pérez’s El grito (1966, The Cry), René J. Landa’s De buena cepa (1967, From Good Stock), Ramiro Gómez-Kemp’s Los desposeídos (1972, The Dispossessed), Miguel F. Márquez y de la Cerra’s El gallo cantó (1972, The Cock Crowed), and Anita Arroyo’s Raíces al viento (1974, Roots to the Wind). These novels denounce the Castro regime, the Revolution, and Communism for betraying the aspirations of the Cuban people. Some try to incorporate their accusations within a narrative frame, but they break it with exclamatory digressions that seem to have no connection with their plots. Fernández Vázquez identifies three novelists who are more successful in maintaining artistic objectivity even as they attempt to show the negative aspects of the Revolution: Henríquez, Cobo Sausa, and Peña. The evocativas group, thirteen novels, is comprised of those works that, despite characters who are ideological incarnations, exhibit more fictional verisimilitude without breaking the plot with accusations, exhortations, or any other form of excursive digression. Among these novels are Manuel Linares’ Los Ferrández (1965, The Ferrández Family), Bernardo Viera Trejo’s Militantes del odio (1964, Militants of Hatred), Luis Ricardo Alonso’s Territorio libre (1967, Free Territory), Raoul A. Fowler’s En las garras de la paloma (1967, In the Dove’s Talons), Alvaro de Villa’s El olor de la muerte que viene (1968, The Scent of a Coming Death), Celedonio González’s Los primos (1971, The Cousins), Pablo A. López’s Ayer sin mañana (1969, Yesterday without Tomorrow), Pedro Entenza’s No hay aceras (1969, There Are No Sidewalks), Alejandro Juan’s Fuego (1971, Fire), Luis Ricardo Alonso’s Los dioses ajenos (1971, The Gods of Others), Francisco Chao Hermida’s Un obrero de vanguardia (1972, An AvantGarde Laborer), and Juan Arcocha’s La bala perdida (1973, The Lost Bullet). These novels include some very worthy efforts such as Entenza’s No hay aceras, which won the Villa de Torrento’s literary prize in 1971 and placed second in the 1969 Premio Planeta (Planeta Publishing House Prize). Alonso’s second novel, Los dioses ajenos, as has been noted by Menton, is a well-crafted work of fiction in which the author works in three historical moments (Batista, Castro, Exile) with a couple, Carlos and Linda, alternating stories, discourses, and techniques to bring the stories a sense of the unreality of exile: memories and death. The figurativas group of novels really includes but two: Carlos Alberto Montaner’s Perromundo and José Sánchez-Boudy’s Los cruzados de la aurora. Fernández Vázquez dedicates a separate chapter to Perera’s El sitio de nadie. There the word figurativa is meant to take the place of allegorical or symbolic 322


forms. The discussion that both Menton and Fernández Vázquez devote to these two works brings a series of virtues to the fore. They first praise the lack of tendentiousness in the narrative itself. Second, they tout the artistic merits of the authors. Third, they center their attention on the baroque-like language of both works, the fragmentation of the narrative, the sudden changes of time and space, and the unity of the central narrative despite the variety of the episodes. Likewise, they observe the influence of cinema, the evasion of chronology, and the modernity achieved by both as they seek to present the essence of history by apparently escaping it. Perera’s El sitio de nadie, for its part (also a finalist in the 1972 Premio Planeta competition), is—according to Fernández Vázquez—the novel that best recreates the drama of the Cuban Revolution as a historical event. He praises it also as a literary document that reflects the crisis and transition that affected so many lives and the reaction of the human beings whose fate it was to incarnate those lives of crisis and change. The Mariel Boatlift brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States and, as we have noted above, a new set of sensibilities as well as a tremendous psychological impact. Prior to 1980, most novels had been written in Spanish, except for two works in French and one in English (Manet’s Les etrangers dans la villa and Un cri sur le rivage, and Marcia del Mar’s A Cuban Story). The significance of this may be seen by demographers and sociologists as evidence that the first generation of Castro exiles were Spanish speakers whose children, having learned English, then wrote novels in English. But the novel, we have also indicated, has a certain very real connection to a sense of nationalism and statehood. It challenges the established social and political order. Thus it is with most of the novels (some 135, give or take) written between 1959 and 1980. They challenge Cuban society and the Cuban power structure. Mariel will not change that; many of the newly arrived writers will continue the tradition of the first exiles but largely in a more artistic way, though not with less tendentious intentions. It is important, however, to remember that the exilic reading public had been engaged for twenty-one years in denouncing the regime in Cuba while harboring some hope (more in some than in others) of return. Mariel deflects that hope. Exiles hope for a free Cuba: for a visit, perhaps for a retirement site in a post-Castro Cuba or even a place to die, but not for a return; after Mariel they have become immigrants. The key figure of the Mariel group of novelists is, without a doubt, Reinaldo Arenas (see Miyares and Rozenvaig). His career begins just before the period of the Latin American “Boom” novel. His first book, written in 1964, Celestino antes del alba (Celestino before Dawn) received honorable mention by the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) in 1965 and won a prize in 1967 but was not published until 1968. This novel opens a “pentagony,” a project of five novels of which two others have been published (El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas [1980, The Palace of the White Skunks]; Otra vez el mar [1982, Once Again the Sea]) and two others await publication (El asalto [The Assault] and El color del verano [The Color of Summer]) by Universal in Miami. His other early novel, El mundo alucinante (1969, Hallucinations) received a 323


UNEAC honorable mention in 1966, having been written in 1965. These dates are important to clearly establish, because several critics have seen influences of García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Cabrera Infante’s De donde son los cantantes (1967, Where Are the Singers From) on Arenas’ early work. His other novels include La loma del ángel (1987, Angel’s Hill), a novel that borrows the alternate title of Villaverde’s novel, and Arturo, la estrella más brillante (1984, Arturo, the Brightest Star), which is a poetic denunciation of a camp for the reeducation of homosexuals in Cuba. El portero (1990, The Doorman), which in its first edition in 1988 was a finalist for the Medicis Prize in Paris, is an account of the incredible adventures of a Manhattan doorman in a luxury high-rise building. This novel is his first dealing with the content of life in the United States. It is important to note, however, that Arenas seeks a very conscious link to Villaverde, a major Cuban figure of the nineteenth-century world of letters whose major work, as already noted, was published in New York while the writer was himself in exile. The “pentagony” remains Arenas’s major contribution to the world of letters. He has pointed out that Celestino antes del alba deals with the childhood of the poet-narrator, El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas continues with the protagonist’s adolescence during the Batista dictatorship, and Otra vez el mar contains the whole period of the Revolution from 1958–1970, the Stalinization of the process. In El color del verano, Arenas anticipates the hallucinatory carnival in which the island’s youth overtakes the country. In El asalto, Arenas presents an arid fable in which the state overpowers human dreams and illusions. It promises to be one of the cruelest works of the century. In each novel the protagonist dies and reemerges under a new name, leaving always his written legacy as the testimony of a poet-narrator whose experience serves as witness of and rebellion against repression and injustice. Arenas stands as the pivotal figure between the exile writers and the immigrant writers. The Mariel group, personified by him, served as a point of transition. The literary tabloid, Mariel, which he founded in 1983, created a refuge for the letters of the newest refugees and ignited a fire under the earlier intelligentsia. Among the first novels after Mariel, Berta Savariego offers her Fiesta de abril (1981, April Fest), a look at a phenomenon that would become central in the Cuban discourse of the 1980s: political prisoners and human rights. Savariego attempts to universalize the experience of prison by relying on many accounts of the hundreds and thousands of Cuban political prisoners in exile in Miami. Written in the first person, it foreshadows Armando Valladares’s biographical testimony Against All Hope, in which fiction becomes reality. In 1982, Roberto Fernández* began his career as a novelist with La vida es un special (1982, Life is a Special), a short novel parodying Cuban life in Miami. Fernández’s delight at playing with language, however, positioned him squarely between the worlds of Spanish and English, between Cuban and

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Anglo, between a vision of the past and one of the future. His second novel, La montaña rusa (1985, The Rollercoaster) continued the world of his first novel but introduced new elements: characters who will continue into his third novel and a built-in mimetic interior parody in which the duplication of a series of pieces “entered into a literary contest” are imitations of similar pieces that themselves imitate an ideal model imagined by the entrants. Fernández’s humor continues to aid him in his critical view of Miami Cuban culture. His best effort switches from Spanish with some English to English with some Spanish; Raining Backwards (1988) ties Cuban hyperbolic discourse with the closest literary rendering of choteo (a Cuban practice of poking fun at serious things): parody. Making fun of everything and everybody is a way to deconstruct an artificial world that all exiles build and keep in a haze of everchanging memories. Critics have both praised and questioned the novel because of its shift from the Spanish world to that of English, carrying with it (if not dragging with it) the cultural baggage of Cubans across the linguistic divide. But it is a divide that assumes not only a strong measure of bilingualism, but of biculturalism, specifically including Cuban American life in Miami. The trouble is that some experiences are untranslatable from one code to another when the experience consists of parodying (choteando really) other texts, other discourses, and other codes. Fernández’s work opens a space within which the Cuban American writer may operate. Omar Torres,* poet, playwright, and novelist, has also offered a novel that, like Arenas’s and Villaverde’s, links him not only to Cuba’s past but to that past as it has overlapped the space of United States life and manners. Torres, in Al partir (1986, Upon Departure), has created an achingly beautiful portrait of Evangelina Cisneros, the young woman whose adventures include her dramatic escape from Spanish prison in Cuba to the United States to evade the cruel sentence of Spanish colonial authorities. His telling of the tale is done poetically, and Torres places Evangelina in a very preeminent place in Cuban American letters. Other young novelists have also emerged on the scene: Virgil Suárez* and Oscar Hijuelos,* both products of university creative writing programs. Hijuelos has published an ethnic autobiography in his Our House in the Last World (1985), a novel that presents a negative series of memories about Cuba. According to the author, this could be caused by a kidney illness that, having been contracted in Cuba, stayed with him for a year in the United States. The “last world” of the title, of course, refers to Cuba, and it is his access to the United States that marks his happiness in the novel. His most successful book, and the first Pulitzer Prize winner written by a Hispanic author, is The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). This novel tells the story of two young Cuban musicians during the Mambo craze. César and Néstor Castillo go from Havana to New York to appear with Desi Arnaz on the I Love Lucy show. Their moment of glory becomes a memento for old age and mediates their reminiscence of the girl (María) and the island (Cuba) they left behind.

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Virgil Suárez has depicted in Latin Jazz (1989) the trials and tribulations of a Cuban American family that faces the usual dilemmas of immigrants left with a shattered past and a promised future. In The Cutter (1991), Suárez returns to the theme of dramatic escape from the island. Here he refines the story by presenting a young protagonist, Julián, who is left behind and must make his own way out of Cuba. These new post-Mariel novelists have brought forth their American experiences in English, but they remain Cuban to the core. Finally, it may be useful to at least mention the novels of Elías Miguel Muñoz* whose Orlando Cachumbambé (Orlando Seesaw), Crazy Love (1989), and The Greatest Performance (1991) range from interesting to excellent.

Poetry Cuban poetry in the United States established an island presence in continental letters from the early nineteenth century. The Neoclassical poet José María Heredia fled the island to avoid imprisonment by Spanish colonial authorities, who had accused him of being a separatist. In the tradition of dramatic exile escapes from the island, Heredia hid in the Galaxy, an American ship docked in Havana, and disembarked at Boston harbor in 1823, disguised as a sailor. By 1825, he published a book in New York titled Poesías (Poems), which included his famed “Oda al Niágara,” a song written in praise of the falls. His “Himno del desterrado” (Hymn of the Exile), written in a different exile tradition of letters, tells of his love for home and of his pain of separation from the homeland. He wrote this poem while at sea, traveling from New York to Mexico, after seeing in the distance Cuba’s Pan de Matanzas mountain. His poetry praising the solitary star and the royal palm stimulated others to regard these symbols as nationalist triggers for their patriotic enthusiasm. Heredia’s work, ironically, awakened a regard for independence, which he himself was seeing from the disappointing perspective of Mexico’s chaotic organization of its state. Heredia’s brief return to Cuba, between late 1836 and early 1837, came at the price of renouncing his belligerence toward Spain. The Romantic period yielded an important book: El laúd del desterrado (1858, The Exile’s Lute), a collection of poems written by a group of poets who felt a strong affinity for independence. Among them, of course, was the late Heredia, whose patriotic poems were included by the editors. The principal compiler was Miguel Teurbe Tolón,* a highly educated professor whose energetic voice and great rancor toward Spain was evident in his “Himno de guerra cubano” (Cuban War Hymn), in “Mi propósito,” (My Purpose), and in “El pobre desterrado” (The Poor Exile). Another voice from that group was that of Leopoldo Turla, whose fluidity of tone appears in “Perseverancia” (Perseverance), “Degradación” (Degradation), and “A Narciso López” (To Narciso López), dedicated to a general of Venezuelan extraction who led a group of annexationists to Cuba. Pedro Angel Castellón displayed his elegant and correct, yet spontaneous, verse in “A Cuba” (To Cuba) and “A los mártires de Trinidad y Camagüey” (To the Martyrs of Trinidad and Camagüey). Pedro 326


Santacilia,* who would also publish Lecciones sobre historia de Cuba (1859, Lessons on Cuban History), cultivated verse and good taste in his “A España” (To Spain) and his 1856 book of poems, El arpa del proscripto (The Proscript’s Harp). Santacilia was Benito Juárez’s secretary and son-in-law and, while in Mexico and the United States, worked tirelessly for Cuban independence. Another collaborator in the anthology was José Agustín Quintero (1829–1885), whose contributions “El banquete del destierro” (The Banishment Banquet), “¡Adelante!” (Forward!), “Poesía bajo la tiranía” (Poetry Under Tyranny), and “A Miss Lydia Robbins” (To Miss Lydia Robbins) displayed the merit of his themes and his care for poetic forms. Another famous Cuban bard represented in the collection was Juan Clemente Zenea (1832–1871), with three compositions: “El filibustero” (The Filibuster), “El 16 de agosto de 1851” (August 16, 1851), and “En la muerte de Narciso López” (On Narciso López’s Death). In 1860, he published a book in Cuba titled Cantos de la tarde (Afternoon Songs). He is known as Cuba’s best poet of the elegiac tradition during the Romantic period. His importance, therefore, is somewhat ironic because his posthumous book Diario de un mártir (Diary of a Martyr) consists of sixteen poems published in New York’s El Mundo Nuevo (The New World). The poems were delivered to the United States Consul on the eve of his execution in Havana. The book tells of his love for his wife and daughter and of his love affair with Ada Menken, an American actress and poet. Beyond El laúd del desterrado and its remarkable New York publication, there were other Romantic poets who lived and worked in the United States. Angel Turla was, in fact, born in the United States. He did not publish a book of poems. Rather, his very tender poetry, delicate in its artistry, appeared in periodicals of the time. Nicolas Cárdenas y Rodríguez, a newspaperman and poet, had a book of poems titled Ensayos poéticos por un cubano ausente de su patria (Poetic Essays by a Cuban Absent from his Fatherland, 1836). His brother, José María, also studied in the United States and was known in the island as a famed costumbrista, dubbed the Cuban Mesonero Romanos because of his feature articles on Cuban manners and customs. Another poet of the time, Isaac Carrillo O’Farril, was sent to jail after writing a sonnet addressed to Queen Isabel II of Spain in the New York weekly La Revolución (The Revolution). After his release, he moved to New York to practice law. There he founded La Revolución in 1863. He had written a novel (María, 1863), a descriptive poem (Matilde), several other poems, and three plays published in Havana: Luchas del alma (1864, Struggles of the Soul), El que con libros anda (1867, He Who Has Books Walks), and Magdalena (1868), this last written in prose. Two other poets of the Romantic period were Rafael María Mendive, whose own translation of Thomas Moore’s Melodías irlandesas (1875, Irish Melodies) reflects the softness and grace of the Irish bard, and José Jacinto Milanés. This poet and playwright had his complete works, Obras de José Jacinto Milanés (Works by José Jacinto Milanés), published posthumously in New York by Juan 327


F. Trow y Cia. in 1865 as a second edition of the four-volume set published in Havana in 1846. The post-Romantics who really belong to the group of Idealist Realists (referring to the German philosophical Idealism of the nineteenth century) are the Sellén brothers.* Francisco Sellén had a book, Poesías, issued in New York in 1890. He had published his first poems, together with his brother Antonio’s own verses, in a book Estudios poéticos (1863, Poetic Studies). Francisco translated Heine’s Intermezzo lírico (Lyrical Intermezzo) superbly. It appeared in his Ecos del Rhin (1881, Echoes of the Rhine) with other Germanic republications. He also translated Lord Byron’s El Giaour (The Infidel). His brother Antonio, after collaborating on the Estudios with Francisco, published his own Cuatro poemas (1877, Four Poems) with a translation of English poets. Antonio also did other books: Joyas del norte de Europa (1878, Jewels from Northern Europe, featuring Danish, Swedish and German poets), and Ecos del Sena (1883, Echoes of the Seine, feautring French poets). He also translated Conrado Wallenwood from Adam Mickiewitz’s original Polish version and translated Amor y orgullo (Love and Pride), Bulwer Lytton’s English drama. The Sellén brothers not only contributed their poetry to Cuba and the United States but also made available in Spanish the literature of those European poets and playwrights whose influence would be felt in the next Impressionist generation. It is in the Impressionist aesthetic that we must include José Martí,* usually classified under the Spanish American label of Modernismo (Modernism, though not with the same meaning that is applied to American literature). He is the poet who closed the nineteenth century in the United States, just as Heredia had opened it. Martí lived in New York from 1880 until 1895 and traveled frequently to Key West, Tampa, and Philadelphia in his quest for Cuban independence. Martí’s famous book Ismaelillo (1882) saw the light of day the same year that Villaverde’s novel appeared in New York. His book deals with his love for his son, and the poems’ intimate tone is delicately etched in diminutives and images of precious jewels. His Versos sencillos (1891, Simple Verses) picks up some of Heredia’s poetic symbols of Cuba and sings his love for Cuba and of freedom. While in New York, Martí also published a book of essays, Cuba y los Estados Unidos (1889, Cuba and the United States). But what memorializes his life in the United States are his two collections of articles (gathered each in one volume of his complete works) corresponding to people and events. The first one is titled “North Americans” and portrays James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Generals Grant and Sheridan, Peter Cooper, and many others. The second one is titled “North American Scenes” and describes events such as the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a summer day on Coney Island. Martí’s feature articles on the United States made many Latin Americans aware of people and events unknown to them. To the Cuban communities of the United States (Key West, Tampa, Philadelphia, New York), he was best known and loved for his oratory. His skill and passion, put at the service of the cause of Cuban independence, 328


made him a draw at any political gathering. His final trek to Cuba in 1895 makes larger than life his person as a martyr and a hero. The significance of José Martí, as of Heredia and Juan Clemente Zenea,* is that several key figures of Cuban poetry did, in fact, write most of their work in the United States in the context of a life of exile and adjustment to the new land. The twentieth-century poetic story begins with Eugenio Florit y Sánchez de Fuentes.* Born in Madrid in 1903, Florit went to Cuba as a teenager and to the United States in 1940 as a diplomat. Florit began teaching in 1942 at Columbia University’s Barnard College and in 1969 was named Professor Emeritus at Columbia. Also in 1969, he received the Mitre Medal of the Hispanic Society of America. He served as editor of the Revista Hispánica Moderna (Modern Hispanic Review) from 1960 to 1969. Florit has been a lawyer, diplomat, educator, critic, and anthologist, but most importantly a poet. He graduated from the Secondary Education Institute of Havana in 1918 and in 1926 became a doctor of civil law at the University of Havana. Florit served in the Cuban diplomatic corps from 1927 until 1945. His books of poetry include Hábito de esperanza: Poemas (1936–1964) (1965, Habit of Hope: Poems), De tiempo y agonía (1974, Of Time and Agony), and Castillo interior y otros versos (1987, Interior Castle and Other Poems). As a young man in Havana he published other volumes. When he arrived in the United States in 1940, he was an accomplished poet. Florit’s merit as a poet lies in his lyrical qualities, his care of form, and his controlled passion. In the realm of literary history, Eugenio Florit opens the twentieth century in the United States. He belongs to the Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) of the 1926 Cuban generation, which roughly corresponds to the Spanish generation of 1927. Clara Niggemann, whose books include Canto al apóstol (1953, Song to the Apostle), her only Cuban publication; En la puerta dorada (1973, At the Golden Door, prologue by Severo Sarduy); Como un ardiente río (1985, Like a Burning River); and other unpublished books, is a member of this generation but does not belong to the Orígenes group. She has had her poetry selected for many anthologies from all over Spain and Spanish America. Most of the poets of this generation are associated with José Lezama Lima’s Orígenes (Origins) group. Of the ten poets who published in the literary magazines Verbum (1937, The Word), Espuela de plata (1939, Silver Spur), Nadie parecía (1942, No One Seemed), and Orígenes (1944), which gave the group its name, three went into exile after the Castro Revolution. Gastón Baquero lives and works in Madrid, Lorenzo García Vega resides in Miami, and Justo Rodríguez Santos lives in New York. The late Virgilio Piñera never left Cuba, but his work did. Some of his plays were published in the United States, several under the auspices of Luis González-Cruz.* During his exile, García Vega published three books: Ritmos acribillados (1973, Riddled Rhythms), Rostros del reverso (1977, Reverse Faces), and Los años de “Orígenes” (1979, The Years of “Orígenes”). Rodríguez Santos also published three books: El diapasón del ventisquero (1976, The Blizzard’s Pitch), Los naipes conjurados (1979, The Plotting Cards), and Las óperas del sueño (1981, Dream Operas). 329


The problem with the Orígenes group is that the baroque quality of the language made the poetry hermetic. It is small wonder that the most popular poetry of the time belongs to Négritude poets Nicolás Guillén and Emilio Ballagas, not to mention José Angel Buesa and his Neo-Romantic poetry. The 1953 generation, which was called the Grupo Renuevo (after the Cuadernos Literarios Renuevo, [Renewal Literary Notebooks]), represents the eleventh generation, according to Lazo’s organizational scheme. The poets called themselves the generation of the Martí centennial celebration, and the group was known for its opposition to the Batista regime. The group was well received in the United States, but in Cuba it faced the problem of language as it prepared to engage a new generation of readers. Their choices in the past, as we have noted, were the folkloric Afro-Cuban tradition, the Neo-Romantic verse of easy consumption, and the obscure, evasive, and highly symbolic Orígenes type of poetry, limited to a select group. The generation, with a few exceptions that persist to this day in subsequent groups, did modernize Cuban poetic discourse. It did this by choosing a more communicative and direct language that the poets felt the country’s circumstances demanded of them. In Cuba the group was begun by Angel N. Pou, who died there, as well as by Carlos Dobal, Luis Angel Casas, Ana Rosa Núñez, Angel Cuadra,* Carlos Casanova, María Josefa Ramírez, Adolfo Suárez, and Juan Oscar Alvarado, who also died during the Batista dictatorship. Their generational anthology Cuba: su joven poesía (1957, Cuba: Its Young Poetry), edited by Angel N. Pou, presented a new poetry that could be understood by the average person. Some members of the group did immigrate to the United States, including Carlos Cancio Casanova, who published a book in the United States, Sale del verso el corazón ileso (1984, The Unharmed Heart Emerges From Verse), and Luis Angel Casas, who has written many unpublished books of poetry. In the United States, however, Ana Rosa Núñez opened the generation with her dual interest in poetry and criticism born of her studies of library science. She connects the poetic voice of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the Cuban Romantic poet, with her interest in the fresh and pure voice of Juan Ramón Jiménez and the accessible vision of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Núñez’s very own readings help the readers of her poetry to find a context for her innovation. From Avellaneda she inherits passion; from Bécquer, the intimate tone; from Juan Ramón, his purification of language—all characteristics necessary for the group. Her books include Las siete lunas de enero (1967, The Seven Moons of January), Réquiem para una isla (1970, Requiem for an Island), and Escamas del Caribe: haikus de Cuba (1971, Caribbean Resentments: Cuban Haiku), as well as numerous anthologies. The volume of her work makes Núñez a prolific and important intellectual force in the United States. Ángel Cuadra Landrove continues the renovation of poetic discourse with his piercingly lyrical love poetry. Cuadra, a law and dramatic arts graduate from the University of Havana, spent fifteen years in prison. His sentence was 330


commuted after ten years, but the Cuban government considered one of his books of poetry published abroad to be subversive and remanded him to prison for five more years. He left Cuba under the auspices of Amnesty International and in 1982, together with Jorge Valls and Armando Valladares, received the International Prize from the Hispanic–Puerto Rican Association for Culture because of his distinguished endeavors in the arts in spite of grave impediments. His books from prison include Impromptus (1977), Tiempo del hombre (1978, Man’s Time), and Poemas en correspondencia (desde prisión) (1979, Poems in Correspondence [From Prison]), an antiphonal response to poems by Juana Rosa Pita sent to him while in prison. In 1985 he was allowed to leave Cuba and, except for a short period of residence in California, has lived in Miami. Like his generation, he endeavored to reconstruct a poetry that was neither hyper-baroque nor colloquial and informal. After arriving in the United States, Cuadra published two books, Fantasía para el viernes (1985, Fantasy for a Friday) and Esa tristeza que nos innunda (1985, That Sadness That Floods Us), although the former was written in 1961 and the latter was an anthology of his work. He has also published an essay, Escritores en Cuba socialista: experiencia y testimonio (1986, Writers in Socialist Cuba: Experience and Testimony), in which he talks about the writers’ situation in Cuba. With 1988’s Las señales y los sueños (Signals and Dreams), he brought to light a book written in Boniato Prison, and in 1989 he issued his book Réquiem violento por Jan Palach (Violent Requiem for Jan Palach), dedicated to the Czechoslovakian youth who committed suicide in 1968 when his country was invaded by Soviet tanks and troops. Because the major theme of his poetry is that of love, this book of political poetry inspires wonder in readers—a wonder born from recognition that the book is really an admiration of Pallach’s love of country and is about the poet’s own deep sense of morality. Although his first poem, “Lamento a José Martí en su centenario”—read on the university steps in 1953, a year after Batista’s coup—earned him the title of “critic for democracy” and his book Peldaño (1959, Step) brought him recognition as the Poet of the 26 of July Movement, Cuadra has won several poetry prizes because of the aesthetic merits of his poems, among them the Rubén Martínez Villena Poetry Prize (Havana, 1964), Circulo de Escritores y Poetas Iberoamericanos de New York Poetry Prize (Spanish American Poets Circle of New York Prize) in 1958, the Mariscal de Ayacucho Poetry Prize in Venezuela, 1975, the Congresos por la Libertad de la Cultura Essay Prize (Paris, 1962, [Congresses for Cultural Liberty Essay Prize]), Pluma de Oro Prize (Miami, 1981, [Golden Pen Prize]), the PEN Club Prize (Los Angeles, 1986), Honorary Member of the PEN Club (Sweden, 1980), the Amantes de Teruel Poetry Prize (Teruel, 1988), and the prestigious Cintas fellowship, 1989–1990. These honors notwithstanding, Cuadra feels that one of his key moments of redemption as a poet came when he received a letter from Vaclac Havel in response to his book. In it Havel thanked Cuadra for the book and announced to him that the Wenceslaus Plaza, site of the immolation, had been renamed in honor of Jan Palach. Palach, who set fire to himself, was made by through Cuadra’s verses too bright to ignore. The irony, 331


of course, is that Réquiem violento por Jan Palach was written in the Guanajay prison in 1972 where Cuadra led the poetic workshop known as Vísperas (Eves). While still in prison, Cuadra was honored by his peers (Pita, Sábalo, Guillén, Arenas, and more) in a book organized and edited by Juana Rosa Pita: Homenaje a Angel Cuadra (1981, Homage to Angel Cuadra). Another important poet of this generation is Heberto Padilla, burdened by “el caso Padilla” (the Padilla case), an account of official persecution, domination, repression, and humiliation of the poet by a totalitarian regime. After winning UNEAC’s Julián del Casal Poetry Prize in 1968 for his book Fuera del juego (1969, Out of the Game), he was severely criticized in Verde Olivo (Green Olive), a government organ, for his earlier defense of Cabrera Infante and his attacks on Lisandro Otero. Padilla suffered arrest and imprisonment for a month but was allowed to work as a translator for nine years in Havana after a brief period of house arrest in Las Villas in exchange for his recantation of his earlier stance and for his denunciation of other intellectuals in Cuba. The uproar in the socialist intellectual world was marked, and this incident signaled the end of the cozy relationship between the Cuban regime and the European Left. He left Cuba in 1980 and entered the United States through Montreal. While still in Cuba he had published other books: Lent off the Field: A Selection of the Poetry of Heberto Padilla (1972, trans. J. M. Cohen), El justo tiempo humano (1972, The Just Human Time), Provocaciones; Poemas (1973, Provocations; Poems), and Poesía y política: poemas escogidos de Heberto Padilla (1974, Poetry and Politics: Selected Poems of Heberto Padilla, trans. Frank Calzón). His early works, including Las cosas audaces (1984, The Daring Things), mark him as an important author of verse. It is important to note that Padilla lived in the United States from 1949 until 1959, where he worked as a laborer, an English teacher at the New York Berlitz language school, and a radio commentator in Miami. His return to the United States in 1980, therefore, was not as shocking to him as it was to other exiles. He wrote a novel, En mi jardín pastan los héroes (1981), that was translated in English as Heroes are Grazing in my Garden (1984). Another collection of his poetry is Legacies: Selected Poems/Heberto Padilla: A Bilingual Edition (1982, trans. Alistair Reid and Andrew Hurley). He has coedited an anthology of poetry (Poesía cubana: 1959–1966 with Luis Suardíaz), but his continuing impact is because of his publication of Linden Lane Magazine, published from New Jersey, where he makes his home. Jorge Valls has had a trajectory similar to that of Cuadra and Padilla because of his persecution by the Cuban government. He suffered prison because of his testimony on behalf of a friend at a trial for high treason. As a result, his friend was executed in 1964. He has few books published: Donde estoy no hay luz y está enrejado (1980, Where I Am There Is No Light and It Is Barred), A la paloma nocturna desde mis soledades (1984, To the Night Dove from My Solitudes), and Hojarascas y otros poemas (n.d., Dead Leaves and Other Poems). He has written a play, Los perros jíbaros (1983, The Wild Dogs), and a book of essays, Twenty Years and Forty Days: Life in a Cuban Prison (1986). His profound sense 332


of ethical behavior is rooted in a personal understanding of Christ and Gandhi, which has led Carlos Pellicer to call him a mystic. Mireya Robles (1934–) arrived in the United States in 1957, where she lived until 1985. She teaches at Natal University in South Africa. Her poetry includes Petits Poémes (1969, Little Poems) in French translation; Tiempo artesano (1973, Time the Artisan, bilingual edition in 1975), which won her the 1971 Ibero American Writers and Poets Guild in New York; and En esta aurora (1976, This Dawn). She has published a novel, Hagiografía de Narcisa la bella (1984, Hagiography of Narcisa the Beautiful), has written several unpublished books, and is the recipient of numerous awards. Félix Cruz-Alvarez has a doctorate from the University of Miami, where he wrote a dissertation on the Orígenes group of poets, which received the annual John Barrett Prize as the best dissertation on a Latin American topic. His books include Varadero: sueño con mareas (1973, Varadero: Dream with Tides), Sonetos (1975, Sonnets), and Homenaje a las furias (1977, Homage to the Furies). Also in 1973, he collaborated with Ana Rosa Núñez and Enrique Márquez in the book RES. Mauricio Fernández left his studies of international law when he left Cuba in 1961. In Miami he became a whirlwind of writing, editing, and publishing. He founded the literary magazines Cuadernos desterrados (Exile Notebooks), Cuadernos 66 (Notebooks 66), Cuadernos del hombre libre (Notebooks of the Free Man), and Punto cardinal (Essential Point) in 1967. He worked with Teatro 66, a dramatic arts group, and in 1976 with Orlando Rodríguez-Sardiñas edited the journal Enlace (Liaison)-later with José Kozer.* Pieces of his poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and book anthologies. His books of poetry include Meridiano presente (1967, Present Meridian), El rito de los símbolos (1968, The Rite of Symbols), and Calendario del hombre descalzo (1970, Calendar of a Barefoot Man). Armando Alvarez Bravo left Cuba in 1981 when he went to Madrid. He has since moved to Miami. He has written three books of poetry: Juicio de residencia (1982, Judgment of Residence), Para domar un animal (1982, To Tame an Animal), and El prisma de la razón (1990, Prism of Reason). He writes for El Nuevo Herald in Miami. He has served as a critic and researcher while still in Cuba and continues his critical writings to this day. His poetry has also been included in several anthologies and has earned him the José Luis Gallego Poetry Prize for his book Para domar un animal (How to Tame an Animal). He has prepared many useful books, including a dictionary of Cuban literature and an anthology of José Lezama Lima’s poetry. Another member of the Generation of 1953 is Rita Geada, who had already published a book of Poetry in Havana in 1959 with a prologue by Raimundo Lazo. The book was titled Desvelado silencio (Sleepless Silence) and was issued by Imprenta Méndez. She left Cuba with a scholarship from the Organization of American States and went to Argentina to do postdoctoral studies at the University of Buenos Aires. She entered the United States in 1963 to teach at Southern Connecticut State College and, since her arrival in the United States, has contributed to journals, magazines, and other periodicals. Her 333


poetry has come to light in books such as Cuando cantan las pisadas (1967, When Footsteps Sing); Mascarada (1970, Masquerade), which won the Carabela de Oro Poetry Prize; and Esa lluvia de fuego que nos quema (That Rain of Fire Burning Us), recently published. She has been the recipient of many other honors and awards, among them the Cintas Fellowship, 1978–1979, the Faculty Scholarship First Prize at Southern Connecticut State College, and the C.E.P.I. Prize in New York. She has also taught as a visiting professor of humanities at Yale University. Geada’s poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, and she also published in 1963 a poetry chapbook in a bilingual Portuguese/Spanish edition: Ao romper da aurora/Pulsar del alba (1963, Dawn Break). Hers is a poetry of searching wherein lies its mystery and greatest joy. One of this generation’s most prolific members is Juana Rosa Pita, who took the Ángel Cuadra case under her wing and provoked his book Poemas en correspondencia by writing and sending poems to him in prison, as well as by editing Homenaje a Angel Cuadra. She studied humanities at Santo Tomás de Villanueva University and at the University of Havana but left Cuba in 1961, going first to Spain and then to the United States. She completed a graduate degree in the United States and, while studying for her doctorate at the Catholic University of America, cofounded Ediciones de Poesía Solar (Solar Poetry Editions), a small press for the publication of poetry books. Her poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals as well as North American and international anthologies. Pita’s book production reveals the constancy of her work. She has published fifteen books, among them Pan de sol (1976, Bread of the Sun); Mar entre rejas (1977, The Sea behind Bars); Grumo D’Alba (1985, bilingual Italian/Spanish edition), for which she received the Premio Internazionale Ultimo Novecento (Last of the Twentieth Century International Prize) in Italy; and El sol tatuado (1986, The Tattooed Sun). She currently works editing Hombre de mundo (Man of the World) in Miami. Another poet of this generation is Gladys Zaldívar, whose books of poetry include El visitante (1971, The Visitor), De su ardiente llama (1979, From Your Ardent Flame), and Viene del asedio (1987, Comes from the Siege). Her poetry appears in various anthologies, and she has also produced several books of criticism on several major Cuban writers. Other poets of this generation also include Armando Valladares, whose books Desde mi silla de ruedas (1976, From My Wheelchair), Prisionero de Castro (1982, Castro’s Prisoner), and Caverna del silencio (1985, Cavern of Silence) are testimonies to Cuban political prison conditions. Carmen Valladares must also be mentioned, who published Presencia del alba (1956, Presence of Daybreak), Sinfonía en azul mayor (1958, Symphony in Blue Major), and Ruta de linternas (1982, Route of Lanterns), leaving unpublished “Traje de madera” (1960, Suit of Wood) and “Canto quinto” (1985, Fifth Song). But still others complete the generational list. Benigno Nieto, who resides in Venezuela, published Un ojo de asombro (1983, Eye of Astonishment). The books of Robert F. Lima, Jr., include Seventh Street: Poems of Les Deux Mégots, with Donald Katzman (1961) and Poems of Exile and Alienation, with Teresinka Pereira (1976). Lima’s work reveals his search for the ideal, 334


for the platonic absolute that words attempt to enclose into verse. Edith Llerena Blanco is the author of La piel de la memoria (1976, The Skin of Memory), Canto a España (1979, Song to Spain), and Placer de la palabra (1986, Pleasure of the Word), as well as of numerous books of children’s literature. Matías Montes Huidobro,* who is an active playwright, novelist, critic, and shortstory writer, is also a poet of note, wrote La vaca de los ojos largos (1967, The Cow with the Sad Eyes) and with his spouse, Yara González, has worked on their important Bibliografía crítica de la poesía cubana (1972, Critical Bibliography of Cuban Poetry). Julio Matas published a book of poetry in Cuba in 1958, Retrato de tiempo (Portrait of Time). Teresa María Rojas, known as an actress and an educator as well as a poet, has contributed to the poetic vein with her books Señal en el agua: poemas (1956–1968) (1968, Sign on the Water: Poems [1956–1968]), Campo oscuro (1977, Dark Countryside), and Capilla ardiente (1980, Funeral Chapel). Pura del Prado, an important voice of her generation, expresses her feelings and emotions in one of the most honest and open uses of colloquial language. She has a deep affinity for the African presence in the Cuban cultural milieu. Her books include De codos en el arcoiris (1953, Lying on the Rainbow), La otra orilla (1972, The Other Shore), and Color de Orisha (1973, Color of the Gods). Her poetry also appears in several anthologies. Still other poets include Antonio A. Acosta, author of such books as Mis poemas de otoño (1982, My Autumn Poems), Imágenes (1985, Images), and La inquietud del ala (1986, Restless Wing), as well as Rosa Cabrera, author of Versos míos: selección de poemas (1971, My Verses: A Selection of Poems), Carmen R. Borges, whose books include Raíces (1968, Roots) and Siempre el amor (1976, Love Always), and Ernesto Carmenate with his books Un río inmóvil (1974, Motionless River) and Entre las islas del silencio (1974, Among the Islands of Silence). Finally of the generation of 1953 is José Corrales* and his Nada temas en común (1974, No Common Fears, with other poets), Razones de amargura (1978, Reasons for Bitterness), and Los trabajos de Gerión (1980, The Labors of Gerión), as well as several unpublished manuscripts. The generation of 1970 comprises those authors born as early as 1940 and as late as 1955. These are the poets who, scattered throughout the United States in the first decade of exile during the 1960s, began writing around 1970 and continued to publish throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Although classed as one generation, they may be subdivided into three distinct groups: the conservatives (most of whom belonged to a group known as “El Puente” [The Bridge]), whose attempt to preserve and improve the Spanish linguistic possibilities of Cuban poetry in the United States is caused by their own sense of rootlessness, the group of newly arrived Mariel poets whose unwitting linguistic contribution to the first group is linked to their desire to affirm their newness together with their right to be in exile, and the third group, dubbed the atrevidos or the daring group, whose linguistic experiments led them to explore the limits of their dual cultural environment. Implied in this third group, of course, is the displacement of Cuba as sentimental center of their song by the substitution of Miami or other American venues for nostalgia. 335


To the first group must go the credit for opening the generation. Already in the magazine El Puente (The Bridge) in 1960, they published a few poems and established their historical space in the continuum of Cuban letters, though it would be an exaggeration to consider these, yet, exile writers: they felt their stay in the United States would be temporary, even transitory. José Kozer,* whose books are numerous, offers the trajectory of the fragmented vision of a generation in search of coherence. They include Padres y otras profesiones (1972, Fathers and Other Professions), Este judío de números y letras (1975, This Learned Jew), Jarrón de las abreviaturas (1985, Jar of Abbreviations), and Carece de causa (1988, Without Cause). In addition, he has a series of chapbooks, including a Spanish–English book of poems. Kozer arrived in the United States at age twenty and settled in New York, where he completed his studies and now teaches. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines. In 1974 he received the Julio Tower Poetry Prize in Tenerife for his book Este judío de números y letras. Isel Rivero and Reinaldo García Ramos also belong to El Puente. Since moving to the United States in 1961, Rivero has made New York her home. There she published Tundra (1963), Night Rained Her (1976), and El banquete (1980, The Banquet). One of the founders of El Puente, she was also published in Havana. García Ramos, for his part, has a special place in this generation. A member of El Puente from 1962 to 1964, he left Cuba in 1980 in the Mariel Boatlift, thus sharing in two distinct experiences that have separated rather than united this generation. He was therefore a coauthor of the anthology titled Novísima poesía cubana (1962, Recent Cuban Poetry) and later on the editorial board of Mariel magazine from 1983 to 1984. His poetry, included in many anthologies, has been collected in two books: Acta (1962, Act) and El buen peligro (1987, The Good Danger). To that group must be added Enrique Márquez, Omar Torres, Magaly Alabau, Uva Clavijo,* Manuel Santayana, Octavio Armand, Amando Fernández, Orlando González-Esteva, and Vicente Echerri, though they were not part of it originally. Echerri has written a book in Cuba entitled Luz en la piedra (1985, Light in the Stone), which he reproduced from memory later, winning the seventh Poetry Prize José María Lacalle in Barcelona in 1981. His other books, Casi de memorias (1985, Almost From Memory) and Fragmentos de un discurso amoroso (Fragments of Loving Discourse), complete his production. González-Esteva has written, in addition to his dramatic works, some books of poetry that reflect (as do Isel Rivero’s) an interest in music. These are El angel perplejo (1975, The Perplexed Angel), El mundo se dilata (1979, The World Lingers), Mañas de la poesía (1981, Ways of Poetry), and a forthcoming work, “El pájaro tras la flecha” (The Bird beyond the Arrow). Amando Fernández has definitely become one of the most important members of the group. His works have almost all won distinction in the form of prizes. These include Azar en sombra (1987, Fate in Shadow), El ruiseñor y la espada (1989, The Nightingale and the Sword), and Los siete círculos (1990, 336


The Seven Circles). His prizes include José María Heredia (1986), Mairena (1986), Agustín Acosta (1987), Jaén (1987), and the Góngora and the Juan Ramón Jiménez. He was a Cintas Fellow in Poetry from 1987 to 1988. His abstract poetry reverts upon its nature, making his verse a metapoetic enterprise. Also in this general grouping is Octavio Armand, a very productive and well-received poet. He, of these El Puente poets, is the one who borderlines with the atrevidos, because of his interest in bilingualism as a poetic device. His books include Horizonte no es siempre lejanía (1970, The Horizon Isn’t Always Distant), Entre testigos (1970, Among Witnesses), and Origami (1987). He has also edited Mark Strand: 20 Poemas (1979) and has written two books of criticism. In 1978 Armand founded and became editor of a quarterly literary journal named Escandalar (Compass Room). Magaly Alabau lives in New York and takes part in the theater scene there. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and in numerous magazines. Her books include Electra Clitemnestra (1986), La extremaunción diaria (1986, Daily Last Rites), and Ras (1987). Manuel Santayana has been published in several magazines. His only collection appeared with the title De la luz sitiada (1980, From a Besieged Light). The work of Uva Clavijo* has been featured in two anthologies, and her books of poetry are Versos de exilio (1976, Verses of Exile), Entresemá foros: Poemas escritos en ruta (1981, Between Stoplights: Poems Written En Route), and Tus ojos y yo (1985, Your Eyes and I). She has written plays but is best known for her short stories, which have earned her numerous awards. Enrique Márquez, known under the pen name Maro Ajoel, has also been included in an anthology of Cuban poetry and has published Esquema tentativo del poema (1973, Tentative Sketch of a Poem), RES (Poema colectivo), as a coauthor (1973), and Lo esperado, lo vivido (1975, The Expected, the Experienced). The bilingual edition of Lo esperado, lo vivido received the 1980 Florida Council of Fine Arts Award and was republished in Madrid in 1985. Omar Torres,* a Cintas Fellow, 1978–1979, has won awards for his acting (A.C.E. Best Actor in 1978), has written for the theater, and has written two novels. His poetry includes Conversación Primera (1975, First Conversation), Tiempo robado (1978, Stolen Time), and De nunca a siempre (1981, From Never to Always). His poetic sensibility runs throughout his poetry and his prose; he is a master of sentiment and nuance. The second group of this generation is the Mariel group. Not all of these poets, however, came in the boatlift. Some left about the same time and are thus grouped together because of their long stay in socialist Cuba. These poets are Jesús Barquet,* Roberto Valero, Carlota Caulfield, Belkis Cuza Malé,* and Reinaldo García Ramos. Cuza Malé is a case in point. Although technically outside the Mariel experience, she founded Linden Lane Magazine* in 1982 and still directs the publication along with her husband Heberto Padilla.* Her books of poetry all precede her exile: El viento en la pared (1962, The Wind in the Wall), Los alucinados (1962, The Deluded), and Carta a Ana Frank (1965, Letter to Anne Frank). Her poetry has been included in several anthologies 337


and magazines and has received many prizes. Carlota Caulfield is founder and editor of El gato tuerto (The One-Eyed Cat), a literary arts gazette. Her books include Oscuridad divina (1985, Divine Darkness), El tiempo es una mujer que espera (1986, Time Is a Waiting Woman), and 34th Street and Other Poems (1987). Her interest in English as a vehicle for her poetry puts her in touch with the atrevidos group, the daring ones. The youngest poet of the Mariel group is Roberto Valero, whose pseudonym is Julio Real. Valero was a Cintas Fellow in 1982–1983. His poetry is collected in several books: Desde un ángulo oscuro (1982, From a Dark Corner), En fín la noche (1983, Finally Night), and Dharma (1985), a book of poetic prose. Valero is a prolific young writer with several unpublished books. Jesús J. Barquet’s books include Sin decir el mar (1981, Without Telling the Sea), Icaro (1985, Icarus), and Sagradas herejías: elegías (1985, Sacred Heresies: Elegies). The atrevidos group, mentioned above, was so labeled by Carolina Hospital* in her anthology Cuban American Writers: “Los Atrevidos” (1988). The poets included are Ricardo Pau-Llosa,* Mercedes Limón, Pablo Medina,* Iraida Iturralde, Lourdes Gil, Jorge Guitart, Bertha Sánchez-Bello, Elías Miguel Muñoz,* Gustavo Pérez-Firmat,* and herself. In her book, Hospital included prose selections from Roberto Fernández,* Pablo Medina, Bertha Sánchez-Bello, Carlos Rubio, and Elías Miguel Muñoz. Unfortunately, the introduction and notes give little information on the poets, their works, their awards, and their poetics. Rather, this is a personal anthology. Therefore, here we will deal only with the following poets: Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Lourdes Gil, Iraida Iturralde, Elías Miguel Muñoz, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa. According to Hospital, these poets write in English and are daring because of their acceptance of a new identity and voice. Gustavo Pérez-Firmat certainly does belong to this group as a leader. His books Carolina Cuban in Triple Crown (1987) and Equivocaciones (1989, Mistakes) are experiments in the expansion of a poetic voice and a Cuban American identity. Elías Miguel Muñoz wrote En estas tierras (1988, In These Lands), and several of his works have been published in anthologies and magazines. He has also written two novels and a study, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (1988, From the Shore: Cuban Poetry in Exile). Iraida Iturralde was a Cintas Fellow for 1982–83. Along with Lourdes Gil, she coedited Románica (Romanesque), a literary journal, and Lyra. Since her arrival in the United States in 1962, she has received many awards. Her poetry has been collected in three books, Hubo la viola (1979, There Was the Viola), The Book of Jossaphat (1983), and Tropel de espejos (1987, Crowd of Mirrors). In 1961, Lourdes Gil arrived in the United States. In addition to coediting Románica and Lyra and receiving the Cintas Fellowship for 1979–1980 and several other awards, she has published some important books of poetry. Included are Manuscrito de la niña ausente (1979, Manuscript of the Absent Girl), Vencido el fuego de la especie (1983, Defeated Fire of the Species), and Blanca aldaba preludia (1989, Foretold by White Knocking). Ricardo Pau-Llosa wrote two books of poetry—Veinticinco poemas, Twenty Five Poems (1973) and Dirube 338


(1979)—before Hospital credits him with his first book, Sorting Metaphors (1983). His fourth book, Rogelio Polesello (1984), has continued his productive vein. He has had poetry included in various reviews and other important magazines. His main influence comes from the field of art, about which he writes and teaches.

Short Story The Cuban short story in the United States began with the publication of José María Heredia’s* Cuentos Orientales (Oriental Tales) in 1829. The setting of the stories speaks of the Romantic penchant for exoticism that occasionally took the form of an escape in time to the Middle Ages and at other times of a geographical flight into other territories alien to the author’s and the readers’ homeland. Heredia (1803–1839), whose major literary achievements were in the field of poetry, spent several of his years of exile in the United States and in Mexico. In both countries he published important portions of his work. Cirilo Villaverde,* in addition to his novelistic production, engaged the genre of the short story. Likewise José Martí,* better known as a poet and as a patriot, wrote short stories for the children’s magazine La Edad de Oro (Golden Age). In 1883 he prologued the stories of one of his contemporaries, Rafael de Castro y Palomino, who published his book of stories in New York under the title Cuentos de hoy y de mañana (Short Stories of Today and Tomorrow). The short story, a rich genre in Cuba, was probably also well represented in the United States in the many Cuban newspapers published in various American cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Key West in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. But the history of the short story of that period, covering a little over a century, has yet to be written, because most of the material in those newspapers remains unknown to today’s readers and unedited by our contemporary critical establishment. Material is more readily available during the course of the last thirty years, coincident with the revolutionary period. For the last three decades authors who favor the short story have found it a vehicle for conveying their sense of loss or of remembrance, of projecting their indignation or of recreating a fugitive moment, of imagining a fantasy or of seeking an identity through folkloristic creations. In short, it became as popular a genre as it had been in republican Cuba. One interesting characteristic of recent collections of short fiction, as noted by Julio E. Hernández-Miyares— one of the foremost students of the short story in exile—is the intergenerational mix of authors. These authors derive their inspiration not by associating themselves with a school or movement but by learning from any and all while positioning themselves in the most advantageous context. Hernández-Miyares has published a bibliography of the exile short story and has written an article on the types of short story that can be found in the Cuban diaspora. Among them he cites stories of accusation and testimony, those about the nature of the exile experience, children and family stories, Afro-Cuban and folkloric stories, rural stories, and tales of fantasy and the absurd. 339


Seymour Menton, in his study on the prose fiction of the Cuban Revolution, includes the short story. He notes as worthy of mention the volume of short stories by Beltrán de Quirós entitled Los unos con los otros . . . y el seibo (1971, With Each Other . . . and the Seibo [Tree]) because of the author’s very sincere, direct style of relating the loss of freedom and dignity in one of Cuba’s military camps established for the support of production. Menton also mentions Carlos Ripoll’s Julián Pérez por Benjamín Castillo (1970), a parody of literary censorship in which Castro and Martí engage in a dialectic battle. The irony is that the parody appears in a volume that also parodies the physical appearance of the books produced in Cuba’s Casa de las Américas when these receive the prize bearing its name. Menton’s study analyzes with more detail those writers whom he considers professional short story writers. Among them he lists Lino Novás Calvo* (1903), whose book Maneras de contar (1970, Ways of Storytelling) includes stories written in exile as well as a few of his earlier stories. The predominant theme of his stories, revenge, appears in progressing intensity. He also presents Lydia Cabrera, whose silence of some twenty years was broken when she published in Miami in 1971 her Ayapá: Cuentos de Jicotea (Ayapá: Stories about Turtle), a collection of stories that present the character of the trickster Jicotea. She has also published Cuentos para adultos, niños y retrasados mentales (1983, Stories for Adults, Children, and the Mentally Retarded). José SánchezBoudy’s* Cuentos grises (1966, Grey Stories), Cuentos del hombre (1969, Stories of Man), and Cuentos a luna llena (1971, Stories by the Full Moon), Menton comments, have nothing to do with the politics of exile but rather with other themes. For example, the first collection is about Cuban topics, the second is about Spain and the United States, and the third is a collection of Poe-style horror stories. Asela Gutiérrez Kahn, in her book Las pirañas y otros cuentos cubanos (1972, The Piranhas and Other Cuban Stories), delves into the forms of exile nostalgia and fantasy. Matías Montes Huidobro’s La anunciación y otros cuentos cubanos (1967, The Annunciation and Other Cuban Stories) treats marital infidelity in a variety of styles, and Carlos Alberto Montaner’s two volumes, Póker de brujas y otros cuentos (1968, Witch Poker and Other Stories) and Instantáneas al borde del abismo (con un epilogo desde el fondo) (1970, Snap Shots on the Edge of the Abyss [with an Epilogue from the Bottom]) explores the abnormal mind. The younger writers not studied by Menton include Lourdes Casal, who after her exile returned to Cuba with her book Los fundadores: Alfonso y otros cuentos (1973, The Founder: Alfonso and Other Stories), Uva Clavijo, who was not only a granddaughter of Alfonso Hernández Catá but won the prize issued in his name with her collection Ni verdad ni mentira y otros cuentos (1976, Nor Truth nor Lie and Other Stories), and whose latest book, No puedo más y otros cuentos (1989, I Can’t Stand It Anymore and Other Stories) has won the readership of those who share her existential view of contemporary life. Roberto Fernández has published Cuentos sin rumbo (1975, Stories without Direction) and Hilda Perera won the Lazarillo Prize for her volume Cuentos para chicos y grandes 340


(1976, Stories for the Little and Big). Leonardo Fernández Marcané, in addition to his own creative sallies into the field of the short story, has produced an anthology entitled 20 cuentistas cubanos (1978, Twenty Cuban Short Story Writers), which not only contains his study but illustrates Hernández-Miyares’s mixture of generations and styles. Further study of the short story, however, awaits research and analysis by scholars knowledgeable about the genre. Further Reading Arces, Mercy, et al., eds., Características nacionales de la literatura cubana (Dominican Republic: Corripio, 1986). de Armas, José R., and Charles W. Stule, Cuban Consciousness in Literature: 1923–1973: (A Critical Anthology of Cuban Culture) (Miami: Universal, 1978). Cuadra, Angel, Escritores en Cuba socialista (Washington, D.C.: Fundación Nacional Cubano-Americana, 1986). Escarpenter, José, “El exilio en Matías Montes Huidobro y José Triana” Linden Lane Magazine Vol. 9, No. 4 (1990): 63–64. González, Yara, “La poesía cubana en los Estados Unidos” in Culturas hispánicas en los Estados Unidos, eds. María Jesus Buxó Rey and Tomás Calvo Buezas (Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1990: 681–689). Gutiérrez de la Solana, Alberto, “La novela cubana escrita fuera de Cuba” Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana Vols. 2–3 (1973–1974): 167–189. Hernández, A. R., and Lourdes Casal, “Cubans in the United States: A Survey of the Literature” Estudios Cubanos Vol. 5 (1975): 25–51. Hernández, Gema, “La cuentística cubana” Krisis Vol. 2, No. 1 (1977). Hernández-Miyares, Julio E., “The Cuban Short Story in Exile: A Selected Bibliography” Hispania Vol. 54, No. 2 (May 1971): 384. Hernández-Miyares, Julio E., Narradores cubanos de hoy (Miami: Universal, 1975). Hospital, Carolina, “Los Atrevidos: The Cuban American Writers” Linden Lane Magazine Vol. 6 (1987): 22–23. Hospital, Carolina, “Los hijos del exilio cubano y su literatura” Explicación de textos literarios Vol. 15, No. 2 (1986–1987): 104–114. Izquierdo-Tejido, Pedro, El cuento cubano. (Panorámica y antología) (San José: Lii, 1983). Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Leal, Rine, Breve historia del teatro cubano (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1980). Lipp, Solomon, “The Anti-Castro Novel” Hispania Vol. 58 (1975): 284–296. Luis, William, Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Méndez Soto, Ernesto, Panorama de la novela cubana de la revolución (1959–1970) (Miami: Universal, 1977). Menton, Seymour, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975). Montes Huidobro, Matías, Persona, vida y máscara en el teatro cubano (Miami: Universal, 1973). Montes Huidobro, Matías, and Yara González, Bibliografía crítica de la poesía cubana (New York: Plaza Mayor, 1972).

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Mormino, Gary, The Immigrant World of Ybor City (New York: Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island Centennial Series, 1987). Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (Madrid: Betania, 1988). Perrier, José Luis, Bibliografía dramática cubana (New York: Phos Press, 1926). Ripoll, Carlos, Cubanos en los Estados Unidos (New York: Las Americas, 1987). Rivero, Eliana, “From Immigrant to Ethnics: Cuban Women Writers in the United States” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). Robreno, Eduardo, Historia del teatro popular cubano (Havana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana, 1961). Rodríguez Sardiñas, Orlando, La última poesía cubana (Madrid: Hispanova, 1973). Ruiz del Viso, Hortensia, “Poesía cubana de la rebeldía: poetas del encierro, poetas del exilio” Folio Vol. 16 (1984): 58–68. Sánchez-Boudy, José, Historia de la literatura cubana del exilio: la novela (Miami: Universal, 1975). Valdés, Bernardo José, Panorama del cuento cubano (Barcelona: Medinaceli, 1976). Yolanda, Apuntes sobre el teatro colonial (Havana: Cuadernos Cubanos de la Universidad de La Habana, 1968).

Rodolfo Cortina Cubí y Soler, Mariano (1801–1875). The Spanish-born university professor Mariano Cubí y Soler was an early professor of Spanish language and literature at various universities in the United States, including St. Mary’s College in Baltimore and the College of Orleans in New Orleans in the 1820s and 1830s. A Catalan by birth, Cubí y Soler came to the United States at age twenty and taught Spanish in Baltimore at various levels. He later left the city to go to Havana and then to Tampico, Mexico, where he founded secondary schools. He returned to the United States in 1837, where he taught Spanish at the College of Orleans until 1842, when he returned to Spain. Cubí y Soler was a prolific writer of Spanish grammar books, dictionaries, and other texts for university classes. Included among these were his Nuevo diccionario portátil, de las lenguas española é inglesa (1823, New Dictionary of the Castilian Language, of the Spanish and English Languages), Grammatica de la lengua castellana: adaptada a toda clase de discipulos, a todo sistema de enseñanza (1824, Grammar of the Spanish Language: Adapted for All Types of Students for All Systems of Teaching), El traductor español; or, A practical system for translating the Spanish language. To which are added observations on the Mariano Cubí y Soler. 342

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modes generally pursued in learning languages (1826), The English translator: o nuevo i práctico sistema de traduccion/por Mariano Cubi i Soler; adaptado al ingles para los que hablen español (1828, The English Translator: or New and Practical System for Translating, by Mariano Cubi i Soler: Adapted to English for Those Who Speak Spanish) and El conductor inglés y español: ó série de diálogos familiares y cartas de comercio (18?, The English and Spanish Conductor: or Series of Familiar Dialogs and Commercial Letters). These are just a few of the many editions that he produced. He went on to apply these grammar systems to French and Latin as well, also producing grammars for these languages. Cubí y Soler was an obsessive believer in the pseudoscience of phrenology and produced various books on the subject, including Introducción al studio de la frenología (1836, Introduction to the Study of Phrenology) and Manual de frenología (1844, Phrenology Handbook). In fact, his travels in Spain after 1842 were intended for his promotion of this pseudoscience, whereupon he became a laughingstock of Spanish intellectuals and was eventually tried in the religious tribunal of Santiago de Compostela for heresy. Further Reading Leavitt, Sturgis, “The Teaching of Spanish in the United States” Hispania Vol. 44, No. 4 (1961): 591–625.

Nicolás Kanellos Cuchi Coll, Isabel (1904–). Dramatist, novelist, journalist, biographer, historian, and scholar Isabel Cuchi Coll was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1904. Granddaughter of the historian Cayetano Coll y Toste, Isabel began her studies in Puerto Rico and continued her scholarly career first in New York and then at the Ciudad Universitaria in Madrid. In Spain she wrote her first book, Del Madrid literario (1934, On Literary Madrid), a collection of biographies of famous pre–Civil War Spanish authors and poets such as Ramón del ValleInclán, Pío Baroja, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Federico Garcia Lorca. Upon returning to Puerto Rico, she began to write for the New York magazine Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters) and published her second book, Oro nativo (1936, Native Gold), a collection of biographies of prominent Puerto Rican authors. She returned to New York, where she worked for the United Press International while studying journalism at Columbia University. She also worked for Sterling Products, writing novels for radio broadcasts. In 1945, she published Mujer (Woman), an essay that discussed relatively unmentioned topics of that decade, such as the economic and social independence of women as well as homosexuality and divorce. She returned again to Puerto Rico—this time permanently—and published her three major plays. La novia del estudiante (1965, The Student’s Fiancée) is a play about a young woman who leaves her boyfriend, choosing social liberty instead of waiting for him to finish his studies and marrying a future doctor. Perhaps her greatest theatrical work, La familia de Justo Malgenio (1970, Justo Magenio’s Family) is a comical look at the difficulties that a Puerto Rican family faces in New York and the gaps between the older and younger generations that are 343

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magnified in a country not their own and when surrounded by a language that is not their native tongue; as such, it is clearly a work of immigrant* literature. El seminarista (1971, The Seminarian) examines the difference between conservative Spain and liberal Puerto Rico when a future priest falls in love with his Puerto Rican cousin. Cuchi Coll also wrote a series of short narratives during this period, Trece novelas cortas (Three Novellas), although the quality of her prose does not match that of her dramas. During her old age, her literary production did not stop. Del mundo de la farándula (1980, The World of the Theater) is a collection of biographies of Puerto Rican actors and actresses, and in 1984 she published her first novel, La espera (The Wait). Much as La novia del estudiante, the novel follows the frustrations of Vivian as she waits for the man she loves to finish his schooling. In her fiction, Cuchi Coll is at her best when analyzing the conflicts and aggravations that different cultures experience when they interact, as in La familia de Justo Malgenio. The parents simply cannot relate to the culture in which their children are being educated and working. The filial connection is practically lost, and the parents are helpless. When presenting her parents to her fiancé at the end of the play, Santa explains the difference between Puerto Rican and American weddings: “¡Es que, así son las bodas aquí, mammy, de sorpresa!” (“That’s how weddings are here, Mom—surprise!” 127). Everything about the new land is not only frustrating to Justo and his wife, Remedios, but surprising, and the immigrants are forced to cope in the face of such differences. Further Reading Babín, María Teresa, Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña (New York: Las Américas Publishing, 1958).

Craig Denison Culture Clash. Symbolically, on Cinco de Mayo, 1984, a group of Chicano actor/entertainers, including Chicano Richard Montoya and two Salvadoran Americans, Ric Salinas and Herbert Sigüenza (initially José Antonio Burciaga,* Marga Gómez, and Mónica Palacios also participated), formed an improvisational theater company: Culture Clash. Since then, the group has played in such venues as the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Public Theater, Mark Taper Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, INTAR, Dallas Theater Center, Berkeley Repertory Theater, South Coast Repertory Theater, and San Diego Repertory Theater. In addition, Culture Clash has been invited to countless universities, colleges, and comedy nightclubs throughout the country. Culture Clash writes and performs its own material, such as the renowned play, “A Bowl of Beings,” which satirizes the question of immigration and premiered on the Public Broadcasting System’s Great Performances Series, “The Mission,” which semi-autobiographically deals with the historical oppression of Mission Indians and with racism in theater and entertainment, “The Return of Che,” which revives and comically updates Che Guevara, and “Radio Mambo,” in which Culture Class takes on the politically rightwing Cuban community. All four were published in the first collection, Cul344

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Culture Clash at the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas.

ture Class: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy (1998). Culture Clash satirizes many of the political and social issues that confront the Latino community without being strident or overly polemic, a feat accomplished by injecting humor that is often self-deprecating. In addition, Culture Clash has been in the vanguard of creating and exemplifying a Chicano/Latino aesthetic that crosses linguistic, cultural, and ideological borders at will, evincing 345

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the Latino’s power to choose from and navigate distinct identities depending on the social setting and politics of the moment. To date, only performers— performance poets and improvisational theater companies, for instance— have been able to represent this fluidity that so characterizes Latino life in the United States. Further Reading “Culture Clash” (www. cultureclash.com).

F. Arturo Rosales Cumpián, Carlos (1953–). Carlos Cumpián is one of the pioneers among Chicago Mexican and Mexican American writers in identifying themselves as Chicano and presenting and publishing their work in the city during the 1970s. From San Antonio, Cumpián came to Chicago as a boy and attended school in the city. His interest in poetry was awakened by the presentations of Chicago Puerto Rican poet David Hernández* and cultivated by contacts with other young writers, such as Carlos Morton,* Ana Castillo,* Sandra Cisneros,* and his “spiritual father,” Carlos Cortez.* Starting as the poetry editor for Abrazo (Embrace), the small journal of the Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH, Chicano Artistic Movement), Cumpián soon became the leading figure in the organization, shifting its emphasis from the arts to print media and poetry, developing chapbooks and small volumes of verse, and coordinating a group project of poetic performance. Cumpián also became a staff member of the campus journal Ecos while pursuing his B.A. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The uncredited editor of MARCH’s collection, Emergency Tacos, featuring his own work alongside that of Sandra Cisneros and other writers, Cumpián went on to produce three volumes of his own: Coyote Sun (1990), Latino Rainbow (1994), and Armadillo Charm (1997). In Coyote Sun, Cumpián’s work evokes the sound and fury of barrio streets, and almost all this work is profoundly and directly urban in its irony, cynicism, and sarcasm. But what modifies all of this is his strong ideological commitment to Native American strains and the more rurally and folk-rooted antimodern dimensions emanating from the earliest phases of Chicano Movement* culture and writing. At this point, there was a strong “Green Peace” and “New Age” current to Cumpián’s work and thought (a concern with health food, ecology, and so forth) that inevitably led him to champion precapitalist culture as he espoused an indigenist stance developed with Carlos Cortez* in their interaction with Midwest Native American poets. It is this syncretism of New Age and Chicano indigenist ideology that generates contradiction and tension within the urban patter and verbal twists that dominate his poetic style Cumpián sees the world as a harmonious cycle disrupted by European conquest, the invasion of Texas by gringos, and all that we call history. History is in many respects the enemy, but there is no uneating the apple: once in the stream, it is swim or die. Cumpián devours every aspect of what is to him a fallen world, marking the stages, the dates, and the modes of disintegration, 346

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promoting consciousness of further forces of destruction and creation, filling in the missing pages, calling attention to false and illusory modes of salvation, and, above all, searching in Chicano and Native American lore for all ways of recovering spiritual wholeness and moving toward human regeneration. Cumpián’s Armadillo Charms is his most important book. His concern with totemic or mythical animals becomes fully involved in a Chicano transmutation of Aztec magic and animism. Although the coyote is often seen as the exploiter of undocumented Mexicans, Cumpián chooses to connect Chicano struggles with the coyote in a positive light. The coyote represents Chicano Indian identity: perseverance and survival by wits at the margins of society and human habitat. Encroached, endangered, the coyote is a magician, a trickster, a poet, who draws on the modern world (using telephones, signing cards, even publishing books) to maintain a connection with nature and life. This is Cumpián negotiating his Texan Chicano identity through the complexities of Chicago Latino life. Somehow the coyote has attributes that take us to Cumpián’s earlier identification with Buddhism, but of course this connection is always inflected by his concerns with New World indigenism, balance, and ecology. Cumpián is still the ironic rapper, the storyteller, the performance artist on paper and in action. But now his New Age qualities turn postmodern in a world (dis)order marked by great capital expansion and an anti-Latino backlash even as the Latinization and “Aztlanization” of the U.S. continues. Further Reading Zimmerman, Marc, “Carlos Cumpián” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 209: Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 52–60). Zimmerman, Marc, “Transplanting Roots and Taking Off: Latino Writers in Illinois” in Writers in Illinois, ed. John Hallwas (Urbana, IL: Stormline Press, 1989: 77–116).

Marc Zimmerman Cuza Malé, Belkis (1942–). Belkis Cuza Malé is a Cuban poet and writer who was imprisoned by the Cuban government in 1971, along with her husband Heberto Padilla,* for writing anti-revolutionary poems. Though both were released shortly afterward, her works were censored and her activities monitored until she went into exile in 1979. Born on June 15, 1942, in Guantanamo, she and her parents moved to Santiago de Cuba in 1954. She attended the Universidad de Oriente, earning a master’s in Spanish American and Cuban literature in 1964. In 1962, the Department of Culture of the same university published her first book of poetry, El viento en la pared (The Wind at the Wall). In this volume, Cuza Malé examined her growth as a poet, revealing a fascination with words and the creative process, the poems light and celebratory. In 1964, Cuza Malé relocated to Havana, where she continued literature studies at the University of Havana while also writing for the cultural section of the newspaper Hoy. When the paper ceased publication, she was transferred to Granma, the official organ of Cuba’s Communist Party but was fired two years later for expressing views critical of the 347

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revolution. In 1967, she was hired by the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (Cuban Writers and Artists Union) to edit the journal La Gaceta de Cuba (Cuban Gazette). In 1967, she married poet Heberto Padilla. During this period she wrote three books of poems: Tiempo de sol (1963, Time of the Sun), Cartas a Ana Frank (1966, Letters to Anne Frank), and Juego de damas (1970, The Game of Checkers). Tiempo de sol is a somber volume in which the poet contemplates a world filled with anxiety and destruction. Cartas a Ana Frank was written as a diary; the poems are sad and lament man’s inhumanity to man. Both volumes received honorary citations in the Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas) literary contests. The third volume, Juego de damas, was deemed subversive and was shredded by Cuban authorities. After hers and Padilla’s arrest, Cuza Malé lived in virtual silence and isolation in Cuba. In 1979, she migrated to the United States. In 1980, her husband joined her in exile, and they moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where they edited the literary journal Linden Lane. In 1984, she authored El clavel y la rosa (The Carnation and the Rose), a fictionalized biography of the Cuban poet Juana Borrero, who died in 1898 while still a teenager. In 1994, she wrote Elvis: la tumba sin sosiego (Elvis: The Tomb with Peace) and in 1996 En busca de Selena (In Search of Selena), explorations of the cultural impact of the two legendary performers and their tragic deaths. In 1997, she relocated to Forth Worth, Texas, where she founded La Casa Azul: Centro Cultural Cubano (The Blue House: Cuban Cultural Center), a cultural institution and art gallery. Despite a tumultuous relationship with Padilla and their eventual separation in the late 1990s, the two remained friends. After Padilla’s death in 2000, Cuza Malé added his name to the society: Centro Cultural Cubano Heberto Padilla. Cuza Malé writes for several periodicals in Argentina, France, Mexico, and Spain. Through the Casa Azul, she is involved in charity work and assistance to the Latino community in Texas. In 2002, she published her censored book, Juego de damas. She continues to defend the memory of Padilla (often criticized as an opportunist), while also attempting to make the world aware, through her blog on the Internet and through her other writings, of the repression of Cuban intellectuals on the island. Further Reading Figueredo, D. H., “Interview with Belkis Cuza Malé” November, 2003. Niurka, Norma, “El más allá de Belkis Cuza Malé,” El Nuevo Herald (Dec. 17, 2000: 3E). Weiser, Nora, Open to the Sun: A Bilingual Anthology of Latin American Women Poets (Van Nuys, CA: Perivale Press, 1980).

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D Décimas. The décima, named for its ten lines, is a poetic composition that has been cultivated in Hispanic tradition, both in Spain and in the New World, since the early Renaissance. Most literary scholars believe that literate poets on the Iberian peninsula (possibly Vicente Espinel) developed the form as a sophisticated native structure similar to the equally complex sonnet, which developed in Italy. They also believe that it passed into oral literature as the common folk began reciting décimas that they had heard recited and began adopting the form to their own themes and expressions. For centuries, similar conclusions have been passed down about the sonnet, which ultimately proved to have its origins in oral poetic expression in Sicily, passing into written tradition with such poets as Petrarch, who perfected it as a written literary genre. Probably the same is true of the décima: it arose among the folk in Spain, passed into written literary discourse, and became popular among both literate and oral poets or song composers. Among Latinos in the United States, the décima reveals both literate and oral traditions. In the Southwest, writers continued the literate décima tradition that was inherited from Mexico. Within that broad tradition, Mexican and Mexican American poets cultivated the décima as a specialized verse form that was appropriate for debates and polemics, often of a political nature. Southwestern Spanish-language newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are rife with décimas written by both practiced poets and community bards who were engaged in supporting or attacking candidates for office, debating the pros and cons of political policy, interpreting and examining social issues, and so on. The practice of the poetic debate is long-standing

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in Hispanic tradition: it originated from oral poets facing off in competition to see who had the greater mastery in improvising verses on any given topic and through a variety of verse forms. Related to this debate is the custom of the décima among Puerto Rican composers of song, often called trovadores, or troubadours. The Puerto Rican décima does not have the specialized function of political or social debate, as in the Mexican tradition; however, it has developed as a form for demonstrating the artistry and mastery of its complicated rhyme scheme and internal poetics, as applied to any theme. The more technical, scientific, or obscure the theme and the more difficult the pattern of rhyme, the more highly regarded the oral composer, especially during a debate or a certamen, or contest. Thus, unlike the unselfconscious composers of the Mexican corrido,* whose main objective is to narrate a story, the Puerto Rican décimistas are conscious and proud of their artistry, consider themselves artists, and are especially proud—even boastful—when they can improvise a stanza with the difficult esdrújula rhyme (rhyming three syllables, with the third from the end being tonic at the end of each line) or when they can elaborate a stanza on a difficult theme such as astronomy, DNA, or some other recondite topic. This tradition, which passed to the continental United States with the migration of Puerto Ricans, is represented in song structure—certainly in traditional jíbaro music, but even in Afro-Caribbean salsa, as well as in the published compositions of such poets as Pedro Carrasquillo.* The décima is, moreover, identified as such a traditional song that it is one of the most popular forms for Christmas songs, especially those that lament being far from home during the holidays and describe the culture conflict that the immigrants feel. The most popular trovador to perform in New York City was the famed El Canario, although numbers of décimistas traveled back and forth between the Island and New York City, especially during the holidays. The literary structure of the décima is ten lines of eight syllables (using Spanish prosody to count); the pattern of rhymes is varied but is most often the following: abbaaccddc, with both consonants and vowels rhyming. In the décimista’s oral performance, he or she improvises a string of at least four or five of these stanzas, often along a plot line or argument that continues rhyme patterns and internal poetics from one stanza to the next. The ability to improvise is amazing, harkening back to the oral acuity of preliterate culture. During the 1950s and 1960s, a Spanish-language radio station in New York City had the news broadcast by a décimista who improvised on the news events of the day. (See also Folklore and Oral Tradition.) Further Reading Marrero, Carmen, “La Décima Popular Puertorriqueña” in Antología de décimas populares puertorriqueñas (San Juan: Editorial Cordillera, 1971: 5–30).

Nicolás Kanellos Del Monte, Domingo (1804–1851). It was literary mentor and promoter of Cuban culture and writers Domingo Del Monte who prompted Cuban authors to write antislavery texts, thus helping launch abolitionist literature on the Island. 350

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A writer and bibliophile, Del Monte hosted in his home tertulias—informal gatherings or symposiums on culture, literature, and politics—which attracted Havana’s emerging writers and intellectuals, including economist José Antonio Saco, novelist Cirilo Villaverde,* and the poet-slave Juan Francisco Manzano. Del Monte was born August 4, 1804, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, but moved to Cuba in 1810. He attended the San Carlos Seminary and the University of Havana, befriending along the way educator and writer Félix Varela* and legendary poet José María Heredia.* Becoming a lawyer in 1827, he traveled to Europe and the United States. Back in Cuba in 1829, he was elected president of the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (Friends of the Homeland Economic Society), a national organization that promoted culture and education. In 1835, he founded, in the province of Matanzas, the first public library outside Havana. He also wrote for and founded numerous influential journals, including Revista Bimestre Cubana (Cuban Bimonthly Review) and La Moda (Fashion). In 1834, Del Monte began to host tertulias in which he coordinated and led discussions on European literature, politics, and slavery. The members of the tertulia also read aloud poems and stories that they had written, which the group would comment on. The tertulias were so popular that the Spanish authorities suspected the gatherings were an occasion to conspire against the Crown, and, in 1843, Del Monte had to flee Cuba to avoid arrest. While living in Paris, Del Monte was accused of participating in The Conspiracy of the Ladder, a supposedly abolitionist plot against the colonial government. He proved his innocence and was able to relocate to Madrid. In Spain, Del Monte lobbied for colonial reforms that would improve relations between Cuba and Spain and suggested the replacement of slavery with the paid labor of white workers. He passed away in Spain in 1851, and his body was sent to Cuba for burial in 1852. Del Monte wrote hundreds of letters, which were collected in seven volumes— titled Centón epistolario de Domingo del Monte (Collected Letters of Domingo Del Monte), the volumes were published between 1926 and 1957—and a bibliography of Cuban works, La isla de Cuba tal cual esta (1836, The Isle of Cuba as It Is). His true contribution, however, was the leadership that he exerted and the encouragement to write for patriotic writers such as Cirilo Villaverde and others who went into exile in the United States. In this light, his tertulias were the key to launching a generation of writers who fought colonialism. For many literary historians, Del Monte’s tertulias were responsible for the literary boom on the Island and in the United States from 1835 to 1843. His essays were reprinted and appeared frequently in Spanish-language periodicals in the United States during the period of struggle for independence. Further Reading Andioc, Sophie, Centón epistolario/Domingo del Monte; ensayo introductorio (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2002). Bueno, Salvador, Domingo del Monte (Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1986).

D. H. Figueredo 351

Delgado, Abelardo

Delgado, Abelardo (1931–2004). Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado is one of the most renowned and prolific Chicano poets, a pioneer of bilingualism in Hispanic poetry, and a consummate oral performer of his works. Delgado was born in the small town of La Boquilla de Conchos in northern Mexico on November 27, 1931. At age twelve, he and his mother immigrated to El Paso, Texas. In El Paso, he lived in a poor Mexican barrio until 1969. Despite early problems with the English language in school, Delgado excelled as a student, and, by graduation in 1950 from Bowie High School, he had become vice president of the National Honor Society chapter. He went on to college while working at a variety of jobs and graduated from the University of Texas, El Paso, in 1962. Since that time, he has earned his living as a counselor for migrant workers and as a teacher in Texas and later in Colorado. During the height of the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s and throughout most of the 1970s, Delgado was also one of the most popular speakers and poetry readers in the Southwest and lived a life of frequent tours and engagements. Besides writing numerous poems, essays, and stories that have been published in literary magazines and anthologies nationwide, Delgado is the author of fourteen books and chapbooks; many of these were published through his own small printing operation, known as Barrio Press. Delgado’s first book, Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind (1969), is his best known; it contains many of the poems that he had performed personally in the heat of the protest movement and that subsequently received widespread distribution through small community newspapers and handto-hand circulation throughout the Southwest. Poems such as “stupid america” not only embodied the values of life in the barrio but also called for the types of social reform that became anthems for the Chicano Movement. Other noteworthy titles include Mortal Sin Kit (1973), It’s Cold: 52 Cold-Thought Poems of Abelardo (1974), A Thermos Bottle Full of Self-Pity: Twenty-five Abelardo Delgado reading at the first National Latino Book Fair in Chicago in 1979. Bottles of Abelardo (1975), A 352

Delgado, Juan

Quilt of Words: Twenty-five Quilts of Abelardo (1976), Under the Skirt of Lady Justice: Forty-three Skirts of Abelardo (1978), and Here Lies Lalo: 25 Deaths of Abelardo (1979); many of these works were the result of $5.00 investments that Delgado collected in the printing of the chapbooks, which were returned, on sale of the print run, as $6.00—not quite self-publication, it nonetheless allowed Abelardo’s supporters to underwrite the dissemination of his poems on an annual basis. His book of essays, Letters to Louise (1982), which explores the feminist movement and the social roles of women and men, was awarded the Premio Quinto Sol, the national award for Chicano literature. In 2001, Delgado published a compilation of his favorite works, Living Life on His Own Terms: Poetic Wisdom of Abelardo. In all, Delgado was a remarkably agile bilingual poet, an outstanding satirist and humorist, an undaunted and militant protester and pacifist, and a warmhearted and loving narrator and chronicler of the life and tradition of his people. He died of liver cancer on July 23, 2004. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). Kanellos, Nicolás, “An Overview of Latino Poetry: The Iceberg below the Surface” American Book Review (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 5, 10.

Nicolás Kanellos Delgado, Juan (1960–). Born on February 28, 1960, in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in Colton, California, Delgado did not become a naturalized citizen of the United States until 1989. Delgado, who graduated in English from California State University in 1983 and received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine in 1985, went on to make a life for himself as a professor and academic administrator. But his first love was poetry, and he has distinguished himself by publishing his poems in magazines throughout the United States and authoring four important collections of poems: All Too Familiar (2002), El Campo (1998, The Country), Green Web (1994), and Rush of Hands (Camino del Sol) (2003). In addition to various fellowships and distinctions, Delgado was the first Chicano whose manuscript won the Contemporary Poetry Series contest, resulting in the publication of Green Web by the University of Georgia Press. He was also awarded the Whittenberger Fellowship in 2000. Delgado is a poet of both the urban and the rural scene. El Campo explores the lives of Mexican farm workers, their joys and sorrows; Rush of Hands confronts such urban realities as gang violence, labor organizing, and illegal immigration. Delgado has an active tour schedule and spends a great deal of time teaching poetry writing to high school and middle school students, as well as students in alternative schools. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “An Overview of Latino Poetry: The Iceberg below the Surface” American Book Review (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 5, 10.


Díaz, Junot

Junot Díaz.

354

Díaz, Junot (1968–). Born in the Dominican Republic, short story writer Junot Díaz came to the United States with his parents when he was six years old. Raised in a low-income neighborhood in Parlin, New Jersey, by his housecleaner mother and forklift-driving father. Díaz himself became a mill worker after high school, but he soon decided to get a college education. He received a B.A. in English from Rutgers University and also studied history, with the idea of becoming a high school teacher. Because of his financial aid situation, he decided to enter the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Cornell University, where he worked as a teaching assistant. While there, he began writing his breakthrough book, Drown, and received his M.F.A. in 1995. His short fiction soon appeared in noteworthy literary magazines throughout the United States, and Drown (1996), his debut collection of these stories, received national acclaim. Even before the publication of Drown, he had already been hailed as a great discovery based on a story he had published in Story magazine. Díaz brings the grit and dreariness of urban life, very much experienced by him as a laborer before attending college, to his writing. Despite his stories’ being populated with gang bangers, drug dealers, and immigrants, Díaz is able to convey a sense of piety and pride in survival. He was soon named one of the “New Faces of 1996” and an “overnight literary sensation” by Newsweek because of his excellent short fiction. The interrelated stories in Drown, which are often narrated by Yunior de las Casas, form a type of odyssey of the immigrant experience with realism and humor, moving from the Dominican Republic to the barrios in New Jersey. Drown was selected for a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and as an American Library Association Notable Book. After dealing with fame as well as many false starts on two new novels, in 2007, Díaz published his long-awaited novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a Dominican nerd, growing up in a New Jersey barrio, who wants to become a writer and win the love of a sweetheart but must overcome his family’s curse. More than just the story of the protagonist, Oscar, the novel also narrates the lives of the members of his immediate family. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao made The New York Times best seller list in September and was chosen as one of the Best Books by Publishers Weekly. The novel was awarded the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, as well as the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Currently, Díaz teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

Díaz Guerra, Alirio

Further Reading Bures, Frank, “Chasing the Whale” Poets & Writers (Sept.–Oct. 2007): 52–57. Figueredo, D. H., ed., Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature, Vol. 1 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2006). Radelat, Ana, “Junot Díaz” Hispanic (Nov. 2000): 32.

Nicolás Kanellos Díaz Guerra, Alirio (1862-c. 1925). Born in Sagamoso, Colombia, to a prominent political family, Díaz Guerra became involved in politics from a young age; he also was a creative writer from school age and, by his teen years, was publishing poetry in Colombian newspapers. By age twenty, he published his collection of romantic poetry, Ensayos literarios (Literary Essays), and, at age twenty-two, he founded his own newspaper, El Liberal (The Liberal), which openly opposed the regime in power. Díaz Guerra soon became part of a revolution that resulted in his exile. In Venezuela, he again became involved in politics and was once again driven into exile in 1895. This time, he and his family took refuge in New York City, where he remained for the rest of his life, serving as a salesman of medical supplies and writing for Spanish-language periodicals. In 1901, Díaz Guerra published two books of poems: Nuevas poesías (New Poems) and Ecce homo (This Is Man). The latter book, a long narrative poem of a religious, moralistic, and philosophical nature, possibly led the way to his greatest contribution, which was the first-ever Spanish-language novel of immigration to the United States, Lucas Guevara (1914), a moralistic narrative about a young greenhorn who comes to New York and is corrupted by this Sodom. Some scholars have noted that Díaz Guerra published other books before Lucas Guevara, but, to date, they have not been located. It is in Lucas Guevara that most of the conventions that dominate Hispanic immigrant literature appear: the hopes and disillusionment of the immigrant, which leads either to a return to the homeland or death in the metropolis; the protest against mistreatment of immigrants; Hispanic nationalism in reaction to the riches and technological advances of the United States; American women personifying all of the ills of the metropolis and serving as temptresses for Latin males. Among Díaz Guerra’s missing books is May, a novel about society that perhaps continues the trajectory of immigrant literature that he began with his first novel. Further Reading Browitt, Jeff, “Sexual Anxiety in Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara” Hispania Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec. 2005): 677–686. Kanellos, Nicolás, and Liz Hernández, “Introduction,” Alirio Díaz Guerra, Lucas Guevara (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos

Alirio Díaz Guerra.

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Diego Padró, José I. de

Diego Padró, José I. de (1896–1974). One of the most sophisticated but overlooked writers in Puerto Rican and Hispanic immigrant literature is José I. de Diego Padró, an avant-garde writer in the full sense of the word, who challenged the generic limits of literature as well as the understanding of critics. Born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, on April 12, 1896 (some sources state 1899), he received his high school education in San Juan, served in the U.S. military during World War I, and lived for a number of years in New York. De Diego Padró worked as a journalist, both in New York and on the Island; his partly autobiographical novel, En babia (1940, In Babel), seems to indicate that he took on other types of office work in New York to keep life and limb together, especially during the Depression. In Puerto Rican letters, he is remembered for pairing up with poet Luis Palés Matos in starting a short-lived poetry movement called “Diepalismo that insisted on onomatopoeia”; today, it seems as though these two were its only members. Even in his prolific prose, De Diego Padró was always poetic and commanded an immense lexicon that was drawn from all human fields of endeavor. De Diego Padró’s most important opus is an extensive trilogy, which contains, as its second volume, the experimental novel of immigration En babia, a two-volume tour de force that not only deconstructs the American Dream as it follows the suffering of the protagonist in the frigid New York metropolis but also attempts to rewrite or expand the rules for novel writing, It is at once a response to such Spanish novelistic innovators as Jacinto Benavente and Miguel de Unamuno, as well as a predecessor of France’s nouveau roman. This literary landmark may have been overlooked because of its length (more than 800 pages), its taxing of readers’ erudition, or even, perhaps, the fact that De Diego Padró’s stay in New York falls outside the Island’s literary mainstream. The first and second installments of the trilogy are Sebastián Guenard (1924), which reads like an outline for En babia, and El tiempo jugó conmigo (1960, Time Played a Trick on Me), in which his protagonist has returned to Puerto Rico but nevertheless continues to elaborate on his experiences in New York and as part of the U.S. Army. De Diego Padró’s other works include the poetry collections La última lámpara de los dioses (1921, The Last Lamp of the Gods), Ocho epístolas mostrencas (1952, Eight Oafish Epistles), and Escaparate iluminado (1969, Lighted Showroom), as well as the following prose works: El minotauro se devora a sí mismo (1965, The Minotaur Devours Himself), Un cencerro de badajos (1969, The Calapper’s Cowbells), and El hombrecito que veía en grande (1973, The Little Man Who Saw a Great Deal). En babia won the award for the novel from the Institute for Puerto Rican Literature in 1940. De Diego Padró died in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, in 1974. Further Reading “José I. De Diego Padró” in Breve encyclopedia de la cultura puertorriqueña, eds. Rubén del Rosario, Esther Melón de Díaz, and Edgar Martínez Masdeu (San Juan: Editorial Cordillera, 1976).

Nicolás Kanellos Dominican American Literature. An outline of Dominican literature in the United States might usefully begin by delimiting the confines of the field. 356

Dominican American Literature

Today, criticism and theory speak confidently of the literary act as one that almost invariably transcends national boundaries, cultural heritage, linguistic background, and social identity. A writer in Santo Domingo or one in Boston is equally likely to have been the first to feel the urge to make worlds with words after reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Gibran’s The Prophet, or St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince. In other words, the writer’s literary revelation may have been triggered by the pen of a Russian in the 1860s, a Japanese in the 1960s, a Lebanese American in the 1920s, or a Frenchman in the 1940s—someone writing from another country, another civilization, another historical experience. However, the organization of literary knowledge along ethnic or national lines still remains current, especially in diverse multicultural societies such as the United States, in which differentiated segments of the population have found it necessary to demand recognition for their respective traditions. An outline of U.S. Dominican literature, therefore, might first address the question of what qualifies for inclusion. Without direct reference to the operating contours, scholars who have attended to the literary production of Dominicans in the United States, such as Franklin Gutiérrez and Daisy Cocco de Filippis, have generally circumscribed their inquiry to writers born or raised in the United States or who came to this country at an age when their literary sensibility could still be shaped by their U.S. immigrant experience. As a result, the language in which this literature is written varies according to each writer’s profile—namely English for those born or raised in this country, Spanish for those who left the Dominican Republic with the rudiments of an education in their native tongue, and “Spanglish” for those who, boasting equal access, feel equipped and compelled to explore the expressive possibilities of the intersection of the native and the acquired tongue. The literary presence in the United States of the Dominican experience dates to a period generally referred to as “before the diaspora,” a large chronology from the late nineteenth century, the time of an initial Dominican settlement, to the start of the 1960s, which marks the end of the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Trujillo was the bloodthirsty tyrant whose suffocating regime caused many liberal-minded Dominicans to go into exile;* the majority ended up in the United States (Torres-Saillant 1991; 1991; 1993; 2000). Gutiérrez has also shed light on the early presence of Dominican writing in the United States, from 1900 to 1950, as well as on the critical reception of this corpus from 1920 to 1990 (Gutiérrez 2002: 83–99). Similarly, Cocco de Filippis has focused on recovering the legacy of Dominican writers, especially females, who left their literary mark in the country in the first half of the twentieth century, including Jesusa Alfau Galván de Solalinde, Virginia de Peña de Bordas, and Camila Henríquez Ureña (Cocco de Filippis 2001; 2002; 2003). The case of the siblings—Jesusa Alfau, who wrote in Spanish and valued her Hispanic background, and Felipe Alfau, 357


who wrote in English, did not identify with Hispanics, and embraced retrograde ideologies—presents Cocco de Filippis with the difficulty of mapping an ethnically differentiated literary corpus when authors complicate the parameters of inclusion. Cocco de Filippis’s commitment to Jesusa as Dominican extends to her brother Felipe, suggesting perhaps a certain degree of liberal, political identification among the qualifying features of Dominican letters (2003: 47). Apart from such cases as those of Jesusa and Felipe, who had no direct cultural contact with their ancestral Dominican roots, the majority of the literary figures with links to a Dominican heritage who lived and worked in the United States “before the diaspora” may perhaps be regarded as authors writing “abroad,” individuals for whom the receiving society generally remained a foreign land. For the most part, they were “away from home,” even if they did not find it possible to return to their native Dominican cradle after the Trujillo dictatorship came to an end in 1961. Although clearly worthy of recovery and study, their writings reflect existential distance from their North American soil, even when they chose the receiving society as the setting of their stories, as in the rare cases of El amor en Nueva York (1920, Love in New York) by Manuel Florentino Cestero, Los cuentos que Nueva York no sabe (1949, The Stories Unknown to New York) by Angel Rafael Lamarche, and Cien dias en Nueva York (1925, One Hundred Days in New York) by Gustavo Berges Bordas. U.S. settlements of Dominicans with a sense of self-recognition, as an ethnically differentiated group aware of its minority status, emerged in the 1970s, following the start of the great exodus from the Dominican Republic to the United States, and eventually gave rise to the development of a Dominican American community with a cultural presence in the host country and, subsequently, a discernible representation in the literary scene. New York soon became the most clearly identified hub of the Dominican community in the Northeast, with neighborhoods such as Washington Heights acquiring a distinctive identification with that population. Cocco de Filippis has aptly noted the salient role of the Racata literary workshops at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York—initially under the influential stewardship of the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez*—in galvanizing Dominican literary talent. Out of that initiative came individuals who subsequently committed themselves to creating venues for literary expression and to promoting the writings of otherwise marginal voices. Gutiérrez, himself an author of poetry and fiction before pursuing scholarship, stands out as a salient figure. Gutiérrez compiled anthologies—Niveles del imán (1983, Levels of the Magnet), Espiga del siglo (1984, Stalks of the Century), and Voces del exilio (1986, Exile Voices)—edited the journal Alcance (Reach), and organized readings. Similarly, poet and fiction writer Juan Torres, the driving force behind the literary magazine Revista Punto 7 (Point 7 Review), and poet, journalist, and entrepreneur Jose Carvajal, editor of the short-lived journal Inquietudes (Concerns), each led efforts that brought together distinct constituencies of 358


New York–based Dominican immigrant writers, including Juan Rivero, Esteban Torres, Viriato Sención, Diógenes Abreu, Dagoberto López, José Cornielle, Fermín Cruz, José de la Rosa, Emiliano Pérez, Tomás Rivera Martínez, Manuel Marshall, Héctor Rivera, Carlos Rodríguez, Carlos Márquez, and Gerardo Tapia. The cultural activism of Alexis Gómez Rosa— an award-winning poet in the Dominican Republic who, for many years, shuttled between his native Santo Domingo and New York City—also created a forum that appealed to yet another grouping of Dominican literati. Alexis Gómez Rosa edited and dedicated to Dominican poets for a section in the Barcelona magazine Zurgai in the fall of 1995 that gathers poems by Luis Manuel Ledesma, Miguel Aníbal Perdomo, León Félix Batista, Marianela Medrano, Juan Manuel Sepúlveda, and Carlos Rodríguez. The majority of these poets came to New York in the late 1980s and seem less identified with the social practices and cultural stances associated with the New York Dominican population. However, Leandro Morales, Rei Berroa, Tomás Modesto Galán, Julio Alvarado, Eloy Alberto Tejera, Medar Serrata, and Norberto James Rawlings earned mention in Gómez Rosa’s critical overview of Dominican poets in the United States. On the other hand, Irene Santos, Josefina Báez, Miriam Ventura, Juan Matos, Ynoemia Villar, Teonilda Madera, Maitreyi Villamán Matos, and César Sánchez Beras were not included. The various lists of names to represent Dominican writers in the United States vary in accordance with the particular aesthetic or political inclinations of the individual or group assembling them, as well as with their downright familiarity or lack thereof with those actively writing in the community. The most salient feature of the lists shared in the 1970s and 1980s was their flagrantly masculinist makeup. The landmark publication of Poemas del exilio y otras inquietudes (1988, Poems of Exile and Other Concerns)–a bilingual collection of verse by U.S. Dominicans edited and translated by Daisy Cocco de Filippis and Emma Jane Robinett—represents a significant development in the organization of literary knowledge produced by Dominicans. The publication announces the particular contribution that Cocco de Filippis increasingly made to the study of Dominican letters. Having begun her scholarly career with a semiotic study of Dominican poetry of the 1940s, a period of overwhelming predominance of male authors, by 1988, when Poems of Exile appeared, she had already identified the writings of women as the primary focus of her inquiry. She published an anthology of poems by women that exhibited a clear feminist perspective in the critical commentary and an acute awareness of the significance of the class and racial locations of her authors in understanding their experience of literature and society. Not incidentally, therefore, Poems of Exile strives as much as possible to approach gender balance in its contents and includes texts by Anglophone Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez.* With the poetry collection Homecoming (Grove Press, 1984), Alvarez had begun to accrue a measure of visibility in the literary market. Since then, while continuing to promote the literature of Dominican 359


women writers, Cocco de Filippis has tirelessly disseminated texts and data to enhance the visibility of Dominican authors writing in the United States. She edited the bilingual collection Stories from Washington Heights and Other Corners of the World (1994), in collaboration with Gutiérrez, and compiled Tertuliando (1997, Hanging Out), which includes texts in many genres, written mostly by women of Dominican descent. Another collaboration with Gutiérrez yielded the critical overview Literatura dominicana en los Estados Unidos (2002, Dominican Literature in the United States). Among her numerous publications, the bilingual collection of essays Desde la Diaspora (2003, A Diaspora Position) merits particular mention for its retrospective look at Cocco de Filippis’s career, as a scholar who is fully aware of the political significance of her diasporic location. Having arrived in New York from Santo Domingo in 1962 as a primary school-age child, Cocco de Filippis quickly became aware of the dual-language reality as she successfully wrestled with the language barrier in the classroom. Therefore, although she completed a doctorate in Spanish and centered primarily on the Hispanophone production of Dominican writers in the United States, her focus never remains exclusively monolingual, as her bilingual compilations of poetry and prose clearly show. Her inclusion of Julia Alvarez in Poems of Exile suggests that Anglophone and Hispanophone Dominican writers might fruitfully partake of a common conversation. The contributions of Cocco de Filippis go far beyond the realm of strict scholarship, translation, and editorial work. Since July 1994, she has regularly welcomed into her home in Queens, New York, women writers who meet monthly to share their texts, hear and offer feedback, eat, drink, and spend a good time together. The gathering—Tertulia de Escritoras Dominicanas en los Estados Unidos (GetTogether of Dominican Women Writers in the United States)—started with Isabel (Rosi) Espinal, Marianela Medrano, Virginia Moore, Yrene Santos, Miriam Ventura, Ynoemia Villar, and the award-winning Cuban fiction writer Sonia Rivera Valdés. Annecy Báez,* Rosa Sánchez, Josefina Báez,* Nelly Rosario,* and the Puerto Rican writers Nemir Matos and Lourdes Vásquez* are frequent participants. Cocco de Filippis has documented the value of the tertulia for its participants as a forum for criticism, sounding board of new ideas, support system, and, ultimately, stimulus for creativity and production that has invariably contributed to promoting, refining, and disseminating their works (2003: 153). Cocco de Filippis’s recognition of the need for these conversations and her affirmation of the role of women writers, in addition to her attention to issues such as class, gender, and race as key to the study of the literary corpus, presciently announced the dominant trend of Dominican American writing, beginning in 1991, with the publication of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, the immigrant novel by Julia Alvarez that became the first best-selling work of fiction by a Dominican in the United States. All of the Dominican-descended authors who have gained ascendancy (with one exception) have been women, and questions of gender, racial, and cultural 360


identity have overwhelmingly fueled their texts. The family of Julia Alvarez differs from the profile of the average Dominican migrant in manner of incorporation into U.S. society, class extraction, and phenotypical whiteness, which shielded family members from much of the racist and ethnocentric animosity that economically disempowered immigrants encounter. Nor did they suffer a language barrier: the autobiographical essays “An American Childhood in the Dominican Republic” and “My English” capture key stages in the writer’s early education. Brought to her parents’ homeland from her birthplace in New York, the young Alvarez attended the Carol Morgan School, where American diplomats educated their children, spoke English, and generally led a “gringo” existence. A prolific writer, Alvarez has demonstrated a dexterous command of the historical novel in compelling evocations of courageous women from Dominican history—the Mirabal sisters from In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and the venerated nineteenth-century poet Salomé Ureña and her daughter Camila (who lived until the 1970s) from In the Name of Salomé (2000). An enlarged edition of Homecoming: New and Collected Poems (1996), The Other Side/El Otro Lado (1995), and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004) figure among her productions in verse. She has published several books for children and young adults, in addition to the collection of essays Something to Declare (1999). Her most recent novel, Saving the World (2006), like The Other Side, shows the Dominican Republic as a heart of darkness and presents a precarious image of Dominican society and its people that emerges when Alvarez steps away from history and relies on her imagination. Given her literary prominence, more than that of any other Dominican voice, she enjoys the power to give currency to a particular version of the group’s collective immigrant experience and to disseminate images that readers afflicted by excessive literalism and devoid of a sound ethics of reading may construe as representative of the human caliber of the group. By the time that Alvarez was born, Rhina Polonia Espaillat,* a native of Santo Domingo who spent her earliest formative years in La Vega before coming to the United States at age seven in 1939, had already established herself as a child prodigy who wrote poetry exhibiting a prodigious use of the English language. Although she began publishing in the 1940s and continued writing for the next three decades, she did not pursue a career as a professional writer until after she had finished raising her three sons with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, an industrial arts teacher and sculptor, and retired from her job as a high school teacher in New York City. Espaillat’s commitment to sharing poetry through workshops extends to her working closely with Dominican poets who write primarily in Spanish. Significantly, her verse frequently draws from her own immigrant background, even though she did not grow up or live in a Dominican ethnic enclave. Although she earned her spot in the literary community in isolation from any Dominican settlement, she has nonetheless joined the Tertulia Pedro Mir, a Dominicanled poetry reading series in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Her venturing into 361


poetry also precedes the boom of Latino writers that began in the 1980s, when it also became established practice to locate literary artists as voices of their respective ethnic communities. At age sixteen, Espaillat became the youngest person inducted into the Poetry Society of America, the first of a string of honors that included the Gustav David Memorial Award, the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award, and the 2003 Stanzas Prize, as well as her invitation (by the First Lady and the Library of Congress), among eighty writers nationwide, to participate in the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., on October 4, 2003. By 1992, at age sixty, when she published Lapsing to Grace, her first book-length collection, she had already built an impressive literary dossier in various anthologies, journals, and magazines. Espaillat’s poetry collections—Where Horizons Go (1998), Rehearsing Absence (2001), Mundo y Palabra/The World and the Word (2001), Rhina P. Espaillat’s Greatest Hits (2003), The Shadow I Dress In (2004), and Playing at Stillness (2005)—almost invariably include at least one poem in Spanish. All of the Spanish-language texts in Agua de dos ríos (2006, The Water of Two Rivers), a bilingual compilation of her writings, published by the Dominican Commissioner (an overseas branch of the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture), are of her authorship, whether as translations or as original compositions. Vigorously involved in translation, which she regards as key to her overall oeuvre, she has rendered much Spanish and Latin American poetry into English, as well as U.S. and British poetry into Spanish, having gained recognition especially for her Spanish versions of poems by Robert Frost. Attentive not only to the needs of poets from the past, Espaillat has produced the fine English texts that accompany the Spanish verse of Trovas del mar (2002, Troves of the Sea), a bilingual volume of poems by the Lawrence-based Dominican immigrant poet César Sánchez Beras. Even though she was raised and educated in the United States at a time when Dominicans did not have much of a community to speak of, Espaillat has become a major figure among contributors to the cultural production of Dominican Americans. Witness the dedication to her of the First Dominican Book Fair in New York in April 2006. Espaillat’s accomplishments as a first-rate poet—particularly in light of her remarkable command of traditional English prosody, as reflected in her flawless sonnets, ballads, villanelles, and other metrical poems—have placed her at the forefront of New Formalism. Over the past three decades, this movement in American poetry has sought to disrupt the hegemony of free verse, with a view to bringing about a new renaissance to make poetry relevant to the general public again. With the accolades received by Junot Díaz* since the spring 2007 publication of his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which, according to New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, establishes him “as one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices,” it seems that another Dominican American writer has gained ascendancy as a considerable

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force in the core of the country’s literary scene. A story that makes gestures to the tradition of the immigrant family saga while drawing much on science fiction and fantasy literature, the novel hilariously explores linkages between a young, New Jersey-born Dominican male’s failed quest to realize himself carnally and the geopolitics that explains U.S. imperial involvement in Caribbean affairs with the consequent emergence of dysfunctional diasporic family networks. Like no other text before it, the novel imaginatively locates the Dominican experience in the core of world history and global destinies. Díaz had already met with unprecedented acclaim with his 1996 debut book Drown, a collection of ten interlaced stories that straddled the geographies of Santo Domingo, New Jersey, and the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights. A PEN/Malamud Award, numerous scholarships, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories several times figure among his honors. The success of his new book and his position as a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest that his prestige as a major figure in American letters will become firmly established. To some degree, Dominican American writers have offered competing and therefore complementary images of the immigrant experience of their ethnic community. The novel Geographies of Home (1999) by Loida Maritza Pérez* shows the extent to which old country traumas, poverty, and cycles of oppression do not disappear when people cross the immigration checkpoint into the United States. The novel Soledad (2001, Solitude) by Angie Cruz* explores the extent to which the children of the meek, even in these United States, must necessarily address the source of their parents’ disempowerment if they are to aspire to a life of wholeness. Let It Rain Coffee (2005), the second novel by Cruz, locates, in the political and economic events of the Dominican Republic in the second half of the twentieth century, the clues for understanding the lives of characters that seem fated to a life of dispossession and diasporic uprooting. Nelly Rosario’s novel Song of the Water Saints (2003), more intently than any of her peers’ work, looks for the causes of the unsavory plight of her characters, who also end up inhabiting Washington Heights, in a geopolitical history that starts with the 1916 military occupation of the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara’s* Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) contributes to the conversation elements of African-descended Dominican spirituality and nonheteronormative sexuality that previous works had only hinted at. By the same token, My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories (2007), the collection of short fiction by Annecy Báez, draws on the author’s psychological training to examine the technologies that the lowly deploy in their necessary quest to cope with legacies of pain and pervasive trauma. The characters in these books face obstacles that emanate from their inhabiting settings, where they cannot take for granted amenities such as stable and urbane homes, quality schools, clean neighborhoods, language-rich environments, adequate health services, amicable support networks, and straightforward

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physical safety. The awareness of their racialization, social impediments, and cultural otherness with respect to a distant and indifferent mainstream is thrust on them by the ordinary drama of their struggle for material and spiritual survival. The concerns that fuel the texts of these Anglophone Dominican writers seem to continue in the works of newly emerging voices, including Marielys Divanne-Pichardo, Cleyvis Natera, and Leo Suárez, who shared their literary and social sensibilities in a reading series in the spring of 2004 at the Brooklyn Public Library (sponsored by the Willendorff Division). Key among their common features is the memory of the Dominican past as a source of clarity and potential strength, even while they indict the less democratic and ecumenical characteristics of the ancestral heritage. Reconnecting with Dominican history seems to be a strategy for their characters to cope better with the ethnic, racial, sexual, and cultural antipathies that they face in the United States. With the exception of Díaz, the writers who have risen to visibility with books issued by mainstream American publishers and dynamic small presses are all women. This predominance of female voices also finds correspondence in the scholarly work on the Dominican experience that has attained the most recognition in the U.S. academy. Consistent with the prophetic incursion of Daisy Cocco de Filippis in the study of the literature, the key contributions to the production and dissemination of knowledge on the Dominican experience are those of Ramona Hernández, author of The Mobility of Workers under Advanced Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States (2002) and coauthor of The Dominican Americans (1998); Dulce María Gray, who has authored High Literacy and Ethnic Identity: Dominican American Schooling in Transition (2001); Milagros Ricourt, the coauthor of Hispanas of Queens: Latino Panethnicity in a New York City Neighborhood (2002); Nancy López, who has published Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education (2004); and Ginetta E. B. Candelario, author of Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (2007). The construction of Dominican cultural identity that has thus far gained currency in the literary imagination draws largely from the perspective, the location, the sensibility, and the historical experience of women. Their vision therefore evokes traumas associated with the unequal position of women in society, as reflected in the consequences of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the lurking menace of rape, the suffocating force of social norms bent on limiting women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, and the resilience of phallocratic regimes, both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. The gender-inflected texture of Dominican American literature is auspicious, particularly in light of the charge of machismo often imputed to Dominican society, where patriarchal capitalism, the Catholic Church, and other misogynistic institutions still cling fiercely to paradigms of gender oppression. Perhaps women historically outnumbering men in the successive armies of emigrants from the homeland has thrust those women into an economic reality that makes their leadership inexorable. On the whole, the numerical superiority of women has probably 364


brought to the fore the harshness of gender inequity and the need to forge models of relationship based on partnership rather than domination. Dominican American literature arguably exhibits fewer misogynistic traits than its counterparts in the ancestral homeland and than other ethnic literary traditions of the United States that lack a predominance of women authors. Witness the sympathetic, complex, and psychologically deep female characters in the fiction of Díaz, the one male author in the cohort. Something similar may be said of Alan Cambeira,* the author of Azucar!: The Story of Sugar (2001), the first of a trilogy of novels that set out to evoke the dehumanized existence of sugarcane workers of both sexes on Esperanza Dulce plantation, a setting that only thinly disguises the shantytown camps known as bateyes, where Haitian migrant and Haitian Dominican laborers languish in dreadful living conditions. With his literary attention turned almost exclusively to the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean sites, Cambeira occupies a different location from that of most Dominican American writers because his work does not engage the U.S. immigrant experience. A native of Samana, he migrated with his family first to Barbados and later to Pennsylvania, where he completed his education through graduate school, spending nearly five decades in the United States. Cambeira is the author of an overview of his country’s history and culture, Quisqueya La Bella: The Dominican Republic in Cultural and Historical Perspective (1997) and has written widely on social issues in Dominican society. Atypically for Dominicans who have lived so long in the United States and received their education there, Cambeira, in 2005, materialized his wish to return to his native land. Perhaps his humble origins and his self-awareness as an African-descended Dominican motivated his attraction to the horrors of exploited and devalued sugarcane workers. The constant focus on the study of social injustice in the home country, compelling in light of his own workingclass background, and his lack of sustained contact with a Dominican ethnic enclave, perhaps explains his harboring the cultural sentiment and state of mind necessary for effectuating his decision to go “home” again. Dominican American literature finds, arguably, the most engaging statement of the complexity of the group’s cultural and ethnic identity in Josefina Báez, a New York–based performance artist. Her collection of poems and performance texts, Dominicanish (2000), launches an exploration of Dominicanness that discards nothing, no matter how seemingly alien, from the contours of the group’s identity. The logic that regulates her all-inclusive demeanor seems to be that any empirical reality that touches Dominicans must necessarily form part of the arsenal of ingredients that goes into what they are. Thus, her experiences of travels in southeastern India, in Andhra Pradesh, combine smoothly with the urban immigrant education she receives in her daily contact with such inexorable classrooms as the New York City subway system. The main character in Dominicanish came to the Big Apple as a child, and she owes her knowledge of English more to the jazz classics that she listened to assiduously than to the questionable efficiency of the public schools. An Africandescended native of La Romana, Báez, like Cambeira, has the batey experience 365

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in her background. Her work, therefore, reflects a complex sensibility that combines world knowledge with working-class rootedness—a sort of proletarian cosmopolitanism. All of the writers discussed here thus far reveal a particular combination of emphases that stem from their class origins, their ethnoracial self-awareness, the chronology of their settlement in the United States, and the impact of family or personal circumstances in accentuating a gender-inflected perspective. To a greater degree than her peers, Báez also exhibits a commitment to exploring the coming-together of English and Spanish in the life of her community, as well as a radical prodding of artistic forms that tends compulsively toward the most hybrid, aided by her interest in popular culture and the poetry of everyday urban life. Her particular location represents—biographically, socially, and artistically—a potential existential space that combines the concerns and the instincts of the Dominican immigrants who write in Spanish about their North American habitat, the Anglophone literary artists for whom the ancestral Dominican homeland exists as a subject of cognitive discovery, and the long-time residents of a receiving society that fails to feel welcoming, causing the likes of Cambeira to continue to yearn for home elsewhere after nearly half a century. Further Reading Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, Desde la diáspora/A Diaspora Position: selección bilingüe de ensayos/A Bilingual Selection of Essays (New York: Ediciones Alcance, 2003). Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, “Una flor en la sombra: A Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Virginia Peña de Bordas.” Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. IV, eds. José F. Aranda and Silvio Torres-Saillant (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002: 50–58). Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, ed., “Como los crisantemos lila: Obra Escogida de Jesusa Alfau Galván de Solalinde” Colección Tertuliando Vol. 5, No. 1 (New York: Ediciones Alcance, 2000). Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, and Franklin Gutiérrez, eds., Literatura dominicana en los Estados Unidos (Santo Domingo: Editora Buho, 2001). Gutiérrez, Franklin, Palabras de ida y vuelta: Ensayos literarios (New York: Ediciones Calíope, 2002). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, “Before the Diaspora: Early Dominican Literature in the United States” in Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. III, eds. Maria HerreraSobek and Virginia Sanchez Korrol (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000: 250–267). Torres-Saillant, Silvio, “La literatura dominicana y la periferia del margen” Punto y Coma Vol. 3, Nos. 1–2 (1991): 139–149 [Reprinted in Brújula/Compass 11 (1991): 16–19 and in Cuadernos de Poética Vol. 7, No. 21 (1993): 7–26].

Silvio Torres-Saillant Dominican Immigration. Dominicans have been immigrating to the United States in steadily rising numbers since the 1960s. In the 1990s, they became the second largest (after Mexicans) group of immigrants to the United States from the Western hemisphere. Nonetheless, their presence has gone almost unnoticed, other than in New York City and a few other places in the Northeast. But baseball, a game that is as much a part of the national identity 366

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in the Dominican homeland as it is for Americans, has shattered the invisibility of Dominicans in the United States. Dominican players have taken their domination of America’s favorite pastime to high levels. Of course, Islanders are making their mark in many other areas of life on the U.S. mainland. One such area is literature, written in both Spanish and English. During the past two decades, some of the most dynamic Latino writers to become known in mainstream U.S. culture have been Dominicans: Julia Alvarez,* Junot Díaz,* and Angie Cruz.* The 2000 U.S. Census put the Dominican population at about 1.5 million, surpassing Cubans as the third largest Hispanic group in the United States (after Mexicans and Puerto Ricans). The Dominicans have immigrated for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is poverty in their homeland. Yet many Dominican immigrants to the United States are middle class; nevertheless, although some have tasted success as professionals and entrepreneurs, many more labor in the factories or the immense service sector of Northeastern cities. But, as has happened with massive immigration from Mexico, Korea, the Philippines, Cuba, and Vietnam, U.S. intervention in the affairs of the Dominican Republic, including invasions in 1916 and 1965, has resulted in a domination that has found a release in immigration. As their numbers increase, Dominicans are transcending their traditional destinations—largely the Northeast and Puerto Rico—and are now a growing presence in Miami, Florida. More recently, the émigré community is discovering that increasing numbers do not necessarily translate into the ability to defend interests. In spite of some setbacks and disputes within the community, Dominican unity and organization are growing, along with commensurate political clout. In addition, community leaders see the value of pan-Latino coalescence. Dominicans—along with Salvadorans, Colombians, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, and others—are forcing an expansion of the traditional scope of Hispanic minority status in the United States. Further Reading Castro, Max J., and Thomas D. Boswell, “The Dominican Diaspora Revisited: Dominicans and Dominican Americans in a New Century,” Dominican American National Round Table (http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/cam03/).

F. Arturo Rosales Dorfman, Ariel (1942–). Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised in Chile and the United States (Queens, New York), novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Ariel Dorfman became a Chilean exile in 1973 when the Salvador Allende democratic government was overthrown by a coup d’état led by General Augusto Pinochet and supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. After serving as a professor in various European universities, Dorfman settled into a career as professor of Spanish American literature at the University of Maryland. In his academic work, Dorfman is known for studying 367

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popular culture and how it influences national identity and becomes an arm of cultural imperialism for United States capitalism. Along these lines, he has published studies of the Lone Ranger, Superman, Donald Duck, and other Disney characters in such books as Para leer el pato Donald (1971, To Read Donald Duck), Superman y sus amigos del alma (1974, Superman and His Soul Mates), La última aventura del Llanero Solitario (1979, The Last Adventure of the Lone Ranger), and Patos, elefantes y heroes (1985, Ducks, Elephants, and Heroes). However, Dorfman’s most known and acclaimed literary work in the United States is his play Death and the Maiden/La muerte y la doncella (1992)— a successful Broadway play as well as a respected Roman Polanski film—in which Dorfman deals with the human rights violations of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the highly dramatic and stark Death and the Maiden, his main character confronts his former torturer. Other politically engaged works by Dorfman include Desaparecer/Missing, published by Amnesty International in 1981; Máscaras (1988, Masks); Los sueños nucleares de Reagan (1986, The Nuclear Dreams of Reagan); Más allá del miedo: El largo adios a Pinochet/Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (2002); and Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980–2004. Completely bilingual and prolific, Dorfman often writes both a Spanish and an English version of his books. In 1998, Dorfman published a memoir of his bilingual, bicultural career: Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. Today, Dorfman is the Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Further Reading Dorfman, Ariel, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (New York: Ferrar Strauss & Giroux, 1998). Oropesa, Salvador, La obra de Ariel Dorfman: Ficción y Crítica (Madrid: Pliegos, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Drama. See Theater. Duclós Salinas, Adolfo (1855–1915). Born in Cuatro Ciénagas, Coahuila, Mexico, Adolfo Duclós Salinas became a journalist, immigrated to the United States, worked on El Comercio Mexicano (Mexican Commerce) in 1886 with the controversial journalist Catarino Garza in Eagle Pass, and, in 1894, founded and edited Las Dos Naciones (The Two Nations) newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1893, Duclós Salinas published a book in English, The Riches of Mexico and Its Institutions. In 1902, he moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and founded La Democracia Latina (Latin Democracy), which attacked the administration of General Bernardo Reyes; because of this and other political activities, he was arrested and exiled to the United States in 1903. In St. Louis, Duclós Salinas became associated with the Flores Magón* Brothers and worked on their anarchist newspaper, Regeneración (Regeneration). Along with 368

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these founders of the Mexican Liberal Party, Duclós Salinas was persecuted by state and national authorities in the United States, while at the same time considered as persona non grata in Mexico. By 1906, Duclós Salinas was writing a weekly column on Mexico for the New York Herald. Duclós is remembered as an important essayist and ideologue who dedicated his writing, most of it done in exile in the United States, toward bringing about democratic change in Mexico. He died in St. Louis in 1915. Among his books published in the United States are The Riches of Mexico and Its Institutions (1893); Méjico pacificado: El progreso de Méjico y los hombres que lo gobiernan: Porfirio Díaz—Bernardo Reyes (1904, Pacified Mexico: The Progress of Mexico and the Men Who Govern It: Porfirio Díaz—Bernardo Reyes); Héroe y caudillo (continuación de Méjico pacificado) (1906, Hero and Chief [Pacified Mexico Continued]); Emigrados políticos. Sus deberes para con la patria (1907, Political Émigrés: Their Duties to the Homeland); and El problema monetario (1907, The Monetary Problem). In addition, perhaps hundreds of his newspaper essays and opinion pieces have never been collected. Further Reading Langham, Thomas C., Border Trials: Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Liberals (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1981).

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E El Eco del Pacífico. After California was annexed by the United States, San Francisco was able to support a number of Spanish-language newspapers, including the two dailies El Eco del Pacífico (The Pacific Echo) and El Tecolote (1875–1879, The Owl). The ownership and editorship of many of these papers included immigrants from Spain, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The largest of these was El Eco del Pacífico, which had grown out of a Spanish-language page of the French-language newspaper L’Echo du Pacifique and had become independent in 1856 under the editorship of José Marcos Mugarrieta. San Francisco’s Spanish-language newspapers covered news of the homeland, which varied from coverage of Spain and Chile to Central America and Mexico and generally assisted the immigrants in adjusting to the new environment. El Eco del Pacífico, like the other journals, published poetry and stories, as well as cultural commentary. Very closely reported was the French Intervention in Mexico, with various newspapers supporting fundraising events for the war effort and aid for widows and orphans, in addition to working with the local Junta Patriótica Mexicana (Mexican Patriotic Committee), even printing in toto the long speeches made at the Junta’s meetings. The newspapers reported on discrimination and persecution of Hispanic miners and generally saw the defense of the Hispanic colonia to be a priority, denouncing abuse of Hispanic immigrants and natives. Hispanic readers in the Southwest were acutely aware of racial issues in the United States and sided with the North during the Civil War, which also was extensively covered in the newspapers.

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Ediciones Universal

El Eco del Pacífico.

Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Ediciones Universal. Cuban émigrés arrived in such large numbers after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that they were able to establish their own publishing houses, bookstores, and newspapers. Many of the exiles were scholars, poets, 372

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or novelists; cut off as they were from Spanish-language outlets back home, they found the need for a vehicle to circulate their works before a wide audience in the United States and in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. In 1965, Juan Manuel Salvat, one of the many members of the Cuban intelligentsia now in Miami, Florida, founded Ediciones Universal to publish the literary and scholarly works of leading émigré intellectuals, as well as classics of Cuban history, art, and literature. Among the writers published by Ediciones Universal are Angel Cuadra,* Uva Clavijo,* Roberto Fernández,* and Matías Montes Huidobro.* To this day, Ediciones Universal maintains and circulates a large portion of the published repository of Cuban history and exiled thought and literature; Salvat’s bookstore, Librería Universal (The Universal Library), on Calle Ocho, serves as a gathering place for artists and writers of the community. Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Editorial Quinto Sol. In 1967, there appeared the most influential Chicano literature magazine, El grito (The Shout), which initiated the careers of some of the most prominent names in Chicano literature.* With its affiliated publishing house, Editorial Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun Editors), established in 1968, El grito began to delineate consciously the canon that, for the early 1970s, became the official identity of Chicano literature. It accomplished this by publishing those works that best exemplified Chicano culture, language, themes, and styles. The very name of the publishing house emphasized the Mexican/Aztec identity, as well as the Spanish language: the “quinto sol” (fifth sun) referred to the Aztec belief in a future period of cultural flowering, a fifth age that conveniently coincided with the rise of Chicano culture— additionally, this was consonant with the Chicano indigenists who were promoting the concept of Aztlán,* the place of Aztec origin as the five southwestern U.S. states. In 1968, Quinto Sol published an anthology, El espejo (The Mirror), edited by the owners of Quinto Sol, Octavio Romano and Herminio Ríos. It included works by such foundational writers as Alurista,* Tomás Rivera,* and Miguel Méndez,* whose works are still models of Chicano literature. El espejo recognized the linguistic diversity and the erosion of Spanish literacy among the young by accompanying works that were originally written in Spanish with an English translation; it even included Miguel Méndez’s original Yaqui-language version of his short story “Tata Casehue” (Grandfather Casehue). In El espejo and in later books that Quinto Sol published, there was a definite insistence on working-class and rural culture and language, as exemplified in the works of Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa* and most of the other authors published in book form. Also, there was not only a tolerance but a promotion of works written bilingually and in switching from English to Spanish in the same sentences and paragraphs, as in the poems of Alurista and the plays of Carlos Morton.* 373

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In 1970, Editorial Quinto Sol reinforced its leadership in creating the concept of Chicano literature by instituting the national award for Chicano literature: Premio Quinto Sol, which carried with it a $1,000 prize and publication of the winning manuscript. The first three years of prizes went to books that are still seen as exemplary Chicano novels; in fact, they are still among the bestselling Chicano texts: Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless me, Ultima (1972), and Rolando Hinojosa’s Estampas del valle y otras obras (1973, Sketches of the Valley and Other Works). All three books depict rural or small-town life in Texas and New Mexico and represent a masculine perspective on Chicano life, even using masculine language; two of them are bildungsromane and two of them were originally written in Spanish—the Spanish texts were translated, but not the English. In broad strokes, these books became examples for the canon that Quinto Sol was establishing. It was not until 1975 that the Quinto Sol award was given to a woman: Estela Portillo Trambley,* for her short story collection Rain of Scorpions. By the late 1970s, Romano and Ríos split for numerous reasons, professional and personal, and for all intents and purposes Chicano canonization became a far more complex matter, especially because a new generation of Chicanas were developing a female esthetic of their own and because U.S. mainstream publishers began taking interest in Chicano literature during the 1980s. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, RetroSpace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Eire, Carlos (1950–). As the son of a municipal judge, Carlos Eire was born into an economically and socially privileged household in Havana, Cuba. However, his life in private schools, alongside the son of dictator Fulgencio Batista and other elites, ended at the age of eleven, when he became a refugee of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. He became one of 14,000 children relocated by Operation Peter Pan when his parents sent him to the United States to avoid communist indoctrination in the Cuban schools. Eire was later reunited with his mother and brother, and they settled in Chicago. Eire went on to become an outstanding student at Loyola University in Chicago and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1979. Today he is Yale University’s Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies. Eire has written academic studies about social upheaval in sixteenth-century Spain. It was only after his academic success that Eire began to consider writing about his personal journey and upheaval. His resultant memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, was so well received that it won the 2003 National Book Award for nonfiction. Eire calls it “my first book without footnotes.” In the memoir, Eire recalls how he went from enjoying swimming pools, private clubs, and schools in Havana to orphanages and foster homes in Miami, Florida. 374

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Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Elías González, Adalberto (c. 1902–?). Adalberto Elías González was by far the most prolific and successful playwright in the Hispanic communities of the United States. A native of Sonora, Mexico, who probably immigrated to Los Angeles in 1920 to further his education after graduating from the Escuela Normal in Hermosillo, he is known to have worked as a journalist and professional playwright in Los Angeles at least until 1941. Because of the subject matter of some of his plays, it is assumed that he also had military experience in Mexico before moving to the United States. By 1924, González had steady employment as a movie critic for El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald) newspaper in Los Angeles and had four new plays debut that year. By 1928, his fame as a playwright was so great that in one year alone his works were staged in Hermosillo, Mexicali, El Paso, Nogales, and, of course, Los Angeles. González’s works ran the gamut from historical drama to dime-novel sensationalism. The most famous of his plays was Los Amores de Ramona (The Loves of Ramona), a stage adaptation of the Helen Hunt Jackson novel of early California, which broke all box-office records in 1927 when it was seen by more than 15,000 spectators after only eight performances. His second most successful play, La Asesino del Martillo, o La Mujer Tigresa (The Hammer Assassin, or Tiger Woman), was based on news stories of 1923 and 1924. Adalberto Elías González. González also wrote historical drama, based on Hispanic history in California and on the Mexican Revolution, such as La Conquista de California (The Conquest of California), Los Expatriados (The Expatriates), La Muerte de Francisco Villa (The Death of Francisco Villa), and El Fantasma de la Revolución (The Phantom of the Revolution). González was the leading winner of playwriting contests in Los Angeles at the height of a playwriting boom never before seen among Hispanics in the United States. In all, González is known to have written fourteen or fifteen plays that were successfully produced in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Elizondo, Hortensia (1908–). Journalist and writer Hortensia Elizondo was born in Lampazos de Naranjo, Nuevo León, Mexico. She was very young during the Mexican Revolution, and, at the death of her parents, she went into exile and 375

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studied in schools in the United States, Canada, Rome, and Paris. Her family was connected to important Mexican intellectuals in exile. Her sister Angelina Elizondo* was the wife of Nemesio García Naranjo* and was also a writer. Her sister Alicia married Ignacio E. Lozano,* the founder of two newspapers, La Prensa (The Press) in San Antonio and La Opinión (The Opinion) in Los Angeles, and the Casa Editorial Lozano (Lozano Publishing House). María Elizondo de Cantú, her other sister, was also married to the administrator of La Opinión, Arturo Cantú. Hortensia Elizondo started writing at a young age under the pseudonym of “Ana María.” Her letters and chronicles, sent from various parts of the world, were published in newspapers in the United States, Cuba, and Central and South America. In the United States, her articles appeared in La Prensa in San Antonio, El Continental (The Continental) in El Paso, and El Defensor (The Defender) in Edinburg, among other newspapers. Younger and more liberal than her sister Angelina, Hortensia Elizondo pursued her profession as a writer. In her chronicles, she embraced the emancipation of women through the idea of the mujer moderna (modern woman) and appealed for the defense of women’s intellect, history, and equal rights, including the right to vote. Hortensia Elizondo was also a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics), secretary of the Ateneo Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Atheneum), and correspondent of the Liga de Acción Social of Mérida (Mérida Social Action League). In addition to her newspaper articles, Elizondo published a book of short stories titled Mi amigo azul (My Blue Friend) in 1934. Further Reading Ibarra de Anda, F., Las mexicanas en el periodismo (Mexico: Editorial “Jumenta,” 1937). Luna Lawhn, Juanita, “María Luisa Garza: Novelist of El Mexico de Afuera” in Double Crossings. Entrecruzamientos, eds. Mario Martín Flores and Carlos Von Son (Fair Haven, NJ: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2001).

Carolina Villarroel Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina (1888–1971). Angelina Elizondo was born in Lampazos de Naranjo, Nuevo León. A graduate of the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón (College of the Sacred Heart) and a normal teacher’s college (1907), she married Nemesio García Naranjo,* a member of one of the most prominent families in town—one of his uncles named the town—and one of the most important intellectuals of Mexico. In 1914, during the Mexican Revolution and because of her husband’s close relationship with the governments of Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta, Elizondo and her young family fled to New York City and later settled in San Antonio, Texas, where they spent most of their exile. During her stay in San Antonio, Elizondo published crónicas* (chronicles) under the pseudonym of “Gracia De Fontanar” in Revista Mexicana (Mexican Review), a magazine founded by her husband that ran from 1915 until 1919. The magazine was dedicated to the Mexican exile community in the United States and opposed the 376

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revolutionary government in Mexico. A follower of the ideology of the México de Afuera* (Mexico Abroad), her chronicles portrayed a traditional feminine stand in defense of the culture and the conservative traditions of the homeland. Angelina Elizondo was also the first president of the Unión Femenina Iberoamericana (Ibero American Women’s Union), and, as a representative of Mexico, she delivered two speeches to the Pan American Round Table, where she spoke about the role of women in Pan Americanism and the importance of femininity—in opposition to feminism. Angelina and her family returned to Mexico in 1923 and went into exile for a second time during the Cristero War. During this second exile (1926–1934), the family lived in New York and traveled through Europe and Venezuela. After her final return to her homeland, she took up residence in Mexico City, where she died at the age of eighty-three on January 12, 1971. Angelina Elizondo wrote two books: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, breve historia de un alma (1949, Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz. History of a Soul) and the unpublished Notas de viaje (Notes from a Trip). Further Reading García Naranjo, Nemesio, Memorias de Nemesio García Naranjo (Monterrey: Talleres de “El Provenir,” n.d.). Luna Lawhn, Juanita, “María Luisa Garza: Novelist of El México de Afuera” in Double Crossings. Entrecruzamientos, eds. Mario Martín Flores and Carlos Von Son (New Jersey: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2001).

Carolina Villarroel Elizondo, Sergio (1930–). Sergio D. Elizondo, recognized internationally as a major Chicano poet, novelist, literary critic, and short story writer, was born in 1930 in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, and first came to the United States in 1950. Between 1954 and 1956, he served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany. In 1955, he became a U.S. citizen and, on his return to civilian life, finished his B.A. in social studies at Findlay College in Ohio. He earned his M.A. in Romance languages in 1961 and his Ph.D. in 1963 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a dissertation on Spanish Golden Age literature. Elizondo has been a professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Chicano/a literature since 1961 and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin, California State University at San Bernardino, New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, San Diego State University, and San Diego State University at Imperial Valley. He also served as Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at Western Washington State and as Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. During his years as a graduate student and professor in the 1960s, Elizondo was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement and the Chicano movement and organized the first Mexican American Student Organization at the University of Texas Austin. His political engagement is evident in both his poetry and prose. Elizondo has two books of published poetry, Perros y antiperros (1972, Dogs and Anti-Dogs) and Libro para batos y chavalas chicanas (1977, Book for 377

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Chicano Guys and Gals); two novels, Muerte en una estrella (1984, Death on a Star) and Suruma (1990); as well as a collection of short stories, Rosa, la flauta (1980, Rosa, The Flute). His work is written in Spanish. His poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in a variety of anthologies and literary journals, especially Chicano, German, Latin American, and Mexican journals. He has also done extensive editorial work, especially with Palabra Nueva (New Word) and Revista Cultural de Excelsior (Excelsior Cultural Magazine). As a writer, he has been recognized in U.S. literary biographies and has received a variety of awards for his creative work. Northern Mexican universities, as well as the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and the Mexican cultural journal Plural, have recognized his work. A polyglot who speaks Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, and English, Elizondo is also a lover of classical music; languages and music inform all of his work. Elizondo’s poetry is written primarily in free verse, although there is much experimentation in form. A master of the albur (Mexican punning or “sounding”), Elizondo’s poetic discourses range from sardonic to parodic, but he is also adept at the use of lyrical language, often with metaphysical and philosophical overtones. Perros y antiperros, his first book of poetry published bilingually, is divided into thirty-four cantos retelling the history of the Southwest, especially the U.S. invasion of Mexican territory, and affirming the Mexican roots of the Chicano, constructed as subject, worker, lover, activist, and resident in the “Gran Gringoria” (Greater Gringoland). The poetry contrasts the dynamic, collective culture of the Chicano with the cold, sterile culture of the Anglo, who lives in a vapid world, marked by consumerism, racist practices, and a need for drug-induced relief. The poetry laments the Chicano loss of the land and its majestic landscapes. Other poems in this collection deal with the political activism of the past, with the distortion of history by hegemonic historians, with the racism faced by Chicanos, who, despite serving in U.S. wars, face rejection and police brutality. All of these issues are also explored in Elizondo’s subsequent fiction. The critique of the sterility of U.S. consumer society is at times tinged with a certain nostalgia for the past. There are also lyrical love discourses in his poetry, which praise the Chicana/ Mexicana woman and recognize her labor, her nurturing, and her beauty. His second book of poetry, Libro para batos y chavalas, a bilingual edition of thirtythree poems, contains poems chronicling the Chicano movement and its struggles, as well as lyrical love poems with erotic images of the Chicana. Elizondo’s heterodox and complex prose is also experimental and marked by a variety of strategies and techniques in which dialogue, philosophical and metaphysical interior monologues, and lyrical prose pieces are juxtaposed to historicizing discourses. His fiction is characterized by play with narrative perspective and fragmentation of time-spaces, as is the case in his third work, Rosa, la flauta (1980), a fugue of voices in a collection of narratives that effect radical shifts in style from story to story, although all are interior monologues. Experimentation with narrative composition and perspective, including a series of existential stories that focus on the formation of the subject and on 378

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one’s relation with space and time are the central focus of the collection. Half of the stories deal with philosophical issues and half with local problems in which the characters are also acutely conscious of time and space. The opening story, “Obertura,” serves to set up the various themes and voices that appear in the subsequent stories. Some stories are grounded in the local, providing vignettes of working-class women, in particular the voices of Chona and Agueda, who recall the past, their work in the fields or at home with their children, their relation to the Earth, the loss of their sons on the battlefield, and their sense of being alone. The stories testify to Elizondo’s keen ear, his ethnographic bent, and his talent for reproducing working-class women’s voices, expressions, and philosophical discourses on the meaning of life. Contrapuntally, there are several stories, such as “Ur,” that are metaphysical and focus on space and on the female entity, the Dama Arquitecto del Universo (Lady Architect of the Universe), that is, the architect of all creation. Ur, however, is not a physical space but a mental space; it is a discursive construct, and the narrator, try as he might, is unable to find it on Earth. It is a space not to be located; it simply is, and it is the original place where harmony reigns. The title story, “Rosa, la flauta,” continues with the focus on space. A young female flute player, enamored of music and conscious of notes as sounds suspended in space, loses her innocence, along with her desire to play her instrument, once she becomes sexually active. Other stories deal with a child’s mental sense of time and space and consciousness of direction, will, time, and the multiplicity of dimensions, including reality and fantasy. The metaphysical and local come together in the story “Pa que bailaba esa noche” (What He Was Dancing for That Night), as the narrator tells a ghost story about Pedro, newly arrived in a desert town, who dances all night with the ghost of a girl who had died thirty years before. Innovation and experimentation are likewise clear in “Las flores” (The Flowers), narrated from the perspective of wildflowers growing in the Texas countryside. In a commentary on incommunicability, the flowers witness a group of farm workers marching by with their red United Farm Workers flag; they hear the words of their preacher leader and see that two nearby cars—one is a police car— have parked to observe the group through binoculars. The flowers are conscious of trees, other flowers, and people, but they can make no sense of why the marchers appeared or where they are going. In the same mode, in “Coyote, esta noche” (Coyote, Tonight), we find a coyote’s monologue about finding his evening meal, his “refín.” Having shared his rabbits with nursing coyotes, he contemplates finding his meal elsewhere, eyeing the rancher’s chicken coop. He plans his attack, including entry into the corral, and his dance below the mesquite tree to scare the hens into falling; the coyote’s strategy succeeds—he grabs one of the hens as the rancher’s dogs arrive. Ever the astute trickster, he releases his prey and then defecates as a ploy to throw the dogs off his scent. Distracted by the smell, the dogs return to the corral and the coyote returns for his “refín.” Elizondo’s novel Suruma, published in 1990, is structured around a series of dialogues/monologues between the ostensible narrator and Rito, a Vietnam 379

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War veteran, who is never heard. Organized around various episodes, in which the narrator recalls his years as a soldier stationed in Germany in the 1950s, his political activism against racial segregation as a student at the University of North Carolina in the decade of the 1960s, and his years in Suruma, the fictitious city of southern New Mexico. The term surumatos is used by northern New Mexicans to refer disparagingly to those from the South, those considered to be of Mexican origin and thus not directly descended from the original Spanish colonists, as claimed by the Northerners. Contrasting this narrow, exclusionist view, in the novel, Suruma is an allegorical space of equality representing the Southwest, where a number of immigrants, from Germany, Poland, Russia, and Mexico, come together. The narrative’s perspective is international in scope, and the narrator’s ongoing “dialogue” with Rito serves as the connecting thread throughout the numerous episodes. The nine episodes or chapters of Suruma focus on a narrator who looks back on the Chicano movement and on the politics of Chicanos in the late 1980s, some of whom, like Rito, have assimilated into “the Gran Gringoria.” The narrator assumes a didactic conversational tone, at times urging Rito toward a less conservative, less assimilationist, more internationalist perspective. Suruma is ideal for the development of this new, more inclusive perspective because it is a space created by immigrants, a land where veterans of the Mexican Revolution arrived to labor in the fields—like Juan, Miriam’s grandfather, later working with Russian Jewish immigrants and never, even after sixty years, losing his identity or culture. By contrast, the narrator is quick to call native Surumatos, like Rito, fools for often being ignorant of their history, for denying their roots, and for calling themselves “Spanish.” Suruma also interestingly focuses on children, specifically young girls of nine or ten years of age, like Miriam, Justynka, Cris, and Abi, whose perspectives and family stories enable views of other lands, such as Mexico, Germany, and Poland. A second Miriam from Rheinheim is a nine-year-old girl who, like Juan’s granddaughter, also dreams of riding a horse. In the final episode of this self-referential text, three girls, Miriam from Rheimheim, Cris from Suruma, and Abi from Mexico, reflect on their construction by the narrator/author and on their bilingual–bicultural subjectivity and share their plans to ride the horse that the narrator/author constructs for them. Elizondo’s masterpiece is undoubtedly his novel Muerte en una estrella (1984), in which he reconstructs, in an original and lyrical key, the shooting of two Job Corps trainees by the Austin Police on March 23, 1968. Elizondo, then a professor in the Spanish Department of the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Austin Human Relations Commission (HRC), was part of a coalition, including the HRC, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), that protested the police shooting of two unarmed youth who, after stealing a car for a joyride, were pursued by the police and who crashed a short distance from the grounds of the City Coliseum. On getting out of the car, the two boys, Óscar Balboa and Valentín Rodríguez, ran but were shot in the back. Balboa died of his 380

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wounds at the scene. Police brutality and attempts to cover up their crime by claiming that the boys had a gun and a knife are the focus of Elizondo’s novel. Muerte en una estrella is especially notable for its fragmented structure, shifts in narrative perspective, and multiple spatial and time dimensions, especially social spaces reconstructing the Chicano movement and Chicano/Mexicano history in Texas. The novel has three main narrators: Óscar Balboa, Valentín Rodríguez, and the narrator–guitar player. The narrator figure functions as an alter ego of Balboa, able to expand on Óscar’s death reverie to reveal episodes of which Óscar has no knowledge. In a sense, the narrator’s voice is one of Óscar’s possible avatars, his otro Yo (other self) that enables him to know, see, and feel what he will never know. Once memories are shared, they become part of the Other, as Óscar explains, as he shares his thoughts with Valentín through the running mental exchanges that take place as they both lie dying on the grass. The novel records what may be the final moments and thoughts of Óscar and Valentín, with constant flashbacks to the past, and begins with the arrival of Óscar, sixteen years old, and Valentín, nineteen years old, at the carnival grounds near the City Coliseum in Austin. The narrator–guitar player of this ballad/corrido*/eulogy immediately serves to make the reader aware of multiple and simultaneous spaces in the city, a strategy used throughout the work. The narrative perspective shifts, between Balboa and Valentín, are also established, as are their conversations in their youthful slang, in Spanish. This initial conversation between Óscar and Valentín about where to go when they get to Austin is a flashback; in the present, the two lie bleeding and dying. In the short time before his death, Balboa, the poetic dreamer, reminisces, analyzes, fantasizes, and imagines multiple lives, multifold subjectivities encompassing both male and female. From his prone position, Balboa sees colors, lights, blades of grass, and insects and recalls his own past in the Texas Valley or in Ohio, where his father worked in the beet fields. In his reverie, his discourse often takes on the voice of his double, the narrator–guitar player, who moves beyond Balboa’s subjectivity and projected return as a ghost—to a discussion of race relations and of internecine violence within Chicano communities, as in the case of Pedro the Toad, once a Brown Beret and college student in California, knifed to death in the back of a bar where Chicano protestors celebrated and planned their next protest. Flashbacks take the reader to life at Camp Gary, a Job Corps camp organized by the federal government for working-class youth of all ethnicities, where blacks, Chicanos, Indians, and poor whites gain workplace skills and high school equivalency degrees. The flashbacks, which are not chronological, offer insights into various periods of Óscar’s life: before his birth, during his childhood, as a young boy cutting the lawn, working in the field with his father, attending a concert, marching with strikers walking all the way to Austin, and, despite his father’s fears and misgivings, signing up with the Job Corps. For his part, Valentín’s reminiscences are about his friendship with Óscar and about his father, a man who is aware that the odds are stacked against poor Chicano migrants, whether by gringos or from vendidos (sellouts) in his own community. Valentín’s voice is the last heard; in the novel, it is not clear 381

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whether both young men die or one lives, but there are indications that Valentín survives—he does not see his life flash before his eyes in his final moments as Óscar does. Elizondo’s novel Muerte en una estrella is highly experimental and, in 1984, set a benchmark and new directions for Chicano and Chicana narratives with its complex structure and formal experimentation. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Rosaura Sánchez Emilio, Luis Fenellosa (1844–1918). Luis Fenellosa Emilio was a military man and historiographer who was born of Spanish immigrant parents in Salem, Massachusetts. Like many others of Hispanic descent, he fought in the American Civil War from 1863–1865 with the Union’s army, which led him to his historical work. After serving as captain of the famous all-black 54th Infantry of Massachusetts, he saw himself forced to take the role of provisional commander when Colonel Robert Gould Shaw either died or suffered grave injuries during a military operation. The battle, just outside Charleston, South Carolina, was of paramount importance because it convinced both Northern and Southern commanders that slaves and freed blacks could make good soldiers. Based on its capital sacrifice, in which the North lost the majority of its men, President Abraham Lincoln ordered aggressive recruitment of blacks for the North, which resulted in more than 100,000 blacks serving during the Civil War. One of the battles in which Emilio fought was portrayed in the movie Glory. His book, A Brave Black Regiment, is an important source for American Civil War scholars because of its inclusion of the African American legacy and participation in this war. Further Reading “Find a Grave” (www.findagrave.com).

Luziris Pineda Enamorado Cuesta, José (1892–?). Born in Yauco, Puerto Rico, José Enamorado Cuesta was an active nationalist who plotted, with other like-minded activists on the Island and in New York City, to liberate Puerto Rico from the colonial rule of the United States. As a poet, he belonged to the generation of 1930; he published various polemical book-length essays as well as poetry in Spanish and English. His best-known work was Porto Rico, Past and Present. The Island after Thirty Years of American Rule, published in New York in 1929. He was also the author of Truth—Not Yet All the Truth—about Puerto Rico. One Half Century of United States Intervention (1948) and Protohistoria e historia de Puerto Rico (1971, Protohistory and History of Puerto Rico). Enamorado Cuesta’s political commitment led him to volunteer to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. His political activities as an independentista, in association with Pedro Alvizu Campos, were followed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which opened files on this community leader, eloquent orator, and poet. In San Juan, he published a newspaper, Puerto Rico Libre (Free Puerto Rico) from 1943 to 1975. 382

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Further Reading Lidin, Harold J., History of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement (Washington, D.C.: Waterfront Press, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Engle, Margarita (1951–). Born on September 2, 1951, in Los Angeles to a Cuban mother and an American father, novelist Margarita Engle grew up in an artistic household. Her father met her mother while on an oil painting journey to Cuba in the late 1940s. Engle did not visit her mother’s longed-for homeland until 1960; she became enchanted with the people and the culture and has maintained connections to her family there ever since. Despite the artistic background of her family, Engle studied the sciences in college, receiving a B.A. in agronomy from California Polytechnic Institute and an M.S. in Botany from Iowa State University. For many years, she was employed as a scientist. Nevertheless, she was always interested in writing and wrote many scientific articles. Finally, she made a life decision and returned to school to study creative writing; in 1983, she studied under Tomás Rivera* at the University of California-Riverside. The next year, 1984, Engle published a poetry chapbook, Tzintzuntzan. Since then, her stories and poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, Bilingual Review, Thema, and Nimrod. She has published three novels based on Cuban culture: Singing to Cuba (1993), Skywriting: A Novel of Cuba (1995), The Surrender Tree (2008), and a young adult biography, The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (2006), which won The Americas Award for Children and Young Adult Literature in 2007. Engle’s awards include a Cintas Fellowship, a San Diego Book Award, and a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Both novels deal with repression under the Communist regime of Cuba, the latter novel documenting how a sister, divided from her brother by the fate of politics, helps him leave the Island for the United States on a raft. Engle’s most recent Margarita Engle. 383

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work is a book of poetry for children, Word Wings (2006). Her other poetry chapbooks include In the Garden of Dreams (2001), Dreaming Sunlight (2002), and Salt: Poems of Peace (2004). Further Reading Quintana, Alvina E., Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Escalona, Beatriz (1903–1980). Actress and vaudevillian Beatriz Escalona, whose stage name was “La Chata” Noloesca (a rearranged spelling of her last name), was born on August 20, 1903, in San Antonio, Texas. The greatest stage personality to come out of Hispanic communities, Escalona was discovered while working as an usherette and box-office cashier at the Teatro Nacional (National Theater) in San Antonio. She became associated with the Spanish–Cuban troupe of Hermanos Areu (The Brothers Areu)—she married José Areu—and played everything from melodrama to vaudeville with them, beginning in 1920, when she made her debut in El Paso, Texas. Over the course of the 1920s, Escalona developed and perfected her comic persona as the streetwise maid, a peladita,* or underdog character, that maintains a spicy and satirical nature. The numerous sketches that she wrote or improvised for this persona are mostly lost to posterity; however, a few have been preserved on 78-rpm records. By 1930, Escalona had split from the Areu Brothers and formed her own company, Atracciones Noloesca (Noloesca Attractions); she continued to tour the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. In 1936, she reorganized her company in her native San Antonio and set out to weather the Depression by performing in Tampa, Florida, and in Chicago Beatriz Escalona as “La Chata” Noloesca. 384

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and New York City—as well as in Cuba and Puerto Rico—as the Compañía Mexicana (Mexican Companion). La Chata’s novel idea was to bring to Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos a Mexican variety show with her own brand of humor. In 1948, the company set down roots in New York City for a stretch of nine years, during which time it was the mainstay on the Hispanic vaudeville circuit comprising the Teatro Hispano, the Teatro Puerto Rico, the Teatro Triboro, and the 53rd Street Theater. After her New York City sojourn, back in San Antonio, she periodically performed for special community events until her death in 1980. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Escandón, María Amparo (1957–). Mexican immigrant writer María Amparo Escandón was born in Mexico City on June 19, 1957, and enjoyed the privileges accruing to wealthy and distinguished Mexicans; her family descended from a former Mexican president. After several tumultuous years, in which Escandón ran into trouble at most of the nine private elementary schools her parents chose for her, in 1981, Escandón was able to go on to study for and receive a B.A. in communications from Universidad Anáhuac, a Catholic institution. Soon thereafter, she eloped with Benito Martínez-Creel and settled in Los Angeles, California, where the two opened a Hispanic advertising agency that has become very successful. After giving birth to her daughter in 1988, Escandón became inspired to write a type of thriller about the disappearance of the protagonist’s daughter; her search takes her throughout Mexico and into California, all the while carrying around her daughter’s box of saints. Esperanza’s Box of Saints (1999) was dramatized in a film, for which Escandón also wrote the screenplay; the film, Santitos, won the Latin American Cinema Award (1999) at the Sundance Festival and projected the book to the top of the Los Angeles Times best seller list. The book subsequently was translated into eighteen foreign languages. Escandón’s latest novel, González & Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License (2005), deals in a surrealistic manner with the incongruous success of a book club within the walls of a prison in Mexico. Escandón has taught creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1993. Further Reading Wood, Jamie Martínez, Latino Writers and Journalists (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Escobar, Elizam (1948–). Elizam Escobar was arrested in Evanston, Illinois, with eleven other Puerto Ricans on April 2, 1980, and sentenced to sixty-eight years in a federal prison for seditious conspiracy against the United States because of his involvement in the Armed Forces of Puerto Rican National Liberation (FALN), an avowed anti-imperialist organization that 385

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supported independence from the United States. His supporters, however, consider his only crime to be one of a long line of Puerto Ricans resisting the U.S. government’s control of their nation’s sovereignty. Escobar was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on May 24, 1948. He studied art at universities in both Puerto Rico and New York, where he worked as a teacher at the Museum del Barrio, in public schools, and as a graphic artist with the Hispanic Artists’ Association. Elizam was incarcerated in prisons in Wisconsin and Oklahoma, and efforts to serve his time nearer to his family, in New York and Puerto Rico, have consistently been denied. While in prison, Elizam continued writing and painting and had exhibits of his paintings in Puerto Rico, the United States, Latin America, and Europe. He also published articles widely on art and politics in magazines in Canada, England, Italy, Latin America, and the United States. His release from prison on September 10, 1999, coincided with the publication of his book, Los ensayos del artificiero: Más allá del postmodernismo y lo político-directo (Essays from the Artificer: Beyond Modernism and Political Directness). He later received the PEN Club first prize for best creative essay. Admirers consider Escobar to be one of the most important Puerto Rican revolutionary painters and poets. In 2006, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture published Elizam Escobar: Cuadernos de cárcel (Prison Sketchbooks), a selection of drawings from his prison sketchbooks. Today, Escobar is the dean of painting at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan. Further Reading “Elizam Escobar. This Is Me” (http://www.zoominfo.com/search/PersonDetail.aspx? PersonID=781599183).

F. Arturo Rosales Escobar, José (18?–?). José Escobar was a central figure in the Spanishlanguage press at the end of the nineteenth century. A Mexican citizen, he immigrated to New Mexico in the late 1880s; little is known of his background or formal training as a journalist. He was a member of La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana (Hispano American Press Association), the first Spanishlanguage press association in the Southwest. Escobar edited some fourteen newspapers in ten communities in Colorado and New Mexico. In each, he included a literary arts column that reprinted literary and historical texts from Mexican and New Mexican newspapers. Starting about 1889, Escobar offered his expertise as a trained journalist to several fledgling newspapers. In New Mexico, he edited El Defensor del Pueblo (1891–1892, The People’s Defender), La Libertad (1892, Liberty), El Combate (1892 and 1898, Combat), El Pais (1893, The Nation), La Voz de Nuevo Mexico (1894–1895, The Voice of New Mexico), La Opinión Pública (1894, Public Opinion), El Amigo del Pueblo (1896, The Friend of the People), Nuevo Mundo (1897, New World), and El Defensor de Socorro (1897, The Socorro Defender). In Colorado, he edited El Progreso (Progress), Las Dos Repúblicas (1896, The Two Republics), and El Independiente (1896, The Independent).

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Returning to El Paso, he published Las Dos Américas (The Two Americas) in 1898. Escobar’s poems and essays are scattered throughout the newspapers that he published. His poems, verbose in style and imagery, follow the tenets of Latin American postromanticism. His editorial essays are direct in addressing the major concerns in the Mexican American community of his day. Escobar had a deep interest in the history of the Southwest. In 1893, he launched “Nuevo México y sus hombres ilustres: 1530–1894” (New Mexico and Its Illustrious Men), a series that aimed to recover the neglected history of his adopted region. He produced a ten-part epic poem, published in Las Dos Repúblicas, that began with the canto “Popé” on March 14, 1896. The subject of the poem is the heroic Pueblo Indian leader, Popé, of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Only cantos III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII survive, but these provide evidence of Escobar’s mestizo consciousness. An important example of decolonizing verse, each canto treats the cause of the insurrection and pays tribute to the first successful large-scale revolt against a colonial power in the Americas. Escobar’s Popé is a commanding and heroic figure who embodies the spirit of indigenous resistance to colonial subjugation. By some accounts, Escobar is the first published Chicano cultural critic, by virtue of offering some of the earliest commentary on the progress of education and literacy in the Nuevomexicano (New Mexican) community. Escobar’s essay “Progreso literario de Nuevo México” (New Mexico’s Literary Progress), published in July 1896, refutes charges in the Eastern press that the Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest were indolent in matters concerning education. Escobar gives lie to the idea that they were uninterested and passive in their own cultural development. In listing the achievements of the press, Escobar shows the emergence in his community of a vital culture of print. Escobar often extolled the virtues of literacy as a means to liberate the mind, exhorting his readers, “Foment your noble desire for knowledge; persevere in your noble struggle.” Further Reading Meléndez, A. Gabriel, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Meyer, Doris, “The Poetry of José Escobar” in Hispania Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar. 1978: 24–33).

Gabriel Meléndez Escobedo, Alonso Gregorio (15?–?). Born in the mid-fifteenth century in southern Spain, possibly in Palos de Moguer, Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo became a Franciscan missionary assigned to the New World. He arrived in the Caribbean some time around 1587. Most of what is known about this religious poet has been gleaned from his monumental epic poem, La Florida, written between 1606 and 1610, on his return to Spain from an evangelizing mission in present-day Florida. It is one of the first epic poems to emerge from the Spaniards’ New World encounter and one of the first to be conceived in territory that became part of the United States. It is probably

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earlier than Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s epic, La Conquista de la Nueva México (The Conquest of New Mexico), which resulted from the 1598 colonizing expedition into New Mexico. In the 22,000 lines of poetry, divided into 449 cantos, Escobedo not only explores the motives and practices of the explorers and other missionaries but also the culture of the natives whom the Spanish encountered on coming to what they called the “flowered land.” Not a straight historical or chronological account, La Florida incorporates many imagined and fabulous events, as well as a general history of the Franciscan order. Almost entirely unknown or ignored for centuries, the entirety of the voluminous La Florida is only available in Alexandra Sununu’s dissertation. Further Reading Covington, James W., Pirates, Indians and Spaniards: Father Escobedo’s “La Florida” (St. Petersburg, FL: Great Outdoors Publishing Co., 1963). Sununu, Alexandra, Estudio y edición anotada de “La Florida” de Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo, O.F.M., Ph.D. dissertation (City University of New York, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Escuelitas Mexicanas. In the early twentieth century, Mexican and Mexican American communities in the southwestern border states began running their own schools, in part because of racism and segregation in the public schools and also because of the control over the curriculum—especially as concerned the teaching of the Spanish language and Mexican history—that the community could exert. The Idar* family of journalists were leaders in the

Leonor Villagas de Magnón’s escuelita.

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effort to attract female graduates of normal schools in Mexico to come teach in the U.S. Mexican communities. Among the early teachers in these schools, or escuelitas, were some important writers and intellectuals, such as Sara Estela Ramírez* and Leonor Villegas de Magnón.* At some point in later years, the Mexican government became involved. In January 1928, Margarita Robles y Mendoza of the Mexican Ministry of Education toured the southwestern United States to promote Mexican escuelitas, most of which were established in California and Texas. To promote the effort, a Mexican Chamber of Deputies representative from Oaxaca, Alfonso Ramírez, toured various Mexican immigrant settlements in the United States, supposedly to investigate immigrant problems, but his visit really was to reinforce the intensive effort by the Mexican Ministry of Education in promoting Mexicanness. In February 1928, he assured immigrants that their children were still considered Mexican citizens and said that parents should discourage Americanization. The initiative continued into later years. In Phoenix, local immigrant leaders and Consul Manuel Payno inaugurated La Escuela Mexicana (The Mexican School) in 1930 with much fanfare during the Cinco de Mayo (May 5) festivities. Payno was so enthusiastic that he obtained certification from the Arizona Department of Education. Thirty children were enrolled during summer vacation, and Payno himself taught Mexican geography and Mexican history, and volunteer Rosendo Serna taught reading and writing in both languages. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

F. Arturo Rosales Espada, Martín (1957–). Poet Martín Espada was born into a Puerto Rican family in Brooklyn, New York. After having studied law, passed the bar, and exercised the legal profession for various years, Espada gave up the law for poetry. A prolific writer, Espada has published well-received collections of his highly crafted verse, which were somewhat in the Nuyorican* tradition: Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987); Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990); City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993); Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), winner of an American Book Award; A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen: Poems (2000); and Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (2003), recipient of the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and an American Library Association Notable Book. In 2004, Espada published a bilingual audio book, Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo: The Poems of Martín Espada, which captures his dramatic reading style. Espada’s poetry, while often autobiographical and grounded in the realities of Puerto Rican barrio life in New York, tends toward the surreal, as in Imagine the Angels of Bread, in which dreams are populated by cockroaches and where fathers and sons switch identities. Most of his poetry is politically charged, whether from the vantage point of Latinos in the United States, Puerto Rican independence, 389

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Martín Espada.

or regarding U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America and the rest of the world. In 2007, Espada published The Republic of Poetry, in which he develops poems to celebrate politically engaged poets in Latin American, such as Pablo Neruda; poets engaged in liberation struggles throughout the world, such as Dennis Brutus of South Africa; and those of his own works that are engaged with the politics of U.S. war in the Middle East and under the Bush administration’s threats to democracy at home. Among Espada’s mentors and models are Federico García Lorca and Clemente Soto Vélez,* whose poetry he has helped rescue. Espada published a prose collection, Zapata’s Disciple: Essays, in 1998. In addition to the Paterson Award, Espada has received the PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. 390

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Further Reading Sánchez González, Lisa, Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Espaillat, Rhina Polonia (1932–). A Dominican American poet who writes in English and Spanish, Rhina Espaillat Polonia is known for writing poetry that captures the beauty of the mundane and the routine. Often compared to poet Anthony Hecht (1923–), she is considered a member of the New Formalist school, that is, poets who write within certain poetic forms, be it sonnet or couplet. Espaillat was born in La Vega, Dominican Republic, on January 20, 1932, the daughter of a diplomat. Influenced by her grandmother, who wrote poetry and who introduced the young girl to verses and music, Espaillat began to write in Spanish by the age of five. When she was seven years old, her parents moved to New York City, where Espaillat quickly mastered English. Ten years later, her teachers in high school were reading and praising her poetry. When she was fifteen years old, Ladies Home Journal published some of her poems. A year later, she was accepted into the Poetry Society of America. In 1953, Espaillat graduated from Hunter College and became a teacher. During the 1960s, she attended graduate school at Queens College, City University of New York. Her family responsibilities—three children—and her studies curtailed her writing. But, in 1980, she returned to writing poetry. Since then, her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, and, in 1992, she published her first collection: Lapsing to Grace: Poems and Drawings. She followed the collection with four other volumes: Where Horizons Go (1998), Mundo y Palabra (2001, The World and the Word), Rhina P. Espaillat: Greatest Hits (2002), and Rehearsing Absence (2002). Although her poetry, usually consisting of rhythmic sonnets, describes family life and domestic settings, which she has called “snapshots,” she also addresses such issues as ancestry, assimilation, and immigration. Poet and critic Robert B. Shaw wrote of Espaillat’s poetry in the journal Poetry (2002), “She notices what we typically overlook, and she delineates it with lucid intelligence, tolerance, and good humor. Hers is a voice of experience, but it is neither jaded nor pedantic. She speaks not from some cramped corner but from somewhere close to the center of life.” Further Reading Shaw, Robert. B., “Straws in the Wind.” Poetry Vol. 180, No. 6 (Sep. 2002: 345–356).

D. H. Figueredo Espina, Eduardo (1954–). Distinguished Uruguayan poet, U.S. resident since 1980, Eduardo Espina was born and raised in Montevideo. He obtained a Ph.D. in Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis and went on to teach at various universities, including Middlebury College and Amherst College. Currently, he is a professor of Spanish American literature at Texas 391

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A&M University. A prolific poet, Espina is also the editor of Hispanic Poetry Review, which is dedicated to the review and criticism of Spanish-language poetry. His books include Valores personales (1982, Personal Values), La caza nupcial (1993, The Nuptial Hunt), El oro y la liviandad del brillo (1994, Gold and the Lightness of Glitter), Coto de casa (1995, Home Border), Lee un poco más despacio (1999, Read a Little Slower), and Mínimo de un mundo visible (2003, The Minimum of a Visible World). He is also the author of various books of essays, including El disfraz de la modernidad (1992, The Costume of Modernity), Las ruinas de lo imaginario (1996, The Ruins of the Imaginary), Un plan de indicios (2000, A Plan of Indications), and La condición Milli Vanilli: Ensayos de dos siglos (2003, The Milli Vanilli Condition: Essays from Two Centuries); the latter two books won the national prize for essay in Uruguay. In 2007, his collection of poems, El cutis patrio (2006, Homeland Skin), was awarded the Latino Literature Award given by Latin American Writers Institute* of New York. Espina’s poetry is sonorous and orally effective while still involved and complicated in its syntax. His function as a poet is to act both as a seer and as a social and political commentator on the world scene. Further Reading Shaw, Donald L., Spanish American Poetry after 1950: Beyond the Vanguard (Suffolk, UK: Tamesis Books, 2008).

Nicolás Kanellos Espinosa, Aurelio M. (1880–1958). Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, one of the most significant contributors to the field of Spanish dialectology and Hispanic folklore-based literature,* was born in El Carnero, Colorado, September 12, 1880. This small town in the San Luis Valley, approximately forty-five miles north of the present New Mexico–Colorado border, had a strong Spanish cultural heritage. The Espinosa family was one of the many families of Spanish descendants engaged in farming and sheep-raising. As a boy, Aurelio developed an intense curiosity in local traditions, listening with great interest as his neighbors recounted traditional legends, ballads, tales, verses, proverbs, and other forms of Spanish folk literature. To provide his children with a better education, Aurelio’s father moved his family to Del Norte in Río Grande County. In 1895, Aurelio entered Del Norte High School. Later, in the fall of 1898, he enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he graduated in 1902. His bachelor’s degree studies concentrated on modern Romance Languages, Latin, and Philosophy. In 1905, he married María Margarita García, a descendant of a Spanish family of the Santa Fe area. From the beginning of the century, he began to collect traditional Spanish and New Mexican folklore and to study the Spanish dialects spoken in the region. He became a professor of Modern Languages in 1902 at the University of New Mexico. In 1909, he completed his doctoral degree in Romance Languages and Literatures with a minor in Indo-European Comparative Philology. His doctoral dissertation on New Mexican Spanish language and folklore was published in the prestigious Revue de Dialectologie Romance. This publication 392

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attracted the attention of important scholars in the field, to the point that, in 1910, Stanford University offered him a post as an assistant professor in Romantic Languages; he taught until his retirement in 1947. Espinosa was a pioneer in the study and teaching of Hispanic language, folklore, and culture of the Southwest. Among his important works was an edition of the New Mexican folk drama* Los Comanches (1907), as well as numerous collections of New Mexico folk poetry and stories. A particular contribution of his was the collection and documentation of the survival of Spain’s ballad tradition in New Mexico and the Southwest. He died on September 4, 1958. Further Reading Espinosa, J. Manuel, The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).

Patricia Napiorski Espinosa, Conrado (1897–1977). Mexican writer and educator Conrado Espinosa was born in Jalisco in 1897. He grew up in Zapotlán and Tuxpan, Jalisco, where he attended elementary school. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Guadalajara, where he entered Preparatory School and then the University, while active in the Spiritist Center of Guadalajara, which advocated a mixed philosophy of Hinduism, Christianity, and spiritualism. At this center, he met Ramón Iturbe, Governor of Sinaloa, who first employed Espinosa in educational work in the state. After the fall of Venustiano Carranza and Iturbe in 1920, Espinosa continued his work in the educational system in Mexico during the administration of José Vasconcelos, then rector of the National University, establishing schools and undertaking a number of educational projects throughout the Mexican republic. Vasconcelos worked with Adolfo de la Huerta in his candidacy for the presidency of the republic; with the country divided between supporters of Plutarco Elías Calles and De la Huerta, in 1924, Espinosa was identified as a supporter of the latter because of his association with Vasconcelos and forced to go into exile, heading first to New Orleans, Louisiana, and then to San Antonio, Texas, in the same year. In the Alamo city, he collaborated with several different newspapers, including Ignacio Lozano’s La Prensa (The Press). Later, he moved to McAllen, a small city in South Texas that borders Reynosa, Tamaulipas, on the other side of the Río Grande. There, he worked in a newspaper that he described as “modest, with a great influence among the chicanada (Chicanos) and which allowed me to develop myself freely,” most likely El Cronista del Valle (The Valley Chronicler), published in Brownsville, only a short distance away from McAllen. In 1926, the Viola Novelty Company in San Antonio published a novel by Espinosa, El sol de Texas (Under the Texas Sun). The book revolves around two families of Mexican immigrant laborers who come to Texas looking for work and a way to progress economically. Following the publication of this book, Espinosa spent four more years in the United States—California, Illinois, Kansas, and Texas among other states—pursuing his journalism career in various newspapers and magazines, often in the publications of Ignacio E. Lozano, 393

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editor of La Opinión (The Opinion) in Los Angeles and La Prensa (The Press) in San Antonio. In 1930, Espinosa returned to Mexico to continue with his involvement in educational projects, founding a school in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where he worked until his death in 1977. Further Reading García Cortés, Adrián, Memorias del cerro: Espinosa, el hombre, el maestro (Los Mochis, Sinaloa: n.p., 1983). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007: 438–455).

John Pluecher Espinosa, María (1939–). Pondering the sadomasochistic elements of intimacy, María Espinosa’s semiautobiographical novel, Longing (1995), explores the myriad ways in which two people can help both create and destroy each other. Longing is a psychological novel, depicting one young woman’s unhealthy dependence on her abusive husband, her attempts to forge an independent life, and her gradual evolution into her own person. The focus is nearly obsessive, and the hero and victim are sometimes indistinguishable. Espinosa was born January 6, 1939, to a family of Sephardic and German origins. Her maternal ancestors stayed on in Spain, after 1492, until the eighteenth century, surviving as Marranos, or secret Jews. In the mid- or late eighteenth century, they immigrated to Belgium, where they could at last openly acknowledge their Jewish identity. In 1963, Espinosa married a Chilean writer, Mario Antonio Espinosa Wellman. They had one child, Carmen, who now lives in the Los Angeles area. The couple divorced in 1965 but later lived together again until 1970. María married a second time, divorced, and is currently living again with her second husband. Espinosa did her undergraduate work in English and Creative Writing at Columbia University (1962) and received her M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University (1981). A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, she has taught English as a Second Language in various adult education programs, as well as creative writing and contemporary literature at the New College of California in San Francisco. Her publications include a novel titled Dark Plums (1995); two books of poetry, Night Music (1969) and Love Feelings; and a translation of George Sand’s novel Lelia (1978). In 2002, Espinosa published Incognito: Journeys of a Secret Jew (2002), a historical novel of persecution of the Jews in Spain from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century that centers on a story of love and the struggle for liberation. Further Reading Ben Ur, Aviva. “A Bridge of Communication: Spaniards and Ottoman Sephardic Jews in the City of New York (1880–1950)” in Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice of the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

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Esquenazi Mayo, Roberto (1920–2004). Professor, researcher, and strong contributor to the development and diffusion of Latin American culture in the United States, Roberto Esquenazi Mayo was an important promoter of the study of Cuban writers and the growth of Latin American Studies within the American academy. Esquenazi Mayo was born in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. After graduating from the University of Havana, he immigrated to the United States in 1941. Soon after his arrival, he participated in World War II as a paratrooper, and his actions in campaign earned him distinctions from the Venezuelan, Spanish, and French governments; he also received the Purple Heart from the U.S. Army. His experiences in World War II are captured in his juvenile novel Memorias de un estudiante soldado (1951, Memoirs of a Student Soldier). After finishing postgraduate studies at Columbia University, Esquenazi Mayo was invited to join the Romance Languages Department at the University of Nebraska as assistant professor in Latin American Literature; he later became chairman of the department. His broad scholarly production included articles, essays, and reviews in many specialized journals, as well as critical editions such as Latin American Scholarship Since World War Two (1972), Eugenio Florit: Obras completas (1982, Eugenio Florit:* Complete Works), and El Padre Varela, pensador, sacerdote, patriota (1990, Father Varela,* Thinker, Priest, Patriot), all of which greatly contributed to the promotion and revalorization of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture. His Survey of Cuban Magazines 1902–1958 (1993) stands out as a deep critical work promoted by the Library of the Congress. Esquenazi was also the first Editor-in-Chief of Life en Español. Further Reading “Esquenazi Mayo, Roberto,” Contemporary Authors Online (Detroit: Gale, 2002 http:// www.gale-edit.com/cas/).

Flavia Belpoliti Essay. After poetry, the essay is the writing genre most cultivated by Latinos across time for a variety of reasons. The essay offered the opportunity to publish in the more than 1,800 newspapers issued in Latino communities before 1960; formal speeches, readily convertible to essays for publication, are important in Latino community life; there is a need to state positions and propagandize in support of the various Latino political movements—from the struggles for independence to the opposition to U.S. intervention in Latin America to the overthrow of autocratic regimes; and institutionalized religion plays a central role in Latino life in the United States. The very origins of newspaper publishing by Latinos in the United States is intimately related to the struggles by the Spanish colonies for independence from Spain. Such was the motive behind the founding of the first newspaper, El Misisipí (1808, The Mississippi) in New Orleans, Louisiana; La Gaceta de Texas (1813, The Texas Gazette) in Nacogdoches, Texas; and El Habanero (1824, The Havanan) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the latter two newspapers, two of the most significant essayists, Father Félix Varela* and José Alvarez de Toledo, penned essays in support of the separation of the colonies 395

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from Spain. Both went on to produce essays for many years. Varela was also important for initiating the role of essay writing in Hispanic religious thought in the United States. From his early days in Philadelphia and New York, Varela was a prolific researcher and deliberator on the role of religion in daily life; some of his earliest essays compared the practice of Catholic and Protestant religions. For more than forty years, Varela developed theological essays, as well as essays for popular consumption, published in the religious magazines that he edited and in separate volumes. Since then, the essay as a form of educating readers and reinforcing their faith has flourished in the hundreds of Spanish-language religious newspapers and periodicals published by Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, and others. Of particular distinction were the essays of Alberto Rembao,* a Mexican immigrant who became a theologian and also was the editor of one of these periodicals, Democracia (Democracy), in the early and mid-twentieth century. His essays, pamphlets, periodicals, and books were distributed not only throughout the United States but also throughout all of Spanish America, where they were often criticized as part of American hegemony and expansionism. Rembao’s efforts in the United States resulted in part from the mass expulsion of the religious from Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. The Catholic Church and others religious institutions in exile set up headquarters in such places as El Paso, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; and Los Angeles, California. El Paso, in particular, became an important center for the publication of religious periodicals from various Catholic and Protestant denominations; to this date, these periodicals are distributed throughout the hemisphere and have continued to serve as an important forum for the publication of essays. More than any other subject or motivation, the essay is irrevocably tied to political thought. To study the essay and its historical development is to review the political history of Spanish America—from the struggles for independence to the need to organize Latino laborers in fields and factories across the United States—to state the case for opposition to dictators in the homeland; to mold and solidify a Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican identity in the United States; or to support candidates for political office. Some of the most eloquent and renowned essayists in the Hispanic world have actually written and published their essays in the United States as part of their political movements. Probably the most celebrated Hispanic essayist in history was José Martí,* whose effort to raise funds and organize the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movement in U.S. Latino communities was the principal motivator—first, for his eloquent speeches and, second, for their publication as masterful, thought-provoking works, such as his “Nuestra América” (Our America), which has provided, for all of Spanish America, a rationale for solidarity as well as an opposition to American imperialism. Ricardo Flores Magón,* the anarchosyndicalist exile from Mexico, publisher of newspapers and founder of the Mexican Liberal Party, was also an eloquent speaker and essayist who used the medium to spread his ideology; Flores Magón’s words and deeds were so dangerous to the established society in Mexico and the United States that he was ultimately imprisoned in Leavenworth, 396

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Kansas, where he died. While Flores Magón in the Southwest was exhorting the workers of the world to unite, Lucy González Parsons* and Luisa Capetillo, respectively, were issuing similar calls in the Midwest and on the Atlantic coast: the former through her own periodicals and the latter through union newspapers and her own self-published books of collected essays. Capetillo, however, was the most outspoken feminist of the group, establishing a firm anarchist underpinning for the liberation of women and for her beliefs in free sex and the abolition of the marriage conventions. On the completely opposite side of the spectrum from Flores Magón, Gonzáles Parsons, and Capetillo, however, was Mexican exile Nemesio García Naranjo, a former member of the dictatorial regime of Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz. Naranjo was in great demand to speak in Mexican communities throughout the Southwest; he published his often nostalgic essays in opposition to the Carranza regime in Mexico and in support of Díaz and other conservative causes, not only in his own magazine, La Revista Mexicana (The Mexican Review), but also in periodicals throughout the Southwest. Through his essays, as well, Naranjo sought to bring together and solidify—under the nationalist ideology of México de afuera* (The Mexican Nation Abroad)—both the Mexican émigré and Mexican American communities. Unlike the hard-hitting, direct language of the anarchists addressing their working-class readership, Naranjo’s style was flowery and convoluted, and it exuded high-class education and was seemingly meant more to impress with its erudition, poetic phrasing, and appeal to sentiment than with its development of logical arguments and evidence. One of the favorite genres of newspaper columnists writing for immigrant audiences was the crónica (chronicle), a quasi-journalistic and quasi-literary piece that reflected local color, customs, and community issues. In the hands of some cronistas, such as Mexican Julio G. Arce,* the crónica developed a short fictional plot; crónicas written by others, such as Jesús Colón,* developed a logical and, at times, puritanical or paternalistic message for the community. The crónica was ubiquitous in the newspapers and periodicals of all Hispanic immigrant groups, including the Sephardic* essayists writing in such newspapers as New York’s La Luz (The Light). Beginning in the late nineteenth century with such cronistas as Venezuelan Nicanor Bolet Peraza,* the Puerto Rican printer and poet Francisco Pachín Marín,* and José Martí himself, the genre survived into the 1950s and became commonplace in most Hispanic community periodicals. It became a space for correcting errant community habits and promoting community solidarity and loyalty, as well as a space in which to protest discrimination and mistreatment of the Hispanic community, as in some of the crónicas of Rodolfo Uranga, who was writing in El Paso, Texas, at the beginning of the Depression.* Such authors as Clotilde Betances Yaeger and María Mas Pozo, writing in New York’s Gráfico (Graphic) and Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters) in the late 1920s and 1930s, converted the traditional women’s page into a space for the development of feminist ideology and debate through essay-crónicas. The role of community and movement newspapers was reborn during the Chicano movement after a brief hiatus during the late Depression and World 397

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War II, which were traumatic to public life in the Latino communities. As part of the Chicano movement, numerous activist periodicals sprang up in the late 1960s and continued to raise the level of consciousness of students and workers through most of the 1970s. These periodicals included union newspapers, such as the United Farm Workers’ El Malcriado (The Brat), as well as grassroots community efforts, such as San Francisco Mission District’s El Tecolote (The Owl). In all of these, the polemics were fiery and often outrageous. One of the longest-lived was El Grito del Norte (The South from the North), in which the editor, Enriqueta Vásquez, penned well thought-out, satirical, and eloquent essays on the issues of the day. The late 1960s and the 1970s also witnessed the appearance of numerous magazines and journals issued by Latino scholars and students at universities. El grito, enjoying a national distribution from Berkeley, became the vehicle for the incisive and well-researched essays by its editor, anthropologist Octavio Romano, in articulating Chicano cultural nationalism. Likewise, The Rican, nationally distributed from Chicago, became a forum for the essays of its sociologist editor, Samuel Betances, which presented the case not only for Puerto Rican cultural nationalism but for basing it, in part, on the African heritage of Nuyoricans* and Puerto Ricans. One of the most important Latino essays ever published, presenting a framework for Latino culture in the United States and outlining a role for activist scholars and cultural workers was “On Culture,” by University of California at Los Angeles historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones; it was first published in Revista Chicano-Riqueña (Chicano Rican Review) out of Indiana University Northwest. Unfortunately, as more and more Latinos have integrated higher education as scholars and professors, the role of the public, activist scholar has diminished over the years. Today’s academic writers too often write for each other, in a theoretical or social scientific language that is beyond the communities’ comprehension; in any case, their work is published in high-priced university press books that have no local distribution and thus little impact on the grass roots, unlike the essays of earlier generations. To be sure, there are numerous Spanishlanguage newspapers today, but the role of the essayist and cronista seems to have been watered down and rarely engages a particular following, as it seemingly did in the past. The mass-distributed, national English-language commercial publications rarely include thought-provoking essays; they are more given to promoting and celebrating Latino success stories and life among the middle class and the upwardly mobile. There is a need for Latino intellectuals to share their insights and research findings with Latino communities, to step down from the ivory tower and invest in the types of publication, in print or online, that can inform and inspire the common man while addressing the social and political issues that really matter for the progress of the community. Further Reading Gómez-Quiñones, Juan, “On Culture” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 5, No. 2 (1977: 29–47). Kanellos, Nicolás, et al. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Oropeza, Lorena, and Dionne Espinoza, eds., Vásquez, Enriqueta and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito del Norte (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Essex, Olga Berrocal (1932–). Olga Berrocal Essex was born May 26, 1932, in Panama City, Republic of Panama. She is a graduate of Instituto Pan-Americano and received an A.A. degree in Drama and Literature from the Institute of Fine Arts and a B.A. degree in journalism from Justo Arosemena Institute, University of Panama extension. She was a professional actress in Panama’s National Theater and appeared in many plays and poetry readings in the theater and other venues, including her own weekly radio program in Panama City. Essex’s writing career began as Arts reviewer and feature writer for daily newspapers in Panama City. Essex worked as a reporter and feature writer with the Tri-Valley Herald, a daily newspaper in Livermore, California. She also wrote a Spanish-language column. A frontOlga Berrocal Essex. page feature and a series of articles about cancers that affect women brought her an award of recognition from the American Cancer Society. The California Newspaper Association issued an award of excellence to the Tri-Valley Herald’s coverage of the return of American POWs (Prisoners of War) from Vietnam that included a front-page feature under Olga Essex’s byline. Essex was part of the research and development staff at Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation in Pleasanton, California, where she did technical writing as part of her duties in engineering support. She retired from Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical and went to work at US Windpower, a pioneer of wind energy in California, until she and her husband moved to their retirement home in Paso Robles in 1989. Essex has worked for International Accessibility Corporation in Boulder Creek, translating computer software and operation manuals into Spanish for use in Latin America and Europe. She was a writer and photographer for the Country News in Paso Robles until 1991. She became a member of the Paso Robles Writers Workshop and the Cambria Writers Workshop. Her work has been published in national magazines such as Vegetarian Gourmet, Westways, LottoWorld, Lady’s Circle, and New Times. Under the Oaks, an anthology of California Central Coast writers, includes her short stories. Her first novel, 399

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Delia’s Way (1998), has been seen as the quintessential coming-of-age novel. Set in Panama, it follows the development of the eponymous Delia in dealing with her family and sibling rivalry. Essex and her husband, Jack, met in Panama and married there. He worked with the Intelligence Services for the Caribbean Air Command; also, he was an announcer for the English-language radio station in Panama City and for the Caribbean Forces Network. They moved to the United States when his tour of duty with the armed services was completed. Jack is a retired police captain. They have four grown children and four grandchildren. Further Reading Adamson, Lynda G., World Historical Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Novels for Adults and Young Adults (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1998).

Carmen Peña Abrego Esteves, Sandra María (1948–). Sandra María Esteves was born May 10, 1948, in New York City, the daughter of a Dominican garment worker and a Puerto Rican sailor. She received her early education at a Catholic boarding school, where her Spanish language and Hispanic culture were targeted for obliteration by strict Irish American nuns. But that was on weekdays; her weekends were spent in the warmth and comfort of her Puerto Rican aunt’s home. Thus, at an early age, she discerned the language and culture conflicts that Hispanics experience in the United States. Later in life, these conflicts formed the basis for much of her poetry. Esteves studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York City; when, after various interruptions, she graduated in 1978, her writing career was already firmly established. In the early 1970s, Esteves became part of the civil rights movement and the movement to gain independence for Puerto Rico. In connection with the latter, she sang and recited her poetry with a socialist musical group, simply titled El Grupo (The Group), whose recordings became anthems for the independence movement. The recordings also effectively launched Esteves’s career as a poet. In the mid-1970s, she became involved in the Nuyorican* Poets Sandra María Esteves. 400

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Cafe and the performance poetry that it sponsored under the leadership of writers Miguel Algarín, Tato Laviera, and Miguel Piñero. In a literary movement heavily directed by males, Esteves became a beacon of feminism. Her work as a painter followed a similar course as her writing, and she became affiliated with the Taller Boricua (Puerto Rican Workshop), a socially committed collective of graphic artists. After publishing numerous poems in magazines and anthologies, Sandra Maria Esteves published her first book, Yerba Buena (The Good Herb), in 1980, to resounding reviews. Library Journal named the book the best small-press publication in 1981. The title refers to mint, an herb that, in Caribbean culture, has medicinal qualities; her tropical and urban poems are meant to heal or mend the rifts of culture and gender conflict among Latinos and Latinas. Despite widespread interest among publishers in issuing her works, Esteves self-published her next collection of poems, Tropical Rains (1984), probably to control distribution herself. The book followed in the bilingual, urban vernacular of Yerba Buena but did not have its impact. Other chapbooks that she self-published include Undelivered Love Poems (1997), Contrapunto in the Open Field (1998), and Finding Your Way (2001). Her latest work, Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990), is a mature work that is a distillation of jazz and salsa, “sung” in a precisely stylized bilingualism and exuding a deep spirituality and humanism. Like her other works, the line structures and blank verse of the poetry demonstrate that they are meant to be recited and performed. Esteves’s incantations come from both santería (an Afro-Catholic religion) and the cadences, threats, and caresses of speech heard in the barrio. Esteves has also had a lateral career in theater, usually related in some way to her poetry, as the African Caribbean Poetry Theater director from 1983 to 1990 and the director of The Family Repertory Company, beginning in 1990. Among her awards are the New York State Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1985; the Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Latino Community from New York University, 1991; and the Edgar Allen Poe Literary Award from the Bronx Historical Society, 1992. Esteves was Art Review 2001 Honoree from the Bronx Council on the Arts. Esteves’ poems have been widely anthologized and selected for high school and college textbooks. Further Reading Sanchez González, Lisa, Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos Estevis, Anne Hailey (1946–). Anne Hailey Estevis was raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. She graduated from Roy Miller High School in 1954, and, shortly thereafter, her mother moved the family to the Agua Negra Ranch near Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Her mother, a native New Mexican, served as the family’s historian and storyteller and inculcated in Estevis a deep appreciation and a keen interest in the history and cultures of Mexico and the American Southwest. 401

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Estevis earned a B.A. degree in education from College of the Southwest and began her career in Hagerman, New Mexico, where she taught secondary school social studies and physical education. Subsequently, she moved to the Jemez Springs, New Mexico area, where her teaching experiences included physical education and language arts at Jemez Valley High School and a twoyear assignment at the San Diego Mission School at the Jemez Pueblo Reservation. In Jemez Springs, she met and married fellow teacher, Francisco Estevis, a native of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. In 1974, the Estevis family, now including three daughters, moved to Edinburg, Texas. Estevis continued her teaching career, as well as her education, earning a master’s degree in education from Pan American University and a doctorate in education from Texas Tech. She retired from the University of Texas–Pan American in 2000. Estevis marked her literary debut with Down Garrapata Road (2003), a tender debut novel set in South Texas during the 1940s and 1950s, that relates episodes from the lives of four Mexican American families living in a small farming community. Her second book, Chickenfoot Farm (2008), is another collection of South Texas tales. Estevis and her husband continue to live in Edinburg, enjoying their retirement and their grandchildren. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Exile Literature. Hispanic exile literature in the United States is the product of the great moments in the political history of the Hispanic world, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward: the Napoleonic intervention in Spain, the movements of the Spanish American colonies for independence from Spain, the French intervention in Mexico, the War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, the civil wars in Central America, and the numerous struggles in Spanish America against autocratic regimes and foreign interventions—including the many incursions into the domestic affairs of these countries by the United States. At times, the very act of U.S. partisanship in the internal politics of the Spanish American republics directed expatriate streams to the shores of the United States. All of these struggles contributed hundreds of thousands of political refugees to the United States throughout its history. Because of U.S. territorial expansion and Hispanic immigration, the United States gradually became home to large communities of Spanish speakers, which continually received the expatriates. Thus, the refugees found familiar societies, where they could conduct business and eke out a living while they hoped for and abetted change in the lands that might, some day, welcome their return. Much of the literary expression of the exiles has traditionally emerged from their hopes and desires for the political and cultural independence of their homelands, either from the Spanish empire or from U.S. imperialism. Much of this literature is highly lyrical and idealistic in its poetry and often elegant in its prose. However, it is also characterized by 402

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Early exile literature attacking the French puppet government in Spain.

its aggressive and argumentative tone because of its commitment to political change in the homeland. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spanish-speaking political refugees from Spain and the Spanish American countries have, as part of their political culture, repeatedly gone into exile in the United States to gain access to a free press and thus offer their compatriots uncensored news and political ideology, even if their writings have to be smuggled and passed surreptitiously 403

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hand-to-hand back home. In many cases, the exiled writers and their presses also engage in political fundraising, community organizing, and revolutionary plotting to overthrow regimes in their countries of origin. The raison d’être of writing and publishing in exile has always been to influence life and politics in the homeland: by providing information and opinion about the homeland, changing or solidifying opinion about politics and policy in the patria, and assisting in raising funds to overthrow the current regime. The freedom of expression available in exile is highly desirable, in light of the repression that may exist in the homeland. The historical record is rife with examples of the prison terms, torture, and executions of writers, journalists, publishers, and editors during the struggles to establish democracies in Spanish America in the wake of Spain’s colonialism and during autocratic regimes. Numerous Dictator Porfirio Díaz. exiled authors have suffered torture in prisons and death on battlefields in the Americas. Numerous authors, viewing themselves as patriots without a country, have been forced to live in exile or wander from country to country, creating their literary works and spreading their political doctrines. This ever-present base for the culture and literature of Hispanic communities in the United States exemplifies how U.S. Hispanic literature is transnational and can never truly be understood solely from within the geographical and political confines of the United States. The first political books printed in exile by Hispanics were written by Spanish citizens who were protesting the installation of a puppet government in Spain by Napoleon; these exiled writers published poetry and novels in addition to their political treatises. The longest-lasting independence movement in the Western Hemisphere was that of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico; many of their independence struggles were plotted, funded, and written about from U.S. shores. One of Cuba’s first and most illustrious exiles was the philosopher-priest Félix Varela, who founded El Habanero (The Havanan) newspaper in Philadelphia in 1824 and moved 404

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Central American refugees demonstrate for amnesty.

it to New York in 1825. Subtitled papel político, científico y literario (political, scientific, and literary paper), El Habanero openly militated for Cuban independence from Spain. Varela set the precedent for Cubans and Puerto Ricans of printing and publishing in exile and having their works circulating in their home islands. Since the writings of Varela and other nineteenth-century expatriates, exile literature has been one of the continuing currents in Hispanic letters and culture in the United States. Many of the writers to follow them have become steeped in that tradition, building on the work of their predecessors, who used their literary art to promote their political causes. To this date, some of the commonplaces of exile literature remain, even among the most recent exile writers from Central America and Cuba. In general, the literature of exile is centered on the homeland, la patria, rather than on the fate of the exile community in the United States. Always implicit is its premise of return to la patria, and thus there is no question of assimilating into the culture during the temporary sojourn in the United States. Because return is always impending, however, there is a static vision of the homeland culture that oftentimes does not reflect the evolution of culture in the homeland during the exiles’ absence; this literature is nostalgic for the patria as it is remembered before the authors left, and, on foreign soil, these authors seek 405

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through their writing to preserve the language and culture in their communities to facilitate the easy reintroduction into the home culture. The writing does not support the mixing of Spanish and English, because it seeks to emulate the best cultural forms in the elevation of their political ideologies. The stories tend to be epic in nature and the heroes are often larger than life, even in their tragic downfalls. Often, the metaphors that characterize their lives far from home relate to the Babylonian captivity and to a “paradise lost”; their fiction and nonfiction writings alike emphasize the strangeness of the new social environment and the dangers that it poses for cultural survival. The nineteenth-century authors engaged in the movements for independence from Spain, often cultivating the “Spanish Black Legend” (propaganda about the Spanish abuses of the Amerindians spread by the English and Dutch in their competition with Spain for New World colonies) and identifying themselves with the Native Americans, suffering the inhuman abuses of the Spanish conquistadors; these exile writers sought to construct their own New World identity. Thus, the literature was not only nationalistic culturally but often politically as well in attempting to construct the nation and its identity; the impact of this literature is affected by the fact that many of these writers have been actually engaged in armed revolutionary and political struggles. Many of these writers, such as Ricardo Flores Magón,* José Martí,* and Francisco Pachín Marín,* subsequent to their exile and writings from abroad, became foundational to the national literature and culture of the homelands—Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, respectively. Exiles and political refugees have continued to make up an important segment of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. As a result of the Cuban Revolution and the United States fighting much of the Cold War through involvement in the civil wars in Central America, large-scale immigration of political refugees has continued to the present day, and the dictatorships in these countries, Argentina, Chile, and Spain have arisen as themes in the literature of Hispanic exile. Beginning in 1959, a new wave of refugees from the Cuban Revolution established a widespread exile press, as well as a more informal network of hundreds of newsletters. One of the first prominent writers to go into exile in the United States was Lino Novás Calvo,* who soon published stories about prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Cuba. Since then, Chileans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and other Spanish American expatriates have all contributed to a literature of exile. What is different today is that many of these exiled voices have been readily translated into English, and the works of such liberal writers as Argentines Luisa Valenzuela,* Manuel Puig, and Jacobo Timmerman; Chileans Emma SepúlvedaPulvirenti* and Ariel Dorfman;* Guatemala’s Arturo Arias* are published alongside the more conservative voices of Cuban exiles, such as those of Matías Montes Huidobreo,* Heberto Padilla,* and Reinaldo Arenas.* As the Hispanic population of the United States continues to grow—estimated to be one-fourth of the total population by 2050—and as the economy of 406

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the United States becomes more integrated with those countries south of the border through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. culture will become even more directly linked to the internal politics of Spanish America. Further Reading Brickhouse, Anna, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, Ambassadors of Culture. The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Kanellos, Nicolás, et al., Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Souza, Raymond D., “Exile in the Cuban Literary Experience” in Escritores de la diáspora cubana, Manual biobibliográfica/Cuban Exile Writers. A Biobibliographic Handbook, eds. Daniel C. Maratos and Mamesba D. Hill (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1986: 1–11).

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F Falquez-Certain, Miguel (1948–). Miguel Falquez-Certain, poet, playwright, fiction writer, editor, interpreter, and translator, was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1948. From a very young age, he started writing poems. When he was five years old, he wrote a short ode to recite at a religious celebration in his school. His family helped him cultivate the love of poetry by providing him with books by different poets, which he read avidly. He also was inspired by one of his high school teachers, who required him to write freely every single school day. Because of this experience, he recognized that being a writer was his calling in life. His first poem was published in 1968 in El Heraldo (The Herald), a prestigious Colombian newspaper. By the end of 1968, he had abandoned his second year of medical studies and left Colombia to reside in New York City. In 1970, he returned to his country, where he studied economics, law, languages, and music, among other disciplines. He founded Barranquilla’s Film Society and was its programmer and director for two years. He cofounded Suplemento Literario del Diario del Caribe (Caribbean Daily Literary Supplement), in which he published film reviews and short fiction while working as a political and cultural reporter for El Nacional (The National). Five years later, he went to Spain to study Semitic and Hispanic literatures at Universidad Complutense in Madrid. In 1976, he returned to New York, where he still resides. He attended Hunter College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and Latin American literatures and a minor in French literature. He later attended the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at New York University. Falquez-Certain is fluent in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. His literary work is very extensive. His first book, Reflejos de una

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máscara (1986, Reflections of a Mask), is a compilation of all of his poems written between 1968 and 1982. These are free verses poems in which the influence of Neruda’s and Whitman’s poetry is noticeable. His next collection of prose poems, Proemas en cámara ardiente (Proemes in a Burning Room), received the only honorable mention at the first literary competition sponsored by the Latin American Writers Institute in New York and was published in Mexico in 1989. Habitación en la palabra (The Room in the Word) was his next collection of more than twenty poems written between 1983 and 1990; it was published in 1994, followed by Doble corona (Double Crown) in 1995, a collection of fourteen interlocking false sonnets. Usurpaciones y deicidios (Usurpations and Desiderata) was published in 1996. Palimpsestos (Palimpsests), his next volume of poetry in which the main themes are death and the passage of time, appeared in 1997. Falquez-Certain wrote a short novel, Bajo el adoquín, la playa (Under the Cobble Stone, a Beach), published in 2004, which was a runner-up at the first Alvaro Cepeda Samudio competition for this genre. In addition, he has written six plays: La pasión (1984, The Passion); Moves Meet Metes Move: A Tragic Farce (1985), a musical, with Lourdes Blanco and Bobby Sanabria; Castillos de arena (1989, Sand Castles); Allá en el club hay un runrún (1992, Over There in the Club There Is a Rumor); Una angustia se abre paso entre los huesos (1995, An Anguish Is Coming through the Bones); and Quemar las naves (2003, To Burn the Ships), with which he won first place in Concurso Nacional Nuestras Voces (Our Voices National Contest) run by MetLife/Repertorio Español, New York, in 2003; it was staged the following year at Repertorio Español. He has also published “What’s Up, Father Infante?” in the anthology Bésame mucho (1999, Kiss Me Much) and “Rafael Panizza: (1953–1990): A Memoir” in Latin Lovers (1999). His poetry and short stories have been published in various anthologies in the United States and abroad. Falquez-Certain has translated, into Spanish, Cuando se apagan las luces by Pauline Kael (1980, When the Lights Go Out), as well as Jaime Manrique’s* novel El oro colombiano (1985, Colombian Gold), and, into English, Fernando Arrabal’s plays The Extravagant Triumph of Karl Marx, William Shakespeare and Jesus Christ (staged at INTAR Theater, New York, in 1982) and My Heart’s Devotion, as well as Pedro R. Monge-Raful’s* At Carmita’s There’s Always a Fire, and a volume of poetry, Miguel Iriarte’s Cámara de jazz (2006, Jazz Room). His translations of The Coal That Was Embers, And the Carnival Erupted, and I Won the Lottery were staged at Repertorio Español; his version of Gabriel García Márquez’s monologue “Diatribe against a Sitting Man” had a limited run at Repertorio in 1996. His translations of works by American poets have been published in several literary journals, such as Poesía (Venezuela, Poetry), La nuez (New York, The Nut), Prometeo (Colombia, Prometheus), and Realidad aparte (New York, Separate Reality). He has placed himself among the most respected Latino writers, winning numerous awards for his work. Further Reading Directory of Latin American Writers in the New York Metropolitan Area (New York: Ollantay Press, 1989).

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Falquez-Certain, Miguel. Quemar las naves (http://lacasadeasterionb.homestead. com/v4n13naves.html).

Lina DeVito

Fantasy Heritage. “Fantasy heritage” is a term coined by Carey McWilliams in his highly regarded book, North from Mexico. According to McWilliams, Mexican Americans highlighted the Spanish background of the Southwest and their own identity while ignoring or hiding their Mexican, mestizo, or Amerindian heritage and identity, because being Spanish was more socially acceptable in a racist United States. The fantasy heritage emphasized that families of the old Southwest were of pure Spanish heritage, unlike the mixedrace people of later immigrant generations. In addition, Anglos perpetuated this myth as a tool for subordinating Hispanic peoples. Critics of nineteenth-century Southwest Hispanics have probably overstated adherence to the fantasy heritage, confusing class prejudice with the desire to ingratiate themselves with Anglos. Many of the elites who allegedly kowtowed to Anglo whims were also responsible for resisting Anglo cultural domination and continuing Mexican cultural heritage in the Southwest. Moreover, this fantasy heritage may have been developed as a response to the ideology of Manifest Destiny,* which denigrated the cultural institutions of the “primitive” peoples encountered in the Southwest. By claiming Spanish heritage, the Mexican Americans were promoting their priority of arrival and of their introduction of European civilization to the Southwest, thus defending themselves against the claims of superiority that empowered Anglo American settlers and adventurers coming into the territory after the Mexican War. In the early to mid-twentieth century, well after Spanish was displaced as a public language in the Southwest, a series of books attempted to recover the language, culture, and folkways that existed in the Southwest before the coming of Anglo Americans. It was published in English by women authors such as Cleofas Jaramillo,* Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca,* Nina Otero Warren,* and Jovita Gonzáles.* For the most part, these authors experienced a sense of lost or disappearing heritage, and they highlighted customs identified as coming from Spain. There were also various public figures who promoted this imaginary heritage in the age of television, such as Leo Carrillo,* the actor, who traced his lineage back to the early Hispanic settlers of Upper California; he costarred in the 1950s televised serial, The Cisco Kid. Further Reading Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968). Rosales, F. Arturo, “‘Fantasy Heritage’ Re-examined: Race and Class in the Writings of the Bandini Family Authors and Other Californios, 1828–1965” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. II, eds. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Charles Tatum (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996: 83–106).


Farfán de los Godos, Marcos

Farfán de los Godos, Marcos (?–?). Among the soldiers in Juan de Oñate’s* colonizing mission to what became New Mexico in 1598 was Captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos, an amateur playwright who led the soldiers in dramatizing their journey. This was the first play in a European language written and performed in what is the present-day United States. The soldiers also had in their repertoire the folk play, often performed on horseback, entitled Los moros y los cristianos (The Moors and the Christians), which dramatized the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors during the Crusades— there was a direct analogy to the relationship of the Spanish conquistadores and the Native Americans. The play is still performed today on horseback in New Mexico during religious festivals. Other folk plays that have their roots in the religious theater introduced by the Spanish colonizers include the cycle of Los pastores, or shepherd’s plays, which dramatize the shepherd’s journey to Bethlehem while following the star at the birth of Christ. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, Pasó Por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Federal Theater Project (FTP). The Tampa Hispanic unit of the Federal Theater Project (FTP) was the only Hispanic company involved in the effort

The cast of the Hispanic Federal Theater Project at the Centro Asturiano Theater.

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by the historically important Works Progress Administration (WPA) to save the American stage during the Depression by employing theatrical artists. The company was directed by professional leading actor and director Manuel Aparicio, who had risen from the Ybor City stages to perform in New York, Cuba, and Spain. Aparicio became the only Hispanic director in all of the FTP. The company, headquartered at the Centro Asturiano, mostly performed standard zarzuelas (Spanish operettas), along with some other works required by the FTP, during a period of eighteen months from 1936 to 1937. The two theatrical traditions, the Hispanic and the Anglo American, which had existed side by side for so long, finally intersected for a short time to produce exciting theater, at times, but also examples of cultural misunderstanding. From the start, the FTP’s attitude seems to have been a model of condescension, and, ultimately, the Hispanic unit had to disband because of congressional xenophobia. In truth, the FTP’s Tampa repertoire did not vary greatly from the usual Spanish-language fare that Tampa’s Hispanic audiences expected. The greatest difference was brought about, however, by the infusion of capital for scenery, properties, and costumes, which were now all first-rate. Although the list of dramatic and lyric material performed did not change much (with the exception of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, produced in Spanish), the Hispanic actors became integrated, for the first time, into English-language shows of the Tampa FTP vaudeville unit and, in general, began to associate more and more with non-Hispanic artists and personnel. Manuel Aparicio was even chosen to be sent to a conference of FTP directors in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1937. The FTP administrators, even though they took pride in having successfully “brought” theater to Hispanics, otherwise decried the backwardness of the Spanish speakers or fawned at their quaint habits. The Tampa project, always referred to as “one of the strongest in the South,” was joked about by state FTP director Dorothea Lynch in the following terms: “. . . they had the darnedest bunch of flimsy scenery . . . it was paper scenery. All kinds of arabesques and imitation-looking red velvet stuff (laugh).” On meeting the prompter at the Centro Asturiano, Lynch remarked, “And up came a little man, and he said, “I’m the puntador!’ Well, I tried not to look too ignorant, but of course he was the one who sat in the little prompter’s box . . . and, believe me, he was the kingpin.” Lynch and others were unaware that the custom of the prompter still existed to facilitate the production of different plays every evening throughout the Hispanic world, which differed from the English-language custom of running the same play continuously. Ultimately, because of language differences and misunderstandings about citizenship, the Hispanic unit lost twenty-five of its members in 1937, when Congress passed an act that effectively removed foreigners from the WPA. The remaining citizens were integrated into the Tampa English-language vaudeville unit. As Lynch explained, “But we salvaged all the young players from the Latin company, and then all the vaudevillians . . . the older Latins had entered this country for twenty years and had never become American citizens. Nobody ever paid any particular attention to it in those days. . . . They 413

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considered themselves American citizens. They voted and everything else, and may have held office for all I know (laugh).” For all intents and purposes, the Hispanic unit had come to an end. An FTP document states that the Hispanic company held forty-two performances of eleven productions, with a total attendance of 23,401, averaging 280 paid attendance, from January 1936 to September 1937. When the troupe was officially disbanded as a result of the ERA Act, it actually stayed together and performed for benefits around town, hoping to be reinstated by the WPA. In 1937, the regional director argued unsuccessfully for the reinstatement of the Hispanic unit on the basis of the theatrical and social importance to the community; the professional status of the company, and the need of its members for work relief, which had always been in question, because the artists could always make a living rolling cigars. Thus, the primary goal of the WPA of work relief could not be met. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States, Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Fernández, Roberta (c. 1940–). Born and raised in Laredo, Texas, Fernández is completely bilingual and writes equally well in English and Spanish. After obtaining an A.A. degree from Laredo Junior College in 1960, Fernández went on to earn an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Texas in 1966 and a Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from the University of California in 1990. Since the 1960s, Fernández has taught Hispanic literature at colleges and universities around the United States. She was also an editor at Arte Público Press* from 1990 to 1994. Fernández is best known for her finely crafted short stories, which she writes in both languages. In 1991, Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories, based on the lives of six creative women of the border, won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Award. In 2001, her Spanish recreation of the same book was published as Fronterizas: Una novela en seis cuentos. Fernández is also a critic and literary historian who has edited noteworthy anthologies of Hispanic literature, such as In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States (1994). As a creative writer, she has been a Lila-Wallace Resident at the McDowell Colony. She was also the founding Roberta Fernández. 414

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coordinator of the first three issues of Prisma: A Multicultural, Multilingual Women’s Literary Review (1979–1980). In 2006, Fernández was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and do research in the Czech Republic. Further Reading Fernández, Roberta, In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the United States (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994). Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Fernández, Roberto (1951–). In the summer of 1961, when Roberto Fernández arrived in Miami, Florida, with his family from Cuba at the age of ten, he was sure, as his mother was, that they would leave in February 1962. Decades have passed. Today, Fernández considers himself a citizen of Miami, living in exile in Tallahassee. Influenced by the Cuban American experience of exile, Fernández’s writing gives an eloquent voice of satire to the tragicomedy that is born of straddling two cultures and mythifying a former life. Through his novels, Roberto Fernández not only touches on all of the taboo subjects in the Cuban community of Miami—the counterrevolutionary movement in the United States, racism, acculturation, and assimilation—but he also helps the community to take them in a less serious vein and laugh at itself. Born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, September 24, 1951, Fernández went into exile with his family at age eleven. Fernández became interested in writing as an adolescent, and this interest led him to college and graduate school. In 1978, he completed a Ph.D. degree in linguistics at Florida State University and began teaching as an assistant professor; by that time, he had already published two collections of stories: Cuentos sin rumbo (1975, Directionless Tales) and El jardín de la luna (1976, The Garden of the Moon). Fernández has used humor to temper the criticism of his country’s people in the United States. Using Roberto Fernández. hyperbole, he reviles contentiousness, 415

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pretentiousness, consumerism, and a conspiracy mentality, along with the futile dreams of a grotesquely mythified past that can never be recaptured. “I thought Cubans were taking themselves too seriously, you know. People should learn to laugh about themselves,” Fernández says. “I thought it was time to get a little humor and satire here and there and let the people relax from this euphoria—the anti-Communism, the anti-this and the anti-that, Castro and all the campaigns.” Fernández is the author of four kaleidoscopic novels that have created for him the reputation of being a satirist of the Miami Cuban community. In all four novels, he is a master of capturing the nuances of Cuban dialect in Spanish and English. La vida es un special (1982, Life Is on Special), Raining Backwards (1988), Holy Radishes! (1995), and En la ocho y la doce (2001, On Eighth and Twelfth) are all mosaics made up of monologues, dialogues, letters, phone conversations, speeches, and other types of oral performance that, in composite, make up a continuing tale of the development of the exile community and its younger generations of increasingly acculturated Cuban Americans. Through the pages of these books, the author charts the goings-on at social clubs and coming-out parties, follows counterrevolutionary guerrilla movements in the Florida swamps and the emergence of a Cuban pope, plots a mystery novel, discusses a poetry and art contest, and gives many other episodic bits and pieces that create a broad spectrum of a dynamic community caught between two cultures, two languages, two sets of values, and two political systems. His most recent novel, Holy Radishes, is a parable of the Cuban immigrant community with an ingenious, inventive, and often insane cast of characters who are pursing the dream of recreating their former lives in a microcosm of paradise lost and hope everlasting. “As time passes, remembrances become fantasies, and the more people try to remember, the further away they get from the reality of what it was like,” Fernández says. “So what you have at the end is a complete mythical ending with the re-invention of their past.” Fernández holds the Dorothy Lois Breen Hoffman Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. Further Reading Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos Fernández Fragoso, Víctor (1944–1982). Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Víctor Fernández Fragoso came to the United States in 1965 as a student. Fernández Fragoso received a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and became a staff member of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in New York City. During his life in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey (he was an Associate Professor in the Spanish Department at Rutgers University), he wrote plays based on the works of Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos,* Dominican Pedro Mir, and Chilean Pablo Neruda. He published 416

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poetry in a number of magazines, both in the States and on the Island, most notably in Zona de carga y descaraga (Loading and Unloading Zone) and in Claridad (Clarity), the communist newspaper. He founded a literary group in New York, La Nueva Sangre (The New Blood), that not only held readings but also intermittently published a magazine as well as chapbooks. Among the members were Dolores Prida* and Rager Cabán. Of the numerous poems that he wrote and his half dozen completed manuscripts, Fernández Fragoso only published two books: El reino de la espiga: Canto al coraje de Walt y Federico (1973, The Kingdom of the Wheat Stalk: A Song to the Ire of Walt and Federico) and Ser islas (1976, Being Islands). The invocation of Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca in his first volume is an homage not only to their poetic art but also to their homosexuality. The poet was completely bilingual, and this second volume reflected that. In both books, Fernández Fragoso deals openly with his homosexuality and takes both cultural and political stands on the issue. In the latter of the two books, he compares the lack of freedom in Puerto Rico to the oppression of gays and lesbians. All of his work, however, is grounded in the personal and avoids the merely rhetorical. Furthermore, in Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes, Foster notes a consistent tendency in Fernández Fragoso’s work to homosexualize reality in “love, sex, the night, a door.” Fernández Fragoso died of AIDS in 1982, and Rutgers University named a scholarship in his honor. Fernández Fragoso left a number of complete manuscripts unpublished at his death. Further Reading Barradas, Efraín, “La Poesía de Víctor Fernández Fragoso: Un Rescate necesario” Latino(a) Research Review Vol. 6, Nos. 1–2 (2006–2007: 152–161). Foster, David William, and Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Ferré, Rosario (1938–). Born in Ponce in 1938 into one of Puerto Rico’s leading families (her father was governor for four years), Ferré is one of the Island’s most successful novelists, one of the very few who enjoy success through translations into English in major New York publishing houses. After graduating from Manhattanville College in New York with a major in English, she received a master’s degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Puerto Rico in 1985 and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1987. Ferré began writing in 1970, when she edited the magazine Zona de carga y descarga (Loading and Unloading Zone), which was instrumental in launching the careers of various young Puerto Rican writers. Ferré has explored poetry, children’s literature, and adult fiction, but it is as a novelist—with a critical eye to the governance of Puerto Rico by an elite class that furthers its colonial status—that she has made her mark. Ferré has also been considered one of the leaders of Puerto Rico’s literary feminism since the publication of her first book, Papeles de Pandora (1976, The Youngest Doll, translated in 1991). 417

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In 1976, also, she received awards from the Ateneo Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Atheneum) and the Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas) for her short stories. In 1982, she published a book of feminist essays, Sitio a Eros (A Siege on Eros), and, in 1984, she published her first book of poems, Fábulas de la garza desangrada (Fables of a Bled Heron). In 1994, La batalla de las vírgenes (The Battle of the Virgins), a novella, and a selected collection of her poems, Antología Personal (Personal Anthology), were both published. In 1997, her story collection Maldito amor (1998, published in English as Sweet Diamond Dust and Other Stories in 1996), in which she indicts the United States for the Island’s colonial condition, employs a feminist analysis. In 1998, her novel, Eccentric Neighborhoods, which takes the form of a fictitious memoir of a young women trying to come to terms with the death of her mother, was published and translated into a half dozen foreign languages. Most of Ferré’s books have been published in English, in some cases before their Spanish originals became available. Her most highly acclaimed novel, A House on the Lagoon (1996), was a National Book Award Finalist; it narrates the history of a family full of secrets, conflicts, and mysteries that relate to the history of Puerto Rico itself. In 1992, Ferré received the Liberatur Prix, in Frankfurt, Germany, for her novel Kristalzucker, a translation of Sweet Diamond Dust into German, published in Switzerland. Ferré is a prolific writer, who publishes a book almost yearly and has also experimented with children’s stories, some of which have been translated into English and German. Her latest novel is Flight of the Swan, the story of a world-famous Russian prima ballerina who finds herself stranded on a Caribbean island in 1917 because of political upheavals in her own country. Further Reading Fernández Olmos, Margarite, “From a Woman’s Perspective: The Short Stories of Rosario Ferré and Ana Lydia Vega” in Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America: Introductory Essays, eds. Doris Meyer and Margarite Fernández Olmos (Brooklyn: Brooklyn College, 1983: 78–90). Hintz, Suzanne S., Rosario Ferré, A Search for Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Festivals. See Book Fairs and Festivals Figueroa, José-Angel (1946–). Poet José-Angel Figueroa is one of the pioneer voices of the Nuyorican* movement. Born November 24, 1946, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, he moved back and forth between the American continent and the Island with his migrant-worker family, beginning when he was six years old. Eventually, the family achieved stability, settling in East Harlem and later the Bronx. Despite the poverty of his background, Figueroa was able to earn a B.A. from New York University and do graduate work at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Known for working with young writers in the inner city, Figueroa is also an accomplished performer of his verses, many of which have been published in magazines such as Revista Chicano-Riqueña* (Chicano-Puerto Rican Review), The Rican, and Nimrod. His books include East 110th Street (1973) and Noo Jork (1981). 418

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Figueroa writes in a surrealistic style about the oppression of Puerto Ricans and Third World peoples and the struggle to make sense of a chaotic world. Although Figueroa has been writing and reciting poetry for more than three decades, he has had difficulty finding publishers for his work. Nevertheless, in 2007, he was able to publish a collection of new and old poems, Hypocrisy Held Hostage. Overall, Figueroa’s poetry bridges the gap between an island pastoral and an urban one, giving both the tropical roots and the cityscapes and sounds their equal due in a style that is faithful to the Nuyorican esthetic. Further Reading Mohr, Eugene V., The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos Figueroa, Sotero (1851–1923). One of the pair of important artisans who made the publication of periodicals and political and literary tracts possible in New York during the struggle for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence from Spain was Sotero Figueroa, the revolutionary printer and poet from Puerto Rico; the other was Francisco González “Pachín” Marín.* As a young man, Figueroa learned the printer’s trade in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and became an intellectual who not only supported the revolution but was forced into exile some time before the 1890s. Probably of an Afro-Hispanic background—fellow revolutionary Arturo Alfonso Schomburg* counted him among the writers of the African diaspora— Figueroa was, by 1892, a leader in the Puerto Rican section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York at the side of his coconspirators, González Marín, Schomburg, and, of course, José Martí.* It was at his print shop, Imprenta América (American Printing), that the El Porvenir (The Future) and Borinquen (Puerto Rico) newspapers were printed; he also printed Martí’s Patria (Homeland). Figueroa became respected as a poet in the Hispanic community of New York, where he often published his works in the Spanish-language press. After the war with Spain ended in 1895, Figueroa moved to Havana, where he edited the Gaceta Oficial (Official Gazette). Sotero Figueroa. 419

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Even before moving to New York, Figueroa’s literary work was dominated by the desire for independence from Spain. This is true of his one-act zarzuela, Don Mamerto (1886), published in Ponce, as well as of the poems and prose pieces that he published in periodicals such as La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (The New York Illustrated Review) from 1890 to 1893 and Patria from 1892 to 1895. After the war, Figueroa dedicated himself to the nationalist task of writing the biographies of great intellectuals and heroes who struggled for independence, such as José Martí, Lola Rodríguez de Tió,* “Pachín” Marín, and Segundo Ruiz Belvis. In reality, Figueroa’s interest in biography had begun before his exile, when he wrote Ensayo biográfico de los que más han contribuido al progreso de Puerto Rico (1888, Bibliographic Essay on Those Who Have Contributed the Most to Puerto Rican Progress), which was published in Ponce. Figueroa died in Havana in 1923. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás (with Helvetia Martell), Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Toledo, Josefina, Sotero Figueroa, Editor de Patria: Apuntes para una biografía (Havana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 1985).

Nicolás Kanellos Flores, Ángel (1900–1992). Near the end of his long life, critic and translator Ángel Flores had a mission: to finish one last major reference source on Latin American literature. The volume was titled Spanish-American Authors: The Twentieth Century and it was published shortly after Flores passed away. It was symbolic of a life dedicated to the cultivation and promotion of literature. Born October 2, 1900, in Puerto Rico, Flores moved to New York City as a teenager. He later graduated from New York University in 1923 and attended graduate school at Lafayette College and Cornell University. A polyglot, Flores was fascinated by the writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and, in 1926, traveled to Germany to meet Kafka’s literary executor and friends, thus becoming one of the first scholars to introduce Kafka to a North American audience. In 1928, he introduced T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) to Latin American readers by translating The Waste Land into Spanish. Two years later, Flores reversed the process and translated into English the poetry of Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), introducing the poet to North American readers. During World War II, Flores remained in Washington, D.C., where he edited the first Handbook of Latin American Studies (1935), an annual publication that is used the world over by students and scholars. During this period he also noticed a change in Latin American literature: the combined use of surrealist techniques with fantastical and magical elements. In 1954, he dubbed this literary trend “magical realism.” Highly intelligent and charming, Flores was the toast of many literary circles throughout the world. He traveled extensively through the Americas and Europe, befriending and encouraging hundreds of writers, including Cubans Alejo Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén, Puerto Ricans José Luis González* and 420

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René Marqués,* and Dominicans Juan Bosh and Pedro Mir. He wrote, edited, and translated nearly 100 titles in English and Spanish, covering a wide range of topics and national literatures, including Spanish Literature in English Translation (1926), Lope de Vega: Monster of Nature (1930), Cervantes across the Centuries (1947), Masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age (1957), The Medieval Age (1963), The Literature of Spanish America, five volumes, (1966–1969), The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Times (1977), The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (1986)—written with his wife Kate—and Great Spanish Plays in English Translation (1991). His textbook First Spanish Reader, published in 1964 and reissued in 1988, is still being used. Overall, Flores’s texts were highly readable, and his friendship with scores of authors permitted him rare insights into the creative minds of such luminaries as José Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosas, and numerous others. Flores edited the journals Alhambra and Literary World. He taught at numerous prestigious institutions, including Cornell University, Rutgers University, and the University of Wisconsin. Flores helped shape the twentieth-century Latin American canon and influenced thousands of students and readers. Always a traveler, he passed away in Guadalajara, Mexico. Further Reading Flores, Angel, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Flores, Angel, ed., “About Angel Flores” in Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century (New York: Wilson, 1992).

D. H. Figueredo Flores, Carlos Nicolás (1944–). Short story writer and editor Carlos Nicolás Flores has been a pioneer in writing, editing, and publishing Chicano literature. El Pasoan Flores was born November 19, 1944. After finishing a public school education in El Paso, Flores went on to receive a B.A. (1967) in English literature and philosophy and an M.A. (1971) in English literature from the University of Texas at El Paso. For his master’s thesis, he wrote a collection of stories, A Ganglion of Seeds and Other Stories, and he never stopped writing thereafter. Throughout his career, he published short fiction in literary reviews such as The Américas Review,* Rio Grande Review, and La Frontera (The Border), as well as in numerous anthologies. Flores was the founding editor of Revista Río Bravo (Río Bravo Review) from 1980 to 1982. Flores’s books include the highly praised young adult novel Our House on Hueco (2006), which is narrated through the eyes of a ten-year-old reminiscent of Flores himself at that age. He has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Laredo Junior College since 1971, where he founded and administers the South Texas Writing Project (1996–2005), a writing project for classroom teachers. His awards include First Place in Fiction from the Sixteenth Chicano Literary Contest, sponsored by the University of California at Irvine, 421

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1990; the Mid-List First Series Award for the Novel, 2002; and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1972. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Flores, Francisca (1913–1996). Activist Francisca Flores was well known for fighting for the rights of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Born in December 1913, in San Diego, she became politicized early in life. Before World War II broke out, she was inspired by Spanish Republicans and their resistance to Adolf Hitler, by the political positions taken by artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros, and Pablo Picasso. She supported Lázaro Cárdenas’s nationalization of U.S. petroleum interests in Mexico as a symbol of a poor country standing up to powerful international interests. Flores made her greatest impact after moving to Los Angeles during the war. The roll call of activities in which Francisca was involved is remarkable. She worked on the Sleepy Lagoon* case; helped Carey McWilliams with his landmark book North From Mexico; edited Carta Editorial (Editorial Letter), which was often red-baited during the McCarthy era; helped hide and organize underground screenings of the union-organizing movie Salt of the Earth; was a cofounder of the Mexican American Political Association; served as the editor and publisher of Regeneración (Regeneration); was a founder of Comisión Feminil Mexicana Nacional (National Mexican Women’s Commission); and cofounded and served as the first director of the Chicana Social Service Center in Los Angeles. She knew and was greatly respected by the famous journalist Chicano Rubén Salazar; she published a whole issue of Regeneración on his death, including republishing some of his key articles. Flores lived her life fighting for justice and equality. Further Reading Bill Flores “Obituary” (May 2, 1996) (http://www.csufresno. edu/SocialSciences/).

F. Arturo Rosales Flores Magón, Enrique (1877–1954). Born in Teotitlán del Camino, Oaxaca, April 13, 1877, the youngest brother of political activists Jesús and Ricardo, Enrique Flores Magón was a key figure in the inception of the Mexican Revolution and one of the founding members of the Partido Liberal Mexicana (Mexican Liberal Party), which sought liberal reforms and a return to the Constitution of 1857 during the Porfiriato. Flores Magón’s earliest known political involvement occurred in May 1892, when he and his brothers protested the third reelection of dictator Porfirio Díaz. In 1893, he received legal training at the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia (National Law School), which influenced his political views before his involvement with the famous anarchist newspaper 422

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Regeneración (Regeneration), published by the elder Flores Magón brothers and fellow revolutionary Antonio Horcasitas in Mexico City from August 7, 1900, to October 7, 1901. In 1901, Ricardo and Jesús were arrested on defamation charges; following their release, the elder Jesús abandoned his political activity. Ricardo and Enrique then joined together to further the revolutionary cause. Together, they published the periodical El Hijo del Ahuizote (Ahuizote’s Son), wherein they continued their condemnation of Díaz’s government. Enrique, Ricardo, and all of the others who were associated with the paper were arrested April 16, 1903. On June 9, the government banned all publications authored by either of the Flores Magón brothers. Enrique and his brother fled Mexico City in December 1903 and ended up in Laredo, Texas, January 3, 1904. In May 1904, the two brothers moved to San Antonio as political exiles, where they joined with Camilo Arriaga, Antonio I. Villarreal, and other expatriate Mexican revolutionaries. On November 5, 1904, the newly reestablished Regeneración began publication. Even in San Antonio, the brothers were not beyond the reach of Mexican authorities. In December of that year, Enrique foiled an assassination attempt on his brother but was consequently arrested. For reasons of personal safety, Enrique and Ricardo moved to St. Louis, Missouri. On September 28, 1905, Enrique became treasurer of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano (Organizing Committee for the Mexican Liberal Party), with the intention of mobilizing a national movement against the Porfiriato. October 12, 1905, the two Flores Magón brothers were again arrested on charges of libel, this time by St. Louis police, in collaboration with a private detective agency. Facing the possibility of extradition to Mexico, Enrique and his brother fled to Canada. During this time, the Junta published its Programa y Manifesto (Program and Manifesto) July 1, 1906, detailing specific reforms sought by the Liberal Party. Enrique affixed his name to the plan as primer vocal (primary ratifier). Shortly thereafter, Enrique left the Party and Ricardo to spend some time in New York before rejoining his brother in Los Angeles in the fall of 1907. From 1906 to 1908, Ricardo Flores Magón and his followers, known as the magonistas, allied themselves with worker strikes, forging connections with socialist movements. As he matured, Enrique, like Ricardo, assumed an increasingly radical political agenda. His views became associated with anarchism, although he still referred to himself as a liberal. In the spring of 1908, Enrique returned to El Paso to assist in a planned magonista uprising in northern Mexico. Following the failed revolt of 1908, both the Mexican and the U.S. governments now actively pursued Enrique and his associates; the U.S. government did so on the grounds that Enrique had violated neutrality laws. September 23, 1911, Enrique signed a new manifesto, published in the latest reincarnation of Regeneración, stating the anarchist position. In 1912, Enrique was found guilty of violating neutrality laws and imprisoned until 1914. In 1916, he was arrested again for distributing indecent materials through the mail for an article against Wall Street’s interests in Mexico. He served time in Leavenworth prison from May 1918 to September 1920. In March 1923, Enrique was deported to 423

Flores Magón, Ricardo

Mexico, where he continued his political campaign, with little visible progress however, until his death October 25, 1954. Although historically overshadowed by his brother Ricardo, Enrique was an important leader of the Partido Liberal Mexicana and magonista political movements before and during the Mexican Revolution. When Ricardo’s health prohibited much of his physical participation in the movement’s activities, Enrique became a capable spokesman of the cause. Enrique Flores Magón was a prolific essayist, polemicist, and poet; in his periodicals are found numerous examples of his engaged art of writing. Further Reading Amezcua, Jenaro, ¿Quién es Flores Magón y cuál su obra? (Mexico City, D. F.: Editorial Avance, 1943). MacLachlan, Colin M., Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Alberto Varón Flores Magón, Ricardo (1873–1922). Ricardo Flores Magón was the most influential ideologue of the Mexican Revolution. His activism, his revolutionary journalism, speeches, and writing, and his founding of the Mexican Liberal Party were so pervasive that the legions of followers extended his teachings as magonismo and they became known as magonistas. Born in San Antonio Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, September 16, 1873, Flores Magón’s early experiences of communal life in Oaxaca helped fashion his identification with the working classes and the anarcho-syndicalist ideology of his adult life. By 1892, he was demonstrating in Mexico City against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz; by 1901, he was jailed for his activism. After a month, he was freed, and one of his first acts was to write for the opposition newspaper, El Demócrata (The Democrat). As a result, the newspaper was closed down and an order for his arrest and that of his brothers, Enrique and Jesús, was issued. The Flores Magón brothers escaped and founded the anti-Díaz newspaper Regeneración (Regeneration) in 1900; it too was closed down and the brothers were arrested. The same cycle of opposition and repression persisted a number of times until the brothers took refuge in the United States in 1904. Flores Magón led his brothers and radical revolutionaries in the founding of the Mexican Liberal Party, continued their written attacks on the regime in Mexico, and became part of the laborRicardo Flores Magón. 424

Florit, Eugenio

organizing movements in the United States. Flores Magón and his Party members were often persecuted and arrested by the authorities in the United States for breaking the neutrality laws and various other infractions. His activism came to an end when he was sentenced to twenty years at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he died November 21, 1922. Before and during his sojourn at Leavenworth, Flores Magón wrote numerous essays, poems, plays, and letters, for the most part in Spanish, but at times in an elegant and powerful English. A letter in English to Mrs. Winnie Branstetter, March 24, 1921, for example, revealed the utopic vision that had driven him throughout his life. In addition, the letter is a good example of the sincere and direct literary style that Flores Magón also employed in his poetry and drama. Further Reading Albro, Ward, Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Revolution (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992). Day, Douglas, The Prison Notebooks of Ricardo Flores Magón (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). MacLachlan, Colin M., Anarchism and the Mexican Revolution: The Political Trials of Ricardo Flores Magón in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Florit, Eugenio (1903–1999). Eugenio Florit was a poet and scholar who, despite the fact that he was born in Spain and spoke with a Castilian accent, considered himself a Cuban above everything else. More interestingly, he lived half his life in the United States and became a naturalized American citizen. Florit was born in Madrid of a Spanish father and a Cuban mother and moved to Cuba when he was fourteen years old. After studying law at the University of Havana, he served in the Cuban consulate in New York City from 1927 to 1940. In 1942, he accepted a teaching position at Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 1968. Toward the latter years of his long life, he explained that the correspondence that he received from readers and writers in Cuba made him feel closer to the Island. Florit manifested his love of Cuba in his book of poems, Trópico (1930, Tropics). Writing in rhythmic verse, in ten-lined stanzas, he approaches scenes that are familiar to anyone who has visited Cuba and the Caribbean: the royal palm tree, the sugar cane mills, the coffee plantations, and the cocuyo, a firefly common to the region. Yet his descriptions are elusive, far from the stereotypical. For example, he does not name the cocuyos but describes them as “flying lights, atomic diamonds” (Brillan luces voladoras/. . . son átomos de diamante); likewise, he does not use the word palm tree, instead stating “una flecha en un extasis verde” (an arrow in green ecstasy). In Trópico, Florit avoids the sentimental and the obvious, as often practiced by poets writing about nature, thus raising the Cuban countryside from the local to the universal. The universal is present in what might be his most famous poem, “Martirio de San Sebastián” (Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). In this religious poem, 425

Folk Drama and Performance

allusions to peace and serenity abound, so much so that, from the time of its publication on, critics always commented that Florit gave his readers a great sense of serenity. Both Trópico and “Maririo de San Sebastián” made of Florit a favorite among the luminaries of his time, from the Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach to Nobel Prize-winner Juan Ramon Jiménez (1881–1958), from Spain. Although Florit described himself as a slow writer, in reality, he was prolific, writing hundreds of poems, articles, and essays, including a number of books: Conversación a mi padre (1949, Conversation to My Father), Hábito de esperanza; poemas, 1936–1964 (1965, Habit of Hopes; Poems), Versos pequeños 1938–1975 (1979, Small Verses), A pesar de todo (1987, In Spite of Everything), and Antología personal (1992, Personal Anthology). His textbook, Literatura hispanoamericana; antología e introducción histórica (1960, Spanish American Literature; Anthology and Historical Introduction), cowritten with Enrique Anderson Imbert (1910–2000), served for decades as the standard college introduction to Latin American literature. Further Reading Núñez, Ana Rosa et al., eds., Homenaje a Eugenio Florit (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2000). Vitier, Cinto, Lo cubano en la poesía, 2nd ed. (Havana: Instituto del Libro, 1970).

D. H. Figueredo

A collection of pastorelas.

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Folk Drama and Performance (Mexican American). From the first sixteenth-century missions of exploration and colonization into North America to the cycles of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury northward immigration from Mexico, popular folk dramas and performance have always served a dual purpose. Ritual enactments of plays, dance, and procession enable Hispano Mexicano communities to define themselves, as well as their relations to the cultural others whom they encounter, whether Native American or Anglo American. These performances combine the expressive resources of text, music, costume, and choreography. The matachines dance is an Indo-Hispano tradition that inscribes the narrative of the spiritual struggles of the conquest of Mexico and the process of mestizaje (mixing European and indigenous blood) entirely into choreography. Performed by native, Hispano, and Mexicano communities in a huge region of northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, the dance also travels with immigrant communities as they establish themselves elsewhere. The cast of characters varies between northern and

Folk Drama and Performance

southern style matachines, but it can include militant spirits, ancestral elders, a king called Monarca or Moctezuma, his daughter Malinche, and a bull. The Autos de Entrada, or “entry plays,” are a family of secular plays that feature the Morismas—spectacular martial pageants of Christians and Moors, which are still wildly popular in the Mexican state of Zacatecas and still performed in New Mexico. A version of the play was performed by the colonizing expedition of Juan de Oñate* on the banks of the Río Grande, both to celebrate North America’s “First Thanksgiving” as well as to display horses, weaponry, and the pantomime of Christian conversion to the Indians. Written to commemorate the devastating Comanche wars two centuries later, Los Comanches uses the same dramatic paradigms, but with eighteenth-century historical content. Both plays begin as a discourse of power and evolve into a discourse of resistance that is set against the political and cultural ascendency of the United States. The Autos Sacramentales (Sacramental Plays) are the family of religious dramas that were originally designed as the centerpiece of the missionary project in Mexico. They include Adán y Eva (Adam and Eve), La Pastorela (the Shepherd’s Play), Las Posadas (The Inns), El Niño Perdido (Jesus as the Lost Child in the Temple), Las cuatro apariciones de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (The Four Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe), and La Pasión (The Passion of Jesus). The Guadalupe and Passion plays in some communities have elaborate scripts, but in others they are distilled into dramatic tableaux or processions with hymns and prayers such as the Estaciones de la Cruz (Stations of the Cross). Ubiquitous in Greater Mexico, Las Posadas is entirely processional because it dramatizes the Holy Family’s search for shelter, which culminates on Christmas Eve. The most enduring and popular play in the Pastorela cycle is Los Pastores (The Shepherds). With angels and devils to aid and confuse the shepherds on their way to Bethlehem and the Epiphany, the play is a metaphor of the human condition. Both church and secular authorities in Mexico banned the play on numerous occasions because it lends itself so easily to political satire and social criticism. Although this traditional repertory can be deemed ritual because of the devotion with which Mexican American peoples enact it, many of the plays have also been the inspiration for historic and contemporary literary renditions by prominent Mexican and Chicano writers. Further Reading Gutiérrez, Ramón, “The Politics of Theater in Colonial New Mexico” in Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest, ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993). Lamadrid, Enrique, Hermanitos comanchitos: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Rodríguez, Sylvia, The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Inter-Ethnic Relations in the Upper Río Grande (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Sobek, María, “The Mexican/Chicano Pastorela” in Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities, eds. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genevieve Fabre (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

Enrique Lamadrid 427

Folklore and Oral Tradition

A collection of folk poetry composed for celebrating the Day of the Dead.

Folklore and Oral Tradition.

Introduction The nineteenth-century humanist Johann Gottfried von Herder distinguished “art poetry” from “natural poetry,” and he discovered in the latter “the heart and soul of a people” (Bluestein). Scholars aligned with the nationbuilding process all around the world have frequently turned to the traditions that issue directly from the life of human communities in the effort to capture their true character, to establish their authentic identities. Oral tradition emerges from the fabric of everyday existence; it responds to the immediate and ultimate problems posed by life in human societies. Its insights and artistry derive from individual genius, tempered by collective assent. More than any

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Ruby T. Lomax snapshot of folk singers Lolo Mendoza and Chico Real in Kingsville, Texas, 1940.

other expressive product, oral literature provides access to the wisdom and resolve of a people acting within and sometimes against the confines of their historical destiny. The Hispanic population of the United States nourishes a remarkable body of oral tradition that has been produced through the encounter of Native American, European, and African prototypes and perpetrated in the midst of the North American polity. This lore conserves echoes of its origins, even as it forges a contemporary expressive synthesis. It indexes the various Spanish

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American communities that have flourished in the United States, even as it provides a foundation for Pan-Hispanic communication and understanding. Most important, Hispanic oral tradition in the United States offers a unique perspective on the hopes and joys, the struggles and deceptions, that have marked the Hispanic experience in this Anglo American clime. Hispanic oral tradition encompasses several large inventories of expressive genres, each regional tradition featuring specific genres that are highly developed in that particular community. The full spectrum of oral genres found among the world’s peoples can be charted among U.S. Latinos. At the more formal end of the continuum are narrative and lyric poetry of the sort that graces significant public events. At the more informal end are conversational forms, such as jokes and stories of personal experience. Riddles and rhymes associated with the enculturation of children are prominent in this Hispanic corpus of oral tradition. Traditional wonder stories and legends are present throughout the Hispanic community. Proverbs come readily to the Hispanic tongue because interlocutors draw on traditional wisdom in search of understanding and persuasive rhetoric. Attending to the form and content of these enduring, expressive vehicles brings into focus the paradoxical nature of oral traditions, which evolve even as they persist. The persistence of corridos* on the lips of Mexican American citizens, of décimas* among persons of Puerto Rican descent, the emergence of salsa with its Afro-Cuban rhythmic foundations, these and other manifestations of Hispanic oral tradition attest to the irrepressible vitality of Hispanic communities in the United States. These traditions have not merely survived as a remembrance of the old country; rather, they have evolved into living cultural resources answering the needs of Hispanic peoples as they search out a niche in the general North American demographic landscape. And their impact has been felt far beyond the confines of the Hispanic communities, as the Latino musical style has mixed with other musical idioms in the artistic melting pot of modern North America. In the context of a nation whose ideology discourages the maintenance of alternative cultural systems, the florescence of Hispanic oral tradition is a moral victory of significant proportion. Hispanic oral traditions circulate through word of mouth and through the intervention of the mass media in the form of records, cassettes, television programs, radio shows, and movies. Hispanic America cherishes the poetic word, and poetic forms often exist in association with music and dance. Hispanic folk poetry stands as one of the most vital strands of folk poetry in the contemporary United States. The prose forms, especially the narrative traditions, constitute one of our nation’s most remarkable bodies of oral tradition. Hispanic storytelling in the United States is rich in legendry—in the form of tales of saints, heroes, witches, and devils—and the Hispanic folktale is justly famous as one of the hardiest branches of the old European stock of wonder and mystery tales. All of the forms of oral tradition, the poetic and the prosaic, have flourished among the Hispanic groups in the United States, as an evocation of a 430


cherished homeland and as resources for coping with travails in the adopted homeland.

Origins of Hispanic Oral Traditions Peninsular Iberia with its strong Northern African inlay, Native America from the Caribbean to the Andes to the Amazonian jungle, and sub-Saharan Africa in the guise of a hybrid slave culture that took root in tropical regions of the Americas, all have contributed form and substance to the oral traditions of the New World’s Hispanic peoples. From the beginning of the Spanish presence in the New World, the rich and diverse oral traditions of Iberia have been transplanted in the Spanish colony and constantly reinforced through a continued pattern of contact between the mother country and its former colonies. Since the Spaniards arrived as military conquerors and then settled in as the dominant political and economic element, their language and their traditional expressive genres achieved a special saliency in the resulting cultural composites. But even as Spanish language and culture achieved this eminence, it became inflected into a thousand regional varieties, each revealing the impact of substrate African and Native American configurations, as well as the imprint of specific Spanish regional styles. The situation is complex beyond belief. A diversified Spanish inventory of traditional song and story arrives on the shores of a continent that is itself highly diverse. The intruders and aboriginals work out a variety of arrangements with respect to the autonomy of these separate cultural strains. A third element enters the picture: Africa with its splendid traditions of poetry, song, dance, and story. These three elements, each diverse in its own right, blend in varying degree, sometimes with all three on an equal footing, sometimes with one or two of them preponderant. The resulting cultural products are almost always synthetic, inadvertent witnesses to the process of mutual accommodation that has characterized the formation of culture in the New World. As a result, each Latin American region has evolved its own particular version of this multiple inheritance, and these regional adaptations have been transported to the United States as prized cultural possessions. The Iberian originals were first “Americanized” in regional Latin American settings and then further adapted to the peculiar cultural climate of the United States. The two most important branches of this vast cultural trunk are the Mexican and the Caribbean, represented most abundantly by the traditions of Puerto Rican and Cuban Americans. Other significant contributions derive from Central American, Andean, and Southern Cone immigrants to the United States.

Transformations within the U.S. Context The United States, with its ideology of assimilation, has been a rather unfriendly climate for the perpetuation of a Hispanic oral tradition. But within U.S. Latino communities, the elders have insisted on the relevance of lore and 431


poetry from the old country, and the younger generations have found ingenious applications of this precious store of knowledge. These oral traditions evoke a particular period in the history of the home country and have been streamlined to deal with different settings and predicaments in the U.S. context. The presence of La Ilorona (weeping woman) on almost every block within Chicano neighborhoods in the United States is a telling sign of the vitality of these traditions in their new setting. Hispanic forms of oral tradition have prospered wherever Latin American communities have taken root in U.S. soil. The presence of community has favored the retention of the Spanish language as a vital means of communication, and with the language comes the vivid world of Hispanic oral tradition. But the new setting has occasioned important changes in the old stock of oral tradition. Where Hispanic people from different regions and countries have come together, there has been a tendency for hybrid, pan-Hispanic cultural forms to develop. Where Hispanic communities have felt the impact of their English-speaking, non-Hispanic surrounding, the traditional resources have moved in the direction of creolization, or blending of distinct cultural traditions into a cultural composite. In many inner-city settings, Hispanic traditions have come into contact with African American traditions, creating a particular intersection of urban black and urban Latino. Where Hispanic families have landed beyond the circle of the Latino community, the retention of language and oral tradition has been a difficult and often impossible task, but it is sometimes accomplished through the maintenance of a strong Hispanic culture within the family. The economic and political forces affecting U.S. Latino communities have produced a wide variety of social climates, some of them favoring the static retention of traditional forms, some of them favoring the adaptation of the traditional to suit the needs of emerging conditions. Whatever the scenario, Hispanic oral tradition in the United States is indisputably an explosion of vernacular tradition, giving the lie to the melting-pot version of U.S. social history. With U.S. Latinos poised to become the largest minority group within the current decade, the oral traditions discussed in this essay will likely serve as the foundation for an expansion of unimaginable proportions. As the United States comes to accept and celebrate its status as the most heterogeneous gathering of Western Hemisphere populations, Hispanic oral tradition should attain a national prominence, in keeping with the vitality of the human communities that nurture it.

Mexican American Oral Traditions Americans of Mexican descent, the Chicanos or Mexican Americans, were the first European inhabitants of much of the area that they now occupy within the United States. Their oral tradition cannot be viewed as an immigrant tradition, yet history has conspired to make them strangers in their own land, alienated (until recently) from the venues of political and administrative 432


power. Chicano oral tradition reveals a grounding in a sense of territory and a remarkable capacity to assimilate contact with Anglo institutions into a thoroughly mexicano worldview. Different conditions have produced different responses in the various regions of the Mexican diaspora in the United States. Texas, New Mexico and Colorado, and Arizona and California can be thought of as three strains, each with its own specific textures and tonalities. Américo Paredes* (1976) has coined the term “greater Mexico” to encompass the numerous tendrils of the Mexican ethos that have established a base outside the political boundaries of Mexico. Greater Mexico includes all of those far-flung Chicano communities that have developed as people of Mexican origin sought economic opportunity in the cities and towns of Mexico’s neighbors to the North. In cities such as Detroit, New York, and Chicago, in the towns of western Oregon, Idaho, and Massachusetts, and in countless other sites around the country, people from Mexico or from the border communities have established a foothold and, in the process, expanded the territorial dominion of Hispanic oral tradition. A comprehensive survey of the oral forms that flourish in the Chicano homeland, the Southwest of the United States, and that have accompanied Mexican Americans in their journeys northward is beyond the scope of the present essay. The coverage of a few of the major genres—ballads, folktales, and proverbs, which circulate principally among adults, and riddles, rhymes, and spooky stories, which belong to the culture of childhood—in selected settings gives a fair picture of the vitality of oral tradition within the context of the modern Chicano experience.

The Ballad of Greater Mexico The history of the Chicanos, their destiny in the land of the gringos, is presented in this grass-roots chronicle, composed from the vantage point of the common man. Scholars such as Merle Simmons (1957) and Jean Meyer (1976) have demonstrated the close relationship between the turbulent history of modern Mexico and this voice of popular narrative, and the same relationship can be traced in the case of the Mexican American communities of the United States. The corrido is a ballad form that was ultimately derived from the Spanish romance but adapted to the climate and character of Mexico, where it took root and has flourished over the last hundred years or so. It is a well-established (if somewhat mysterious) fact that the great ballad tradition of the Spanish peninsula, the romance, achieved its most fluent New World expression in the corrido tradition that has evolved in Mexico since the latter half of the nineteenth century. From the writers of the Chronicles, we know that the old store of Spanish balladry was on the lips of the conquistadors as they encountered the wonders of ancient Mexican civilization. Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1694), loyal witness of the conquest of what was to become Nueva España (New Spain) and, later, Mexico, cites a number of dramatic moments and incidents that brought lines from the “old romances” to the 433


minds of Hernán Cortés and the soldiers in his retinue. As seen in the following excerpt, the Spanish romance authority Ramón Menéndez Pidal views these instances as part of a general pattern: Seguramente en la memoria de cada capitán, de cada soldado, de cada negociante, iba algo del entonces popularísimo romancero español, que como recuerdo de la infaricia reverdecerla a menudo para endulzar el sentimiento de soledad de la patria, para distraer el aburrimiento de los inacabables viajes o el temor de las aventuras con que brindaba el desconocido mundo que pisaban.” (16) (Surely in the memory of every captain, of every soldier, of every merchant, went along something of the extremely popular Spanish romancero, a memory from childhood that would have gained strength all the time to sweeten the sentiment of loneliness for the home country, to lessen the boredom of those endless trips or the fear of the adventures awaiting them in the unknown world they set foot on.) [my translation]

There is abundant evidence that this Iberian tradition became firmly established in its New World environment: to this day, the occasional romance or fragment thereof can be heard in the towns and villages of many Mexican provinces, as well as in New Mexico and Colorado (Espinosa; Mendoza; Campa*). The Mexican corrido derives from this same store of Spanish folk poetry, but it takes a radically different evolutionary path. After a period of hiatus (perhaps an artifact of gaps in the historical record), it emerges in the mid-nineteenth century as a vibrant tradition of folk poetry that is founded on the model of the old romances but adjusted to the climate and times of the singers and their audiences. This tradition climaxes during the period of Anglo–Mexican border strife and later, during the Mexican Revolution, as a ballad form that is intimately wedded to the destiny of the Mexican people. Américo Paredes, the great authority on these matters, characterizes the dramatic emergence of the Mexican corrido from the residue of the Spanish romance as an instance of the formation of a ballad tradition. He writes of “a crystallization of those survivals at one particular time and place into a whole ballad corpus, which by its very weight impresses itself on the consciousness of the people who cultivate it, owing its pervasiveness to the fact that it shapes the way of life or reflects the character of that people (1963, 231). The Mexican corrido apparently takes its name from one rather late version of the Spanish ballad, known as the romance corrido, or “through-sung ballad.” The term corrido is found throughout much of Spanish America and can be traced to Spain. The ballad collector Agustín Durán tells us that “en Andalucía, con el nombre de corrío o corrido o carrerilla llama la gente del campo a los romances que conserva por tradición” (in Andalucía, the country people call the romances that they conserve in their tradition by the name of corrío or carrerilla). “The modern corrido is a thriving continuation of the European ballad tradition, much like the British ballad in its heyday, with new 434


ballads being composed and performed on the topic of striking local and regional events. Corridos are sung in the homes, cantinas, and marketplaces of greater Mexico. The modern corrido has transformed the sixteen-syllable line of the Spanish romance into a pair of eight-syllable lines and stacked these together into stanzas of four or six lines. Assonance or increasingly consonance is observed between the final syllables of even-numbered lines. Corridos generally begin and end with a metanarrative frame, that is, with discourse that reaches beyond the story to allude to the singing occasion itself. Most often, the song begins with a cordial invitation to the auditors, and it ends with a despedida, a formulaic leave-taking on the part of the singer. Plot details are quickly laid in place, the time and setting of the events, the identities of the participants, so that the singer can focus on the alleged words that are exchanged by protagonists as they are challenged by mortal dangers. Apart from solo recitations, corrido performances require musical accompaniment, minimally a single guitar, but possibly encompassing an entire musical conjunto, or ensemble. The norteño (Northern Mexican) sound, with its chordslapping rhythm guitar and accordion melody, has become a familiar vehicle of corrido performance throughout greater Mexico. Corridos are composed and performed by regional and local bands, as well as by amateur musicians in the Mexican American community. They are frequently disseminated by records and cassettes marketed within the Mexican American community, and they can be heard over the airwaves in those places serviced by Spanish-language programming. After its initial emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, the corrido gradually became a national balladry, depicting the events that engulfed people in the great crossroads of Mexican history. This portrait of history emerges from the viewpoint of the common people, not from the official record or sophisticated overview of the learned historian. And so the corpus of corridos from the revolutionary period offers an inimitable vision of the impact of these events on the families and villages of Mexico; and the corpus of corridos from the Texas-Mexican border zone displays the fierce determination of the mexicano caught in a desperate economic struggle with the Anglo invader. Américo Paredes cites the border corrido, born in the clash of cultures and aspirations along the Mexican-United States border, as a harbinger of the revival of this dormant narrative form in greater Mexico (1957). Corridos were composed and performed along the border in response to intercultural conflict as the Anglo population asserted its economic and political dominance over the region. Typically, the border corridos celebrate Mexican culture and its heroes, placing special emphasis on the man who stands up for his rights in the face of outside aggression, often perpetrated by the infamous Texas Rangers. Paredes has provided excellent documentation of one particularly interesting case, that of Gregorio Cortez,* a Mexican American rancher who was dragged into skirmishes with the law (1958). Gregorio Cortez killed one sheriff and wounded another, evaded the authorities for a time, and finally fell into 435


their hands for trial. Amazingly enough, he was acquitted of the major charges against him and finally convicted of a minor one. Cortez quickly became a symbol of the oppressed Texas Mexican, and numerous versions of his story were transmitted through legends and corridos passed along within the community. As shown in the following excerpts, the corridos about Gregorio Cortez contain stanzas that exhibit the prevailing attitude toward the process of cultural contact in the region: (1) Decía Gregorio Cortez con su alma muy encendida: —No siento haberlo matado la defensa es permitida. (2) Decía Gregorio Cortez abrochándose un zapato: —Aquí traigo más cartuchos pa’ divirtirlos un rato. [sic] (3) Decía Gregorio Cortez con su pistola en la mano: —Ah cuanto rinche cobarde para un solo mexicano. ([1] Then said Gregorio Cortez, And his soul was all aflame, “I don’t regret that I killed him; A man must defend himself.” [2] Then said Gregorio Cortez, As he was tying his shoe, “I have more cartridges left To entertain you a while.” [3] Then said Gregorio Cortez, With his pistol in his hand, “Ah, how many cowardly rangers against one lone Mexican.”)

These stanzas, taken from the collection by Paredes (1958), indicate the spirit of the genre in this setting. The first, performed by Alberto and Fernando Garza, Fernando Rodríguez, and Pioquinto Medina, in Brownsville, Texas, August 1954, extols the right of self-defense. The second and third, from a performance by Gil González Cisneros in Las Comas, Tamaulipas, in 436


December 1951, reveal, first, the carefree posture of defiance that is characteristic of the corrido hero and, then, the plight of the hero, outnumbered by the cowardly Texas Rangers who always gather in large numbers to do their mischief. In each instance, the corrido hero is emblematic of the Mexican American community, itself beleaguered by the onslaught of Anglo settlers and developers. The continued popularity of this emblematic song is shown by its presence in the repertory of contemporary Chicano conjuntos (combo band). A recent issue of Sing Out: The Folk Song Magazine (Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 1991) features the following version of the song, as performed by Los Pingüinos del Norte (Arhoolie CD 311, “Tex-Mex Conjuntos): Gregorio Cortez En el condado del Carmen miren lo que ha sucedido, murió el Cherife Mayor quedando Roman herido. Anduvieron informando como tres horas después, supieron que el malhechor era Gregorio Cortez. Decía Gregorio Cortez con su pistola en la mano: —No siento haberlo matado lo que siento es a mi hermano. Decía Gregorio Cortez con su alma muy encendida: —No siento haberlo matado la defensa es permitida. Iban los americanos que por el viento volaban, porque se iban a ganar diez mil pesos que les daban. Al Ilegar al Encinal lo alcanzaron a rodear, poquito más de trescientos allí les brincó el corral. Le echaron los perros jaunes que iban detrás de la huella, pero alcanzar a Cortez era alcanzar a una estrella. Decía Gregorio Cortez —Pa’ qué se valen de planes si no me pueden pescar ni con esos perros jaunes? Gregorio le dice a Juan:

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—Muy pronto lo vas a ver, anda, dile a los cherifes que me vengan a aprehender. Dicen que por culpa mía se ha matado a mucha gente, yo me voy a presentar porque esto no es conveniente. Pues ya Gregorio murió ya terminó la cuestión, la pobre de su familia lo llevan en el corazón. (In the county of Carmen [Karnes], Look at what has happened: The High Sheriff died, Leaving Roman wounded. They went around asking questions. About three hours later, They found out that the wrongdoer Was Gregorio Cortez. Gregorio Cortez was saying, With his pistol in his hand, “I don’t regret having killed him— The one I’m sorry about is my brother.” Gregorio Cortez was saying, With his soul all ablaze, “I don’t regret having killed him; self-defense is permitted.” The Americans were riding, They were flying down the wind, Because they were trying to earn The 10,000 dollars they would be given. On arriving in Encinal, They succeeded in surrounding him, Just a few more than 300 of them; There he jumped out of their corral. They loosed the hound dogs on him That were tracking his trail, But catching up with Cortez Was like catching up with a star. Gregorio Cortez was saying, “What’s the use of all your scheming If you can’t even find me, Not even with these hound dogs?” Gregorio tells Juan, “Very soon you will see it; Go and tell the sheriffs To come and arrest me.”

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“They say it’s my fault That many people have been killed; I’m going to turn myself in, Because this isn’t right.” Well, Gregorio is already dead; Now the matter is finished. His poor family Carries him in their hearts.)

Gregorio Cortez has been converted into a pan-Hispanic symbol of Latino resistance, first, through the scholarly work of Américo Paredes and, more recently, through the production of a video that has played several times on national television. The corrido among Mexican Americans has frequently pursued this mode of resistance, expressing the inconformity of the community to political and economic conditions imposed by the dominant Anglo institutions. During the Chicano Movement* of the 1960s, meetings and rallies throughout the Southwest and beyond frequently involved performances of corridos from Mexico, preserved from their earlier period of origin but resonant within the contemporary political climate. Undoubtedly the best known of these was “Valentín de la Sierra.” Valentín de la Sierra Voy a cantar un corrido de un amigo de mi tierra, llamábase Valentín y fue fusilado y colgado en la sierra. Ni me quisiera acordar era una tarde de invierno, cuando por su mala suerte cayó Valentín en manos del gobierno. El capitán le pregunta: “Cuál es la gente que mandas?” “Son ochocientos soldados que tienen sitiada la hacienda de Holandas.” El coronel le pregunta: “Cuál es la gente que guías?” “Son ochocientos soldados que trae por la sierra Mariano Mejías.” El general le decía: “Yo te concedo el indulto, pero me vas a decir cuál es el juzgado y la causa que juzgo.” Valentín como era hombre de nada les dio razón: “Yo soy de los meros hombres que han inventado la revolución.”

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Antes de Ilegar al cerro Valentín quiso llorar: “Madre mía de Guadalupe por tu religion me van a matar.” Vuela vuela palomita párate en aquel fortín, estas son las mañanitas de un hombre valiente que fue Valentín. (I will sing a corrido about a friend from my land; he called himself Valentín, and he was shot and hung in the highlands. I don’t even wish to remember. It was a winter afternoon when, for his misfortune, Valentín fell into the hands of the government. The captain asked him, “How large is the troop you command?” “They are eight hundred soldiers who have laid siege to the Holandas hacienda.” The colonel asked him, “How large is the troop you command?” “They are eight hundred soldiers that Mariano Mejía brings in the highlands.” The general told him, “I will grant you a pardon, but you must tell me who is the accused, and the complaint that I judge.” Valentín, since he was a man, he gave them no information at all: “I am one of the very men who have invented the revolution.” Before arriving at the hilltop, Valentín wanted to cry, “My Mother, Virgin of Guadalupe, for your religion they are going to kill me.” Fly, fly, little dove! Perch on that little fort over there; this is the lament for that brave man who was Valentín.)

The appeal of this song, which is historically displaced from the little-known events of the Cristero movement—a peasant rebellion ostensibly about churchstate relations, but fundamentally about access to land (McDowell)—lies in the bold defiance of the hero, his claim with regard to “inventing the revolution,” 440


and the rehearsal of symbols of Mexican identity, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Chicano activists of the 1960s could relate the plight of the hero in the song to their own quest for recognition in the face of an unfriendly Anglo establishment. The theme of social and political protest became prominent in the struggle of the Mexican American farm workers to achieve basic economic rights through union organization, a struggle that continues to this day. The Teatro Campesino, which began as improvisatory theater aimed at rallying farm workers by dramatizing their problems, incorporated the corrido as a major vehicle of political protest, thereby tapping into a preexisting channel for contemplating events affecting Mexican American communities. Many other Chicano theater groups have drawn on this same resource (Kanellos). In these settings, the corrido was used self-consciously by political activists in the service of La Causa (The Cause). A beautiful example of the vitality of the genre in the Mexican American consciousness is the Corrido de Schenley (1976). Directed against the grape producers of this liquor industry, the corrido was spontaneously composed by a group of protesters who were arrested and held together in the Bakersfield jail. Pablo Saludado provides the following description: Andábamos haciendo demonstración airededor de las viñas cuando . . . los policías nos subieron a los carros y nos llevaron a la cárcel en Bakersfield. Pos, pasando el tiempo, para pasar el tiempo, un poco allí en la cárcel, nos juntamos entre todos, unos pusimos uno, dos, tres palabras, otros un verso y compusimos el corrido que le nombramos Corrido de Schenley. (We were demonstrating around the vineyards when . . . the police put us in the cars and took us to jail in Bakersfield. Well, to pass the time there in jail, we all got together: some added one, two, or three words, others a verse, and we wrote the ballad that we call The Ballad of Schenley. [Trans. Hildebrando Villarreal, Mary MacGregor-Villarreal, Michael Heisley])

As the following excerpt indicates, the text evinces the power of simple, direct corrido language: Corrido de Schenley Señores voy a cantarles lo que en Delano ha pasado, que en los ranchos del White River Fuimos varios arrestados. Nos Ilevaron de Delano a la cárcel del condado, porque quebramos la orden que el juez nos había dado. Fue en septiembre veinte-cinco que todos recordarán, decidimos los huelguistas a esos files entrar. Nosotros lo que queríamos

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con esquiroles hablar, que no quebraran la huelga y fueran a otro lugar. Pablo Lopez empezó a meterse con la gente, y dijo llegando allí: “Les encargo que se sienten.” Llegamos a ese lugar que Pablo nos indicó, cada quien con su bandera que nunca la separó. Al pie de nuestra bandera simbolo de nuestra union, declamos, “Viva la causa por todita la nación.” Como a las dos de la tarde del día antes mencionado, en los carros del cherife nos llevaron esposados. Las mujeres son valientes y grandes de corazón, gritaban, “Que viva Chávez el líder de nuestra unión.” Les pedimos su criterio y gracias por su atención, estos versos compusimos adentro de la prisión. (Gentlemen, I am going to sing to you About what happened in Delano, That on the White River farms Several of us were arrested. They took us from Delano To the county jail, Because we violated the order That the judge had given us. It was on September 25; That everyone will remember: We, the strikers, decided To enter these fields. What we wanted was To talk to the scabs, To ask them not to break the strike And to go to another place. Pablo Lopez began To mix with the people, And upon arriving there, he said, “Let’s sit down.” We arrived at that place

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That Pablo indicated to us, Each one with his banner, With which we never parted. At the foot of our flag, Symbol of our union, We said, “Long live the Cause throughout the whole nation.” About two in the afternoon Of the day already mentioned, They took us away handcuffed In the sheriff’s cars. The women are brave And of great heart. They shouted, “Long live Chávez, The leader of our union!” We ask your judgment And thank you for your attention; We composed these verses Inside the prison. [Trans. Villarreal, Heisley])

The corrido among Mexican Americans has been exclusively an instrument of political protest. Corridos have been composed and performed to commemorate natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornados, and they are sometimes devoted to expressing a Chicano viewpoint of current events affecting the entire nation, such as the assassinations of the Kennedys and of Martin Luther King. It can be argued, by virtue of its ubiquity and the diversity of its content, that the corrido has served the Mexican American community in the United States as a shared cultural instrument for probing the complications and limits inherent in the historical destiny of this community. Although it is one of the most important forms of expressive culture that the Mexican American population has developed, the corrido is not, by any means, the only genre popular throughout the Hispanic United States. The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend provides us with a basic guideline vis-à-vis the various Mexican American folklore genres extant in North America: (1) prose narratives (myths, folktales, legends, memorates, [personal experience stories], casos [events], jests); (2) folksongs (ballads, canciones [songs], décimas, coplas); (3) folk speech; (4) proverbs and proverbial expressions; (5) folk drama; (6) children’s songs and games; (7) riddles; (8) beliefs and folk medicine; (9) folk festivals; (10) folk arts and crafts; (11) folk dance; and (12) folk gestures. This study focuses on the first eight genres subsumed under the category of literary folklore.

Prose Narrative The categories subsumed under the broad umbrella of “prose narratives” include myths, folktales, legends, casos, memorates, and jests. There are no 443


“true” Chicano myth narratives as such; myths evidenced in Chicano literature derived mainly from Aztec and Mayan sources. These myths proved vitally important in the Chicano quest for self-definition and in the search for identity since the turbulent sixties. It should not be surprising that Aztec myths found fertile ground in the creative thought processes of Chicanos who, having been denied their Indian heritage in previous eras, suddenly felt a renovated affiliation with that heritage. Thus, a new political meaning was grafted into the old myth of Aztlán,* the land of the Chicanos’ mythic Aztec ancestors, who dwelled in what became the American Southwest before they migrated south to Tenochtitlán (Mexico City). Early Chicano political activists and creative writers renovated these Aztec myths in their quest for a reaffirmation of their centuries-old roots in America. These myths became an important element in their search for a sense of identity, which they perceived to be not wholly Mexican, not wholly American, but Chicano. Lo indio, lo azteca, lo maya (that which is Indian, Aztec, Maya) was no longer a source of embarrassment or something to be ashamed of, but a source of pride. Through the fascinating myths of the ancients, they could perceive that brown was indeed beautiful. To convey effectively this new found pride, Alurista,* one of the most prominent poets of the Chicano literary renaissance, liberally sprinkles his verse with the themes of Quetzalcóatl, priest-god of the Toltecs; Kukulcán, Mayan god; Coatlicue, an Aztec mother goddess; and many other Aztec and Mayan deities. The folktale, on the other hand, bears the stamp of both an Indian and a Spanish heritage and is a rich source of Chicano folklore. The EuropeanSpanish heritage surfaces in the fairytale or märchen type of narratives: “María Cenicienta” (Cinderella), “Caperucita Roja” (Little Red Riding Hood), “Blancanieves” (Snow White), “The Little Horse of Seven Colors,” “Juan y las habichuelas” (Jack and the Beanstalk), and others of this type are obviously of European origin, having migrated with the Spaniards to the New World. However, contact with a large Indian population inevitably produced a syncretism of European tales with Native American ones. In addition, a significant number of Mesoamerican Indian tales integrated themselves into the general Mexican and Mexican American folktale repertoire. Thus, an important number of animal tales—such as those pertaining to the coyote cycle— originate from Native American stock. A similar statement can be formulated for the legends. Although many came from Europe, particularly the religious legends, a good number derive from Mesoamerican Indian lore. Others demonstrate a decided syncretism in the type of motifs found in their structural framework. A good example of this process is evident in the “La Llorona” legend. In his excellent article, “La Llorona and Related Themes,” Bacil F. Kirtley does a credible tracing of La Llorona’s (the Weeping Woman’s) ancestry to both Germanic and Aztec cultural traditions (155–168). Basically, he cites a Llorona-type legend as first appearing in Germany “by at least 1486” as “Die Weisse Frau” (E425.1.1) and recorded in writing by the poet Kaspar Brushchius 444


in his Chronologia Monasterioum Germaniae Praecipuorum in 1552 and printed at Sulzback in 1682 (157): A second source of input contributing to the development of La Llorona, according to this same author, was the Aztec legends surrounding the Goddess Cihuacóatl (Snake Woman) who was “Among the earth goddesses the most famous . . . and whose voice, roaring through the night, betokened war” (163–164). As might be expected, a controversy exists between those scholars espousing a Mexican origin and those that lean toward both Aztec and European influences. Those supporting an Aztec heritage generally base their theory (as Kirtley did) on such impeccable sources as Sahagún, who, in his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (General History of Things from New Spain, Book I, Chapter IV), described the Goddess Cihuacóatl in the following manner: “Cihuacóatl appeared several times a year as a well-dressed woman. It was said she would cry out and howl at night. . . . Her clothing was white and her long hair was braided in such a manner as to appear like horns sticking out of her forehead” (Leyendas y sucedidos del Mexico colonial 12). Furthermore, Sahagún lists in Book XI the omens that foreshadowed the downfall of the great Aztec Empire. Omen number six predicted: “At night you will hear the anguished wailing of a woman who cries: ‘Oh, my sons, your destruction is near’” (12). On other occasions she will cry: ‘Oh my sons! Where shall I take you so that you will not perish?’” (12). Although controversy exists with respect to the La Llorona’s origins, there is no hesitancy on the part of scholars to acknowledge similarities between this legend and other weeping woman-type legends. For example, many perceive a strong resemblance between La Llorona and the Hebrew Lilith. Lilith, according to tradition, was the first wife of Adam (Gen. I., 27) and was created simultaneously with man. Because of this simultaneous creation, Lilith refused to acknowledge Adam as her superior and was subsequently expelled from paradise. She reportedly cohabited with the Devil and gave birth to the jinn, or evil spirits. Her refusal to return to Adam brought the wrath of God, who condemned her to lose one hundred of her progeny each day (Funk & Wagnalls 622). In addition to Lilith and Lamia, several other weeping woman legends are found among North American peoples. The Penobscot Indians, for example, have the Pskegdemus legend: Pskegdemus . . . is a swamp spirit who wails near camps to entice men and children. A man who shows any sympathy for her, even in thought is lost, for he will never be satisfied to marry a human woman. Another such demon of the Penobscot, dressed in moss and cedar bark, likes children and pets them. But good willed though she be, children have a way of going to sleep forever where she fondles them. (622)

Other Mesoamerican Indian myths that share similarities with La Llorona, apart from the Cihuacóatl myth, include the Ciuateteo (or Ciuapipltin), whom the Aztecs believed to be as follows: 445


. . . certain female spirits (literally “noble women”) who had died in childbirth (or in their first childbirth) or who had been warriors. Their patroness was Cihuacóatl, the serpent woman, probably an aspect of Coatlicue. The Ciuateteo lived in the western sky, through which, from the time it reached the meridian, they carried the sun to deliver it to the lords of the underworld. From this connection with the underworld they probably derived their dangerous character. Sometimes they flew out of the west as eagles, bring epilepsy to children and lust to men. At certain times they scared people on the roads. . . . Under Spanish influence, the Ciuateteo has developed into La Llorona, the weeping woman of folktale, who wanders through the streets seeking her lost children. (Ibid. 236)

Further studies, such as Michael Kearney’s “La Llorona as a Social Symbol,” show that “a variant of La Llorona occurs in Ixtepeji (Zapotec mestizo town in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, Mexico) bearing the name Matlaziwa. Matlaziwa is a spirit-being who is similar enough to La Llorona so that informants tend to equate them. Everyone knows of them and many people report having heard, seen and having had direct encounter with them” (200). A counterpart of Matlacíhuatl, as pointed out by Elaine Miller in her Mexican Folk Narratives from the Los Angeles Area, 1975, is Xtabay, who is also a siren-type Llorona (65). Another interesting group of legends reported from the state of Veracruz bears a close resemblance to this “siren type” Llorona. These legends are those related to the Chanecas who are: “women living in the forest who try to get a traveler to lose his path so that they may live with him, have sexual relations with him and eventually kill him” (Boggs 1939, #1099). With respect to literary versions in Mexico and the Southwest, Betty Leddy, in “La Llorona in Southern Arizona,” cites various adaptations of the legends into other literary genres, such as the novel, drama, and poetry (272). Two literary versions depict the life history of La Llorona. The first, a long poem by Vicente Riva Palacio and Juan de Dios Pesa, details the tragic love affair of Luisa with an aristocrat who abandons her to marry someone from his own class. The anguished Luisa, beside herself from grief, stabs the children to death (79–95). The second literary version appears in a collection entitled Leyendas y sucedidos del Mexico colonial (1963). The legends in this collection are literary versions of popular narratives from Mexico. This Llorona, written by Artemio del Valle Arizpe, is actually a summary of various versions from Mexico City. The principal variations recounted include the following: 1. La Llorona had been a woman deeply in love with her husband but lived far away from him. When she tried to join him, he was married to someone else. 2. She was a woman who actually never married her fiancé because she died before their wedding and now returns to gaze at her beloved and cries upon seeing the wicked life he is living. 3. Others attest she was a widow with children living in poverty.

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4. She was the mother of murdered children and came back to mourn them. 5. She was an unfaithful wife who returned, crying for forgiveness. 6. She was a woman who was murdered by her jealous husband over unfounded suspicions. 7. She was Doña Marina, the beautiful Malinche, mistress of Cortés, who came back to earth crying for forgiveness for having betrayed her race to the Spaniards. (7–12)

Chicano Llorona legends generally fall within three categories, as suggested by Leddy in the previously cited articles: (1) the siren, (2) the grieving woman, and (3) the woman who is dangerous to children (277). In addition, Chicano legends also include the types posited by Fernando Horcasitas Pimentel, who has also done extensive studies on La Llorona: (1) The woman condemned by God for killing her children, (2) Malinche, Cortés’s mistress and supposed betrayer of her race, and (3) Matlacíhuatl, seducer of men (Miller 63). Numerous Chicano Llorona legends yield two basic structural patterns: (1) La Llorona is a beautiful but lower-class girl who meets an aristocratic man (a king, duke, count, etc.) and falls in love with him. Her lover decides to marry another woman from his own class. La Llorona, either for (a) vengeance or (b) because she fears that he will take them away, kills her children. She realizes the consequences of her horrible deed and goes insane, forever condemned to search fruitlessly for her lost progeny. (2) The second pattern basically depicts the same sequence of events as the first, except that the racial characteristics of the female protagonist change from ostensibly Spanish to Indian. La Llorona in these versions is an Indian, and her wayward lover is a Spaniard (personal collection of La Llorona legends from Orange County, California). In this second type, the historical names of Cortés and Malinche appear. The basic kernel of betrayal by her lover, plus the horrible act of killing her children, remains throughout the biographical legends. The differences in the various texts seem to reside in how La Llorona chooses to execute her offspring: stabbing, drowning, throwing them in a hole, killing them in an unspecified manner. In the anecdotal versions (as opposed to the literary variants), La Llorona appears as a scary entity, either to the person relating the tale or to someone close (an uncle, brother, etc.). La Llorona usually takes the form of a woman. In some of these legends, only the terrifying wail is heard. The appearance of La Llorona is commonly associated with some form of transgression: a male coming home drunk, a married male trying to pick up a woman, or a child misbehaving or disobeying orders. The geographic place where she appears varies depending on the narrator: by a canal, by a certain stone at the crossroads of a town, by the railroad tracks, by his or her house, near a tree, etc. Common motifs found in La Llorona legends include the following: E587.5. E547

Ghosts walk at midnight The dead wail

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E425.2.2 C311.1.1. S131. Q211.4 Q503. E265.1. E266 E425.1.1. H1219.2 Q520.1 G264 C943 D791 G261

Revenant as man with horse’s head Tabu: looking at ghosts Murder by drowning Murder of children punished Wandering after death as punishment Meeting ghost causes sickness Dead carry off living Revenant as lady in white Quest assigned as punishment for murder Murderer does penance La Belle Dame Sans Merci (The Beautiful Maiden Without Mercy) Loss of sight from breaking tabu Disenchantment possible under unique conditions Witch steals children

Sociopolitical and Cultural Implications Explanations for La Llorona’s popularity within the Chicano community need to take into consideration the sociohistorical and political reality of Mexican Americans in Anglo American society. In the quest for self-definition during the politically active 1960s and 1970s, Chicanos have searched in time and found inspiration and pride in their Indian ancestral roots. The ancient Aztec, Toltec, and other Mesoamerican myths have come alive for the contemporary Chicano(a). They have found in the myths of Aztlán, of Quetzalcóatl, and other ancient gods and goddesses a link between the past and the present. Lost in a maze of labels—such as Mexican American, Spanish American, Latin American, Hispanic, Latino, and other even less palatable names—they have begun a quest for self-definition. This existential journey has taken them to the pre-Columbian myths and legends of the Aztec-Mexica: here they have found their Indian mother, La Llorona. La Llorona becomes a symbolic figure representing the Chicano’s feeling of alienation and loss of identity. As Rafael Grajeda states in his incisive analysis of “The Figure of the Pocho in Contemporary Chicano Fiction,” “The Chicano is the ‘marginal man,’ the huérfano (the ‘orphan’)—another outsider in the society. Ideologically and psychologically botched through his assimilation of the collective unconscious of an American culture which charges him with the burden of being unworthy, and incapable of ‘going back’ to Mexico, the pocho is the man in cultural limbo” (1). La Llorona is perceived as a wailing mother in search of her orphaned children; her lost children, in turn, are looking for her. As such, she becomes an important recurring motif in the literature of Chicano(a)s, as evidenced in the writings of Chicano authors. La Llorona appears in the work of important Mexican American poets and novelists such as Alurista, Alejandro Morales,* Rudolfo Anaya, and Raúl Salinas. 448


In Alurista’s poetry, for example, La Llorona appears as a mother looking for her lost children in the mechanical labyrinths of U.S. industry. In a poem entitled “Must Be the Season of the Witch,” Alurista exclaims the following: Must be the season of the witch la bruja [the witch] la Llorona she lost her children and she cries en las barrancas of industry [in the canyons] her children devoured by computers and the gears Must be the season of the witch I hear huesos crack [bones] in pain y Iloros [cries] la bruja pangs sus hijos han olvidado [her sons have forgotten] la magia de Durango [the magic of Durango] y la de Moctezuma [and Moctezuma’s] -el Huiclamina Must be the season of the witch La bruja llora [the witch cries] sus hijos sufren; sin ella [her offspring suffer without her] (26)

In Alejandro Morales’s first novel, Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975, Old Faces and New Wine, 1981), the motif of La Llorona serves to emphasize the barrio’s loss of her children to drugs, police, illness. The novel depicts barrio life in the 1950s and 1960s in its most grotesque, degraded, and violent conditions. The constant fights and the poor health, both spiritual and physical, of the inhabitants of that area bring the mechanical cries of the sirens of an ambulance, a fire engine, or the police. It is the wail of La Llorona who comes to take the “children,” her sons and daughters, away. After the death of the mother of one of the main characters, Morales says: “The cold wind wandered through the empty space and La Llorona in her mournful journey played and caressed the trees. Her cry could be heard throughout the barrio because of what she saw. The fingertips dried the eyes but she continued crying” (14). Similarly, La Llorona plays an important part in the structure of Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972), an outstanding Chicano novel. In her penetrating article, “The Function of the La Llorona Motif in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima,” Jane Rogers analyzes the La Llorona motif in his first novel. She posits that the La Llorona motif figures on both a literal mythological level and as an integral part of Antonio’s [the protagonist] life. “As ‘literal’ myth, la Llorona is the wailing woman of the river. Hers is the ‘tormented cry of lonely goddess’ that fills the valley in one of Antonio’s dreams. La Llorona is ‘the old witch who cries along the river banks and seeks the blood of boys and men to drink’” (64). La Llorona has played and continues to play a significant role in the creative process of Chicano(a) writers: these writers, be they poets or novelists, in search of their “roots” or their identity, have traveled back in time and found in childhood memories, in myths and legends, the figure of La Llorona. The legend, never dead, has taken on a new meaning for Chicanos, who frequently feel alienated and lost in American society. The connection between “lost 449


children” and Chicanos living in the United States away from the Mexican “mother culture” is instantly seen by perceptive writers and is felt subconsciously by the rest of this ethnic population. Américo Paredes has commented on the function of legends in a people’s psychosociocultural structures in his article “Mexican Legendry and the Rise of the Mestizo”: For my purposes, then, legends are egosupporting devices. They may appeal to the group or to individuals by affording them pride, dignity and self-esteem: local or national heroes to identify with, for example, or place-name legends giving an aura of importance to some familiar and undistinguished feature of the local landscape. Whether in doing so they validate or challenge the social structure, ease tensions or exacerbate them, is beside the point. One may feel his ego just as well with frustration and defeat as with victory and conformity. Legends, however, are important in providing symbols that embody the social aspirations of the group, whether these be embodied in an ideal status quo or in dreams of revolution. (91)

Paredes further explains the usefulness of legends in exploring the character of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and goes on to propose that the “rise of the mestizo as representative of the Mexican nationality may be illuminated by the study of Mexican legendry” (98). He also observes that, before the “rise of the mestizo” (pre-nineteenth-century Mexico), legends dealt generally with supernatural, miraculous events such as the apparition of saints. As the mestizo seized power, legend content leaned toward the recounting of the deeds of flesh-and-blood heroes, such as Heraclio Bernal, Gregorio Cortez, and, later, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the deeds and actions of the revolutionary heroes such as Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Francisco I. Madero, and others (97–107). Several scholars have undertaken extensive research on the Mexican Chicano legend and the folktale. Juan Rael published a large collection of tales from Colorado. Stanley L. Robe did ample research on tales and legends from various parts of Mexico and the Southwest. Elaine Miller published a collection of folktales from the Los Angeles area titled Mexican Folk Narrative from the Los Angeles Area (1973). Her collection includes religious narratives such as “La Virgen de Talpa” (The Virgin of Talpa) and “El Santo Niño de Atocha” (The Boy Saint of Atocha), devil narratives, and the return of the dead, that is, legends depicting the apparition of dead persons. Another very popular type included in Miller’s collection is the dead person that returns to pay a manda (promise) to a saint. Miller has examples of buried treasure legends, tales about duendes (spirits), as well as traditional tales (animal tales, tales of magic, tales of stupid ogres, and others). Recently, scholars are grappling with the new concepts of caso and memorate. These new terms are designed to meet the ever-increasing problem of defining

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in more precise terms the large corpus of prose narrative present in all cultures. More and more scholars are realizing that the old terminology (folktale, legend, märchen) is inadequate and too broadly based to meet the needs of rigorous scientific analysis. The terms caso and memorate and the phrase “personal experience narrative” are currently used to classify a large body of narratives in Mexican Chicano folklore. These terms generally encompass narratives that happened to the informant or to someone the informant knows. Joe Graham provides the following definition: “[a caso is] a relatively brief prose narrative, focusing upon a single event, supernatural or natural, in which the protagonist or observer is the narrator or someone the narrator knows and vouches for, and which is normally used as evidence or as an example to illustrate that ‘this kind of thing happens’” (19). Graham offers fourteen types of casos that are discernible by their theme and structure in Chicano folklore. The following is an example:

Caso Type I A Mexican American becomes ill and is taken to a doctor, who either treats him, with no visible results, or says that the person is not ill. The person is taken to a curandero or folk practitioner, who provides the proper remedy, and the patient gets well. (31) These new areas of endeavor in folklore, such as the caso, memorate, and personal experience narrative, illustrate the richness and complexity of Mexican Chicano culture. An equally significant area of folklore is the chiste or jest. Américo Paredes undertook seminal research in this genre and provided a theoretical construct for understanding the underlying basis of much of Chicano folklore in general and Chicano jokes in particular. Paredes’s basic thesis underscores the element of cultural conflict as the principal moving force generating Chicano folklore (1968). Much of Chicano humor derives from the confrontation of two cultures: one Mexican, Catholic, Spanish-speaking; the other Anglo, Protestant, Englishspeaking. A large corpus of jokes, for example, relies on Mexican Anglo conflicts using the linguistic differences between the two cultures as points of departure, such as the following: A gringo was traveling on a rural Mexican road in his Cadillac when suddenly a man and his burro block his path. The gringo gets down from his car, takes off his glove, and slaps the Mexican in the face with the glove yelling, “Sonofabitch!” Whereupon the Mexican takes off his huarache, slaps the gringo in the face and yells, “B. F. Goodrich!” (Meza Fuentes, student term paper, University of California, Irvine, California, 1980)

In this jest, although the Mexican does not understand the insult, he manages to outsmart the Anglo by striking the hardest blow. It is typical of

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Chicano humor in general that the Mexican Chicano protagonist comes out the best in the exchange. There is a cycle of jokes, however, in which the protagonist (a Mexican immigrant) is the butt of the joke. This cycle of jokes portrays the difficulties that newly arrived Mexicans have because of the differences in language, for example: A recently arrived immigrant sees a door with the sign: FOR SALE NOT FOR LEASE. He goes to the door and begins struggling to open it. A policemen comes along and asks him what he is doing to which the immigrant replies: “Pues el letrero dice que “Forsale no lease.” [“Fórzale no le hace.” Meaning “Force it; it does not matter.”] (Ibid.)

The joke resides on the play on words between the Spanish word fórzale and the English phrase “for sale” and the nonstandard Spanish expression “no le ase” (no le hace). This type of joke continues to appear. Recently, a joke was circulating with the word “Latina.” There has been a controversy among Latin Americans and Mexican Americans regarding the use of the words “Latino/a” or “Hispanic” as all encompassing words to designate all Spanish surname groups. “Hispanic” seems to be the preferred racial category used by the U.S. government, whereas “Latino/a” seems to be more acceptable to a large number of Latin Americans. Chicanos, on the other hand, prefer the term “Chicano” or “Mexican American.” The following joke was told at a meeting during a heated discussion over what term to use for the purposes of a major research endeavor: The Border Patrol guys see a Chicana crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. They approach her and ask her “Latina?” Whereupon the woman answers: “No. La Tina ya cruzó. Yo soy La Molly.” [“No. ‘La Tina’ already crossed over. I am ‘La Molly.’”] (Informant: Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, University of New Mexico, May 1991).

A second basic factor that characterizes many Chicano jokes is the bilingualism expressed within the jokes, as evidenced in the prior examples. Many Chicano jokes require an understanding of both Spanish and English because the structure of the joke uses the misunderstanding of one or both languages to deliver its intended humor and punch line.

Folk Speech Chicano Spanish has recently been the focus of intense study, particularly by linguists and those interested in bilingual education. The realization by American educators and linguists that the Spanish spoken in the Southwest differs markedly from that spoken in Spain, Mexico, and other Latin American countries led to a flurry of research. The most comprehensive bibliography on 452


Chicano speech is Richard V. Teschner, Garland D. Bills, and Jerry R. Craddock’s Spanish and English of United States Hispanos: A Critical, Annotated, Linguistic Bibliography (1975), which cites 675 items. The most fruitful work undertaken is on the aspect of code-switching (switching from English to Spanish or vice versa in the middle of a phrase, sentence, or paragraph), but the most outstanding area of research, from a folklorist’s point of view, has been neglected. Thus, little indepth research is available on caló (the jargon of the underworld or the pachuco) or other areas of folk speech. A seminal work by George C. Baker, “Pachuco: An American-Spanish Argot and Its Social Function in Tucson, Arizona” (1975), is still one of the best works in the field. Baker studied the speech of pachucos* from Tucson and related this speech to the social function that it played within the in-group and the out-group. Some of these words include carnal (brother), jaina (girlfriend), chante (house), ruka (girl), birreía (beer), canton (house), chale (no), lisa (shirt), simón (yes), and refinar (to eat). The lack of studies in this genre is indeed deplorable. José Limón, a specialist in folklore, has amply demonstrated the importance of this area in his article “The Folk Performance of ‘Chicano’ and the Cultural Limits of Political Ideology.” Limón analyzes the failure of the folk term “Chicano” to gain widespread acceptance in the community and posits that “in part this failure may be attributed to the unintentional violation of the community’s rules about the socially appropriate use of the term—rules keyed on the community’s definition of the performance of the term as belonging to the folklore genres of nicknaming and ethnic slurs” (197). It is fairly easy to deduce from this study that, if political movements are to succeed, the leaders of these movements must have an intimate and working knowledge of the people that they propose to represent. One way to accomplish this is through an in-depth understanding of the cultural vectors (such as folklore) that are operative in the community.

Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions Proverbs and proverbial expressions, entities that are intimately related to folk speech, form an integral part of Chicano folklore. Although these terms are used most frequently by the older generation, a recent study undertaken by Shirley Arora (43–69) demonstrates that the younger generations of Chicanos are indeed aware of proverbs, having been raised by a mother, father, or other family members who interspersed their speech with these colorful expressions. A proverb may be defined as a short, succinct expression that encompasses within its words a philosophical wisdom. Examples include the following: 1. Tanto va el cántaro al agua hasta que se quiebra. [A jar that keeps going to the water fountain will eventually break.] 2. El que tiene hambre atiza la olla. [He who is hungry tends the hearth fire.] 3. Hombre prevenido vale por dos. [A well-prepared man is worth two men.] 4. El que nace para tamal, del cielo le caen las hojas. [He who is born to be a “tamal” will receive leaves from heaven.]

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5. El sol sale para pobres y ricos. [The sun rises for the poor and the rich.] 6. En la cama y en la cárcel se conocen los amigos. [In a sick bed and in jail one knows who one’s friends are.] 7. Al que madruga Dios lo ayuda. [He who rises early gets God’s help.] 8. Vale más malo conocido que bueno por conocer. [It is better to keep that which is already known even though it may not be very good than to try out something new but unknown.] 9. El remedio ha de ser a tiempo. [The remedy has to be given on time.] 10. De músico, poeta, y loco todos tenemos un poco. [There is a little bit in all of us of the musician, the poet, and the insane.] (personal collection)

The proverb, like other folklore genres, is yet another important area in which the philosophy or worldview of a people can be profitably explored. However, in his article “Folklore, Lo Mexicano and Proverbs,” Américo Paredes advised extreme caution when attempting to analyze the character of a people and warns against literal interpretation of proverbs or deducing Mexican Chicano traits taken out of context (1–11). Analysis of proverbs must be undertaken in the context in which these expressions are uttered. Otherwise, the social scientist or folklorist may be, albeit unwittingly, misled to make totally false and harmful generalizations about the character of a people. Valuable information regarding the Chicano experience can be gleaned from careful research of these entities and their use in Chicano households, as demonstrated by Shirley Arora’s article “Proverbs in Mexican American Tradition.” Her study provides key insights into status and usage of proverbs by Chicanos in Los Angeles. For example, Arora found that frequent use of proverbs is most noticeable in the area of child rearing: “from the inculcation of table manner—‘El que come y canta loco se levanta’ [He who eats and sings gets up crazy], ‘la mano larga nunca alcanza’ [the grabby hand has no limits]—to the regulation of social relationships and dating behavior” (1982: 59). Arora also indicates that proverbs have great potential—and may indeed be already employed—for purposes of ethnic identification and group solidarity. Needless to say, more in-depth studies on proverb usage need to be undertaken to comprehend better this particular aspect of Chicano folklore. Shirley Arora has also accomplished much research on proverbial comparisons in the Los Angeles area in her work Proverbial Comparisons and Related Expressions in Spanish (1977). The comparison may be defined as a phrase in which the following formulaic structures appear: está como tan . . . como tan . . . que

The exaggeration likewise employs the formulaic structures of: “más . . . que.” Arora interviewed 517 informants and collected thousands of entries. Some examples follow. 454


1. 2. 3. 4.

Más loco que una cabra. [Crazier than a goat.] Más gordo que un elefante. [Fatter than an elephant.] Más tocada que una guitarra. [(a woman) More “played” on than a guitar.] Más flaca que una lombriz. [Skinnier than a worm.]

The humorous nature and originality of many of these proverbial expressions, together with the large number of them collected within a relatively small geographic area (greater Los Angeles), indicate the amazing creativity that is present in the speech of the Chicano community. It is evident from the large number of entries, both proverbs and proverbial expressions collected by Arora, that a great premium is placed on language skills and language dexterity by Chicanos. Arora has found in her study that, more often than not, people with a large repertoire of proverbial expressions elicited admiration and respect from the community. Proverbs and proverbial expressions provide a strong affectivity factor toward the Spanish language and are no doubt one important reason for the high premium placed on preserving the Spanish language. The wealth of Spanish proverbs and the witticism inherent in proverbial expressions contribute to the widespread folk belief that Spanish is one of the most delightful languages in the world. This folk belief, in turn, offers a closer understanding of why a conquered people, after over one hundred years of political and cultural domination, tenaciously clings to one of its cultural manifestations—the Spanish language.

Folk Theater The folk theater of the Chicano, like Mexican and Latin American theater, traces its roots to the Spanish conquistadors and their religious plays. The early missionaries, interested in converting the Indians of the New World, discovered that, because of the differences in language, the representation of biblical and religious stories through dramatic enactments provided an effective means by which to indoctrinate the Indians into the Catholic faith. Thus, early theatrical works in the Western Hemisphere were religious plays, in which the Indians themselves played major roles and which were extremely popular with the faithful. These plays generally took place in the church atrium and were presented to the populace on specific holy days, such as Christmas or Easter Sunday. When New Mexico was settled in the seventeenth century, works that had been successful in Mexico migrated with the Spanish and Mexican settlers into what is now the American Southwest. Arthur Campa* and Aurora Lucero-White Lea have both collected folk plays from this region. Among those collected is “Coloquio de los Pastores” (Dialog of the Shepherds), which, according to Lea, “represents that older type of traditional Nativity play, which was presented in the village church on Christmas Eve in lieu of Midnight Mass when that village had no resident priest” (5). Other popular plays collected include La aurora del nuevo día (Dawn of the New Day), Adán y Eva (Adam and Eve), Los tres reyes (The Three Kings), El 455


niño perdido (The Lost Child), Las cuatro apariciones de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (The Four Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe), and Los moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians). One should also mention the pastorelas or shepherd’s plays that were performed during the Christmas season and which are still being enacted. Folk theater has influenced, to some extent, present-day Chicano theater, particularly that of Luis Valdez. Like the corrido, contemporary Chicano theater is being effectively used as a vehicle to convey and express the injustices perpetuated on the Mexican Chicano by Anglo society.

Children’s Songs and Games As is true of most of the other genres of folklore, children’s songs and games from the Chicano Southwest evidence basically the same categories and specimens as those from Spain. Songs and games played or sung by or for children may be divided into the following major categories: (1) canciones de cuna (lullabys): “Duérmete mi niño” (Sleep my child); (2) canciones de manos y dedos: “Tortillitas” (hand and finger games); (3) rondas: “Naranja dulce” (Sweet Orange); (4) retahilas: “El castillo de Chuchurumbel” (The Castle of Chuchurumbel); (5) canciones: “La muñeca” (The Doll); (6) conjuros: “Sana, sana colita de rana” (a healing saying); and (7) miscellaneous: “escondidas” (Hide and Seek), “matatena,” “los encantados,” “rayuela” (Hopscotch). Individuals who grew up in a Spanish-speaking environment can nostalgically remember songs and games of yore such as the following: (1) Duérmete mi niño que tengo que hacer lavar los pañales ponerme a coser. (2) Tortillitas de manteca pa’ mama que está contenta. Tortillitas de cebado pa’ papa que está enojado. (3) Naranja dulce limón partido dame un abrazo que yo te pido. ([1] Go to sleep, my child; I have work to do: wash the diapers and some sewing, too. [2] Little tortillas made of lard

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for mommy, for happy is she. Little tortillas made of barley for daddy, for angry is he. [3] Sweet orange lemon is cut Give me a hug I ask of you.)

Paredes made a revealing observation with regard to children’s songs and games and cultural conflict—the basic thread that runs throughout Chicano folklore. As innocuous and free from anxiety and conflict as children’s games may appear, the opposite is discovered on close analysis. Experts agree that children often express their fears and anxieties through play. Paredes pointed this out in a game played by Chicano children: “La roña,” also known as “La mancha” (tag). In this game, children flee from the one that has “la roña” and the latter in turn tries to touch or tag the others. In Texas, the game is known as “La correa,” a name given to immigration officers. Thus, by implication, the Texas children enact the real-life situation of Immigration and Naturalization Services officers trying to capture undocumented workers (Paredes 1966, 158).

Riddles Riddles comprise another area of Chicano folklore. Archer Taylor provides us with the classic definition of a “true riddle”: “questions that suggest an object foreign to the answer and confound the hearer by giving a solution that is obviously correct and entirely unexpected (McDowell 1979, 18). “More recently, Elli Kongas-Maranda has suggested that “the riddle is a structural unit, which necessarily consists of two parts: the riddle image and the riddle answer. In a riddling situation, these two parts are ‘recited’ by two different parties” (20). La adivinanza, as it is called in Spanish, is an integral part of the expressive culture of the Chicano. However, few studies have been undertaken on Chicano riddling habits. An exception is John M. McDowell’s Children’s Riddling (1979). As the following excerpt indicates, McDowell’s in-depth study offers extremely relevant conclusions as to the function of riddles in children’s ludic activities: Riddles in the modern, industrial society serve as models of synthetic and analytic thinking. They encourage children to discover the archetypical set of commonalities binding diverse experiential realities into a single, coherent world view, and at the same time, they require children to confront the tentative status of conceptual systems, thereby fostering a flexibility of cognition evidently of some utility in a great many cultural settings. (20)

The following are some popular examples of riddles common throughout Latin America and the Southwest: 457


(1) Agua pasa por mi casa cate de mi corazón. Si no me adivinas ésta eres puro burro cabezón. (aguacate) (2) Adivíname esta adivinanza que se pela por la panza. (la naranja) (3) Una vieja larga y seca que le escurre la manteca. (la vela) (4) Tito, Tito capotito sube al cielo y tira un grito. (el cohete) (5) Lana sube Lana baja (La navaja) (personal collection) ([1] Water passes through my house, my beloved. If you do not answer this one, you are a thick-headed donkey. (an avocado) [2] Answer this riddle for me. You peel it from the tummy. (an orange) [3] A tall, skinny old lady that drips lard. (a candle) [4] Tito, Tito, little cape, fly up in the sky and give out a scream. (a firecracker))

The adivinanza challenges the intellect and the reasoning processes by offering descriptions that are close enough to resemble the objects yet so hidden 458


between the texture (metaphors, similes) of the words as to make it difficult to answer. The riddle, a thoroughly social act in itself in that at least two people are required for it to function, provides the players with an excellent instrument to play with language. Different opportunities are offered: rhyming schemes (nos. 1–4); disconnecting and connecting various morphemes (nos. 1 and 5); deceiving metaphorical images (nos. 2 and 3); and alliterative, onomatopoetic sounds (no. 4). McDowell perceived two sets of riddles in the repertoire of the children interviewed (Chicano children from a barrio in Austin, Texas, in 1972): (1) a collection of riddles learned at school, from Anglo children, from the media (television, radio) and (2) a set of more traditional ones learned at home from parents, relatives, or peers. One significant function deduced in this Texas study is the proposition that riddles serve enculturation purposes— enculturation being defined as “the process of induction, wherein the individual acquires knowledge requisite to fulfillment of recognized social roles” (McDowell 1979, 222). In the acquisition of the riddling habits of the dominant society, one is also being acculturated into this dominant culture. The riddle, aside from serving the pleasure function manifest in all ludic play, equally serves other cognitive endeavors.

Folk Belief and Folk Medicine The folk-belief system of the Chicano community, particularly as it deals with folk medicine and curanderismo (healing), is one of the most controversial areas of scholarship in Chicano folklore. In a revealing article by Beatrice A. Roeder, “Health Care Beliefs and Practices among Mexican Americans: A Review of the Literature,” the author identified four stages in the trajectory of folk-belief scholarship vis-à-vis Mexican Americans: (1) works dealing with the sources and historical development of Mexican folk medicine; (2) pioneer works of documentation, that is, collections done between 1894–1954; (3) the 1950s–1960s—exemplified by Lyle Saunders and his followers (who sought to understand Mexican American health practices by placing them in their cultural context); and (4) the 1970s—includes revisionist Chicano scholars who vigorously challenge previous research findings and take a socioeconomic approach to understanding Mexican medical practices, as opposed to a “cultural context” approach (1982, 223–256). The basic controversy between the last two major groups centers on whether the Mexican American folk-belief system is largely responsible for the Chicano’s “inability” or reluctance to use and take advantage of modern “scientific” medical services. In other words, this perspective posits that it is the Chicanos’s own cultural restraints that hamper them in obtaining adequate medical services. Chicano revisionists such as Nick C. Vaca, Miguel Montiel, and Armando Morales argue, on the other hand, that the culture-as-culprit thesis—or “cultural determinism,” as they label it—is a “myth” propagated by and used as a rationalization tool by the Anglo-dominant society, which, 459


through institutionalized racism (such as segregated schools, lack of bilingual personnel), prevents Chicanos from attaining proper medical care. A glaring example is found in Joe S. Graham’s article “The Role of the Curandero in the Mexican American Folk Medicine System in West Texas.” In his introductory remarks, he states the following: In West Texas the term “scientific medicine” became almost synonymous with “Anglo medicine”—and still is. To my knowledge, there is not one licensed Mexican American doctor practicing in the whole rural region between Del Rio and El Paso, separated by over four hundred miles—this in spite of the fact that over half of the population is Mexican American. (176)

What Graham failed to do in this otherwise sensitive article was to point out that (1) Texas has had a de facto segregated school system (Chicano schools are generally much inferior to all-white schools); (2) medical schools in the United States previous to the 1970s had racial quotas so that it was next to impossible for an African American, Mexican American, or a woman to be admitted; and (3) border-area residents in Texas resorted to Spanish-speaking Mexican doctors from Mexico (who, in addition, tend to be less expressive than their American counterparts). These issues were totally neglected in the article, which instead zeroed in on the culture-as-culprit theory. As the expressed concerns of these investigators show, folk medicine has been largely studied from a social scientist’s perspective and is very much the concern of the anthropologist and sociologist. Belief and folk medicine have been included in this study, however, because of their close proximity to the legend, the caso, the memorate, and the personal experience narrative. Folk beliefs cover a wide range of cosmological and human experiences and are perceived by some scholars as human beings’ attempts at scientific explanation for otherwise incomprehensible events. Beliefs are interconnected with prose narratives in the sense that, for any given belief, there may be a “story” explaining this belief. In addition to a narrative explicating the belief, additional narratives corroborating the truthfulness or efficacy of this belief may be present. These narratives may surface in the form of (1) a personal experience; (2) an experience that happened to a close relative or acquaintance; or (3) an experience that happened to some unknown person. For example, numerous folk beliefs are associated with the Catholic religion. A common belief is the following: “A manda (promise) to a saint is sacred. One must always keep these promises or suffer the consequences.” Generally, when this belief is stated, a narrative or series of narratives illustrate this specific point. The casos described earlier are frequently corroborating stories of a belief. There are literally thousands of beliefs. The following are but a few examples: 1. belief in the existence of witches (brujas) 2. belief in curanderos(as) or folk healers 3. belief in the devil

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4. belief in la Llorona 5. belief in ghosts, evil spirits, duendes, werewolves, vampires, headless riders, espantos (supernatural beings both good and bad), poltergeists, kobolds, bewitched areas or places (lugares encantados) 6. belief in buried treasures 7. belief in objects to put hexes or prevent bewitchment 8. belief in folk medicine and folk ailments, such as susto (shock), empacho (indigestion), aire (air), caer la mollera (fallen fontenelle), mal puesto (bewitched)

For each of these entities, there are thousands of narratives, told by the folk, that detail how supernatural events (such as those cited) took place. These narratives are told by someone who either experienced the supernatural event or knew of someone who experienced such an event. All of these narratives, of course, are jewels in the rough that, when discovered by a literary genius, can be transformed into polished gems. For example, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez used hundreds of folk beliefs in the process of constructing the magical, fantastic universe of his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). One needs to mention only three well-known Chicano novels—. . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him) by Tomás Rivera*; Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolf Anaya, and El diablo en Texas (The Devil in Texas) by Aristeo Brito*—to realize the impact of folk beliefs on Chicano literature. Folk beliefs are an integral, significant element in Chicano folklore (and in the folklore of all cultures) and certainly merit continued investigation. This necessarily short introduction to Chicano folklore provides the reader with a greater appreciation of the cultural phenomenon called folklore and with a better understanding of the richness of Chicano culture.

Puerto Rican Folkore Puerto Rican folklore has its roots in the three important ethnic groups that constituted the Island’s population: the Arawak Indians (better known for their language, Taínos); the Spanish European conquerors; and the African people enslaved for work in the Island, who went by the Taino name Boriquén or Borinquén. The folk tradition that emerges from the African and Arawak worlds is shared in great measure with the sister island of Cuba. This section emphasizes the indigenous and the European traditions; in the Cuban section, emphasis is on African and Spanish lore so as to avoid repetition. It is true that this also reflects, to some degree, the true impact of both populational cultures—not because the African presence was not felt in Puerto Rico, but because the Arawaks suffered less the Caribbean legacy of genocide left by the Spanish masters because theirs was a smaller island, which was fraught with early out-migration and with fewer agricultural and mining projects than in the Cuban case. Also, the sugar industry in Cuba produced an enormous influx of African forced labor through the institution of slavery. To these facts, another important one must be added: the Arawak migration 461


from South America to the West Indies was northward and then westward, making Puerto Rico an important locus of directional change in the movement of indigenous peoples. Also, in contrast, the island of Cuba was to be populated last and to a much lesser degree by the Arawaks. Some toponymical and folkloric data suggest that this is so: the Cubans still identify much more with their native Indians, the Siboney and Guanajatabey populations, than with the Taínos, and the Cubans named a province, which indicated the level of genocide, “Matanzas” [literally, killings]. By the time that the Arawaks settled in Cuba, the Spanish invasion followed soon after. Hence, Puerto Rico emerges as an important site for archaeological findings for Arawak culture, whereas Cuba does not. These meditations that to justify the treatment of African santería in the Cuban section and that of Amerindian lore in the Puerto Rican piece.

Arawak Mythology The best holistic study of the Arawaks in the Caribbean is that by Stevens-Arroyo in his Cave of the Jagua: The Mythological World of the Taínos, in which he uses archaeological, anthropological, folkloric, and comparative religion data to weave an interpretation of Arawak culture. This work avoids two pitfalls in the process: specialization with blinders, which prevents scholars from looking to other disciplines in search of explanations when data from their own disciplines prevent them from interpreting a puzzle, and using the findings from their small share of Arawak culture to understand their own national culture or to defend a particular notion of national mythography. Stevens-Arroyo’s conclusions are interesting and provide a panoramic picture of the world of the Arawak (he uses the word taíno because he concedes that it is better known, although it refers specifically only to the language of the Arawaks). Obviously, although he stands on the shoulders of giants (Rouse, Arrom, Alegría, Coll y Toste, García Arévalo, Taylor) whose studies of the prehistory of the Antilles he acknowledges, Stevens-Arroyo, by availing himself of the work of Freud, Jung, Campbell, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade, Radin, and Turner, is able to view his field more comprehensibly. The story in its most simple outline is as follows: the Arawaks had advanced in their migration because of a societal imperative of compelling each generation to keep its most immediate descendants in the person of the firstborn son and forcing the remaining offspring to out-migrate their settlement. This was necessary because the cassava, fruit, and fish that constituted their diet was insufficient to support a growing population. It meant that the need to take wives away from one’s own parental settlement involved stealing them, sometimes calling for skirmishes with other settlements. It also meant that the linguistic development of these youngsters was not quite complete, causing a slight language shift in each wave of migration. Stevens-Arroyo implies that

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these were the feared Caribs, not a separate people. Their social organization, therefore, followed the patterns imposed by these necessities, and their myths enveloped these needs and transformed them into divine laws. His careful reading of the Taíno myths—including the restoration of the text to its original transcription when possible—and his reconstitution of the Cemí [Arawak totem] system and its place in the Taíno cosmos brings him to create a table something like the following:

GENDER & GENERATION

ORDER OF FRUITFULNESS

ORDER OF INVERSION

Masculine

Yucahu[guamá] lord of the yucca plant bitterness and strength life of worker on earth root symbolism

Maquetaurie Guayaba lord of the dead sweetness and delight symbol of the guayaba berry bat symbolism

Twins Generated from the masculine

Baibrama guardian of workers fire to clear earth for planting yucca fire of oven for making cazabe

Opiyelguobobirán guardian of the dead privacy and felicity dog god

Baraguabael guardian of plants, animals, and fish replenisher of nature

Corocote guardian of sexual delights, romance, and spontaneity picaresque spirit

Attabeira fertilizing earth water in ponds, rivers, and lakes

Guabancex driver of wind and water on the sea rider of the hurricane

Earth and serpent mother protectress of childbearing and lactation

Mistress of the hurricane the Amazon woman, menstruating, untamed, and indomitable

Márohu the cloudless sky, announcing the sun

Guataúba thunder, announcing the stormy rain

Boinayel son of the gray serpent the clouded sky, announcing the fertilizing rain

Coatrisquie carrier of water to the mountains drifting storm clouds

Feminine

Twins Generated from the feminine

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Other studies of the Indian influence on Puerto Rican folklore include the examination of the areyto or pre-Columbian song-dance of the Arawaks that was conducted by Cesáreo Rosa-Nieves, based on the Spanish chronicles written at the time of the Conquest. Others present the more contemporary view of the areyto, as is the case in the study by Carlos Miguel Suárez-Radillo of a school presentation of a literary “are yto de Marojo” performed at the Festival de la Tierra Puertorriqueña. The Amerindian stratum of Puerto Rican folklore, illustrated by the studies of the Arawak or Taíno population, explains the significance that it has achieved in the Puerto Rican view of itself. Even though, during the nineteenth century, when Manuel Alonso published his important collection of folklore entitled El Gíbaro (1849), the definition of jíbaro* was restricted to a white, rustic peasant born of the land (criollo), nowadays the term embraces the ethnicity of the criollo [offspring of Spanish parentage, born in the New World], that of the African, as well as that of the Arawak. Today, the Indian identity is an integral part of being a Puerto Rican.

The Spanish Presence Another important approach to the folklore of Puerto Rico has to do with the enormous Spanish influence in everything from governance and economy to the arts. Of the many students of this particularly rich vein of folk manifestations is J. Alden Mason, whose collecting trip to Puerto Rico on behalf of the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History in the early part of the twentieth century has yielded four major collections of Puerto Rican oral materials. Among the findings were the traditional ballads or romances that appeared in 1918 in the Revue Hispanique; the 373 specimens—including 231 décimas, 25 aguinaldos (Christmas carols), 117 nursery rhymes and other songs—that were published that same year by The Journal of American Folklore; the 800 riddles in some 1,288 variants that had also been published there in 1916 (surpassed only by the Lehmann-Nitsche Argentine collection of 1,030 riddles); and the folktales (mostly Juan Bobo tales, known traditionally as Pedro de Urdemalas or Juan Tonto) that appeared in 1921. The Puerto Rican tradition, as documented by J. Alden Mason, is rich in both oral narrative and poetic materials. Following in Alden Mason’s footsteps is the collecting done by Maria Cadilla de Martinez, who in 1938 published a collection of brief studies treating several aspects of Puerto Rican manners. She includes dances, villancicos (songs), food, dress, sports, and so on. In 1940, she followed that book with one on children’s songs and games from all over the Island. Maxine W. Gordon continued collecting some ten years later and, in 1951, published her study, which concentrates on materials from Vieques, Yauco, and Luquillo. RosaNieves (1968) has also conducted studies of the popular theater and dances that took place in early colonial Puerto Rico and that were mentioned in documents written during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are 464


mostly ecclesiastical documents that tend to censure the performances of those folk productions. Based on the folktale tradition and on historical legends and following the very successful example of Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian Traditions), Cayetano Coll y Toste writes a series of literary narratives published in a multivolume set. Some of these are clearly derived from folklore, others are not. Likewise, Antonio Oliver Frau’s Cuentos y Ieyendas del cafetal (Stories and Legends from the Coffee Plantations), a group of literary short stories published in Yauco in 1938 and reissued in 1967, depend to a large extent on the customs, superstitions, and other lore from the Puerto Rican rural areas. Some retelling for children is also done by Ricardo Alegría in his The Three Wishes, which contains twenty-three tales drawn from the Taíno, African, and Spanish traditions. His earlier collection of twelve tales, Cuentos folklóricos de Puerto Rico (Folkloric Stories of Puerto Rico), is more conventional in terms of folklore. Puerto Rican folklore contains a rich variety of décimas or ten-line poems that serve usually as lyrics for improvised songs, although they may be and often are literary in confection as well. The décima tradition has received scholarly attention from a variety of sources. In addition to the collecting efforts, there are other aspects to the studies of the tradition: tracing its history, finding how it has taken root in Puerto Rico by tracking its many manifestations throughout the Island, and examining its performance modes and analyzing its themes. These are topics covered in the typical studies on that poetic form, as is the case of the treatment accorded to it by María Cadilla de Martínez in La poesía popular en Puerto Rico (Popular Poetry in Puerto Rico, published both in San Juan and in Madrid in 1933). This is the case with Yvette Jiménez de Báez’s comprehensive examination of it in La décima popular en Puerto Rico (The Popular Décima in Puerto Rico). Her book is the most fundamental study of the décima. Also, in the Mook piece in the journal Names, dealing with the “Décima Onomástica” (Décimas about names), the emphasis is on the general characteristics of the form. However, this is but a short analysis of one of Alden Mason’s décimas, a long one consisting of forty-four verses, of which every word is a personal name. Other general studies, such as Francisco López Cruz’s La música folklórica de Puerto Rico (The Folkloric Music of Puerto Rico), which appeared first in San Juan in 1956 and was later reprinted by Troutman in 1967, or María Luisa Muñoz Santaella’s La música en Puerto Rico: panorama histórico-cultural (Music in Puerto Rico: Historicocultural Panorama, also by Troutman in 1966) provide a framework for the décima within the larger context of other music. However, the most interesting aspect, in terms of cultural interpretation, emerges in those very few studies that concentrate on the nature of Puerto Rican identity and the relation of the décima to it, for example, Francisco Manrique Cabrera’s “Décima, vehículo de nuestra queja?” (Vehicle of Our Complaint?). In addition to the general studies and those on the décima, there are studies of other forms, as indicated by the prior references to Alden Mason’s collecting 465


activities. Some of these, such as Marcelino J. Canino Salgado’s 1968 La copla y el romance en la tradición oral de Puerto Rico (The Copla and the Romance in the Oral Tradition of Puerto Rico), do a very interesting survey of the history of the coplas (couplets) and romances in Puerto Rico. It contains an excellent literature review of scholarly works about these song forms; an analytic description of their form (musical, metric) and their content (thematic, stylistic); several hundred songs, collected orally for the most part, including some musical transcriptions; a fine bibliography; and a useful index of songs. Francisco López Cruz had also done a study of Christmas songs in his El aguinaldo y el villancico en el folklore puertorriqueño (The Aguinaldo and Villancico Song Forms in Puerto Rican Folklore). In her article for Ethnomusicology, which appeared in 1972, “The Social Organization of a Musical Event: The Fiesta de Cruz in San Juan, Puerto Rico,” Martha Ellen Davis provides a historical analysis of the Fiesta de la Cruz de Mayo (Celebration of the Cross of May), noting its Spanish origins, traditional celebration in the Island, decline, and revival. She also explores in functional terms the need for the festival and examines the music, practices, organization, participants, and so on. Another aspect of Puerto Rican folklore that needs to be considered is that dealing with folk medicine. Although the Puerto Ricans share with the Cubans the curative role of the holy persons in santería (Afro-Caribbean folk religion) and the curative power of spiritism, the latter is much stronger in Puerto Rico than in Cuba. Joan Koss has studied this phenomenon and reports her findings in her 1972 article on religious cults. There she offers an explanation of spiritism by tracing its origins in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Puerto Rico and analyzing the psychological need that it fulfills for those who are believers. In a more recent article (1975), she probes further into the relationship between spirit possession and ritualized possession trance and the potentially therapeutic relationship that emerges between the cult believer and the cult leader. In his study of Puerto Rican folk medicine, published in 1972, Vidal has described some of the popular cures, quoting prayers and incantations and providing the scientific name of curative plants used in the rituals. Likewise, Seda Bonilla (1969), by describing a spiritualist curing session from Tipán, Puerto Rico, in 1958, is able to compare spiritualism and sorcery to psychoanalysis, particularly to the technique of psychodrama. In 1964, he conducted a study of a Puerto Rican community in which he reported his observation of the sung rosaries, the curanderos (healers), the enchanters, the casters of spells, and other such matters. Some linguistic studies about Puerto Rican Spanish have paid attention to folk speech. The most famous study is Tomás Navarro Tomás’s El español de Puerto Rico (The Spanish of Puerto Rico), which describes the particular features associated with Puerto Rican folk speech. The monograph written by Manuel Alvarez Nazario, La herencia lingüística de Canarias en Puerto Rico: estudio histórico-dialectal (1972, The Linguistic Inheritance of the Canary Islands in Puerto Rico: Historicodialectal Study), examines the migration from the Canary Islands to Puerto Rico to trace some influences of canario 466


Spanish on local speech. The study considers folk speech within the context of folk culture to such an extent that it includes some treatment of food, beliefs, traditions, superstitions, customs, songs, dances, and so on. A very complete bibliography and useful indices are appended. Zlotechew follows in this vein when he documents folk etymology claimed in the use of buena hermosa (good beautiful) in Puerto Rico as a substitute for the Spanish expression buena moza (good girl) used in the peninsula. More recently, another concern has emerged among researchers: two other studies seek to document the impact of English on Puerto Rican Spanish. Such is the case with Germán de Granda’s study, Transculturación e interferencia lingüística en el Puerto Rico contemporáneo: 1898–1968 (1968, Transculturation and Linguistic Interference in Contemporary Puerto Rico: 1898–1968), which touches on controversial issues, particularly folk speech, and Paulino Pérez Sala’s Interferencia lingüística del inglés en el español hablado en Puerto Rico (1973, Linguistic Interference from English in the Spanish Spoken in Puerto Rico), which relies on fifty informants and on some broadcast media to determine the degree of interference. Finally, it might prove useful to note the work done in other areas of folklore, specifically on material culture. In 1974, Teodoro Vidal produced a wonderful volume, Los milagros en metal y en cera de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Ex-Votos in Metal and Wax), in which he traces the history of milagros (ex-votos) and examines the contemporary scene. He bases his study on field research and looks at milagro types, designs, manufacturing techniques in both media, and their uses. The photography is of excellent quality, and the other documentation, in the form of notes and bibliography, is rich. Ivonne Lange’s study of lithography surveys the development of religious printmaking in several Hispanic venues (the American Southwest, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) and sets about explaining what influences the media chosen for the production of santos (saints). Enriqueta Narcano Zorrilla’s bibliography for the study of Puerto Rican popular imagery lists books, journal articles, newspaper features, and so on, on the crafting of religious images. Berta Cabanillas de Rodríguez has assembled a very informative text on food. Her El puertorriqueño y su alimentación a través de su historia (siglos XVI al XIX) (1973, The Puerto Rican and His Food throughout History [16th to 19th Centuries] deals with the various traditions of Puerto Rican culture that contribute their choice, preparation, and use of food: the Arawak, the Hispanic, the African, and other influences. The information in her book provides an excellent background to the student of folk traditions dealing with food. It offers a few recipes and a plentiful bibliography, but it is not a folk study. Puerto Rican folklore includes even a biological creature: the coquí, a small frog, which perishes when transplanted and whose distinct song is identifiable from its onomatopoeic name. It has, therefore, become a symbol of Puerto Rican identity in that it resembles the jíbaro whose nature has changed in the national mythology since last century. 467


Cuban American Folklore Cuban American folklore came into the United States through the immigration of Cubans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cuban culture itself, however, is a hybrid culture of European, African, and Amerindian traditions. The folklore of Cubans, therefore, corresponds to that of their ancestors, although not in a pure form. Rather, one tends to find different types of mixtures of cultural forms. For example, in the area of religion, the fusing of the African Yoruba pantheon of gods and Orishas with the Christian Catholic God and saints forms a religion called santería. This phenomenon of joining two religious forms into one is termed “syncretism.” In the United States, these hybrid cultural forms acquire adaptational quirks that are not found in the country of origin. Continuing with the example of santería, institutions such as that of the botánica clearly did not exist in Cuba but are a product of the Cuban exile community of the last thirty-odd years: the botánica is a store that sells herbs, artifacts, and other paraphernalia connected with santería rituals. In Cuba, these items were purchased in a traditional market or from the specific suppliers of each variety of goods. For instance, the herbs might come from the yerbero [herb man], or the sopera [soup tureen, used in the rituals] might come from a store specializing in the sale of dishes and crockery. The botánica is one of those quirks of a syncretic form that has been further adapted in the transplantation of its roots. It seems to be an anthropological verity that, whenever a cultural artifact is uprooted from its home environment and placed in a different context, the artifact comes to mean something else. Such is the case of an American tourist buying a traditional Mexican mourning dress from a particular community, taking it home with her and wearing it at a party or other festive occasion: what was a sign of mourning and loss becomes a curiosity, a conversation piece, a memento of a journey. But when a group of people migrate, carrying with them their cultural baggage, the shape of these cultural artifacts becomes altered with respect to the new environment, without the artifacts losing their original meaning. Hence, the botánica, as a new institution of santería, does not, nevertheless, alter the meanings of the various rituals performed with the materials that it supplies. It would be useful to examine some of the features of Cuban American folklore as it is manifested in Miami, Florida, and other Cuban American communities of the United States. A general sense of Cuban popular lore in the United States involves the following topics: folk religion (santería), folk speech, tales, jokes, sayings, and folk music. Excluded is the whole area of folk arts, because—whereas Cuban popular music, folk speech, folk religion, and jokes form an important corpus of popular artistry and wisdom—no such heritage exists in the plastic arts. This conclusion not only confirms personal observation but follows a survey reported by Americas, a monthly magazine of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Organization of American States (OAS), published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, entitled Folk Arts of the Americas (Washington, D.C.: OAS, 1973). 468


Folk Religion: Santería The religion known as santería is a syncretic religion. It consists of the transplanted religion of the Yoruba and Congo peoples, who, enslaved and sold to Europeans for work in the New World, had to adapt the characteristic features of their religion to that of their new masters. So their creator god, called variously Olodumare, Olofín, or Obrún, is identified with the Catholic Jesus Christ or God the Father. He is removed from the everyday happenings of the world and depends on his Orishas (entities who are identified with Catholic saints) to carry on his good works. The Orishas have various functions, not unlike the Catholic saints with whom they are identified. And like the Catholic priests, santería has babalaos, who officiate at ceremonies. This syncretism did not come about rapidly; instead, it may be viewed as a historical process. In Cuba during the Spanish colonial days (1492–1898), the Catholic Church established a method to teach African slaves the mysteries of Christianity. They divided the slaves according to their provenance (Congos, Yorubas, Dahomey, etc.), assigning to each group a bishop who would visit on Sundays to impart the lessons of the catechism. And to each group of slaves, a virgin or a saint was assigned to watch over them. These cabildos or cofradías were ethnic associations created for a religious purpose that fostered an identification of their Orishas with Catholic saints: hence the syncretism of the African and European religions in colonial Cuba. This popular religiosity persisted during the period of the republic and even more so during the period of the revolution, partially because it was frowned on in the former and forbidden in the latter. Although the first Cuban refugees brought some of these practices with them in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as during the 1960s and 1970s, it was not until the Mariel Boatlift in 1980 that santería became a growth industry among Cubans in the United States. Of course, today that religion is not confined to Afro-Cubans but is practiced by Cubans of all races. The following are some of the most popular Orishas and their corresponding saints: ORISHAS

SAINTS

Changó Obatalá Yemayá Ogún Ochún Babalú Ayé Elegguá

Santa Bárbara Virgen de las Mercedes Virgen de Regla San Pedro Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre San Lázaro Santo Niño de Atocha

Changó is the Orisha of fire and storms. Ochún is one of his concubines, the patroness of rivers and the goddess of love. Yemayá is the daughter of Obatalá and she controls the waters. Ogún is the god of war and iron. Babalú Ayé, the patron-saint of the ill and infirm, is represented by an old leper on crutches, 469


accompanied by a pair of dogs. Elegguá is the guardian of the roads and the messenger between the gods and human beings; thus, he serves as propitiator for divining the future, but he also possesses a foul temper and can turn a party into a bloody carnage. Obatalá, a male divinity signifying purity, is represented by a white-clad female saint—not an unusual practice—who married Oduduâ and is, therefore, the father of the first gods of the Yoruba pantheon. These are but a few of the many Orishas in santería, who appear involved in the life of human beings and who participate in the rites of that religion. The santería rites practiced by Cuban Americans are few nowadays. They consist of the rite of initiation, a long process that lasts over a year, with a ceremony that takes some ten days to perform; the rite of cleansing, or despojo, which serves to take away the evil spirits in the person; the rite of divination, which helps believers see into the future and act accordingly. Through the use of batá drums, the gods are called at many of these ceremonies. Often, they come and ride a caballo, or are on horseback (son or daughter of that Orisha), in a frenzied dance in which the person first loses balance and then begins to dance possessed by the Orisha. The practice of santería by Cuban Americans serves a useful purpose for many of its practitioners in addition to any benefits derived directly from religious practice. It makes them feel as though they know their identity in times of difficulty and places them in solidarity with practitioners back in Cuba. It is a vehicle for the survival of popular culture, providing a collective popular identity and serving as an agent of socialization. Curiously, because of syncretic tendencies, the practice of popular religions does not, in the mind of the practitioners, exclude institutional religions, such as the Roman Catholic faith, from also forming a part of their own cultural identity.

The Oral Tradition The Cuban oral tradition covers many aspects of folk speech and oral literature. Students of Cuban Spanish have categorized the various topics by defining their fields of research: campesino or peasant speech (Pichardo), easily detected in the décima song; the African influence on Cuban speech (Ortiz, Cabrera, Castellanos); urban popular speech (Suárez, Sánchez-Boudy), such as chuchero expressions (not unlike the lunfardo dialect of Buenos Aires); and finally, in the United States, the bilingualism (Guitart, Castellanos) that emerges from the language contact between Cuban Spanish and English of the American South via new blends of Cuban American speech, exhibited primarily by young people. The latter studies, of course, presuppose a knowledge of Cuban Spanish, including the peasant, African, and street dialects that, together with New World standard Spanish, make up Cuban Spanish. But identifying these linguistic strands does not mean that they are neatly separated; it is more typical to find them woven together. The character of the chuchero, popular since the forties, for instance, is an urban dweller, a street person, who practices the Afro-Cuban religion of santería, who smokes marijuana, 470


who reflects in his dress the American zoot-suiters of the same period—with tube pants, pointed-toe shoes, huge hat, enormous shoulder pads, coat to the knees, a long key chain that he twirls while standing in the corner, and a haircut called arte y renovación (art and renovation), which receives constant loving attention from his comb. His speech is a blend of all of the Cuban dialects. Calling his hat a porta-aviones (aircraft carrier) demonstrates his propensity for hyperbole, a very Cuban trait, and suggests the color of his street speech. But calling his mother vieja (old lady) sometimes or ocamba (mother) other times connects his speech to rural peasant speech and to Afro-Cuban dialects, respectively. This speech forms part of Cuban American speech in the United States, although it is toned down somewhat. Consideration of one speech situation, rendered in different forms, is more useful than a long glossary. The situation that Sánchez-Boudy uses for illustration is very appropriate: Juan sees his friend, Pedro, and announces to him that he is about to ask his girlfriend Lola’s father for her hand in marriage and that he will do it in such a way (elite speech pattern, force of personality) as to prevent a negative response from the father. This particular stratagem is more apparent as Juan’s speech becomes less standard. In standard Cuban Spanish, Juan might say: “Mi querido amigo Pedro. Qué alegría encontrarte! Hoy es un día muy feliz para mí porque voy a pedir a Lola. Me casaré con ella enseguida. Es el amor de mi vida.” (My dear friend Pedro. Great to see you. Today is a very happy day for me because I’m going to ask for Lola’s hand. I’ll marry her soon. She is the love of my life.) In a more colloquial expression, he might say: “Mi querido amigo Pedro; Chico, qué chévere encontrarte! Hoy estoy de farolero porque voy a pedir a Lola. Con la velocidad del rayo me voy a casar con ella.” In still more popular renderings, Juan might say one of the following: (a) “Mi hermano Pedro, estoy, mi hermano, de comparsero de los buenos. Hoy voy a pedir a Lola para caer de flai en el himeneo enseguida” or (b) “Mi hermano Pedro, estoy que ya tú sabe, negro, de farolito chino. Figúrate que hoy voy a tallar con el padre de Lola para que con el consentimiento del ocambo caer con ella en San José del Lago.” Meanwhile, a chuchero might offer these two other versions: (a) “Mi hermano, estóy, ya tú te puedes figurar: de Marte y Belona con los hermanos Palau. Hoy le parlo barín al puro de Lola, la jevita mía, pa que con la venia del socio la tire de flai en Varadero y le caiga arriba nagüe con la bendición de la minfa de ella” or (b) “Oye, caballón, estoy de cohete chino, negro. Le voy a caer de Tarzan al pureto de Lola que es la jeva que me aboca y chamullarle como lo haría el Pureto del Chamullo, mi hermano, para que me deje aterrizar en el promontorio de Lola, que es la lea que me Ilega a donde el cepillo no toca mulato. Estoy metido hasta donde dice collín.” It is impossible to understand these versions of the same speech function fully without knowledge of the source lexicon of each linguistic cluster. For example, it would be very difficult to realize that the words for “happiness” (“estar de farolero,” “estoy de comparsero,” and “farolito chino”) are related to the carnival—in which each light carrier (farolero) carries a light (farolito chino) to lead the dancing troupe (comparsa), a very happy time in Cuban 471


culture. Other expressions of happiness (“estar de Marte y Belona,” “con los Hermanos Palau”) refer to a dance hall of dubious reputation in Havana and to the orchestra playing there; “cohete chino” uses the word “Chinese” as a redundancy that serves as an augmentative of the word for “rocket,” thus marking a festive occasion. Other expressions (“puro,” “pureto”) substitute the word padre or “father.” Speaking to the father to ask for Lola’s hand may be simply “pedir a Lola,” or “tallar (convince) con el padre de Lola,” “parlarle barin” (well), or even “caerle de Tarzan (victorious or imposing) al pureto de Lola.” Yet, Juan plans to speak well (barín), just like the “Pureto (father) del Chamullo” (speech, in this case Spanish) would, meaning just like Miguel de Cervantes would. To marry (casarse) appears as “caer de flai” (unexpected event), “en el himeneo” (marriage), or “caer con la mujer en San Jose del Lago” (a typical haunt of honeymooners), or even the very carnal reference of “aterrizar en el promontorio” (landing on her buttocks). The love of Juan’s life, Lola, is rendered similarly “el amor de mi vida,” or “la jevita mía” (little woman), “la jeva que me aboca” (woman whom I like), or even “la lea que me Ilega a donde el cepillo no toca mulato” (the woman who gets under my skin, literally where no brush can touch the mulatto skin). The “minfa” refers to her family and “velocidad del rayo” to the speed of lightning. It is easy to see how the various sources of vocabulary allow linguistic paraphrases to substitute for the standard, making the language unique to the group. There are other linguistic peculiarities to Cuban American speech that have to do with specific registers. For instance, the language used in the game of dominoes is very interesting and varies somewhat from that used in Puerto Rico (e.g., Cubans use up to double nine but Puerto Ricans only to double six). From the name of the pieces, as detailed in the following list (collected in March and April 1987 at the Parque del Domino “Antonio Maceo,” in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood at 15th Avenue and Calle Ocho): one: caballo, el lunar de Lola, la puyita two: mariposa, Doroteo, el Duque, dos veces guapa three: marinero, Teresita, Tres Tristes Tigres, triciclo, el Trío Servando Díaz four: gato, cuarteto, el catre, cuatro milpas, los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis five: Monja, Quintín Bandera, quinqué, sin catre six: jicotea, Sixto Escobar, se hizo hombre entre las mujeres, se iba sin decir adiós seven: caracol, se te cayó el tabaco, si te pica no te rasques, septiembre, mes de las aguas eight: muerto, ochoa, bizcocho, Ochiin, Octavio, ochotorena nine: elefante, Nuevitas, puerto de mar, de nuevo a tus pies, sin novedad en el frente blank: Blanquita Amaro, Blanquisal de Jaruco, el fantasma, coco seco, Pirey y fuerza blanca

There are also names for some of the pieces in dominoes that are just as colorful as the numbers themselves. For example, the double blank is known as 472


“gallinita blanca” (white little chicken), 1–0 as “el gallito tuerto” (one-eyed rooster), 4–4 as “cuácara con cuácara,” double six as “caja de muerto” (deadman’s coffin), and double nine as “Nabucodonosor, Rey de Babilonia” (Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon) or “el fantasma de la opera” (Phantom of the Opera). The richness of speech, of course, comes with the many sayings that come to the fore when the players are actively engaged in implementing their game strategy, but these are too numerous to mention. In addition to the many examples of speech groups or situations, it may also be useful to relate some of the popular sayings (refranes) that help establish folk wisdom for the community. Some of these are more familiar to rural dwellers and tend to give advice: “No cruces al puente antes de Ilegar al río” (don’t cross the river before you get to the bridge), “La yagua que está para uno, no hay vaca que se la coma, ni isleño que la recoja” (the plant that was meant for you to eat will not be eaten by any cow, nor will it be harvested by any island dweller). Others are more sententious in their character: “Chivo que rompe tambor, con su pellejo la paga” (the goat that tears the drum will pay with his hide), or “Camarón que se duerme, se lo lleva la corriente” (the shrimp that goes to sleep will be carried off by the current). The refranero tradition is very old in the Hispanic world. It created the possibility in the Renaissance for the laity to challenge the Church, which, to that point, possessed all authority because it controlled all of the books. The doctrine of vox populi, vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) allowed the refranes to be collected and held up as popular wisdom with divine sanction. From Erasmus and his Adagia to Mal Lara and his refranero, the study of paremiology has been indicative of people power and has run counter to the established orders. In Cuban and Cuban American society, it reflects the class solidarity that is a feature of Cuban Spanish (this does not imply that it reflects any reality in the society, just in speech).

Popular Music Cuban popular music is a mixture of Spanish and European melodic lines and harmonic conventions, brought together with powerful African rhythms and a touch of the haunting evocations of an indigenous world that vanished. The popular music coming to Cuba from Europe was embedded in the habanera, which served as the basis for a number of other types of composition, including the danzón and even the tango, a form that became famous in Argentina. Nevertheless, the romance form of the popular ballad was not as popular in Cuba as it was in Mexico. Rather, as in Puerto Rico, the preferred form was a song derived from Vicente Espinel (thus also known as espinela) that became popular among rural folk and known as the décima (for ten-line composition). The décima is anonymous, a product of the Cuban campesino, guajiro, or montuno (synonymous). It is usually a simple song that addresses the themes of love of nature, mother or a beloved one, rural work, and the plaints of the bard’s existence. These themes, however, are all rendered within a general 473


frame of good-natured fun, with the singer being able to laugh at his or her own problems. The songs are generally sung for an audience of family and friends, although they have sometimes become the instrument of poetic and musical dueling between two individual singers. In this case, the talent of each singer in terms of improvisation of décimas is what makes one victorious over another. The use of formulaic treatments for the composition of verses and the ease of the assonant rhyme make the décima a versatile form for the poeticomusical jousts of the two adversaries. The African influence on Cuban music is definitely a much more complex phenomenon that includes a number of features that do not apply to the ballad tradition. The issue of musical instruments, of their preservation in the new situations in which the African enslaved population had to survive, and the acceptance of these strange new sounds by the general population, all have a part in the story. Generally, music historians and musicologists agree that the survival of the instruments had to do with their use, aboard the slave ships that the Spaniards commanded, as a means of bringing the human cargo to the top deck for exercise. This practice allowed the slaves to bring their drums aboard and to play them for their dances. In the island of Cuba, the creation of cabildos (slave societies) allowed these African groups to devise certain changes to the practice of Catholicism under the protection of designated priests and bishops. Finally, the acceptance of the African rhythms by the general population came as a result of a transformation in the population of the Island: in the nineteenth century, the African population came to represent nearly eighty percent of the total population. There was much contact between the Spanish stock populace and the new Africans. Cuban music, like a great deal of Cuban culture, is a product of that miscegenation. As the Cuban population settled in the United States, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in different migrations, the Cuban culture was clearly as portable as any other, including taste in music. The U.S. population had already been influenced by the commercial versions of these new rhythms and connected with Afro American musical creations such as jazz. Therefore, Cuban Americans were able to maintain their affinity for that strand of their own music and even see its commercial impact. For example, Desi Arnaz, in the popular television situation comedy I Love Lucy, was always playing bongo drums and singing to Babalu Ayé, an Afro-Cuban deity. A more contemporary version of the same phenomenon is the popularity of the Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga,” a worldwide hit song. Within the more quiet world of the folk tradition, Afro-Cuban music is use in religious ceremony and in secular festivity. Music is, without a doubt, a definite factor in the identity of Cuban Americans. Further Reading Ada, Alma Flor, and Maria del Pilar Olave, “Desarrollo lingüístico y vivencia cultural a través de la literatura infantil” NABE Vol. 1, No. 1 (1976: 65–72). Alegría, Ricardo, ed., Cuentos folklóricos de Puerto Rico (Buenos Aires: Ateneo, 1967). Alzoía, Concepción Teresa, Folklore del niño cubano, I (Formas cantadas) (Santa Clara, Cuba: Universidad Central de las Villas, 1961).

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Arora, Shirley, “Proverbs in Mexican American Tradition” Aztlán Vol. 13, No. 1–2 (1982: 43–69). Arora, Shirley, Proverbial Comparisons and Related Expressions in Spanish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Bluestein, Gene, “Herder’s Folksong Ideology” Southern Folklore Quarterly Vol. 26 (1962: 137–44). Cadilla de Martínez, María, Juegos y canciones infantiles de Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR: Baldrich, 1940). Cadilla de Martínez, María, “Más juegos tradicionales de Puerto Rico” Anuario de la Sociedad Folklórica de Mexico Vol. 4, No. 3 (1940). Cadilla de Martínez, María, La poesía popular en Puerto Rico (U. de Madrid, San Juan: Venezuela, 1933). Campa, Arthur L., Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946). Campa, Arthur L., Spanish Religious Folktheatre in the Spanish Southwest University of New Mexico Bulletin, Language Series Vol. 5, No. 1–2 (Albuquerque, 1934). Canino Salgado, Marecelino, El cantar folklórico de Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR: U. de Puerto Rico, Universitaria, 1974). Canino Salgado, Marcelino J., La copla y el romance popular en la tradición oral de Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR: Cultura Puertorriquelia, 1968). Cobos, Ruben, “New Mexican Spanish Proverbs” New Mexico Folklore Record Vol. 12 (1969–1970: 7–11). Cole, M. R., Los Pastores, Vol. 9 (New York: Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, 1907). Engelkirk, John E., “The Source and Dating of New Mexican Spanish Folk Plays” Western Folklore Vol. 16 (1957: 232–255). Engelkirk, John E., “Notes on the Repertoire of the New Mexican Spanish Folktheatre” Southern Folklore Quarterly Vol. 4 (1940: 227–237). Espinosa, Aurelio M., Romancero de Nuevo México (Madrid: CSIC, 1953). Espinosa, Aurelio M., “New-Mexican Spanish Folklore” Journal of American Folklore Vol. 28 (1916: 319–352). Espinosa, Aurelio M., “New Mexican Spanish Folk-Lore: 2. Superstitions and Beliefs” Journal of American Folklore Vol. 23 (1910: 405–418). Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1950). Graham, Joe, “The Caso: An Emic Genre of Folk Narrative”; “The Role of the Curandero in the Mexicano Folk Medicine System in West Texas” in American Folk Medicine, ed. Wayland Hand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976: 175–191). Herrera-Sobek, María, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Herrera-Sobek, María, “Verbal Play and Mexican Immigrant Jokes” Southwest Folklore Vol. 4 (1980: 14–22). Herrera-Sobek, María, The Bracero Experience: Elitelore Versus Folklore (Los Angeles: UCLA, Latin American Center Publications, 1979).

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Jiménez de Báez, Ivette, La décima popular de Puerto Rico (Xalapa, Veracruz: Universidad Veracruzana (Cuadernos de la Facultad de Filosofía, Letras y Ciencias, 21), 1964). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Folklore in Chicano Theater and Chicano Theater as Folklore” Journal of the Folklore Institute Vol. 15 (1978: 57–80). Kearney, Michael, “La Llorona as a Social Symbol” Western Folklore Vol. 28 (1969: 199–206). Kirtley, Bacil F., “La Llorona and Related Themes” Western Folklore Vol. 19 (1960: 155–68). Leddy, Betty, “La Llorona in Southern Arizona” Western Folklore Vol. 7 (1948: 272–77). Limón, José, “The Folk Performance of ‘Chicano’ and the Cultural Limits of Political Ideology” in “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore (Bauman: 197–225). (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). “La Llorona.” Leyendas y sucedidos del Mexico colonial (Mexico: Libro Español, 1963: 7–12). Lopez Cruz, Francisco, El aguinaldo y el villancico en el folklore puertorriqueño (San Juan, PR: Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1956). Lucero-White Lea, Aurora, Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest (San Antonio: Naylor, 1953). Marie, Sister Joseph, The Role of the Church and the Folk in the Development of the Early Drama in New Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948). McDowell, John H., “The Corrido of Greater Mexico as Discourse, Music, and Event” in “And Other Neighborly Names”: Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, eds. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (Austin: University of Texas, 1981: 44–75). McDowell, John Holmes, Children’s Riddling (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). McDowell, John H., “The Mexican Corrido: Formula and Theme in a Ballad Tradition” Journal of American Folklore Vol. 85 (1972: 205–220). Mendoza, Vicente T., Lírica infantil (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1951). Mendoza, Vicente, El romance español y el corrido mexicano: Estudio comparativo (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 1939). Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Los romances de America y otros estudios (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1945). Meyer, Jean A., La cristiada, 3 vols. (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973–4). Miller, Elaine K., Mexican Folk Narratives from the Los Angeles Area (Austin: American Folklore Society, 1973). Palacio, Vicente Riva, and Juan de Dios Pesa, “La Llorona” in Tradiciones y leyendas mexicanas (Mexico: Manuel Porrúa, 1977: 79–95). Paredes, Américo, “Folklore, Lo Mexicano and Proverbs” Aztlán Vol. 13, No. 1–2 (1982: 1–11). Paredes, Américo, A Texas Mexican Cancionero (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 1976).

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Paredes, Américo, “Mexican Legendry and the Rise of the Mestizo” in American Folk Legend: A Symposium, ed. Wayland D. Hand (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971: 97–107). Paredes, Américo, “Folk Medicine and the International Jest” in Spanish-Speaking People in the United States. Proceedings of the 1968 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle: American Ethnological Society, 1968: 104–119). Paredes, Américo, “El folklore de los grupos de origen mexicano” in Folklore Americano Vol. 14, No. 16 (1966: 146–163). Paredes, Américo, “The Ancestry of Mexico’s Corridos: A Matter of Definitions” Journal of American Folklore Vol. 76 (1963: 231–35). Paredes, Américo, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Folk Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). Paredes, Américo, “The Mexican Corrido: Its Rise and Fall” in Madstones and Twisters (Austin: Texas Folklore Society Publications Vol. 28, 1957: 91–105). Pearce, T. M., “The New Mexican Shepherds’ Play” Western Folklore Vol. 15 (1956: 77–88). Rael, Juan B., The Sources and Diffusion of the Mexican Shepherds’ Plays (Guadalajara, Mexico: La Joyita, 1965). Robe, Stanley L., Mexican Tales and Legends from Veracruz) Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971). Rogers, Jane, “The Function of the La Llorona Motif in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima” Latin American Literary Review Vol. 5 (1977: 64–69). Romero Salinas, Joel, La pastorela mexicana: origen y evolución (Mexico: Cultura Fondo Nacional para el Fomento de las Artesanías, 1984). Rybak, Shulamith, “Puerto Rican Children’s Songs in New York” Midwest Folklore Vol. 8 (Spring 1958: 5–20). Simmons, Merle E., The Mexican Corrido as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870–1950) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957). Tully, Marjorie F., and Rael, Juan B., An Annotated Bibliography of Spanish Folklore in New Mexico and Southern Colorado (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950).

John H. McDowell, María Herrera-Sobek, and Rodolfo J. Cortina

Folklore-Based Literature. Folklore is the knowledge of the people, the grass roots, those people and communities that are situated the farthest away from the official institutions of a society. For the most part, folk literature is the oral expression of the common folk; it maintains its own sense of history, art, and audience. Although folk literature arises in preliterate societies, it can persist and grow within literate societies among communities that have been subjected to colonization, marginalization, and exploitation. Much literature created by Latinos is either based on oral literature—that is, narratives, legends, songs, folk wisdom (proverbs, sayings, aphorisms, etc.)—or assumes the styles, perspectives, and speech of the common folk to represent the communities from

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Alan Lomax snapshot of Jovita Gonzales, author of folk-based stories, with students at St. Mary’s Academy, San Antonio, 1934. (Library of Congress)

which the authors emerged or with which they identify. The reasons are twofold: the majority of Latinos come from or live in working-class communities and, in native Hispanic culture, especially in the Southwest, schools, books, and the institutions of literacy were scarce, especially during the frontier period when these regions were geographically distant from the centers of Spanish colonial administration. Also, the Spanish crown outlawed the printing press in these northern frontier territories; thus, much of cultural expression in what became the U.S. Southwest was created and passed on orally—in the form of personal experience narratives, tales, proverbs and sayings, songs and other poetic genres, dramatic pageants, such as las posadas (Christmas pageant), and

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plays, such as the pastorela (shepherd’s play). This corpus of expressive knowledge was cumulative over centuries, and it became the basis of a Spanishlanguage literary culture—not only when Mexico gained its independence in 1821 and subsequently administered these territories, but also when these territories came under U.S. rule and Hispanic and indigenous communities were colonized, marginalized, and exploited as human resources of these lands. From the late nineteenth century onward, as labor recruitment from Mexico and the Caribbean became a federally sanctioned and industrially preferred practice, U.S. industrial policy and practice were central to the formation within U.S. borders of large immigrant communities that were drawn from the poorest and least educated workers in the nearby Latin countries. Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, Panamanian, and Puerto Rican economic refugees also brought a wealth of oral lore to add to the rich repositories of folk literature already existing in U.S. Hispanic communities. These repositories, once again, became the raw material that many of today’s writers draw from, in both English and Spanish. Although most of these immigrant workers did not have access to education and integration, some specialized workers, such as tobacco rollers, were able to become literate and informally educated through their own efforts of hiring readers to distract them from the boredom of their repetitive jobs. Nevertheless, within their own unions, mutual aid societies, and communities, working-class Hispanics were able to develop consistent oral and written expression that served their own needs for cultural sustenance and reflection, developing a true working-class literature, with its own sense of aesthetics and mission. A rich corpus of oral literature exists in the border ballads, or corridos,* of the Southwest, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and composed and sung to this day; in the plenas, bombas, and décimas* (folk song genres of Puerto Rico) of Puerto Rican migrants and their children in the large cities of the East and the Midwest; and in the Hispanic women’s songs and proverbs related to family and domestic life. This oral literature has not only survived but has influenced the development of written literature throughout the twentieth century. Of particular importance is the folk expression in the written literature of immigrants, which has often reproduced diction, anecdotes, and genres from oral expression. Such is the case not only of the poems—décimas and corridos published in immigrant newspapers—but also of entire novels. A prime example is Daniel Venegas’s* Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (1928, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000), which incorporates entire songs, proverbs, and worker experiences and also employs a narrative voice that is representative of working-class immigrants. Even crónicas*—local-color satirical newspaper columns, written by members of the elite such as Julio G. Arce* and Benjamín Padilla,* and often intended to criticize the “uncivilized” and uneducated behavior of immigrant workers—borrowed extensively from the personal experience narratives, language, and perspectives of the immigrant working classes. There were also

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working-class cronistas, such as Jesús Colón* and Alberto O’Farrill,* who consciously produced a literature based in immigrant working-class culture that was representative of working-class interests. Beginning in the mid-1960s with the emergence of university-educated Hispanic writers originally from the working-class communities, Chicano and Puerto Rican literature consciously assumed a working-class stance—not only to reflect the culture from which it had sprung but also as a tool to help students and communities analyze their economic, social, and political circumstances. Thus, foundational Chicano writers of Spanish narrative, such as Tomás Rivera* and Rolando Hinojosa,* became masters of orality* in their works, capturing the nuances of oral speech as well as the ideology and worldview behind the folk speech patterns. Of course, the literary genres that are performed orally and are closest to the community through performance, such as drama and poetry reading, depend the most on folk tradition and performance styles, as in the case of such poets as Tato Laviera* and Evangelina Vigil,* and in the case of Chicano theater in general. These tendencies in written literature continue to this date, even though there are always new wellsprings of oral literature emerging from the grass roots and from immigrant communities. (See also Orality, Working-class Literature.) Further Reading McDowell, John H., María Herrera-Sobek, and Rodolfo J. Cortina, “Hispanic Oral Tradition: Form and Content” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 218–247). Paredes, Américo, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Fontes, Monserrat (1940–). Historical novelist Montserrat Fontes was born September 5, 1940, in Laredo, Texas, into a family that lived in what became the borderlands between the United States and Mexico since before the border was established. Cognizant of the family’s history of living on the frontier and experiencing the wars with the Yaquis and with U.S. expansionism, Fontes chose to set her novels in the past, as a means of exploring the social and political determinants of Mexican American history and of her own family. Fontes’s antecedents include Mexican presidential candidates and military leaders who were exiled during the Revolution. This family legacy was drummed into Fontes by her parents, who were both teachers and writers. Despite her parents’ love of education, Fontes was expelled from various Catholic schools in the United States; she finally graduated in 1959 from the American High School in Mexico City. Her grade point barely allowed her to graduate; apparently she suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. Wanting to become a writer, Fontes went on to college and graduated with a B.A. in English from California State College, Los Angeles, in 1966; she earned a master’s degree the next year, 480

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specializing in Russian literature and then became an instructor of English, at the University of California, Los Angeles, among various other area colleges, and continued to read world literature broadly. Throughout the 1980s, Fontes taught, studied creative writing, and crafted her first novel, First Confession, which was published in 1991. The novel traces and contrasts the development from 1947 to 1968 of two families in a Mexican town on the Rio Grande border; one family suffers from endemic workingclass poverty; the other family belongs to the rising professional class that benefits from Mexico’s advancement into American-style industrialization. In Dreams of the Centaur (1996), Fontes charts the genocide inflicted upon the Yaqui Indians in Mexico from 1880 to 1900; the novel represents in its characters the varying forces intervening in northern Mexico at the time—such as American capitalism, Mexican upper-class prerogatives dating back to the Spanish conquistadors, and the oppression of the Yaquis themselves, victims of dictator Profirio Díaz’s push to modernize the nation. Fontes has also written teleplays and collaborated with Norine Dresser in the writing of a novel, High Contrast (1988), under the pseudonym of Jessie Lattimore. Further Reading Cantú, Roberto, “Montserrat Fontes” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 78–83). Quintana, Alvina E., Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Fornés, María Irene (1930–). María Irene Fornés is the dean of Hispanic playwrights in New York City, having enjoyed more productions of her works and more recognition, in the form of six Obie awards, than any other Hispanic. Born May 14, 1930, in Havana, Cuba, she immigrated to the United States in 1945 and became a naturalized citizen in 1951. This sets her off considerably from most of the other Cuban playwrights who immigrated to the United States as refugees from the Cuban Revolution. Since 1960, Fornés has been a playwright, director, and teacher with the Theater for New York City (1973–1978) and various other workshops, universities, and schools. Fornés has had more than thirty plays produced, including adaptations of plays by Federico García Lorca, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Anton Chekhov. Her plays have been produced on Hispanic stages, in mainstream off-off-broadway and off-broadway, as well as out of town in such cities as Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Houston, Texas; London, England; and Zurich, Switzerland. Fornés’s works, although at times touching on political and ethnic themes, generally deal with human relations and the emotional lives of her characters. Her plots tend to be unconventional—and, at times, her characters are fragmented—in structures that vary from musical comedy to the theater of ideas to the realistic. Many of her plays have been published in collections of 481

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her work: Promenade and Other Plays (1971), María Irene Fornés: Plays (1986), Lovers and Keepers (1987), and Fefu and Her Friends (1990). Further Reading Austin, Gayle, “The Madwoman in the Spotlight: Plays of Maria Irene Fornés” in Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989: 76–85). Delagdo, María, and Caridad Svich, eds., Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of María Irene Fornés (Lyme, NH: Smith & Kraus, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Foronda, Valentín de (1751–1821). Born in Alava, in the Basque region of Spain, February 14, 1751, Valentín de Foronda studied in France, became an economist, and later served as an official in the Spanish consulates in Belgium, Holland, France, and Italy. He became a schoolteacher, known for disseminating the ideas of the French encyclopedists in Spain. It is believed that he was persecuted by the Holy Inquisition between 1795 and 1798 for owning and reading prohibited books; he must have made his way to Philadelphia by 1801, the date of publication of his first book in the City of Brotherly Love. Somehow, in 1801, he was named consul to the United States in Philadelphia, which brought him directly into contact with the some of the Founding Fathers and their liberal ideas. During his eight-year stint, he became a member of the Philosophic Society as well as the Chemical Society of Philadelphia. On his return to the Iberian Peninsula in 1811, his liberal and constitutionalist activities intensified until he was arrested in 1814 and then exiled to Pamplona, where he died December 23, 1821. As a follower of the Enlightenment and of American liberalism, Foronda’s knowledge was broad, encompassing such fields as history, classical learning, politics, geography, science, and technology. The majority of his written works reveal this broad knowledge, as well as his desire to introduce a constitutional monarchy to his homeland and to build democratic institutions based on American models. The majority of his works—published thanks to the freedom of the press that he encountered in Philadelphia—took the form of long, rhetorical letters, dialogues, and polemical essays, such as his Carta sobre los efectos productores de la educación. Escrita a un príncipe imaginario (1800, Letter on the Effects Produced by Education), Carta sobre lo que debe hacer un príncipe que tenga colonias a gran distancia (1803, Letter on What a Prince Who Has Colonies at a Great Distance Should Do), Cartas presentadas a las Sociedad Filosófica de Philadelphia (1807, Letters Presented to the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia), Cartas escitas por Valentín de Foronda encargado de negocios y cónsul general de SMC. Fernando VII cerca de los Estados Unidos de la América septentrional relativas a lo acontecido en España (1808, Letters about What Occurred in Spain, Written by Valentín de Foronda, Business Chargé and General Consul of His Majesty Ferdinand VII in the United States), and Apuntes ligeros sobre la nueva constitución proyectada por la Magestad de la Junta Suprema Española y reformas que intenta hacer en la 482

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leyes (1809, Brief Notes on the New Constitution and Legal Reforms Presented by the Spanish Supreme Council). Further Reading Benavides, Manuel, and C. Rollán, Valentín Foronda, los sueños de la razón (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1984). Spell, Jefferson Rea, “An Illustrious Spaniard in Philadelphia, Valentín de Foronda” Hispanic Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr. 1936: 136–140).

Edna Ochoa Franco, Jesús (1898–1972). Jesús Franco was born in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1898. After immigrating to El Paso during the Mexican Revolution, he worked to improve his countrymen’s living conditions and strengthen their loyalties to the Mexican state. Franco worked as a journalist

Jesús Franco’s book El alma de la raza.

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in the 1920s for El Paso’s La Patria (The Homeland), Phoenix’s El Sol (The Sun), and, in the 1930s, he also served as the editor of El Sol. In his journalistic work, he came to the defense of the Mexican community in the Southwest and was a particular foe of capital punishment. At all times, he was deeply involved in community organizations. During the 1921 recession, he took various investigative trips throughout the Southwest on behalf of the Mexican government to assess the living conditions of his compatriots. Franco used journalistic forums, as well as his position in several Phoenix organizations— such as La Comisión Honorífica Mexicana (Mexican Honorary Commission), La Brígada Cruz Azul (Blue Cross Brigades), and Woodsmen of the World—to serve as a spokesperson for the community. When he started to publish the newspaper El Sol in the 1930s, Franco continued his efforts to ensure that the civil rights of his people were respected. In the 1940s, he became the Mexican Consul in Phoenix, Arizona. His book, El Alma de la raza; narraciones históricas de episodios y vida de los mexicanos residents en los Estados Unidos de Norte América. La repatriación, la vida y origen de las comisiones honoríficas y de la Cruz Azul (The Soul of Our People; Historical Narrations of Episodes and the Life of Mexican Residents in the United States. Repatriation, Life, and Origin of the Honorifican Commissions of the Blue Cross), published in 1929, left behind a treasure of information regarding the efforts made by community activists to protect the civil rights of immigrants and to resolve some of their problems. Franco continued publishing El Sol until 1962. Further Reading Gamio, Manuel, The Mexican Immigrant. His Life Story (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1931). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

F. Arturo Rosales Fusco, Coco (1960–). A Cuban American essayist and multimedia artist, born in 1960, and raised in New York City, Coco Fusco has created works produced in theaters and open spaces nationally and internationally—not only on stages but at such art biennials as those of Medellín, Colombia; London, England; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. Fusco earned a B.A. in literature and society/semiotics from Brown University (1982) and an M.A. in Modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985); in addition she worked toward a Ph.D. in visual culture at Middlesex University in England. She has published essays and commentary in The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and elsewhere, and three collections of her writing were published as English Is Broken Here (1995), which was named Critics’ Choice by the American Educational Studies Association; The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001); and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), an at times tongue-in-cheek, but otherwise dead-serious assemblage of texts, performance and illustrations supposedly documenting her 484

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undercover spying at a military training camp and discoveries of anti-feminist documents and plans of the FBI, among other authorities, along with her criticism of torture and inhumanity at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba. She is the editor-compiler of Corpus Dilecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She has also produced videos for broadcast television, including The Couple in the Cage, Pochonovela, and Havana Mostmodern: The New Cuban Art. In 1993, Fusco collaborated with Guillermo Gómez-Peña* on a documentary about caged Amerindians, The Couple in the Cage, which has been shown in more than two hundred venues around the world. A winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts International, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, she is also the winner of the Herb Alpert Award for the Arts (2003). Fusco is a tenured associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She serves on the Editorial Board of the Performance Research Journal. Further Reading Shoat, Ella, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Boston: MIT Press, 2001).

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G Galarza, Ernesto (1905–1984). Born on August 7, 1905 (some references say August 15) in an Indian village in Jalcocotán, Mexico, Galarza immigrated to Sacramento, California, in 1911 as a child with his mother and two uncles during the Mexican Revolution, and soon afterward lost his mother to the influenza epidemic of 1917. Despite living in poverty and having to work even during his elementary and secondary education, Galarza graduated from Occidental College in 1927 and later obtained an M.A. from Stanford University in 1929 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1944. Galarza became a renowned expert on labor conditions and practices prevalent in the United States and Latin America, publishing pioneering reports for government agencies, as well as books for specialists and the general public in an effort to improve the lives of farm workers in particular. Among numerous reports and nonfiction books—as well as a book of poetry, Thirty Poems (1935)—Galarza wrote the first exposé of abuse of the Bracero Program and the inhuman conditions maintained by growers for Mexican farm workers in his Strangers in Our Fields, published in 1956 by the Joint U.S.–Mexico Trade Union Committee. The report was so successful that it went through two editions for a total of ten thousand copies and was condensed in three national magazines, receiving widespread publicity. Galarza’s book even spurred the AFL-CIO to begin supporting the unionization of farm workers by granting $25,000 to Galarza’s National Agricultural Workers Union. The book was one of the most damaging documents to the visitor worker program so favored by California agribusiness and helped to force both the United States and Mexico to allow the program to expire in

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1964. The termination of the Bracero Program, in turn, led to the successful unionizing of farm workers that began in 1965 under the leadership of César Chávez and what would become the United Farm Workers Union. Two other important books creating great political as well as academic impact were his Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story; an Account of the Migration of Mexican Farm Workers in California, 1942–1960 (1964) and Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970). In addition to his academic and nonfiction writing, Galarza was an accomplished poet and fiction writer. However, he did not really launch his creative writing career until 1971, with the publication of his coming-of-age memoir, Barrio Boy. At the same time, he wished to address the need for bilingual/ bicultural education, consequently producing pioneering works of bilingual children’s literature that could be used in classrooms throughout the Southwest. Galarza penned some ten titles within the space of six years. Among the most well-known titles are Zoorisa: Rimas y fotografías (1971, Zoo Laughter: Rhymes and Photographs), Poemas párvulos (1971, Poems for Kids), and Rimas tontas (1971, Dumb Rhymes). Further Reading Bustamante, Jorge A., Ernesto Galarza’s Legacy to the History of Labor Migration (Stanford, CA: Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 1996). Galarza, Ernesto, Barrio Boy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).

Nicolás Kanellos Galiano, Alina (1950–). Born in Manzanillo, Cuba, in 1950, poet Alina Galiano is considered one of the finest poets in exile but is unfortunately unknown and marginalized for reasons that no critic can explain. Galiano settled in the United States in 1968 and received her master’s degree in social work from Fordham College in New York. She has published numerous poems in magazines such as Linden Lane and in online journals and is the author of the following books, published abroad: Entre el párpado y la mejilla (1980, Between the Eye and the Cheek), Hasta el presente (Poesía casi completa) (1989, Until the Present [Almost Complete Poetry]), and La geometría de lo incandescente (en fija residencia) (n.d., The Geometry of the Incandescent [On Fixed Residence]). In 1990, Galiano won the Premio Letras de Oro (Golden Letters Award) with her book En el vientre del trópico (In the Womb of the Tropics), which was subsequently published in New York in 1994. Further Reading “Dos Poetas Cubanas en Nueva York: Alina Galiano y Maya Islas” Linden Lane Magazine Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 17–19.

Nicolás Kanellos Galindo, Mary Sue (1958–). Children’s literature writer Mary Sue Galindo was born on December 8, 1958, in Laredo, Texas. She obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 and an M.F.A. in creative writing 488

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from Southwest Texas State University in May 2001. A teacher as well as a writer, Galindo’s mission has been to address the need for a Latina influence in the realm of the written word. Her bilingual picture book Icy Watermelon/ Sandía fría (2000) portrays a bicultural family and a quiet afternoon in a delightfully sweet tale for young readers. In the story, three generations of a family enjoy eating watermelon together while Grandfather tells of selling melons as a young man and meeting his future wife, the children’s grandmother. Icy Watermelon/Sandía fría was a commended title in the 2000 Américas Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. As a parent interested in the acquisition and maintenance of Spanish by her children, Mary Sue Galindo struggled to find quality children’s books in Spanish. This shortage of culturMary Sue Galindo. ally relevant literature in Spanish became more evident during her first year as a bilingual elementary teacher. Galindo believed that materials from Spain did not speak to the experiences of the children in the Southwest, an observation that inspired her to write for a new audience. She has been an approved artist with the Texas Commission on the Arts’ Artist-in-Residence program since 1985 and has worked with programs such as Project Bridge, which sends artists into low-income areas in an attempt to make art accessible to more people. Galindo worked the summer of 1994 with youth from two colonias in south Laredo. Icy Watermelon/Sandía fría is Galindo’s first bilingual picture book. Galindo’s early work consists of poetry and short prose, published in a chapbook entitled Merienda Tejana (1985). Her experiences working in the colonias of South Laredo resulted in an article entitled “Inspiring Young Writers with Chicano Pinto Poetry,” which was included in an anthology to inspire Latino children to write creatively: Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American and Latino Literature, edited by Julio Marzán* and published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 1997. Galindo teaches English at Laredo Junior College. She has three children. 489

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Further Reading Marzán, Julio, ed., Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American and Latino Literature (New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1997).

Carmen Peña Abrego Gálvez, Wenceslao (1867–?). Wenceslao Gálvez y del Monte was born in Cuba and is most well-known as the author of the first book on Cuban baseball, Beisbol en Cuba (1889, Baseball in Cuba), which he was able to write from first-hand experience as one of the greatest Cuban batters of all time, who was elected in later life to the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame. However, Gálvez, who was educated as a lawyer, migrated to the United States during the turbulent years of the Cuban independence movement, played ball for Key West for a while and ended up in Tampa, writing for the local Spanish-language press and taking a number of odd jobs. (It seems he also spent some time with the Cuban independence community of New York, where he coedited with poet Bonifacio Byrne* Cacarajícara: Batalla seminal contra España [Cacarajícara: Weekly Battle against Spain]). In Tampa, he became active in supporting independence and José Martí, whom he would later elevate to mythic proportions in his writings. In writing his newspaper columns and his one known U.S.published book, Tampa. Impresiones de un emigrado (1897, Tampa: Impressions of an Émigré), he signed with the pen name of “Wen Gálvez”—perhaps the nickname he became accustomed to on the ballfield. In his book, Gálvez gives a sensitive but at times satirical portrayal of the hard times of a working-class immigrant trying to eke out a living in racially segregated Ybor City/Tampa during the late nineteenth century. He also documents the solidarity among the working-class immigrants during these hard times and how they support the independence movement. Gálvez was one of the immigrant writers who returned to his native land and made a minor success of his career as a writer, publishing such works as De lo más hondo (1925, Out of the Deepest Part), a book of poems, and Costumbres, sátiras, observaciones (1932, Customs, Satires, Observations), in which he recalls some of his sojourns in the United States. Further Reading Mormino, Gary Ross, The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

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Gamboa, Harry, Jr. (1951–). Pioneer Chicano performance artist, poet, and fiction writer Harry Gamboa, Jr., was born and raised in East Los Angeles. Despite his parents’ working-class status and lack of educational achievement, Gamboa did well in school and was a student leader in high school, where he participated in the 1968 East L.A. school walkouts, which were a milestone in the Chicano* civil rights movement. Already a visual artist, Gamboa attended 490

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California State University in Los Angeles and, in 1971, edited a special issue of the Chicano literary and arts periodical Regeneración (Regeneration), introducing such important artists as Patssi Valdez, Gronk and Will Herrón. The next year, he founded the arts collective, ASCO (an anagram meaning “revulsion”), which from 1972 to 1987 staged multimedia “happenings” throughout southern California. As a photographer, Gamboa documented these happenings and had them published with his writings in magazines throughout the United States. In the “found art” of his photography and video, as well as in his poetry, fiction, and essays, Gamboa is the consummate artist of urban life, often juxtaposing incongruencies that we accept without thinking in daily life. Like many Chicano artists and writers, Gamboa is keen to examine the effects of racism, sexism, and class oppression in his works. Included among his awards are the J. Paul Getty Trust for the Visual Arts Award (1990) and the Durfee Artist Award (2001), as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980, 1987). Further Reading Gamboa, Harry, Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. and intro. by Chon Noriega (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos García, Anthony J. (?–). Anthony J. García, born and raised in Denver, is a well-known leader in the Chicano theater movement, in which he became involved during the early 1970s. A graduate of the University of Colorado–Denver with a degree in theater, Garcia began performing with Su Teatro (Your Theater) soon after its founding in 1971. At first performing as a guitarist, he soon began acting, directing, and writing. He became the theater’s director in 1974. To date, he has written more than twenty plays, most of which have not been published. Su Teatro has developed into a cultural arts center, for which he has served as the executive director since 1989. García’s “Introduction to Chicano History 101” was taken to Joseph Papp’s New York Latino Theatre Festival and then toured the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. “I Don’t Speak English Only!” (1993), by García and José Guadalupe Saucedo, has toured throughout the United States. His “Ludlow, Grito de las Minas” (Shout from the Mines) is a play that documents the killing of workers, women, and children in the Ludlow, Colorado, labor strike of 1914. García’s “Serafín: Cantos y Lagrimas” (Serafín: Songs and Tears) was awarded a Rocky Mountain Drama Critics Award. His other awards include the Swanee Hunt Individual Leadership Award, Colorado Council on the Arts Literary Award for Excellence, NEA/Theater Communications Group Directing Fellowship, Chicano Literary Award from University of California–Irvine, and Ovation Award. During his executive directorship, Centro Su Teatro was awarded the 1997 Governors Award for Excellence in the Arts. In his arts leadership role, García has served as the vice chairperson of the board of the National 491

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Association of Latino Arts and Culture. In 1991, a number of García’s plays were published in Su Teatro: 20 Year Anthology. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos García, Cristina (1958–). Cristina García is the first Cuban American woman to experience mainstream success as a novelist in the United States, through the publication of her first novel Dreaming in Cuban. Her journalistic background and interest in politics led her into the world of writing and the examination of her Cuban American circumstances, which have been so shaped by the political history of the United States and Cuba. Cristina García was born in Havana, Cuba, on July 4, 1958, and was brought to the United States when her parents went into exile after the triumph of the Cuban Revo492

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lution. García was an excellent student and was able to attend elite American universities, graduating from Barnard College with a degree in political science in 1979 and from the Johns Hopkins University with a master’s in Latin American Studies. She was able to land a coveted job as a reporter and researcher with Time Magazine, where she was able to hone her writing skills. She quickly ascended to bureau chief and correspondent at Time but left the magazine in 1990 to pursue her career as a creative writer. Her highly acclaimed Dreaming in Cuban was the first book authored by a woman to give insight into the psychology of the generation of Cubans born or raised in the United States who grew up under the looming myth of the splendors of the island in the past and the evils of Castro—a group, however, that never really had first-hand knowledge of its parents’ homeland. In addition, the novel closely examines women’s perspective on the dilemma of living between two cultures. Dreaming in Cuban chronicles three generations of women in the Pino family and in so doing compares the lives of those who live in Cuba with those living in the United States. Celia, a revolutionary and a true believer in the Communist regime, has remained in Cuba with her daughter, Felicia, and her three grandchildren. Celia’s equally committed counter-revolutionary daughter, Lourdes, lives with her own daughter in Brooklyn, where she runs a bakery that also serves as a gathering place for militant exiles. The novel shows how the revolution and the resulting immigration and exile disrupted and fragmented Cuban family life. Dreaming in Cuban was awarded the National Book Award in 1992. García’s second novel, The Agüero Sisters (1997) is a novel of family history and myth that contrasts the lives of two sisters, one in Cuba and the other in the United States. The novel explores identity—personal, familial, and national—in its rapprochement of the topics that have divided Cubans since the Revolution. In García’s following novel, Monkey Hunting (2003), she once again explores the search for identity, this time centering on a ChineseCuban family. Her latest novel, however, A Handbook to Luck (2007), García explores alienation among three young immigrants from diverse backgrounds— Cuban, Salvadoran, and Iranian—who struggle with alienation and a sense of homelessness. García has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award. Further Reading Alvarez-Borland, Isabel, “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction” World Literature Today Vol. 68, No. 1 (Winter 1994): 43–48. Lopez, Kimberle S., “Women on the Verge of a Revolution: Madness and Resistance in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban” Letras Femeninas Vol. 22, Nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1996): 33–49.

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez García, Lionel G. (1935–). Texas Mexican American writer Lionel G. García was the first Hispanic to win the PEN Southwest Award (1983), for his novel Leaving Home. García went on to become the first and only Hispanic author to win 493

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the two other major awards for fiction in the Southwest: the Southwest Book Award of the Southwest Booksellers Association and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction for his 1989 novel Hardscrub. García is a novelist who has created some of the most memorable characters in Chicano literature in a style well steeped in the traditions of the Texas tall tale and of Mexican American folk narrative. Born in San Diego, Texas, on August 20, 1935, García grew up in an environment in which Mexican Americans were the majority population in his small town and on the ranches where he worked and played. To make a living, García became a veterinarian, but he always practiced his first love: storytelling and writing. In 1983 he won the PEN Southwest Discovery Award for his novel in progress, Leaving Home, which was published in 1985. Leaving Home and his novels, A Lionel G. García. Shroud in the Family (1987) and To a Widow with Children (1994), draw heavily on his family experiences and smalltown background. Both are set in quaint villages very much like San Diego, Texas, where he grew up, and follow the antics of children similar to the friends and family members who surrounded him as a child—they reappear again in his collection of autobiographical stories, I Can Hear the Cowbells Ring (1994). His prize-winning novel Hardscrub (1989) is a departure from his former works, a realistically drawn chronicle of the life of an Anglo child in an abusive family relationship. In 2001, García continued with his autobiographical stories in the collection The Day They Took My Uncle. During a decade-long hiatus from novel-writing, García explored playwriting and poetry, winning the Texas Review Poetry Prize in 2003. García published his first collection of poetry, Brush Country, in 2004, exploring death in the hard-scrabble existence of southeast Texas. Further Reading Padilla, Genaro M., My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Tatum, Charles. Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).


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García, Richard (1941–). Poet and children’s book writer Richard García was born on August 5, 1941, in San Francisco, California, to a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father. García began writing early in his educational career but did not receive his M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College until 1994. One of the more cerebral offerings of the Chicano Movement, García’s first book, Selected Poetry, reprises political and literary history in the search for personhood and nationhood, ending with a Chicano nationalist revision of the Gregorio Cortez legend. Thus, García had emerged during the Chicano Movement* when Selected Poetry was published by the movement’s most important press, Editorial Quinto Sol,* but he did not publish any more creative books until the 1990s, perhaps disheartened by the lack of critical response to his book. García re-initiated his literary career in 1990, when he became poet in residence at the Long Beach Museum of Art. In 1991, he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, followed in 1992 by his receipt of the Cohen Award for the best poem published in Ploughshares magazine. In 1995, he received the Greensboro Award for his poem, “Note Folded Thirteen Ways,” published in the Greensboro Review; the same poem also won the 1997 Pushcart Award. In addition, García’s poem “Adam and Eve’s Dog” was selected for Best American Poetry 2004. García’s second book of poems, The Flying Garcías, was finally published in 1991; it is a collection of poems based on family anecdotes and the metaphor of flying to represent the narrator’s status as outsider. García’s third book of poems, Rancho Notorious (2001), populates its pages with colorful characters whose lives are horrific and depressing; one critic stated that they are “agony personified.” In addition to publishing books, García has published numerous poems in periodicals and anthologies. Despite the depressing tone of García’s later poems, García deftly handled children’s literature in My Aunt Otilia’s Spirits (1978, revised in 1987 and 1992), which reflects García’s upbringing in a home with a dual Latino identity. García still lives in Los Angeles, where he has served since 1991 as the poet in residence at the Children’s Hospital. Further Reading López, Miguel R., “Richard García” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 92–99).

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García-Aguilera, Carolina (1949–). Mystery novelist Carolina GarcíaAguilera was born in Cuba on July 13, 1949, and immigrated to the United States with her refugee parents in 1960. She received her early education in New York and Connecticut and then went on to Rollins College in Florida, where she majored in history and political science; she later did graduate work in language and linguistics at Georgetown University. After almost a decade of traveling the world with her husband, including living in Beijing for eight years, she returned to the United States and to her studies, receiving a degree 495

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in finance from the University of South Florida and later studying toward a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. Then she took a radical departure and became a private investigator in Miami. After operating her own agency for ten years, she quit to dedicate herself to writing mystery novels using her insider’s insight and experience. In addition to using her detective know-how, García-Aguilera draws heavily from her family’s and her own experiences in Cuba and as political refugees. Not really a “gumshoe” (for she only wears designer shoes), Cuban American detective Lupe Solana is a both a Cuban American Princess, known to Miami culture as a “CAP,” and intensely feminist—sexually liberated, obsessively independent, and dressed to the nines. She strives for these values, even while trying to be a good Catholic and loyal to her family. In the first of the Lupe Solano series, Bloody Waters (1996), a Cuban couple employs Solano to find a bone marrow match for their dying daughter. The next installments in the series delve into themes that are rarely talked about in Miami Cuban society—the secrets held closely by families. Bloody Shame (1997) is an intimate tale involving the death of Lupe’s best friend and a love triangle. Bloody Secrets (1998), however, pitches Solano into the midst of political intrigue and a rereading of Cuban history. As in other installments in the series, the plot inevitably takes Solano to Cuba and its attendant dangers. In A Miracle in Paradise (1999), Solano investigates the mystery surrounding a weeping statue of the Virgin of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint; in so doing, she explores the political infighting in a religious order while also weaving anti-Castro elements into the plot. In Havana Heat (2000), Lupe Solana is on the trail of a valuable, historic tapestry believed to have been given to Queen Isabela La Católica. Bitter Sugar (2001) reveals the world of Cuban sugar culture and its intersection with the Communist regime in Cuba and expatriates in Miami. One Hot Summer (2002) is a departure from the mystery series in that it explores a conundrum of mothers who have to decide on whether to return to work or stay at home after having a child. Luck of the Draw (2004) is also a departure from the series and now features a Cuban American woman, Esmeralda Navarro, in search of her missing sister in Las Vegas; the plot is tied to her family’s past ownership of a casino in Havana and their attempts to somehow recover it. She is accompanied by a retired New York homicide detective. Further Reading Sutton, Molly, Sara Mozayen, and Nubia Esparza “Carolina Gacrcía-Aguilera” (http://voices.cla.unm.edu/vg/Bios/entries/garcia-aguilera_carolina. html).

Nicolás Kanellos García-Camarillo, Cecilio (1943–2002). Poet, publisher, editor, cultural journalist, textual artist, dramaturge, radio personality, and cultural attaché Cecilio “Xilo” García-Camarillo was a Chicano Renaissance man, a gentle war-

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rior whose cultural activism over the past quarter-century has transfigured Chicano literary culture. Born on September 12, 1943, in Laredo, he left Texas on a trip to Arizona in 1977 and made it as far as New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days. With seventeen bilingual chapbooks and a retrospective anthology, Selected Poetry (2000), to his credit, his poetry is brash and playful, resonant with dream imagery, pulsating with dialogic orality, passionately involved with the personal dimensions of social struggle and the tortuous inner quest for self understanding. Their titles reveal the artistic leaps and risks he always embraced: Hang a Snake, Ecstasy & Puro Pedo (Pure Gas [Farts]), Winter Month, Calcetines embotellados (Bottled-Up Socks), Carambola (Billiard Balls), Double-Face, Cuervos en el Río Cecilio García-Camarillo. Grande (Crows in the Rio Grande), Burning Snow, Borlotes mestizos (Mestizo Gab), The Line, Soy pajarita (I’m a Little Bird), Black Horse on the Hill, Zafa’o (Wiped Out), Crickets, Fotos (Photos), Dream-Walking. Cecilio alternately explored vanguard as well as social realist styles. His poetics celebrate the classical Náhuatl esthetics of flor y canto—flower and song— symbols for the ephemerality of life and the eternal aspirations of art. He is one of the first bards to revel in the symbols and syntax of Chicano cultural nationalism: revolutionary heroes, Aztec indigenism, English/Spanish codeswitching, and barrio slang. García-Camarillo’s individual creative vision is profoundly articulated with his community. He founded and edited two visionary and influential reviews, Magazín (1971–1972) and Caracol (1976–1980, Shell), which provided a forum for scores of new Chicana and Chicano writers. Their literary impact far surpassed their circulation list of about 1,000 copies. His newsletter Rayas (1977–1979) evolved into a weekly public radio show, “Espejos de Aztlán” (1979–present, Mirrors of Aztlán), the longest-running cultural affairs program at radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which still reaches thousands of listeners weekly.

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Highly anthologized as a poet, he also edited key anthologies of poetry. The first was a special issue of Caracol titled Nahualliandoing (1977, untranslatable) published after a call for trilingual Spanish/Náhuatl/English poems on indigenous themes. His last, Cantos al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings (2002, Songs to the Sixth Sun: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings), is a collection of poetry on the theme of Aztlán. Many lesser poets have seized the center stage of celebrity and been praised. The editions of García-Camarillo’s chapbooks with his signature Mano Izquierda Books press never ran to more than a few hundred copies. Like his magazines, their influence far surpassed their numbers. Although relatively few critics and readers have heard his song, they are realizing clearly that this foundational poet has one of the most evolved and expressive voices in the broadening range of Chicano literature. García-Camarillo died of cancer on January 16, 2002, in Albuquerque. Further Reading García-Camarillo, Cecilio, Selected Poetry (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). García-Camarillo Cecilio, Cantos Al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writings, eds. Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2002).

Enrique Lamadrid García Naranjo, Angelina Elizondo de. See Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina García Naranjo, Nemesio (1883–1962). Journalist, politician, lawyer, intellectual, gifted orator, and newspaper owner Nemesio García Naranjo was one of the most important intellectuals in Mexico and, today, remains probably one of the most overlooked. Born on March 8, 1883, in Lampazos de Naranjo, Mexico, as a child he accompanied his parents into exile in Encinal, Texas, where he learned to speak English. However, he was able to finish elementary school in his home town. García Naranjo graduated as an attorney in Mexico City in 1909. He came from a family of well-known generals and national heroes; his uncle, General Francisco García Naranjo, gave his name to his home town. García Naranjo married the writer Angelina Elizondo de García Naranjo* in 1912; together they raised four children through the hardship of exile. After receiving a university education in Mexico City, García Naranjo rose in the ranks of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s administration. At age twenty-seven, during the Porfirio Díaz regime, he was elected to the Mexican congress in representation of the First District of Michoacán, becoming one of the youngest members of Parliament in the history of Mexico. When the Carranza regime was instituted, he went into exile in New York City in 1914, and by 1915 established himself in San Antonio, Texas, where he founded the Revista Mexicana (Mexican Review) that same year. He also established a long-term

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relationship with Ignacio E. Lozano* and worked as a journalist and editorialist in Lozano’s newspaper, La Prensa (The Press). García Naranjo became one of the best-known leaders of the Mexican expatriate community during the Revolution. Renowned for his eloquence as a speaker and editorialist, Naranjo’s essays and speeches were reproduced in newspapers throughout the Southwest. An inexhaustible writer, Nemesio García Naranjo was also a consistent one in his views throughout his life. He is credited with, and was himself proud of, his political constancy as a lawyer, poet, playwright, biographer, historian, orator, and journalist. He believed that Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship in Mexico embodied the best form of government possible: efficiently managed plutocracy with liberal economic policies. His oeuvre is massive, including a ten-volume autobiography, but of particular interest in the United States—both from a literary and a historical point of view—was his launching of Revista Mexicana, a conservative exile periodical published in San Antonio between 1915 and 1920. As editor, he fashioned a journal that elucidated the political program of the Porfiriato for the first time, because, ironically, “Don Porfirio” had not allowed anyone to do so in Mexico during his rule. Some of the main tenets included an opposition to any agrarian reform that would break up great Mexican estates or plantations for distribution to the peasantry, opposition to returning tribal lands to indigenous groups who had been stripped of their ancestral claims under Díaz, opposition to general suffrage among adult men, especially the poor and illiterate, opposition to women’s suffrage, and opposition to compulsory public education in Mexico. On this last issue, García Naranjo’s journal instead advocated Catholic mission schools to teach the Church’s value system as well as academics, because, according to the editorial perspective, secular education left the poor lacking in morality. In its day, Revista Mexicana became very popular, publishing articles by such well-known anti-Carrancistas as Junco de la Vega, Querido Moheno,* Guillermo Aguirre y Fierro,* Ricardo Gómez Robelo, Teodoro Torres,* and others. Revista used irony, satire, verbal cleverness, and incendiary essays to oppose the government of Venustiano Carranza, the Mexican president during the magazine’s existence. The magazine adhered to the ideology of México de afuera (Mexico abroad), a term used by fellow publisher Ignacio G. Lozano* that claimed to preserve the true Mexico outside Mexico. Interestingly, García Naranjo was opposed to Woodrow Wilson’s support of Venustiano Carranza, as a pragmatic matter. Articles in Revista to this effect have been interpreted to mean that he had a generalized, principled opposition to United States intervention in Mexico. However, García Naranjo disingenuously claimed that Porfirio Díaz had never relied on the United States as Carranza did, keeping absolutely silent about the historically unprecedented exploitation of Mexico’s land and people that Díaz had orchestrated on behalf of United States corporate interests over many decades. These basic positions were expounded in the magazine to attract support for Díaz’s nephew, Félix Díaz, in a putschist attempt the latter launched from Texas in 1916, and which

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failed relatively quickly. The magazine lost its readership by the end of 1919, when Carranza extended amnesty to the former elites and almost all estates previously expropriated by the Revolution were returned to the preRevolutionary Mexican ruling class. The exiled community started to go back to Mexico, and the subscription to the magazine started to diminish. Besides commenting and agitating from a conservative perspective on the Revolution—for which he was tried in Laredo for breaking federal laws of neutrality—García Naranjo also crusaded against racism and discrimination against Mexicans in the United States. When the magazine failed in 1920, he went to work at the editorialist San Antonio’s La Prensa newspaper, owned and operated by Ignacio Lozano, arguably the most powerful cultural entrepreneur in the Southwest. García Naranjo returned to Mexico in 1923, only to go into exile once again during the Cristero War. In this second exile, he wrote articles and books from a religious perspective and advocated freedom of religious practice in Mexico. During the second exile, García Naranjo lived in New York, Europe, and Venezuela until his return to Mexico in 1934. García Naranjo wrote a laudatory biography of Porfirio Díaz in 1930. García Naranjo was a prolific author; his contributions were published in various newspapers in Mexico, Latin America, and the United States. He worked as editor in La Patria (The Homeland) in El Paso, Texas, and contributed articles to El Imparcial de Texas (The Texas Impartial), and La Prensa, among many others. He wrote editorials and chronicles under the pseudonym of Valerio and was also the author of numerous essays, speeches, religious texts, and fiction. In the 1960s, García Naranjo published his memoirs in ten volumes, recounting his life, his political involvement, and his intellectual adventures. His books include Memorias de Nemesio García Naranjo (1959, Memoir of Nemesio García Naranjo), Discursos (1923, Speeches), El balance rojo de 1919 (1920, The Red Balance of 1919), En los nidos de antaño (1951, The Indians of Yore), Simón Bolívar (1931), Porfirio Díaz (1930), and El quinto evangelio (1929, The Fifth Testament). He was inducted into the Mexican Academy of the Spanish Language in 1938 and the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Spain in 1956. He died in Mexico City on December 21, 1962. Further Reading García Naranjo, Nemesio, Memorias de Nemesio García Naranjo (Monterrey: Talleres de “El Provenir,” c. 1960). Ríos McMillan, Nora E., “García Naranjo, Nemesio (1883–1962)” in Handbook of Texas Online (June 9, 2007) (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/ GG/fga94.html).

Maura L. Fuchs and Carolina Villarroel Gares, Tomás (1892–?). Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on December 21, 1892, a graduate of the normal teacher preparation school, Tomás Gares emigrated to New York in 1919. Like other compatriots who emigrated about the same time, such as Jesús Colón* and Joaquín Colón López,* Gares found 500

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employment in the U.S. Post Office, where he worked for the next thirty-three years, eventually reaching the rank of supervisor. Like the Colón brothers, he, too, was a labor organizer and in 1935 helped to establish the Sociedad de Empleados del Servicio Civil (Civil Service Employees Society). He was also a founder of the Puerto Rican Brotherhood and the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana* (Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) mutual aid society. In 1938, he was elected to the board of the federation of Puerto Rican societies in New York. Gares’s true calling, however, was that of poet, and for more than four decades he was ubiquitous in the Hispanic community, reciting his verses and publishing them in community newspapers. Despite all this work as a poet, it was not until he was seventy-seven years old that Gares published his first book of poetry: Agridulce (1969, Bittersweet). Published in New York, as were his next two volumes, Agridulce contains early poems of nostalgia for his homeland and of yearning to return someday, as well as later poems of accommodation to New York. His second collection, Frutos de una nueva cosecha (1970, Fruit of a New Harvest), is more militant in tone and denounces U.S. colonialist oppression of Puerto Rico. Dimensión de serena espiritualidad (1972, Dimension of a New Spirituality), while more lyric in tone, still manages to denounce the American army’s presence in Puerto Rico. His final contribution, Jardín sonoro (1975, Resounding Garden), was published in Puerto Rico and evokes the Puerto Rico that no longer exists: the passing of a way of life. Further Reading Martin, Eleanor Jean, “The Poetry of Tomás Gares: Puerto Rican Affirmation in the Face of Destruction” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 4 (1976): 119–124. Martin, Eleanor Jean, “Tomás Gares: Poet of Love” Revista Chicano-Riqueña Vol. 3 (1975): 45–52.

Nicolás Kanellos Garza, Beatriz de la (?–). Short story-writer and young adult novelist Beatriz de la Garza was born in Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Mexico. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1967, a year after she graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in Spanish. Interested in literature and writing since she was a child, Garza later won the Hemphill Short Story Contest at the University of Texas. She went on for her master’s degree in Spanish at U.T. (1971) but then made a career change and studied law. She received her law degree from the same school in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984, while she was practicing law in her own firm. Garza became a public figure in Austin, serving as president of the school board during very difficult times. She nevertheless resumed her interest in writing and in 1994 published a very well reviewed collection of short stories, The Candy Vendor’s Boy and Other Stories (1994). In the collection, Garza presents a series of Mexican American characters struggling with forces not of their own making: war, exile, migration, poverty, racism, and political conflict. Each story is a sensitive portrait 501

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of human beings striving to locate a home and an identity in an often hostile environment. In her young adult novel, Pillars of Gold and Silver (1997), Garza in part relives her own adolescence growing up on the border through a child who is sent to live with her grandmother in the old Mexican town of Revilla, discovering a culture and heritage that sustains her. Garza departed from fiction in her next offering, Law for the Lion: A Tale of Crime and Injustice in the Borderlands (2003), a nonfiction study of Anglo–Mexican conflict on the border at Laredo, revolving around a miscarriage of justice in which a Texas Ranger captain shot two prominent Mexicans over a land dispute. Themes that Garza set out in The Candy Vendor’s Boy were now confirmed with hard fact and reality in Law for the Lion. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (The Mexican American Experience) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Garza, Catarino (1859–1895). Journalist, memoirist, and folk hero Catarino Erasmo Garza Rodríguez was born on November 24, 1859, near the recently established border with the United States, in Matamoros, Mexico. In his late adolescence, he underwent formal schooling in Hualhuises, Nuevo León, and later at San Juan College in Matamoros. He also served in the Tamaluipas National Guard. Between 1877 and 1886, Garza resided and worked in Brownsville, Laredo, and San Antonio, Texas. Garza married Carolina Connor of Brownsville, Texas, and had two children with her. He held numerous jobs, including clothing clerk, sewing machine salesman in Texas, and even Mexican consul in New Orleans. Then he entered journalism and published two newspapers. In 1885, he served as Mexican consul in St. Louis, Missouri. In St. Louis, he wrote for La Revista Mexicana (The Mexican Magazine), and in Brownsville for El Bien Público (The Public Good); he founded El Comercio Mexicano (Mexican Commerce) in Eagle Pass in 1886, followed by El Libre Pensador (The Free Thinker) in 1887. Many of Garza’s articles were reprinted in periodicals throughout the Southwest of the United States. In 1887, Garza’s printing equipment was confiscated and Garza jailed for libel for thirty-one days. In 1888, Garza was arrested for libel by the Texas Rangers in Corpus Christi after criticizing a killing of a Mexican by a Ranger officer. In Corpus Christi, he had continued publishing El Comercio Mexicano. When he was taken by a Ranger to Rio Grande City, he was wounded by the Ranger, and the notable Rio Grande City Riot ensued. It was in 1888 that Garza began writing a memoir of his twelve years living in the United States, “La lógica de los hechos” (The Logic of the Facts), in which he details the oppression under which Mexicans and Mexican Americans were living in Texas; the hand-written manuscript has not been published to this date. Beginning in 1891, a spontaneous arising of followers allied themselves with Garza and he began to make 502

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war on both dictator Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and the authorities in the United States. In connection with this “Garza War,” he issued two very poetic but belligerent broadsides calling for support for his cause. In 1892, Garza took his militancy to Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, issuing an anti-Díaz pamphlet in Costa Rica: La Era de Tuxtepec en México o Sea Rusia en América (1893, The Era of Tuxtepec in Mexico, or Russia in America). Garza continued in his path down to Colombia to liberate Spanish Americans. He was killed in battle in what is today Panama on March 8 (some sources say March 28), 1895. Garza’s literary legacy has not been adequately studied to date, attention largely being focused on his revolutionary activities. Catarino Garza has become a folk hero on both sides of the border, primarily because of his militancy against injustice. His legendary status was also cemented in numerous newspaper articles that were reprinted in the Spanish-language newspapers of the Southwest. Further Reading Cuthbertson, Gilbert N., “Garza, Catarino Erasmo” in Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/GG/fga38_ print.html). Young, Elliott “Before the Revolution: Catarino Garza as Activist/Historian” in Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 2, eds. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and Chuck Tatum (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 213–236).

Nicolás Kanellos Garza, María Luisa (1887–1990). Journalist, novelist, poet, chronicler, and essayist María Luisa Garza was born in Cadereyta Jiménez, Nuevo León. Unlike many women of her time, Garza maintained an important role in Spanish-newspaper publications in the United States and Mexico. In the United States, she contributed to El Demócrata (The Democrat) and El Universal Gráfico (Universal Graphic). She was head of the editorial staff at La Época (The Epoch) and was given the weekly “Crónicas femeninas” (Women’s report) column in San Antonio’s El Imparcial de Texas (The Texas Impartial). Garza wrote under the pseudonym of “Loreley,” and when her novel La novia de Nervo (Nervo’s Betrothed) was reviewed by Angel Nieva in El Imparcial de Texas on November 11, 1920, he revealed her name. Garza was an erudite, cultured woman who took the responsibility of representing in the printed word the Mexican community living in exile in the United States after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Her writing resonated with the literary, social, and political trends of her time. Her novel La novia de Nervo, for example, spoke of her close relationship with Latin America’s Modernist literary movement, led by Amado Nervo and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera in Mexico and José Enrique Rodó and Rubén Darío in Central and South America. Escucha (Listen) and Tentáculos de fuego (Tentacles of Fire) are novels dealing with alcoholism, a social issue in both Mexico and the United States. Her weekly chronicles dealt with a variety of topics related to Mexican women, especially in relation to their lives in the United States. Garza was also a 503

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supporter of the México de Afuera* ideology propagated by intellectuals of her time, who wanted to recreate the Mexico that they had brought with them as they fled the Revolution of 1910, in San Antonio and other cities where they settled. For that reason, Loreley’s chronicles often chose role models for Mexican women, such as Susana de Grandais, as well as participants of the Pan American Roundtable. In this sense, she often resorted to the leitmotif of the “Ángel del hogar” (Angel of the home), which clearly advocated the right of women to access education but also respected and upheld her responsibilities at home as wife and mother. Garza made significant contributions to the literary production of Mexicans in the United States, especially as regarded women’s rights and social position, as well as feminine and feminist issues. Her major works, according to Juanita Luna Lawhn, include Hojas dispersas (n.d., Disperse Leaves), La Novia de Nervo (1922, Nervo’s Bride), Los amores de Gaona (1922, Gaona’s Loves), Alas y Cover of María Luisa Garza’s novel. Quimeras (1924, Wings and Chimeras), Escucha (1928, Listen), Tentáculos de fuego (in its first edition published in Los Angeles, California, and in its second in Mexico in 1930), and Soñando un hijo (1937, Dreaming a Child). She left two unpublished works: Raza nuestra (Our People) and Más allá del Bravo (Beyond the Rio Grande). Further Reading Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del México de Afuera (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 2006: 61–81). Lawhn, Juanita Luna, “María Luisa Garza: Novelist of El México de Afuera” in Double Crossings. EntreCruzamientos, eds. Mario Martín Flores and Carlos Von Son (Fair Haven, NJ: Nuevo Espacio, Academia, 2001: 83–96). Lawhn, Juanita Luna, “Victorian Attitudes Affecting the Mexican Women Writing in La Prensa during the Early 1900s and the Chicana of the 1980s” in Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.–Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture, eds. Renate von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister, and Juan Bruce-Novoa (Tübingen: Narr, 1986: 65–71).

Gabriela Baeza Ventura Garza, Xavier (1968–). Xavier Garza was born on October 14, 1968, and was raised in the Rio Grande Valley. Since receiving his B.F.A. at the University of Texas–Edinburg in 1994, Xavier Garza has become a prolific artist, 504

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writer, and storyteller. His early publications include Creepy Creatures and Other Cucuys (2004) and Lucha Libre: The Man in the Silver Mask: A Bilingual Cuento (2005). Garza’s latest work is a suspenseful and entertaining bilingual picture book for children, Juan and the Chupacabras/Juan y el Chupacabras (2006). He has also produced five collections of artwork, Jesus Wore a Zoot Suit, Los Tesoros, Las Limosnas, Los Cucuis, and Masked Marvels, and has exhibited them in various venues throughout Texas. Xavier Garza and his Masked Marvels collection were featured in the book Contemporary Chicana/Chicano Art: Works, Culture and Education, produced by the University of Arizona, which chronicled 200 of the top up-and-coming Chicano artists in the country. Xavier Garza’s stories and illustrations have been featured in such magazines and newspapers as El Mañana, The Monitor, TABE, The Mesquite Review, The Corpus Christi Caller Times, and The Milwaukee Spanish Journal. He has Xavier Garza. been included in such anthologies as Aztlanahuac Project: Cantos al Sexto Sol (2002) and Penn English: Chicano Writings (2001), among others. Whether in his stories for children and young adults or in his art, Garza’s inspiration has been the folk tales and popular culture of South Texas. His tone in presenting many of the spooky tales and his style in drawing them is often humorous and whimsical, taking the bite out of their gore and grizzle. Garza resides in the city of San Antonio, Texas. Further Reading Schon, Isabel, The Best of Latino Heritage, 1996–2002: A Guide to the Best Juvenile Books about Latino People (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 2003).

Carmen Peña Abrego Gasavic, Quezigno. See Vásquez, Ignacio G. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia (1958–). Born on July 29, 1958, and raised in El Paso, Texas, Gaspar de Alba is the quintessential bilingual/bicultural writer, 505

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Alicia Gaspar de Alba before a reading in Houston, Texas.

penning poetry, essays, and narrative with equal facility in English and Spanish. Gaspar de Alba earned bachelor’s (1980) and master’s degrees (1983) in English from the University of Texas at El Paso and a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of New Mexico (1994). Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an associate professor and founding faculty member of the César Chávez Center for Chicana/Chicano Studies at UCLA. In 2001, she was jointly appointed to the English department. She is also member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Faculty Advisory Committee and is affiliated with the Women’s Studies Program. Gaspar de Alba is the author of a 506

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short story collection, The Mystery of Survival (1993), which won the Premio Aztlán, and the highly acclaimed historical novel Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1999), which has been translated into Spanish and German. Gaspar de Alba’s major fiction project bore fruition in 2006: Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. After years working with activist groups protesting the assassination and disfigurement of working women in Juárez, Mexico, Gaspar de Alba set about researching the causes of the more than 400 mysterious murders and border authorities reaction to them, including corrupt investigations and indifference. Her meticulous details of the atrocities form the background for a gripping mystery novel in which the protagonist, a lesbian graduate student, desperately follows the trail of the abductions and murders in an attempt to save her suddenly missing little sister from a similar end. Dessert Blood was awarded the Lamba Literary Award and awarded to the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. Gaspar de Alba is also a renowned poet and essayist whose works have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. In 1989, her poetry was featured in an anthology of the works of three poets: Three Times a Woman: Chicana Poetry. In 2003, she published her selected poems and essays in La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry Y Otras Movidas, 1985-2001 (La Llorona on the Longfellow Bridge: Poetry and Other Moves). Her incisive and controversial book-length essay, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition, was published by the University of Texas Press in 1998. In 2002, she and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto coedited a collection of essays on Chicano esthetics: Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities. In 1989, Gaspar de Alba received a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Award in poetry. In the fall of 1999, she held the prestigious Roderick Endowed Chair in English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she was a distinguished visiting professor for one semester. In all of her work, Gaspar de Alba is one of the most eloquent exponents of a lesbian esthetic and promoters of the empowerment of women. Further Reading Latina Feminist Group, The, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latin America Otherwise) (Raleigh–Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Ruiz, Vicki L., From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Gay and Lesbian Literature. Within the last thirty years, there has been a proliferation of literature by gay and lesbian Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Initially, the work of these authors focused on challenging the multiple burdens put on them by stigmatization and discrimination targeting their sexuality and ethnicity. On one hand, gay and lesbian Latino and Latina authors reacted strongly against a dominant patriarchal and homophobic strain within Latino and Latina cultures—in particular, the diverse Latino civil rights movements of the 1960s created a narrative that did not recognize the 507


existence of sexual diversity within itself. At the same time, these authors protested the racism and xenophobia inherent in emerging Anglo gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements that did not consider their interests or, in many cases, even recognize their existence. For example, although Stonewall is claimed by the contemporary gay and lesbian movement as its initial cry of freedom, it is often overlooked that Sylvia Rivera, a young Puerto Rican transsexual in New York City, was one of the initial catalysts of that rebellion against anti-police harassment on June 28, 1969. Part of the work of gay and lesbian Latino and Latina literature has been challenging their exclusion and marginalization within the larger gay and lesbian community and Latino and Latina communities in the United States. Despite the difficulties faced by gay and lesbian Latinos and Latinas, their commitment to write their stories, document their existence, and fight back against discrimination has resulted in a large array of literary production. The most obvious place to begin a discussion of Latino and Latina gay and lesbian literary production is with the Chicana lesbian feminists who published some of the first outright challenges to the racism and homophobia they were encountering in the larger, Anglo-dominated feminist movement in the United States. Beginning in 1981 with the publication of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa* and Cherríe Moraga* forged alliances with other feminists of color, claiming a collective space and defining their issues. At the same time, these authors struggled with their experiences of exclusion and discrimination in Latino and Latina communities. From the very beginning, the literature has been one of protest and defiance. The fact that many Latino and Latina writers did not relate to the gay and lesbian literature produced by Anglo writers accelerated the process of producing their own literature. Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) is, perhaps more than any other gay or lesbian Latino or Latina, responsible for breaking through the barriers of racism, sexism, and homophobia that previously constrained creative expression. By organizing and editing This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa issued a clarion call for an end to the discrimination that women of color, whether lesbian or straight, had experienced forever. Although directed primarily to the white radical feminist community, the book provided a starting point for both scholarly and political discussion. In her groundbreaking collection of trilingual (English, Spanish, and Náhuatl) essays and poetry, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa laid out entirely new areas of analysis through her development of New Mestiza Consciousness. In the book, Anzaldúa destroys the notions of identity as fixed or stable and resists facile divisions of identity into constituent parts: her identity cannot be divided into lesbian, woman, Chicana, poet, and scholar, but must rather be conceptualized as a whole. Most importantly, Anzaldúa made border spaces, particularly those of the U.S.-Mexico border, and deviant sexualities within those spaces, legible to a broader reading public on an international level. To Anzaldúa, the border becomes not only a geographical and cultural reality but also a physical 508


experience that is present whenever two people are joined in love and intimacy. Anzaldúa invented new ways to speak of and name diverse sexualities in the Borderlands, always insistent on a plethora of terms: “tejana tortilleras” (Texan tortilla makers) and “putas malas” (bad whores) or, as she stated in Borderlands: “Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (3). Her insistence on using terminologies indigenous to the communities she writes of has influenced a generation of scholars of sexuality who resist the imperializing tendency to label bodies in ways more characteristic of the “center” than the “periphery.” Despite Anzaldúa having passed away in 2004, her legacy will live on as subsequent generations discover and rediscover her work. Emerging for the first time in This Bridge Called My Back in 1981, Cherríe Moraga has now developed a vast body of work comprised of theater, essay, poetry, and fiction that is challenging, experimental, and genre-blurring. Moraga was born in 1952 in Southern California, the daughter of an Anglo father and a Mexican mother, and that clash of culture and identity has served as a background to much of her work. Her collection of essays and poetry, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983, What Never Passed through Her Lips) explores lesbian sexuality and intimacy, and, perhaps most important, rewrites dominant myths of La Malinche, reclaiming the conquistador Cortés’s translator as a heroine, rather than the traitor she was thought of previously. Moraga has two other books of nonfiction: a book of essays on identity, community, and art called The Last Generation and a memoir about her process of becoming a mother, Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of Queer Motherhood (1997). In addition, Moraga is well known as a playwright. Perhaps her most critically acclaimed play is Heroes and Saints (in Heroes and Saints and Other Plays, 1994), a piece that denounces the abuses of pesticides and the prevalence of cancer in the Central Valley in California while artistically capturing the texture of daily life in a farm-worker family. Moraga is currently a writer in residence at Stanford University, active in Latino and Latina gay and lesbian performance, theater, and literature. A different case is Sheila Ortiz Taylor (1939), who, unlike Moraga and Anzaldúa, began focusing her work on the mainstream lesbian audience but later shifted her work when she published Southbound (1990), a sequel to her Faultline: A Novel (1982), published eight years earlier. Ortiz Taylor’s contributions go beyond Mexican American lesbian literature; she has a career as a scholar and has an endowed chair at Florida State University. The history of Latino gay male writing has been quite different from that of their female counterparts. Although authors such as Anzaldúa and Moraga emerged from radical, political movements, the gay male authors who began publishing in the second half of the twentieth century were not involved to the same degree in activist endeavors. Rather, if we look at the work of authors like John Rechy,* Arturo Islas,* Richard Rodriguez,* and Jaime Manrique* we find 509


very different trajectories. All of these authors began neither as activists nor by writing openly politicized work; rather, their focus was on more personal struggles around issues of identity, health, physicality, and intimacy. Nevertheless, literary criticism of the work of Rechy and Islas (in particular) has made clear that their work is loaded with challenges to the dominant social order that would deny their existence as raced and sexualized men. John Rechy was perhaps the first out Chicano to write openly about issues of sexuality in a decidedly defiant way. His literary works reflect the underbelly of American life, beginning with his first semi-autobiographical novel, City of Night, which depicts the life of a traveling gay male sex worker in El Paso, New Orleans, and other cities. In later books, he has focused in on other Chicano and Chicana characters, including The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), which chronicles the story of a Chicana from El Paso living in Los Angeles. In these books, his work as a vocal gay man centers around themes of sex, borders, and societal barriers, often featuring protagonists who grapple with societal discrimination and marginalization. Of the same generation as John Rechy was Arturo Islas (1938–1991), who crossed numerous borders in his life from his origins in El Paso to Stanford University, where he studied and remained as a professor until his death. When he was first starting as writer, Islas, according to José David Saldívar, sent his works to various publishers, who rejected them because his writings, according to the main-stream publishers, were either too limited or not “ethnic” enough. Islas is best known for his novels, including The Rain God (1984) and Migrant Souls (1990). His novels take on questions of family and migration, marginality and secrets, painting a rich tapestry of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. In other novels, he has explored Chicano and gay lives in urban San Francisco. In recent years, Frederick Luis Aldama edited a collection of his unpublished work, Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (1993), which included poetry and short fiction. His poetry includes courageous and explicit discussion of his very queer sexuality and his struggles with health conditions, including a colonoscopy and, at the end of his life, HIV and AIDS. This poetry explodes some of the traditional critical takes on his work that have portrayed a certain reticence on Islas’s part to discuss his sexuality. Richard Rodriguez, one of the best known Mexican American writers, has not until recently been associated with the gay and lesbian movement. At the beginning, he did not talk about his sexuality, and his works did not discuss anything related to gay and lesbian themes. Rodriguez has written several works that have become key texts in the Latino community, among them Hunger of Memory (1983), Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), and Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003). In his classic Hunger of Memory, one can see a Rodriguez who is not interested in gay themes. In Days of Obligation, however, Rodriguez attempts to explore other topics, including his own sexuality. Later on, in his award-winning book, Brown, he is more forthcoming with his sexuality and he introduces himself as a “queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a 510


fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation.” Rodriguez uses the color brown to symbolize the Latinoness and Latinization of the United States. He analyzes his own personal situation to deconstruct and elucidate the cultural intricacies of brownness. Rodriguez, like many other gay and lesbian Latino/a writers, has a doctoral degree—in his case in English from the University of California, Berkeley—and is firmly ensconced in the North American academy. As this historical review of the literature should make clear, certain themes emerge repeatedly in the work of Latino and Latina gay and lesbian authors. The recurrent themes and motifs of gay and Latino writers have been related to their place of origin, migration, social realism, sexual experiences, and the tension, pressures, and dilemmas of being Latino or Latina and gay or lesbian. Nevertheless, it must be made clear that it is not the themes that make this literature Latino and Latina, but the identities of those who are writing it. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of these works makes them difficult to classify, not only because of the difference in the national background of the writers, but also the geographical location of their diasporas. Anthologies play extremely an important role in the legitimization and dissemination process. Two of the pioneer anthologies are Juanita Ramos’s Compañeras: Latina Lesbians. An Anthology (1987) and Carla Trujillo’s Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). Juanita Ramos compiled the first Latina lesbian anthology, Compañeras: Latina Lesbians. An Anthology, which includes works by forty-seven diverse Latina lesbians (women of Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, Cuban, Honduran, Colombian, Peruvian, Nicaraguan, Puerto Rican, and Brazilian descent). In addition, the genres presented in the book vary from poetry to narrative fiction, interviews to testimonies, coming-out stories, and more. This project was part of the Latina Lesbian History Project that had as an objective to give women voice to express their feelings and views. In addition to this anthology, the very same year Ramos published an extraordinary piece entitled Bayamón, Brooklyn y yo (1987), in which she talks about the coming-out process of a Puerto Rican woman in the United States. She equates the lesbian coming-out process with the ethnic coming-out process—in other words, there is a close relationship between gender, sexuality, and ethnic identity. Another important pioneer anthology is Carla Trujillo’s Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. This is an anthology of works of poetry, fiction, and essays that discusses the role of Chicana lesbians in their community. The twenty-four contributors discuss in different forms their relationships and interactions with other women within and outside their community and also with themselves. Carla Trujillo, besides her work as activist and director of the Graduate Diversity Program at the University of California, Berkeley, also has a novel that deals with gay and lesbian themes. In What Night Brings (2004), the protagonist, Marci Cruz, a young girl who knows all her family’s secrets, is attracted to other girls and wishes she could become a boy. Marci struggles with these feelings as she is forced to deal with her alcoholic and abusive father. 511


In recent years, a new generation of Latino and Latina gay and lesbian writers has taken on new forms and new subjects that build upon, deepen, and further complicate the work of the historical figures such as Anzaldúa, Moraga, and Islas. Categories, such as “gay and lesbian” and “Latino and Latina,” have been exploded to include wider expressions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. On one hand, “gay and lesbian” has expanded to now include a number of different groups that had been previously excluded, such as bisexuals, transgenders, and transsexuals. In addition, the term “queer” has emerged, used variously as an umbrella term for all sexually transgressive groups or as a more radical, anti-assimilationist moniker. As regards “Latino and Latina,” recent years have seen a proliferation of ethnicities and national groups that previously had a lesser presence in the U.S. It is important to look at these authors and recognize the ways they are enlarging our conception of what it means to be Latino or Latina and “queer.” Two Puerto Rican gay male authors in particular have opened new horizons for writing about sexuality both on the Island and in the diaspora. Alfredo Villanueva Collado* was born in 1944 in Santurce, Puerto Rico. He has published more than eight volumes of poetry, including La voz de la mujer que llevo dentro (1990, The Voice of the Woman I Carry inside Me) and Pato salvaje (1991, Savage Queer), in addition to numerous short stories and essays. In much of his poetry, Villanueva Collado writes openly about homosexual love while including references to the larger Western tradition of erotic or love poetry. His stated goal is making a space for gay love among Puerto Ricans and in the larger erotic traditions of Western literature. Manuel Ramos Otero,* a contemporary of Villanueva Collado, also was a member of the well known Puerto Rican Generation of the Seventies. Ramos Otero was born in 1948 and died of AIDS in 1990. His radical perspectives on issues of sexuality and writing subjected him to a certain degree of marginalization, both on the island and in the diasporic communities of New York, where he lived from 1968 to 1990. Ramos Otero wrote about all segments of Puerto Rican society— from practitioners of sadomasochism to high society figures, from prostitutes to the powerful—not only in New York, but also on the Island. His work pushed the boundaries of narrative and poetic experimentation, preferring a fluid style to a fixed and unchanging one. He is perhaps best know for his El cuento de la mujer del mar (1979, Story about a Woman from the Sea) and also for his final work on the ravages of AIDS, Invitación al polvo (1991, Invitation to Dust). Both of these authors are recognized for their tireless work to defeat what they saw as the machista domination of Puerto Rican cultural life. Another author who followed the steps of the new generation of Latino writers is the Cuban Italian Rafael Campo,* born in 1964 in Dover, New Jersey. The recurrent themes in his works are the juxtaposition of gay and Latino identity, literature, the art of healing, and health (special attention is given to AIDS). His best known works are The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1994), which won the National Poetry Series Award, What the Body Told (1996), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Poetry, The 512


Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (1997), and The Enemy (2007), a book of poems that has been well received by the critics. His work has appeared in various anthologies as well as in periodicals and on Web sites and National Public Radio. In addition to producing creative work, he teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School, combining the fields of medicine and the humanities. He also works at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, an institution that serves mostly Latinos, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and people with HIV. Jaime Manrique,* a Colombia-born writer (1949) who moved to the United States as a teenager, has made a significant contribution to gay and lesbian Latino and Latina literature with his novels, criticism, and memoirs. His autobiographical novel, Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992), depicts the life of a young Colombian boy, Santiago Martínez (Sammy), who comes to New York City with his mother. The novel discusses the problems Sammy faces after being transported from Bogotá to Times Square, including drugs, violence, adaptation to a new culture, and his relationship with his family and his sexuality. For Sammy conflict exists between being gay and Colombian; through the course of the novel his difficulties are explored as readers witness his evolution as a gay man discovering that it is possible to be gay and Latino at the same time. Manrique’s second novel published in English in the United States, Twilight at the Equator (1997), is a transnational novel that takes places in Colombia, the United States, and Spain. The protagonist is Santiago Martínez, who continues dealing with homophobia and fighting against it. In his most recent book, Eminent Maricones (1999), Manrique takes on an extremely important project, tracing what could be called a genealogy of literary gay men, or maricones, in the United States—a historical tract that explores expressions of queer male sexuality in several Latin American (and one Spanish) authors, all of whom lived for critical periods in the States. Manrique recounts his own interactions with Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas* and Argentinean author Manuel Puig, both of whom he met while they were living in New York. He also examines what he sees as the internalized homophobia and repressed yearnings of Federico García Lorca. Manrique provides us with an important genealogy of U.S. Latino authors that he uses as the foundation for his own holistic acceptance of himself and his many, sometimes conflicting identities. In the same light, Latina lesbian writers have been key players in the growing gay and lesbian literature in the United States. Luz María UmpierreHerrera,* born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1947, moved to the United States in 1974, where she completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College. In her work, Umpierre combines issues of sexual orientation vis-à-vis gender and sexuality, discrimination, cultural shock, class, and ethnicity. Among her most important contributions are her books of poems: Una puertorriqueña en Penna (1979, A Puerto Rican in Pennsylvania/Pain) and The Margarita Poems (1987). In the former, she addresses her complex experience as a Puerto Rican lesbian woman living in the United States and the discrimination she has suffered; the latter, as Julia Alvarez states, is “an invitation to all of us julias and margaritas who 513


are stuck in our towers, our garrets and garitas, to come through the kitchen in la cocina of the poet and join our voices and populate that internal homeland.” Other relevant fiction and poetry contributions are En el país de las maravillas (1990, In Wonderland), which is an expanded version of her first book of poems, and Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes (1995). In addition to her contribution as a writer, she is a devoted human rights activist. Journalist, activist, writer, and translator Achy Obejas* was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956, where she spent the first six years of her life until she moved with her parents to the United States in 1962. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies, such as Conditions, Revista Chicano-Riqueña (Chicano-Rican Review), The Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Noir, The Cuba Reader, Cuba on the Verge, and various other publications. Included among her novels are We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? (1994), Memory Mambo (1996), and Days of Awe (2001). Her last two novels won Lambda Awards for Lesbian Fiction. In most of her works, she writes about public and private identities, focusing particularly on her Cuban, Sephardic, and Lesbian identities. As a journalist, she writes for the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. Another lesbian writer whose work has been pivotal in the development of Latino and Latina gay and lesbian literature is professor, activist, and writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba. In her academic work, fiction, and poetry, Alicia Gaspar de Alba* forcefully addresses questions of gender and sexuality in the border region. In a short collection The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories (1993) and her first novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1998), Gaspar de Alba uses fiction to explore sexuality, ethnicity, and identity. In her recent book, Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders (2005), a Chicana lesbian academic returns to her native El Paso to adopt a baby from across the river in Juárez but quickly becomes embroiled in the wave of violence sweeping the border town, targeting young women. Gaspar de Alba creatively reimagines through her writing many of the same issues first commented upon by Gloría Anzaldúa years earlier. Gay and lesbian Latino and Latina writers have achieved much in recent years, a growing body of scholarship and literary work produced by Latino and Latina writers in the last two decades that builds on the path-opening work of earlier generations. For example, poets such as Stephen Cordova, Francisco Alarcón,* and Eduardo Corral are expanding our conception of Latino and Latina poetry. Queer Latino and Latina performance artists such as Luis Alfaro,* Marga Gómez, Mónica Palacios, Alina Troyano* (Carmelita Tropicana), Paul Bonin-Rodríguez, and Alberto Sandoval have broken new boundaries in the crossroads of theater, writing and performance. A good example is queer Latino writer, poet, performer, and actor Emanuel Xavier (born in Brooklyn, New York in 1971). He is one of the best known representatives of the Neo-Nuyorican* poetry movement. His unique life experience as a hustler, drug dealer, and homeless man who suffered sexual abuse 514


and family rejection have permeated his work and served as an inspiration. His poetry and fiction deal with religion, sexuality, politics, power, gay identity, homophobia, and latinidad (particularly his own heritage background, Nuyorican and Ecuadorian). His opera prima Pier Queen (1997), a collection of poems, shocked and captivated his readers. For this work, he won the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe Grand Slam Championship. Arguably his best work is his novel Christ-Like (1999), which earned him a Lambda Literary Award nomination. Christ-Like is a semi autobiographical novel that uncovers the hard life of gay Latino youths, dealing with sexual abuse, drugs, and religion. His most recent work is a new collection of thirty-five poems under the title Americano (2002). In addition, a new wave of academics, such as José Quiroga, Licia FiolMatta, Juana María Rodríguez, Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, Frances NegrónMuntaner, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, and others have brought a new critical vocabulary to the discussion of texts and social identities. As has been demonstrated in an abbreviated way in this essay, gay and lesbian members of the Latino and Latina community have produced important works of literature that have announced their presence and their diversity—not only in their home spaces but outside in the larger world of politics, arts, and academia. Further Reading Alarcón, Norma, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga, The Sexuality of Latinas (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1989). Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). Anzaldúa, Gloria, “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana” in Versions: Writing by Dykes, Queers & Lesbians, ed. Betsy Warland (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1991: 249–263). Anzaldúa, Gloria E., Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987). Aponte Parés, Luis, et al., “Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 2007). Cruz Malavé, Arnaldo, and Martin Manalansan, IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York: New York University Press, 2002). DiFranco, Maria, “Poetic Dissidence: An Interview with Luz Maria Umpierre” MELUS Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter 2002): 137–154. Epps, Brad, Keja Valens, and Bill Johnson González, eds., Passing Lines: Sexuality and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and Harvard University Press, 2005). Foster, David William, ed., Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Identities (New York: Garland, 1999). Pérez, Emma, “Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard” Frontiers (2003): 122–131. Ramos, Juanita, Compañeras: Latina Lesbians. An Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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Rechy, John, “A Substantial Artist” John Rechy Official Website (Sep. 15, 2006) (www.johnrechy.com/bio). Saldívar, José David, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Summers, Claude J., ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995). Trujillo, Carla, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991).

Guillermo de los Reyes Heredia and John Pluecher Gil, Lydia M. (1970–). Born on November 12, 1970, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, to Cuban immigrant parents, Lydia M. Gil is a teacher and writer. She obtained her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Texas (1999) and her master’s degree in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo (1984). She also obtained a B.A. in French and West European studies from American University (1990). Her scholarly publications deal with children’s literature and Spanish American writers of Jewish ancestry. Her first published book, La parranda de Mimi/Mimi’s Parranda (2007), is a tale that deals with a young girl experiencing culture conflict and confusion about holidays celebrated in the United States and Puerto Rico; the story ends with a wonderful Latino-style fiesta for all the school children. Since 2006, she has been director of foreign languages at the University of Denver. In addition, she has authored numerous cultural articles syndicated by Spain’s EFE news service. Further Reading Figueredo, Danilo, ed., Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Gilb, Dagoberto (1950–). Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican mother and an Irish American father, Gilb earned a B.A. (1973) and an M.A. (1976) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Until becoming an established writer, Gilb worked as a carpenter, which has lent his fiction a common-man perspective. It was not until the mid-1980s that Gilb’s stories began to garner the attention of critics and academics for their fine craft and down-to-earth attitude. After publishing noteworthy short-story collections in the 1990s, Gilb began taking visiting professorships in creative writing departments at universities and in 1997 became a tenured associate professor at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Gilb’s short story collections include Winners on the Pass Line (1985), The Magic of Blood (1993), and Woodcuts of Women (2001). In 2004, he published a volume of essays, Gritos (Shouts), that often explore what it was like growing up as a mixed-race child in Los Angeles, as well as other themes of Mexican American life. In 1994, Gilb published his first novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña. In 2007, he departed somewhat 516

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from the previous completely serious tone of his stories and novel to publish The Flowers, a novel focusing on a wide variety of characters living in and around the Flores Apartment and satirizing and poking fun at an array of racial prejudices held by them. Some of these books have been translated to French, German, Italian, and Japanese, as well as being reprinted in the United Kingdom and Australia. Gilb’s awards include the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (1994), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1992). Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (The Mexican American Experience) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Gillow y Zavalza, Eulogio (1844– 1922). Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza, a Catholic priest who rose to become the archbishop of Oaxaca, was also an important memoirist and religious historian. Among his writings is Apuntes históricos (1899, Historical Notes), but his most noteworthy work is his Reminiscencias del Ilmo. y Rmo. Sr. Dr. D. Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza, Arzobispo de Antequera (Oaxaca) (1920, Reminiscences of the Illustrious and Most Reverend Dr. Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza, Archbiship of Antequera [Oaxaca]), which he dictated while in exile in Los Angeles. Like much of the writing of Mexican political and religious expatriates, Gillow’s memoir contains vitriolic attacks on the liberal reforms and persecution of the Church during the Mexican Revolution. During the Revolution, a large representation of the Catholic hierarchy from Mexico took refuge in the southwestern United States. Gillow was born in Puebla, Mexico, on March 1, 1844, the son of an Englishman and a Spanish marquesa. At the age of ten, he accompanied his father to England to Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza’s memoir. continue his early education and perfect his English; he later studied at Stoneyhurst College, the training ground for many bishops and Catholic officials. Still later, he graduated from the Gregorian University in Rome and returned to 517

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Mexico in 1865 to function as a priest; that same year, he was ordained in Puebla. He soon moved to Mexico City, where his father integrated him into the society of nobles who were ruling the country under Emperor Maximilian. By the time the empire was brought down, Gillow was studying for his doctorate at La Sapienza in Rome, where he also became an attendant of the Pope and, in time, a judge on the Supreme Papal Tribunal. Gillow returned to Mexico in 1877 and ten years later became the bishop of Oaxaca. Even before his investiture, however, he became a close associate of dictator Porfirio Díaz and participated in the leader’s ventures for modernizing Mexico and introducing European technology and culture. In 1891, Gillow became Archbishop of Oaxaca, an office that he took with him into exile, first in San Antonio and ultimately in Los Angeles. He died on May 18, 1922, in Ejutla, Oaxaca, while still serving as the administrator of Saint Vincent Mission in Los Angeles. Further Reading Meyer, Jean A., The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State 1926–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

Nicolás Kanellos Girona, Julio (1914–2002). Julio Girona was born in Manzanillo, Cuba, a small city in Oriente, the easternmost province of the country at the time, on December 29, 1914. In 1927, at the age of twelve, he was introduced to artistic circles of the capital as a very talented and promising young cartoonist, by the outstanding Cuban publisher and graphic artist Conrado Massaguer. After his family settled in Havana (1929), he soon entered San Alejandro Art Academy, where he studied sculpture, alongside the well-known artist José Gómez Sicre, and then took part in several exhibitions. Girona first arrived in the United States in 1937, after having spent more than three years in Europe studying sculpture with artists in Paris and other cities, as part of an academic scholarship he had received from the Cuban Ministry of Education (1934). According to Girona, his first “professional” job in the United States was his drawing of political cartoons for the Hispanic antifascist daily La Voz (The Voice) in New York from 1937 to 1939, which earned him an invitation as “Guest of Honor” at the first Congress of American Artists, held in New York City, in 1937. After the fall of the Spanish Republic (1939), feeling defeated himself, he returned to Cuba and later traveled to Mexico City for a short and professionally unsuccessful stay that convinced him to return to New York City early in 1941. Girona then earned a living doing odd jobs and continued drawing and working on his sculptures. Shortly afterward, while settled in Brooklyn at the old Ovington Studios building on Fulton Street, he married his German classmate from Havana’s art school, Ilse Erythropel, and, in 1943, was finally drafted by the American Army because of his previous application as a volunteer because of his “antifascist conviction, and a feeling of personal guilt for not participating in the Spanish Civil War, as many of his countrymen.” 518

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While at the war front, Girona continued drawing—soldiers, prisoners, women—creating a small collection that has been partly exhibited at the Centro Internacional de Prensa (International Press Center) in Havana in 1998 as “Dibujos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial” (1943–1946, Drawings from the Second World War); these were published in Barcelona as Dibujos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial: 1943–1946 (2000). But it was not until after being discharged that he resumed what he then called “serious” art and entered the professional artistic world by taking advantage of a scholarship program for veterans. He attended Morris Kantor’s oil painting class at the Art Students’ League and eventually became an “American artist” and part of the 1950s art movement in the United States: abstract expressionism. For the rest of his life he was a painter, holding his first personal exhibition in Manhattan at Artist’s Gallery, in 1953, and his last in Havana, at Galería L, in 2001. His successful artistic work earned him several prizes and recognitions during these years, both in the United States and in Cuba. When Girona was unable to keep up a steady artistic production because of his failing eyesight, he decided to take up writing. First he penned testimonies, memoirs, and then poetry: Seis horas y más (1990, Six Hours and More), Música barroca (1992, Baroque Music), Memorias sin título (1994, Untitled Memoirs)— all of which were published in Havana—and La corbata roja (1996, The Red Necktie), which was published in Spain. All of these were remembrances of his best personal and professional years in New York City and New Jersey, his main places of residence. Seis horas y más is entirely dedicated to his World War II experiences, starting with his recruitment in Brooklyn, followed by his training at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey; Fort Belvoir, Virginia; Youngstown, Ohio; and New York, shipping out on the “Queen Mary.” Later in Europe, the tale continues through his deployment in England, France, and finally Krefeld, Germany, mainly in rear-guard companies (Group 555). There are no references to battlefields or heroic actions in this book; instead, the author gives vivid testimony of accounts and circumstances he faced daily in his barracks, including sketches of ordinary GIs in which he documents their psychology and multiple social and ethnic origins. In La corbata roja, he returns to this subject and offers a very personal insight into his real status in this Army and that of Hispanics in general: MI NOMBRE Mi nombre, en la pizarra, era siempre el primero para la guardia y la cocina, o una tarea que todos temían. Mi nombre, como González, Rodríguez o Romero, me señalaba como material de segunda, siempre disponible. (1996:123)

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MY NAME My name, on the blackboard, Was always the first For guard duty or mess hall, Or whatever job others feared. My name, the same as González’s, Rodríguez’s or Romero’s, Designated me as second-class And always available.

Memorias sin título follows the structure and the unique literary style Girona adopted practically at the end of his life (1990–1996): a highly descriptive prose that transmits a certain sense and intention of modeling reality with words, as if the story were one of his sculptures, caressed by sight. Also characteristic is an emotional approach towards facts that includes the very typical Cuban choteo— a general attitude in Cuban verbal culture and literature that consists of making fun of the most difficult situations encountered in life, even of oneself, as a way of dealing with reality. All of this is also present in his Memorias . . ., a book in which the author recalls men and women he met—and who impressed him— during his entire life in Manzanillo, Europe, New York, and Havana. Girona describes in detail the atmosphere and circumstances of each acquaintance: relatives, friends, models, artists, neighbors, or occasional encounters. La Corbata roja (1996), his last book, is a sort of résumé of his life: remembrances, nostalgia, recurrences, solitudes . . . Nevertheless, it is penetrating in its observation, evaluation, and interpretation of new realities in matters involving his long-lived Cuban identity in the United States: CARTAS DE U.S.A. Trabajé en fábricas a cuarenta centavos la hora en Nueva York. Fui tres años soldado en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Conocí el miedo, conocí los cañonazos y los bombardeos Conocí la nieve y el frío. Al regreso viví en Brooklyn. Ilse bañaba a las niñas en el fregadero de la cocina. En el invierno poníamos la mantequilla, la carne, la leche, la cerveza y la Coca-Cola

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en la ventana. Así vivimos siete años. Ahora, según las cartas, a los tres días de llegar a Miami o Nueva York, tienen los cubanos un buen trabajo, casa, automóvil y televisor. Brooklyn (1996:156) LETTERS FROM THE USA I worked in factories, Forty cents an hour, In New York. For three years, I was a soldier In the Second World War. I learned about fear And cannon blasts And bombs. I learned about snow And the cold. On returning, I lived in Brooklyn. Ilse was bathing the girls In the kitchen sink. In the winter, We kept the butter, the meat, The milk, the beer, and the Coca-Cola Outside the window. That’s how we lived For seven years. Today, according to letters, Within three days upon Arriving at Miami or New York, Cubans have A good job, a home, a car And a TV set.

Julio Girona lived more than six decades in the United States, where he raised a family and was dragged into the mainstream of American art as an “American artist.” Yet, at the end of his life, he lived, acted, spoke, wrote, felt, and recognized himself as nothing else but “Cuban.” Girona died in Havana on December 24, 2002. Further Reading Girona, Julio, Café frente al mar (Havana: Ed. Letras Cubanas, 2000).

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Hernández, Orlando, “Girona antifascista” in Palabras en el catálogo de la muestra de caricaturas de Julio Girona (1937–1939) (San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba: Museo del Humor, 1990). Suárez Díaz, Ana, “‘Andar y desandar hacia la verdad.’ Entrevista al pintor cubano Julio Girona” Revolución y Cultura Vol. 36, No. 1 (Feb. 1997): 32–39.

Ana Suárez

Glickman, Nora (1944–). Born in La Pampa, Argentina, to Eastern European parents, and educated in Israel, England and the United States, Nora Glickman is an indefatigable scholar, educator, playwright, fiction writer, and editor. She earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and is currently a professor of Spanish at Queens College–CUNY, in New York, where she teaches literature, film, and creative writing, as well as Jewish studies. Glickman is one of few Latina/Latin American women writers who employ a combination of linguistic and geographic multipositionality (Spanish, English, Yiddish, and Hebrew), autobiography, narrative and theatrical techniques, and history to create a sort of literary homeland and redefine diaspora and exile for herself and others. As a scholar, she has written, edited, and coedited extensively about Latin American and Latin American Jewish literature in books such as Leib Malach y la trata de blancas (translated from Yiddish in 1984 as Leib Malach and White Slavery), Argentine Jewish Writers: Critical Essays (1993), Tradition and Innovation: Reflections on Latin American Jewish Writings (1993), Argentine Jewish Theatre: A Critical Anthology (1994), A Critical Anthology of Argentine Drama (1996), The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (1999), and Bridging Continents: Cinematic and Literary Representations of Spanish and Latin American Writings (2005), which offers an often neglected but very useful trans-Atlantic perspective on the triangulation of film, literature, and culture in the Spanish-speaking world. She has also published scholarly articles in journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna (Modern Hispanic Review), Hispamérica, Chasqui, and Revista Iberoamericana (Ibero-American Review). Her published and performed plays, which have been staged in the United States, Ireland, Belgium, Israel, Mexico, and Canada, include the collection Teatro de Nora Glickman: “Un dia en Nueva York,” “Noticias de suburbio,” “Liturgias” (2000, The Theater of Nora Glickman: “A Day in New York,” “News from the Suburbs,” “Liturgies”), “Una tal Raquel” (1999, Raquel Somebody), and “Dos Charlottes” (2004, Two Charlottes), which has been performed in Canada, the United States and Europe. In 2005, she was also included in the New Play Commission of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s publication 9 Contemporary Jewish Plays. Her first play, “Suburban News,” won the Jerome Foundation Drama Award in 1993 and was produced at the Theatre for the New City in New York in 1994. Her play “A Day in New York” was produced by the Bridge Theatre of Miami in 1997 and was on tour with the 522

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Broadway star Zohra Lampert. Another play, “Liturgies,” was performed the summer of 1998 at the International Students Theatre Festival in Jerusalem. Glickman has also published short story collections, among them Uno de sus Juanes (2005, One of Her Johns), Mujeres, Memorias, Malogros (1991, Women, Memories, Failures), and Puerta entre abierta (2004, Half Open Door). Her stories and articles have also appeared in numerous publications, such as In Other Words: Literature by Latinas in the United States (1994) and Tropical Synagogues (1994), and in journals, among them Chasqui, OLLANTAY,* La noticia (The News), Shalom, Alba de América (American Dawn), and La revista bilingue: The Bilingual Review. Further Reading Bausset-Orcutt, Mónica, “Nora Glickman: Diaspora and Identity in Liturgies and Blanca Días” Yiddish Vol. 12, No. 4 (2001): 98–107. Nora Glickman. Cordones-Cook, Juanamaría, “Liturgias: Máscaras de Identidad Sefardita” Latin American Theatre Review Vol. 37, No. 1 (Fall 2003): 105–116. Schneider, Judith Morganroth, “Nuevas mestizas: Hibridismo y Feminismo en el Teatro de Nora Glickman” Alba de América: Revista Literaria Vol. 21, Nos. 39–40 (July 2002): 181–190. Weingarten, Laura Suzanne, “Homelands in Exile: Three Contemporary Latin American Jewish Women Writers Create a Literary Homeland” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences Vol. 66, No. 6 (Dec. 2005): 2235.

Kenya Dworkin y Méndez Goldemberg, Isaac (1945–). Born on November 15, 1945, in Chepén, Peru, to a Russian Jewish father and a Peruvian mother, Goldemberg was raised until the age of eight by his Catholic mother. However, in 1953, he went to live with his father, attended a Jewish school, and became immersed in the Jewish metropolitan culture of Lima. At age seventeen, he went to Israel and lived in a kibbutz for almost two years. After marrying a North American and having a child, Goldemberg immigrated to the United States in 1964 and 523

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developed into a leading voice of Hispanic immigrant writers as well as of Hispanic Jewish literature. He has been able to develop his literary career while earning a living as a distinguished professor of humanities at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He has also served as director of the Latin American Writers Institute and editor of the Hostos Review, an international journal of culture. As his own biography demonstrates, one of Goldemberg’s major themes is multiple identities or multiple cultural backgrounds; faced with the challenges of identity, Goldemberg searches for an ever-illusive spiritual, if not, physical home. These themes are explored in his novels—The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner (1976, translated by Robert S. Picciotto in 1999), Tiempo al tiempo; o, La conversión (1983, Time for Time, or The Conversion), and En el nombre del padre/The Name of the Father (2002)—as well as in his poetry collections: Tiempo de silencio (1970, Time of Silence), De Chepén a La Habana (1973, From Chepén to Havana), Homre de paso/Just Passing Through (1981, translated by David Unger*), La vida al contado (1991, Life Paid in Full), Cuerpo del amor (2000, Body of Love), Las cuentas y los inventarios (2000, The Accounts and the Inventory), Peruvian Blues (2001), Los autorretratos y las máscaras (2002, SelfPortraits and Masks), El amor y los sueños (2003, Love and Dreams), Crónicas del exilio (2003, Chronicles of Exile), and Los Cementerios Reales (2004, The Royal Cemeteries). He has also published two plays: Hotel AmeriKaKa (2000, AmeriCaCa Hotel) and Golpe de gracia: farsa en un acto (2003, Coup de Gras: A Farce in One Act). The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner was chosen by the National Yiddish Book Center of the United States as one of the best 100 Jewish works of the last 150 years. Further Reading Dolan, Maureen, ed., Crossing Cultures in Isaac Goldemberg’s Works (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 2003). Sosnowski, Saúl, Isaac Goldemberg: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation (Culver City, CA: Antylo Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Goldman, Francisco (1954–). The son of a Guatemalan mother and an American Jewish father, Francisco Goldman was born in Boston in 1954. He grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, and Guatemala City, but English is clearly his first and preferred language. Goldman has been able to enter elite establishment worlds where few Latinos have been accepted, such as the pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Sunday New York Times Magazine, with his elegant prose style and knowledge of Latin America. A 1997 graduate of the University of Michigan, Goldman has made a living by writing awardwinning novels, placing essays and journalistic pieces in magazines and teaching creative writing at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he holds the Allan K. Smith Chair in literature. In response to his creative writing, Newsweek declared him “one of the most exciting and ambitious novelists currently explor524

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ing the form.” His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. As a detective novel, it follows American Roger Graetz to Guatemala City in his effort to solve the mystery of the murder of his former housekeeper; on another level, the novel is a love story and a tale about a boy growing up in two cultures. His second novel, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; based on a true story, it is the tale of fifteen Central American men who make their way to New York to work on a rusting old ship in dry dock. His third, The Divine Husband (2004), is a historical novel that follows José Martí* from New York to Central America and explores his romantic relationship with a nun amidst political intrigue and turbulence. Goldman’s latest book, his first nonfiction work, is The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (2007), based on the assassination of human rights leader Bishop John Gerardi in Guatemala. The extensively researched book reveals the U.S. role in the Central American civil wars and the legacy of violence and corruption; it is believed Gerardi was assassinated because he published a multi-volume report on the genocide committed by the armed forces in Guatemala. His novels have been published in ten languages. In 1998, Goldman was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and in 2000–2001 was a fellow of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Further Reading Menton, Seymour, “Los Senores Presidentes y Los Guerrilleros: The New and the Old Guatemalan Novel (1976–1982)” Latin American Research Review Vol. 19, No. 2 (1984): 93–117. Mondragón, Amelia, Cambios estéticos y nuevos proyectos culturales en Centro América (Washington, D.C.: Literal Books, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Gómez Peña, Guillermo (1955–). Interdisciplinary artist and writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City. He immigrated to the United States in 1978, received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the California Institute for the Arts, in 1981 and 1983, respectively, and became the most renowned experimenter with transculturalism and transnationalism* through the arts. An internationally renowned “performance artist” who has produced multimedia “happenings” and “installations” everywhere from Austria to Australia, Gómez-Peña is also the author of essays, poetry, and theater that often form a part of those happenings and installations but that also stand alone in published venues. He has published the following volumes of his diverse essays, scripts, poetry, and drama: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (1997), The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century (1996, winner of the American Book Award), Warrior for Gringostroika (1994), and Temple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santos (1997), which serves more as documentation of a performance piece rather than conventional discursive 525

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writing, Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol (2000, SpanishEnglish Codex: From Columbus to the Border Patrol), Ethni-Techno (2000), El Mexterminator: Antropologia inversa de un performancero postmexicano (2002, Mexterminator: Inverse Anthropology of a Post-Mexican Performer), and Bitácora del cruce (2004, Logbook of the Crossing). In 1989, Gómez-Peña was the recipient of the Prix de la Parole (Prize for the Word) at the International Theatre of the Americas (Montreal). In 1991, he became one of the very few Latinos to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (1991). He has performed and exhibited his work internationally, including at the 1992 Sydney Biennale, the 1993 Whitney Biennale, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Gómez-Peña was also the editor of the experimental arts magazine The Broken Line/La Línea Quebrada (1985–1990) and was a founding member of the Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (1985–1990). In all of his work, Gómez-Peña challenges the concept of national culture, as well as American or Mexican identity. Adopting the persona of a trickster, GómezPeña has become the most outspoken advocate of hybridization as a solution for the national, ethnic, and racial conflicts of our time. Acknowledging that people always lead hybrid lives of multiple social identities, Gómez-Peña uses satire, humor, and shock to force readers and spectators to identify and embrace all the borders they cross in daily life, understanding their multiple identities. Further Reading Cutter, Martha J., Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Davis, Mike, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the Big City (New York: Verso, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez

Gonzales, Ambrose Elliot (1857–1926). Short-story writer and humorist Ambrose Elliot Gonzales’s roots go back to the early nineteenth century to the days of support for the U.S. purchase of Cuba and the island’s integration as a southern slave state. His father was General Ambrosio José Gonzales, a Cuban revolutionary leader who moved to South Carolina, married wealthy Harriet Rutledge, the daughter of a state senator and rice plantation owner. Thus Ambrose Elliot Gonzales was initially raised in that genteel class of landed gentry, very much at the heart of the system of slavery, which seceded from the Union. But after the Civil War was over, the family became impoverished, and Ambrosio José Gonzales took his family to Cuba in 1869. Harriet contracted yellow fever and died, after which her husband returned with his six children to his deceased wife’s family, where the children’s maternal grandmother subsequently cared for them. In 1891, Ambrose and his brother Narciso Gener Gonzales founded the outspoken The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. (The muckraking of the newspaper resulted in a lame-duck governor shooting Narciso to death across the street from the state house in 1901, leaving Ambrose to 526

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manage the newspaper alone until his own death.) In the newspaper Ambrose Gonzales published his first sketches of southern life, often depicting the dialect of the Gullah people of the coast. It seems that Gonzales had picked up the dialect from the slaves and, later, freedmen when he was a child on the family’s rice plantation. Gonzales was later able to compile in books many of the stories he published in periodicals in The Black Border (1922), The Captain: Stories of the Black Border (1924), With Aesop Along the Black Border (1924), and Laguerre: A Gascon of the Black Border (1924). Today, professional linguists question the veracity and quality of Gonzales’ representation of the Gullah language; the stories are also often too racist for modern tastes. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, with Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: Origins to 1960 (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Gonzales, Oscar (?–). Honduran poet and writer Oscar Gonzales was born and raised in the port city of Puerto Cortés, the son of a union organizer who was persecuted by the military government of his country. In Puerto Cortés, he attended a bilingual school and became fluent in English. This allowed him to win a scholarship to the New England Boarding School in Connecticut at age fourteen. From there, he went on to study at Yale University. Gonzales earned a B.A. in Latin American Studies and a combined B.A./M.A. in Latin American literature at Yale. As an undergraduate, he won Yale’s Theron Rockwell Field Prize for his poetry manuscript, “Donde el Plomo Flota” (Where Lead Floats), in which he already exhibited the traits that would characterize his mature verse: precise craftsmanship, eroticism, and a yearning for liberty while denouncing oppression and injustice. Donde el plomo flota was subsequently published as a thirty-five-page long, highly autobiographical poem in book form in 1994. His second book, Amada en Amado transformada (1995, The Beloved Female Transformed into the Beloved Male), takes its title from the Bible’s “Song of Songs” and reveals the influence of the Spanish mystic poet St. John of the Cross in its expression of love for the motherland, for a female lover, or even for poetry itself. In Gonzales’s bilingual Central America in My Heart (2007) the poet explores the theme of exile* and injustice as well as the constant in his lyric: love. Gonzales is also a nonfiction writer who advocates rights and humane treatment of the poor and marginalized in Latin America. In these essays and books, Gonzales speaks very much as a social scientist well versed in agricultural, economics, and political science research. Gonzales is currently working on issues related to the reconstruction of Gulf Coast communities after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Further Reading Carr, Dorothy A., Central American and Caribbean Literature (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005).


Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky”

Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky” (1928–2005). Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales was born on June 18, 1928, in a Denver barrio to parents who were seasonal farm workers. Because of the instability of migrant work, Gonzales received both formal and informal education. Gonzales used boxing to get out of the barrio, becoming the third-ranked featherweight in the world. Eventually, he quit boxing and became a successful businessman, political leader, and director of poverty programs. Politics frustrated Gonzales, who soon ended his affiliation with the Democratic Party. As an alternative, he established the Crusade for Justice, a community service organization. Working with the Crusade for Justice, Gonzales helped organize high school walkouts, demonstrations against police discrimination, legal battles to protect Mexican American civil rights, and protests against the Vietnam War. In 1968, Gonzales and Reies López Tijerina led the Mexican American component of the Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C. At the nation’s capital, the efforts by African Americans to gain civil rights and achieve self-sufficiency greatly impressed him. There, Gonzales issued “El Plan del Barrio,” a proclamation that mapped out separate public housing for Chicanos, bilingual education, barrio economic development, and restitution for land that had been taken from hispanos in Colorado and New Mexico. To achieve these goals, Gonzales suggested a Congress of Aztlán. Gonzales also organized annual Chicano Youth Liberation conferences that sought to cultivate a national sense of cultural solidarity and to work toward self-determination. The first such conference resulted in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán* (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), a document that outlined the concept of ethnic nationalism for liberation. The Chicano Youth Liberation conferences continued to refine these ideas. Gonzales authored the famous and influential epic poem, I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín, which weaves myth, memory, and hope as a basis for a Chicano national identity. The poem was reprinted in Mexican American neighborhood newspapers across the Southwest, recited repeatedly at activist meetings, and made into a film produced by El Teatro Campesino and recited by Luis Valdez,* which made it one of the best-known pieces of Chicano literature during and after the Chicano Movement.* It thus helped to reinforce the Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales rallying a crowd. 528

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terms of Chicano nationalism* that the conferences and the various “plans” had developed. Gonzales has stated, “Nationalism exists . . . but until now, it hasn’t been formed into an image people can see. Until now it has been a dream. . . . Nationalism is the key to our people liberating themselves. I am a revolutionary . . . because erecting life amid death is a revolutionary act. . . . We are an awakening people, an emerging nation, a new breed.” During the Chicano Movement, Gonzales was also a prolific poet as well as a playwright whose plays were produced at the Crusade for Justice and elsewhere. Such plays as The Revolutionist and A Cross for Maclovio (1966–1967) were an early call to militancy and nationalism for Chicanos. Gonzales’s political and inspirational speeches can also be considered in the body of Chicano literature. On April 12, 2005, Gonzales died of heart failure. Further Reading Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” Message to Aztlán (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001). Marín, Christine, A Spokesman of the Mexican American Movement: Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Fight for Chicano Liberation, 1966–1972 (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1977).

F. Arturo Rosales González, Adalberto Elías. See Elías González, Adalberto González, Celedonio (1923–). Celedonio González has been known as “el cronista de la diaspora” (the chronicler of the Cuban diaspora, or flight from Cuba). Of all of the Cuban exile novelists, he is the one who has turned his attention most to the trials, tribulations, and successes of the Cuban refugees and their children in the United States. Born on September 9, 1923, in the small town of La Esperanza in central Cuba, González began his education in the neighboring city of Santa Clara at a Catholic school and later graduated from a Protestant high school in the city of Cárdenas. Upon returning to La Esperanza he began working in his family’s farming enterprises, which he eventually came to manage. He was a supporter of progressive causes and of Castro’s revolution, but by 1960 had become disillusioned with the revolution and was imprisoned for two months as a counterrevolutionary. Upon his release, he immigrated to the United States with his wife and children. In Miami he eked out a living at a number of odd jobs. In 1965, he and his family resettled in Chicago in search of a better living. It was there that he began writing, but it was not until his return to Miami at age forty-one that he wrote his first successful novel, Los primos (1971, The Cousins), a mirror of Cuban life in Miami during the 1960s. The same year, his short stories depicting the loneliness of Cuban exile life in the United States, La soledad es una amiga que vendrá (Solitude Is a Friend Who Will Come), were published in book form. His novel Los cuatro embajadores (1973, The Four Ambassadors) criticizes American capitalism and the dehumanization of American life. His greatest work to date is his El espesor del pellejo de un gato ya cadáver (1978, The 529

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Thickness of Skin of a Dead Cat), a call for Cubans to give up their dreams of returning to the island of their birth and to make the best of life in the United States. González’s short stories also deal with American life, often from the vantage point of the Cuban laboring classes and small-scale shopkeepers. Further Reading Fernández, José B., “Celedonio González” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos González, Genaro (1949–). Genaro González was born on December 28, 1949, in McAllen, Texas. The son of migrant farm workers, González was exposed since his childhood to the hardships of toiling in the fields and working in the agricultural packing sheds. But young González soon demonstrated academic skills, becoming a top student, which earned him a scholarship to Pan American College. There, González became active in the Chicano Movement and penned his first literary efforts, including the short story “Un hijo del sol” (A Child of the Sun), which brought him recognition as a promising young writer. Worried about a school investigation of his involvement with the Chicano Movement, González decided to transfer to Pomona College in California, although he was still active in Texas politics: in 1972, he worked on the gubernatorial camGenaro González. paign of the La Raza Unida Party but left the organization the following year because of personal and political conflicts. After his graduation, González pursued degrees in social psychology and personality at the University of California, Riverside and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, receiving both an M.S. and a Ph.D. His creative writing continued during that time, and he published several short stories while working on the manuscript of a novel, which he completed in 1982. From 1982 until 1985, González lived in Puebla, Mexico, where he taught at the Universidad de Las Américas and conducted research on earthquake victims. Shortly after returning from Mexico, his edited manuscript was accepted for publication by Arte Público Press,* which released it in 1988 as Rainbow’s End. The novel focuses on Heraclio Cavazos, a Mexican immigrant, and his family, depicting life and death on the U.S.–Mexico border for a period of several generations. Border life and culture, the migratory cycle, and the acculturation of the younger generations are but some of the major themes in this novel, which is full of humor and pathos. Three years later, González published a collection of short stories entitled Only Sons. The title is suggestive of Ivan Turgenev’s classic Fathers and Sons, and the book does address some of the same generational conflicts that the Russian explored. González’s ability to depict difficult father–son relationships and an overall sense of orphanhood is enriched by autobiographical insights and by his professional training as a psychologist. 530

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Interestingly, some of the stories include characters from Rainbow’s End, thus suggesting their genesis as part of the original manuscript of the novel. González’s literary output to date includes a second novel, The Quixote Cult, published in 1998. González’s acerbic sense of humor, already visible in Rainbow’s End and in Only Sons, is central to this literary look back into the Chicano Movement* period. Building on his own experiences as a militant and as a college student, González sets out to counter the official record on the Movement. As the novel puts it, “Movements aren’t quite how history books paint them. Most accounts give you the big picture—leaders and events—but leave out the everyday people and routines” (32). Overall, González’s writings are most notable for his talent for characterization, psychological complexity, and original—quite often humorous—insights into Chicano life and history. González is presently a professor of cross-cultural psychology at the University of Texas–Pan American. Further Reading Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., “Genaro González” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 115–118).

Manuel Martín-Rodríguez González, José Luis (1926–1996). José Luis González, Puerto Rico’s greatest fiction writer, was born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, to a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother. The family migrated to Puerto Rico when González was four. He was raised and educated on the island. Before graduating from the University of Puerto Rico in 1946, he had already published two collections of stories, the second of which, Cinco cuentos de sangre (1945, Five Bloody Tales), won the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña Prize (Puerto Rican Literature Prize). After graduating, González moved to New York City and attended the graduate New School for Social Research. During this time he became involved in the Puerto Rican community and with writer Jesús Colón, whose small press published one of González’s books. In 1948, González returned to Puerto Rico and became politically active in the socialist and independence movements, publishing El hombre en la calle (The Man on the Street), which protested the oppression of the urban poor in Puerto Rico. In 1950, González published his famous novel Paisa, a poetic but realistic portrayal of Puerto Rican life in New York City. In 1953, González renounced his American citizenship in protest of American colonialism and moved to Mexico, José Luis González. 531

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where he spent the rest of his life, writing and working with some of the leading figures in Latin American fiction. In 1972, González published his short novel Mambrú se fue a la Guerra (Mambrú Went to War), a remarkable piece of anti-war fiction. In 1978, he became the first Puerto Rican novelist and short-story writer to win Mexico’s most prestigious literary award, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Fiction, for his novel Balada de otro tiempo (1978, Ballad of Another Time), which is set to the background of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico during the Spanish American War. However, Paisa and the short story collection En Nueva York y otras desgracias (1973, In New York and Other Disgraces) remain his most famous works from the perspective of Hispanic immigration to the United States. Further Reading Flores, Juan, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos González, Jovita (1899–1983). Jovita González is considered one of the pioneers of Mexican American creative writing in English. Born in Roma, a small border town in South Texas, in 1899 (some sources say 1904), González centered her writing not only around the social and political struggles of her people and their customs but also on the injustices suffered by them as a result of AngloSaxon rule. Jovita González was the daughter of Jacobo González Rodríguez, the son of a long line of artisans and educators, and Severina Guerra Barrera, a descendant of a family of settlers under the command of José de Escandón in the colonization of Nuevo Santander, a province of New Spain that extended into what is today southern Texas. As a reward for his colonizing efforts, her greatgrandfather received a vast land grant from King Charles V of Spain. González received her B.A. in history and Spanish education from Our Lady of the Lake College in San Antonio, Texas, in 1927. Shortly after graduation, she became a full-time teacher at Saint Mary’s Hall in San Antonio. After teaching for several years, she did post-graduate work and received her master’s in art from the University of Texas in 1930. As part of her graduate work, González researched the history and customs of the people that lived in South Texas along the Mexican border. This research became her graduate thesis: Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties. Her research was considered a serious study that carefully documented the customs and traditions of the Hispanic people along the southern border. González’s undergraduate and graduate degrees gave her an unprecedented status among women of that time and within the Hispanic community; minorities comprised only a small number of the college population in the United States. Furthermore, her scholarly aspirations and achievements were rare and unusual in an era almost completely dominated by males. Within academic, political, and social circles, Jovita González played an important role. While at the University of Texas at Austin, she met J. Frank 532

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Dobie, a prominent figure in the university and an active member of the Texas Folk-Lore Society, an institution of popular prestige since the twentieth century. The Texas Folk-Lore Society was comprised of folklore teachers and professionals who found a perfect venue for publishing rescued works and preserving oral literature. With Dobie’s support and motivation, González was successful in launching a lengthy and laborious investigation of the folklore of the Hispanic population in Texas and produced a series of works that she would later present at the society’s meetings. González eventually became vice-president—and later president—of the society. González also participated in LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) as president and vice president. LULAC involved itself in forming an ideology among Mexican Americans that facilitated the understanding of their rights as North American citizens and aided in confronting socioeconomic and political problems. As a result of her thesis, and with the assistance, inspiration, and recommendation of her mentor, Frank Dobie, Jovita González was awarded a Rockefeller grant in 1934 to investigate South Texas culture. Consequently, González collected enough material to form the basis for two novels that remained unpublished for many years: Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996), also an ethnographic literary work on the customs and traditions of South Texas, and Dew on the Thorn (1997), a series of short, interwoven folkloric stories that she published first independently in magazines and literary anthologies. In 1935, Jovita González married Edmundo Mireles, a teacher. While living in Del Rio, Texas, she taught English at San Felipe High School; Edmundo became a principal at that same school. With her husband, González worked in public education until they moved in 1939 from Del Rio to Corpus Christi. Once married, González limited the time she spent writing so that she could devote time to being a wife and a public-school teacher. She and her husband published textbooks for use in teaching Spanish language, a subject she taught along with Texas history until her retirement from W.B. Ray High School in 1966. Although González published several essays and short stories in religious magazines such as San Antonio’s Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate and in LULAC News, Southwest Review, and literary anthologies of the Texas FolkLore Society, many of her manuscripts have been recently salvaged from oblivion, and some of them published in various venues. In her two novels, Dew on the Thorn and Caballero: A Historical Novel, Jovita González provided a historical framework that demonstrates to the reader the struggle of her people— “mi gente,” as she called them—to defend their rights as U.S. citizens. Dew on the Thorn is a novel about the cultural, political, and social patterns of the first Hispanic people who lived in the region that later became Texas. The plot, fraught with flashbacks and digressions of legends and stories she had already compiled, unfolds in a context characterized by historical changes faced by the Hispano-Mexican ancestors who settled in Texas in the 1700s. González tells of the relative autonomy and tranquility of their descendants, even when the 533

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Spanish government had them expelled after the war for Mexican independence broke out in 1810. She narrates in Dew on the Thorn the first real crisis in the lives of her ancestors: the U.S. invasion and its imposition of foreign laws and government. In Caballero: A Historical Novel, set in the 1840s, González narrates the military conflicts and political treaties that forced Mexico to surrender its northern territory. Caballero illustrates the new historical reality that the Texans suffered immediately when they experienced brutal change enforced by an oppressive government. The other literary works of Jovita González, comprising short stories and essays, continue her interest in the culture and folklore of Texas but also portray the climate of discrimination, oppression, and discontent that Hispanics endure. González also studied HisJovita González. panic patriarchy and its oppression of women at a time when Anglo American culture was becoming dominant. The underlying objective in each one of her pieces is the description of the folklore of the Hispanic community without neglecting historical legitimacy. Included in her literary pieces are the life of the cowboy, the patriarchal system of the family, and the defined and static role of women and men within the hierarchy of the values of the Texan culture—such as honesty, honor, and respect for the elders. In addition to highlighting the personality of the cowboy, the peon, and the shepherd, González emphasizes the strong presence of the Hispanic landlords who live in the patriarchal system saturated with myths and superstitions. One of the last themes that Jovita González embraced in her writings was the political resistance of the Mexican American. This theme is evident in one of her last short stories, The Bullet Swallower, written in 1935. González illustrates the life of a smuggler who defies the laws imposed by the Anglo-Saxon government and enforced by the Texas Rangers. In this creation, she reveals her extensive yet subconscious critical and political perspectives. Throughout her literary career, González’s expression of these perspectives continued to unfold and were defined and refined with each literary creation. Her oppo-

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sition to the invasion of Texas and the imposition of the laws in the Hispanic community is observable in the resistance of the Mexican American people through smuggling and other illicit activities, as well as in the fierce and iniquitous fight of the law-breakers against the Texas Rangers to protect their contraband. Although Jovita González denounced the abuse and injustice of the Hispanic people—her people—by the Anglo-Saxons, she also maintained a strong hope that through her writing she would influence the North American culture to build paths of tolerance and understanding that would allow for both groups to live together in mutual respect and harmony. González died in Corpus Christi in 1983. Further Reading Chase, Cida S., “Jovita González de Mireles (1899–1983)” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Karl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992). Kreneck, Thomas H., “Recovering the ‘Lost’ Manuscripts of Jovita González: The Production of South Texas Mexican-American Culture” Texas Library Journal (Summer 1988): 76–79. Limón, José, “Introduction,” Jovita, Gonzalez, Dew on the Thorn, ed. José E. Limón (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1977).

Sergio Reyna González, Julián S. (1899–1936). Mexican journalist Julián S. González was born in Minas Prietas, Sonora, on January 25, 1899. An outstanding student, González was about to leave the northern provinces to study in Mexico City with a scholarship in 1911, but the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution canceled his advanced studies and he remained in the North, where he was able to ascend to the position of editor of the daily newspaper El Tiempo (Time) in Cananea. From 1922 to 1924, he served in the national congress. His political activities during the 1923 elections, especially his attacks in the press on candidates Alvaro Orbegón and Plutarco Elías Calles, caused him to go into exile in Los Angeles, where he made a living working for the Spanish-language press, most notably Ignacio Lozano’s* La Opinión (The Opinion). It was Lozano’s publishing house that issued González’s novel of the revolution, Almas rebeldes (1932, Rebel Souls), a novel of the Mexican Revolution that not only displays some disillusionment with the social transformation in Mexico but also contrasts women’s customs in both California and Santa María, Mexico, where the female protagonist is forced to deal with the conservative traditions she did not know in California. A previous work, La danzarina del estanque azul (novela de la vida latina en cinelandia) (1930, The Dancer on the Blue Watering Hole [a novel about Latino Life in Movieland]) was issued by the Latin American Publishing Company in Los Angeles; González rewrote the novel as a play for the Los Angeles theater. Two other novels were published in Mexico: Noches de Hollywood, novela (1934, Hollywood Nights, a

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novel) and Tierra, amor, dolor (1934, Land, Love, Pain). González was assassinated in Mexico City on February 7, 1936. Further Reading Brushwood, John S., Mexico in Its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967). Rutherford, John, An Annotated Bibliography of the Novels of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 in English and Spanish (New York: Whitston, 1972).

Nicolás Kanellos González, Leopoldo (?–?). Most likely of Spanish origin, Leopoldo González was a journalist, playwright, librettist, and composer for musical theater who made his way to Tampa, Florida, after living in Cuba. In Tampa during the 1930s, when the Hispanic theater was encountering difficulties because of the Depression, he wrote light, comedic works for the stage. His first work produced on the Tampa stage was a topical revue, “Cosas de Tampa o la historia habla” (1927, Tampa Themes or History Speaks), which seems to indicate that he had prior knowledge of Tampa history or had resided there for some time. After the stock market failure, he staged his satirical one-act sainete, “La picada de la mosca o el pánico de los bancos” (The Mosquito Bite, or The Bank Panic). In 1930, his two-act zarzuela, “El escapulario” (The Scapular), and “El huérfano de Ybor” (The Orphan from Ybor City) were staged at the Círculo Cubano theater. Other works produced and or staged in Tampa include “Borinquen” (Puerto Rico), “El cambio de niños” (The Exchange of Children), the latter based on current events in Tampa, and “La columna y el círculo” (The Column and the Circle), in which he satirized the Círculo Cubano from the vantage point of his newspaper column. In May 1933, González made his way to New York City, where his works were produced by the Teatro San José and the Teatro Variedades. It was in New York that González became active in support of the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. In the mutual aid societies of that city, he prepared works of protest, especially as part of the efforts to raise funds for the Republicans of the Comité Antifascista de los Estados Unidos, which published his collection of one-act political plays, Ensayos breves de teatro popular: ¡Abajo Franco! Y ¡Rebeldía! (1937, Popular Theater Exercises: Down with Franco! And Rebellion!). His other published works, all issued in New York, include the narrative poem La Pasionaria (1936, The Passionate Woman), dedicated to a heroine of the Spanish Popular Front, and the musical scores for his lyric plays: Miaja (1936, Crumb), Similau (1937, Assimilated), and Souvenir: Sé Feliz (1949, Souvenir: Be Happy). In 1990, a collection of his songs, Canciones de Leopoldo González, was also published in New York. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

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González, Rafael Jesús (1935–). Born in El Paso, Texas, on October 10, 1935, Rafael Jesús González is one of the most prolific poets to emerge from the Chicano* literary movement. A master of clean, crafted poetry, rich in symbolism and themes evocative of both the Anglo American tradition and that of Hispanic world culture, González crafts poems in both English and Spanish. After an initial period of publishing works in literary magazines and in his own volumes, González has preferred to share his poetry directly with colleagues and friends, as well as online to his very large list of readers. González studied English literature at the University of Texas at El Paso (B.A., 1962) and the University of Oregon (M.A., 1964) and took a variety of courses at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1960). In 1964, the Carnegie Foundation awarded him a grant to study Nahua poetry in Mexico, which subsequently became a major influence on his future work. He has taught literature and creative writing at various universities in the West and Northwest until gaining tenure at Laney College in Oakland, California, in 1973. His first published collection of poems, El Hacedor De Juegos/The Maker of Games (1977), a tour-de-force of contemporary symbolist poetry and Chicano cultural motives, was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His later published works are grounded in Aztec mythology and poetic practice: the chapbook Las fiestas del arco iris/The Feasts of the Rainbow (1978); his illustrated book issued by the Oakland Muesum, Descent to Mictlán, the Land of the Dead (Trance Poem in the Nahua Mode) (1996); and his El corazón de la muerte [The Heart of Death]/Altars and Offerings for the Heart (2005). González is also a painter whose works have been exhibited in San Francisco–area museums and galleries, as well as in Mexico and other countries. His awards include the Love Poetry Prize by Quicksilver Poetry Magazine (1961), the Dragon Fly Press Annual Award for Literary Achievement (2002), the National Council of Teachers of English and Annenberg/CPB Award (2003), and the 20th World Congress of Poets, United Poet Laureates International Award (2007). In 2006, he was named Universal Ambassador of Peace, Universal Ambassador Peace Circle, Geneva, Switzerland. He has also been invited to read his poetry at world and international poetry congresses in Argentina, China, Uruguay, and other countries. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

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González, Ray (1952?–). Ray González was born on September 20, 1952, and raised in the border town of El Paso, Texas, and this desert landscape permeates his writings. González is primarily known as an award-winning poet, having authored numerous collections of poetry over the last two decades, beginning with From the Restless Roots (1985). Since then, González has published at least nine additional collections of his poetry. His collection 537

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entitled Twilights and Chants (1987) won the Four Corners book award in poetry and, in 1996, The Heat of Arrivals earned him a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. His acclaimed collection Turtle Pictures (2000), a multi-genre poetic text, earned a Minnesota Book Award in Poetry along with widespread critical success. In addition to his many works of poetry, González has written two collections of essays and two works of fiction. Memory Fever (1993) alternates between personal essay and short story to paint a moving portrait of growing up on the U.S.–Mexico border. González invokes the imagery of the desert—its geological forms, animal characters, and palpable effect on people—to convey the struggle of life amidst family poverty, civil injustice, and social change during the 1960s and 1970s. His later collection, The Underground Heart (2002), written nearly a decade later, deals with the author’s return to his early home. Whereas Memory Fever focused on the American Southwest as the backdrop for autobiography, The Underground Heart approaches this terrain after a long period of absence. In it, González is transformed into a tourist in a land that once was an inseparable part of his identity but that distance and the passing of time have rendered into only memory. His changed perspective informs the work’s treatment of U.S.–Mexico border regions and relations. He constructs a world of entwined opposites, a world where past and present work together to shape the future. Borders disappear through patterns of migration and increased linguistic and cultural bilingualism. The new borderland promises increased visibility for the Mexican American community within the United States; at the same time, the increase in regulation over international traffic elevates the border as a symbol of difference. In 2001, Gonzalez published his first work of fiction, The Ghost of John Wayne. Like much of his work, the collection of short stories blends Southwestern history and folklore to inform characters’ hybrid cultural identities that reflect the personal in their formation of the communal. For instance, the story from which the collection draws its name juxtaposes contemporary American popular culture against the history of conquest, converging on a site of historical contestation, the Alamo, now subsumed under San Antonio’s bustling downtown topography. Along with his own creative projects, González has edited over a dozen anthologies, including After Aztlan (1992) and Muy Macho (1996, Very Macho). As a prolific

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anthologist, González actively participates in the formation of a Latino canon by engaging questions of literary representation within Latino literature. Although such choices at times stimulate disagreement, his work in this area proves essential in asserting the Latino literary presence within American literature. Many of González’s works take up issues of sexuality as an essential component of identification. Particularly focused on questions of masculinity, González as editor and author grapples with what it means to be a male Latino in the United States today. González served as assistant professor of English and Latin American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1996 to 1998. He most recently wrote Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005). He currently serves as a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches creative writing and U.S. Latino literature. Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia Chávez, “Ray González” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 119–121). González, Ray, Religion of Hands: Prose Poems and Flash Fictions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).

Alberto Varón González, Rigoberto (1970–). Born on July 18, 1970, in Bakersfield, California, and raised in Michoacán, Mexico, Rigoberto González is a poet, novelist, and book critic. Raised to be a farm worker, he nevertheless obtained an education, earning a B.A. from the University of California at Riverside (1992), a master’s from the University of California at Davis, and an M.F.A. from Arizona State University (1997). He is the author of two books of poetry; So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (1999), a selection of the National Poetry Series; and two collections of stories: Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (2006) and Men without Bliss: Stories (2008). He has work recently published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Chelsea, Colorado Review, and ZYZZYVA. The recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and writing residencies to Spain and Brazil, he has also written two bilingual children’s books: Soledad Sigh-Sighs (2003) and Antonio’s Card/La tarjeta de Antonio (2005), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His novel, Crossing Vines (2003), which deals with farm worker life and the struggle to unionize, was winner of Foreword Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year. In 2006, he published a memoir of growing up gay in a family of farm workers, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa. González is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has also won various international residency fellowships, including residencies in Spain, Costa Rica, and Scotland. González is also a book reviewer for the El Paso Times. For two years he worked as a bilingual literacy instructor for the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services After School Program in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He is a member of the board of directors of Poets & Writers Magazine 539

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and of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, the University of Illinois, and Rutgers University. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos González-Cruz, Luis F. (1943–). Poet and fiction writer Luis F. González-Cruz was born in Cárdenas, Cuba, in 1943, the son of a medical doctor father and a teacher mother. He received his early education there, and in 1961 went to Florida to study Pre-Med; in 1963, he obtained an X-ray technician degree in Havana’s Carlos J. Finlay Institute for Tropical Medicine. Throughout the years of his higher education, he wrote stories and poems. In 1965, he became a graduate student in Hispanic literature at the University of Pittsburgh and obtained a Ph.D. in 1970, after which he started a long career as a professor of Spanish American literature at various universities. He continued writing and even became the editor of Concenso (Consensus), a literary magazine that he founded, from 1977 to 1980. After years of publishing poetry, fiction, and drama in numerous magazines and anthologies, González-Cruz has published two collections of poetry, Tirando al blanco/Shooting Gallery (1975) and Disgregaciones (1986, Disintegrations), that evince his style of grounding his poems in everyday reality and launching them into more surreal and even hermetic language and symbology. In 2001, González-Cruz published the experimental novel Olorún’s Rainbow, Anatomy of a Cuban Dreamer, in which testimonial, autobiography, dreams, allegories, and legends, as well as Afro-Cuban religious rites, are mixed with the narrative, and in which even an entire play is embedded. In 2005, he translated and published the novel in Spanish as El arco iris de Olorún, Anatomía de un cubano soñador. González-Cruz has also developed a respectable career as an academic critic, publishing books on Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Federico García Lorca. Further Reading Montes Huidobro, Matías, “Luis F. González-Cruz” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos González Parsons, Lucía. See Parsons, Lucía (Lucy) González González-Viaña, Eduardo (1941–). Eduardo González Viaña was born in Chepén, La Libertad, Peru, on November 13, 1941. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the region—nostalgia for northern Peru and the influence of the neighboring port city, Pacasmayo, suffuse his first collection of short 540

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stories, Los peces muertos (1964, The Dead Fish). Perhaps the most pervasive memory that imbues his earlier works is the city of Trujillo and its university, Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, where he graduated with a law degree in 1967 and a doctorate in Spanish languages and literatures in 1973. González Viaña later obtained a degree in journalism from the Colegio de Periodistas del Perú, and his interest in journalism took him to numerous war-torn countries in Africa and to Iran, where he observed the fall of the Shah and the beginning of the fundamentalist revolution. When he was twenty-six, his story collection Batalla de Felipe en la casa de palomas (1969, Felipe’s Battle in the House of the Pigeons) received Peru’s National Literary Prize, the Premio Nacional de Fomento a la Cultura Ricardo Palma. His novel, Identificación de David (1974, Identification of David), won the Universo national prize for the novel. Later, his work focused on anthropological themes. His novel, Habla, Sampedro (1979, Talk, Sampedro), became a best seller in Spanish, and Sarita Colonia viene volando (1990, Sarita Colonia Comes Flying), the imagined biography of a saint created by the people, was his homage to the sanctity of the poor and is considered one of the best Peruvian novels of the twentieth century. González Viaña came to the United States in 1990 as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty at Western Oregon University in 1993. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1999. His writing during this time focuses on the immigration of Hispanics to the United States, and he pens bold and powerful depictions of those who face fierce challenges in adapting to life on this side of the border. Los sueños de América (2000, The Dreams of America) received critical acclaim; Mario Vargas Llosa called it, “A magnificent testimony of the Latin American presence in the United States.” The English-language translation, American Dreams, was published in 2005 by Arte Público Press. In 2006, González Viaña published one of the most outstanding and insightful novels about the immigration of workers from Mexico to the United States. Entitled El corrido de Dante (2006), the novel follows an immigrant worker as he searches for his escaped teenage daughter. Dante is accompanied on his odyssey by a lame donkey and the voice of his deceased wife. His journey is filled with joys of music and the pain of Eduardo González-Viaña. 541

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flashbacks to his life in Mexico with his wife. He encounters a series of eccentric characters, from spiritualists who broadcast their spells on the radio to fundamentalist American preachers to a wealthy labor smuggler and gangster to a criminal mastermind planning to rob a Las Vegas casino. In this bittersweet tour de force, the First and Third Worlds join hands, and Mexican pueblo life and Internet postmodernity dance together in one of the most memorable fables to shed light on issues such as immigration, culture conflict, and the future of the United Status with its ever-increasing Latino population. In addition to receiving Peru’s National Prize for Literature, he is the recipient of the 1999 Juan Rulfo Award, for his story “Siete noches en California” (Seven Nights in California), and the 2001 Latino Literature Prize, awarded by the Latin American Writers Institute of New York. In 2004 he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Spanish Language, a lifelong appointment. He is the author of numerous short-story collections and novels, among them El amor se va volando (1990, Love is Flying Away), Frontier Woman (1995), and Las sombras y las mujeres (1996, Shadows and Women). González Viaña also writes the Correo de Salem, a Web-based collection of journalistic commentaries. Further Reading Monsiváis, George, Hispanic Immigrant Identity: Political Allegiance vs. Cultural Preference (The New Americans) (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004).

Carmen Peña Abrego Gou Bourgell, José (c. 1835?–1937). Born in Catalonia, Spain, José Gou Bourgell crossed from Mexico into Laredo, Texas, on May 23, 1923, and settled in the Los Angeles area around 1924; he resided there until his death in 1937. (Although some data indicates that he was born c. 1835, this seems too early a date.) Gou Bourgell was one of the perennial entrants in the playwriting contests sponsored by the commercial Spanish-language theaters in Los Angeles, although audiences never seemed to appreciate his efforts. While working as a journalist on the staff of El Heraldo de México* (The Mexican Herald), he is known to have written and had produced five plays for Los Angeles audiences: La Mancha Roja (1924, The Red Stain), El Crimen de la Virtud (1924, The Crime of Virtue), El Parricida (1926, The Parricide), El Suicida (1927, The Suicide Victim), and Virginidades (1928, Things Virginal). El Parricida, dealing with the suicide of a playwright after great conflicts with his father, was the only drama that received positive reviews from the critics. The others were either ignored or openly panned. From 1935 to 1937, Gou Bourgell edited the newspapers La Voz (The Voice) and El Mundo al Día (The World to Date) in Calexico. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).


Gráfico

Gráfico. New York’s Gráfico weekly newspaper, published from 1926 to 1931, was published by a consortium of tobacco workers, writers, and theatrical artists. Although probably limited in its circulation, its impact was great, because many of the cultural leaders and artists who had access to audiences through such other means as mutual aid societies,* theaters,* and unions were affiliated in one way or another with the periodical. Entrepreneur and playwright Gonzalo O’Neill* was a major investor in the weekly, and such writers as Alberto O’Farrill* and Bernardo Vega* were among its editors. Although dominated by males, Gráfico accorded space for the feminist writer Clotilde Betances Jaeger.* More than any other of these cultural leaders, it was playwright and actor Alberto O’Farrill who stamped his personality onto the first years of Gráfico. This he did not only as editor but also as a writer of crónicas* under various pseudonyms such as Ofa and Gabitoca, and by serving as the chief cartoonist for the journal. In both his columns and his cartoons, O’Farrill set a macho tone in his immigrant’s perspective on life in the United States during the late 1920s. Since the late nineteenth century, New York, as a port of entry for immigrants from Europe and the Caribbean, has spawned numerous immigrant newspapers whose function in addition to providing news and advertising, served to allow newcomers to make a transition to their new homes. In some of those newspapers, the awareness of their communities’ evolution toward citizenship status or American naturalization was reflected, and the demand for the rights of citizenship became more pronounced. Even Gráfico, which in most respects was a typical immigrant newspaper, began to recognize that the American citizenship of its readers (mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans residing in East Harlem) allowed them to demand rights guaranteed them under the Constitution. Front page of Gráfico. 543

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Often the editors penned English-language opinion pieces that balked at being considered foreigners in the United States and the subjects of discrimination. Although the editors of Gráfico often made comparisons of their community with that of other immigrant groups, it is obvious that they were aware of the differences between Puerto Ricans and the other groups; because of the Jones Act of 1917, for example, Puerto Ricans did not have to take steps to become citizens—citizenship was automatic. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, with Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: Origins to 1960 (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Grillo, Evelio (1920–). The octogenarian author of Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (2000) was born of Afro-Cuban parents and raised until the age of fifteen in Ybor City, a multi-ethnic, cigar-making Cuban enclave in Tampa, Florida. Evelio Grillo grew up biculturally and bilingually. At home, he learned Spanish and Cuban culture; in his neighborhood and in segregated black schools in Tampa (at St. Peter Claver, a black Catholic parochial

Evelio Grillo meeting President Jimmy Carter at the White House.

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school), Washington, D.C. (at Dunbar High School), and New Orleans (Xavier University), he learned English and learned about the black experience and African American role models. His life lessons continued when he served in the segregated U.S. Army, in the 823rd (Colored) Engineer Aviation Battalion, in the China–Burma–India Theater, building the Ledo Road, writing for a local Army newspaper, and organizing integrated sporting and entertainment events for the G.I.s. Upon his return to the United States, Grillo attended Columbia University and then earned a master’s in social welfare from University of California, Berkeley. He later remained in Oakland, where he still lives, and became the director of the Alexander Community Center, a center for blacks and Mexicans. He also served as a teacher and social group worker in the Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall. Eventually, Grillo was hired as the first black employee of the city manager’s office, after which he became truly active in organizations, such as Oakland Men of Tomorrow (a primarily black organization that he was instrumental in shaping) and the Community Service Organization (mostly Hispanic and founded by Saul Alinksy, who trained such activists as César and Richard Chávez and Grillo). Grillo used his Spanish skills and Cuban culture to bridge the gap between his African Americanness and Hispanicness when working with the Chávez brothers. He was also active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Negro Political Action Association, and the Mexican-American Political Association and was a strategist for the East Bay Democratic Club. Grillo is an authority on the development of black politics in Oakland and has served as a political advisor to numerous Oakland mayors and an executive assistant for Policy Development in the U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (under President Jimmy Carter). He received the National Urban Coalition’s award for community service. On Oakland politics, Grillo has published such articles as “D.G. Gibson: A Black Who Led the People and Built the Democratic Party in the East Bay,” in Experiment and Change in Berkeley: Essays on City Politics, 1950–1975 (1978). He is characterized by many as an eloquent and insightful storyteller with a quiet, self-effacing rebelliousness. The publication of his memoir, has made him perhaps the first person to write truthfully and directly about Hispanic racial discrimination in Tampa’s Latin enclaves, controverting the persistent myth of unproblematic racial and ethnic harmony. Furthermore, Black Cuban, Black American is a heartfelt and detailed story about Grillo’s early years up to the period immediately following World War II and exposes a great deal about the difficulties of biracialism–biculturalism in the United States, the importance of education, and the horrors of segregation in the nation’s armed forces. Further Reading Dworkin y Méndez, Kenya, “Introduction,” Grillo, Evelio, Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000: vii–xiv).

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Guerra, Pablo de la (1819–1874). A Californio who lived under three flags—Spanish, Mexican, and American—Pablo de la Guerra was born on November 29, 1819, into a distinguished family of ranchers, descended from the first colonizing expedition from New Spain. De la Guerra attended one of the first secondary schools in California, in Monterey, where he studied English and French (he had already mastered Latin) as well as science and humanities. From 1838, he began working in the customs house at Monterey and in 1842 was named customs inspector. When American forces invaded California, de la Guerra resisted and was jailed until receiving amnesty after the cessation of hostilities. In 1847, he was elected senator and participated in the state’s constitutional congress. In his senatorial service, de la Guerra delivered many eloquent speeches that were published statewide in both English and Spanish, in which he came to the defense of the rights of the native Californios under the new regime. His literary reputation rests on these speeches, as did his political fortunes. De la Guerra also came to the aid of the Amerindian population of California and also gave numerous speeches and exercised his influence against slavery in the United States—especially against its introduction in California. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, de la Guerra threw his weight on behalf of the Union. In 1860, after having served four terms in the state senate, de la Guerra ran for district judge, a position he won and held until his death on February 5, 1874. Further Reading Gutiérrez, Ramón A., “Community, Patriarchy, and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the Dream of Equality” American Quarterly Vol. 45, No. 1 (Mar. 1993): 44–72. Pitt, Leonard, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californios, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Sánchez, Rosaura, Telling Identities: The California Testimonies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Guerrero, Eduardo “Lalo” (1916–2005). One of the most beloved Mexican American singer-songwriters, Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero was born in Barrio Vielo, Tucson, Arizona, on December 24, 1916. His popular music compositions may serve as a chart of the evolution of Mexican American popular culture over seven decades, during which he composed and recorded what may be considered oral poetry reflecting the sentiments of the barrio as it confronted such historical events as Repatriation, the Zoot Suit Riots,* the farm worker struggle and the Chicano Movement.* His ingenuity as a musician led him to use all the musical genres popular at each moment in history, from corridos* and rancheras to boogies and boleros. Born into a family of twenty-four children, Guerrero’s only music teacher was his mother, Concepción, who was an exceptional guitar player. At the early age of nineteen he 546

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was already selling his compositions, one of which, “Canción Mexicana” (1934, Mexican Song) became an overwhelming hit on both sides of the border when singer Lucha Reyes recorded it in 1941. From then on his career took off as such international stars as the Trío Los Panchos recorded his songs. His great diversity of musical genre even extended into children’s songs, of which he recorded a total of twenty-five albums in his “Las Ardillitas de Lalo” (Lalo’s Squirrels) Lalo Guerrero and his band. series. Guerrero was a pioneer, becoming one of the first Mexican American recording artists to cultivate swing and to incorporate code-switching or bilingualism* in his compositions, as in “Los Chucos Suaves” (The Suave Pachucos*) and “Vamos a Bailar” (Let’s Dance), which returned to popularity when playwright Luis Valdez* incorporated them into his play Zoot Suit. In 1955, Guerrero’s parody of the hit song, “The Ballad of Davey Crockett,” crossed over and became a national hit itself, earning him enough profits to open a nightclub in Los Angeles that he operated for the next fifteen years. Continuing to write music and lyrics well into the 1990s, Guerrero recorded other parodies as protest songs: “Battle Hymn of the Chicano” (1989), “Mexican Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Bus Boys” (1990), and “No Chicanos on TV” (1986). Lalo Guerrero died on March 13, 2005. Further Reading Guerrero, Lalo, and Sherilyn Meece Mentes, Lalo: My Life and Music (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Guitart, Jorge (1937–). Born in Havana, Cuba, poet Jorge Guitart came to the United States in 1962 as a refugee from the Cuban Revolution. Guitart worked in a variety of businesses and trades, including waiter and file clerk, while obtaining higher education. He obtained a B.A. in psychology from George Washington University in 1967 and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics from Georgetown University in 1970 and 1973, respectively. Guitart went on to become a professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he still teaches. Guitart writes poetry in Spanish and in English, publishing it in periodicals and anthologies throughout the United States and the Spanish-speaking world, including Linden Lane Magazine,* Carolina Hospital’s* Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos, and Ray González’s* Currents from the Dancing River: Literature by U.S. Latinos. He also holds workshops for elementary and high school students in the Buffalo area in a writers-in-the547

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schools program. In 1993, he published his first collection, Foreigner’s Notebook. On his own home page (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/guitart/), Guitart has published some of his chapbooks. Further Reading Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos Gutiérrez, José Angel (1944–). Writer and civil rights activist José Angel Gutiérrez earned degrees from Texas A&M University at Kingsville (B.A., 1966), St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas (M.A., 1968), the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D., 1976), and the University of Houston, Bates College of Law (J.D., 1989). He has done other postdoctoral work at Stanford University, Colegio de México, the University of Washington, and the Centro de Estudios Económicos y Sociales del Tercer Mundo (Center for Economic and Social Studies of the Third World) in México City, México. A key figure in the Chicano Movement, José Angel Gutiérrez began his career in 1963 by helping to elect five Mexican Americans to the city council of Crystal City, Texas. As a student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio in 1967, Gutiérrez and four other young Chicanos—Mario Compeán, Nacho Pérez, Willy Velásquez, and Juan Patlán—founded the the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), the forerunner of the La Raza Unida Party (LRUP). MAYO sought to effect social change for the Mexican American community and to train young Chicanos for leadership positions. Under the guidance of political science professor at St. Mary’s, Charles Cotrell, Gutiérrez produced a master’s thesis entitled “La Raza and Revolution: The Empirical Conditions of Revolution in Four South Texas Counties” that became the basis for the Winter Garden Project, an initiative that led to the founding of LRUP in later years. MAYO members led by Gutiérrez held to the belief that confrontational tactics could convince cowed Texas Mexicans that the gringo was vulnerable. For example, by engaging in public confrontations with the feared Texas Rangers, they demonstrated that at least some Mexicans were willing to stand up to those often despised law enforcement officials. But MAYO’s highly publicized tactics also provoked the ire of established Anglo liberals and Mexican American políticos. San Antonio’s Congressman Henry B. González, for example, almost single-handedly eradicated most of the funding sources for the young militants. After being stymied in their community development efforts, in 1968 the young activists turned to gaining electoral power. Naming their effort the Winter Garden Project, they chose to start in Crystal City, Gutiérrez’s hometown. Although the population of this agricultural town in South Texas was more than eighty percent Mexican, the power structure in both local government and private business was Anglo American. Gutiérrez and his MAYO 548

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cohorts returned to Crystal City to reestablish a Mexican American majority on the city council. But unfolding local dissatisfaction with the school system prompted the organizers to put gaining electoral goals on hold temporarily. When Mexican American students at Crystal City High School led a walkout in 1969, the WGP, led by Gutiérrez, joined high school students and their parents to form the Ciudadanos Unidos (United Citizens). In December, when the school board did not accede to their demands, practically all of the Chicano students walked out of their classes. The strike ended on January 6, 1970, when the school board acceded to the reforms demanded by strikers. The next move for Gutiérrez and the group was to gain political power in Crystal City. After the successful school boycotts, Gutiérrez and other MAYO members formed an LRUP chapter and won five positions on the city council and school board in 1970. José Angel Gutiérrez. LRUP spread to other regions in the United States, exerting particular strength in Colorado, where the popular Chicano leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales* headed the effort and also called for a national political party. Although Gutiérrez was reluctant to begin a national effort at this point, arguing that it could jeopardize his regional strategy, he decided to accede to the national focus and was elected chairman of LRUP at its 1972 convention in El Paso, Texas. The most important issue at the meeting became whether the pragmatic Gutiérrez or the ideological Gonzales would be elected party chairman. Colorado LRUP leaders encouraged rumors that accused Gutiérrez of making deals with the Republicans to obtain funding for LRUP programs in Texas. Nonetheless, Gutiérrez won, provoking a bitter split that could not be bridged by any number of overtures for unity; the national Chicano party initiative was still-born. Later, disaffected LRUP members in Zavala County formed a breakaway faction; José Angel Gutiérrez resigned in 1981. In 1986, Gutiérrez earned a Ph.D. in government at the University of Texas at Austin and later graduated from law school at the University of Houston. Gutiérrez has served as executive director of the Greater Texas Legal Foundation, a nonprofit organization seeking justice for poor people and is currently a lawyer in Dallas and a professor of Chicano 549

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studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. He continues to research and publish on the Chicano Movement. Like Corky Gonzales, José Angel Gutiérrez often expressed his militant experiences and his aspirations for his people in poems that were often published in movement and community periodicals. Gutiérrez also furthered the movement by issuing El Político: The Mexican American Elected Official (1972) and a selfpublished handbook detailing how Chicanos could attain power in society: A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans (1974). It was not formally published until well after the Chicano Movement was over, in 2001. He followed this up with Chicano Manual on How to Handle Gringos (2003). In 1999, Gutiérrez published an autobiography, The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal. In 2005, he adapted the book for young adults as The Making of a Civil Rights Leader and he also penned a biography of Severita Lara, a civil rights leader who got her start during the Crystal City school walkouts: We Won’t Back Down: Severita Lara’s Rise from Student Leader to Mayor. His other books include A War of Words (coauthored in 1985) and Chicanas in Charge: Texas Women in the Public Arena (coauthored in 2005). In addition, Gutiérrez translated My Struggle for the Land: Autobiography of Reies Lopez Tijerina (2000). He has also has written several articles and book chapters over the years. Gutiérrez has been the subject of many articles and film documentaries, the most recent being the PBS four-part video series, CHICANO! The Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights, and his life and work are studied in many Chicano history and political science books. His many honors include being named one of the “100 Outstanding Latino Texans of the 20th Century” by Latino Monthly (January 2000) and “Distinguished Texas Hispanic” by Texas Hispanic Magazine (October 1996), as well as being awarded the Distinguished Faculty Award from the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education (June 1995) and the National Council of La Raza’s Chicano Hero Award in 1994. Gutiérrez is currently a professor of political science at the University of Texas–Arlington and maintains a law practice in Dallas. Gutiérrez also heads the Greater Dallas Foundation, a civil rights litigation unit. Further Reading Gutiérrez, José Angel, The Making of a Chicano Militant: Lessons from Cristal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

F. Arturo Rosales Gutiérrez de Lara, Lázaro (?–1918). Born in Ciudad Guerrero, Tamaulipas, Mexico, Lázaro Gutiérrez de Lara was the great-grandson of the founder of the first Texas Republic, José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara. He graduated from the National Law School in 1898 and practiced law, later becoming a judge. As a judge and an editor of the El Porvenir (the Future) 550

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newspaper, he became associated with the Flores Magón brothers* and the Mexican Liberal Party, which worked for the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Díaz. He was also a labor leader who participated in the historic Cananea mining strikes in 1905 and in 1906 was arrested but escaped into exile in the United States. In Los Angeles, he was an associate of the Flores Magón brothers and one of the founders and directors of the radical newspaper Revolución (Revolution) in 1907, editing the Maginista newspaper Regeneración (Regeneration) in 1910. In 1916, he was captured in Sasabe, Sonora, Mexico, on his way to assist a group of striking workers and was executed on August 30, 1918. As part of his revolutionary efforts, Gutiérrez de Lara published El pueblo mexicano y sus luchas por la libertad in Los Angeles in 1901 and its translation to English, The Mexican People: Their Struggle for Freedom in New York in 1914. In Los Angeles, he reportedly published another English-language political treatise, Story of a Political Refugee, but to date no copies of this text have been located. Gutiérrez de Lara tried his hand at creative writing with his novel, Los bribones (The Brazen Ones), published around the same time in Los Angeles. Los bribones documents in fiction how U.S. corporations were responsible for the exploitation of miners in Mexico and how socialist organizers very similar to Gutiérrez himself and the Flores Magón brothers were fighting for their liberation. In the back matter of the book, the author announced other novels soon to be published, but these, too, have never been located. Further Reading Raat, Dirk W., Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903–1923 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981).

Nicolás Kanellos Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio (1894–?). Antonio Guzmán Aguilera, whose pen name was Guz Aguila, was one of Mexico’s most prolific and beloved librettists and the composer of scores for popular theatrical revues. Born in San Miguel del Mesquital on March 21, 1894, Guzmán studied in Mexico City at the Jesuit Instituto Científico de México and by 1916 had his first play produced at the Teatro Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. After that, he began developing his career as a journalist at various newspapers; while still a journalist he became a famous author of revistas (musical comedy revues) that commented on current events. He became the friend of presidents and politicians and suffered the ups and downs of these associations—so much so that he was arrested when a political rival became president (Alvaro Obregón). He went into exile in Los Angeles in 1924. A portion of Guzmán’s career was developed on the Los Angeles stage and in the Spanish-language periodicals of Los Angeles. Just how many of his supposed 500 revues he wrote there is unknown—none of his works were ever published, but scripts that have survived show a great deal of recycling of material. Renowned playwrights were at times contracted by the playhouses in Los Angeles to produce scripts and 551

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librettos, and such was the case when the Teatro Hidalgo contracted him for $1,000 a month to write for its stage. It was at the Teatro Hidalgo that he wrote and debuted one of his few fulllength dramas, María del Pilar Moreno, o la Pequeña Vendedora (Maria del Pilar Moreno, or The Diminutive Street Vendor), based on the real-life story of a young girl recently exonerated of murder in Mexico City. While at the Hidalgo, he also wrote and staged the following revues based on culture and events in Los Angeles: Los Angeles Vacilador (Swinging Los Angeles), Evite Peligro (Avoid Danger), and El Eco de México (The Echo from Mexico). In 1927, Guz Aguila returned to the stages of Mexico City but never regained the level of success he had enjoyed earlier. However, his revues continued to be staged for many years in Los Angeles, San Antonio, and other cities in the southwestern United States. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

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H Helú, Antonio (1902–?). A Mexican exile in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s, Antonio Helú returned to Mexico c. 1934 to become a well-known pioneer of detective fiction and a celebrated movie director. Born in San Luis Potosí on July 17, 1902, Helú became associated with the famed educator, philosopher, and writer José Vasconcelos and had to leave the country when his mentor went into exile. In Los Angeles, Helú wrote for El Heraldo de México* (The Mexican Herald) and published short stories in this newspaper as well as in magazines in Mexico. In addition, Helú wrote scripts for the Spanish-language cinema being produced in Hollywood at that time; they were mainly scripts based on such theatrical plays as Malditas Sean las Mujeres (Women Be Damned) and Nostradamus. In addition to having one-act plays and revistas (revues) produced in Los Angeles, Helú saw two of his dramas staged commercially: “El Gangster” (1932) and “El Hombre que Todo lo Arreglaba” (1932, The Man Who Arranged Everything). His one-act play, “Los Mexicanos Se Van” (1932, The Mexicans Are Leaving) was an especially poignant documentation of the repatriation of Mexicans during the Depression. It seems that Helú’s Los Angeles sojourn served him richly in developing his talents for writing popular fiction and directing. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

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El Heraldo de México. El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald) newspaper, founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by owner Juan de Heras and publisher Cesar F. 553

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Marburg, has been called a “people’s newspaper” because of its focus on and importance to the Mexican immigrant worker in Los Angeles. It often proclaimed its working-class* identity, as well as its promotion of Mexican nationalism. Through its publishing house it issued the first novel narrated from the perspective of “Chicanos,” a term that at that time referred to Mexican working-class immigrants: Daniel Venegas’s* Las aventuras de Don Chipote o cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed). The most popular Mexican newspaper at this time, El Heraldo de México had a circulation of some 4,000. Like many other Hispanic immigrant newspapers, El Heraldo de México devoted the largest proportion of its coverage to news of the homeland, followed by news directly affecting Mexican immigrants in the United States, followed by news and advertisements of interest to working-class immigrants. Among the social roles played by El Heraldo de México, the most important was the defense of the Mexican immigrant, by publishing editorials and devoting considerable space to combating discrimination and the exploitation of immigrant labor; it particularly brought attention to the role played by labor contractors and American employers in mistreating the immigrant workers. El Heraldo de México even went a step further in 1919 by attempting to organize Mexican laborers into an association, the Liga Protectiva Mexicana de California (Mexican Protective League of California), to protect their rights and further their interests. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

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Heredia y Heredia, José María (1803–1839). The prototype of the writer in exile who pines for his country—a common figure throughout all of the Caribbean across the centuries—José María Heredia was a Romantic poet whose ode to the Niagara Falls was one of most popular poems in nineteenthcentury Cuba. He was also a playwright, a literary critic, an orator, and a patriot. Heredia was born in Santiago, Cuba on December 31, 1803. His parents were Dominicans who, fearing that the Haitian Revolution would expand to the Dominican Republic, had come to Cuba. A precocious child, Heredia was introduced to the classics by his father, started to write poetry when he was ten years old, and by the age of sixteen had penned a drama, Eduardo IV o el usurpador (Edward IV, or the Usurper), which was staged in Havana in 1819. In 1820, he traveled to Mexico, where he wrote the ode “En el Teocalli de Cholul” (In Cholula’s Teocalli), a celebration of Mexico’s pre-Columbian cultures. Returning to Cuba after his father’s death, he earned a law degree and joined the conspiracy called Soles y Rayos de Bolívar (Bolívar’s Suns and Rays), which advocated separation from Spain. In 1823, he went into exile in the United States, visiting Niagara Falls the following year. The overwhelming beauty and majesty of the cataracts inspired him to write his famous ode. But the ode is not only a celebration of the falls but also a song of exile: 554

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before the spectacle of the cascading waters, the homesick poet sees Cuban palm trees. In 1825, he published his first book of poetry, Poesías (Poems), in New York, and moved to Mexico. In that country, he married a Mexican woman, worked as a critic for the newspapers El Iris (The Iris) and La Miscelánea (Miscellany) and taught history and literature while also achieving acclaim as a public orator, usually discoursing on political themes. In 1836, he returned to Cuba after writing a letter to the Spanish authorities in which he recanted his separatist activities. Reproached by his friends for his change of heart, especially by literary mentor and cultural promoter Domingo Del Monte,* with whom he had been friends for decades, Heredia had to leave his beloved Cuba once again. He died in Mexico on May 7, 1839. As famous as his Niagara ode is his 1825 poem “El himno del desterrado” (Hymn of the Exile), a dramatic lament about exile and his longing for Cuba:

José María Heredia.

Cuba, Cuba, que vida me diste dulce tierra de luz y hermosura, ¡cuánto sueño de gloria y ventura tengo unido a tu suelo feliz! (Cuba, you gave me life/Sweet land of light and beauty/How many glorious and happy dreams/I link to your happy soil).

Heredia was a passionate poet who not only depicted dramatic images of nature by the use of colors and classical allusions but also chose words that conveyed sounds and speed: in his ode to Niagara the reader can hear the water rushing down a precipice. His love poetry, on the other hand, was gentle, almost as if he were whispering into his beloved’s ear. Heredia was one of the founders of a Cuban national poetry and one of the earliest writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to write in the United States and to be translated into English, first in Selections from the Poems of Don José Maria Heredia (1844), and then in Modern Poets and Poetry of Spain (1852), both translated by James Kennedy. José Martí,* Cuba’s most popular poet, regarded Heredia as his intellectual and poetic father, as did the other poets of exile. On a wall at Niagara Falls a plaque, reprinting his poem in English, renders tribute to the poet. Further Reading Aparicio Laurencio, Ángel, ¿Es Heredia el primer escritor romántico en lengua española? (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1988). Harms, Alvin, Jose-María de Heredia (Boston: Twayne, 1975).

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Hernández, David (1946–). David Hernández has figured as a major poet in the Chicago Latino literary scene from the early 1970s to this present day. He has been a mentor and model for younger poets and is the talented Latino “token” in citywide, statewide, and nationwide anthologies—a Nuyorican* poet Chi-town style. Some complain about his unwillingness to join a specific Puerto Rican political group; some complain he makes light of Puerto Rican problems; still others mutter that he hides in the Chicago shadows, unwilling to speak to a broader U.S. Latino audience. But the fact is that Hernández has taken on the persona of a Puerto Rican Whitman, singing fiercely democratic and populist hymns to the bums, drunks, losers, and bag ladies—all those whose lives have somehow come to represent the worst and saddest outcomes in the Puerto Rican diaspora as lived in the second-largest Puerto Rican city in America. Hernández has sought to express the entire range of U.S. Puerto Rican literary themes: from nostalgia over roots to growing up Latino in rough parts of town to struggling for equality and recognition to expanding beyond the Puerto Rican (and, more broadly, Latino) world to the still larger world beyond. This variety is present in Hernández’s debut mimeographed collection, Despertando (1971, Waking Up). The title is derived from the nationalist chant, Despierta, boricua, defiende lo tuyo (Wake up Puerto Rican, defend what’s yours), a refrain constantly heard in Chicago’s Rican neighborhoods in the 1960s and afterward. Despertando is very uneven, with strong poems mixed with weaker ones—and weak stanzas mixed with stronger ones. However, even the unevenness speaks to how, from the beginning, Hernández situated his work as a virtual manifesto of creative improvisation with all the risks so entailed. As a poet, Hernández insists on the crucial, inviolable status of inspiration and spontaneity. Part of his art is irreverent to academic poetics; his trick is to create poems which seem unpremeditated and unchecked, even when the effect may prove ultimately calculated. The poems are written as variants of an unstated melody or set of chords, in function of a given rhythmic design, with internal rhymes and other poetic devices creating a sense of form that is then continually violated, usually in a gentle and mocking way, as if the dissonance or rhythmic interruption is a function of life’s or society’s confusions, disequilibria, and discord. Born in Cidra, Puerto Rico, in 1946, Hernández arrived in Chicago with his parents, two brothers, and sister in 1955. As one of his poems tell us, his parents were very poor; they lived mainly on the Puerto Rican North Side, and he went to three different grade schools, where he was demoted, displaced, and spewed through (and then out) of the educational system “because no spik English.” In the late 1960s, he was already a member of the counterculture— into drugs, alcohol, jazz, and sexual adventures. Dedicating his work to all those he could call his people and community, he tumbled out his poems, half hacked, half formed, bits and pieces taken here and there, impressions of Chicago’s rapid transit system, vignettes of Chicago night life, personal remembrances that, 556

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considered together, might make a little novel: a miniature version of a Latino life. So Despertando starts in Puerto Rico with a boy climbing up a mountain, tin pail full, dogs barking and birds singing behind him. Next he is on a plane, arriving at Midway Airport. A proud boy but brown, anticipating the smiles of Americans, he arrives and is hit by the Chicago wind. And, as the book unfolds, we see him get to know his new world. There are poems about Puerto Ricans young and old, about the brown, black, and white lumpen. He describes a Puerto Rican man who loses his fingers and job, swallows his pride, and gets on welfare; a Puerto Rican teen who has no choice but to join the Army; a suffering Mexicana; a prostitute; a lonely old woman eating alone. The remembrances and vignettes rank among his best work—they are hard, deeply felt portraits of an unjust and cruel reality. From 1972 and for many years afterward, Hernández usually read and performed his poems with his musical group, Los Sonidos de la Calle, or Street Sounds, (often bass, guitar, and congas and other percussion) in a Latin-jazz syncretism that paralleled and complemented the mixing process found in the poems themselves. Because the Sounds supplied the unheard undercurrent music and rhythm, the full effect of Hernández’s stylistic tricks came to the fore: the half-shaped, purposely offbeat line played out against the more truly formed notes and chord patterns; the dissonance, interruptedness, and tentativeness of a voice between two cultural systems, belief patterns, and imperatives emerging most fully. Perhaps this is Hernández’s challenge as a writer: many of his poems do not work as well on paper as they do against a musical background or just read aloud. Part of this question is one of spoken word and performance; in the 1980s, theatrical productions based on his poems proved them effective, even when he was not directly delivering them. When asked some years ago about his inspiration, Hernández responded that “Poetry is a means to change the English language. . . . I am a product of the African griot . . . poetry is important to me because it fills the space between my heartbeats.” The heartbeats emerge in poems providing harsh portraits of how country Puerto Rican values are bludgeoned by the urban nightmares that lead from drugs to death. In a telling statement, he noted, “Being from Illinois and Chicago, the environment, the place of the city definitely influences the images and rhythm of poetry. . . . Being in a racist town, Latino poets must be slicker, tougher—they have to be no-holds-barred-kill-with-kindness artists.” Most of Hernández’s major poems became available in Roof Top Piper (1991) and then in The Urban Poems (2004), attractive publications presenting the poet as a Rican bard whose traumatic slap by the Chicago wind opens his eyes to the forces sending Ricans and so many others to poverty, drugs, insecurity, and identity confusions. The poems are filled with humor, sentiment, and hope in what may turn out to be his definitive text portraying the ups and downs of Chicago Rican life. Similar material had come out on tape in their definitive performance form as Liquid Thoughts (1988). The tapes reveal that what really keeps his work alive is his capacity in performance for conveying his irony and his 557

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humor—not his indulgent sentimentalism or his anger, but that side of him that makes him and his listeners laugh at the pain stemming from an absurd, dread surreality in which the worst things are always ready to happen. In such a world, the refuge of intimate love and the profession of such love in a poem become dangerous, unmodern, romantic, sentimental, and “un-hip” options. But they are the options open to this eminently Rican/Latino poet as he makes his way, twisting and turning, through the years. Along the way, Hernández self-published three other collections: Collected Words for a Dusty Shelf (1973), Satin-City Lullaby (1987), and Elvis Is Dead but at Least He’s Not Gaining Any Weight (1995). Further Reading Zimmerman, Marc, “Defendieno lo suyo en el frío: Puerto Rican Poets in Chicago” Latino Studies Journal Vol. 1, No. 3 (Sep. 1990): 39–58.

Marc Zimmerman

Inés Hernández.

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Hernández, Inés (1947–). The pioneering feminist poet of the Chicano Movement,* Inés Hernández was born on December 27, 1947, in Galveston, Texas, to Janice Tzilimamúh Andrews Hernández, who was a member of the Nez Perce nation, and Mexican Rodolfo Hernández of Eagle Pass, Texas. Hernández became a student activist at the University of Houston, representing the cause of Chicanas and the downtrodden in general. She earned bachelor’s (1970), master’s (1972), and doctoral (1984) degrees from the University of Houston and went on to teach English and Chicano studies at various institutions of higher learning. In 1989, Hernández took a position at the University of California– Davis, where she earned tenure in 1995. In response to her Native American culture, Hernández was awarded a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellowship for American Indians and from 1996 to 1998 served as chair of the Native American Studies Department. In 2002, she became a full professor of Native American Studies.

Hernández, Jo Ann Yolanda

As an academic, Hernández has published scholarly articles and edited anthologies on Chicano, Native American, and Feminist literatures. While an undergraduate, she began writing and publishing her poems in Chicano Movement periodicals. She also became a consummate performer of her poetry as well as a talented singer of activist songs. In 1977, she published her first book, Con razón, corazón (No Wonder, Heart), cultivating the typical codeswitching of languages in vogue at that time. Since teaching at the University of California–Davis, Hernández has concentrated on publishing poetic and ideological essays especially dealing with feminist and Native American issues. Further Reading Latina Feminist Group, The, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Latin America Otherwise) (Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos Hernández, Jo Ann Yolanda (1948–). Born on August 2, 1948, in Uvalde, Texas, Jo Ann Yolanda Hernández is a defining feminist author who has struggled with the patriarchy in her own life since her childhood. Raised in San Antonio and educated in Catholic schools, her relationships were prescribed; she finally married someone who whisked her away to Vermont, where she became pregnant five times but only gave birth once, prematurely. The couple also adopted a black Vietnamese child, but her husband then left the marriage. He was a poet who prioritized his own development as a creative writer over hers, although his wife had

Jo Ann Yolanda Hernández.

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written her first novel at age seventeen. While Hernández’s husband wrote, she was consigned to husband care and child-rearing. Hernández soon experienced the lack of support available to a single, divorced mother having two young children and an oft-interrupted education. Despite all this, she managed to produce outstanding literary works. Under these pressures and competing maternal duties—Hernández served as a foster mother for eight years and engaged in such social and nurturing duties as coaching and presiding over Little League activities—Hernández’s education took some forty years to complete: San Antonio Junior College, 1965–1969; B.A. in psychology and business, Burlington College, Vermont, 1988; M.F.A. in writing at the University of San Francisco State College, 1995; and further study in creative writing at San Francisco State University. “I went back as an undergraduate at 33. After the second writing class I attended, I broke down and cried for three months because someone had remarked how good my writing was. I had never known I was smart. I learned that there were people interested in what I had to say; I had found a voice.” She was able to reach these milestones in her education because of a number of scholarships she won from 1983 to 1985, awarded by the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, among others. Beginning in the mid-1990s her work began to pour forth and receive recognition. This was in part due to her resolve to become a writer; she wrote one story after another as long as her unemployment benefits continued. A number of her stories won local prizes in Vermont and Texas, and other of her works also garnered acclaim: her novel manuscript Aftermath was awarded third prize in the University of California–Irvine Chicano/Latino Prize (1995) and second prize in the Great River Writers Contest; her collection of short stories White Bread Competition was awarded second place the next year; and her short story “Grandmother’s Garden” won the Wellspring Magazine short story award in 1997. This was also the period when Hernández began publishing numerous stories in literary magazines and small-press anthologies, spanning the country from Maine to New York to Oklahoma and California. In her first published book, a collection of stories for young adults, White Bread Competition and Other Stories (1997), Hernández sensitively deals with themes of discrimination, miseducation, and coming of age. In her second offering, The Throw-Away Piece (2006), Hernández tackles the hard-hitting theme of an alienated teenager in foster care and enrolled in a new school who hides her intelligence and talent under her goth dress and makeup as well as in a type of babbling designed to make her speech unintelligible; the plot drives forward toward the threatened ending of suicide for the main character and her alcoholic mother. This stark but poetic tour de force was awarded the coveted Patterson Prize for Literary Excellence. In the meantime, Hernández survives on disability payments and any honoraria and royalties she gets from speaking appearances and her publications. Further Reading Perpetusa-Seva, Inmaculada, and Lourdes Torres, Hispanic and U.S. Latina Expression (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos

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Hernández, Rafael (1892–1965). One of the greatest composers and Spanish-language lyricists, Rafael Hernández was born on October 24, 1892, in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, into an Afro–Puerto Rican family. At the age of twelve, he began to study instrumental music formally with José Rullán Lequerica; later, he studied music at a conservatory. Although Hernández composed operas and zarzuelas, it was in the world of popular, commercial music that he became known throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Even from the release of his first commercial hits, Hernández was an intellectual in the popular music scene, composing music to the verses of famous Puerto Rican poets such as José Gautier Benítez in his “A Mis Amigos” (1924, To My Friends) and such as José de Diego in “Laura Mía” (1924, My Laura). Many of his songs and lyrics also developed patriotic—even nationalist—themes, such as “Pobre Borinqueño” (Poor Puerto Rican), “Mi Patria Tiembla” (My Homeland Shakes), “¡Oh Patria Mía!” (Oh, My Homeland!), “El Buen Borincano” (The Good Puerto Rican), and “Lamento Borincano” (Puerto Rican Lament). To develop his career as a musician and composer, Hernández spent a great deal of time in New York City, which by World War II had become the center of Latin music publishing and recording. In 1926, Hernández formed the performing group Trío Borinquen and later began publishing his compositions with PeerSouthern Music, mostly on the Columbia label. In 1934, he formed another group, the Cuarteto Victoria, in New York. Compositions that have become classics of Latin American music include “El Cumbanchero” (Idle One/Good-timer), “Preciosa” (Precious One, in honor of Puerto Rico), “Capullito de Alelí” (Oleander Bud), and his most famous, “Lamento Borincano,” which laments the poverty in rural Puerto Rico as the main motive for migration to the United States. His “serious” music includes “Ballet Imaginario” (Imaginary Ballet), “Rapsodia Borincana I y II” (Puerto Rican Rhapsody I and II), “Nueve Danzas Clásicas” (Nine Classical Dances), “Seis Caprichos Musicales” (Six Musical Caprices), and four operettas. He died in San Juan on December 11, 1965. Rafael Hernández.

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Further Reading Roberts, John Storm, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Songs of Rafael Hernández, (New York: Hal Leonard Corporation, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Herrera, Juan Felipe (1948–). Born on December 27, 1948, in Fowler, California, and despite interruptions in his education that were caused by his parents’ migrant work, Herrera was able to graduate high school in San Diego (1967) and later to receive a B.A. in anthropology from the University of California at Los Angeles (1972). Working with the arts, from theater to photography, in the Chicano Movement—and afterward—Herrera went on to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology that he soon abandoned in favor of literature. In 1990 he received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa and soon began a career as a professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies at Fresno State University. From the late 1960s, Herrera wrote poetry and became one of the most experimental poets during the Chicano Movement, finding inspiration for his work not only in the pre-Colombian past but also in such things as weaving tapestry, as in his first book Rebozos of love we have woven sudor de pueblos on our backs (1974, Shawls of love we have woven the sweat of peoples on our backs) and photography, as in his poetry book, Exiles of Desire (1983). Included among Herrera’s other books are Facegames (1987), Zenjosé: Scenarios (1988), Akrílica (1989), Night Train to Tuxla (1994), Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (Camino del Sol) (1999, Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream [Path of the Sun]), Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de Rayos (1999), Giraffe on Fire (1991), and Notes of a Bilingual Chile Verde Smuggler (2005). In 1997, Herrera crossed the boundaries of genres (poetry, narrative, drama) and geographic, chronological, and political borders to confront the situation of Mayas in history and the present as part of his own discovery of self in Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America. In the last few years, Herrera has also produced a number of young adult fiction and poetry works, including Coralito’s Bay (2004), Featherless/Desplumado (2004), and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found inside a Cereal Box (2005), a pastiche of poetry and letters, as well as two novels in verse: Crashboomlove (2001) and Downtown Boy (2005). In this voluminous body of work, Herrera has moved from recovering and reinvigorating pre-Colombian native past and political protest to an exploration of the urban life of Latinos to the crossing of borders of all kinds, from the linguistic and cultural to the geographic and psychological. Among Herrera’s awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980, 1985), two University of California–Irvine Chicano Literary Prizes (1979, 1985), an American Book Award (1987), and the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award (2007). Further Reading Bell, Marvin, “A Poet’s Sampler: Juan Felipe Herrera” Boston Review (Oct. 14, 1989): 6.

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Flores, Lauro H., “Juan Felipe Herrera” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Second Series, Vol. 122 (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Hijuelos, Oscar (1951–). Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer Prize (1991) for fiction for his book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Born on August 24, 1951, to Cuban American working-class parents in New York City, Hijuelos was educated in public schools and obtained a B.A. in 1975 and an M.A. in 1976, both in English, from City College of the City University of New York. Hijuelos is one of the few Hispanic writers to have formally studied creative writing and to have broken into the Anglo-dominated creative writing circles, participating in such prestigious workshops as the Breadloaf Writers Conference and benefiting from highly competitive fellowships that include the American Academy in Rome Fellowship from the American Academy and the Institute for Arts and Letters (1985), the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1985), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1990). Hijuelos is the author of various short stories and the following novels: Our House in the Last World (1983), The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993), Mrs. Ives’ Christmas (1995), Empress of the Splendid Season (1999), and A Simple Habana Melody: (from when the world was good) (2002). Hijuelos’s first book is a novel of immigration cut in the mold of American ethnic autobiography. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is more than just a story of immigration. It examines a period in time when Hispanic culture was highly visible in the United States and was able to influence American popular culture: the 1950s during the height of the mambo craze and the overwhelming success of Desi Arnaz’s television show, “I Love Lucy.” Written in a poetic but almost documentary style, the novel follows two brothers who are musicians trying to ride the crest of the Latin music wave. The novel provides a picture of one segment of American life never before seen in English-language fiction while also indicting womanizing and alcoholism. Since the publication of The Mambo Kings, which was made into a movie of the same title, Hijuelos’s novelistic output has diversified in themes. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilo Montez O’Brien follows the interwoven lives of some seventeen characters from a Cuban Irish family living in Pennsylvania over the course of some seven decades. In Mrs. Ives’ Christmas, Hijuelos evokes Charles Dickens and paints a melancholy tale of adjustment to a violent death on the streets of New York. In the ironically titled Empress of the Splendid Season, Hijuelos focuses on a cleaning woman and some fifty years of her family history in New York. His Simple Habana Melody, returning to the world of popular music, explores such topics as Nazism in Europe and nostalgia for a simpler age in Havana after the war and prior to the Communist takeover. Further Reading Rollyson, Carl E., and Frank Northen Magill, Critical Survey of Long Fiction: Oscar Hijuelos-Patrick McGinley (Salem, MA: Salem Pr. Inc., 2000).


Hinojosa, Federico Allen

Hinojosa, Federico Allen (?–?). One of the first authors to write a book about the ideology and the community conceived of as “México de afuera,”* Federico Allen Hinojosa was an expatriate Mexican journalist who resided in San Antonio for some twenty-five years during and after the Mexican Revolution. His 1940 treatise, El México de afuera (y su reintegro a la patria) (México Abroad and Its Reintegration into the Homeland), was one of the first documents to accept that there would always be a Mexican presence within the United States, developing its own culture and identity. He nevertheless argued in his book that the homeland should facilitate means for receiving the former emigrants and exiles and prepare to integrate them into modern life, with its culture that had progressed considerably since the expatriates had left. Hinojosa’s book provides valuable evidence that the concept of “México de afuera” was still evolving during the Depression and Repatriation of Mexicans, becoming a much broader term than that originally coined by Ignacio Lozano* and popularized by Nemesio García Naranjo.* Further Reading Arreola, Daniel D., “The Mexican American Cultural Capital” Geographical Review Vol. 77, No. 1 (Jan. 1987): 17–34.

Nicolás Kanellos

Hinojosa, Rolando (1929–). Rolando Hinojosa is the most prolific and probably most bilingually talented of Latino novelists, the author of original creations in both English and Spanish, published in the United States and abroad. Born on January 21, 1929, and raised in Mercedes, Texas, to an Anglo American school teacher and a Mexican American policeman, Hinojosa has embodied in his life and literature the cultural fusion and conflict that he depicts in his continuing, epic narrative about life in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. His Quinto Sol Award–winning Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973, Sketches of the Valley and Other Works) is a mosaic of the picturesque character types, folk customs, and speech of the bilingual community in the small towns in South Texas. While his sketches and insights are at times reminiscent of the local color crónicas* published in 1920s Spanish-language newspapers, his experimentation with numerous novelistic forms in his various novels, ranging from reporting to epistolary to detective fiction, made Hinojosa’s art one of the most sophisticated contributions to Hispanic literature. Estampas was just the beginning phase of a continuing novel that has become a broad epic of the history and culture of the Mexican Americans and Anglos of the Valley, centered in the fictitious Belken County and focusing on the lives of two fictitious characters and a narrator—Rafa Buenrostro, Jehú Malacara, and P. Galindo—all of whom may be partial alter egos of Hinojosa himself. What is especially intriguing about Hinojosa’s continuing novel, which he calls the Klail City Death Trip Series, is his experimentation not only with various forms of narration—derived from Spanish, Mexican, English, and American literary history—but also with English–Spanish bilingualism. The respective 564

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installments of the continuing novel include Klail City y sus alrededores (1976, Klail City), which owes much to the picaresque novel; Korean Love Songs (1980), narrative poetry; Mi querido Rafa (1981, Dear Rafe, 1985), part epistolary novel and part report; Rites and Witnesses (1982), mainly a novel in dialogue; Partners in Crime (1985), a detective novel; Claros varones de Belken (1986, Fair Gentlemen of Belken), a composite; and Becky y sus amigos (1990, Becky and Her Friends), a novel that continues his reportage style, but with a new unnamed narrator, P. Galindo having died. The Useless Servants (1993) is a highly autobiographical chronicle of his characters’ participation in the Korean War, Ask a Policeman (1998) is a detective novel about drug smuggling on the border, and We Happy Few (2006) is his only novel set in the halls of academia, where Hinojosa has spent the major portion of his life. Because of his many awards, his academic background as a Ph.D. in Spanish and the positive response to his sophisticated art from critics and univerRolando Hinojosa. sity professors in particular, Hinojosa is one of the few Hispanic writers in the country to teach in creative writing programs at a high level. In holding the distinguished title of Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Hinojosa is the most recognized and highest-ranking Chicano/Hispanic author in academia. He holds the unique distinction of being elected to the Spanish Academy of the Language and holding a chair in creative writing in the English department of the University of Texas. He has won both the highest award for the novel in Latin America—the 1976 Casa de las Américas Prize—and the National Award for Chicano Literature in the United States. The various installments of Hinojosa’s generational, continuing novel, The Klail City Death Trip Series, have become standard texts in Hispanic and American literature courses throughout the United States and have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese and, of course, Spanish. Further Reading Lee, Joyce Glover, Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997).

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Saldívar, José David, The Rolando Hinojosa Reader (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985). Zilles, Klaus, Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader’s Guide (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos

Hispanic Peoples. “Hispanics” or “Latinos”—terms deriving from hispanoamericano and latinoamericano—are United States residents with roots in the Spanish-speaking Americas; the label is sometimes applied to Spaniards and their descendants in the United States. (In Spain the official term for the people of the Spanish-speaking Americas is iberoamericanos: i.e., Ibero Americans. In the Spanish-speaking Americas, people are more likely to refer to themselves as hispanoamericanos, as well as to their relatives in the United States; they only use the term Latin America, when they include Brazil, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and such countries in the discussion.) “Latino” is often used interchangeably with “Hispanic,” but the nineteenth-century concept of “Latin America,” from which “Latino” derives, broadly referred to the peoples emerging from Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies. The term was especially promoted when the French had designs on expanding their empire in the Americas. However, “Hispanoamérica” referred solely to the Spanish-speaking peoples formerly residing in the Spanish colonies. Although some laymen contend that emphasizing the hispano/Hispanic or latino/Latin part of these terms effectively erases the indigenous and mestizo culture and history of these peoples, in reality these groups and their heritage are represented in the second syllable: América, which for hispanos or latinos does not refer uniquely to the United States of America, but to the whole Hemisphere as distinct from Europe: they are all americanos, the inheritors and descendants of the New World, whose culture blends those of the native peoples of the Americas with those of Europe and Africa. This blending is really what is celebrated on El Día de la Raza (The Day of the People), October 12: not Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas but the process of cultural confrontation and blending that Columbus was the first to put into motion. In common usage today, both terms refer to the U.S. residents of diverse racial and historical backgrounds related to the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas, including the United States. The vast majority of them are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban origin, and the presence of their ancestors in North America predates the arrival of English colonists. In fact, Western civilization was introduced to North America and the lands that eventually would belong to the United States first by Hispanics. Many of the institutions and values that have become identified as “American” were really first introduced by Hispanic peoples (Spaniards, Hispanicized Africans and Amerindians, mestizos, and mulattoes) during the exploration and settlement of these lands. Not only were advanced technologies, such as those essential to ranching, farming and mining, introduced by the 566

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Hispanics but also all the values and perspectives inherent in Western intellectual culture. These values, blended with those of the indigenous peoples and those of the Africans forcibly transported here, and much of the culture of the indigenes and the Africans, have survived and become a part of what we believe latinos or hispanos to be today. The Spanish and their mixedbreed children continued to blend Western culture with that of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the peoples imported from Africa for five hundred years. Each generation of immigrants to the United States from Spanish America and Spain is also included in these categories, as are their naturalized children. Among scholars and laymen there has been some controversy as to how to refer to this entire group of United States residents of Spanish and Spanish American origin, some opting for Hispanics or Latinos and others not wishing to use either term in preference of maintaining their national origins, such as Mexican, Colombian, Cuban, and so on. Moreover, various heterogeneous communities around the United States have traditionally called themselves one or the other. In the Chicago area, communities have preferred to see themselves as “Latinos,” for instance, but today many in Texas urban centers prefer “Hispanics” or “hispanos.” In Tampa, people of Italian, Spanish, and Cuban origin have all called themselves “Latins.” In the Northeast, until recently, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others were all called “Spanish” because of the language they spoke and by analogy with other immigrant groups whose nationality is synonymous with their language, such as Italians, Germans, and Polish. What’s more, Puerto Ricans and Cubans were actually citizens of Spain until 1898 and many continued to use the term “Spanish” for years beyond their separation from the “mother country.” Thus the diversity of nomenclature reflects the real-life diversity of the people. Further Reading Sosa, Al, “Hispanic versus Latin” (http://alsgenealogy.com/hispanic-vs-latin.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP). Since 1985, the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, has administered the Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP), a workshop for the development of new plays by Latina and Latino writers. Over the years, more than half of the plays developed have gone on to production at theaters throughout the United States. Playwrights submit their scripts to a South Coast panel; the authors of selected scripts are then brought to Costa Mesa to participate in workshops and readings with a director, dramaturg, and professional actors to prepare the script for presentation. In 1998, the South Coast Repertory initiated its annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, into which it incorporated the Hispanic Playwrights Project; some of the Hispanic plays developed in the project have been staged at the festival. Yearly, the festival presents six to eight new plays in readings, workshops, and performances, among which there is usually at least one Hispanic play. For 567

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eleven years, playwright and director José Cruz González served as the director of the Hispanic project. Among the Latino playwrights who have benefited from the Hispanic Playwrights Project are Luis Alfaro,* José Rivera,* and Caridad Svich.* Further Reading Anderson, Douglas, “The Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America” TDR Vol. 32, No. 3 (1988): 55–84.

Nicolás Kanellos Hospital, Carolina (1957–). Born in Havana, Cuba, Hospital accompanied her family into exile in 1961 and was raised and educated in Florida. Hospital graduated from the University of Florida in 1979 with a B.A. in English and in 1983 with an M.A. in Hispanic American literature. Since 1979, she has taught English at Miami–Dade Community College. A poet from an early age, Hospital captures in her bilingual verse the transition of her community from exile and immigration to American identity. In 1989, Hospital compiled the first anthology of Cuban American literature, Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos, thus announcing the birth and acceptance of Cuban American literature as other than a literature merely of exile and immigration. Before Hospital’s works there existed barely a consciousness of the corpus of Cuban American literature—the legacy of exile being so dominant, especially in Miami. The prevailing political sentiment in Miami and other centers of Cuban exile had fought against the concept of a Cuban Americanism, because the exile community’s identity depended on remaining distinctively Cuban, someday returning to its home. But Hospital braved opposition, openly embracing English and bilingualism and recognizing the birth of a literature firmly planted on American soil: here to stay. In Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos, she declared that Cuban American writers were risk-takers, daring to belong to a future made up of a new reality. After publishing individual poems in numerous periodicals and anthologies, Hospital finally selected her best work from 1983 to 2003 and published it The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir. Across this intensely felt psychological and emotional poetic exploration, Carolina Hospital. Hospital searches for identity and meaning 568

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in a life that has been bifurcated by political and cultural borders. In spite of numerous dislocations, Hospital manages to arrive at a wholeness and integrity that art and poetry have helped her to produce. Among her awards is a 1995 Hispanic Women in Literature Award from the Coalition of Hispanic American Literature. From 1996 to 1999 and from 2003 to 2005, she held the Endowed Teaching Chair at Miami–Dade College. Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Hospital, Carolina, ed., Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos (Princeton: Linden Lane Press, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Hostos, Eugenio María de (1839–1903). Born on January 11, 1839, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, writer and political figure Eugenio María de Hostos was educated by tutors at home and later studied at a lyceum in San Juan before being sent to Spain for his secondary and university education. While a student, he wrote his first book attacking Spanish colonialism in the Americas: La Peregrinación de Bayoán (1863, Bayoán’s Pilgrimage), a political allegory in the form of a novel. In 1868 in Barcelona, Hostos became the editor of El Progreso (The Progress), a newspaper that was shut down by the authorities. He was subsequently deported to France and from there moved to New York City to become involved in the independence movement for Puerto Rico and Cuba. In New York, he edited La Revolución (the Revolution), the official organ of the Cuban independence movement. It was at this stage in his life that he envisioned the creation of an Antillean federation, a government of free, united islands of the Caribbean. From 1870 on, he traveled throughout Spanish America to raise support for the independence movement. In Lima, he founded La patria newspaper and took part in labor organizing. In 1872 he moved to Chile, where he wrote most of his important works on politics, history, and art; he also published a second edition of Peregrinación de Bayoán there and wrote for two more newspaper: El Ferrocarril (The Railroad) and Sud América (South America). In 1873, he became a professor of philosoEugenio María de Hostos. phy at the University of Buenos Aires, 569

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but soon after, in 1874, he returned to New York to join the revolutionary movement once again. Persecuted by police, he then moved to Santo Domingo, where he edited the newspaper Las Tres Antillas (The Three Antilles), and then to Venezuela; from 1878 to 1888, he once again resided in Santo Domingo. In 1889, he became rector of a lyceum in Chile. In 1898, he returned again to New York to organize the Liga de Patriotas (Patriots’ League) in support of the independence movement. Upon the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico, he was unsuccessful in his pleas for Puerto Rican independence and subsequently went into exile in Santo Domingo, where he died on August 11, 1903. The twenty volumes of his complete works, which include writings on politics, education, biography, and law, as well as his own creative writing, were published posthumously in Puerto Rico in 1939. For his contributions to education and culture in many of the countries of Spanish America, Hostos today is known as “Citizen of the Americas.” Further Reading Alexander, Robert Jackson, Biographical Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean Political Leaders (Westport, CT: 1988). Balseiro, José Agustín, Eugenio María de Hostos, Hispanic America’s Public Servant (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami, 1949).

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Hoyos, Angela de (1940–). Angela de Hoyos was born on January 23, 1940, into a middle-class family in Coahuila, Mexico, the daughter of a proprietor of a dry-cleaning shop and a housewife with an artistic bent. After being tragically burned as a young child, de Hoyos was forced to convalesce in bed for many months, during which she entertained herself by composing rhymes. While she was still a child, her family moved to San Antonio, where her interest in poetry continued. From her teenage years on, her education was informal but was supplemented by art courses she took in area institutions. In the late 1960s, de Hoyos began publishing poetry and entering her work in international competitions, for which she won such awards as the Bronze Medal of Honor of the Centro Studi a Scambi Internazionale (CSSI), Rome, Italy, 1966; the Silver Medal of Honor (literature), CSSI, 1967; Diploma di Benemerenza (literature), CSSI, 1968; the Diploma di Benemerenza, CSSI, 1969 and 1970. During the 1970s, her interest in literature and her awareness of the lack of opportunity for Chicano writers led her to establish a small press, M&A Editions, in San Antonio, through which she issued not only her own work but also that of such writers as Evangelina VigilPiñón. During the 1980s, de Hoyos also founded a cultural periodical, Huehuetitlan, which is still in existence. In addition to this intense literary life, de Hoyos developed a successful career as a painter. Her works, also inspired by Mexican American culture, are widely exhibited and collected in Texas. De Hoyos has cultivated a free-verse, terse, conversational poetry—which at times takes dialog form—that provides a context for cultural and feminist issues within a larger philosophical and literary framework. De Hoyos, a student of writing in many languages and cultures, examines themes and issues from cross570

Huerta, Dolores

cultural perspectives; her work is multifaceted. Although her readers are always aware of these larger frameworks, the themes are perceived as very specific and as embodied in the actions and circumstances of real people. De Hoyos’s poetry is socially engaged while at the same time humanistic in the best sense of the word. Her particular concerns are poverty, racism, and disenfranchisement, whether of a people, of her people, of children, or women. Her particular mission is to give voice to those who cannot express themselves. De Hoyos is also a poet of humor and wit, creating piquant exchanges in verse between lovers and enemies, as exemplified in her dialogues between Hernán Cortés and La Malinche. Her most important book, Woman, Woman, deals with the roles that society has dictated for women and with their struggle to overcome the limits of those roles. De Hoyos surveys history from Aztec days to the present and even casts an eye Angela de Hoyos. on the image of women in fairy tales, as in her poem “Fairy-Tale: Cuento de Hadas.” Throughout Woman, Woman, de Hoyos sustains the dynamic tension that both unites and separates male and female. In her poetry, that tension is always erotically charged, always threatening to one or the other, always reverberating in the political. In Woman, Woman, de Hoyos has also perfected her bilingual style, innovatively mixing the linguistic codes of English and Spanish to reach beyond the merely conversational to the more philosophical: the choice of language and lexicon is not just a sociolinguistic one but also a deeply cultural one. Angela de Hoyos’s other books and chapbooks include Selecciones (1976, Selections), Poems/Poemas (1975), Chicano Poems from the Barrio (1975), Arise Chicano: and Other Poems (1975), and Linking Roots (1993). Further Reading Aguilar-Henson, Marcella, The Multi-Faceted Poetic World of Angela de Hoyos (Austin, Texas: Relámpago, 1982). Lindstrom, Naomi, “Four Representative Hispanic Women Poets of Central Texas: A Portrait of Plurality” Third Woman Vol. 2, No. 1 (1984): 64–70. Ramos, Luis Arturo, Angela de Hoyos: A Critical Look/Lo Heroico y Antiheroico en su poesia (Albuquerque, NM: Pajarito, 1979).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez

Huerta, Dolores (1930–). Dolores Huerta is one of the most significant Latina leaders in the twentieth century, having made her mark in many areas, 571

Huerta, Dolores

especially in the civil rights movement and in farm-worker organizing. Huerta partnered with César Chávez* in launching the farm worker’s union in Delano, California, in 1965; it was an action that served as a catalyst for the Chicano Movement* and the development of Chicano literature.* Like Chávez, she has become a model and inspiration for writers of Chicano and Latino literature. Born in the mining town of Dawson, New Mexico, Dolores Huerta was the second child and only daughter of Juan Fernández and Alicia Chaves Fernández. Huerta’s ancestry on her mother’s side is from New Mexico; her father’s parents came from Mexico. After her parents divorced when she was only a toddler, her mother took her and her two brothers to northern California, where she became a businesswoman. Unlike most farm worker leaders, Huerta had no experience laboring in the fields; instead, she inherited her mother’s business skills and, after being an active organizer in Girl Scouts and Catholic youth groups in her youth, dedicated her life to service, first in the Community Services Organization (CSO) and then in the farm workers union. Huerta’s father, a onetime migrant farm worker who received a college degree and was elected to the New Mexico state legislature, also served to inspire her political and social activism. One of his main concerns as a legislator was labor reform. Unlike Hispanic women of her generation, Huerta attended college and received a teaching certificate, but instead of going into the classroom, she turned to social activism. In the mid1950s, she began to work for the Community Service Organization, a Mexican American self-help association founded in Los Angeles. Once in, she became one the most successful organizers in registering people to vote and persuading immigrants to attend citizenship classes for immigrants; she also led grassroots campaigns pressing local governments to make improvements in the Mexican barrios. Recognizing her considerable skills, the CSO sent her to Sacramento to lobby for legislation that would benefit Hispanics. One of her major accomplishments as a lobbyist was persuading the legislature to eliminate the citizenship requirement for public assistance programs. Before serving as a lobbyist, the CSO had assigned her in 1957 to help organize the Agricultural Workers AssociaDolores Huerta. tion in Stockton, an experience that 572

Huerta, Javier O.

injected in her a lifelong concern about the living and working conditions of farm workers. In 1962, Huerta caught the attention of César Chávez, the director of the CSO in California and Arizona, who resigned to organize farm workers full-time. Compatible because of their mutual training, Huerta shared with Chávez the CSO will to win. Huerta became second-in-command to Chávez, helping to shape and guide the nascent National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). In the ensuing years, the union had many successes, but an equal number of disappointments. Through it all, she remained faithful to Chávez, but she also spoke out on behalf of women within the union. Chávez assigned Dolores Huerta to negotiate all union contracts in the early 1970s, because he recognized that she was by far the toughest of all the union leaders. Her skills in lobbying and organizing were crucial when the California legislature passed the California Labor Relations Act, which provided farm workers the same rights as other workers. After Chávez died, she continued to serve in leadership positions. Huerta sacrificed much in her endeavors, eschewing financial rewards, going to jail, and sustaining a 1988 beating by policemen that hospitalized her. Further Reading “Dolores Huerta” (http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/ chh/bio/huerta_d.htm). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1979).

F. Arturo Rosales Huerta, Javier O. (1973–). Javier O. Huerta’s numerous research interests can be reduced to one: feet. His academic foot fetish deals both with feet of the metrical variety found in the verse of the British Romantics and with feet of the mobile variety attached to millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. He intends to go beyond the pun to study the rhythm of immigration. As one of his poems says, “el mundo da vueltas al ritmo de tus pasos,” which translates to the world rotates to the rhythm of your steps. Huerta is a native of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, the only Mexican border city to be founded by people who crossed to the Mexican side of the Rio Grande to remain Mexican citizens in 1847 during the Mexican–American War. He was born in 1973 to Margarita Gómez, a nineteen-year-old maquiladora worker, and Javier Huerta, a twenty-one-year-old coyote (labor smuggler). They lived in la Colonia Mirador until July of 1981, when he and his family—father, mother, and two-year-old brother Tomás—crossed the Río Bravo/Rio Grande into the United States of America. He often questions whether their journey north could not be considered a betrayal to the loyalty of the founding families of his beloved Nuevo Laredo. Huerta’s family (not including his father) settled in Houston, Texas, which became his adopted home. After six years of living as undocumented immigrants, his family filed for residency under the amnesty clause of the Immigration 573

Huerta, Javier O.

Reform and Control Act of 1986. They received Permanent Resident cards in 1989 and were able to return to Mexico for the first of many reunions with his mother’s family, los Gomez, who continued to thrive and triumph in la Colonia Mirador. As part of his naturalization interview with an INS inspector, he was asked to write out the sentence, “Today I’m going to the grocery store.” He knew that the sentence scanned as iambic pentameter and swore to make it the first line of his epic masterpiece. In January of 2000 (almost two decades after his arrival), he received an official welcome from the White House in the form of a photocopied letter signed by William J. Clinton, becoming a U.S. citizen. Huerta’s 2005 manuscript, Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Some Clarifications and Other Poems) received the thirty-first Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from the University of California, Irvine. This poetry collection was his MFA thesis for the Bilingual MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. At UTEP, he had the privilege of working with talented classmates from Texas, California, Chicago, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Many of his classmates have gone on to receive prestigious awards in their respective countries. His experience at UTEP helped to shape him as a writer and will always remain one of the most important phases of his writing career. Indeed, El Paso will remain the center of his literary world. Huerta is currently a graduate student in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. Huerta says that the poetry in Some Clarifications y otros poemas (2007) is based on the mispronunciation of his name: Javier as have air. The poems in this collection should be considered as experiments and observations on a different kind of air. In “Blasphemous Elegy for May 14, 2003,” he attempts to show how not having a name (legal documents) can equate to not having air. He lives in Oakland, California, with artist and fiction writer Maria Tuttle. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

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I Ibáñez, Armando P. (1949–). Mexican American journalist and religious poet Armando P. Ibáñez was born on June 26, 1949, in the town of San Diego, Texas, into a family that had resided in the area for generations. After a thriceinterrupted education studying journalism at Texas A&I University (later Texas A&M University–Kingsville) and the University of Texas at Austin, Ibánez left his studies in the late 1970s to work in public television and later on the staffs of the Alice-Echo News and the Corpus Christi Caller Times. After a few years, Ibáñez answered a call from his God and earned two master’s degrees in theology and divinity at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in 1993 and was ordained a Dominican priest upon graduation. Although Ibáñez had written poetry and published it in journals during the 1970s, as well as issuing a vanity-press book, Midday Shadow, in 1980, it was not until the 1990s that he perfected his spiritual voice and issued the books for which he is most known: Mesquites Never Die—A Theology of Poetry (1993) and Wrestling with the Angel: A Collection of Poetry (1997). He has also created a series of poetry videos inspired by the two books, as well as Sea (1995), Creating Sacred Space—Reaching Out to the Artist (1995), and A Moment of Silence (1998). Like the poetry of Fray Angélico Chávez, Ibáñez’s poetry takes much spiritual sustenance from nature and the Southwestern landscape in directing the poetic narrator’s eyes upward to the Creator. Ibáñez concretizes his poetry also by incorporating and referring to various cultural motifs and themes and to folkloric characters and legends from Mexican American and Native American life in Texas and the Southwest. Ibáñez’s poetry demonstrates concern for farm workers and the poor and ponders their relationship to the overall scheme of 575

Idar, Jovita

life. Completely bilingual, Ibáñez writes some poems in English and others in Spanish and in still others switches between languages as he speaks. Further Reading Rosales, Jesús, “Armando P. Ibáñez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 122–126).

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Jovita Idar.

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Idar, Jovita (1885–1946). Educator, journalist, social activist, and nurse Jovita Idar was born into an enterprising newspaper family of Laredo, Texas, on September 7, 1885. Idar’s parents, Nicasio Idar of Point Isabel, Texas, and Jovita Vivero de Idar of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, moved in 1880 from Corpus Christi to Laredo, where they established their business as journalists and commercial printers and raised their nine children. Educated at the Methodist Holding Institute, Idar received her teaching credentials in 1903. Her superior linguistic skills—in Spanish, English, French, and Italian—informed her work as a bilingual educator and journalist. She helped found a bilingual school and worked for her family’s newspaper, La Crónica (The Chronicle), intermittently collaborating as contributor and copy editor with other Texas Spanishlanguage newspapers, such as Laredo’s El Progreso (Progress), Corpus Christi’s El Eco del Golfo (The Gulf Echo), and San Benito’s La Luz (The Light). Rarely, however, was her name included in the bylines of her journalistic contributions. Through the use of pseudonyms such as “A. V. Negra” (which phonetically reads “ave negra,” Black Bird) and “Astrea” (Greek goddess of justice), Idar advocated bilingual, bicultural education and women’s rights, denouncing Anglo racism. A vehement social activist, Idar was instrumental in her family’s organization of the 1911 El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (First Mexicanist Congress), the first conference to address the issues of the lynching, economic exploitation, and social oppression of the Mexican population of Texas. As an extension of this effort, she founded the Liga Femenil Mexicanista (Mexicanist Feminine League) to encourage women’s social and political participation within the public sphere and to provide free education for Mexican children. Idar’s acitivism was transnational. Along with Leonor Villegas de Magnón,* she worked with the organization, Unión, Progreso y Caridad (Union, Progress, and Charity) and in 1913 joined the revolutionary forces struggling to oust Victoriano Huerta from the presidency of Mexico. As a nurse,

Immigrant Literature

propagandist, and journalist, she traveled from the border to Mexico City with other nurses and doctors as part of the Cruz Blanca Nacional (National White Cross) medical corps. In 1916, Idar bought a press and, with the assistance of her brothers, Clemente and Federico, founded the periodical Evolución (Evolution). Soon after her marriage in 1917 to Bartolo Juárez, she moved to San Antonio, where she contributed to La Prensa (The Press), the Italian periodical La Voce della Patria (Voice of the Homeland), and El Heraldo Cristiano (The Christian Herald). Jovita Idar is most often remembered as the woman who often challenged and confronted the Texas Rangers, both in writing and in person, in defense of journalists’ First Amendment rights. Further Reading Lomas, Clara, “Introduction,” The Rebel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994). Rogers, Mary Beth, Janelle Scott, and Sherry Smith, We Can Fly: Stories of Katherine Stinson and Other Gutsy Texas Women (Austin: Ellen C. Temple, 1983).

Clara Lomas Immigrant Literature. Hispanic immigrant literature is literature created orally or in written form by the immigrants from the Hispanic world who have come to these shores since the early nineteenth century. Among its characteristics are (1) the predominant use of the language of the homeland in (2) serving a population united by that language, irrespective of national origin, (3) solidifying and furthering national identity. The literature of immigration serves a population in transition from the land of origin to the United States by reflecting the reasons for emigrating, recording the trials and tribulations of immigration, and facilitating adjustment to the new society—all while maintaining a link with the old society. Unlike the literature of European immigrants to the United States, Hispanic immigrant literature generally does not support the myths of the American Dream and the Melting Pot: the belief that the immigrants came to find a better life—implicitly, a better culture—and that soon they or their descendants would become Americans, leaving behind any need for literature in the language of the “old country.” Although Hispanic authors writing in English since World War II may have subscribed to these notions to get published or to achieve a broad readership, Hispanic immigrant literature in the Spanish language is not about assimilating or “melting” into a generalized American identity. In fact, the history of Hispanic groups in the United States has shown an unmeltable ethnicity, and, because immigration from Spanish-speaking countries has been almost a steady flow since the founding of the United States to the present, there seems no end to the phenomenon at this juncture in history, or in the foreseeable future. In general, the literature of Hispanic immigration displays a double-gaze perspective: forever comparing the past and the present and the homeland and the new country, only seeing the resolution of these double, conflicting points of reference when the author, the characters, or the audience can return to the 577


Mexican immigrants working at an Arizona mine, early 1900s.

patria. The literature of immigration reinforces the culture of the homeland while facilitating the accommodation to the new land. Although fervently nationalistic, this literature seeks to represent and protect the rights of immigrants by protesting discrimination, human rights abuses, and racism. Because much of this literature arises from or is pitched to the working class, it adopts the working-class and rural dialects of the immigrants. Among the predominant themes in the literature of immigration are the description of the Metropolis, often in satirical or critical terms, as in essays by José Martí,* Francisco “Pachín” Marín,* and Nicanor Bolet Peraza;* the description of the trials and tribulations of immigrants, especially in their journey here and, once here, in their exploitation as workers and discrimination against as foreigners and racial others, as in Daniel Venegas* and Conrado Espinosa;* the conflict between Anglo and Hispanic cultures, ubiquitous in this literature; and the expression of gender anxieties in nationalist reaction against assimilation into mainstream culture, as in the crónicas of Julio G. Arce (Jorge Ulica).* Immigrant authors often cast their literary discourse in the framework of an 578


The Border Patrol, c. 1930.

imminent return to the homeland or a warning to those back home not to come to the United States and face the disillusionment that the writers and their protagonists have already experienced. This stance of writing to warn their compatriots, when in actuality they are speaking to their own immigrant enclave or community, helps authors to find common cause and solidarity with their audiences; both writers and readers are rendering testimony to the uninitiated, who are the potential greenhorns destined in the future to suffer as have the protagonists of these immigrant genres. Of course, these formulae and themes depend upon the underlying premise of immigrant literature: the return to the patria, which necessitates the preservation of language and culture, as well as loyalty to the patria. Almost invariably, the narratives of immigration end with the main characters returning to the home soil; failure to do so results in death, the severest poetic justice—as illustrated in the first novel of immigration, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s* Lucas Guevara (1914), and, almost half a century later, in René Marqués’s* play La carreta (1953, The Oxcart, 1969). Because of the massive migrations of working-class Mexicans and Puerto Ricans during the twentieth century, much of immigrant literature is to be found in oral expression, folk songs, vaudeville and other working-class literary and artistic expression. The anonymous Mexican corrido “El lavaplatos” (The Dishwasher) reproduces the same cycle as Daniel Venegas’s working-class novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (1928, The 579


Mexican immigrants leaving Mexico to come to the U.S. as guest workers during the Bracero Program. Hermanos Mayo photo.

Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000)—leaving home to find work in the United States, disillusionment in laboring like a beast of burden here and eventual return home. The immigrants’ songs of uprootedness and longing for the homeland can be heard in the décima* (a song with ten-line stanzas and a sonnet-like rhyme scheme) “Lamento de un jíbaro” (Lament of the Jíbaro*). But the ultimate disillusionment and disgrace for the immigrant is deportation, as documented in the plaintive refrains of the corrido “Los deportados” (The Deportees) and the outraged newspaper editorials by Rodolfo Uranga. Quite often the setting for this literature is the workplace, whether on the streets walked by Wen Gálvez’s* door-to-door salesman in his Tampa: impresiones de un emigrado (1897, Tampa: Impressions of an Émigré), in the factory of Gustavo Alemán Bolaños’s* La factoría (1925, The Factory), or under the burning sun in the agricultural fields, as in Conrado Espinosa’s El sol de Texas (1927, Under the Texas Sun, 2007); but domestic settings are also frequent, even in contemporary plays, such as René Marqués’s La carreta and Iván Acosta’s* El super (1977), both depicting the intergenerational conflict splitting U.S.-acculturated children from their immigrant parents. In fact, culture conflict of all sorts typifies this work, and from this conflict arise some of its most typical characters, such as the agringados (Gringoized), renegados 580


Scene from El Teatro de la Gente’s “El Cuento de la Migra.”

(renegades), and pitiyanquis (petite Yankees), who deny their own culture to adopt “American” ways. But more than any other archetype of American culture, the predominantly male authors have chosen the American female to personify the eroticism and immorality, greed, and materialism that they perceive in American society. What was an amoral Eve in a Metropolis identified as Sodom for Alirio Díaz Guerra evolved into the 1920s flapper in Jesús Colón,* Daniel Venegas, and Julio G. Arce, an enticing but treacherous Eve who led unassuming Hispanic Adams into perdition. These authors place the responsibility for preserving Hispanic customs and language, for protecting identity, in the hands of their women, subsequently levying severe criticism at those who adopt more liberal American customs or even dare to behave like flappers themselves. This can also be seen in such contemporary works as René Marqués’s La carreta and Jaime Carrero’s* Nuyorican play Pipo Subway No Sabe Reír (Pipo Doesn’t Know How to Laugh). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” in American Literary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–455. Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction,” Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, eds. Nicolás Kanellos, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).


Immigration Narratives

Immigration Narratives. Immigration has been one of the basic realities of life for Latino communities in the United States since the nineteenth century. It has not only been a sociocultural reality but also a powerful determinant of the Latino or Hispanic vision of the world. The impact of successive generations of immigrants, originating principally in Mexico and the Caribbean but also from Central and South America, has made an indelible mark on the psyche of Hispanic minorities in the United States. These successive waves of immigration have also had the effect of renewing the cultural character of the Hispanic communities in this country. It is no wonder that one of the most important themes in Hispanic literature is immigration, or that it has even given rise to a specific type of narrative. Just as all themes that arise from the grassroots of society, permeating many aspects of daily life, the theme of the Hispanic immigrant in the grand Metropolis first arises in oral lore as personal experience narratives and anecdotes, spreading with its characteristic dialectical expression to jokes and songs and then to such popular theatrical forms as vaudeville. Long before literary works based on immigrant life appeared in literature, Spanish-language newspapers began collecting and printing these jokes, anecdotes, and tales of misfortune surrounding greenhorns come to the Metropolis. It is not surprising that the first Hispanic novel of immigration appeared in New York City in 1914; the city was one of the favorite ports of entry for Hispanic immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the publication of Alirio Díaz Guerra’s* Lucas Guevara in that year, New York and other cities have continued to be the base for the launching of a continuous stream of immigrant literature in Spanish. Included among the many immigrant novels and plays that have appeared throughout the twentieth century are Conrado Espinosa’s* El sol de Texas (San Antonio, 1927 [The Texas Sun]), Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (Los Angeles, 1928 [The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000]) by Daniel Venegas,* La factoría by Gustavo Alemán Bolaños* (written in New York and published in Guatemala in 1925 [The Factory]), Trópico en Manhattan (Tropics in Manhattan) by Guillermo Cotto-Thorner* (written in New York and published in San Juan in 1951), La carreta by René Marqués* (The Oxcart), which debuted in New York in 1952, El super by Iván Acosta* (New York, 1977, The Superintendent), Odisea del Norte by Mario Bencastro* (written in Washington, D.C., and published in Houston in 1998 [Odyssey to the North, 2000]), Roberto Quesada’s* The Big Banana (1998), and Not through Miami (2001)—both written in New York but published in Miami—and Eduardo González Viaña’s El corridor de Dante (2006, Dante’s Ballad, 2007), written in Oregon and published in Houston. All of these works are tales about greenhorn immigrants come to the big city to improve their lives—that is, to seek their fortunes in the land of opportunities— who in the end become disillusioned by what the authors see as the ills of American society: oppression of the working class, racial discrimination, underworld and underclass culture, and a capitalism that erodes Hispanic 582


identity and values, including family, religion, machismo, language, and culture. In this way, Spanish-language immigrant literature opposes and deconstructs the myth of the American Dream—in opposition to the reinforcement and celebration of the American Dream that usually occurs in the Englishlanguage ethnic autobiography written by the children of immigrants, such as those written by Julia Alvarez,* Oscar Hijuelos,* Esmeralda Santiago,* and Victor Villaseñor.* In fact, the Spanish-language immigrant novel is written by the immigrants themselves, not their children, and their texts take on an additional historical authenticity as opposed to stories re-created from inherited family sagas. Lucas Guevara is the first of these novels and inaugurates the ethos and structure that will be repeated in many of the works cited above: 1. A naive Hispanic immigrant filled with high expectations and fascinated by the advanced technology and progress of the Metropolis ultimately becomes disillusioned with the United States. 2. The greenhorn, unfamiliar with sophisticated city ways, becomes the victim of numerous abuses perpetrated by authorities, petty criminals, and hucksters, as well as by the bosses and foremen at his place of employment. 3. The authors or narrators reject the materialism and “superiority” of the Metropolis, instead embracing Latino cultural values and identity, eventually leading the protagonists to return to their homelands. Those who remain in the Metropolis, as in Lucas Guevara and La carreta, will die, a sort of poetic justice for the betrayal of national values and ideals. 4. Frequently the plot of these immigrant novels and plays is a vehicle for an—at times—biting criticism of Metropolitan culture’s lack of ethical standards, prevalence of racial discrimination, rampant sense of superiority to Latinos and their cultures, and endemic hypocrisy. The Metropolis is seen as Babylon or Sodom and Gomorra, and Anglos as the corruptors of Latino innocence: their money perverts everything. The technological marvels of their advanced civilization destroy humanism, dignity, and respect. The Hispanic immigrant is considered by them to be nothing more than a beast of burden, or “camello” (camel), on whose back the technological marvels are built. The immigrants compare themselves to the slaves of Babylonia, Egypt, and the Old South. Their foremen are “slave drivers.” 5. Needless to say, cultural nationalism prevails in these works, and it tends to protect and preserve Catholicism, the Spanish language, and Hispanic customs that are threatened with assimilation. At times the severest criticism, however, is reserved for those Latinos who are seen as cultural traitors for having adopted Anglo American cultural practices. They are denigrated as “agringados” (Gringoized), “renegados” (renegades), “pochos” (no longer Mexicans), and “pitiyanquis” (little Yankees).

The Adventures of Don Chipote: When Parrots Breast-Feed (1928), by Daniel Venegas, is an immigration novel that seems to have suddenly arisen from the rich wellsprings of oral tradition, where its basic plot already existed, as did the character types and even the specific argot of the Chicanos; all of these had made their way from the anecdotes and lived experience of the 583


bracero immigrants into the jokes, popular ballads (corridos), and vaudeville routines that became so popular in Mexican American culture in the U.S. during the early twentieth century. The character types as well as their picturesque argot had developed in oral culture from at least the turn of the century, if not before, and broke into print first in the local-color columns (crónicas) of Spanish-language newspapers published throughout the Southwest. In the weekly crónicas of such satirists as “Jorge Ulica” (Julio G. Arce*), “Kaskabel” (Benjamín Padilla), “Loreley” (María Luisa Garza*), “Az T.K.” (pseudonym of an unknown author), “El Malcriado” (Daniel Venegas) and so many others, the customs of Mexican immigrants were habitually transformed into literary texts. The written literature of immigration in the Spanish language was not just represented by the crónicas; there were also hundreds of books of immigrant literature issued by publishing houses and newspapers. As in Lucas Guevara, Venegas’s Don Chipote also contrasts the United States with the homeland, which is presented as pristine and honest, although unable to afford its native son the education or economic resources to sustain an adequate level of existence at home. The United States, while seen as the seat of great industrial and technological progress, is also a center of corruption, racism, and dehumanization, as in Lucas Guevara. Beyond mere local color in these novels is the depiction of the social environment in the United States, which is without exception portrayed as corrupt and anti-Hispanic. So far as the folk base of Don Chipote is concerned, there is a notable similarity between its plot of coming to the U.S. “to sweep the gold up from the streets” and that of several corridos,* including El lavaplatos (The Dishwasher), which coincides in the narrative structure of immigrating and working on the traque (railroad) as well as in the attraction that the cinema and theater hold for their respective protagonists and the protagonists’ progressive disillusionment (“Adiós sueños de mi vida”/Good-bye, my life’s dreams) and return to Mexico (“vuelvo a mi patria querida/mas pobre de lo que vine”/I return to my beloved fatherland/poorer than when I left). The message of El lavaplatos is just as clear and firm as that of Don Chipote: Mexicans should not come to the United States. Qué arrepentido qué arrepentido estoy de haber venido. Aquél que no quiera creer que lo que digo es verdad, Si se quiere convencer que se venga para acá. (How regretful, how regretful I am of having come. He who won’t believe

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that what I say is true is sure to be convinced by coming straight here.

The burlesque tone of Don Chipote, so characteristic of this corrido as well as of the crónicas that even Daniel Venegas wrote, serves to entertain the reader and soften the criticism of the social, economic, and political reality on both sides of the border that the poor to leave their homeland and be exploited here by “slave-drivers,” labor smugglers, ladies of the night, and flappers—all of whom are personifications of the hostile and corrupt metropolitan environment. Daniel Venegas’s tragicomic treatment of immigration was developed during years of writing and directing vaudeville reviews for the poorest classes of Mexican immigrants, as well as of writing, illustrating, and publishing his weekly satirical tabloid, El Malcriado (The Brat). Díaz Guerra, on the other hand, was a medical doctor and a poet from his early, privileged days among the elite in Colombia. An intellectual and political activist, Díaz Guerra found his way to New York as a political exile, expelled from both Colombia and Venezuela. He avoided the kind of grassroots-based humor characteristic of Venegas to explore the mythic dimensions of exile and Babylonian captivity in New York. Venegas chose Don Quijote as a metatext, but Díaz Guerra found his inspiration in the Bible. In Don Chipote, the flappers (changed but still Mexican), represent acculturation and disloyalty to the homeland; in Lucas Guevara, the Eves are the American temptresses, personifications of iniquitous Yankee culture, which lures the protagonist into perdition after turning his back on Latin American religion and morality. In Don Chipote, social order is reestablished by Doña Chipota’s rescue and return of her straying husband to Mexico, for she represents hearth, home, and Mexican family and cultural values—but Díaz Guerra’s Hispanic Everyman cannot be rescued, for there is no salvation possible after having given himself over completely to Eve. Lucas thus commits suicide by diving from the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol at that time of Yankee technological and industrial prowess. Novels and plays of immigration continue to be written into the present, employing similar formulas to preserve the integrity of the immigrant psyche and culture. The genre will exist as long as Hispanics continue to come to the United States to better their economic circumstances and opportunities, and as long as they are reluctant to change their identities as the price of economic betterment. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction,” Daniel Venegas, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Kanellos, Nicolás, and Liz Hernández, “Introduction,” Alirio Díaz Guerra, Lucas Guevara (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003). Mendoza, Louis, and Subramanian Shankar, eds., Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (New York: The New Press, 2003).


Indigenous Roots

Indigenous Roots. See Aztlán

Inditas. The inditas of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are New Mexico’s unique contribution to the history of Ibero Mexican balladry in the Southwest. Their origins can be traced back into the colonial literature of New Spain, including to popular songs, church hymns, and the bilingual villancicos or multi-voiced Christmas music of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and many others, which incorporated Spanish and Náhuatl code-switching into song lyrics, dialogue, and a dance style called Tocotín. Like the Iberian romances, or ballads, their millennial root-stock, and the greater Mexican corrido* ballads to which they are closely related, the inditas share a thematic fascination with disasters natural and historical and with the personal dimensions of human tragedy and love. The folk term “indita” can be translated as “little Indian girl” or “little Indian song” and is applied to a variety of musical and poetic forms, including a large corpus of historical narrative ballads, a smaller corpus of burlesque intercultural love songs, a few Indo–Hispano religious songs-and-dance, and even a popular social dance performed to instrumental music based on the previous forms. Brenda Romero affirms that the genre is “female-gendered and indigenous,” in sharp contrast to the masculine inflected corrido. As the term indita implies, the genre makes overt thematic and musical references to Indo–Hispano relations on topics as diverse as warfare and love. The earliest inditas are called cautivas, or captivity ballads, and their protagonists are almost exclusively women. The sacred inditas include hymns for the Virgin of Guadalupe as well as devotional dance songs used in healing ceremonies. Some indita love lyrics burlesque the amorous relations between hispanos and natives, but others are tender mestizo lullabies. The historical ballads appear only in the Hispano repertory, but the burlesque and religious inditas are also occasionally performed by Pueblo Indians. In formal terms, almost all inditas feature the copla, the ubiquitous quatrain of popular poetry, characterized by its octosyllabic lines and alternating assonant rhyme scheme. A few use the sextain and even the décima,* or ten-line stanza. As with the corrido ballad, the narrative conventions of the indita include the naming of participants, dates, and places, the rhetorical foregrounding of key speech acts of the protagonist, and a loosely strung sequence of decisive dramatic scenes. A particularly poignant characteristic of the indita is the highly reflexive use of a refrán (refrain) or chorus between verses, as well as the common use of first-person narration. Sometimes the rhetorical use of the word “cuándo” (when) in choruses prompts many, including musicologists, to use the New Mexican folk genre term “cuándo” to refer to these ballads. In their melodic and rhythmic structures, inditas are quite hybrid. Like the tunes of the Matachines dance, many inditas are actually sones with the catchy duple/triple meters that link them to the rest of the Americas. Some even resemble habaneros. In addition, several Native American melodic elements

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have been identified in the inditas. Of particular interest is the frequent use of vocable choruses with melodic lines that emulate and approximate the pentatonic scale of Native American music. Vocables are the nonlexical seed syllables characteristic of native songs, a dramatic manifestation of musical interculturality. Inditas are often sung a capella or with the tombé or Pueblo Indian drum to accompany the dancing. Inditas can also be heard with traditional Nuevomexicano guitar and violin accompaniment. Although long eclipsed by corridos and only rarely performed or composed at present, inditas are by no means an archaic form belonging solely to another time. Rather, they are what Raymond Williams defines as a residual form: “effectively formed in the past, but still active in the cultural process.” Most musicians and singers who have inditas in their repertories present them as cultural demonstrations or presentations—examples of what New Mexican singers themselves term la música de antes (music from before): compositions from a bygone day. Further Reading Romero, Brenda M., “The Indita Genre of New Mexico: Gender and Cultural Identification” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, eds. Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera Ramírez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002: 56–80).

Enrique Lamadrid International Arts Relation (INTAR). INTAR is one of the nation’s oldest theaters producing works by Latinos in English. Its mission includes nurturing aspiring Hispanic playwrights and theater artists and promoting diversity in American culture. INTAR offers workshops and readings for playwrights accompanied by feedback from seasoned directors such as INTAR’s artistic director Eduardo Machado* and assistant artistic director Alina Troyano* (Carmelita Tropicana), both nationally renowned as playwright and performance artist, respectively. From its workshops INTAR goes on to stage works in progress as well as completed works for full main stage productions. INTAR’s Playwrights-in-Residence Lab, founded by María Irene Fornés* and now run by Machado, focuses on characterization, storytelling, and dramatic structuring. Founded in 1966 by Max Ferra as Adal Theater, it changed its name in 1971, when Ferra joined playwrights Magaly Alabau and Manuel Martín, Jr. Ferra retired in 2004 as artistic director and was succeeded by Machado. Over these forty-two years, INTAR has staged more than 175 plays, most of them by Latino playwrights, composers, and choreographers. INTAR has been essential in assisting Latino playwrights and theater artists to obtain their first professional experience—and even reviews in English-language media. Among the many playwrights who have seen their plays workshopped or staged at INTAR are Michael John Garcés, Carlos Locamara, Eduardo Machado,* Manuel Martín, Jr., Manuel Pereiras García, Ana María Simo, and Caridad Svich.*

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Further Reading Anderson, Douglas, “The Dream Machine: Thirty Years of New Play Development in America” TDR Vol. 32, No. 3 (1988): 55–84.

Nicolás Kanellos

Irisarri, Antonio José de (1786–1868). Novelist, poet, essayist, and fighter for the liberation of the Spanish American colonies Antonio José de Irisarri was born in Guatemala City on February 7, 1786, into a merchant family that afforded him an education. On a business trip for his father to Chile, Irisarri married a Chilean woman in 1809 and settled in Santiago; he soon became involved in the war for Chilean independence and served as an officer in battle. Once independence was won, he was named to various governmental posts. Irisarri is considered one of the founders of Chilean journalism, having established and edited the Semanario Republicano (1813, Weekly Republican), a newspaper that spread liberal ideas and supported independence. Through his many subsequent travels he also edited the following newspapers: in Santiago, El Duende (1818, The Ghost); in London, El Censor Americano (1820, The American Censor); in Guatemala City, El Guatemalteco (1828, The Guatemalan); in Guayaquil, La Verdad Desnuda (The Naked Truth), La Balanza (The Balance), and El Correo (The Mail) from 1839 to 1843; in Quito, La Concordia (1844–1845, The Accord); in Bogotá, Nosotros (We) and Orden y Libertad (Order and Liberty) during 1846 to 1847; and in Curaçao El Revisor (1849, The Reviewer), a newspaper that he continued in New York the next year. Earlier, Irisarri had as a diplomat for Chile negotiated with European nations for recognition of Chilean independence and for loans to the new republic. Irisarri had a falling-out with his government when he was abroad, was tried in absentia, and was condemned to death. Irisarri became an exile of Chile as well as of Guatemala and other countries that considered him a persona non grata. He arrived in the United States in 1850, where he spent the rest of his life. Despite his exile, in 1855 Irisarri was named a minister of Guatemala and El Salvador in Washington, D.C. In New York, Irisarri dedicated more time to literary pursuits, publishing poems and other writings in periodicals. In 1863, he published his most famous novel, Historia del perínclito Don Epaminondas de Cauca (History of the Ultra Heroic Don Epaminondas de Cauca), a satirical road novel of the protagonist’s wanderings through Spanish America. In New York, he also published a substantial collection of his poems, Poesías satíricas burlescas (1867, Satirical–Burlesque Poems). His other famous novel is El cristiano errante: novela que tiene mucho de historia (1846, The Wandering Christian: A Novel with Much History), which is thought to be autobiographical. Among his nonfiction writing he also published Breve noticia de la vida del Ilustrísimo Señor Arzobispo de Bogotá, Doctor Don Manuel José Mosquera Figueroa y Arboleda (1854, Brief Notice on the Life of the Most Illustrious Archbishop of Bogotá, Dr. Don Manuel José Mosquera Figueroa y Arboleda) and Cuestiones filológi588

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cas: sobre algunos puntos de la ortografía, de la gramática, del origen de la lengua castellana, y sobre lo que debe literatura española a la nobleza de la nación (1861, Philological Questions: On Various Points of Spelling, of Grammar, of the Origin of the Spanish Language, and What Spanish Literature Owes to the Nobility of the Nation). He died in Brooklyn, New York, on June 10, 1868. Further Reading Donoso, Ricardo, Antonio José de Irisarri: escritor y diplomático (Santiago, Chile: n.p., 1934).

Nicolás Kanellos Islas, Arturo (1938–1991). Born to a policeman and a secretary on May 24, 1938, in El Paso, Texas, novelist, poet, and essayist Islas grew up dealing with the conflict between his homosexuality and his familial and social environment. Early on he developed the discipline he needed to survive and to become an outstanding student, allowing him to attend Stanford University on a scholarship. In 1960, Islas graduated from Stanford as a Phi Beta Kappan and went on to study for his Ph.D. in English, also at Stanford. He earned his Ph.D. in 1971 and became a member of the faculty at Stanford, where he won various awards for excellence in teaching. He was a pioneer in teaching Chicano literature and Chicano creative writing courses at that institution. Islas began writing in elementary school; by the time he reached college, he was already penning excellent stories and essays. At Stanford, he was fortunate to study at the undergraduate and graduate levels under such outstanding writers as Wallace Stegner. Despite his excellent prose and academic credentials, Islas had difficulty placing his works with the New York commercial presses; thus his first book, The Rain God: A Desert Tale (1984), was issued by a small press in California. Nevertheless, The Rain God achieved outstanding reviews and went through twelve printings by the time his next novel, Migrant Souls, was ready. It was finally accepted and issued by a mainstream publisher in 1990, only a year before his untimely death due to AIDS. In both his novels, Islas examines family relationships, border culture, and the omnipresence of death—Islas had faced death in a battle against intestinal cancer that spanned a number of years. Also Arturo Islas. 589

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embedded in these novels is a critique of patriarchy and of traditional views of gender and homosexuality. The larger part of Islas’s writings, including a large body of poems and stories, an unfinished novel, and essays, were left unpublished at his death but were published posthumously; the novel was issued under the title of La Mollie and The King of Tears: A Novel (1996) and the remaining works as Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (2002), compiled and edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. Further Reading Aldama, Frederick Luis, Critical Mappings of Arturo Islas’s Fictions (Tempe: Bilingual Press, 2005). Aldama, Frederick Luis, Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos

Maya Islas.

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Islas, Maya (1947–). A poet of symbolism and metaphysics, Maya Islas was born on April 12, 1947, in Cabaiguán, Las Villas, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1965. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and Montclair State University in 1972 and 1978, respectively, and has worked as a counselor in institutions of higher education since then. Currently she is coordinator of supportive services for the New School University in New York City. Her books of poetry include Sola, Desnuda . . . Sin Nombre (1974, Alone, Naked . . . without a Name), SombrasPapel (1978, Shadow-Paper), Altazora acompañando a Vicente (1989, Altazora Accompanying Vicente), Merla (1991), and Lifting the Tempest at Breakfast (digital, 2001). Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and her books have been finalists in the Premio Letras de Oro (1986, 1987, 1990, 1991) and have been awarded the Latino Literature Prize, 1993. In 1978, Islas won the Silver Carabel Poetry Award in Barcelona, Spain, where she has published three of her poetry books. Islas was awarded a Cintas Fellowship in 1991 to continue her writing. She has also served as the editor of the literary magazine Palabra y Papel (Word and Paper) during the 1980s. Islas’s major themes deal with women’s archetypes, mythology, and the exploration of symbols; she poses existential questions and answers them metaphysically. She is also a talented graphic artist who quite often juxtaposes plastic works with poetry or uses one form

Islas, Maya

to inspire or comment upon another. Such is the case in her online book, Lifting the Tempest at Breakfast, which is made up of thirty-five stream-of-consciousness poems and thirty-five collages. Further Reading Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1998). Piña Rosales, Gerardo, “Dos poetas cubanas en Nueva York: Alina Galiano y Maya Islas” Linden Lane Magazine Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 17–19.

Nicolás Kanellos

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J Jaramillo, Cleofas M. (1878–1956). Born on December 6, 1878, in Arroyo Hondo into a prominent New Mexican pioneering family, Cleofas Martínez Jaramillo was a mother, wife, businessperson, writer, and a folklorist. She was educated at the Loretto Convent School in Taos and continued her studies at the Loretto Academy in Santa Fe. At the age of twenty, Martínez married Venceslao Jaramillo, her wealthy second cousin. He was a land- and business-owner from El Rito, New Mexico. He also served Territorial Governor Miguel Antonio Otero and was later a delegate in New Mexico’s Constitutional Convention in 1912. The couple had three children. Unfortunately, two died in infancy. Tragedy continued when Venceslao died of cancer in 1920. With her four-year-old daughter, Angelina, forty-two-year-old Jaramillo returned to Santa Fe; however, fifteen years later, tragedy struck again when Angelina was murdered. Bereft of family, Jaramillo was left with her writing and her dedication to preserving an authentic nuevomexicano culture. In fact, Jaramillo dedicated her life to preserving nuevomexicano hispano culture from the encroaching Anglo American culture. In the 1930s and 1940s, Anglo Americans and Europeans, inspired by Hispanic culture, flocked to the New Mexican towns of Taos, Las Vegas, and Santa Fe. These towns became centers for a sort of cultural renaissance. For Jaramillo, however, Anglo American and European immigrants “did not understand Hispano customs the way they should be understood” (Shadows 64). As a way to participate in this “cultural renaissance,” Jaramillo and her contemporaries Fabiola Cabeza de Baca,* Aurora Lucero-White, and Nina Otero-Warren* dedicated themselves to collecting and publishing stories,

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poems, plays, and cookbooks that highlighted their versions of “authentic” Hispanic cultural traditions. In 1936, Jaramillo founded a folklore society, La Sociedad Folklórica. The society limited its membership not only to Spanishspeaking nuevomexicanos of Spanish descent but also to those who were committed to the preservation of Spanish cultural traditions. Several years later, in 1939, Jaramillo demonstrated her continued commitment to the preservation of hispano culture by publishing two manuscripts, The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes (Potajes sabrosos) and Cuentos del hogar (Spanish Fairy Tales). Both manuscripts demonstrate Jaramillo’s dedication to preservation as well as her position as the purveyor of knowledge. Although Potajes sabrosos is a collection of New Mexican recipes and Cuentos del hogar is a collection of twenty-five Spanish folktales inherited from Jaramillo’s mother, both are attempts to situate the author as someone who knows New Mexican folk traditions. The last two monographs that Jaramillo penned not only highlighted New Mexican culture and traditions but were also autobiographically driven. Shadows of the Past (Sombras del pasado), published in 1941, combined the official history of New Mexico’s Spanish presence with the personal (and often autobiographical) story of the Jaramillo family. In the sequel to Shadows, Romance of a Little Village Girl, Jaramillo revealed much more about her life. In her life’s story, published in 1955, Jaramillo recounted her history in detail. She chronicled the main events of her personal life, including the loss of her husband and children, as well as the main events of New Mexican history, including the social and political transformations that changed her life and the lives of other nuevomexicanos. One year after the publication of Romance, Jaramillo died at the age of seventy-eight in El Paso, Texas. Further Reading Padilla, Genaro M., My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Rebelledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

Sonja Z. Pérez

Jíbaro. Many scholars, artists and writers have selected and elaborated on the figure of the jíbaro as the archetype of Puerto Rican culture, so much so that although in common parlance the poor, rural campesino may be looked down upon, in art and literature he is legendary and symbolic of the origins of Puerto Rican identity. The term jíbaro probably originates with the native indigenous populations of the Caribbean—even today there are Native Americans in South America who call themselves jíbaros—and variously meant “mountain folk” or “forest people.” However, its usage in Spanish, from its earliest appearance in written text, generally denotes rural folk. In Puerto Rico, over the last two centuries, the term has come to refer to the poor, white, rural campesino who is thought to have developed a series of customs and attitudes about life that embody Puerto Rican national character. But anthropologists today dispute the idea that the mountain and rural population is mainly white and that the indigenes were totally 594

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decimated and disappeared from the Puerto Rican landscape; in fact, they propose a much higher degree of mestizaje (mixing of Europeans and Taíno Indians) than scholars have sustained for more than a century. According to such scholars as María Teresa Babín and Eugenio Fernández Méndez, among many others, the nineteenth-century jíbaro typically lived in a mountain shack, was a tenant farmer or worked on an hacienda and had an innate skepticism of the outside world and of institutionalized religion but was deeply religious and moral, identifying with nature possessed of a sense of place in the natural world. Many of these attributes were previously traced to the Spanish Jíbaros in 1897. campesino or highlanders who settled in Puerto Rico during the colonial period. Although the jíbaro begins appearing in literature as early as 1820, in Arceibo poet Manuel Cabrera’s Coplas del jíbaro (Jíbaro Couplets), the landmark work that established the jíbaro as a foundational character of Puerto Rican identity was Manuel Alonzo’s Gíbaro (1849) in which he detailed and celebrated the rustic life style of the jíbaros. It is also thought that the jíbaros played an important role in the wars for independence from Spain, and that they were particularly involved in the 1868 Grito de Lares (Shout at Lares) declaration of independence; thus the figure became doubly identified with the growing sense of Puerto Rican nationhood. Throughout the twentieth century, educated poets and writers have sought to adopt the ethnopoetics of the jíbaro, especially cultivating the décima* verse form, as in the works of Luis Lloréns Torres—even reproducing jíbaro dialect in their novels and other works, as in Manuel Zeno Gandía’s La charca (The Puddle). The most important and influential work of Puerto Rican theater, La carreta (1953, The Oxcart, 1969), by René Marqués,* follows the trials and tribulations of 595

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a family of jíbaros dislocated from their homestead and migrating first to the city of San Juan and eventually to New York, the playwright’s attempt to grapple with the epic transformations of Puerto Rican life as symbolized by the tragic plight of this family. The term jíbaro is still commonly used today and still connotes “backward” and “ignorant” in the eyes of sophisticated city dwellers, as well as an idealization of Puerto Rican culture in the eyes of many writers and artists. Nuyorican* writers such as Miguel Algarín* and Tato Laviera* have updated the term to represent a new jíbaro as a basis for their New York and continental identity, as in the former’s poem “El jibarito moderno” (1980, The Modern Jíbaro) and the latter’s “Doña Cisa y su anafre” (1979, Doña Cisa and Her Brasier). Further Reading Babín, María Teresa, Panoroma de la cultura puertorriqueña (New York: Las Americas Publishing Co., 1958). Fernández Méndez, Eugenio, Historia cultural de Puerto Rico, 1493–1968 (Río Piedras, PR: Editorial Universitaria, 1975).

Nicolás Kanellos Jiménez, Francisco (1943–). Francisco Jiménez is one of the most successful Latino writers of young adult literature. Born in San Pedro, Tlaquepaque, Mexico, Jiménez, aged four, crossed the border into California illegally with his family; by six, he was working alongside them in the fields, only getting a sporadic and interrupted education. When he was in the eighth grade, he and his entire family, which had grown to nine children, were deported; they later made their way legally back into the United States. Jiménez discovered literature and its personal relevance for him when his high school teacher gave him John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to read. His (by then excellent) school record ensured his higher education and his love for literature. In 1966, he received his B.A. from Santa Clara University in Spanish and History and went on to earn an M.A. (1969) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Spanish and Latin American literatures at Columbia University. Jiménez pursued his academic career and rose to his current rank of Fay Boyle Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at his alma mater, Santa Clara University. Over the years, he returned to writing, penning narratives based on his family’s experiences. In fact, his first young adult book, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (1997), is highly autobiographical. The book became an instant classic of Latino young adult literature, garnering awards such as the prestigious Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction, the Americas Award for Children and Young Adult Literature, and the California Library Association’s 10th annual John and Patricia Beatty Award. But this initial venture was even surpassed by its sequel, Breaking Through: A Migrant Child’s Journey from the Field (2001), which was named Booklist Editors’ Choice and the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and won The Américas Award, the American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Honor Book Award, and The Tomás Rivera Book Award, among many others. 596

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In 1998, Jiménez published a children’s book, La Mariposa (The Butterfly), which became a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award. His The Christmas Gift/El regalo de Navidad (2000), a bilingual children’s book, was selected a Notable Children’s Book by the American Library Association and won the Cuffie Award from Publisher’s Weekly for “Best Treatment of a Social Issue.” Jiménez’s stories have been published in more than fifty textbooks and anthologies of literature. Both his young adult books have been published in Spanish translation. Further Reading York, Sherry, Children’s and Young Adult Literature by Latino Writers: A Guide for Librarians, Teachers, Parents, and Students (Columbus: Linworth Publishing, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Jones Act. Congress passed the Jones–Shafroth Act, more popularly known as the Jones Act, in 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law on March 2, 1917. It granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship, even if they were born on the island. Although they had citizenship, Puerto Rican islanders could not vote for president. Neither could they elect congressmen or senators to Congress. Instead, Puerto Rico could have representation in Congress through a nonvoting Commissioner in the House of Representative to advise on issues pertaining to Puerto Rico. Migration out of Puerto Rico was a definite trend quite a few years before the Spanish–American War, however, establishing a pattern that would be repeated and accelerated in the twentieth century. Skillful diplomacy by island politicians resulted in the passage of this congressional bill that created two Puerto Rican houses of a legislature whose representatives were elected by the people—although the United States Congress had the power to stop any action taken by the legislature in Puerto Rico. The United States government exercised control over fiscal and economic matters and authority over mail services, immigration, defense and other basic governmental matters. Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, however, could enjoy the full benefits and privileges of citizenship, including the right to elect congressmen and senators from their home districts and states on the mainland. Over the course of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans’ confusing and conflicting cultural status led to a literary identity that often vacillated from an immigrant to an exilic or native identity, depending on individual writers’ political, linguistic, or geographic status. Further Reading: “Jones Act” (http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/jonesact.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Juárez, Tina (1942–). In her writings, and in whatever other form she can be heard, Juárez argues for the abolition of the “A-B-C-D-F” comparative grading system in schools, favoring a system of “charting” each learner’s progress with the intention of making certain all students are successful in the school’s academic program. Her most recent writing effort is The School at Box Canyon, which, Juárez says, “is sort of [an] Animal Farm of the American Southwest. But 597

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whereas Orwell’s allegory satirizes government, my book is a satire of education, especially the grading system invented to separate the ‘educable from the uneducable,’ the ‘sheep from the goats,’ and used without modification in our schools for most of the past two hundred years.” Juárez was born on June 20, 1942, and studied English and education, achieving an M.Ed. in 1981 and a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction in 1988. Currently the principal of Walter Prescott Webb Middle School in Austin, Juarez is a past president of the Austin Hispanic Public School Administrators Association. She serves on numerous advisory boards relating to teen pregnancy and runaways and has been a member of a Texas Education Agency task force on AIDS education. When not performing her duties as an educator or researching another writing project, Juarez and her husband Bill enjoy traveling. They have been to Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, and the United Kingdom, but some of their most memorable trips have been spontaneous drives to out-of-the-way places along the back roads of Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. Among her other interests, Juarez enjoys hiking, gourmet cooking, classical music, opera, reading, and taking care of her five cats. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Junco de la Vega, Celedonio (1863–1948). Poet, critic, playwright, and journalist Celedonio Junco de la Vega was a versatile writer. He was born in Matamoros, Tamahulipas on October 23, 1863, but in 1889 moved to Monterrey, Nuevo León, and worked there for the rest of his life, first in banking and later as a journalist in such newspapers as El Cronista (The Chronicler), El Sol (The Sun), and El Porvenir (The Future). He was inducted into the Mexican National Academy of the Spanish Language (Academia Mexicana de la Lengua) in 1917 as a result of his celebrated poetry. Of particular importance to United States letters was his collaboration with editor Nemesio García Naranjo* on a conservative journal of exile, Revista Mexicana (Mexican Review), published in San Antonio, Texas, between 1915 and 1920, speaking against the Mexican Revolution in general—and specifically against the policies of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza. Junco de la Vega wrote weekly crónicas* satirizing the current state of affairs from inside Mexico under the pen name Silverio. He was thus a key source of information for Revista Mexicana, as well as its premier humorist. The Silverio crónicas mostly follow epistolary form, but he also sent some versified satire in new versions of old verse forms, as well as in comic skits, one fable, and serious personal essays. His crónicas record the destruction of the unions by Carranza, the human collateral damage of the battlefield, and Carranza’s desperate and failed fiscal policies, among other topics. They also reveal the unequivocal contempt that the group of exiles (including Silverio, who was still in 598

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Mexico) around the journal had for the popular Mexican masses. In 1919, he stopped writing the weekly column to launch the newspaper, El Porvenir (The Future) in Monterrey with his eldest son. He died in Monterrey on February 3, 1948. Further Reading Diccionario Porrúa de historia, biografía y geografía de México (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, S. A., 1995). Junco de la Vega, Rodolfo, Un homenaje a Don Celedonio (Nov. 3, 2003) (http://www. juncodelavega.org).

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K Kanellos, Nicolás (1945–). Nicolás Kanellos cofounded the first Hispanic literary magazine, Revista Chicano-Riqueña (later The Americas Review), and the largest and oldest Hispanic publishing house, Arte Público Press. Prior to his publications, most publications efforts had specific ethnic targets and missions, such Chicano or Puerto Rican. The prestige and place that Hispanic and Latino literature holds in the academic world and American literature as a whole was built in large part on the dedication and persistence of Kanellos. The son of Costantinos and Inés (de Choudens García) Kanellos, Nicolás Kanellos was born in New York City on January 31, 1945. The Kanellos family moved to the warehouse district of Jersey City, New Jersey, close to a large commercial book bindery. As a child, when not in Puerto Rico, Kanellos would pull the discarded large printed sheets, known in the publishing industry as signature pages, and create books of his own. He became an avid reader, which was supported by his father, who traded meals from the restaurant where he worked for books the bindery workers smuggled out of their shop. In this way, the Kanellos family acquired a near-complete set of the Encyclopedia Americana. Kanellos devoured these tomes and other collected books, such as the complete works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Somerset Maugham. He also continued reading in Spanish, which he had picked up on the Island, but most of what were available at the corner bodega were comic books in Spanish. During the 1950s, the immigration of Puerto Ricans into the United States was at its peak. Because Kanellos was bilingual, teachers often asked him to translate for the newest arrivals. His aunt, Providencia García, served as a major influence and example in Kanellos’ life. García overcame gender and

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Nicolás Kanellos receiving an award in the White House Rose Garden from President Ronald Reagan.

racial discrimination to develop the Latin division of Peer Southern Music Company (Peer International), to this day the largest Latin music publishers in the world, and became a primary influence in creating the Latin Boom in music. Kanellos gained a B.A. in Spanish literature from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1966 and his Master’s in Romance languages from the University of Texas–Austin in 1968. He spent a year studying at the Universidad Nacional de México and another year at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He entered the Ph.D. program in Spanish and Portuguese literatures at the University of Texas–Austin and earned his doctorate in 1974. While he did his graduate work, Kanellos became deeply involved in the Chicano Movement.* He worked in the Teatro Chicano de Austin and then moved to Gary, Indiana, where he cofounded, with Luis Dávila, Revista Chicano-Riqueña (later The Americas Review) in 1972, formed El Teatro de Desengaño del Pueblo (The People’s Enlightenment Theater), and taught Hispanic literature at Indiana University from 1971 to 1979. During these years, Kanellos also developed as a scholar in Latino theater, an effort which culminated years later with his groundbreaking A History of the Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (1990). To get a complete understanding of the development of Latino culture in the 602

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United States, Kanellos also became a cultural historian and writer of reference works. Among the other books Kanellos has written or compiled are Mexican American Theater: Legacy and Reality (1987), Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States: The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Writers (1989), The Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States (1993), Chronology of Hispanic-American History: From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present (coedited with Cristelia Pérez, 1995), Hispanic Literary Companion (1996), Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Image in American Culture (1998), Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (2000), Noche Buena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories (2000), Herencia: An Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (coedited with Kenya Dworkin y Méndez, José B. Fernández, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, and Charles Tatum, 2004), and Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (2005). Herencia is the first collection to feature the comprehensive works of Hispanic writing in the United States, covering the writings from the 1500s to present. In hopes of finding more funding for his publishing projects, Kanellos accepted a tenured faculty position at the University of Houston and moved to Houston, Texas, in 1979, where he opened the doors to Arte Público Press,* the first modern-day Hispanic publishing house in the United States. At first the “oil bust” and resistance to minority culture and publishing stymied Kanellos’ plans, but he was nevertheless able to sign and promote the first generation of Latina authors, who not only became well known in academia, but also bridged the gap to mainstream publishing and culture—a generation that included Ana Castillo,* Sandra Cisneros,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Pat Mora,* and Helena María Viramontes.* Included also among the Arte Público Press writers were some of the most well known and canonized writers of Latino literature, such as Miguel Algarín,* Alurista,* Rodolfo Anaya,* Roberto Fernández,* Rolando Hinojosa,* Nicholasa Mohr,* Alejandro Morales,* Miguel Piñero,* Tomás Rivera,* Piri Thomas,* and scores of others. By the 1990s, Arte Público Press was registering such commercial best sellers as Victor Villaseñor’s* Rain of Gold (1991). Thereafter, the press expanded to include nonfiction, reference, and children’s publishing—the latter through its new imprint, Piñata Books. In 1992, Kanellos launched the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage* program, which endeavors to locate, preserve, index, and publish Latino literary contributions from the colonial period to 1960. The recovery program locates a lost written legacy, having recovered some 1,800 books written and published in the United States before 1960, as well as some 1,700 periodicals published during the same period. Researchers at the program microfilm archives, manuscripts, books, and periodicals for preservation and digitize them for accessibility over the Internet. In addition, the recovery program has published some forty books of recovered literature and issued the first comprehensive anthologies of Hispanic literature: Herencia: The Anthology of 603

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Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002) and En otra voz: antología de la literature hispana de los Estados Unidos (2003). In 1994, Kanellos founded the Ph.D. program in U.S. Hispanic literature at the University of Houston and was awarded an endowed chair by the Brown Foundation. Kanellos has received many honors, including the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature (awarded by President Reagan in 1988), the American Library Association’s Award for Best Reference Work (1993), and an appointment to the National Council on the Humanities (made by President Clinton in 1994). Further Reading “Nicolás Kanellos” in Hispanic Writers, ed. Ryan, Brian (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990: 274). Who’s Who in America; Who’s Who in the Southwest, “The Social Value of Good Literature: Focus on Arte Público Press,” Texas Journal Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1989).

F. Arturo Rosales Kaskabel. See Padilla, Benjamín

Gary Keller.

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Keller, Gary D. (1943–). One of the most important Latino literary publishers, and a writer in his own right, Gary D. Keller was born on January 1, 1943, in San Diego to a Mexican mother, Estela Cárdenas Keller, and an Anglo American father, Jack Keller. A student of linguistics and Hispanic literature, Keller received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of the Américas in Mexico (1963), his M.A. in Hispanic literature and linguistics from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Hispanic literature and linguistics from Columbia University in 1971. Thereafter, he taught at a number of universities, including the City College of New York (1970–1974); York College of the City College (1974–1979); Eastern Michigan University, where he served as a dean (1979–1983); the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he was Provost (1983–1986); and Arizona State University, where he is to this day a Regents’ Professor and director of the Hispanic Research Center. While at York College, Keller founded one of the most enduring and influential Latino journals, The Bilingual Review, which at first served the study of bilingual education in academia but soon became an important publisher of original Latino literature. The magazine grew into The Bilingual Press, which became one of the two largest publishers of Latino literature in the United States, issuing works by such foundational writers as Alurista,* Judith Ortiz

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Cofer,* Rolando Hinojosa,* Miguel Méndez,* Alejandro Morales,* and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat.* In addition, his Bilingual Press was one of the first to publish an inclusive anthology of Latino literature: Hispanics in the United States: An Anthology of Creative Literature (1980), edited by Keller and Francisco Jiménez.* In recent years, the press has branched out into the publication and promotion of Chicano art books and catalogs. Keller is also a respected writer who publishes poetry and short stories under the pseudonym of El Huitlacoche, which represents Keller’s alter ego: a detached and somewhat cynical Chicano* observer of the social scene. His humorous and satirical poems and stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies; fourteen poems were published in the collaborative anthology Five Poets of Aztlán* (1985). A collection of his interrelated stories was issued as Tales of El Huitlacoche (1984); his most recent collection is Zapata Rose in 1992 and Other Tales (2007), which includes four stories from the first collection. In addition to his interest in literature, Keller is an extensive Chicano film critic and art historian, with various books on these subjects to his name. He has also written extensively on bilingual education and educational access for Latinos. Through his varied interest and accomplishments, Keller has been a major force influencing the direction of Latino literature, education, and culture. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Kozer, José (1940–). José Kozer was born in Havana to parents who immigrated to Cuba from Poland and Czechoslovakia during the 1920s. He is also the grandson of a founder of Adath Israel, Cuba’s first Ashkenazi synagogue. Kozer studied law at the University of Havana until he left Cuba in 1960. In New York, he received a B.A. from New York University in 1965 and taught for many years at Queens College–CUNY. He is considered by many to be the foremost Cuban poet of his generation and a leader of the Latin American Neo-Baroque movement, something more than evident in his use of language. His work can be characterized as multi-positional, which expresses, in some way, the dynamic energy that he derives from being in a space between home and exile, and between being Jewish and Cuban. In addition to being a prolific poet and prodigious reader, Kozer is an active translator, critic, and essayist, publishing in numerous journals worldwide and offering occasional poetrywriting workshops. After retiring in 1997 and living in Spain for two years, he moved to and settled in South Florida. Kozer is the author of nearly 6,000 poems; his work has been translated into English, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Greek. One of his recent collections, No buscan reflejarse (2002, They Do Not Look to Reflect Themselves), became the first poetry book written by a Cuban American or Cuban exile to be published in Cuba. He has authored over more than fifty books, including Padres y otras profesiones (1972, Fathers and Other Professions), Este judío de números y letras 605

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(1975, This Jew of Numbers and Letters), Y así tomaron posesión en las ciudades (1978, And That’s How They Took Possession in the Cities), Jarrón de abreviaturas (1980, A Pitcher of Abbreviations), La rueca de los semblantes (1980, The Loom of Appearances), The Ark Upon the Number (1982), Bajo este cien (1983, Under These Hundred), Nuevas láminas (1984, New Laminations), El carillón de los muertos (1987, Carillon of Dead People), Carece de causa (1988, Missing a Cause), Prójimos/Intimates (1990), De donde oscilan los seres en sus proporciones (1990, Where Beings Oscillate in Their Proportions), Trazas del lirondo (1993, Clean Traces), La maquinaria ilimitada (1998, Unlimited Mechanisms), Dípticos (1998, Diptyches), Farándula (1999, Theater World), Mezcla para dos tiempos (1999, A Mix for Two Time Periods), Anima (2002, Spirit), Una huella destartalada (2003, A Messing Footprint), Y del esparto la invariabilidad: Antologia, 1983–2004 (2005, And from Fiber a Lack of Variety: Anthology), Stet (2006), La garza sin sombras (2006, The Heron without Shade), and one of his most recent, De dónde son los poemas (2007, From Whence Come the Poems). He is also coeditor, with Roberto Echavarren and Jacobo Sefamí, of Medusario. muestra de poesía latinoamericana/A Sampling of Latin American Poetry (1996, Medusa’s Directory). Further Reading Heredia, Aida L., La poesía de José Kozer: De la recta a las cajas chinas (Madrid: Verbum, 1994). Sefamí, Jacobo, “Llenar la máscara con las ropas del lenguaje: José Kozer” Revista Iberoamericana Vol. 66, No. 191 (Apr.—June 2000): 347–366. Zapata, Miguel Angel, “Avispero de Forest Hills: La poesía de José Kozer, 1983–1993” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana Vol. 29, No. 58 (2003): 317–337.


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L Labarthe, Pedro Juan (1906–1966). Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist Pedro Juan Labarthe was one of the first Puerto Rican writers in New York to pen an autobiographical novel in English: The Son of Two Nations: The Private Life of a Columbia Student (1931). Born in Ponce in 1906, Labarthe received his elementary and secondary education on the Island and then studied at Columbia University in New York. From 1930 to 1935, he worked as a teacher in New York and then returned to Puerto Rico. In 1945, he studied for his doctorate at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and, in 1946, returned to the United States to work as a professor at Wesleyan College in Illinois. He remained stateside until 1965; during that time, he produced a number of literary works while continuing to work as a professor of Spanish American literature. He also took a leadership role in writers’ societies, serving as president of the Writers Club of Pittsburgh and as an active member of the Society of British and American Poets. Through the society and his university work, Labarthe became a correspondent of such famous American poets of the time as e.e. cummings. Among Labarthe’s literary books are two novels, Pueblo, Golgotha del espíritu (1938, Pueblo, Golgotha of the Spirit) and Mary Smith (1958), and two collections of poetry, Estrías de sueño (1936, Stretches of Sleep) and Y me voy preguntando . . . (1959, And I Go Asking Myself . . .). His most important work is The Son of Two Nations, which is very unlike the work being produced in Spanish in New York by Puerto Ricans such as José Isaac de Diego Padró,* Jesús* and Joaquín Colón,* and many others. Not at all community-based literature, the memoir accepts the theories of the melting pot and the American Dream in which immigration to the United States was framed by mainstream society.

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Labarthe’s scholarly work deals with Puerto Rican and Latin American literature and theater. Labarthe died in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1966. Further Reading Knippling, Alphana Sharma, New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Labor and Literature. See Working-class Literature Lachtman, Ofelia Dumas (1919–). Born on July 9, 1919, in Los Angeles of Mexican immigrant parents, Ofelia Dumas Lachtman attended Los Angeles city schools and received an A.A. from Los Angeles City College in 1939. She suspended her plans to study further when she married and moved to Riverside, California, where she raised two children while developing a writing career in her spare time. She had been writing since childhood; when she was only twelve years old, her first work was published in an anthology of children’s poetry. Little did she know that, as an adult, she would become a successful writer for young people. During World War II, Dumas Lachtman worked as a stenographer. Later, after her children were grown and had left home, she became a group worker and eventually rose to the position of executive director of the Los Angeles–Beverly Hills YWCA. She retired from that position in 1974 and devoted herself fulltime to writing. In addition to her books, she has published personal interest stories and short fiction in major city dailies and magazines throughout the country. Dumas Lachtman’s first young adult novel, Campfire Dreams, was published in 1987 by Harlequin and was eventually translated into French, German, and Polish. Campfire Dreams is the story of a camp counselor who believes that she has found her biological mother and does not know how to Ofelia Dumas Lachtman. break the news to her adoptive mother, whom she loves very much. Despite the success of Campfire Dreams, Dumas Lachtman was not able to find another publisher until her agent placed her works with Arte Público Press* in the mid-1990s. Thereafter, Dumas Lachtman’s productivity seemed boundless; she completed many books, including a novel for adults, A Shell for Angela (1995), which explores the consequences of rejecting one’s heritage. The novel charts the past of a well-to-do Mexican American woman and her journey to Mexico to solve the mystery of her father’s deportation from the United States and subsequent murder. But the journey becomes more than just a quest to solve a mystery; it involves finding roots and identity. Dumas Lachtman is the author of five children’s picture books: Pepita Talks Twice (1995), Lupita y La Paloma (1997), Big Enough (1998), Pepita Thinks Pink (1998), Pepita Takes Time (2000), Pepita Finds Out (2002), and Pepita Packs Up 608

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(2005). Her tremendously popular “Pepita” series charts the misadventures of a precocious young Mexican American girl, confronting cultural as well as psychological problems in her barrio life. In 1995, Ofelia Dumas Lachtman won the Stepping Stones Award for Children’s Multicultural Literature for Pepita Talks Twice/Pepita habla dos veces. The “Pepita” series, like Dumas Lachtman’s other books, highlights the inventiveness and genius of girls. Initiative, courage, and resourcefulness also win the day in Dumas Lachtman’s most important book to date, The Girl from Playa Blanca (1996), which received critical acclaim and won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Young Adult Literature. The adventure follows a teenager and her little brother from their Mexican seaside village to Los Angeles in search of their father, who has disappeared while working in the United States. The young protagonist unravels the mystery behind a major crime and not only succeeds in finding her father in the metropolis but also falls in love along the way. Dumas Lachtman followed up with other mystery novels for young adults: Call Me Consuelo (1997), The Summer of El Pintor (2001), A Good Place for Maggie (2002), Looking for La Unica (2004), and The Trouble with Tessa (2005). Dumas Lachtman has also written a book for middle readers, Leticia’s Secret (1997), which deals sensitively—and in the context of the Hispanic family— with the subject of death. Leticia is a terminally ill preteen whose family members attempt to keep her illness a secret. Leticia’s cousin and close friend, on the other hand, sees Leticia’s secret as a mystery to unravel. Leticia’s Secret is a book that can help preteens and teens deal with death and grief—topics that are deftly, even poetically, handled by Dumas Lachtman. Further Reading Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Ladino. Ladino is the now somewhat archaic Spanish language spoken by the Jews who were expelled from Spain, beginning in 1492; they continued to identify with their Hispanic past and to speak and write Ladino in their new homes, including the Spanish and Portuguese frontiers in the American colonies (especially in Texas, New Mexico, northern Mexico, Recife–Brazil, New Amsterdam/ New England, and Charleston, South Carolina). Whereas many Sephardim (“Sepharad” means Spain), such as Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, eventually learned English, wrote the language, and became important figures in American life, others blended into the Hispanic immigrant and native populations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. The Sephardic exiles in the Ottoman Empire began writing their language using Hebrew characters but, nevertheless, preserving the Spanish pronunciation. It is this written language that the Sephardic immigrants to the United States used in the periodicals and books that they published in the twentieth century. While maintaining its Spanish base and structure, the Ladino that was spoken and written by these immigrants and their children was enriched with a vocabulary 609

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reflective of the Sephardim’s wanderings: Turkish, Dutch, Italian, English, and other lexica in addition to the Spanish base. National scholars working with Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage* program at the University of Houston have created bibliographies of Sephardic literature, funded research projects to recover Ladino works, and brought in-house periodicals and books to be microfilmed for preservation, as well as indexed and digitized for universal accessibility. However, the greatest challenge in rescuing this material, making it accessible to scholars and students, and making it available for textbooks, anthologies, and online is being able to read the three generations of Hebrew characters in which the Ladino is written, transcribing it to modern Spanish, and translating it into English. Further Reading Ben-Ur, Aviva, “A Bridge of Communication: Spaniards and Ottoman Sephardic Jews in the City of New York (1880–1950)” in Recovering U.S. Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Lalo Press. See Chávez Padilla, Ernesto Lama, Pedro de la (?–?). Pedro de la Lama became one of Arizona’s most active crusading journalists. He helped found La Liga Protectora Latina (The Latino Protection League), one of Arizona’s first civil rights organizations, and published numerous newspapers in Phoenix, including the vitriolic Justicia (Justice). Perhaps a Spaniard by birth, Lama came to Arizona from Veracruz during the late nineteenth century, first to Solomonville, a mining community, and then to Phoenix. He married a Mexican American woman, had three children, and remained in Arizona for the rest of his life. By his own account, because he opposed the 1898 war with Spain, “he was almost lynched.” During the Mexican Revolution, he sided with the reaction—first with the opportunistic Pascual Orozco, when he turned against Madero in 1913, and later with various exiled malcontents in the 1920s. Nonetheless, in spite of his seemingly conservative alignments, few activists in this era were as strident as they sought to protect the rights of Latinos. Often, however, his political skills were questioned because he was quick tempered and extremely contentious. Further Reading McBride, James B., “The Liga Protectora Latina: A Mexican-American Benevolent Society in Arizona” Journal of the West Vol. 14 (Oct. 1975): 82–90.

F. Arturo Rosales Land Grants. From its very origins as a native expression, Chicano literature is rife with tales of lands that have been stolen or foreclosed for taxes or lost for other reasons. The idea of “lost land” underlies much Chicano thought today; struggles to regain patrimonial lands are still being fought in courts of the Southwest. The expropriation of Spanish, Mexican, and Mexican American lands is still a significant motive for Mexican American and Latino historical, 610

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fictional, and poetic writing and can be easily seen in the works of such writers as Jovita González,* Rolando Hinojosa,* Alejandro Morales,* Américo Paredes,* Victor Villaseñor,* among many others. In much of the Southwest, the property-owning system was originally based on Spanish land law. The Crown issued mercedes (land grants) to colonizing groups, who divided them among themselves. The petitioners lived in villages and walked or rode out to their assigned plots to plant, irrigate, and harvest. Land use was governed collectively, using a system called ejidos (parcels of land). The villages were organized around a plaza, where inhabitants gathered to establish policy and settle disputes. With the changeover after the United States acquired New Mexico, villagers continued using “public domain” lands as they had for centuries, but, in the twentieth century, the U.S. Forest Service took control of these grounds. Soon, economic growth fostered land antagonisms, and, although the villagers participated in the new ventures and competed with newcomers, lack of capital prevented their full integration. According to some interpretations, the collective approach that evolved among the small farmers did not engender the keen competitive spirit that was common among Anglos and their rich Hispanic collaborators. This notion also holds that Hispanics pursued a traditional way of life that put less emphasis on profits and more on family. This assumption can be put to debate, but, if true, such fealty must have blunted their competitive edge. The Spanish and Mexican land grants have been contentious issues in Mexican Americans’ struggle for civil rights. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo* (1848), the United States promised to honor the grants and the property rights of the Mexican residents in the lands being annexed after the Mexican War. Article X of the Treaty declared that “all grants of land made by the Mexican government or by competent authorities in territories previously appertaining to Mexico . . . shall be respected as valid, to the same extent . . . as if the said territories had remained within the limits of Mexico.” Although the United States Senate eliminated Article X before it ratified the treaty, an appended protocol assured Mexico that the rights of Mexican Americans would be fully guaranteed because “these invaluable blessings, under our form of Government, do not result from Treaty stipulations, but from the very nature and character of our institutions.” For many villagers in the remote regions of the new territory of the United States, the promises of the agreement were not honored. The United States did not adequately implement the Treaty’s provisions. Mexican Americans seeking to prove legitimate ownership of their lands were forced to appear in front of legal committees or engage in lengthy and expensive litigation. The judges or council members often were ignorant of Spanish and the legal system under which the land grants had been administered. Consequently, Mexican Americans often had their land taken from them either by an alien American judicial system or through outright fraud. This alienation from their land encouraged and exacerbated impoverishment. The federal government has refused to take an active role in restoring these land grants. (See also Land in Literature) 611

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Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

F. Arturo Rosales Land in Literature. In literature, land always figures as a sociospatial construct that can be mapped in a variety of ways. It is more than a physical location in space and time; it is the product of specific social relations and processes. Land is a place that can be figured as property or capital, a space of production and subsistence, a landscape, a nation or homeland, or a dwelling space. In all of these constructions, land is always also a cultural space that constitutes place-bound identities. It is the basis for a “sense of place,” a sense of location that is linked to specific social relations, which operate within particular sociospatial boundaries. In Chicano and Chicana and Latino and Latina poetry and prose, given the population’s specific history, this sense of place is often accompanied by a sense of loss or displacement and often by a loss of identity. When, however, relations to the land Reies López Tijerna marching in the Poor People’s Campaign. are threatened by changing socioeconomic and political relations, new imaginary constructs often emerge to construct a new sense of rootedness or connection to the land and community. Particular constructs of land are taken up repeatedly in Latino literature, often with different meanings, as in a memory feedback loop that allows for shifts in nuances and meanings. Shifts in literary configurations can also be attributed to location, historical moment, class and gender identity, and the native/nonnative status of the narrator. Often, too, mappings from the past are taken up to address the present. All constructs are interrelated; thus, a sense of place, memory, lan612

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guage, and culture is embedded in all constructs of land. What is also clear is that, in their constructs of land, Latino and Latina writers are interested in producing a place of difference, a place that stands as culturally different and in opposition to dominant constructs of land and place. Land has always been a key image in U.S. literature, a symbol, in fact, of nation, state, and empire. In U.S. literature, constructs of the frontier, the promise of free land, the garden of civilization, and the agrarian myth have been foundational. These constructs are products of U.S. history and state policies that led European American settlers to assume an entitlement to the land— Native American, French, Spanish, or Mexican land. Their entitlement was construed as divinely ordained (see Manifest Destiny) and therefore to be garnered by force, warfare, competition, corruption, or legal means. This is clear in the way that the nation-state, through its serial Removal Acts, forcibly relocated the indigenous populations from eastern and southeastern territories that were desired by white settlers and speculators. Warfare pushed the Indians farther west, and, through deceit and corruption, speculators further divested them of their lands. In the Southwest, lands claimed by the Mexican government were taken by the United States by force and, later, after the U.S.–Mexican War, through congressional and juridical means—despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which, in its Article 8, promised to respect the property rights of former Mexican citizens. However, the deletion of Article 10 from the Treaty, which promised to recognize all titles valid under Mexican law, was already a clear indication that the United States did not mean to respect Mexican property. As Ebright makes clear, the United States saw the Treaty “as an enormous real estate deal; it expected to get clear title to most of the land it was paying for [that is, the $15 million it paid to Mexico after defeating it in war and taking possession of half of the Mexican territory] regardless of the property rights of Mexicans” (9). In the process, landholders became claimants and producers were separated from the means of production; this type of enclosure was repeated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and figures prominently in Chicano and Chicana and Latino and Latina literature. Given this history, land has always been a symbol of loss and dispossession, displacement, injustice, and de facto and de jure violence against the Latino and Latina population. The loss of land is tied not only to the loss of the war and Mexican neglect of its territories, but also to betrayal, to the notion that the United States failed to live up to what it guaranteed residents of the Southwest when it signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The notions of land loss and betrayal have figured prominently in historical romances about Hispano, Tejano, and Californio land. Regardless of the particular focus in the prose or poetry, the motif of loss has been crucial. Although this brief overview of land in Latino and Latina literature cannot deal with the many texts that address these issues, several are referenced in relation to historical period, perspective, location, and acts of resistance since the nineteenth century. According to Alonso, the period after the U.S.–Mexican War establishes “the importance of land or space to the settlers’ way of life and identity” (3) 613

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and is marked primarily by the loss of land grants in California, Texas, and New Mexico through war, violence, debt, fencing, and legislative and juridical means that favored Anglo land speculators, land developers, homesteaders, and squatters. During this period, it is the invader, the Anglo intruder, who is perceived as the primary cause of land loss, displacement, and the weakening of cultural ties. The late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were marked by continued violence, harassment, lynching, armed resistance, legal resistance, forced sales of land, fraud, and relocation through eminent domain tactics. Some land tracts were abridged but not entirely lost; in South Texas, for example, a few rancheros were able to hold on to their land, and, in New Mexico, especially in the northern part of the state, those with community land grants were able to retain some titles, although they became minority landholders. With growing land loss, second and third generation Latinos/as, previously linked to the land, found it necessary to relocate, primarily for reasons of employment. The contemporary period is marked by urban renewal and gentrification, which have likewise led to the displacement of barrio dwellers; often, renters are forcibly removed from buildings by landlords—sometimes through drastic measures, such as eviction or arson—or by the state, through the mechanisms of eminent domain tactics. Published works on these historical periods can be traced to 1885, the year of the publication of The Squatter and the Don by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,* and continue to 2007, with the publication of Helena María Viramontes’s* Their Dogs Came with Them. Underlying any discussion of land in Chicano and Chicana and Latino and Latina literature— whether it is a reference to a territory, farm, ranch or city lot, a barrio, or even a rental space—is the notion of community. Several literary texts address and reconstruct land issues in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries; other texts historically situate these issues and texts.

Land, Property, and Place: 1846 to the Present We often forget that land was communally held in the Americas by the indigenous populations long before the arrival of European colonists. With conquest and colonial settlement came the dispossession of the Indians on a scale hitherto unknown. Geographical expansion first brought Spanish explorers, conquerors, and colonists in the sixteenth century to the area later called the Spanish Borderlands, extending from Florida to California. Exerting control meant occupation of the land by soldiers, colonists, or missionaries in the name of the Crown. The practice of entrusting land, granting usufructuary rights to colonists and soldiers, was not viable for long, and, by the seventeenth century, colonists were seeking private title to land, with a few exceptions. By the early nineteenth century, the period of Mexican independence, these grants were considered private property. In Texas, the landowners, like Mexican rancheros, ruled despotically over peons, who worked the land for subsistence and were always beholden and in debt to the 614

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patrón (boss). Some Chicano and Chicana writers have tended to idealize the pre-1846 period: Américo Paredes* in With a Pistol in His Hand, who suggests that “The simple pastoral life led by most Border people fostered a natural equality among men.” But the reality is that this was a quasifeudal/precapitalist system: landowners were like lords, and peons were a subservient caste treated much like slaves. In California, as in New Mexico, the private landowners were criollos (creoles) and mestizos (mixed heritage), but the producers were for the most part indios (Indians). In New Mexico, there were also community grants, with a group of settlers receiving individual allotments of land for a house and garden and the rest to be used as a commons for hunting, pastures, watering places, and so on. Writers who describe the early land grant period generally focus on the landowners, not on the producers. Although there are critiques in literature of this precapitalist mode of production, for example, in Jovita González’s* novel Caballero (Gentleman), texts dealing with this period, for the most part, tend to romanticize the life of the ranchero (ranch owner) or Don and to describe the peones (peons) in quaint picturesque sketches, as, for example, in the sketches by Nina Otero Warren* or Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca,* or even in the work of González herself. The story of the early period in which ranchers, farmers, and sheepherders were dispossessed through military invasion, court decisions, congressional and state acts and commissions, laws, imposed taxes, fraud, land speculators, settlers, and squatters can be found in Californio, Tejano, and Nuevomexicano testimonios (see Testimonial Literature), memoirs, letters, oral interviews, and, especially, court decisions, as well as in proclamations and corridos,* and, to a lesser extent, in short stories and novels. With the loss of land came also the disempowerment of the landowners. Juan Nepomuceno Seguín,* former mayor of San Antonio, had backed the Texans against Mexico and, by 1842, found himself harassed and intimidated and forced to leave for Mexico. Already in his personal memoir of 1858, he noted that the Anglos were using illegal means to “deprive rightful owners of their property.” In 1859, Antonio María Pico and forty-nine other Californios sent a letter to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to protest the Land Act of 1851 and the ruinous high taxes that were leading to their loss of land. The petitioners argued that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to protect the property rights of all landholders possessing titles under the Spanish or Mexican governments, but that the requirement to submit their titles before the Land Commission led to litigation costs that forced them to mortgage at usurious rates or sell part of their property. Subsequently, the Gold Rush brought squatters to their lands, who seized their houses, killed their cattle, and destroyed their crops. The longdelayed Land Commission judgments only led to further appeals in district courts and, even when they were finally confirmed, to costly surveys. The wait and the expenses led to loss of land, cattle, and livelihood to the point where many found themselves living in penury. The Supreme Court decision, in Botiller v. Dominguez, to give precedence to the Land Act of 1851 over the 615

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Treaty (Ebright 32), made the adjudication of land grants even more difficult for the landowner, as depicted in Ruiz de Burton’s historical romance The Squatter and the Don. Issues of dispossession are central to Ruiz de Burton’s novel. In The Squatter and the Don, she provides a look at the dispossession of Californios, who are subjected to “the sins of our legislators” and the conniving of speculators and corrupt lawyers, as well as to squatters overtaking their lands. Like the other letters, testimonios (testimonies), and proclamations, Ruiz de Burton’s novel notes the betrayal of the Californios by a government that does not adhere to the promises made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the novel, the lands of Don Mariano are lost after squatters invade his lands, taxes are due on lands that he no longer controls, and his livestock die in a storm as he tries to protect the herd from being killed by the squatters. In the end, the land is lost but indirectly restored when the young Clarence Darrell purchases the lands and marries Mercedes, Don Mariano’s daughter. The novel is highly critical of the government, which does not seek to protect the rights of the Californios. By 1895, when Ruiz de Burton published her work, her good friend Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo* and other Californios had suffered land loss, and she herself was having a hard time clinging to her homestead, Rancho Jamul, a ranch that her husband had purchased, in part, from the wealthy Californio and former governor of Alta California, Pío Pico, who, like Vallejo and Ruiz de Burton herself, died nearly destitute. The dispossession of the Californios and their loss of the Alta California “paradise” is also the subject of Alejandro Morales’s* novel Reto en el Paraíso (Challenge in Paradise), which was published almost a hundred years later, in 1983. Here, Morales has created several generations of a fictitious family based on the lives of historical figures, the Berreyesa family and Antonio Franco Coronel,* who face dispossession at the hands of James Liford—the historical James Irvine. The novel grounds a number of episodes in the narrative on information provided in two testimonios recorded for the Bancroft Historical project. Although the testimonio by Coronel, “Cosas de California” (California Things), was dictated to Thomas Savage in 1877, in the novel Coronel himself writes a memoir, “Reto en el paraíso,” that offers what he considers a true account of how the land was lost after the U.S. invasion in 1846. It is this memoir that the main character, Dennis, the great grandnephew of Coronel and Nicolás Berreyesa, peruses every evening when he returns home from work and lies down naked inside his apartment within his artificially constructed garden. The “lost paradise” and “nakedness” can only be recreated artificially, but the challenges—“el reto”—continue, especially for Dennis and now even for the descendant of James Liford (i.e., Irvine), Jean, who has lost control of the immense property to the corporate board. The novel includes two additional time spaces that witness the effects of dispossession: the period of the second Berreyesa–Coronel generation, with emphasis on the family’s proletarization and later social mobility through Rafaela’s design and seamstress work, and the modern period of the 1960s. 616

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This post-1846 invasion period and its long-term effects are also the focus of two novels written in the 1930s and 1940s by Jovita González. The two novels, Dew on the Thorn, written between 1926 and 1940, and Caballero, written with Eve Raleigh in the 1930s, present contradictory visions of the post-1846 period. González’s historical romance, Caballero, is a costumbrista (novel of customs), like many nineteenth-century Latin American novels, that provides a view of the changes faced by South Texas landowners, such as Don Santiago de Mendoza, with the breakout of the U.S.–Mexican War. The fragmentation of the Mendoza family serves as an allegory for Mexican Texas. Like the territory, the family faces a losing battle in the contest with the invaders and finds itself unable to withstand the onslaught of U.S. culture, law, and military might. The novel begins in 1846, ten years after Texas has declared its independence from Mexico and a year after Texas was admitted into the union as a state. Faced with military camps on the Rio Bravo and in Matamoros, roving Rangers who are eager to kill Mexicans, squatter encroachments, and new laws—the Mexican landowners find themselves under siege. In South Texas, the landowners refuse to accept these changes—until their invasion by military forces and Rangers makes it clear that the only choices are to negotiate with the invaders and attempt to save their land, fight, or flee. Yet, within Rancho La Palma, Don Santiago continues to be the pseudofeudal lord—master of family, peons, and land. Under this despotic patriarchal system, Don Santiago determines when the family can travel, who his daughters can marry, and what the peons can do on his lands. Like the land, his daughters become “americanas” when they choose to be the wives of americanos; his younger son, Luis, follows Captain Devlin to Baltimore to study painting. Only his son Alvaro shares his hate for the invaders, joins the guerrilleros (guerrilla fighters), is caught, saved from hanging by his sister, and finally shot by a Ranger after he kills another “rinche” (ranger). The fragmentation of his family, the departure of Mexican families leaving for Mexico, the acceptance by his best friend of negotiation with the invaders, filing title to the land—all are indications that the loss is irreversible. All this leads to Santiago’s early death. This historical romance thus combines the political with the personal to narrate the Tejanos’s loss of power and their land and the willingness of some to accommodate to keep their property or to assimilate. This story of Anglo encroachment on Tejano land continues into the early twentieth century, as recalled in El diablo en Texas (The Devil in Texas), by Aristeo Brito. Brito’s novel narrates the story of Presidio, Texas, in three distinct periods: 1883, 1942, and 1970. The fragmented structure includes a variety of dialogues, including that of ghosts who still roam the area, the dialogue of the devil, who is identified with the oppressive and exploitative land baron Ben Lynch, and the dialogues of the living mexicanos (Mexicans), who continue to work the land that they no longer own. Resentment over land loss also figures as a dominant discourse in Chicano and Chicana literature dealing with Hispano land grants in New Mexico, 617

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where community grants predominated in the nineteenth century, but literary examples cast the land issue as private holdings. In We Fed Them Cactus, Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, through a series of sketches, offers a nostalgic account of nuevomexicano (New Mexican) traditions and practices, including the buffalo hunt, the rodeo, the fiestas, the evening gatherings to hear and tell stories about the past, the environment, the religious festivities, the herb remedies of the curandera (healer), the Indian raids, the trade with the Comanches, the bandits, the mustangs, and the coming of the homesteaders, the americanos. The narrator is the daughter of a rich landowner, who seeks to remedy the distortions of historical accounts with respect to her ancestors, the white, blueeyed, landed descendants of the early Spanish colonists: “The families who settled on the Llano were not of the poor classes; they were of the landed gentry, in whose veins ran the noble blood of ancestors who left the mother country, Spain, for the New World.” While pointing out that some of the grantees managed to keep their lands, Cabeza de Vaca recalls their overall loss of land with the coming of the homesteaders. Likewise, one of Angélico Chávez’s* short stories, “The Lean Years,” includes the loss of a community land grant, when, with the arrival of the railroad at Las Vegas, José Vera and his neighbors are forced to leave their village, La Cunita, and their communal lands as the Anglos arrive with documents granting them rights to “all the prairie around La Cunita.” Like some New Mexican Hispanos, a limited number of Tejanos also managed to hang on to the land. The story of those who managed to retain their holdings, at least in part, is told in Rolando Hinojosa’s* Klail City Death Trip series. In these novels, four of the Valley landowners, the Vilches, Campoy, Buenrostro, and Villalón families, were able to keep at least part of their lands, which had been granted to them in the eighteenth century. The Klail City series also narrates the enmity and division among the Tejano families that contribute to their political weakness and dispossession. Valley residents, like Echevarría in his old age, despair over what they see: “The Valley is disappearing.” Land loss leads concomitantly to dissolution of home and community and the loss of cultural traditions, producing a sense of displacement, as old Echevarría notes when, by the 1960s, he is one of the few remaining men of his generation to remember what happened in the past century in the Valley. The loss is great; many have left and gone North, says Echevarría; his “sense of place” is gone, but those who stay on, like the young Jehú Malacara and Rafa Buenrostro, are busy constructing a new sense of place. Thus, the land, whether alienated or not, continues to give rise to an imagined community and a sense of place and identity. In Hinojosa’s late twentieth-century narratives, there are no long descriptions of landscapes; the land is the place that the people living on it construct. In the work of Cabeza de Vaca, by contrast, there are detailed descriptions of the geographical features of the Staked Plains and the mountains of New Mexico, physical markers that serve to construct the particular sense of place that she recalls. In all of these works, however, the perspective is that of natives of Texas, New 618

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Mexico, and California, whose ancestors have inhabited the Southwest since the eighteenth century or before.

Land as a Place of Production: The Emergent Producer Perspective The various approaches to land and landscape signaled earlier notwithstanding, it is in twentieth-century texts that the land is constructed from the perspective of the producers, the farm laborers. For the workers, the land is not property; it is a place or site constructed through their labor. This different perspective is already suggested, for example, in González’s Caballero, in which Don Santiago’s peons, whom he sees as “his to discipline at any time with the lash, to punish by death if he so chose,” begin to leave his rancho to become wage laborers on americano lands. In Dew on the Thorn, Don Francisco de los Olivares, a rico (rich man) like Don Santiago, is described as a “feudal lord,” as “the master of everything, not only of the land he possessed but of the peones who worked the soil.” González’s narrator tries to explain away the fact that the peones grow pessimistic and develop “a spirit of hopelessness and despair” by alluding to “traditions” of precapitalist rancho life from the vantage point of the wealthy landowners: “The existence of such conditions does not imply that Don Francisco was cruel or unjust. The customs merely part of a system that had been inherited by both classes. Neither one nor the other knew of a better plan; the unfairness and injustice of it was never realized by the master and the peones looked upon it as a thing that had to be.” Loss of land and shifts in the mode of production gave rise to displacement and migration to seek work elsewhere, with other landowners, or by going North. Migration is the subject of a multitude of corridos, short stories, and novels. In 1900, some Tejano Mexicanos did not move far, but, like Gregorio Cortez,* rented land from Anglo landowners, as noted in the corrido. By the middle of the twentieth century, many families in the Valley boarded up their homes and spent part of the year on labor circuits that took them north to Iowa and Minnesota and west to Washington and California. Former landowners and peons had become farm workers and migrant workers, as in Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip series and in Tomás Rivera’s* . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him). Rivera’s work is possibly the best-known Chicano narrative of native migrant workers from Texas. Land in his work is reconfigured principally as a place of production, with shelter becoming an urgent spatial issue; but the sense of place also is linked to a sense of identification, as in Rivera’s short stories “Zoo Island” and “The Salamanders.” In “Zoo Island,” the characters need to establish and mark their space, no longer through land tenancy but through representation. The farm land is alienated, that is, the property of a white man, but the chicken coops where the farm workers live during the seasonal harvest constitute their space and 619

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place, and they claim this space—making it their own when they name it “Zoo Island” and set up a sign with the name and population. Land and place of identity are thus closely related in Chicano and Chicana literature. In “The Salamanders,” Rivera’s adolescent character, who is aware of the extreme poverty of his migrant family, who has no place to stop for work or even to set up a tent to get some sleep, begins to detach and disidentify with his parents, until finally a farmer allows them to set up their tent at the foot of a flooded beet field. Glad to have the space to stretch out rather than sleep in the car, the family is rudely awakened by the invasion of salamanders, trying “to reclaim the foot of the field.” In response to the “attack,” the boy binds again with his family: “I don’t know why we killed so many salamanders that night. [ . . . ] Now that I remember, I think that we also felt the desire to recover and to reclaim the foot of the field,” finding in this resistance against the salamanders renewed solidarity and identification with his family. Rivera’s narrative allegorizes dispossession and the importance of a space of one’s own, solidarity, and communal resistance. Similar connections between alienated land and the sense of alienation with respect to migrant farm labor are also found in the work of many other Chicano and Chicana writers. The female perspective is often missing from these migrant labor stories, although women have historically made up a good number of the workers. In Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, the farm worker experience is from the perspective of a young woman who, in the midst of her family’s plight, is able to construct her own space. The land as a space of labor can also lead to fetishizing land, as in Rivera’s story “The Harvest,” in which the elderly Don Trine feels the need to dig holes in the harvested fields, stick his arm in the hole, and feel the movement and pressure of the earth on his arm. As essentialized in these works, the land is the soil itself, the earth, having its own essence and a power that is not based on property or social relations.

Land as a Place of Struggle This history of dispossession has generated not only narratives of loss and displacement but also representations of resistance of a militant type. Chicanos’ and Chicanas’ “militant particularism,” to use Williams’s term (242, 249), has much in common with the land struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States, Latin America, and Africa. Stories of resistance in relation to the land can be found in Californio testimonios, memoirs, letters, and court decisions, a well as in proclamations and corridos. Resistance takes various forms: first and foremost, the dispossessed have sought redress through the courts or through legislation. As noted earlier, in 1859, Antonio María Pico and others sought redress through the U.S. Congress for their land loss. Their complaints did not bring results, but their documents remain as testaments to the avenue of legal resistance. Records of 620

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resistance also exist in ballads such as the “Corrido of Jacinto Treviño,” which speaks to resistance against the rinches (the Texas Rangers), who were infamous for their lynching and dispossession of mexicanos/tejanos (Mexicans and Tejanos) in Texas during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta”* similarly records the resistance of the legendary nineteenth-century Californio bandit and his vengeance-seeking after the americanos took the lives of his brother and wife, along with his land. In New Mexico, where, according to Ebright, only twenty-four percent of the land claims were confirmed by the Surveyor General and the Court of Private Land Claims (33), as opposed to the seventy-three percent confirmed in California, delays in surveys as well as fraud and manipulation of land laws further enabled the dispossession of Nuevomexicanos (New Mexicans). In 1890, the Gorras Blancas (White Cap guerrillas) rose up to protest the establishment by incoming Anglos of large landed estates. In addition to fence cutting, to prevent grants from being enclosed, they issued a political platform, on a broadside nailed to various buildings in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that recognized the rights of the Nuevomexicanos to the Las Vegas grant and protested the theft of lands by “land grabbers” and abuse by the local tyrants, proclaiming their right to resist. In We Fed Them Cactus, Cabeza de Vaca briefly narrates the arrival of cattle companies and their attempts to displace the New Mexican sheep men by building fences: “The New Mexicans were ready to fight for the land which traditionally had been theirs, and out of this grew up an organization of influential New Mexicans for protection against the usurpers. These citizens banded together and, by cutting down a few fences, discouraged fence building by those who had no titles for the land” (50). Cabeza de Vaca, while recalling this act of resistance, excludes the participation of the Gorras Blancas, converting them into marauders, against whom the respectable Hispanos had to organize (90). Historically, however, as Rosenbaum and Larson point out, the Gorras Blancas were at least partly successful in their rebellion: “By the end of the summer of 1890 no fences enclosed the common lands in the San Miguel county and none were being constructed” (288). Resistance to the expropriation of land grants in New Mexico continued throughout the twentieth century. Like the Gorras Blancas, a group called La Mano Negra (The Black Hand) emerged, in the late 1920s to mid-1930s, to continue resisting Anglo encroachment and the oppression of mexicanos by engaging in continued fence cutting, as well as “barn and haystack burning, cattle maiming, firing shots to warn intruders and arranging ambushes” (Rosenbaum and Larson, 295). This tradition of guerrilla resistance has been seen as an antecedent to the courthouse raid at Tierra Amarilla by Reies López Tijerina and La Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (the Federal Land Grant Alliance), a militant organization, formed in the 1960s, that demanded a return of the land taken from the Hispano villagers. What is most striking about the Tijerina and Alianza resistance is that it came in response to the land demands of the poor, not the rico landholders (Rosales, 300). As Rosenbaum and Larson point out: “Tijerina could get people to attack the courthouse because they knew how to 621

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do it and doing it made sense to them” (297). Tijerina and his Alianza would be a crucial aspect of the Chicano Movement’s denunciation of land usurpation throughout the Southwest in the late 1960s and 1970s (Rosales, 168). Sergio Elizondo,* in Muerte en una estrella (Death on a Star), for example, recalls Tijerina’s participation in the Farmworkers’ March from the Texas Valley to Austin in 1966. Tijerina’s subsequent incarceration brought an end to his leadership and, in time, to the Alianza Movement. Nevertheless, Tijerina’s actions attracted a good deal of attention and sparked a renewed interest in land issues. The animosity toward Mexicans that was prevalent in Texas, starting in the 1850s, and the Ranger policy of terrorizing them led to armed resistance early on. In 1859, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina* rose up in arms, shooting the sheriff of Brownsville for abusing a former servant of his, and issued his Proclamation, railing against laws that betrayed those that held to the promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and against those that, in collusion with lawyers and land speculators, wished to drive the mexicanos off the land. Cortina favored armed resistance: “our personal enemies shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their own gore,” as he stated on a widely distributed broadside. Thus began the first of the Cortina Wars (1859–1860), with Cortina’s army defeating the Rangers until U.S. Army troops were sent in December 1859. The “Ballad of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina” narrates the struggle against the rinches in defense of their lands. In Texas, armed responses to injustices were not uncommon in the late nineteenth century and, in a way, served as precedents for what was to follow in San Diego, Texas. According to Sandos, the armed insurrection that erupted in South Texas needs to be viewed in relation to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the politics of Ricardo Flores Magón.* Faced with lynchings, continued oppression from the rinches, and continued dispossession, a group of secessionists in Texas issued their revolutionary Plan de San Diego, Texas, in 1915, to proclaim their plan to have the Southwest states, formerly Mexican territory, separate from the United States and form an independent republic of mexicanos, blacks, Native Americans, and Japanese. The Plan de San Diego, as noted by Sandos, offers historical documentation that the community of Mexican descent in the United States was not all marked by conservatism or complacency, as is commonly portrayed (Sandos xvii). This secessionist conflict turned “the Valley into a virtual war zone during 1915–1917” and led to the loss of hundreds of lives and the displacement of thousands. The secessionist insurrection—in response to displacement, lynching, and oppression of the Tejanos—is the subject of the initial chapters of Américo Paredes’s* George Washington Gómez. Pizaña, who joined the secessionists after his ranch was raided and ultimately fled to Mexico (Sandos xvi), is represented by the character Anacleto de la Peña, who had vowed to die before giving up: “When the American soldiers came, Anacleto de la Peña decided he would rather not be a corpse, and the movement for a Spanish-speaking Republic of the Southwest had collapsed. Who would have thought the Gringos had so many soldiers?” With de la Peña’s flight to Mexico, another sedicioso (seditionist), 622

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Lupe, is left to lead the other insurrectionists, including his brother Feliciano. When, however, Gumersindo, his brother-in-law, is killed by the rinches, things change for Feliciano, who had joined the insurrection because he resented being dispossessed by the gringos: “I was born here. My father was born here and so was my grandfather and his father before him. And then they come, they come and take it, steal it and call it theirs.” Instead of fleeing to Mexico with the other seditionists, Feliciano stays to take care of Gumersindo’s family. The novel notes the dispossession and violence against the Tejanos but does not hold violence as a viable response; as Feliciano recalls, Gumersindo had always indicated that “the peaceful, innocent people” would pay. Later on in the novel, Feliciano’s social mobility through hard work enables him to support his sister and her family and eventually to acquire his own farm. He feels a special responsibility for his nephew Gualinto, who grows up to be a good student, goes to college, joins the Army, and marries an Anglo who is, ironically, the daughter of a former Texas Ranger. The ironies multiply when Gualinto returns to Texas in the 1940s as an Army intelligence officer, sent undercover to spy on his own people along the border. Not only is Gualinto a vendido (sellout), but he also looks down on darker-skinned Tejanos, particularly those interested in organizing politically for redress. In the 1960s, Tijerina’s land grant movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Chicano Movement* brought about a variety of acts of resistance within the United States. Parallel movements were emerging in Europe and Latin America. As Chicanos/as sought to occupy additional social spaces that had previously been closed off to them, the Chicano Movement focused on recognition of the loss of the Southwest territory and the ongoing policies that kept Chicanos and Chicanas oppressed, exploited, and disenfranchised. “Aztlán,”* the legendary land from which the Aztecs had ostensibly migrated south, became a rallying cry when the poet Alurista* equated Aztlán with the Southwest. A recognition of the dispossession of the mexicanos was central to “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” signed at a conference in Denver in 1969 (Rosales, 181). This Plan recognized the Southwest, Aztlán, as belonging to those who work it: “Aztlán pertenece a los que siembran la semilla, riegan los campos y levantan la cosecha, y no al extranjero europeo” (Aztlán belongs to those who sow the seeds, water the fields, and harvest the land, and not to the European foreigner). During this same period, Rudolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s* poem “I am Joaquín” retook and recast the ballad of the legendary Californio bandit as a refunctioned symbol of Chicano dispossession: “My land is lost/and stolen,/My culture has been raped,/I lengthen/the line at the welfare door/and fill the jails with crime.” Self-determination was also the cry of the 1969 “Plan de Santa Barbara,” which proclaimed a new identity and called for a culturally relevant curriculum and an increased representation of Chicano students and faculty at California universities and colleges (Rosales, 183). These same issues were taken up by many other Chicano and Chicana poets, including Elizondo in his collection Perros y antiperros (Dogs and Anti-Dogs). 623

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In subsequent decades, land has been foregrounded once again, this time recast as “the borderlands” and “the border.” A number of writers have traded in the construct of “Aztlán” for “the borderlands.” It is now the symbol of the Southwest and is said to extend north, to an area far beyond the physical division between the two nation-states, the United States and Mexico. As Saldívar has indicated in Border Matters, the border paradigm has displaced the frontier paradigm; still, as he notes, to avoid falling into a fetishization of the border, it becomes important to examine this space within a historical and intercultural perspective that takes into account a whole range of border discourses (xiii). Often, unfortunately, the border is mapped from the U.S. side of the dividing line, and writers focus on how Chicanos and Chicanas and Latinos and Latinas view the border rather than on how the border came to be and how those “de este lado” (on this side) are viewed by those “del otro lado” (on the other side).

Urban Sites: Living Space Following larger, global-scale processes, by the middle of the twentieth century, the notion of land for Latinos/as had become largely urbanized. Today, it is the place of habitation, the barrio (neighborhood), or the dwelling itself— be it a house, an apartment, a room, a space of transition in a continual state of flux as a result of exclusionary covenants, urban renewal, eminent domain policies, or gentrification—all leading to transitoriness, relocation, and an increased sense of displacement. For Latinos/as in the late twentieth century, urban land became synonymous with the barrio. Along with turf wars among youth that signaled the fragmentation of the barrios by streets and zones, barrios have been primarily fragmented by the construction of freeways, factories, and junkyards—as states have used eminent domain to buy up lands for the construction of complex freeway systems, as, for example, in Los Angeles. In Viramontes’s* Their Dogs Came with Them, the old woman Chavela in East Los Angeles tells the Zumaya child that “displacement will always come down to two things: earthquakes or earthmovers.” And, soon, all that the child can see are the earthmovers lined up like tanks next to a row of vacant houses on the other side of First Street: “In a few weeks, Chavela’s side of the neighborhood, the dead side of the street, would disappear forever. The earthmovers had anchored, their tarps whipping like banging sails, their bellies petroleum-readied to bite trenches wider than rivers. In a few weeks the blue house and all the other houses would vanish just like Chavela and all the other neighbors.” Other events further intrude on the community, giving it the feeling of a war zone; ten years later, the same Ermila Zumaya hears the Quarantine Authority helicopters flying above the barrio roofs and shooting dogs who were not chained up during the curfew, supposedly as part of a quarantine to contain a potential outbreak of rabies. The surveillance of the barrio through curfew, roadblocks, and helicopters takes place the same year, 1970, when the people take to the streets during the Chicano Moratorium against the War in Vietnam and the Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar* is killed by the police. It is 624

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the same year that Chicano and Chicana students carry out walkouts to protest the lack of a relevant curriculum. Land and rootedness are mapped on public streets as protesters symbolically appropriate public space. Exclusion, displacement, and surveillance of the barrio were accompanied by an attendant loss of a particular sense of place that, as noted by Fierro in Viramontes’s story “Neighbors,” was never retrieved. Other notions of place and belonging replaced it, as Aura, traumatized by the gangs in her barrio, tragically discovers. Barrio violence—aggravated by police violence, poverty, unemployment, and family fragmentation—thus gives rise to the tragic denouement of Their Dogs Came with Them. Place as the location of both habitation and struggle is also dominant in two novels by Ernesto Quiñónez:* Bodega Dreams and Chango’s Fire. In his works, urban renewal and gentrification lead to displacement and the relocation of numerous Puerto Rican and other Latino families in New York’s Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side (Loisaida), and the South Bronx, as slumlords have their buildings burned down to collect insurance money. Most of these families are low-income renters, and they end up shifting from one slum area to another. Economic restructuring led to a decline in working-class manufacturing jobs in the early 1970s; by the late 1970s, as high-paying jobs increased in the city, the need for high-rent apartments for yuppies led to gentrification, which threatened to displace lower-income renters in the area. Housing and the issue of who can live where have an impact on inner-city neighborhoods in California as well, where the Mission district in San Francisco has been transformed from Latino to yuppie. Similarly, Echo Park in Los Angeles is rapidly being gentrified, and the Latino neighborhood that existed in downtown La Jolla has disappeared. Throughout urban areas across the United States, this displacement through urban renewal is the latest threat to Latino barrios, an issue that Quiñónez takes up in Bodega Dreams, in which a former Boricua Young Lord activist turned drug lord determines to use his wealth to acquire tenements in Spanish Harlem, which he then remodels and rents out to Latinos. His analysis— that, in U.S. history, capital is accumulated through crime and later legitimized— leads to his multiple acquisitions, establishment of museums and art centers, and a foundation for giving scholarships to bright Latino students. The community, he says, needs housing and professionals. Unfortunately, Bodega is betrayed and killed before his dream is realized. In Chango’s Fire, housing issues are again at the forefront: the main character, Julio, is an arsonist, working for Eddie, who contracts with those wanting their home or buildings torched for the insurance money. As Julio walks through his neighborhood, he is struck by the displacement that has occurred, the number of Anglo commercial establishments that have replaced the old Latino bodegas (grocery stores). The decimation of these barrios and the displacement of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos from these New York City sectors continue. It is the major land-related housing issue for Latinos today, the current configuration of a whole history of land struggles. Constructs of the barrio as a place of comforting familiarity or as a place of violence are likewise evident throughout Chicano and Chicana and Latino 625

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and Latina literature. Constructs of home as a place and, sometimes, as a house are also constant themes. Tomás Rivera* planned to write a novel about la casa grande del pueblo (the big house on the pueblo), but perhaps the best-known novel is Sandra Cisneros’s* dream house on Mango Street. Dominican writer Loida Maritza Pérez’s* Geographies of Home also focuses on Iliana’s home, that old yellow house outside of Brooklyn, where her family resides; it is a turbulent home space, from which she needs to escape, despite her affection for her worn-out immigrant parents. Characters torn between fleeing from home spaces and returning are a common theme in Latino and Latina literature, as is evident in the work of Arturo Islas.* The leaving of home and the homeland is understandably the topic of numerous works dealing with immigration, and there is a vast literature on that topic, given the demographics of the U.S. Latino population, defined as it is by first-generation migration patterns that have been superimposed on multiple layers of native Latinos/as whose residence in the U.S. territory, in some cases, predates its very existence. The construct of land as a rural site persists, however, in immigrant narratives. In her last novel, Let It Rain Coffee, Angie Cruz* deals with Don Chan, an old Dominican widower who immigrates to New York City to spend his last years with his son and family. Through multiple flashbacks, the reader learns of Don Chan’s political activism in the Dominican Republic, as he and his neighbors fight the Trujillo dictatorship to keep their lands. In the end, his daughter-in-law takes him back to his land and homeland, where he wishes to be buried, land that she will sell off when he dies, to pay off her debts in New York and, perhaps, one day to buy, not land, but a place of her own in the United States. Land and place have proven to be recurring themes in Latino and Latina literature and closely linked to issues of loss, desire, power, culture, and resistance. As the United States becomes more and more Latinized, location and “sense of place” will change. Literature has borne witness to these transformations; most notably, sense of place has moved from land figured as property to land as a space of housing and community, particularly in view of the differentiation that has taken place between home and labor/productive sites for what is now primarily an urban population. But land and a sense of place as contested terrains remain constants across time. Further Reading Alonzo, Armando C., Tejano Legacy. Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). Ebright, Malcolm, “New Mexican Land Grants: The Legal Background” in Land, Water, and Culture. New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, eds. Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1987). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996). Rosenbaum, Robert J., and Robert W. Larson, “Mexicano Resistance to the Expropriation of Grant Lands in New Mexico” in Land, Water, and Culture. New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, eds. Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987).

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Saldívar, José David, Border Matters. Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Sandos, James A., Rebellion in the Borderlands. Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Williams, Raymond, Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 1989).

Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita Landestoy, Carmita (?–?). Carmita Landestoy was one in a long line of exiled writers who—from their refuge in the United States, where freedom of the press allowed them to express themselves freely—denounced the governments in their homelands. In the case of Landestoy, a respected writer in the Dominican Republic, who had collaborated with the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, one of the most scathing denouncements of a political figure issued from her pen in New York. In ¡Yo también acuso! (1946, I Also Accuse!), echoing Victor Hugo’s famed declamation of the Dreyfus affair, Landestoy documented all of the corruption and human rights violations in the dictator’s regime. The founder of Hogar (Home) magazine and the Prédica y Acción (Predicating and Action) newspaper in Santo Domingo, Landestoy had a reputation as a feminist activist. Because of her role in the Dominican Party, she was able to develop and administer a public program of assistance to women. After her studies at the University of Santo Domingo, Landestoy became a recognized scholar and intellectual, who published Temas históricos (Historical Themes). She was also the author of a textbook for children, Libro de lectura (Reading Book). But, like many intellectuals of her day, she ran afoul of the dictatorship, became isolated in the regime, and had to leave the country, which she accomplished in 1944 under the pretext of visiting her sick mother in New York, to escape before being jailed. Further Reading Ramos, Alejandro Paulino, “Carmita Landestoy: Una Mujer contra la Dictadura” (http:// historiadominicana.blogspot.com/2005/11/carmita-landestoy-y-trujillo.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Language Choice in Literature. The literary language of U.S. Hispanics contains original and distinctive elements that reflect the multicultural, bilingual character of U.S. Hispanic society. This discussion of the literary language of U.S. Hispanics includes a number of key issues: an overview of the multicultural nature of that language; a discussion of the bilingualism and bidialectalism of the U.S. Hispanic population and how those features of language appear with due artistic elaboration in the literary language; a review of code-switching and how it distinguishes U.S. Hispanic literature; a discussion of the origins and current status of the most distinctive and original elements of U.S. Hispanic literature, particularly code-switching, from a linguistic point of view; and race and ethnic relationships from a thematic perspective. Finally, a sampler from a stylistic point of view of U.S. Hispanic literary language is included, featuring Spanish–English code-switching in 627


the service of theme, characterization, imagery, and a variety of rhetorical devices. The key element of the literary language of U.S. Hispanics is its rich multiculturalism, primarily the interplay of variously bicultural, cross-cultural, and transcultural facets of Anglo America and Hispania. Multiculturalism is the main current that courses through U.S. Hispanic literature in its entirety. This multicultural element is not unique to U.S. Hispanism, but characterizes other Hispanic cultures as well, and was particularly prominent during the formation of Spain in the Middle Ages, when Christians, Moors, and Jews variously fought, coexisted, or assimilated. Juan Bruce-Novoa,* in his “Elegias a la frontera hispánica” (Elegies to the Hispanic Border), has been able to relate, along the dimension of “frontera,” two classics that are separated by five centuries: the Chicano masterpiece “El Louie,” by José Montoya,* and the medieval Hispanic masterpiece “Las coplas por la muerte de su padre” (Couplets on the Death of His Father) by Jorge Manrique. Multiculturalism—mainly Anglo Hispanic, secondarily Hispanic Native American or Afro Hispanic counterpoint—is a defining and pervasive feature of U.S. Hispanic literatures. This is true for the three major U.S. Hispanic subgroups: Chicano/Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American. The focus of this discussion is mostly but not exclusively on continental Puerto Rican writers, sometimes self-defined as Nuyorican or Neo-Rican writers. In contrast, the literature of the Island of Puerto Rico is a complex phenomenon, but one that shares more features with the independent nations of Latin America and the Caribbean than it does with the U.S. Hispanic writers who reside in the forty-eight states of the continental United States. For the purpose of analysis, the quality of multiculturalism in U.S. Hispanic literature has been simplified into three broad categories: the bicultural, the cross-cultural, and the transcultural. Given the rich polyphony of U.S. Hispanic literature, the process of labeling the output of Hispanic writers by one of these three definers would be busy but fruitless. On the contrary, the categories are offered for their heuristic value and with the added caution that the same work often contains, at various moments, each of the three multicultural elements. The bicultural element in U.S. Hispanic literary language does not have to be bilingual, but it often is. However, it is characterized by a level of mastery, comfort, and identification with two cultures, usually the Hispanic and the Anglo. Often, bicultural U.S. Hispanic literature describes the Anglo American element in English and the Hispanic element in Spanish, as in the following example from Chicana poet, Evangelina Vigil.* In this poem, the battle of the sexes and feminism are the primary themes, and the poet marshals, in bicultural fashion, both Spanish and English to energize her attack. eres el tipo [you are the type] de motherfucker

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bien chingón [a bad ass] who likes to throw the weight around y aventar empujones [and push people around] y tirar chingazos [and slap them around] and break through doors bien sangrón [cold blood] saying con el hocico [saying with your snout] “that’s tough shit!” . . . y no creas ti que es que yo a ti te tengo miedo [and don’t go thinking I’m scared of you] si el complejo ese es el tuyo [because it’s your complex] ¿porque sabes qué, ese? [because you know, dude] I like to wear only shoes that fit me gusta andar comfortable. [I like to walk around comfortable] (Thirty an’ Seen a Lot, 46)

In contrast to the bicultural mode, cross-cultural literary expression does not partake “comfortably” of both cultures. It separates the Anglo from the Hispanic, and the author usually identifies himself or herself with the Hispanic persona. For example, in 1885, when José Martí* lived in the United States, he wrote, using the imagery of Goliath and David, “Viví en el monstruo, y le conozco las entrañas:—y mi honda es la de David” (I lived in the monster, and I know its entrails:—and my slingshot is David’s; Martí 1:271). The quote reflects a cross-cultural posture: Martí says that, by virtue of his physical residence in the United States, he will describe and explain the United States as filtered through and organized by his Hispanic sensibilities and intellect. Not all cross-cultural expression is as straightforward as Marti’s example of expository prose. Another example, also Cuban American, is provided by the poet, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat,* in his poem “Bilingual Blues”: You say tomato, I say tu madre; [I say your mother] You say potato, I say Pototo. Let’s call the hole un hueco, the thing [a hole] a cosa, and if the cosa goes into the hueco, [a thing] consider yourself en casa, [at home] consider yourself part of the family. (Triple Crown, 164)

In this poem, the cross-cultural element provides the medium for expressing parody, satire, and exuberant good humor. The transcultural element features the conversion of one culture by another, the subsuming of one culture into another. This transformation, as seen in U.S. Hispanic literature, is almost always in the direction of Hispanic culture being consumed—or, if not consumed, diminished—by Anglo culture. The transcultural 629


element in U.S. Hispanic literature is usually of an anxiety-ridden or nightmarish quality. For example, in Figuraciones en el mes de marzo (Schemes in the Month of March), by the Puerto Rican novelist, Emilio Díaz Valcárcel, appears the following passage by an alleged award-winning Puerto Rican poet: quál siendo la rola de la poetría? Questiona halto difísil a reportal, pero me adelanto a sugestil que la labol de poheta eh la de reflectar asquitaradamanti la realidad de su mah profundo sel. ¿No lo habels dicho ya crazymente el gran Hale? ¿And qualeh su palabra para la hehtoria? Remberlah, señoreh: Sel u no sel, that is el lío [sic]. (Figuraciones en el mes de marzo 30) (What’s the role of poetry? A quite difficult question, but I take the opportunity to observe that it is to reflect precisely the most profound reality of his being. And hasn’t the great Prince Hale said it crazily? And what is his wisdom for the ages. Remember them, gentlemen: To be or not to be, that’s the hassle.)

No one in Puerto Rico, or anywhere else in the Hispanic world, actually talks like this, but there is in the parody an element of recognition, an evocation of the influence of English and Anglo American culture on both the Spanish language and the Hispanic identity. This question is elevated to high philosophic purpose through extreme parody. To be or not to be: will the Puerto Rican people have a genuine identity that is at once distinctive yet true to its Hispanicity? Or will the Puerto Rican identity be illegitimately and— because it is without sufficient awareness of the phenomenon—perversely transformed by an Anglo mold and mind-set? That is the question, or the lío (hassle), that Emilio Díaz Valcárcel poses in this passage. As illustrated by each of the prior examples—Chicano, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican—much of the defining flavor of U.S. Hispanic multiculturalism is framed by the issue of race and ethnic relationships, which not only are central to many of the themes of U.S. Hispanic literature but also influence the artist’s choice of language. The three prime modalities of race and ethnic relationships in the real world—coexistence, conflict, and assimilation—have a somewhat analogical relationship to the three modalities of U.S. Hispanic multicultural and typically bilingual literature: biculturalism, cross-culturalism, and transculturalism. Just as multiculturalism is pivotal to U.S. Hispanic literature, from a linguistic point of view, the use of two or more languages—usually, but not always, English and Spanish—in all of their expressive richness, is a hallmark of that literature. This phenomenon, best described as code-switching, is one of the fundamental ways in which U.S. Hispanic literature achieves its multicultural qualities. Codeswitching in itself can be described in various ways and can have different purposes, among them the expression of biculturalism, cross-culturalism, and transculturalism. The earlier examples taken from Evangelina Vigil, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, and Emilio Díaz Valcárcel use a form of code-switching, specifically the alternation of Spanish and English, as one of the main devices to communicate, respectively, biculturalism, cross-culturalism, and transculturalism. 630


Accepting as axiomatic the multicultural quality of U.S. Hispanic literature, some of the sections that follow in this discussion are dedicated to illustrating this multiculturalism and to explaining the complex phenomenon of codeswitching, which is its primary linguistic component.

Bilingualism and Bidialectalism in U.S. Hispanic Speech Bilingualism is a phenomenon that characterizes all of the subgroups of the U.S. Hispanic world, not only with respect to their literary language but with respect to their spoken language as well. Because the literary language of U.S. Hispanics sometimes reflects or parodies U.S. speech and other times consciously strives to either build on or free itself from that speech through various forms of artistic license, it is valuable to review some of the issues involved in the analysis of U.S. Hispanic bilingual speech and some of the types of U.S. Hispanic bilingualism. It is important to note that bilingualism in the United States among Hispanics is an emotionally charged issue. For example, Hispanic support for bilingual education has become a primary political goal that cuts across all subgroups and is therefore one of the few issues that unite Chicanos, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans. Also, perceived support or lack of support for bilingual education has become a litmus test to separate political allies from foes in Congress. Finally, bilingual education and an allied issue of whether or not English should be the legally defined official language are not only among the most burning political issues of the day, they are ones on which U.S. Hispanic identity hinges. The analysis of bilingualism and the closely related issues of language, academic achievement, and intellectual testing of U.S. Hispanics have developed slowly, over decades, from either a highly deficient or pseudoscientific status to a level of objective methodology, a base of data, and a corpus of knowledge that, while not without uncertainties and controversies, permit them to be legitimately included among the social sciences. In analyzing the bilingualism of U.S. Hispanics, there was originally a tendency on the part of some social scientists, almost exclusively non-Hispanic, often psychologists or educators, to see what they called “language-switching” (later to become known as code-switching) as “evidence for internal mental confusion, the inability to separate two languages sufficiently to warrant the designation of true bilingualism” (Lipski 191). Language, academic achievement, and intellectual testing, usually I.Q. testing, of U.S. Hispanics tended to be badly designed artifacts of these conceptual prejudices that mismeasured Hispanics in a prejudice-fulfilling fashion. However, beginning in the 1960s, in part as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and with the advent of great advances in sociolinguistic and ethnolinguistic investigations of nonprestigious social groups, including U.S. Hispanics, “code-switching became the object of scientific scrutiny, with the unsurprising result that it was shown to be governed by a complicated and as yet not fully delimited set of constraints, indicating a complex and structured interaction between the two languages in the internal 631


cognitive apparatus of the bilingual—a far cry from the anarchical confusion postulated previously” (Lipski 191). As the result of several decades of research with many cultures, where contact among different languages is significant, the phenomenon of codeswitching is now understood to be a complex, high-order phenomenon that is primarily governed by or reflects a host of reasons or rules that can be explained psycholinguistically or in other scientific ways. The term “codeswitching” rather than “language-switching” has become the preferred scientific description. This preference reflects, in part, the fact that code-switching is a more accurate phrase for a phenomenon that describes not only switching between languages—but switching between registers within languages: for example, the vernacular, or most popular form of the language, and the standard register. Social scientists understand and have analyzed a variety of registers that exist in most languages of widespread discourse, including different vernaculars; the standard normal register (typically used for broadcast media such as radio or television); and more formal registers used for oratorical, high literary, religious, or legal discourse. Moreover, many, but not all, U.S. Hispanics are both bilingual and bidialectal, in the sense that, in their linguistic repertoire, they have mastered not only English and Spanish but several of the different registers of English and Spanish, including vernaculars, standard normals, and formal registers. Gary D. Keller (1981) has suggested that the ideal goal of bilingual education for U.S. Hispanics in the United States is precisely to teach both bilingualism (fluency across English and Spanish) as well as bidialectalism (mastery of the most important registers within each target language). On the other hand, social scientists working with various groups of U.S. Hispanics have found different levels of competence among them. For example, some U.S. Hispanics have suffered considerable language loss and are known as “receptive bilinguals.” Typically, they know one language fully, English, but they can understand spoken Spanish only to a degree and speak it haltingly. Historically, this type of bilingualism has been the last linguistic way station in the United States among the great immigrant groups—Italian, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian, and others—who have lost their mother tongue. Receptive bilinguals can no longer transmit the language of which they have such a limited knowledge to their children, who therefore become monolinguals. Another form of bilingualism that is very common both worldwide and among U.S. Hispanic groups reflects partial mastery: the individual understands and speaks both languages but is literate in only one or in neither. Most of the people in Asia are partial, oral bilinguals. They speak two or more languages but can read no language. Some U.S. Hispanics read neither English or Spanish, but it is more common, depending on their length of residence in the U.S., for those who are partial bilinguals to lack either reading in English (for those who have relatively recently emigrated from a Hispanic homeland) or reading in Spanish (for those whose oral knowledge of the Spanish spoken at home is not reinforced by bilingual education in the United States). 632


Another valuable concept for the understanding of bilingualism among U.S. Hispanics that is also reflected in the literary language is the relative level of coordination between the two languages. Psycholinguists have coined the concepts “coordinate bilingual” and “compound bilingual” to describe the extreme types along this axis. The coordinate bilingual is one who is psychologically able to distinguish between the two languages and keep them separate. Thus, the coordinate bilingual speaks English when the occasion demands it and Spanish when another situation calls for it. The coordinate bilingual can switch between the two languages as well, for example, when talking with other bilinguals. The extreme compound bilingual, on the other hand, may know both languages to a greater or lesser degree but is psychologically unable to separate them anymore. The compound bilingual invariably switches between the two languages because, basically, for this person, the two languages have fused into one; they are no longer processed as separate. In reality, no one is perfectly capable of separating both languages, and most of us do some automatic, almost involuntary switching from one to another. Similarly, the extreme compound bilingual is a difficult but not impossible person to identify. Most bilinguals have a considerable level of understanding of their bilingualism and considerable capacity to separate the two languages according to the requirements of the social circumstances.

Multiculturalism and Code-Switching in U.S. Hispanic Literary Language The fact that both the spoken language and the literary language of U.S. Hispanics feature bilingualism to some degree has led to considerable confusion. At first, some analysts of U.S. Hispanic literature assumed that the bilingualism in literary texts was or should be primarily a reflection of what existed in the speech of the community. They tended to praise the literature that was mimetic of the U.S. Hispanic speech communities as good because it was genuine and to criticize the literature that was very different from the bilingualism of the community as bad because it was inaccurate. However, it quickly became apparent to literary critics and eventually to sociolinguists that the literary texts produced by U.S. Hispanics featured a variety of bilingual formats and reflected various objectives. Some writers were interested in reflecting the bilingualism of U.S. Hispanics. In contrast, others were making bilingual literary choices to parody or pursue humorous effects, to create powerful bilingual images, or for experimental and other vanguardist purposes that were extremely far afield from an artistic depiction of social reality. Thus, although a theory of U.S. Hispanic literature that forwarded mimetism as its primary operational criterion was greatly deficient, because U.S. Hispanic writers have exercised great latitude of choice in their literary language, it is also quite observable and documentable that code-switching is a primary phenomenon that is the single most unique characteristic element of U.S. Hispanic creative literature. Furthermore, most code-switching between Spanish and English, or between registers within each language, has been in support of the multicultural feature of U.S. Hispanic literature, in one way or 633


another, and of the themes that revolve around that multiculturalism, particularly race and ethnic relationships. Some understanding of the features of U.S. Hispanic bilingualism in the community and in creative literature provides insight into how code-switching expresses the muticulturality of U.S. Hispanic literature. A few more examples of literary language serve to typify much that is characteristic of this literature and to make ample use of the definitions of multiculturalism (specifically, bicultural, cross-cultural, and transcultural) and bilingualism and bidialectalism that were discussed earlier. One of the most celebrated poems in U.S. Hispanic literature is “El Louie,” the work of Chicano poet José Montoya. Here is an excerpt from this poem: Y en Fowler at Nesei’s pool parlor los baby chooks se acuerdan de Louie, el carnal del Candi y el Ponchi-la vez que to fileriaron en el Casa Dome y cuando se catió con La Chiva Hoy enterraron at Louie. His death was an insult porque no murió en acción— no lo mataron los vatos, ni los gooks en Korea. He died alone in a rented room—perhaps like a Bogard movie. The end was a cruel hoax. But his life had been remarkable! (175–176) (And in Fowler at Nesei’s pool parlor, the pachuco babies remember Louie, the bro of Candi and Ponchi, the time they stabbed him at the Dome House and when he got it on with Horse [Heroin] Today they buried Louie. Because he didn’t die in action the barrio dudes didn’t kill him nor the gooks in Korea. He died alone in a rented room—perhaps like a Bogart movie. The end was a cruel hoax. But his life had been remarkable!)

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As can readily be appreciated, what distinguishes this poem is its codeswitching. In fact, the code-switching is at the heart of the poem, and any analysis that does not take it into account as its primum mobile is deficient. Of course, the poem alternates between English and Spanish. It also alternates between very colloquial English (gooks, Bogard [Bogart]), and a somewhat formal register of English, such as the last stanza beginning with, “The end was a cruel hoax,” which is certainly not the kind of language associated with pachuco speech. Similarly, but to a lesser degree, the Spanish alternates between the vernacular and the standard normal registers. What is intended and what is accomplished by this code-switching? On one level, the code-switching determines both the character of “El Louie” and provides profound intimations into the narrator who paints the word portrait. Thus, the code-switching advances the development of both characters and themes in this narrative poem. The vernacular authenticity of the poem, together with the fashioning of deep feelings into a tough and unique personal statement, provide a profoundly moving and memorable set of signatures, for both Louie and his portraitist. The code-switching not only distinguishes between and separates the vato (guy) and the narrator who dedicates the poem to the former, it also profoundly intertwines the poetic persona of the vato with the voice of the eulogizing poetic narrator. However, as important as the function of the code-switching is at establishing character and developing the theme of admiration for a Chicano archetype and the form of poetic eulogy, this linguistic phenomenon has an even deeper mission. Basically, the massive code-switching is an offering to a switched-on community. The alternation between languages and between registers within languages serves as an “identity marker” between the character El Louie and the narrator of the poem—who is a sophisticated portraitist of El Louie—and the natural bilingual constituency of readers of the poem—who share the narrator’s sophistication and also share with the narrator the community admiration (at an esthetic, not necessarily existential, level) for the pachuco and his rendering into poetry. “El Louie” emerges as one of the finest poems in U.S. Hispanic literature not merely because it is a beautiful portrait by a sophisticated admirer of an archetypal vato, but because, at its most emotionally satisfying level, the poem, especially the code-switching, is offered as a sort of a secret, a cipher that only can be decoded by those who are communally initiated, the genuine bilingualbicultural readers who are able to master both the vernacular and formal codes of English and Spanish as well as their artful intermixture. “El Louie” is a successful example of bilingual–bicultural poetry in its language choice and in the development of its theme. Similarly, the “ideal” reader of this poem is bilingual in English and Spanish, in all of their pertinent registers, as well as bicultural in the sense of appreciating the vato but also appreciating the sophistication of a Hispanic American narrator. The narrator lives in both cultures and is not a vato, or not only a vato but a deeply sensitive multicultural individual capable of knowing vatos and the circumstances that first shape and then oppress them, as well as hosts of other factors in their bicultural society. This is 635


bicultural poetry at its finest because it has successfully established and met a highly ambitious standard of artistic communication. A passage from Ernesto Galarza’s* moving autobiography, Barrio Boy, presents a clear example of cross-cultural code-switching: Crowded as it was, the colonia found a place for these chicanos, the name by which we called an unskilled worker born in Mexico and just arrived in the United States. The chicanos were fond of identifying themselves by saying they had just arrived from el macizo, by which they mean the solid Mexican homeland, the good native earth. Although they spoke of el macizo like homesick persons, they didn’t go back. They remained, as they said of themselves, pura raza. (196–199)

In this passage, where the base language is English, Galarza proceeds in a manner very much like an anthropologist or, for that matter, in a fashion similar to Steinbeck or other American authors who explain Hispanic concepts to an American readership. When Galarza uses a Spanish word or expression, which apparently he feels impelled to do for lack of a suitable equivalent in English, he immediately elucidates that Spanish word with an English definition. Galarza’s procedure is emphatically cross-cultural, taking his reader by the hand through the esoteric or unknown world of the Chicanos. Two examples of work that are primarily transcultural include, first, the poem “Mi gusto” (My Pleasure), an anonymous poem first published in La Voz del Pueblo, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1892, but which probably was composed much before that date. The poem evokes the language and cultural contacts between Anglos and Mexicans during the nineteenth century and the increasing domination of English and Anglo culture. The poem uses the circumstances of a male Mexican disdained by a Mexican woman who has been anglicized. “Mi gusto” is part of a cycle of such poetry of Mexican male lament that can be found in various parts of what is now the American Southwest and Far West: No me hables por Dios! así . . . ¿Por qué me hablas al revés? Di con tu boquita “si”; Pero no me digas “yes.” Si no quieres verme mudo, Saluda “¿cómo estás tú?” Yo no entiendo tu saludo “Good morning, how do you do?” ¡No por Dios! linda paisana, No desprecies nuestra lengua, Sería en ti mal gusto y mengua Querer ser “americana.” Que yo, a las mexicanitas, Las aprecio muy de veras; Triguenas o morenitas

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Me gustan más que las hueras. (Meyer 269) (My God don’t talk to me that way . . . Why do you talk to me in reverse? With your lovely mouth say “sí”; But don’t say “yes.” If you don’t want to see me struck dumb Greet me “cómo estás tú?” I don’t understand your greetings “Good morning, how do you do?” No by God, lovely compatriot Don’t despise our language, It would be in bad taste and diminishing For you to want to be “American.” As for me, dear Mexican women, I truly appreciate olive-skinned girls or brunettes. I like them better than the fair ones.)

The notion of transculturalism is often expressed in a negative, anxiety ridden fashion in U.S. Hispanic literature. This is precisely the case of “Mi gusto,” the theme of which is the loss of the Hispanic woman to the Mexican man because she now appreciates the American way of life more than the Mexican way. The loss of culture is also interplayed with the theme of miscegenation. The Mexican narrator specifically rejects “hueras” in favor of “trigueñas o morenitas”; however, the implication is that the female who is the object of his lament would seem to prefer whites to browns. In “Mi gusto,” the code-switching between English and Spanish are the way that the poet signals the transculturation of the female. This is done with a grace and wit that gives considerable charm to this bilingual, transcultural composition. Although most examples of transculturalism evoke grave consequences for U.S. Hispanics of this trend, the following is an example that is played totally for humor. With many variations, the U.S. Hispanic composition, “The Night Before Christmas,” is traditionally published in newspapers and other outlets that serve the Hispanic communities around the nation during the Yuletide season. One of the well-known versions follows: Tis the night before Christmas, and all through the casa Not a creature is stirring, Caramba, ¿qué pasa? The stockings are hanging con mucho cuidado, In hopes that Saint Nicholas will feel obligado to leave a few cosas, aquí and allí For chico y chica (y something for me). Los niños are snuggled all safe in their camas, Some in vestidos and some in pajamas,

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Their little cabezas are full of good things They esperan que el old Santa will bring. Santa is down at the corner saloon, Es muy borracho since mid-afternoon, Mamá is sitting beside la ventana Shining her rolling pin para mañana When Santa will come in un manner extraño Lit up like the Star Spangled Banner cantando, And mamá will send him to bed con los coches, Merry Christmas to all and to all buenas noches. (Jiménez 315)

In this example, Spanish and English are mixed together in doggerel verse to create a parody of the original. One can make the case that it transculturizes the English just as much as the Spanish. However, the effect would seem to reflect more squarely the influence of Anglo culture on Hispanic culture. What is essentially an Anglo cultural figure, Santa Claus, has made inroads on Hispanic culture, which, in contrast to its own Reyes Magos, does not traditionally recognize this cultural and religious icon. The poem also would seem to evoke a compound bilingual frame of mind. The doggerel effect gives the impression of a narrator for whom Spanish and English are mostly fused and confused. The poetic persona who recites this poem not only subscribes to the Santa Claus feature of Anglo culture but seems unable to separate Spanish and English anymore as well. However, these analyses of what lies under the surface of the poem should not obscure the fact that it has been composed in a lighthearted and unselfconscious fashion and very successfully so to amuse and entertain the bilingual readers and speakers of the U.S. Hispanic communities during the Christmas season.

Code-Switching in U.S. Hispanic Literature: Its Beginnings and Extent Some writers have thought that code-switching, so identified with contemporary U.S. Hispanic literature, particularly poetry, is a contemporary phenomenon. In a revealing interview with Bruce-Novoa, Alurista,* the well-known poet, laid first claim to the use of a bilingual, Spanish–English idiom combined in one poem. In the Interview, Alurista observed as follows: I don’t want to brag, but I believe that I was the first modern Chicano writer who dared send bilingual work to an editor. I remember the reaction of one editor when I first gave him my poetry. He said, “Listen, this is a pochismo. Why can’t you write either in Spanish or English? . . . And all of these vatoisms or chicanoisms; that doesn’t sound good, it’s the decadence of our Spanish language.” He said he wouldn’t publish trash like that when I first talked to him. However, a week later he called me on the telephone and said, “Send me your work because it’s going to be a hit.” . . . After that, if I’m not mistaken, many Chicano and Chicana

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writers began to publish bilingually. And that was only a natural thing. I knew that this would happen; that all that was needed was for someone to get the nerve . . . to say this is the way I think, the way I write, this is the way the people write and think, this is how they speak. One of the responsibilities of the writer is to use the popular language. (271–272)

It is hard to say whether Alurista was the first contemporary Chicano poet to produce and submit bilingual poetry for publication; Bruce-Novoa seems to believe that he was (1980, 265–267). Alurista clearly was one of the first contemporary poets who brought into Chicano poetry the popular habit of combining Spanish and English, although in doing so he was not primarily concerned with reflecting Chicano linguistic or folk behavior as much as he was preoccupied with the establishment of an “Amerindian ideology of Aztlán” (BruceNovoa 1980, 265) which combined pre-Columbian cultural and esthetic elements with contemporary Chicano culture. As Alurista himself observes in the passage previously cited, poetic expression in a bilingual, Spanish–English idiom soon became a very natural phenomenon in Chicano poetry. By the early 1970s, it was in full flower, and it continues in the present as one of the identifying characteristics of Chicano poetry. It has also become a quite common feature of continental Puerto Rican and Cuban American literature as well, primarily poetry and theater, less so prose fiction. However, Randall G. Keller’s research indicates that the same sort of popular, English–Spanish bilingual compositions were common in territorial New Mexico and even earlier, in colonial New Mexican literature. Randall G. Keller has identified a body of work that consists of scores of poems that are clearly related along a number of dimensions—both thematic and stylistic—to contemporary Chicano poetry. Almost all of these poems are written primarily in Spanish, but with intercalated elements of English, usually for satirical purposes. There is clearly a strong continuity between the contemporary Chicano poet and the bards, troubadours, “puetas” (popular form for poetas, poets), and maestros who preceded them, particularly during the colonial and territorial periods. Although to a much lesser extent, because of the increasing oppression of Chicanos and their cultural outlets, there is a similar continuity with those predecessors during the statehood period before the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s. Not surprisingly, many New Mexican Chicano poets, among them Leroy Quintana,* represent the forefront of a contemporary Chicano ars poetica (the art of poetry) that includes interlingual Spanish–English lines of verse, incorporation and elaboration of elements of traditional folklore, and verbal dueling. Similarly, from a thematic point of view, these contemporary poets are preoccupied, as many of their anonymous colonial and statehood ancestors were, with the interrelationships between hispanos, Anglos, and American Indians, with the assimilation or rejection of Anglo culture, and with the economic consequences of varying levels of socioeconomic class and the psychology of class consciousness. 639


Can it be that poets such as Leroy Quintana, Leo Romero,* Bernice Zamora,* and Cordelia Candelaria were influenced by the rich mother lode of written and spoken folk poetry and prose, much of it anonymous? Most definitely so, although, in most cases, it was not directly through recourse to the written word. The challenge in reconstructing the popular and folkloric literary sources and influences on contemporary Chicano writers is compounded by the fact that the decades preceding the emergence of the Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s were marked by the most intense suppression of Chicano culture. The mediating source of the contemporary folk-oriented Chicano writers is the oral tradition, which has flourished despite the restrictions on the published word and continued to communicate itself to Chicano writers, particularly during their youth. Leroy Quintana says as much, as do Bernice Zamora and Leo Romero. These writers found their roots in New Mexican families of long-standing generations and were positively subjected by grandparents, parents, and other relatives to the cuentos (stories), poetry, and other lore of New Mexico. New Mexico is one of the regions of the United States with a long-standing bilingual, multicultural tradition, yet it is also characterized by a very high linguistic and social preoccupation with ethnicity. Arthur L. Campa* (1946), writing shortly after the World War II and referring to ongoing problems in New Mexico that date from the turn of the century or earlier, develops a host of issues that continue to be the mainstay of contemporary U.S. Hispanic literature: the problem of Hispanics living in a culture dominated by Anglos, whose language has “become infused with Anglicisms” (9) and whose sense of self-identity had become, in 1946, sufficiently problematic that there was genuine difficulty in “the selection of an appropriate term to designate the Spanish-speaking inhabitants” (12) of New Mexico. Campa goes on to point out that, in central New Mexico (as compared to the more traditional northern portion), it has become common to give Anglo first names to Hispanics, such as “Mary Gallegos or Frank or Joe Padilla” (10). In contemporary Chicano literature, this theme of a conflictive, possibly transculturized name has not gone unnoticed. In the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes,* “Oaxaca, 1974,” there is a masterful evocation of the ambivalence about the author’s own hybrid name. The poem concludes as follows: I didn’t ask to be brought up tonta! [stupid] My name hangs about me like a loose tooth. Old women know my secret, “Es la culpa de los antepasados.” [“It is the fault of her ancestors.”] Blame it on the old ones. They give me a name that fights me. (44)

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Arthur L. Campa’s description of the social, cultural, and linguistic problematic of self-identification by Hispanics and identification of Hispanics by Anglos also beautifully evokes the poetic opportunities available to U.S. Hispanic writers. Tension, ambiguity, ambivalence, self-doubt or self-hatred, defense mechanisms, projection, anomaly, racially inspired abuse or violence, and other such social, cultural, or linguistic problems, are, for the poet, so many opportunities for creativity. For the contemporary Chicano writer, there is the opportunity to dwell in the word space of Mexican American, cultivating creative advantages not only to spring out to either side, but to call on each side to create a whole that is more than the sum of the two parts. Similar opportunities abound for the Puerto Rican and Cuban American writer. Critics and theorists have noted this distinctive feature of Chicano culture, language options, and, ultimately, poetic choice. Writing in 1971, Philip Ortego referred to code-switching as a process where “linguistic symbols of two languages are mixed in utterances using either language’s syntactic structure” (306). Subsequently, in 1978, the distinguished Texas Chicano poet, Tino Villanueva,* coined the concept bisensibilismo (bisensibility), which he described as the experiencing of something “from two points of reference: on one side from the dimension that the object can suggest within the Chicano context; and on the other side, from the dimension that the same reality suggests within an Anglo-Saxon context” (1978; English version, Bruce-Novoa 1980, 51). Bruce-Novoa has taken the explanation of this phenomenon of Chicano life, culture, and art to a deeper level of understanding: We are the intercultural, interlingual reality formed over a century or more of confrontation between Mexico and the United States. But we are neither one, exclusively; nor are we totally both. To be one or the other is not to be Chicano. We continually expand a space between the two, claiming from both sides a larger area for our own reality. At the same time, we create interlocking tensions that bind the two, forcing them into a new relationship. . . . Language is the best example of this intercultural space.

Suffice it to say that Chicanos inhabit a linguistic area in constant flux between English and Spanish. The two languages inform one another at every level. There are certain grammatical usages, words, connotations, and spellings that, to a native speaker of Spanish or English or to the true bilingual, appear to be mistakes, cases of code-switching, or interference in linguistic terms— but that are, to the Chicano native speaker, common usages, the living reality of an interlingual space. (1980, 12–13) As described variously by Ortego, Villanueva, and Bruce-Novoa, these opportunities for creative elaboration were cultivated from the very beginning of the period in New Mexico that witnessed the confluence of Indians, Hispanics, and Anglos in the region. Most of the traditional genre of New Mexican folk songs contain examples that develop the theme of interaction among the races—usually, but not always, adversarial in nature. Many of these examples 641


also intercalate more than one language, usually Spanish and English, but sometimes Spanish and an American Indian language such as Comanche. For example, among the corridos, there are a number of songs that deal with the relationship between Anglo and Hispanic New Mexicans, including “El Contrabando,” about a group of imprisoned smugglers being taken by their jailer, Mr. Ojíl (O’Hill), by train to Lebembor (Leavenworth Federal Prison) and “La Guerra Mundial,” about a contingent of Hispanic New Mexicans who are sent to France to fight the Germans during World War I. At one point, the poem “La Guerra Mundial” becomes overtly bilingual in recounting how the troops dealt with a wave of influenza: Y ya los americanos Como son hombres de experiencia No nos dejaban salir Porque allá andaba la influencia Contando desde el number one, Contando hasta el number two, No era el Spanish Influencia Era el American Flu. (Campa 1946, 107) (And then the Americans As men of experience Didn’t let us out Because of the outbreak of influenza Counting from number one, Counting up to number two, It wasn’t Spanish Influenza It was American Flu.)

Code-switching is a prominent feature of the Canción inglés (English Song, probably dating from the nineteenth century), in which the narrator laments the loss of castizo (pure) Spanish among the Spanish-speaking people, who have been unduly influenced by speakers of English. (“Jarirú, you my fren,” “dolen ecuora,” and “tumora” stand for, respectively, “How are you, you my friend,” “dollar and a quarter,” and “tomorrow”): Por Dios, qué revoltura La desta gente de hoy, Ya no hablan castellano Todos dicen Good bye. Jarirú you my fren, Nos dice doña Inés, Pues pronto aprenderemos A hablar la idioma inglés [sic]. Para decir diez reales Dicen dolen ecuora;

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Para decir mañana También dicen tumora. (Campa 1946, 214) (My God, what a mess That people nowadays, No longer speak Castilian They all say Good bye. How are you my friend, Doña lnés tells us, For very soon we will all learn To speak the English language To say ten reales They say dollar and a quarter Instead of mañana They say tomorrow.)

In a similar folk song called “Los Pochis de California” (The Pochos of California), the narrator tells that, in order to learn English, he has married a “pochi” (a Hispanic whose Spanish has become broken and unduly influenced from English; this is the term that is the precursor of the contemporary pocho, used in Mexico to signify an Americanized Mexican): Los pochis de California No saben comer tortilla Porque sólo en la mesa Usan pan con mantequilla. Me casé con una pochi Para aprender inglés Y a los tres días de casado Yo ya le decía yes. (Campa 1946, 214) (The pochis of California Can’t eat tortillas Because on their table They eat strictly bread and butter I married a pochi To learn English And after three days wed Already I could say yes.)

Another variation of this theme is cultivated in the folk song, “A una niña de este país,” between a Mexican man and either an Anglo woman or a very assimilated Mexican. The ethnicity of the woman is not certain; she does not seem to speak Spanish—but, either her English is poor as well— “Me no like Mexican men”—or she has been understood badly by the Hispanic poetic narrator. In one passage, the woman is described as 643


agringada. In this song, marked by high banter, the Mexican is speaking always in Spanish, “Le empecé a hacer cariñitos” but gets English responses such as “I tell you, keep still,” and “I tell you, go to hell.” In the final stanza, the Mexican goes bilingual in idiom: I’ll tell you, yo te diré, si tú me quieres a mí, es todo el inglés que sé. (I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, if you love me, it’s all the English I need.)

This type of poem invariably describes a male Hispanic who complains about an Anglicized female. In a corrido entitled “Un Picnic,” composed in the 1930s or 1940s in a light vein, which was somewhat unusual for this usually tragic genre, the New Mexican penchant for combining the two languages is exaggerated for humorous purposes. At different points in the corrido, the language goes from English to Spanish: “Y nos pasaron el bill” (And they passed us the bill), “Y no traemos ni un daime” (And we don’t even have a dime), “Paren un poco la troca” (Stop the truck a minute), and “Componiéndonos el flate” (Fixing the flat). One of the most impassioned, sharpest anonymous poems that review the nature of the Americans is “Los Americanos.” The diction of this poem may be representative of a bygone era, but it has clear affinities to the sharpest poems on the same subject of contemporary U.S. Hispanic writers such as Leroy Quintana. Ambivalence permeates this poem. The poet says that he has composed this song so that the Americans know that his county has the signature of the Mexican nation: Voy a cantar este canto,/Nuevo Méjico mentado, para que sepan los güeros/el nombre de este condado, Guadalupe es, el firmado/por la nación mejicana, (I’m going to sing this song about New Mexico, so that the Yankees learn the name of this county Guadalupe it is called, created by the Mexican nation,)

The poet goes on to contrast the positive and negative qualities of “el extranjero.” On the one hand, they are a “nación muy ilustrada” (an educated nation), “trabajan con mucho esmero” (work with diligence), a “nación agricultora” (an agricultural nation), “hábiles . . . en saber y de grande entendimiento” (able and knowledgeable and learned); “son cirujanos, dotores y hombres de gran talento” (they’re surgeons, doctors, and men of great talent). They are capable of making “carritos de fierro que caminan por vapor” (steam-running railroad cars). Unfortunately, on the other hand, “Su crencia es en el dinero [sic]” (they pray to money), and their goal is “tenernos de esclavos” (they want to have us as 644


their slaves). The “raza americana” (the American race) must be stopped because “vienen a poser las tierras, las que les vendió Ana [sic]” (they come to possess our lands, which Santa Anna sold to them). In summary, numerous examples of New Mexican folk poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as some from the early decades of the twentieth century, have features in common with the poetry of contemporary Chicano and other U.S. Hispanic writers. These features include a preoccupation with the problem of the social, cultural, and linguistic identity of the Hispanics; the interaction of the mexicano with Anglos; and the creative, particularly humorous use of combined, Spanish–English lines or passages of poetry. This rather large body of such examples asserts, with confidence, the genuine existence of a continuity, both thematic and stylistic, between contemporary Chicano writers and their mostly anonymous predecessors, “puetas,” trobadores (minstrels), and cantadores (singers) of the colonial period and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Code-Switching and Ethnic Relationships in Contemporary U.S. Hispanic Literature The preceding section has described how the quality of multiculturalism and the preoccupation with racial and ethnic relationships manifested themselves in early U.S. Hispanic bilingual and bicultural poetry. A number of contemporary U.S. Hispanic writers are responsible for that continuity, starting with the Chicano contemporary poets who have inherited the rich literary heritage briefly reviewed earlier. Leroy Quintana, whose basic theme is a multifaceted exploration of the Chicano Identity* epitomizes the relationship of the present to the past. Quintana is highly concerned with what it means to be Chicano in a multicultural, multiracial, and plurilinguistic society such as that in the United States, both nationally and in New Mexico. There is a continuity and interactiveness among Quintana’s poems that variously depict the insular and isolated Northern New Mexican manito, or native; the more cosmopolitan, anglicized, and occasionally compromised or foolish Chicano or pachuco*; the Anglo and the Indian, first of New Mexico and then nationwide; and finally, the common soldier of the Vietnam War, whether a redneck, a Southerner, a partisan of Dixie and George Wallace, a gung ho militant, a punk Louie, or a prima donna. Clearly, race and ethnic relationships are foremost in Quintana’s poetry, and, from a stylistic point of view, there is a consonant interaction between the thematic concern for capturing the Chicano identity in its various phases and its interactions with Indians and Anglos and stylistic devices, such as the occasional use of Spanish; the inclusion of traditional folklore, folk wisdom, and folk humor; the sympathetic simulation of neotraditional versions of this same folklore and humor; the crafting of narrative poems that seem like stories or vignettes; the use of irony and understatement; the use of colloquial and vernacular language registers; and the use of a collective narrator with a first person plural in the service of carnalismo (camaraderie). 645


With respect to the evocation of relationships between the races, the first poem in Quintana’s collection, The Reason People Don’t Like Mexicans, is entitled “Because We Were Born to Get Our Ass Kicked.” In his own inimitable style—direct, authoritative, popular, aggressive—Quintana takes on the theme of race relationships in an overt fashion: Rule Number One of the barrio states never let anyone kick it for free, otherwise he’ll think it’s his to do, whenever and ever. (1985, 121)

The poem is disconcerting and unexpected because it states—as if it were a totally natural premise—that Chicanos “were born” to lose in the competition for the good life or resources. However, the rest of the poem goes on to modify or attenuate the definitive, terminative, fatalistic dictum of Chicanos as “losers.” Although the barrio dweller is ultimately going to lose out (or possibly sell out, that is, compromise on values for a price), it will not be without a rousing fight and without a tax or a pox on the adversary. The poem is not difficult to interpret within the context of others in the same collection, such as the untitled observation by José Mentiras that, because Anglos have found that the incidence of cob-rectal cancer is higher among their people than among Chicanos, the former are conducting all types of surveys in an attempt to find out “what makes Chicanos different, the diet, the lifestyle.” In this case, although the Chicanos remain the downtrodden group economically and are being used as research subjects by Anglos, they come off as superior in the quest for longevity once again, in disconcerting fashion. The poem concludes the following about the Anglos: José Mentiras says they’re really scared but can’t really blame them figures they’re just trying to save their ass. (125)

A third poem in the collection, “MacMahon’s Grocery,” approaches the relationship between Anglos and Chicanos from a similar perspective. Of all of Quintana’s poems about race relationships, this one is perhaps the most resonant with multiple meanings and directions. The poem goes back in time to when “Cokes were ten cents” and recounts a pattern of petty theft (“delicious, chocolate-covered donuts”; “luscious, bitter lemons”) on the part of the narrator and his fellow, school-age Chicano cohorts. Once again, however, an element of surprise has been inserted: An Anglo, after all And he knew, I’m sure all our little crimes Let us go our way. (125)

It is a mystery why MacMahon, the Anglo, is permitting the school-age Chicano children to rob him. Is it because, as a member of the Anglo but priv646


ileged minority in northern New Mexico, he wants to keep the business of the Chicano population? Is he willing to chalk off the losses as necessary in order not to make waves with Chicano adults? Perhaps it is something entirely different. Perhaps he is genuinely struck by the relative poverty of the Chicano youngsters and views the theft as a sort of welfare, a subsidy. There are yet other possibilities. Perhaps MacMahon is playing the game of cops and robbers with them. He is a player in this game that makes the youngsters feel “great and petty,” that makes the lemons “luscious, bitter”; it is enough for him to know that they are stealing and that they know that he knows that they are stealing. To be deliberate about his knowledge, to do anything other than wink or otherwise sign off knowledgeably, would bring closure, would cause the “game” to end. The mystery is genuinely open-ended: the reason cannot be known with any certainty, and that is what endows this poem with a special poignancy. However, whatever the reason, clearly it must have to do with a superordinate relationship or combination of relationships between the Anglo and the Chicano ethnicities. The pivot in the poem, the limiting parameter, around which, but not beyond which, revolve a number of plausible answers to the mystery are the two lines: “An Anglo, after all,” who “Let us go our way.” “MacMahon’s Grocery,” just like the untitled José Mentiras poem about cobrectal cancer, combines an adversarial, conflictive relationship between Anglos and Chicanos—the former is personal; the latter is at a more abstracted level)—with an understanding and a bond on the human plane that transcends the distinctions of race, color, religion, and culture. Given the history of race relations between Anglos and Hispanics in the United States, particularly the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and its continuation into the present, poetry devoted to interactions between Anglos and Hispanics is rather common in Chicano and Puerto Rican literature, somewhat less so in Cuban American literature. Chicano poems dedicated to race relations range in style and tone from fierce denunciations— such as the famous “Stupid America” by Abelardo Delgado and Leo Romero’s very early composition, “I Too, America”—to heavily satirical verse—such as Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans” and Ernesto Galarza’s “The Wetbacks”—to the pensive Tino Villanueva’s “Chicano Is an Act of Defiance,” to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s* sarcastic “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” to Abelardo Delgado’s* folk song “La causa” (The Cause), to Jim Sagel’s “Teófilo.” Sagel is an Anglo who writes in the Chicano mode; “Teófilo” is reminiscent, in its short storylike, folkloric approach and content, to the work of Leroy Quintana. Among the Puerto Rican compositions is Tato Laviera’s* “esquina dude” (corner dude), which evokes the pueblo on the streets of the urban North East in a fashion analogous to the rural or small town dudes of Leroy Quintana and Leo Romero.* Laviera’s “brava” (bold one) describes the tension between Nuyoricans and Puerto Ricans from the Island. Sandra María Esteves,* in “Here” and “Not Neither,” evokes the agridulce (bittersweet) of a confused U.S. Hispanic identity, as does Martín Espada* in “Tony Went to the Bodega But He Didn’t Buy Anything.” The denunciation of 647


Anglo impositions is the theme of Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s* “Rubbish” and, similarly, of Miguel Piñero’s* “There is Nothing New in New York” and “Inside Control: My Tongue”; the theme is the control and oppression of the Puerto Rican by the Anglo. In “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings,” by Martín Espada, the same phenomenon is evoked in the courtroom. In Pedro Pietri’s* Puerto Rican Obituary, that oppression is seen, at its extreme, as cultural genocide. The Cuban American works are somewhat different, in that many of them feature the nostalgia and longing of the writer exiled from the Island. However, particularly in those compositions which are bicultural (and occasionally, although less often, bilingual as well), stylistic features similar to those of Chicano and Puerto Rican writers consistently appear. The work of Gustavo PerézFirmat primarily combines the themes of exile from Cuba with the mixed emotions of increasing assimilation into the “American Way of Life.” Alberto Romero’s “Caminando por las calles de Manhattan” (Walking down the Streets of Manhattan) contrasts the deplorable circumstances and the deplorable media hype of New York with the eternal verities. Uva A. Clavijo’s* deeply moving poems, such as “Declaración” (Declaration) and “Miami 1980,” evoke a bittersweet tone that is similar to Sandra María Esteves’s work: the ambivalence of an identity forged out of two cultures, often seemingly incompatible. Lourdes Casal* evokes similar sentiments in her poem “Para Ana Veldford” (For Ana Veldford): demasiado habanera para ser newyorkina, demasiado newyorkina para ser, —aun volver a ser— cualquier otra cosa. (Burunat 126) (Too Havanan to be a New Yorker, too New Yorkan to be, —even to become— anything else.)

It is instructive to review several of the poems previously mentioned. Delgado’s poem “La causa” makes use of the form of the folk song, as rendered by artists of the 1960s, to express the conflict between the Chicano and “the boss”: what moves you, chicano, to stop being polite? nice chicano could be patted on the head and wouldn’t bite and now, how dare you tell your boss, “Go fly a kite”? es la causa, hermano, which has made me a new man. (Ortego 1973, 219)

Once again, the code-switching into Spanish, “es la causa, hermano” (it’s the cause, my brother), is central to the poem. This element is the thematic heart of the poem, and its rendering in Spanish artistically foregrounds it. Spanish is reserved for only one moment, but it is the most emotionally satisfying and telling moment in the poem. The technique of Jimmy Santiago Baca in “So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans” is similarly populist in 648


nature, but of a very different quality. Baca lampoons the xenophobic fears of Anglos by caricaturing what this business of taking jobs might be like: O Yes? Do they come on horses with rifles, and say, Ese gringo, gimmee your job? And do you, gringo, take off your ring, drop your wallet into a blanket spread over the ground, and walk away? (12–13)

Ernesto Galarza’s brand of satire in “The Wetbacks” also makes use of a caricaturized version of Hispanic speech, but of a far different register. In this poem, Galarza makes use of English that is literally translated from the Spanish so that it sounds stilted and foreign. In linguistics, these phenomena, which sometimes appear in community speech, are generally known as semantic loan transfers, of which the most common type are calques (for example, estoy supuesto a ir, which reflects the semantic influence of the English “I’m supposed to”). The poor wetbacks approach the “Patrón” with speech such as this: “Pardon, Sir, that we come to molest you./We have shame, but the necessity obliges us.” They recount “that such as us will lose the wage/if the Immigration apprehends us/on the public road.” The poem concludes as follows: If we could have our wages, Sir, or only such a part as would be just, we would go back to Michoacàn. We three companions are from there, a place called Once Pueblos, where you have your modest house, Sir. We are grateful for the cooperation. God will repay you. (1982, 10–11)

Although Baca and Galarza both use Anglo stereotypes of Hispanic personages— the amoral bandido (bandit); the humble, fearful, formal, and dependent peon— and satirically turn it against itself, Sagel’s “Teófilo” recounts an almost epic struggle between a sixth-grade Chicano student, Teófilo, and his teacher, Sister Louise, who refuses to pronounce his name correctly. Every sixth grade morning of slanted geography and outmoded math opened with the stubborn name duel (1981, 65)

In repayment for Teófilo’s insistence on correcting her every morning, he fails the grade. Fifteen years later, in San Antonio, the poetic narrator runs 649


into Teófilo, who is now a successful electrical engineer with a split-level (a very apt double entendre) house. The victim of Sister Louise can no longer even remember her name, but he has learned his lesson at an unconscious and identity-effacing level all too well. He has named his children Mary and Peter, perfectly pronounceable Anglo names despite the readily available Spanish analogs (María and Pedro), takes his guest to visit the Alamo (an infamously anti-Hispanic war symbol), and tells the poetic narrator to call him up whenever he’s in town. “I’m in the book,” he yelled as he disappeared from view “listed under John T.” (66)

Like Quintana’s poetry, “Teófilo” is a high fidelity rendering of a specific interethnic struggle at a precise moment in time in a very precise setting. Its concern with exactitude, accuracy, and specificity is notable. Also, as in Quintana, the loss is foregone, terminative. This Hispanic is destined to get beaten, although, just as in the case of “Because We Were Born to Get Our Ass Kicked,” a tax has to be imposed on the overbearing culture. What is quite different from Quintana is the almost Skinnerian level at which the conditioning takes place. In “MacMahon’s Grocery,” there is a sense of understanding between the Anglo and the Chicanitos, a shared secret, a luscious, bitter theft or trade. In “Teófilo,” the result is galling, pathetic. This is the success story of a Chicano zombie. From the perspective of Hispanic culture, John T. is brain dead, or, even worse, his brain is controlled by the overbearing, majority culture. Tato Laviera’s “esquina dude” is an excellent example of integration between theme and language choice: both are in the service of bilingual/biculturalism. The dude talks bilingually and philosophizes about his street bilingualism: i know you understand everything i said i know you don’t need a bilingual dictionary, what i said can cut into any language. (1985, 58–59)

In Laviera’s poem “brava,” the poetic persona, a puertorriqueña (Puerto Rican woman), voices her indignation—in this instance, against Hispanics who are not sympathetic with her bilingual/bicultural condition. She asserts herself as a “puertorriqueña in english”: yo sé that que you know [I know that you know] tú sabes que yo soy that [you know I am that] I am puertorriqueña in english and there’s nothing you can do but to accept it como you soy sabrosa [it like you I’m delightful] proud. (1985, 63)

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Pedro Pietri cultivates this same theme, but, in a fashion similar to what has occurred in Sagel’s “Teófilo,” he evokes how the linguistic and cultural prejudices become inner directed and corrode the hispano’s identity: Manuel Died hating all of them Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Because they all spoke broken English More fluently than he did. (19)

A similar situation is evoked in the work of Sandra María Esteves. Her poem “Not Neither” is almost the converse of Laviera’s “esquina dude,” because, in contrast to speaking unselfconsciously and bilingually about bilingualism, Esteves evokes, in a bilingual idiom, the confusion inherent in being bilingual and bicultural: Being Puertorriqueña Americana Born in the Bronx, not really jíbara Not really hablando bien But yet, not Gringa either Pero ni portorra, pero sí portorra too Pero ni qué what am I? (1984, 6) (Being Puerto Rican American Born in the Bronx, not really a rustic, not really speaking well But yet, not Gringa either But not Puerto Rican, yet also Puerto Rican. But then, what am I?)

If Esteves identifies herself as a “Puertorriqueña Americana,” Gustavo PerézFirmat’s personae identify themselves as “Carolina Cubans” or “Cubanitas descubanizadas” (decubanized Cubans). To the Cubans still on the Island, they say things like “Oye brother.” The dilemma is basically the same. The persona falls somewhere between ser and estar: Por example: el cubano-americano es un estar que no sabe dónde es Por example: el cubano-americano se nutre de lo que le falta. Cubano-americano: ¿dónde soy? Soy la marca entre un no y un am: (Triple Crown, 165) (For example: the Cuban American is an epiphenomenon that

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doesn’t know where he is, For example: the Cuban American nourishes himself with what he lacks. Cuban American: Where am I? I’m a place marker between no and am.)

In the poem “Dedication,” in his collection Carolina Cuban, Peréz-Firmat says The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. (Triple Crown, 127)

In contrast to Esteves and Peréz-Firmat, for whom the bilingual idiom is occasion for confusion and ambivalence, in Martín Espada, Uva A. Clavijo, and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera, the poem may be expressed bilingually or biculturally—but the English part is the Other, and the Spanish is a refuge from rootlessness, an anchor, or a weapon against Anglo aggression. In Espada’s poem “Tony Went to the Bodega But He Didn’t Buy Anything,” after making an odyssey through the cold Anglo parts of the city where no one spoke Spanish, Tony went to the bodega but he didn’t buy anything: he sat by the doorway satisfied to watch la gente (people island-brown as him) crowd in and out, hablando español, thought: this is beautiful, and grinned his bodega grin. (28)

In Uva Clavijo’s “Declaración,” the refuge into the Hispanic world is combined with the sense of loss and exile and the wish to return to the Cuban hearth: 652


dos hijas nacidas en los Estados Unidos, una casa en los “suburbios” (hipotecada hasta el techo) y no se cuántas tarjetas de crédito. Yo, que hablo el inglés casi sin acento, que amo a Walt Whitman y hasta empiezo a soportar el invierno, declaro, hoy último lunes de septiembre, que en cuanto pueda lo dejo todo y regreso a Cuba. (Burunat 127) (Two daughters born in the United States, a house in the suburbs, (mortgaged to the roof) and who knows how many credit cards I know, I speak English almost without accent, that I love Walt Whitman and that I’m beginning to adjust to winter, I declare today, the last Monday of September, that as soon as I am able I’ll leave it all and return to Cuba.)

Similarly bilingual, Umpierre-Herrera’s poem “Rubbish” describes all of the rules that Hispanics need to follow in “el país de los amaestrados” (land of the tamed ones), concluding with an arranque de ira (burst of anger) in which the English word “rubbish” is turned back on itself. It is another example of code-switching at the heart of the poem: I b-e-g yul paldon, escuismi am sorri pero yo soy latina y no sopolto su RUBBISH. (Barradas, 108)

In Martín Espada’s “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings,” the same sort of use of Spanish to overcome English appears, in a courtroom setting, thus emphasizing the theme of social justice. Judge: Does the prisoner understand his rights? Interpreter: iEntiende usted sus derechos? Prisoner: jPa’l carajo! Interpreter: Yes. (21)

Although the literary language of U.S. Hispanics has been used from the very beginning in support of the Hispanic identity and culture against the incursions of Anglo society, a more recent development has been the theme of women’s rights within the Hispanic world. Currently, as evidenced by the work of Estela Portillo Trambley’s* Sor Juana (Sister Juana) and Trini, Alma Villanueva’s* The Ultraviolet Sky, Ana Castillo’s* The Mixquiahuala Letters, Evangelina Vigil’s Thirty An’ Seen a Lot, and many others, a major element 653


of U.S. Hispanic literature reflects the women’s movement and women’s rights. One way to index the changes in theme and in tone with respect to women’s “place” in U.S. Hispanic society is to review the treatment of La Malinche and malinchismo by Latina writers. The figure of La Malinche stirs up deep and contradictory emotions: this “Eva mexicana” (Mexican Eve), as Octavio Paz has termed her and José Ciemente Orozco has painted her, reflects a variety of representations: the “Indian woman” par excellence; the “traitor” to the Indians, who joined with the Spaniards; the “romantic lover and rebel,” who supposedly was enamored of Hernán Cortés and became his mistress; and the “mother” of the mestizo Malinchismo, on the other hand, whose act has traditionally been viewed as a negative form of behavior, selling out to another culture. Writing in 1973, Lorenza Calvillo Schmidt applies the traditional concept of malinchismo to the notion of consorting with Anglos: A Chicano at Dartmouth? I was at Berkeley, where there were too few of us and even less of you. I’m not even sure that I really looked for you. I heard from many rucos [old guys] that you would never make it. You would hold me back; From What? From what we are today? “Y QUE VIVA” [“AND LIVE ON”] Pinche, como duele ser Malinche. [Damn, how it hurts to be a Malinche.] (61)

By 1985, attitudes had changed to the point that a feminist newsletter called Malantzin had been founded and Carmen Tafolla had written her moving poem, “La Malinche,” which reexamined this traditional figure from a feminist point of view. Yo soy la Malinche [I am Malinche] My people called me Malintzin Tepanal The Spaniards called me Doña Marina I came to be known as Malinche and Malinche came to mean traitor They called me chingada jChingada! (. . .) But Chingada I was not. Not tricked, not screwed, not traitor.

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For I was not traitor to myself— I saw a dream and I reached it. Another world la raza. (Daydí-Toison 195)

Currently, literature reflecting a liberated women’s viewpoint is just as rich and invigorating within U.S. Hispanic literature as in any other literary culture, excellent examples being Alma Luz Villanueva’s La chingada (The Fucked) in Five Poets of Aztlán; Carmen Tafolla’s* La Isabela de Guadalupe y otras chucas (Isabela from Guadalupe and Other Pachucas) in Five Poets of Aztlán and her poems in Woman of her Word; Sandra Cisneros’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways; Lorna Dee Cervantes’s* Emplumada; Beverly Silva’s* The Second St. Poems); Ana Castillo’s Women Are Not Roses; and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s Y otras desgracias (And Other Misfortunes) and En el país de las maravillas (In the Land of Wonders).

The Formal Elements of U.S. Hispanic Literary Language This final section provides a variety of samples and examples of how the bilingual–bicultural literary mode is developed stylistically—specifically, how code-switching serves the development of theme, the portrayal of character, the expression of a tone or literary voice, the depiction of images, and the fashioning of a wide variety of rhetorical devices.

Bilingualism and Identity Markers As seen in examples earlier, Spanish is used in U.S. Hispanic literature to evoke familiarity and safety, English to express strangeness or alienation. In yet another example, the poem by Pedro Ortiz Vásquez, “Quiénes somos” (Who Are We), English is the language consigned to express strangeness: it’s so strange in here todo lo que pasa is so strange y nadie puede entender que lo que pasa aquí isn’t any different de lo que pasa allá. (292) (it’s so strange here everything that’s happening is so strange and no one can understand that what happens here isn’t any different from what happens over there.)

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Related to the use of Spanish to express warmth or familiarity is the use in U.S. Hispanic literature of what sociolinguists analyzing normal social discourse have termed “identity markers.” As in communal language, literary identity markers, such as the examples of órale, ése, ésa, in Alurista’s poetry or pa’l carajo in a poem cited earlier by Martín Espada, are used in part to establish rapport in Spanish between the author and his or her Hispanic readers. In Luis Valdez’s* classic acto, Las dos caras del patroncito (The Two Faces of the Boss), the farm worker manages to trick the patrón. The play ends this way: Farmworker: Bueno, so much for the patrón. I got his house, his land, his car— only I’m not going to keep ’em. He can have them. But I’m taking the cigar. Ay los watcho. (EXIT) (Castañeda Shular 53)

The code-switching into the vernacular Spanish of the United States, “Ay los watcho” (I’ll Be Seeing You) is the perfect ending for this sort of consciousnessraising and rapport-establishing exercise, a theater with the avowed intention of motivating the migrant worker to join the union. At the end of El Huitlacoche’s poem, “Searching for La Real Cosa” (Searching for the Real Thing), after having debunked the conventional identifications of the Chicano, the poet asserts: Por fin, eh? ¡Ya estuvo! ¿Quién es la real cosa? A dime, dime for the love of God! ¡Madre! Ese vato, ¡qué sé yo! (142)

The identity markers ¡Ya estuvo!, ¡Madre!, Ese vato, ¡qué se yo! (That’s enough! Mother! That guy, what do I know!) are all pressed into a plea for a vision of Chicanismo that transcends stereotyping.

Spanish to Express Alienation As exemplified by Spanish identity markers and other uses of Spanish in situations of familiarity, it is common for English to be the language of alienation and Spanish to be the language of intimacy in U.S. Hispanic literature. Yet this is not necessarily the case. Under special circumstances, the tables can be turned: Spanish can be used to express that which is alien. In earlier examples from the poetry of Esteves and Laviera, respectively, Spanish is used to express ambivalence and self-doubt about the poetic persona’s identity as a Puerto Rican, and to express anger by a Nuyorican* against the prejudices of insular Puerto Ricans. In the following example from the poetry of Adaljiza Sosa-Ridell, Malinche, pinche, and gringo are used to depict the sociocultural Other, the alien in one’s own makeup: Malinche, pinche forever with me

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... Pinche, como duele ser Malinche [Damn, how it hurts to be Malinche] Pero sabes, ése [But you know, guy] What keeps me from shattering into a million fragments? It’s that sometimes, You are muy gringo, too. (61)

A special sort of tension, highly productive from an artistic point of view, is set up in the use of Spanish for an Anglo sort of otherness that has intruded itself into the Hispanic persona. Similarly, in El Huitlacoche’s “The Urban(e) Chicano’s 76,” the poet criticizes a moment in John Steinbeck’s famous screenplay ¡Viva Zapata!, which featured Marion Brando in the main role. The scene in question has Brando-Zapata dressed in his pajama bottoms on his wedding night, lamenting to his bride that he can’t read or write. The bride offers to educate him. At this moment, a group of Zapata’s followers congregate below the nuptial balcony and Zapata comes out in pajamas to address them: Zapata comes out on the wedding night in pajama bottoms, he yearns to read and write I love you Johnny, the way you write but shit, you stink, babosísimo fool that’s my boy up there in stripped bottoms addressing armed campesinos in broad-rimmed sombreros from the balcony railing with Arabesques ¡el frito bandito! (Daydí-Tolson 103)

The words “campesinos,” “sombreros,” and “frito bandito” (instead of bandido) are examples of Spanish lexicon that are well-known to English speakers and have actually been partially assimilated into English. The poet shows how these words have been used in the Anglo world to stereotype the Hispano; thus, they become “alien” to the Hispanic world to the degree that they are used by the Anglo to characterize (and caricaturize) the Hispano. A similar example of this process of alienation, not in literary language but in communal language, is the term caramba. Having been stereotypically associated with Hispanics for several decades in the English language, virtually no Hispanic ever uses it. There is an example of code-switching that depicts the creative synthesis between the self and the Other in Angela de Hoyos’s* poem, “Café con leche”: the poet ambivalently observes that she has seen a male Chicano 657


friend coming out of a motel with a gringuita (Little Gringa). The final stanza encapsulates a stirring and subtle irony: No te apenas, amigo: [sic] [Don’t be ashamed, my friend:] Homogenization is one good way to dissolve differences and besides what’s wrong with a beautiful race café con leche? [café au lait] (n.p.)

The expression café con leche serves many functions, only two of which are to evoke the beauty of the prior mestizaje (racial mixing), the fruit of Spaniard and Indian, and second, to prefigure the potential new mestizaje, between Chicano and Anglo. In addition, the image lends itself admirably to the central conflict: café and leche can be thought of as separate entities and identified with the skin color of each race (milk walking with coffee from the motel) or taken together as that cappuccino color made in the blending.

Code-Switching for Characterization The Chicano character who embodies the phenomenon of code-switching is the compound bilingual—someone who is incapable—either chronically or temporarily, because of some specific, say, traumatizing, circumstance—of separating out the two codes. Thus the individual mixes languages and/or registers constantly, typically within phrases and sentences. Nick Vaca’s story, “The Purchase,” a prayer cum free associations, is intended to portray a compound bilingual episode psychologically: Ave María Purísima, I must make another pago hoy or else it’ll be too late. Sí, too late, and then what would I do. Christmas is so close, and if I don’t hurry con los pagos, I’ll have nothing to give any of mis hijos. If that should happen, it would weigh muy pesado on my mind. Even now, con el pensamiento that I may not be able to give them anything, I have trouble durmiendo en la noche. And, Santo Niño de Atocha, if Christmas should come and catch me sin nada, I would never sleep well por el resto de mi vida. (Mexican-American Authors, 144)

Code-Switching as a Function of Style Much of the code-switching that occurs in the community reflects considerations that are basically stylistic. Identity markers, contextual switches, triggered switches (because of the preceding or following item), sequential 658


responses (the speaker uses the language last used, thereby following suit), and the like have clear stylistic purposes. There is considerable stylistic overlap between social and literary code-switching, although the stylistic possibilities available to literature far surpass those found in society. A number of examples follow, focusing particularly on formal rhetorical devices.

Tone The major themes of U.S. Hispanic literature include social protest against Anglo, or, more rarely, Mexican, insular Puerto Rican, or insular Cuban oppression; consciousness-raising of the “naïve” U.S. Hispanic, such as a migrant worker or newly arrived immigrant into the United States; the recuperation of Chicano, Puerto Rican, or Cuban culture or history; the creation or recreation of a U.S. Hispanic mythos (Aztlán, La Raza, Emiliano Zapata, the Taínos, afrocubanismo, etc.); the emancipation of the Latina from both Anglo and Hispano male dominance; and the quest for a personal identity within the bicultural U.S. Hispanic milieu. All of these thematic categories are usually evoked by means of differing tones. For example, in the charge of Anglo oppression, the tone is that of the Ginsbergian rant or howl in Ricardo Sánchez’s* “smile out the revolú”: smile out the revolú, burn now your anguished hurt, crush now our desecrators, chingue su madre the u.s.a. burn cabrones enraviados burn las calles de amerika (1973, 139)

Yet the tone becomes humorous parody in the “Advertisement” in which Mexican Americans for all occasions are offered for sale: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

familially faithful and fearfully factional folk-fettered fool captivating, cactus-crunching, cow-clutching caballero a charp, chick-chasing, chili-chomping cholo a brown-breeding, bean-belching border-bounder a raza-resigned, ritual-racked rude rural relic a peso-poor but proud, priest-pressed primitive a grubby but gracious grape-grabbing greaser (Castañeda Shular 128)

Poems that cultivate the theme of self-identity, in keeping with the subject at hand, typically have a more reflective, self-absorbed tone, such as Estupinián’s “Sonido del Teponaztle” (Sound of the Teponaztle): Y antes de llamarme Chicano . . . there was a mirror in my guts that could not

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be put down with light penetrated through the years of mi madre es . . . ? (Romano 194)

The self-absorbed tone is also apparent in Alurista’s “We’ve Played Cowboys”: We’ve played cowboys not knowing nuestros charros [our cowboys] and their countenance con trajes de gala [with festive attire] silver embroidery on black wool Zapata rode in white campesino white and Villa in brown y nuestros charros parade of sculptured gods on horses -of flowing manes proud erect they galloped and we’ve played cowboys -as opposed to indians when ancestors of mis charros abuelos [my grandfather’s cowboys] indios fueron [were Indians] (Castaneda Shular 31)

All of these examples have in common the fact of language switching, an alternation of codes that adjusts itself to the tone that the writer is seeking.

Imagery The term “imagery” has been used variously in literary criticism but is restricted here to metaphor and simile, both of which appear in abundance in bilingual U.S. Hispanic literature. The following are examples of bilingual metaphors: Brother, oh brother vendido you are hollow inside. (Raymond Peréz, “Hasta la victoria siempre,” Ortego 1973, 202) la tierra is la raza’s kissing cousin (Abelardo Delgado, “La tierra,” Ortego 1973, 202)

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The following are examples of bilingual similes: Transparente como Una jolla, opaca como El Carbon, heavy like A feather-carga fija Del hombre marginal. (José Montoya, “Lazy Skin,” Romano 184) (Transparent life a jar, opaque like carbon, heavy like a feather-steady weight of the marginal man.) I am speaking of Entering Hotel Avila Where my drunk compadres Applaud like hammers (Gary Soto, “The Vision,” 1978, 58)

Rhetorical Devices Some literary devices that are unique to bilingual literature, such as calques, have been described earlier. Here is a sample of additional categories of rhetorical devices. Congeries are accumulations of phrases that say essentially the same thing: Unable to speak a tongue of any convention, they gabbled to each other, the younger and the older, in a papiamento of street caliche and devious calques. A tongue only Tex-Mexs, wetbacks, tirilones, pachucos, and pochos could penetrate. (El Huitlacoche, “The Man Who Invented the Automatic Jumping Bean,” 1974, 195) i respect you having been: My Loma of Austin my Rose Hill of Los Angeles my West Side of San Anto my Quinto of Houston my Jackson of San Jo my Segundo of El Paso my Barelas of Alburque my Westside of Denver Flats, Los Marcos, Maraville, Calle Guadalupe, Magnolia, Buena Vista, Mateo, La Seis, Chiquis, El Sur and all Chicano neighborhoods that now exist and once Existed (Raúl Salinas, “A Trip through the Mind Jail,” Ortego, 1973, 200)

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Anaphora involves repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a literary segment: No hay nada nuevo en nueva york There is nothing new in New York I tell you in English I tell you in spanish the same situation of oppression. (Miguel Piñero, “There is Nothing New in New York,” Algarín 1975, 67) Preso Locked inside a glass-like Canopy built of grief (José Montoya, “In a Pink Bubble Gum World,” Romano 184)

Bilingual anaphoras differ from the monolingual variety in that, with the exception of identical cognates, the repeated word has two spellings and pronunciations. Thus, the anaphora is mostly semantic, and yet the repetitive quality remains. Bilingual anaphoras can be distinguished from mere word plays based on repetition. Consider, for example, the following, also from the Montoya poem: Pero armado con estas palabras De sueños forged into files— “Las filas de la rebelión” Cantaban los dorados de Villa. (184) (But armed with these words of dreams forged into files— “The lines of rebellion” sang Villa’s golden men.)

This latter example, apart from the fact that it does not occur at the beginning of a passage, is properly classified a word play, not an anaphora. The bilingual anaphora conserves some but usually not all of the phonic and rhythmic qualities of this rhetorical device. Chiasmus is a contrast by reverse parallelism: pobre man hombre rich pregnant mujer niño aborted (Cited in Valdés, 37)

Alliteration is also used: under lasting latigazos [lashes] (Ricardo Sánchez, “and it . . . ,” 1973, 39)

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Interrogatio is the “rhetorical” question that is posed for argumentative effect and requires no answer: -A dónde voy?-, pregunta ¿A los cucumber patches de Noliet, a las vineyards de San Fernando Valley, a los beet fields de Colorado? Hay ciertas incertidumbres ciertas: lo amargo de piscar naranjas lo Iloroso de cortar cebollas (Tino Villanueva, “Que hay otra voz,” cited in Guadalupe Valdés, 33) (There are some uncertain certainties: the bitterness of picking oranges the weeping of cutting onions) How to paint on this page the enigma that furrows your sensitive brown face a sadness, porque te llamas Juan, y no John as the laws of assimilation dictate (Angela de Hoyos, “Chicano,” 1975, 23–24)

Metonomy involves naming a thing by substituting one of its attributes or an associated term for the name itself: Zapata rode in white campesino white and Villa in brown (Alurista, “We Played Cowboys”)

Apostrophe is vocative to an imaginary or absent person or thing: come, mother— Your rebozo trails a black web and your hem catches on your heels You lean the burden of your years On shaky cane, and palsied hand pushes Sweat-grimed pennies on the counter. Can you still see, old woman, The darting color-trailed need of your trade? (Rafael Jesús Gonzalez, “To An Old Woman,” Ortego 1973, 170)

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Hyperbole is an exaggeration or overstatement that is intended to produce an effect without being taken literally: stupid america, remember that chicanito flunking math and english he is the picasso of your western states but he will die with one thousand masterpieces hanging only from his mind (Abelardo Delgado, “Stupid America,” Ortego 1973, 216)

Understatement involves a statement that is deliberately worded so as to be unemphatic in tone, often for ironic purposes: sometimes he bragged He worked outside Toiuca For americanos, Shoveling stones Into boxes. (Gary Soto, “A Few Coins,” 1975, 52)

Gradatio is a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax is achieved: Last week, I had been white . . . we were friends Yesterday, I was Spanish . . . we talked . . . once in a while. Today, I am Chicano . . . you do not know me. Tomorrow, I rise to fight . . . and we are enemies. (Margarita Virginia Sánchez, “Escape,” Ortego 1973, 208)

U.S. Hispanic literature has forged a distinctive style that makes use of all of the cultural and linguistic resources at its disposal. The U.S. Hispanic lives in the confluence of ancient cultures—Amerindian, Hispanic, African—that, in degrees, have been oppressed and enriched by Anglo American culture and the English language. Out of that crucible of often contrary forces, the U.S. Hispanic literary style has developed a distinctive, multicultural, bilingual idiom to best evoke its somewhat precarious, somewhat emergent status—one that nevertheless reflects a cultural tradition at least as ancient as the Spanish 664

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language. The U.S. Hispanic literary language is new and distinctive; at the same time, it calls forth linguistic and literary resources that are as long-standing as the Hispanic presence in North America. Further Reading Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (New York: Morrow, 1975). Aparicio, Frances. R., “‘La vida es un spanglish disparatero’: Bilingualism in Nuyorican Poetry” in European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States, ed. Genevieve Fabre (Houston: Arte Público, 1988: 147–160). Barradas, Efraín, ed., Herejes y mitificadores (Rio Piedras, PR: Huracán, 1980). Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980). Burunat, Silvia, and Ofeija Garcia, eds., Veinte años de literatura cubanoamericana (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual, 1988). Campa, Arthur L., Triple Crown (poems by Roberto Durán, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Gustavo Pérez Firmat) (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual, 1987). Campa, Arthur L., Hispanic Folklore Studies of Arthur L. Campa (New York: Arno, 1976). Campa, Arthur L., “Cultural Differences That Cause Conflict and Misunderstanding in the Spanish Southwest” Western Review Vol. 9, No. 1 (1972): 23–30. Campa, Arthur L., Spanish Folk-Poetry in New Mexico (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press: 1946). Castañeda Shular, Antonia, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, and Joseph Sommers, eds., Literatura chicana: Texto y contexto (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). Daydí-Tolson, Santiago, ed., Five Poets of Aztlán (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual, 1985). Harth, Dorothy, and L. Baldwin, eds., Voices of Aztlán: Chicano Literature Today (New York: New American Library, 1974). Jiménez, Francisco, and Gary D. Keller, Hispanics in the United States: An Anthology of Creative Literature, Vol. II (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1982). Keller, Gary D. [pseudonym “El Huitlacoche”], Real Poetría. Five Poets of Aztlán, ed. Santiago Daydí-Tolson (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual, 1985). Keller, Gary D., and Francisco Jiménez, Hispanics in the United States: An Anthology of Creative Literature (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual, 1980). Ortego, Philip D., We Are Chicanos: An Anthology of Mexican-American Literature (New York: Washington Square, 1973). Valdez, Luis, and Stan Steiner, eds., Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature (New York: Random House, 1972).

Gary D. Keller and Randall G. Keller Lantigua, John (1947–). John Lantigua was born in the Bronx, New York, in a neighborhood where Spanish was the language of the streets. His mother was from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and his father was from Matanzas, Cuba; during his first years, Lantigua spoke only Spanish. That radically changed when he was four and his family moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey; at the time, no other 665

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Latinos lived there. Lantigua, an only child, was told to forget Spanish and learn English, and his parents never spoke a word of Spanish to him again. In retrospect, his entire professional life has been a return to the streets where Spanish is spoken. In his twenties, Lantigua was a reporter at The Hartford Courant in Connecticut. The only Latino at the newspaper, he was soon assigned to cover the city’s large Puerto Rican population. In doing this, he began to reconnect with his heritage and with Latin America in general. He soon quit journalism, and, at age twenty-five, hitchhiked to Mexico, where he spent most of the next five years, in Oaxaca. He started a business guiding young American and Canadian tourists on camping trips in the mountains. He owned two burros, packed them, and led his clients on hikes through the beautiful sierra of the Pacific coast of Oaxaca. His business eventually went bankrupt, so Lantigua sold his burros and moved to Oaxaca City, where he taught English and joined the municipal theater company as an actor. Over the next few years, Lantigua’s travels brought him temporarily back to the United States, working for a theater in New York, a casino in Reno, Nevada, and on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, before taking him back to Latin America. There, he worked as a translator in Salvadoran refugee camps, and he covered the “Contra War” for United Press International and later for The Washington Post, while living in Honduras and Nicaragua. Lantigua’s journalism work has won him two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prizes, a share of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism, and other prizes. Lantigua is also the author of a number of mystery novels issued by mainstream publishing houses. Often basing his suspense and mystery novels on historical events, Lantigua is the author of Burn Season (1990), Twister (1992), Player’s Vendetta: A Little Havana Mystery (1999), Heat Lightning (1987), and The Lady from Buenos Aires (2007). Burn Season (Putnam, 1989), about the Sandinista/Contra conflict, was praised by The New York Times Book Review as

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“a superior job.” The reviewer lauded Lantigua for his “crisp style” and called him “a clear, forceful writer.” Heat Lightning, about the Salvadoran civil war, was nominated for the Edgar Prize by the Mystery Writers Association of America. Set in Texas, Twister involves radical religious fundamentalism and, in part, the Mexican American community. In The New York Times Book Review mystery column, Marilyn Stasio said that the character studies in the book “are crisp and clear as anything you will hear in the prairie wind.” Player’s Vendetta, about the children of Operation Peter Pan,* is one of the very few Hispanic mystery novels translated into Spanish and issued by a publisher in Spain, as Finca Roja (2001). Set to the background of the 1990s in Miami, Florida, and the 1960s nightlife and underground politics in Havana, Cuba, Lantigua’s novel introduces his own idiosyncratic Cuban American detective, Willie Cuesta, on the hunt for a murderer. His fifth novel, The Ultimate Havana, published in 2001, follows his erstwhile detective Cuesta as he searches for the missing son of a cigar manufacturer and comes on a ring of manufacturers of counterfeit cigars. The latest installment in the Wille Cuesta novels, The Lady from Buenos Aires, set in the Argentine barrio of Miami, with its tango bars, churrasco (steak) houses, and polo clubs, deals with reuniting an Argentine family divided by the Argentine generals’ dirty war and “disappearances” of dissidents. In all, Lantigua’s novels benefit from his firsthand knowledge of political hotspots in Latin America and their relationship to Latino communities and culture in the United States. Lantigua most recently joined The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida. At The Post, he has specialized in reporting on migrant workers in the United States. His work won him and two colleagues the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2004 and 2006, as well as the World Hunger Year Award in 2004. Further Reading Rodríguez, Ralph, Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). Sotelo, Susan Baker, Chicano Detective Fiction. A Critical Study of Five Novelists (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005).

Carmen Peña Abrego Lara, Ana-Maurine (1975–). A poet, novelist, writer of short fiction, and cultural activist residing in Austin, Texas, Ana-Maurine Lara was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, September 22, 1975, and came to the United States in 1981. The daughter of a diplomat, she lived with her family in Nairobi, Kenya, for two formative years. On their return to the United States, her family settled in Mt. Vernon, New York, where she completed her middle school and secondary education. Lara attended Harvard University, graduating in 1997, with majors in archaeology and social anthropology. Since then, she has devoted her time to writing, doing advocacy work, and sustaining only the kind of paid jobs that enable her to continue to cultivate her literary, political, and overall creative interests. With Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz, she has coauthored a Web site dedicated to contesting binary thought and promoting social justice in the United 667

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States (www.bustingbinaries.com). She has published poems in the Stanford Black Arts Quarterly and Tongues Magazine, among other literary periodicals. Her short fiction has appeared in such venues as Sable LitMag and Blithe House Quarterly, and she has contributed critical essays to several journals and edited volumes. She has actively participated in performance art and installation events, apart from teaching various writing workshops. A member of The Austin Project, a collaborative workshop that gathers artists, scholars, and activists of color along with “white allies” to work on “the jazz aesthetic,” Lara also spearheads the organizing effort behind We are the Magicians, the Path-breakers, the Dreammakers LGBTQ Poc Oral History Project. Her literary work has earned Lara awards from the Puffin Foundation Ltd., the Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Penn Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. The Web site that provides an overview of the writer’s career (www.zorashorse.com) describes Lara as “an Afro Dominican American author,” the emphasis on the “Afro” component of her Dominican background providing an entry into her manner of locating her identity within the large framework of the African Diaspora. The title of her Web site, evincing a tribute to African American literary icon Zora Neale Hurston, announces a resolute affiliation with blackness, as recognizably conveyed through salient symbols. Similarly, the title of her poem “The Wedding of Yemanya and Ogun” evokes two powerful Yoruba deities that most likely resonate as familiar to her readers, given their widespread dissemination through the spiritual traditions of Cuban Santeria. Characteristically, Lara’s compelling debut novel Erzulie’s Skirt (2006) draws openly on the world of vodun, arguably the most recognizable, if often merely by name, of the African-descended forms of worship created by the enslaved blacks who came forcibly to the Americas to fuel the plantation economy during the colonial transaction. Lyrically told, Lara’s story is magical, and not just in the sense of displaying features that readers have come to associate with the Latin American tradition of magical realism. Lara locates her tale in a realm governed by the norms of magical thought insofar as it brings the planes of the divine and of the human, the actions of gods and women, to share the plot’s arena in synchronic coexistence. Homeric poems and Athenian tragedies seem the inescapable antecedents. The novel actually begins with a dialogue between two vodu deities, Erzulie, “great goddess of the sweet waters and the ocean’s waves,” and Agwe, “great spirit of the ocean’s depths,” as they talk about the characters that the reader is about to meet—Miriam, Micaela, and Yealidad—whose destinies are known quantities to the far-seeing gods. Lara locates the home of the vodu pantheon in the Dominican Republic as much as in Haiti, highlighting an insufficiently acknowledged Dominican heritage, just as she helps normalize lesbian desire as a legitimate feature of Dominican love, overtly dramatizing the tender passion that endures in the relationship between her two main female characters. Further Reading Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernandez, The Dominican Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

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Latin American Writers Institute (LAWI). The Latin American Writers Institute (LAWI) was founded by Professor Isaac Goldemberg at The City College of New York in 1987; since 1992, it has been housed at Hostos Community College. The institute’s mission includes promoting Latin American and Latino literature in the United States. As part of that mission, the institute publishes books under its imprint, The Latino Press, and issues two bilingual journals, Brújula/Compass and Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana. It also hosts readings and organizes conferences, writing workshops, book fairs, and writers’ festivals. As a clearing house for Latin American and Latino literature, the institute makes its services available to professors, journalists, reviewers, translators, editors, and publishers. In 2006, the institute and Director Goldemberg received the Luis Alberto Sanchez Award for the Promotion of Culture, which recognizes organizations and writers who have done extraordinary cultural work over the years and contributed significantly to the advancement and dissemination of Peruvian culture throughout the world. That year, the institute published in the Hostos Review an anthology of some seventy Peruvian writers and critics living in the United States. In addition, the institute’s press has published books by six Peruvian authors. Further Reading “Latin American Writers Institute (LAWI)” (http://www.hostos.cuny.edu/oaa/lawi.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Latinos. See Hispanic Peoples Laviera, Jesús Abraham “Tato” (1951–). Jesús Abraham “Tato” Laviera* became the fist Hispanic author to win the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, which recognizes and promotes multicultural literature. Laviera is the best-selling Hispanic poet in the United States; he bears the distinction of still having all of his books in print. Born September 5, 1950, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, he migrated with his family to New York City at the age of ten and settled in a poor area of the Lower East Side. After finding himself in an alien society and with practically no English, Laviera was able to adjust and eventually graduate from high school as an honor student. Despite having no other degrees, his intelligence, assertiveness, and thorough knowledge of his community led to his developing a career in the administration of social service agencies. After the publication of his first book, La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), Laviera gave up administrative work to dedicate his time to writing. Since 1980, Laviera’s career has included not only writing but touring nationally as a performer of his poetry, directing plays he has written, and Tato Laviera performing his poetry. producing cultural events. In 1980, he was received by 669

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President Jimmy Carter at the White House Gathering of American Poets. In 1981, his second book, Enclave, was the recipient of the American Book Award. Tato Laviera has said, “I am the grandson of slaves transplanted from Africa to the Caribbean, a man of the New World come to dominate and revitalize two old world languages.” And, indeed, Laviera’s bilingualism and linguistic inventiveness have risen to the level of virtuosity. Laviera is the inheritor of the Spanish oral tradition, with all of its classical formulas, and the African oral tradition, with its wedding to music and spirituality; in his works, he brings both the Spanish and English languages together, as well as the islands of Puerto Rico and Manhattan—a constant duality that is always just in the background. His first book, La Carreta Made a U-Turn, uses René Marqués’s Oxcart as a point of departure and redirects it back to the heart of New York, instead of to Puerto Rico, as Marqués had desired: Laviera is stating that Puerto Rico can be found here, too. His second book, Enclave (1981), is a celebration of diverse heroic personalities, both real and imagined: Luis Palés Matos and salsa composers, the neighborhood gossip and John Lennon, Miriam Makeba and Tito Madera Smith—the latter being a fictional, hip offspring of a Puerto Rican and a black from the American South. AmeRícan (1986) and Mainstream Ethics (1988) are surveys of the lives of the poor and the marginalized in the United States and a challenge for the country to live up to its promises of equality and democracy. Laviera has continued to write poetry and a number of plays, but, in 2004, he became blind from diabetes. After a series of operations and rehabilitation, he learned to write and type in Braille. Despite having to submit to dialysis, he continues his life as a troubadour or poet on the road. In 2005, he became a spokesperson for Latinos with diabetes as part of the American Association for Diabetes. The Jesus A. Laviera One-Day with Diabetes Project promotes diabetic Sugar Slams, The Sugar Slammers, and his musical play “DIABET-IT-IS.” Laviera’s latest play is “The Spark,” which was commissioned for a cultural center in Chicago. Further Reading Flores, Juan, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Leal, Luis (1907–). Scholar of Spanish American and Mexican American literature, Luis Leal was born in Linares, Mexico. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University in 1940 and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1941 and 1950, respectively. Leal is one of the most honored scholars in Hispanic literatures and a true pioneer of Chicano or Mexican American literature. He has been the mentor of three generations of critics of this literature, as well as a publisher of some of the early and most time-tested historical studies of the literature. Over the course of his long career, he has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Mississippi, Emory University, the University of Illinois (professor emeritus since 1976), and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has served as a professor and acting director of Chicano Studies and where he still publishes his magazine, Ventana abierta (Open Window), which 670

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is dedicated to publishing Latino literature and criticism written in Spanish. Leal is the author of sixteen books, including his most important, El cuento hispanoamericano (1967, The Spanish American Short Story) and Breve historia de la literature hispanoamericana (1971, Brief History of Spanish American Literature). He is the editor of more than twenty anthologies and other books, besides publishing scores of articles. In 1978, a conference was held in Luis Leal. his honor and a book published studying his contributions: Homenaje a Luis Leal (Homage to Luis Leal). In 1998, Leal dictated a memoir to Víctor Fuentes, which was subsequently published. Leal is one of the founders of recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.* Further Reading Bleznick, Donald W., and Juan O. Valencia, eds., Homenaje a Luis Leal: Estudios sobe literature hispanoamericana (Madrid: Insula, 1978). Leal, Luis (with Víctor Fuentes), Don Luis Leal, una vida, dos culturas (Tempe AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos León, Daniel de (1852–1914). Born on the island of Curacao of Spanish American Sephardic Jewish parents, Daniel de León became one of the most important labor leaders and socialist theorists in the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century. His numerous writings were published and circulated widely, as the rights of workers became more and more the concern of intellectuals in the United States. After an education in Germany and the Netherlands, he moved with his Venezuelan-born wife to New York City in 1872, where he became involved with the Cuban independence movement and wrote for Spanish-language newspapers. He studied law at Columbia and later became a lecturer, hoping to become part of the permanent faculty of that institution. As his involvement with the labor movement intensified, he was severed from Columbia and decided to dedicate himself completely to the cause of the working class. By 1891, de León was the Socialist Labor Party candidate for governor of New York. For many years, he edited the Socialist Labor weekly, The People. In addition to his editing and his prolific writing, he also translated Daniel de León. 671

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the works of Karl Marx. In 1905, de León helped found one of the most important labor organizations in history, the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), but, as a radical, he was expelled from that organization shortly after its founding. He then organized a competing institution, the Workers’ International Industrial Union. As a theorist and writer, de León developed many advanced views on such topics as women’s suffrage, the power of the vote among working people, war, and politics. From all accounts, de León was a fiery speaker and polemicist. Many of the speeches that he gave at socialist meetings, rallies, or strikes were published and circulated in pamphlet form and went through repeated reprints and new editions, from the late 1890s through the 1930s. Included among these were such speeches, later published as pamphlets, as “What Means This Strike,” an address delivered at City Hall, New Bedford, Massachusetts, February 11, 1898; “The Burning Question of Trades Unionism,” delivered at Newark, New Jersey, April 21, 1904; “Woman’s Suffrage,” under the auspices of the Socialist Women of Greater New York, in 1911. Further Reading Reeve, Cal, The Life and Times of Daniel De Leon (New York: AIM, 1972).

Nicolás Kanellos Letamendi, Agustín de (1793–1854). Journalist, diplomat, and man of letters, Agustín de Letamendi was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1795. He was the coeditor of Crónica Científia y Literaria (Scientific and Literary Chronicle) from 1817 to 1820 and the founder and editor of the periodical Minerva Española, which ran from 1820 to 1821. In 1823, he was serving in Florida as the Spanish consul, but, by 1825, because of his opposition to the despotism of King Ferdinand VII, his position was revoked. Thereafter, he settled as an exile in Charleston, South Carolina, and made a living as a private language teacher and translator. In 1828, he was able to become a member of the language faculty at the Male Academy of the South Carolina Society, where he remained until leaving the United States for Belgium in 1832 to become part of the Spanish legation. While in the United States, he produced a number of works that classify as the literature of exile, reflecting his nostalgia for the homeland, his protest against the politics in Spain, and, ultimately, his disillusionment with political progress there. Two such titles are Notas históricas sobre la revolución en España comprenediendo la época de 1814 hasta 1823 (1826, Historical Notes on the Revolution in Spain, Including the Epoch from 1814 to 1823) and Al señor don Fernando VII, Rey de España e Indias (1827, To Mr. Ferdinand VII, King of Spain and the Indies). These titles reveal Letamendi as a liberal who admired the American Republic and its democratic institutions. Letamendi was also a pioneer in producing grammar textbooks and aids for the study of Spanish and other languages, including Spanish Grammar: Dedicated to the Youth of North America (1826), Improved Cacology or a New Syntaxical Method to Learn the French Language with Facility, Correctness and Propriety, After the System of Several Celebrated Instructors in Europe (1829), and An Introduction to the French Lan672

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guage with Classical, Analytical, and Synthetical Elucidations (1830). One of his more interesting titles for today’s scholars is his rather conservative treatise on the proper education of women: Mi opinión sobre la educación de las mugeres: A Mrs. Anderson (1825, My Opinion on the Education of Women: A Mrs. Anderson). All of these titles were published in Charleston, South Carolina. He returned to Spain in 1843 and returned to journalism, especially as a writer for El Clamor Público (The Public Outcry). He died in 1854. Further Reading Leavitt, Sturgis E., “The Teaching of Spanish in the United States” Hispania Vol. 44 (1961): 591–625. Shearer, James F., “Agustín de Letamendi: A Spanish Expatriate in Charleston, S.C. (1825–1829)” Charleston: South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine Vol. 43 (1942): 18–25.

Anel Garza Levins Morales, Aurora (1954–). Aurora Levins Morales is an awardwinning writer, essayist, and historian of Puerto Rican and Russian Jewish descent. She writes and speaks about multicultural histories of resistance, feminism, uses of history, cultural activism, and the ways that racism, antiSemitism, sexism, class, and other systems of oppression interlock. Her diarylike Getting Home Alive (1986), alternating her own voice with that of her mother, is a collection of sketches, short stories, and poems that celebrate the lives of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, and other females relatives across continents and through history. As a passionate, poetic evocation of a feminist worldview, Getting Home Alive is her most famous work. Levins Morales’s most recent works are Medicine Stories: Writings on Cultural Activism (1998) and Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (1998). The first is a collection of essays on culture and politics; the latter, coauthored with her mother, is, like her first mother-daughter collaboration in Getting Home Alive, a dialogue in prose and poetry about identity, family, and the immigrant experience. A major theme in Aurora Levins Morales’s work is identity as a lesbian of biracial, bicultural, and bireligious heritage. In all of her works, language and reading are the keys to remembering and memory to integrate personal history and sense of identity and place in the world. Levins Morales has taught Women’s Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of California–Berkeley and has published in a number of academic venues. Further Reading Rojas, Lourdes, “Latinas at the Crossroads: An Affirmation of Life in Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales’s Getting Home Alive” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading, eds. A. Horno-Delgado, E. Ortega, N. Scott, and N. Saporta-Sternbach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 166–177). Stanley, Sandra, Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).


Lidia, Palmiro de

Lidia, Palmiro de. See Valle, Adrián del Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana. In 1927, a league was formed in New York to increase the power of the city’s Hispanic community through unification of its diverse organizations. Among the very specific goals of the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) were representing the community to the “authorities,” working for the economic and social betterment of Puerto Ricans, and propagating the vote among Puerto Ricans. That same year, the Liga founded a periodical, Boletín Oficial de la Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Official Bulletin of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic League), to keep its member organizations and their constituents informed of community concerns. However, under the editorship of writer Jesús Colón,* the Boletín evolved into much more than a newsletter, functioning more like a community newspaper, Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana. including essays and cultural items as well as news items in its pages. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Limón, Graciela (1938–). Born August 2, 1938, in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrant parents, Limón began writing prose fiction only after having achieved success in her career as a professor of Latin American history and culture. With an M.A. from the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico City (1969) and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (1975), Limón developed a long career at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Only in her forties did she begin to sketch out novels based on Mexico’s pre-Columbian history: “I saw what the years had given me in experience and emotions, in the many people and places that had crossed my life. I realized that I had the material I needed to become what I had always wanted to be. A novelist.” Her first critical acclaim was achieved with In Search of Bernabé, which was named a New York Times Notable book for 1993 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In Search of Bernabé won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation in 1994. Inspired by Limón’s official visits to El Salvador during its civil war, 674

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In Search chronicles the desperate mother’s search for her son, after being separated from him during the war; both eventually end up in Los Angeles. Her second novel, The Memories of Ana Calderón (1994), is a novel of immigration that follows the trials and tribulations of a young woman who rises from the working classes to business success but experiences ultimate disillusionment after battling the forces of family, church, and the justice system in the United States. The Memories of Ana Calderón was lauded by Booklist as a book that “should awaken the conscience and compassion that drive and haunt every reader.” One of her most popular novels, The Song of the Hummingbird (1996), finally deals successfully with the pre-Columbian world at the time of the Spanish conquest; Limón successfully portrays this time of conflict and synthesis of cultures through the eyes of an Aztec woman who was captured and forced to Graciela Limón. deal with Christianity. In writing Song of the Hummingbird, Limón strives to get behind the stereotype of the humble native and creates a protagonist who, as an indigenous woman, allows the reader to enter the world of her people, see the tempestuous events of the conquest of Mexico from the perspective of the vanquished, feel the bitter pain of losing a kingdom at its zenith, and swallow the acrid reality of forcefully imposed foreign ways and beliefs. The Washington Post Book World hailed this riveting tale as “downright hypnotic.” Limón updated her chronicling of the conflict between Spanish and Indian cultures, as well as the evolution of racism, in The Day of the Moon, which sets the conflict within a tale of forbidden love. The Day of the Moon is a spellbinding account that spans the twentieth century, across the Southwest from Mexico to Los Angeles, beyond life and death, and over the course of four generations of the Betancourt family. Allowing multiple voices to narrate this beguiling tale, Limón adroitly explores the clan’s tragic reckoning with issues of cultural identity, sexual autonomy, and interracial love. After visiting Chiapas, Mexico, and researching the history of the Mayan conflict that erupted into the 1994 revolt of the Zapatistas, Limón took on the conflict of indigenous peoples with authorities in her Erased Faces (2001), which again explores this conflict from the perspective of women and amorous relationships in conflict with ancestral patriarchal traditions. Erased Faces was named the 2002 winner of the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, in recognition of the novel’s success in extending understanding of the root causes of bigotry and the range of human options in constructing alternative ways to share power. In her latest book, Left Alive (2005), Limón takes on the difficult task of writing from within the mind of a mentally ill narrator and 675

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pondering the motives for women who become family annihilators; it is a stark and challenging narrative. Although Limón has been consistently published by a small press, Arte Público Press of the University of Houston, she is one of the most distinguished and accomplished novelists in Latino literature, not only prolific but also highly literary and nevertheless able to reach everyday readers beyond the academy. Limón is a lifelong resident of her hometown, Los Angeles. She is Professor Emeritus of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where she served as a professor of U.S. Latina/o Literature and Chair of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. She intermittently serves as a visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Further Reading Abarca, Meredith E., Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Workingclass Mexican and Mexican American Women (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University, 2006). López Calvo, Ignacio, “Chicanismo meets Zapatismo: U.S. Third World Feminism and Transnational Activism in Graciela Limon’s Erased Faces” Chasqui Vol. 33, No. 2 (Nov. 2004): 64–75.

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Linden Lane Magazine. Founded in 1892 by exiled Cuban wife-and-husband poets Belkis Cuza Malé* and Heberto Padilla, Linden Lane Magazine and its affiliate publishing house have notably brought together all sectors of the Cuban and Cuban American literary community residing in the United States. Originally founded to publish the works of Cuban and Latin American authors living in exile, it soon broadened its scope to include such writers and editors as Carolina Hospital* and Roberto Fernández* and even published an anthology announcing the new Cuban American generation: Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos (1989). Nevertheless, the magazine generally only accepted works written in Spanish. The magazine was named after the street that the couple lived on in Princeton, New Jersey. For the first few years, exile writer Reinaldo Arenas* worked closely with Cuza Malé and Padilla as a special editor and in soliciting manuscripts. Beginning in 2003, Linden Lane Magazine was only published online. Further Reading “Linden Lane Magazine” (www.lacasaazul.org/Linden_Lane_Magazine).

Nicolás Kanellos Literatura Cubana en el Exilio. In the last decade of the twentieth and in the twenty-first century, a new, dynamic form of publication of exile literature* has developed: online magazines that provide space as well as communication for the authors of the Cuban diaspora, both in the United States and abroad. For the first time, instantaneous communications via the Internet has made possible exchange between exiled Cuban authors residing in the United States, Europe, and Spanish America. Although Cuba has produced thousands of works of exilic literature, from the beginning 676

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of the nineteenth century, the unlimited space and free access of the Internet have made possible the publication of a virtually unlimited number of poets, essayists, and short story writers, in addition to reviews of their works and other cultural information. Of the sites that have proliferated, Literatura Cubana en el Exilio (Cuban Literature in Exile) has gone beyond the publication of works resulting from exiles of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the Mariel Boatlift to publish works from the whole history of Cuban exile, beginning with the early nineteenth-century poems of José María Heredia,* such as his “Himno del Desterrado” (Hymn of the Exiled), and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, such as her “Volver a la Patria” (Return to the Fatherland). Among the authors featured regularly on its Web pages are Angel Cuadra,* Gabriel Cabrera Infante, Belkis Cuza Malé,* José Lesama Lima, José Martí,* and Zoé Valdés. Literatura del Exilio also promotes the recent works of exiled authors and provides links for book purchases. Its editors are the poets Napoleón Lizardo Gómez and María Eugenia Caseiro. In addition to facilitating communications by providing Web and e-mail addresses, Literatura Cubana en el Exilio has organized meetings and conferences of exiled authors, some of them in their home base in Miami, Florida. Further Reading “Fue José Martí un gnóstico similar a los primeros cristianos?” (http://groups.msn.com/ LiteraturaCubanaenelExilio/yourwebpage5.msnw).

Nicolás Kanellos Literature, Development of Latino Literature. In recent years, more Spanish surnames have been appearing on the pages of book reviews and on college syllabi throughout the United States. This sudden appearance of a body of work seems to be associated with the growing Hispanic presence in all social spheres within the borders of the United States and with the seemingly ubiquitous Hispanic influence on popular culture. Because of the lack of available texts, most scholars have limited the study and teaching of Chicano,* Nuyorican,* and Cuban/Cuban American* literature in the United States to works published within the last forty years, thus furthering the impression that U.S. Hispanic or Latino literature is new, young, and exclusively related to the immigrant experience. A systematic and thorough examination of Hispanic life in the United States, however, reveals a greater and richer contribution to literature and culture. Historically, the diverse ethnic groups called “Hispanics” or “Latinos” created a literature in North America even before the founding of the United States. The sheer volume of their writing over 400 years would take many scholars researching for many years to recover, analyze, and make accessible fully all that is worthy of study and memorializing. And, in its variety and multiple perspectives, Latino literature is far more complex than the sampling of the past forty years suggests. This literature incorporates the voices of the conqueror and the conquered, the revolutionary and the reactionary, the native and the uprooted or landless. It is a literature that proclaims a 677


sense of place in the United States while it also erases borders and is transnational in the most postmodern sense possible. It is a literature that transcends ethnicity and race, while striving for a Chicano, Nuyorican, Cuban American, or just Hispanic or Latino identity.

The Historical Background The introduction of Western culture to the lands that eventually belonged to the United States was accomplished by Hispanic peoples: Spaniards, Hispanicized Africans and Amerindians, mestizos, and mulattos. For better or worse, Spain was the first country to introduce a written European language into what became the mainland United States. Beginning in 1513, with Juan Ponce de León’s diaries of travel in Florida, the keeping of civil, military, and ecclesiastical records became commonplace in what became the Hispanic South and Southwest of the United States. Written culture not only facilitated the keeping of the records of conquest and colonization, maintaining of correspondence, planting the rudiments of commerce, and standardizing social organization, but it also gave birth to the first written descriptions and studies of the fauna and flora of these lands that were new to the Europeans, mestizos, and mulattos. It made possible the writing of laws for their governance and commercial exploitation and for writing and maintaining a history—an official story and tradition—of Hispanic culture in these lands. From the very outset, a literature was created by the explorers, missionaries, and colonizers (see Colonial Literature), as well as the mixed-blood offspring of the Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans. Ponce de León was followed by numerous other explorers, missionaries, and colonists. Among the most important was Alvar Núñez* Cabeza de Vaca, whose La relación (The Account), published in Spain in 1542, may be considered the first anthropological and ethnographic book in the United States, documenting his eight years of observations and experiences among the Amerindians. Some scholars have treated his memoir as the first book of “American” literature written in a European language. Other chroniclers, memoirists, playwrights, and poets followed in the Floridas and the area that became the southwestern United States. Literate culture spread northward through New Spain and into the lands that, by the mid-nineteenth century, became part of the United States through conquest, annexation, and purchase. All of the European institutions of literacy—schools, universities, libraries, government archives, courts, and others—were first introduced by Hispanic peoples to North America by the mid-sixteenth century. The importation of books to Mexico was authorized in 1525; the printing press was introduced in 1539, and newspapers began publishing in 1541. During the colonial years, Spain founded some twenty-six universities in the Americas, in addition to numerous theological seminaries. In the seventeenth century, the University of Mexico achieved great distinction in the Americas, in everything from canon law and theology to medicine and the Aztec and Otomí languages. The first naturalist to study and write about 678


Texas and the Gulf Coast regions was a University of Mexico professor, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700). In 1693, this scholar, in the tradition of the Renaissance man, accompanied Admiral Andrés de Pez on a scientific expedition into the present-day southeastern United States to study the local topography, fauna, and flora. As for communications and publishing, the populations on the northern frontier of New Spain fared better after independence from Spain, during the Mexican period of government, when the missions were secularized and the responsibility for education shifted into the hands of a liberal government struggling to establish a democracy. During the Mexican Period, printing presses were finally introduced into these frontier areas, with both California and New Mexico housing operating presses by 1834 (see Publishers and Publishing). The California press was a government press; the New Mexican press was held in private hands, by Father Antonio José Martínez,* who printed catechisms and other books, as well as New Mexico’s first newspaper, El Crepúsculo (The Twilight), beginning in 1835. The printing press had already made its way into Texas in 1813 in the hands of José Alvarez de Toledo,* as part of the movement for Mexico’s independence from Spain. Thus, considerable progress had been made toward the establishment of a literate population before northern Mexico became part of the United States. Hispanics settling in the thirteen British colonies had immediate access to printing. In the mid-seventeenth century, the first Spanish-speaking communities were established by Sephardic Jews in the Northeast. They were followed by other Hispanics from Spain and the Caribbean who, by the 1800s, were issuing, through early American printers and their own presses, hundreds of political and commercial books, as well as many works of creative literature written principally by Hispanic immigrants and political refugees. In Louisiana, and later in the Southwest and to some extent the Northeast, bilingual publications often became a necessity for communicating, first with the Hispano- and Francophone populations and later the Hispano- and Anglophone populations, as publications, including literary publications, increasingly reflected bicultural life in the United States. Hispanic literate culture in the United States, however, has existed beyond the need to communicate with non-Spanish speakers and non-Hispanics. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hispanic communities in the Northeast, South, and Southwest were substantial enough to support trade among themselves and, thus, require written and printed communications in the Spanish language. Spanish-language newspapers in the United States date from the beginning of the nineteenth century. El Misisipi (The Mississippi) was published in 1808 and El Mensagero Luisianés (The Louisiana Messenger) in 1809, both in New Orleans; La Gaceta de Texas (The Texas Gazette) and El Mexicano (The Mexican) were issued in 1813 in Nacogdoches, Texas/Natchitoshes, Louisiana. These were followed by the first Spanish-language newspaper in Florida, El Telégrafo de las Floridas (1817, The Telegraph of the Floridas); the first in the Northeast (Philadelphia), El Habanero (1824); and numerous 679


others in Louisiana, Texas, and the Northeast. Throughout the nineteenth century, despite the existence of Spanish-language publishers and printers, the principal publishing enterprises in Spanish in the United States and northern Mexico (most of the present West and Southwest) were the hundreds of newspapers that existed from New York to New Orleans, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and elsewhere. The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project* has documented and described some 1,700 Spanish-language periodicals of possibly 2,500 issued between 1808 and 1960. Literally hundreds of newspapers carried news of commerce and politics as well as poetry, serialized novels, stories, essays, and commentary from the pens of local writers as well as reprints of the works of the most highly regarded writers and intellectuals of the entire Hispanic world, from Spain to Argentina. To this day more literature has been published by Hispanic newspapers than by publishing houses. And when northern Mexico and Louisiana were incorporated into the United States, this journalistic, literary, and intellectual production intensified. The newspapers took on the task of preserving the Spanish language and Hispanic culture in territories and states where Hispanic residents were becoming rapidly and vastly outnumbered by Anglo and European migrants or what were called “pioneers,” although Hispanics, Amerindians, and mestizos had already lived in those areas and had established institutions there. The newspapers became forums for discussions of rights, both cultural and civil; they became the libraries and memories of the small towns in New Mexico and the “defensores de la raza” (defenders of Hispanics) in the large cities. Quite often, they were the only Spanish-language textbooks for learning to read and write Spanish in rural areas, providing the best examples of written language drawn from the greatest writers in the Hispanic world, past and present. Some of the more successful newspapers grew into publishing houses by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Since the founding of El Misisipí in 1808, the Spanish-language newspaper in the United States has had to serve functions rarely envisioned in Mexico City, Madrid, or Havana. Most of the newspapers, if not functioning as a bulwark of immigrant culture, had to protect the language, culture, and rights of an ethnic minority within the framework of a hegemonic culture that was, in the best of times, unconcerned with the Hispanic ethnic enclaves and, in the worst of times, openly hostile. The immigrant newspapers reinforced the culture of the homeland and its relationship with the United States; newspapers that saw their communities as minorities in the United States reinforced a native identity, protected the civil rights of their communities, and monitored the community’s economic, educational, and cultural development. Whether serving the interests of immigrants or an ethnic minority community, it was always incumbent on the press to exemplify the best writing in the Spanish language, to uphold high cultural and moral values, and, of course, to maintain and preserve Hispanic culture. Quite often, too, Hispanic-owned newspapers and the literature that they published took on the role of contestation, challenging and offering alternative 680


views to those published in the English-language press, especially as concerned their own communities and homelands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary culture of Hispanics began assuming the expressive functions that have characterized it to the present day. These have been predominantly three distinctive types of expression: that of exiles, immigrants, and natives. These categories relate to the sociohistorical processes that Hispanics have experienced in the United States. Thus, these categories not only reveal the three general identities of U.S. Hispanics across history but also offer an understanding of the literary expression of Hispanics. On the foundation of the written and oral legacy of Hispanic exploration and colonization (see Colonial Literature) of vast regions of the United States, these three historical processes and patterns of expression planted firm roots. This foundational base of exploration and settlement included descriptions of the flora and fauna, encounters with the Amerindians and their evangelization, and daily life on the frontier, as perceived by the Spanish and Hispanicized peoples (including Africans, Amerindians, mestizos, and mulattoes) in chronicles, journals, ethnographies, letters, and oral lore. The first texts were written by the explorers who charted this territory and its peoples, such as Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Fray Marcos de Niza; epic poems were composed by soldiers, such as Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá,* in his History of the Conquest of New Mexico, and missionaries, such as Francisco de Escobedo,* in his La Florida. Later, settlers and missionaries, such as Fray Gerónimo Boscana, and the anonymous authors of the folk dramas “The Texans” and “The Comanches” and the indita and alabado songs developed a distinctive mestizo literature, exhibiting many of the cultural patterns that persist to the present. All of this literary ferment, whether written or oral, took place in the northern territories of New Spain and Mexico that did not have access to the printing press. Although the world of books, libraries, and education had been introduced by the Spanish to North America, the strict banning of the printing press by the Royal Crown in its frontier territories impeded the development of printing and publishing among the native Hispanic population, the strongest base of Hispanic native culture in what became the U.S. Southwest. Instead, to this date, a strong legacy persists of oral (see Orality) or folk* expression in these lands, reinforced as well by the overwhelmingly workingclass* nature of Hispanics over the past two centuries. Ironically, the earliest widespread use of printing and publishing by Hispanics in the United States took place in an English-speaking environment. In the northeastern United States at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Spanish-speaking exiles and immigrants were the first to have access to the printing press. Thus, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hispanic immigrants and political refugees in the newly founded American Republic began creating a body of literature that added new dimensions and perspectives to the writing in Spanish that already existed in the Southeast and Southwest. Over time, as immigrants and their descendants remained in the United States, their literary production made the transition to a native literature, as well, to reflect their 681


sense of history, sense of place, and sense of entitlement in the United States. The three tendencies of U.S. Hispanic literature—native, immigrant, and exile—are dynamic categories, indicating the interaction in Hispanic communities that have, throughout the last two centuries, continually received new waves of Hispanic immigrants and refugees. The culture and expression of the newcomers often enriched and updated that of the Hispanic residents, whose preexisting culture and expression have evolved for at least four centuries. Furthermore, it is possible to trace the evolution of writers who may have produced texts of exile on arriving to these shores, but over the course of time made the transition to permanent immigrants and U.S. citizens; their texts register these transitions. Identification of these texts and tendencies is a means of understanding the development of Hispanic literature in the United States.

Native Literature Native Hispanic literature develops first out of the experience of colonialism and racial (see Race) oppression. Hispanics were subjected to more than a century of “racialization,” through such doctrines as the Spanish Black Legend* and Manifest Destiny* (racist doctrines that justified the appropriation of lands and resources by the English and Anglo Americans). The Hispanics were subsequently conquered and incorporated into the United States through territorial purchase and treated as colonial subjects—as were the Mexicans of the Southwest, the Hispanics in Florida and Louisiana, the Panamanians in the Canal Zone and in Panama itself, and the Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean. (A case can also be made that, in many ways, Cubans and Dominicans also developed as peoples under U.S. colonial rule during the early twentieth century.) Added to the base of Hispanics already residing within the United States was the subsequent migration and immigration of large numbers of people from the Spanish-speaking countries over a period of 100 years. Their waves of emigration were directly related to the colonial administration of their homelands by the United States. Their children’s subsequent U.S. citizenship created hundreds of thousands of new natives with cultural perspectives that have differed substantially from those of immigrants and exiles. Hispanic native literature developed as an ethnic minority literature, first among Hispanics already residing in the Southwest when it was appropriated from Mexico—to date, very few Hispanic texts have been studied from the U.S. colonial period and early statehood days of Louisiana and Florida. Native Hispanic literature has specifically manifested itself in an attitude of entitlement to civil, political, and cultural rights. From its very origins in the nineteenth-century editorials of Francisco Ramírez,* the novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,* and New Mexico newspaper editors, Hispanic native literature in general has been cognizant of the racial, ethnic, and minority status of its readers within U.S. society and culture. Making use of both Spanish and English, Hispanic native literature has also included immigrants in its readership and among its interests; it has maintained a 682


relationship with the various “homelands,” such as Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Spain. But the fundamental reason for the existence of native Hispanic literature and its point of reference has been and continues to be the lives and conditions of Latinos in the United States. Unlike immigrant literature, it does not have one foot in the homeland and one in the United States; it does not share that double gaze of forever-contrasting U.S. experience with homeland experience. For native Hispanic peoples of the United States, the homeland is the United States; there is no question of a return to their ancestors’ Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Spain. Thus, this literature exhibits a firm sense of place, often elevated to a mythic status. Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, referenced Aztlán,* the legendary place of origin of the Aztecs supposedly in today’s Southwest, which gave them—as mestizo people—priority over Euro Americans. This sense of place, which for the immigrants often was the “Trópico en Manhattan” or the “Little Havana,” became transformed in the 1960s and 1970s into a place where new, synthetic, or syncretic cultures reigned supreme, as in the Nuyoricans’* “Loisaida” (the Lower East Side of New York), so eulogized by poet and playwright Miguel Piñero* and “El Bronx” as in Nicholasa Mohr’s* El Bronx Remembered. This sense of belonging to a region or place or just the barrio, where the culture has transformed the social and physical environment, is only one manifestation of the general feeling of newness, that is, of a new culture derived from the synthesis of the old Hispanic and Anglo cultures that had initially opposed each other. The “Chicanos”* and “Nuyoricans” appeared in the 1960s, along with the civil rights movement, to claim a new and separate identity from that of Mexicans (even from Mexican Americans) and Puerto Ricans on the Island. They proclaimed their bilingualism* and biculturalism and mixed and blended the English and Spanish in their speech and writing and created a new esthetic that was interlingual and transcultural—one that, to outsiders at times, seemed inscrutable because of the outsiders’ own linguistic limitations. And the construction of this new identity was often explored in literary works that examined the psychology of characters caught between cultures, pondering the proverbial existential questions, as in four foundational works on coming of age: Piri Thomas’s* autobiography, Down These Mean Streets (1967); Tomás Rivera’s* novel, written in Spanish, . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1971); Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me Ultima (1972); and Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973). But the process of sorting out identity and creating a positive place for themselves in an antagonistic society was at times facilitated only by a cultural nationalism that, as in immigrant literature, promoted a strict code of ethnic loyalty; the vendido (sellout) stereotype replaced those of the pocho, agringado (Gringoized), and renegade (renegade) as negative models. No other artist explored the question of image and identity more than playwright Luis Valdez* throughout his career, but most certainly in his allegory of stereotypes, Los Vendidos (1976), in which he revisited the history of Mexican stereotypes, the products of discrimination culture clash. 683


Many of the Hispanic newspapers, books, and other publications that appeared in the Southwest after the Mexican War (1846–1848) laid the basis for U.S. Hispanics shaping themselves as an ethnic minority. Although the origins of their literature date to well before the crucial signing of the peace treaty between the United States and Mexico, the immediate conversion to colonial status of the Mexican population—in the newly acquired territories of California, New Mexico, Texas, and other acquired territories—made their literature a sounding board for their rights as colonized and later as “racialized” U.S. citizens. There was a nascent, native Spanish-language literature in Florida and Louisiana, but the Hispanic population was not large enough to sustain it at the time of the U.S. takeover. Later, in the twentieth century, a literature emerged again in such Florida authors as José Rivero Muñiz,* Jose Yglesias,* and Evelio Grillo.* Although the printing press was not introduced to California and New Mexico until 1834, the society there, as in Texas (where the press appeared in 1813), was sufficiently literate to sustain a wide range of printing and publishing once the press was allowed. And when Anglos migrated to these new territories after 1848, they made printing and publishing more widespread; later, they also introduced the telegraph, the railroads, and improved communications, thus facilitating the ability of the native populations to associate over distances and solidify their cultures. Despite attempts to form public opinion and exert social control over the Hispanics through bilingual newspapers and publications, ironically, the Anglo American colonial establishment brought the means for Hispanics to effect their own self-expression and creativity, which led to development of alternative identities and ideologies. Subsequently, Hispanic intellectuals founded an increasing number of Spanish-language newspapers to serve the native Hispanic populations. By the 1880s and 1890s, books were also issuing from these presses, although books written in Spanish were printed from the very inception of the printing press in 1834. A native oral literature and a literature in manuscript form had existed since the Colonial Period as a pre-native base for later expression; when the printing press became available, this literature made the transition to print. When the railroad reached the territories, dramatic changes occurred as a consequence of greater access to machinery and technology as well as to better means of distribution for print products. The last third of the century, thus, saw an explosion of independent Spanish-language publishing by Hispanics in the Southwest; Hispanic native literature helped solidify their sense of ethnic and regional identity. Autobiographies,* memoirs, and novels appeared, specifically treating the sense of dislocation and uprootedness, the sense of loss of patrimony, and, given the Hispanics’ status as a racial minority in the United States, the fear of persecution and discrimination. In 1858, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín* published his Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguín, the first memoir written by a Mexican American in the English language. Seguín was an embattled and disenchanted political figure of the Texas Republic who ultimately experienced great disillusionment in the transformation of his Texas by Anglo Americans. In 1872, the first novel written in English by a U.S. Hispanic was published by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Her romance 684


Who Would Have Thought It? reconstructed antebellum and Civil War society in the North and engaged the dominant U.S. myths of American exceptionalism, egalitarianism, and consensus, offering an acerbic critique of Northern racism and U.S. imperialism. In 1885, Ruiz de Burton published another novel, from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of the Southwest: The Squatter and the Don, which documents the loss of lands to squatters, bankers, and railroad interests in Southern California shortly after statehood. Even Californios, such as Platón Vallejo* and Angustias de la Guerra Ord, who tended to romanticize the Hispanic past in their writings and dictations, were ambivalent and circumspect about the American takeover. In 1881, the first Spanish-language novel written in the Southwest was Manuel M. Salazar’s* romantic adventure novel, La historia de un caminante, o Gervacio y Aurora (The History of a Traveler on Foot, or Gervasio and Aurora), which created a colorful picture of pastoral life in New Mexico at that time, perhaps as a means of contrasting this idyllic past with the colonial present. During this territorial and early statehood period in the Southwest, there were also various oral expressions not only of resistance but of outright rebellion, such as in the proclamations of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina and in the corridos* fronterizos, or border ballads, about such social rebels as Joaquín Murieta, Catarino Garza,* and others. Cortina, himself the leader of a massive rebellion known as the “Cortina War,” was also a subject of these ballads. But the real cauldron in which a Hispanic ethnic-minority consciousness fermented was the Spanish-language newspaper. When Francisco P. Ramírez* founded El Clamor Público (The Public Clamor, 1855–1559), he created a landmark in awareness that Hispanics in California had been and were being treated as a race apart from the Euro Americans who had immigrated into the area. Even the wealthy Californios who had collaborated in the Yankee takeover saw their wealth and power diminish under statehood. In addition to covering California and U.S. news, El Clamor Público also maintained contact with the Hispanic world outside California and attempted to present an image of refinement and education that demonstrated the high level of civilization achieved throughout the Hispanic world. This, in part, was a defensive reaction to the negative propaganda of Manifest Destiny, which had cast Mexicans and other Hispanics as unintelligent and uneducated barbarians who were incapable of developing their lands and the natural resources of the West— which would justify these lands and resources being wrested from their hands by the superior newcomers. Ramírez and his paper were staunch supporters of learning English; it was not only important for business but also for protecting the Californios’ rights. Ramírez from the outset assumed an editorial stance in defense of the native population; on June 14, 1856, he wrote: “it has been our intent to serve as an organ for the general perspective of the Spanish race as a means of manifesting the atrocious injuries of which they have been victims in this country where they were born and in which they now live in a state inferior to the poorest of their persecutors.” Only seventeen years old when he took the helm of El Clamor Público, Ramírez was a partisan of statehood and of the 685


U.S. Constitution; however, his indignation became greater as the civil and property rights of the Californios failed to be protected by that Constitution that he loved so much. He became a consistent and assiduous critic, attempting to inspire the Hispanics to unite in their defense and the authorities to protect the Hispanic residents of California who were being despoiled, even lynched. Ramírez was instrumental in building a consciousness of the idea that this injustice and this oppression were not isolated and local phenomena—by reprinting news and editorials from around the state and by analyzing U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. It was in El Clamor Público that southern Californians read the speeches of Pablo de la Guerra,* decrying the loss of lands and rights by the Californios. In his own editorials, Francisco P. Ramírez laid the basis for the development of a Hispanic ethnic minority consciousness in the United States; his influence in disseminating that point of view in the native population and raising their consciousness as a people cannot be underestimated. Ramírez seems to have been the first Mexican American journalist of the West and Southwest to use the press consistently to establish a Hispanic native perspective and to pursue civil rights for his people. In the years to come, there were many successors to El Clamor Público and Ramírez; they insisted on integration into the American education and political system and promoted learning the English language for survival. In doing so, they created a firm basis for the development of not only an ethnic-minority identity but also biculturation, that is, a bicultural and bilingual citizenry for Mexican Americans—precisely what Hispanics advocate today in the United States. In Texas, in the post-statehood period, there were numerous journalists and writers, such as the famed and persecuted Catarino Garza—mentioned earlier as the subject of corridos—who helped foster a sense of identity among the native Hispanic population. Born on the border, in 1859, and raised in or around Brownsville, Texas, Garza worked on newspapers in Laredo, Eagle Pass, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio. In the Brownsville–Eagle Pass area, he became involved in local politics and published two newspapers, El Comercio Mexicano (Mexican Commerce, 1886–?) and El Libre Pensador (The Free Thinker, 1890–?), which criticized the violence and expropriations suffered by Mexican Americans. Beginning in 1888, when he confronted U.S. Customs agents for assassinating two Mexican prisoners, Garza became more militant and struck out at authorities on both sides of the border, leading a band of followers that included farmers, laborers, and former Texas separatists. A special force of Texas Rangers eventually broke up his force of raiders, and Garza fled in 1892 to New Orleans and from there to Cuba and Panama, where he was reportedly killed while fighting for Panamanian independence from Colombia. Garza’s exploits were followed in detail in the Spanish-language newspapers of the Southwest and helped coalesce feelings about exploitation and dispossession among the Mexican American population. This process was also abetted by the reprinting of Garza’s articles in Spanish-language newspapers throughout the Southwest. 686


Although Garza reverted to striking out at authorities militantly, the Idar family of journalists and labor organizers brought both natives and Mexicans together in the pursuit of rights at the turn of the century and concentrated on the consistent year-in-year-out power of editorials and political organizing. Laredo’s La Crónica (The Chronicle, 1909–?), written and published by Nicasio Idar and his eight children, became one of the most influential Spanishlanguage periodicals in Texas. Like many Hispanic newspaper publishers and editors who spearheaded social and political causes for their communities, Idar and his eight children led many liberal causes. His daughter Jovita Idar* was at the forefront of women’s issues and collaborated in a number of women’s periodicals. La Crónica decried everything from racism and segregation in public institutions to negative stereotypes in tent theaters and movie houses. Of a working-class and union-organizing background, Nicasio Idar supported three overriding ideas: humans, in general, and Mexicans in Texas, in specific, needed to educate themselves; only through education would social and political progress come about; and it was the special role of the newspapers to guide the way and facilitate that education. Only through education would Mexicans in Texas uplift themselves from their poverty and misery and defend themselves from the abuse of the Anglo Texans; Mexican families were exhorted to maintain their children in school so that the situation of Mexicans in the state would gradually improve from one generation to the next (Oct. 11, 1910). The Idar family and their publications were as good as their words: they headed up a successful statewide drive to import Mexican teachers, find them places in which to teach children, and support them financially. Through this strategy, two social ills began to be addressed: nonadmittance of Mexican children to many schools and the stemming of the loss of the Spanish language and Mexican culture among the young. In New Mexico, which received far fewer immigrants than California and Texas, a native press flourished. Because New Mexico had drawn comparably fewer Anglo settlers and entrepreneurs than California and Texas and because it had a proportionately larger Hispanic population—only in New Mexico did Hispanics maintain a demographic superiority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—New Mexico was the territory that first developed a widespread independent native Hispanic press and sustained it well into the twentieth century. Not only did more Hispanics than Anglos live there, but they resided in a more compact area, with comparably less competition and violence from Anglo newcomers. The Nuevomexicanos were able to hold onto more lands, property, and institutions than did the Hispanics of California and Texas. Control of their own newspapers and publications became essential in the eyes of Hispanic intellectuals and community leaders in the development of Nuevomexicano identity and self-determination in the face of adjusting to the new culture that was foisted on them during the territorial period. This meant that the New Mexican hispanos controlled the writing and publication of their own literature, as well as its distribution. But Nuevomexicanos were living under a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they wanted to control their 687


own destiny and preserve their own language and culture while enjoying the benefits and rights of what they considered to be the advanced civilization that the United States had to offer through statehood. On the other hand, the Nuevomexicanos immediately became aware of the dangers of Anglo American cultural, economic, and political encroachment—which also meant fewer opportunities to publish in Spanish and to control their own literary production. According to Gabriel Meléndez, many of the intellectual leaders, especially newspaper publishers, believed that the native population would only advance, learn to protect itself, and merit statehood through education (24–25). They saw the newspapers as key to the education and advancement of the natives, as well as to the protection of their civil and property rights. This meant that there was a role for literature in creating identity, preserving history and culture, and furthering self-determination. Nuevomexicanos felt the urgency of empowering themselves in the new system—retaining some of the power they had under Mexico—but Washington delayed statehood for more than fifty years in expectation, most historians agree, of Anglos achieving a numerical and voting superiority in the territory. In the decade following the arrival of the railroad in 1879, native Hispanic journalism and publishing increased dramatically in the New Mexico territory. A true flowering of Nuevomexicano periodicals and the literature published in them followed in the 1890s, when some thirty-five Spanish-language newspapers were being published. In these periodicals, native Hispanic literature took hold in New Mexico. From 1879 to 1912—the year New Mexico was admitted as a state—more than ninety Spanish-language newspapers were published in New Mexico. How and why did this occur? Meléndez posits the political exigency of preserving their language, culture, and civil rights (30). The new technology that Nuevomexicanos adopted did not represent fundamental cultural change; rather, it empowered cultural expression that was long-held and deeply rooted in the area. As Doris Meyer put it, “The Spanish-language press, as a bridge between tradition and modernity and as an advocate of its people in Hispanic New Mexico, served as a counter discourse contesting the Anglo myth of the frontier and claiming a space for otherness in American society. In its pages one finds the multivocal reality of Neomexicano cultural identity that resists monolithic definition.” (110) In his book, Meléndez proceeds to document amply how the Nuevomexicano journalists set about taking control of their social and cultural destiny by constructing what they saw as a “national” culture for themselves, which consisted of using and preserving the Spanish language, formulating their own version of history, and publishing their own literature, all of which would ensure their selfconfident and proud entrance as a state into the Union. From within the group of newspaper publishers and editors sprang a cohesive and identifiable corps of native creative writers, historians, and publishers who were elaborating a native and indigenous intellectual tradition, which is the basis of much of the intellectual and literary work of Mexican Americans today. The development of the New Mexican Hispanic press, thus, followed a very different pattern at that 688


time from that of New York’s Hispanic press, which received publishers, writers, and journalists who had been trained in their homelands and who saw themselves as exiles or immigrants. This same pattern of an immigrant press also emerged in the major cities of the Southwest, with the massive arrival of economic and political refugees of the Mexican Revolution after 1910. The cultural nationalism of these native journalists sprang from the necessity to defend their community from the cultural, economic, and political onslaught of the “outsiders.” To counter the American myth of civilizing the West—that is, subduing the barbarous and racially inferior Indians and Mexicans—that empowered the United States and its “pioneers” to encroach and dispossess Indians and Hispanics of their lands and patrimony, the Nuevomexicano writers began elaborating a myth of their own, that of the glorious introduction of European civilization and its institutions by the Spanish during the colonial period. Prior achievement legitimized their claims to land, as well as to the protection and preservation of their language and culture. In their rhetoric the Nuevomexicano editorialists were able to turn the tables on the Anglo American settlers and businessmen who had “invaded” the territory; the Nuevomexicanos claimed their own higher breeding and Catholic religion over the low morality, vicious opportunism, and hypocrisy of the Anglo Protestant interlopers and adventurers. In the construction of their history, the editors included historical and biographical materials regularly, even in weekly columns, covering the full gamut of Hispanic history, from the exploration and colonization of Mexico, including what became the U.S. Southwest, to the life histories of important historical figures, such as Miguel de Hidalgo y Costilla, Simón Bolívar, and José de San Martín. They also began to publish history books and biographies documenting their own evolution as a people. Even in their newspapers, biographies became standard fare because they documented the contributions of their own forebears and even their contemporaries in New Mexico and the Southwest. This Fantasy Heritage* of Spanish superiority was carried on long into the twentieth century by essayists, storytellers, poets, and a cadre of women writers who sought to remember and preserve the culture and folkways of their Hispanic ancestors before Anglo culture had begun transforming life in New Mexico. When English became the language of widespread publication in the twentieth century, Nina Otero Warren,* Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca,* and Cleofas Jaramillo* cultivated this idealized heritage in attempts at retaining a grandiose past that reminded them—and supposedly their Anglo readers as well—of the high culture and privilege that anteceded the transformations brought on by the migrants from the East. Even the religious poet and historian Fray Angélico Chávez* memorialized the Hispanic past and previously unaltered landscape of New Mexico. In Texas, too, Adina de Zavala* and Jovita González* plumbed history and folklore in an effort to preserve the Hispanic heritage of their state, lest all forget that there was life and culture there before the arrival of the Anglos. And despite all of these writers’ emphasis on validating, some would say romanticizing, the life on ranches and missions, 689


their study and preservation of folklore translated to respect for the culture of common men and women, not just the privileged landowners. This perspective differed from that of the nineteenth-century Californios, such as Platón Vallejo,* Brígida Briones, Angustias de la Guerra Ord, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton*—who had elevated the pastoral and mannered life on ranches and missions to an elite status superior to that of the rough and rowdy forty-niners and pioneers who purportedly had civilized the West. Ironically, during the early twentieth century, although a number of immigrant authors and refugees—such as María Cristina Mena,* Salomón de la Selva,* and Luis Pérez*—found their way into the mainstream Englishlanguage publishing houses in the United States, most of the works of these native writers were issued by small, regional presses—or they remained unpublished. Even though Miguel Antonio Otero,* Adina de Zavala,* and Amparo Ruiz de Burton* had the resources to self-publish and underwrite their own books, such an important native writer as Américo Paredes,* of Brownsville, Texas, was unsuccessful in placing his early works in English (he had previously published in Spanish in Texas newspapers); his 1936 novel George Washington Gómez did not make it into print until 1990. Even as late as 1953, when his manuscript novel The Shadow won a national contest, Paredes was unsuccessful in locating a publisher. Similarly, in her lifetime, Jovita González* never saw her two novels in print: Caballero and Dew on the Thorn, novels that sought to preserve the Hispanic cultural past of Texas. It was not until the 1960s that such writers as Puerto Ricans Piri Thomas* and Nicholasa Mohr,* Cuban American Jose Yglesias,* and Chicanos José Antonio Villarreal* (although Doubleday issued his Pocho in 1959) and Floyd Salas,* a descendant of the original Hispanic settlers in Colorado, saw their works issued by the large commercial houses in New York. Most of their works fit into that melting-pot genre par excellence: ethnic autobiography. The Hispanic civil rights movements and the entrance of a broad sector of Hispanics into universities helped usher in a period of flourishing of Hispanic literature in the English language that began in the 1970s and persists today. The Hispanic civil rights movement that emerged in the 1960s had inherited a legacy of resistance against colonialism, segregation, and exploitation; this legacy was expressed in the writings of editorialists, union organizers, and defenders of the culture in the early twentieth century. At the turn of the century, Nicasio and Jovita Idar* used their Laredo newspaper La Crónica to raise the level of consciousness about the cultural and political struggles, as well as to organize communities of both natives and immigrants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Alonso Perales* published hundreds of letters and editorials in newspapers in defense of civil rights of Mexicans in the Southwest, long before he came together with others to found the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is still fighting civil rights battles. New Mexico’s Aurora Lucero* and Eusebio Chacón* delivered an untold number of speeches in defense of the Spanish language and cultural rights. In San Antonio, the firebrand of the 1938 pecan shellers’ strike, Emma Tenayuca,* moved 690


thousands with her passionate speeches, in the first large, successful strike in that industry. In their essays, she and Isabel González created a firm, ideological base for the civil rights struggles of Mexican Americans. But it was Américo Paredes, writing in English in the mid-1930s, who best articulated the cultural and economic devastation felt by his generation of bilingual/bicultural natives of the Southwest. In poems, novels, and short stories, this native of Brownsville, Texas, was able to capture the nuances of language and the ethos of an oppressed people that he would transmit during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s through his leadership as a scholar and teacher at the University of Texas. Indeed, a broad range of writers, scholars, and even singersongwriters, such as Tish Hinojosa and Linda Rondstadt, continue to cite Paredes as their cultural mentor. Since the late nineteenth century, New York, as the principal port of entry for immigrants from Europe and the Caribbean, has always harbored and nurtured a culture of immigration that facilitated the integration of immigrants into the economy and overall culture. Within this general framework, numerous immigrant newspapers flourished, in part to facilitate this transition. Some of those newspapers reflect the awareness of their communities’ evolution toward citizenship status or American naturalization and expressed demands for the entitlements and guarantees of citizenship. Even Gráfico—which, in most respects, was a typical immigrant newspaper—began to recognize the American citizenship of its readers, mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans residing in East Harlem, and to demand the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and freedom from discrimination. And, although the editors of Gráfico often made comparisons of their community to those of other immigrant groups, the editors were leveraging the U.S. citizenship of many Hispanics residing in East Harlem. Because of the Jones Act of 1917, which extended citizenship to Puerto Ricans, these former islanders did not have to learn English, acculturate, or assimilate to become citizens; citizenship was automatic. Since 1917, this line between immigrant and citizen for Puerto Ricans in New York has been blurred, even accounting for highly complex modes of expression that exhibit the confidence and entitlement to the expressive rights of natives, but nevertheless maintain that double gaze, that dual perspective that is characteristic of immigrant culture. With the advent of the Great Depression, New York did not experience the massive repatriation of Hispanics that occurred in the Southwest. Instead, the opposite was true. Hard economic times on the Island brought even more Puerto Ricans to the city—a trend that would intensify during World War II, as northeastern manufacturing and services industries experienced labor shortages and recruited heavily in Puerto Rico. The massive return of Puerto Ricans from serving in the war further intensified the community’s identity as a native citizenry. And community members were appealed to as citizens by their local newspapers to organize politically and vote. In 1941, a new newspaper, La Defensa (The Defense), appeared in East Harlem, specifically to further the interests of the Hispanics of the area who, it stated, were there to stay (“no somos aves de paso”—we are not here as temporary birds). 691


In 1927, a league was formed in New York City to increase the power of the Hispanic community by unifying its diverse organizations. Among the very specific goals of the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana* (The Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) were representing the community to the “authorities,” working for the economic and social betterment of the Puerto Ricans, and propagating the vote among Puerto Ricans. The Liga founded a periodical in 1927 entitled Boletín Oficial de la Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Official Bulletin of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) to keep its member organizations and their constituents informed of community concerns. However, the Boletín evolved into much more than a newsletter, functioning more like a community newspaper and including essays and cultural items, as well as news items, in its pages. The periodical provided needed information and education to the Hispanic community and, especially, promoted suffrage among Puerto Ricans. Although cultural items were front and center in the early years, coverage of working-class* issues and ideology became more emphasized later in its run under the directorship of Jesús Colón.* Like Américo Paredes in the Southwest, Jesús Colón was a figure who made the transition from Spanish to English and laid the basis for a more militant literature during the 1960s and 1970s among Nuyoricans. Colón must be considered one of the most important immigrant writers in the early twentieth century, but, by the time he was writing in English for the Daily Worker and published his first collection of essays, A Puerto Rican in New York, in 1963, he had already articulated many of the perspectives on race, class, and esthetics that Nuyoricans soon adopted. The Chicano and Nuyorican generations were fortunate to have these models of working-class esthetics available, as they began to define their bilingual–bicultural ethnopoetics. These models came not only from educators like Américo Paredes and journalists like Jesús Colón, but from community poets and activists raised in the oral tradition (see Orality), such as Abelardo Delgado* of El Paso and Jorge Brandon* of the Lower East Side of New York City. Historians date the beginning of the Chicano Movement to the effort in the mid-1960s to organize the United Farm Workers Union, led by César Chávez.* The farm worker struggle served as a catalyst for a generation of Mexican Americans, who had been inspired by the African American civil rights movement and the protest against the Vietnam War. This was the first generation of U.S. Hispanics to have greater access to college, largely because of the Kennedy–Johnson initiatives to democratize education. For Chicano Literature,* the decade of the 1960s was a time of questioning all of the commonly accepted truths in the society, foremost of which was the question of equality. The first writers of Chicano Literature committed their literary voices to the political, economic, and educational development of their communities. Their works were frequently used to inspire social and political action; quite often, poets read their verses at organizing meetings, at boycotts, and before and after protest marches. Of necessity, many of the first writers to gain prominence in the movement were the poets who could tap into the Hispanic oral tradition of recitation and declamation. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* Abelardo Delgado,* 692


Ricardo Sánchez,* and Alurista* (Alberto Baltasar Urista) stand out in this period. They created works to be performed orally before groups of students and workers to inspire them and raise their level of consciousness. The two most important literary milestones in kicking off the movement were both related to grassroots activism. In 1965, actor-playwright Luis Valdez* organized farm workers from the nascent union into an improvisational agit-prop theater company, El Teatro Campesino. In 1967, the epic poem I Am Joaquín was written and selfpublished by “Corky” Gonzales, the founder of the militant Chicano civil rights and social service organization, the Crusade for Justice. Under the leadership of Valdez and the powerful example of El Teatro Campesino, a full-blown grassroots theater movement emerged and lasted for almost two decades, with hundreds of community and student theater companies dramatizing the political and cultural concerns of the communities while crisscrossing the nation on tours. The movement, largely student- and workerbased, eventually became professionalized, producing works for Broadway and Hollywood and fostering the creation of the field of Chicano theater at universities. By 1968, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino had left the vineyards and lettuce fields in a conscious effort to create a theater for the Chicano nation, a people whom Valdez and other Chicano organizers and ideologues envisioned as exclusively working-class, Spanish-speaking or bilingual, rurally oriented people with a very strong heritage of pre-Columbian culture. The word “Chicano” was a working-class derivation and abbreviation of the indigenousbased pronunciation of the name of the Aztec tribes, “Mechicano,” from which the name of Mexico is also derived. Through the extensive touring of El Teatro Campesino, the creation of a national organization for Chicano theaters and annual conventions and workshops, and the publication of a teatro magazine and the company’s Actos, along with Valdez’s guidelines on creating plays and emergent Chicano nationalism, Valdez was able to broadcast and solidify the movement. It eventually gave rise to a generation not only of theaters and actors but also of bilingual–bicultural playwrights, directors, producers, and theater educators who are still very active today. Gonzales’s I Am Joaquín followed a similar trajectory in disseminating not only a similar nationalist esthetic, but also in providing a model for poets, whether at the grassroots level or at universities. The poem, which summarized Mexican and Mexican American history, shaped a nationalist ideological base for activism in that it reviewed the history of exploitation of the mestizos from colonial times to the present and called for an awakening to activism, using the model of the nineteenth-century social rebel, Joaquín Murrieta.* The short bilingual pamphlet edition of the poem was literally passed from hand to hand in communities, read aloud at rallies, dramatized by Chicano theaters, and even produced as a slide show on a film with a dramatic reading by none other than Luis Valdez. The influence and social impact of I Am Joaquín—and of works of the other poets who wrote for and from the grass roots in the militant stage of the Chicano Movement—is inestimable. This period was one of euphoria, power, and influence for the Chicano poet, who was sought after, 693


almost as a priest, to give his or her blessings in the form of readings at all Chicano cultural and movement events. The grassroots movement was soon joined by one in academe: universitybased magazines and publishing houses were formed and Chicano studies and bilingual education departments were institutionalized. Sharing a similar nationalist/indigenist esthetic as Valdez and Gonzales were scholars Octavio Romano and Herminio Ríos, the publishers of the most successful magazine, El Grito (The Shout—a title hearkening back to the Mexican declaration of independence from Spain), and its affiliate publishing house, Editorial Quinto Sol* (Fifth Sun—a title based on the renascence of Aztec culture). Besides introducing Alurista’s bilingual poetry and Miguel Méndez’s* trilingual prose (Yaqui, in addition to English and Spanish) to a broad audience through its magazine and its first anthology, Quinto Sol consciously set about constructing a Chicano canon with its publication of the first three award-winning literary works, all of which have become foundational for Chicano prose fiction: Tomás Rivera’s* . . . y no sel tragó la terra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Rolando Hinojosa’s* Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973, Sketches of the Valley and Other Works). This predominantly male canon belatedly admitted a feminist writer of stories and plays in 1975 with the publication of Estela Portillo Trambley’s* Rain of Scorpions. Her influence has not been as lasting as that of other women writing from the mid-1970s and who, by the 1980s, had taken the reins of Chicano literature, making up the first crossover generation of writers to mainstream publishing in English. Most of these writers—including Ana Castillo,* Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Denise Chávez,* Sandra Cisneros,* Pat Mora,* Helena María Viramontes,* and Evangelina Vigil*—had received their first national exposure through Revista Chicano-Riqueña, founded in 1973, and Arte Público Press,* founded in 1979, both published at the University of Houston. In addition to picking up the pieces after the demise of Quinto Sol by publishing Alurista, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, and Luis Valdez, Arte Público Press continues to bring newer writers to the fore. But in its panHispanism, the press has also been the major publisher of Nuyorican* and Cuban American literature.* Arte Público Press and Revista Chicano-Riqueña have been major long-lived promoters of a national Latino culture and literature; they were the first publishing enterprises to open their doors to writers of all of the Hispanic ethnic groups in the United States. And it has been Arte Público Press itself that has launched the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage,* a program to find and make accessible all of the documents created by Hispanics in every area that became the United States from the colonial period to the present. Nuyorican writing made its appearance in the United States with a definite proletarian identity, emerging from the working-class, urbanized culture of the children of the migrants. It arose as a dynamic literature of oral performance (see Orality)—based on the folklore and popular culture within the neighborhoods of the most cosmopolitan and postmodern city in the United States, 694


New York (“Nuyorican” was derived from “New York Rican”). Piri Thomas’s multivolume autobiography in the poetic language of the streets, Victor Hernández Cruz’s* urban jazz poetry, and Nicholasa Mohr’s developmental novel Nilda—all issued by mainstream commercial presses—led the way toward the establishment of a new cultural and literary Nuyorican identity that was as hip as salsa and as alienated and seethingly revolutionary as shouts from urban labor camps and from prisons—the prisons in which many of the first practitioners of Nuyorican poetry and drama learned their craft. Ex-con and ex-gang leader Miguel Piñero* and the Nuyorican group of poets, some of whom were outlaws in the literal as well as figurative sense, embellished on the theme of urban marginalization and repression and made it the threatening dynamic of their bilingual poetry and drama. Piñero was successful at taking it even to the stages of Broadway and to Hollywood films. Their works threatened the very concept of literature that was cultivated by the academy as highly crafted art based on literate models selected from the classical repertoire of Western civilization. The Nuyorican writers created a style and ideology that still dominates urban Hispanic writing: working-class,* unapologetic, and proud of its lack of schooling and polish—a threat not only to mainstream literature and the academy but also, with its insistence on its outlaw and street culture elements, to mainstream society. Poets such as Tato Laviera,* Victor Hernández Cruz, Sandra María Esteves,* and Pedro Pietri* did not seek written models for their work. They were far more attuned to and inspired by the salsa lyrics and the recitations of bards and folk poets (see Folklore and Oral Tradition), who had always performed the news, history, and love songs in the public plazas and festivals of small-town Puerto Rico—often in the form of décimas* and the refrains of bombas and plenas, the prevalent folk-song frameworks on the Island. In capturing the sights and sounds of their “urban pastoral,” it was an easy and natural step to cultivating bilingual (see Bilingualism in Literature) poetry, to capturing the bilingual/bicultural reality that surrounded them and reintroducing their works into their communities through the virtuosity that live performance demands in folk culture. El Barrio, El Bronx, and Loisaida* (the Lower East Side) neighborhood audiences, made exigent by the technical sophistication of salsa records and performance as well as television and film, demanded authenticity, artistic virtuosity, and philosophical and political insight. And Laviera, Hernández Cruz, Esteves, and Pietri reigned as masters for almost two decades. That they are accessible to far more people through oral performance than publication is not an accident nor is it a sign of lack of sophistication—it was their literary mission, their political and economic stance. Miguel Algarín,* a university-educated poet, a professor at Rutgers University, who also was raised in the Puerto Rican barrios, stimulated, through example and entrepreneurial insight, the publication of Nuyorican poetry in anthologies, magazines, and through Arte Público Press books. He further showcased Nuyorican performance art at his Nuyorican Poets Cafe in Loisaida and took troupes of writers on national tours of poetry slams. Besides 695


authoring outstanding avant-garde poetry himself, Algarín helped solidify the Nuyorican literary identity and foster its entrance into the larger world of contemporary American avant-garde poetics. During the 1980s and continuing to the present, with the assistance of such publishing houses as Arte Público and Bilingual Review Press,* a new wave of Hispanic writers has emerged, not from the barrios, fields, prisons, and student movements—but from university creative writing programs. Almost all are monolingual English-speaking and English-writing: Julia Alvarez,* Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Daniel Chacón,* Sarah Cortez,* Alicia Gaspar del Alba,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Cristina García,* Junot Díaz,* Dagoberto Gilb,* Oscar Hijuelos,* Marcos McPeek Villatoro,* Alberto Ríos,* Benjamin Saenz,* Gary Soto,* Virgil Suárez,* Gloria Vando,* and Helena María Viramontes.* (The outstanding Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes is a transitional figure, who arose in the mid-1970s as part of the Chicano Movement, but, after becoming a recognized poet, she returned to the university in the 1980s in pursuit of a Ph.D.) Most of them are natives of the United States, but some arrived as children from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. They cultivate coming-of-age novels and novels of immigrant adjustment to American society, akin to the ethnic autobiography* written in the United States by a variety of minorities and ethnic groups—to be distinguished from the literature of immigration that is written in Spanish and promotes a return to the homeland. They and many others continue to explore their identity in U.S. society. Some authors, such as Gloria Anzaldúa,* Cherrie Moraga,* and Aurora Levins Morales,* have furthered feminist positions in their literature, exploring the relationship between gender and ethnic identity and entering realms considered taboo by earlier generations of Hispanic writers, such as those concerning sexual identities. And from the ranks of the new wave, Hispanic literature in the United States produced its first Pulitzer-Prize winner, Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The literature of this generation is the one most known by a broad segment of readers in the United States today and has the greatest possibility of entering and influencing mainstream culture. However, this is also the Hispanic literature that has emerged from and been influenced most by mainstream culture and its institutions; therefore, it is the most accessible to a broad segment of English speakers and has the greatest access to commercial publishing. On the other hand, this is the literature of a minority of Hispanic writers, and it often tends to distance itself very far from its indigenous communities. This is a contemporary manifestation of a long-standing heritage; it is the very tip of an iceberg: the body is made up of writing in Spanish from the three literary traditions: native, immigrant, and exile.

Immigrant Literature Although the roots of immigrant literature were planted in nineteenth-century newspapers in California and New York, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that a well-defined immigrant expression emerged from New 696


York to the Southwest. Although New York had been the port of entry for millions of Europeans and hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, major cities in the Southwest received an outpouring of approximately 1 million dislocated working-class Mexicans during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. And Los Angeles and San Antonio received the largest number of Mexican immigrants and, consequently, supported most writing and publication efforts. San Antonio became home to more than a dozen Spanish-language publishing houses, more than any other city in the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and many other cities, an entrepreneurial class of refugees and immigrants came, with sufficient cultural and financial capital to establish businesses of all types to serve the rapidly growing Hispanic enclaves. They constructed everything from tortilla factories to Hispanic theaters and movie houses, and, through their cultural leadership in mutual aid societies, the churches, theaters, newspapers and publishing houses, they were able to disseminate a nationalistic ideology that ensured the solidarity and isolation of their communities, or their market. In addition to being the location of important preexisting Hispanic communities, these cities were chosen by the economic and political refugees because their urban industrial bases were expanding and undergoing rapid industrialization and modernization and because work and opportunities were available. New York offered numerous opportunities in manufacturing and service industries; Los Angeles and San Antonio were also good bases for recruitment of agricultural and railroad workers. Since their arrival in the United States, Hispanic immigrants have used the press and literature in their native language to maintain a connection with the homeland while attempting to adjust to a new society and culture. Hispanic immigrant literature shares many of the distinctions that Park identified in 1922 in his study on the immigrant press as a whole: the predominant use of the language of the homeland in serving a population united by that language, irrespective of national origin, and solidifying and furthering nationalism (9–13). The literature of immigration serves a population in transition from the land of origin to the United States by reflecting the reasons for emigrating, recording the trials and tribulations of immigration, and facilitating adjustment to the new society while maintaining a link with the old society. Underlying Park’s distinctions and those of other students of immigration are the myths of the American Dream and the Melting Pot: the belief that the immigrants came to find a better life, implicitly a better culture, and that, soon, they or their descendants would become Americans and no longer a need literature in the language of the “old country.” These myths and many of Park’s opinions and observations about European immigrants do not hold true for the literature of Hispanic immigration, which was not about assimilating or melting into a generalized American identity. The history of Hispanic groups in the United States has shown an unmeltable ethnicity. As immigration from Spanishspeaking countries has been almost a steady flow since the founding of the United States to the present, there seems no end to the phenomenon at this juncture in history nor in the foreseeable future. 697


In general, the literature of Hispanic immigration displays a double-gaze perspective: forever comparing the past and the present, the homeland and the new country, and only seeing the resolution of these double, conflicting points of reference when the author, characters, or audience can return to the patria (homeland). The literature of immigration reinforces the culture of the homeland while facilitating the accommodation to the new land. Although it is fervently nationalistic, this literature seeks to represent and protect the rights of immigrants by protesting discrimination, human rights abuses, and racism. Because much of this literature arises from or is pitched to the working class,* it adopts the working-class and rural dialects of the immigrants; today, earlier immigrant literature may be seen as a museum of orality* during the period of its writing. Among the predominant themes in the literature of immigration are the description of the “Metropolis,” often in satirical or critical terms, as in essays by José Martí,* Francisco “Pachín” Marín,* and Nicanor Bolet Peraza*; the description of the trials and tribulations of immigrants, especially in their journey and in their exploitation as workers and discrimination as foreigners and racial others, as in Daniel Venegas* and Conrado Espinosa*; the conflict between Anglo and Hispanic cultures, ubiquitous in this literature; and the expression of gender anxieties in nationalist reaction against assimilation into mainstream culture. Highly politicized authors, including those of the working class, often cast their literary discourse in the framework of an imminent return to the homeland or a warning to those back home not to come to the United States and face the disillusionment that the writers and their protagonists had already experienced. This stance of writing to warn their compatriots, when in actuality they were speaking to their immigrant enclave or community in the “belly of the beast,” to use Martí’s term, helped authors find common cause and solidarity with their audiences. Both writers and readers were rendering testimony to the uninitiated, who were the potential greenhorns, destined in the future to suffer as had the protagonists of these immigrant genres. These formulas and themes depended on the underlying premise of immigrant literature: the return to the patria, which thus necessitated the preservation of language and culture and loyalty to the patria. Almost invariably, the narratives of immigration end with the main characters returning to the home soil; failure to do so results in death, the severest poetic justice, as illustrated in the first novel of immigration, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s* Lucas Guevara (1914), and, almost half a century later, in René Marqués’s* play La carreta (1953, The Oxcart, 1969). Because of the massive migrations of workingclass Mexicans and Puerto Ricans during the first half of the twentieth century, much of immigrant literature is to be found in oral expression, folk songs (see Folklore), vaudeville, and other working-class literary and artistic expression. The anonymous Mexican corridor* “El lavaplatos” (The Dishwasher) reproduces the same cycle as Daniel Venegas’s working-class novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen (1928, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000) of departure to find 698


work in the United States, disillusionment in laboring like a beast of burden, and eventual return home. The immigrants’ songs of uprootedness and longing for the homeland can be heard in the decimal* (a song with ten-line stanzas and a sonnet-like rhyme scheme) “Lamento de un jíbaro” (Lament of the Jíbaro*). But the ultimate experience of disillusionment and disgrace for the immigrant was being deported, as documented in the plaintive refrains of the corrido “Los deportados” (The Deportees) and the outraged newspaper editorials by Rodolfo Uranga.* Quite often, the setting for this literature is the workplace, be that on the streets walked by Wen Gálvez’s* door-to-door salesman in Tampa: Impresiones de un emigrado (1897, Tampa: Impressions of an Immigrant), in the factory of Gustavo Alemán Bolaños’s* La factoría (1925, The Factory), or under the burning sun in the agricultural fields, as in Conrado Espinosa’s El sol de Texas (1926, The Texas Sun). But domestic settings are also frequent, even in contemporary plays, such as René Marqués’s La carreta and Iván Acosta’s* El super (1977), both depicting the intergenerational conflict splitting U.S.-acculturated children from their immigrant parents. Culture conflict of all sorts typifies this work; from this conflict arise some of its most typical characters, such as the agringados (Gringoized) and renegados (renegades) and pitiyanquis (petit Yankees), who deny their own culture to adopt American ways. But more than any other archetype of American culture, the predominantly male authors chose the American female to personify the eroticism and immorality, greed, and materialism that they perceived in American society. What was an amoral Eve in a metropolis identified as Sodom for Alirio Díaz Guerra evolved into the 1920s flapper in Jesús Colón, Daniel Venegas, and Julio G. Arce* (“Jorge Ulica”); this enticing but treacherous Eve led unassuming Hispanic Adams into perdition. These authors placed the responsibility for preserving Hispanic customs and language, for protecting identity, in the hands of their own women and, subsequently, levied severe criticism at those who adopted more liberal American customs or even dared to behave like flappers themselves. Despite this conservative, even misogynist propaganda, from these very same communities emerged a cadre of Hispanic women journalists and labor leaders who rejected circumscribed social roles, even if they were draped in nationalist rhetoric fashioned in the lofty and elegant prose of Nemesio García Naranjo’s* “México de afuera” (1923, Mexico on the Other Side) or the mordant satire of Jorge Ulica’s Crónicas diabólicas (1925, The Stenographer). In word and deed, such political activists and labor organizers as Leonor Villegas de Magnón* and Sara Estela Ramírez* inspired social action through their speeches, poems, and journalism. Teacher Ramírez was renowned, through her eloquently passionate speeches, for inspiring predominantly male workers to unionize; her sister teacher in Laredo, Villegas, organized Anglo, Mexican, and Mexican American women to enter the Mexican Revolution as nurses and then sought to record their contributions for posterity in her memoir, The Rebel. María Luisa Garza,* as a cronista writing under the pseudonym 699


of Loreley, took on the defense of women in numerous unflinching and elegantly well-reasoned articles. These women did this despite their having to negotiate the hostile environment of an all-male editorial staff at San Antonio’s La prensa (The Press) in the 1920s. Consuelo Lee Tapia* sought to document the history of activism and contributions to Puerto Rican nationhood by women. On the same pages of Tapia’s Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), one of the greatest lyric poets of the Americas, Julia de Burgos,* wed her intimate verses to the movement for Puerto Rican nationhood. And on the very grassroots but subtle level of vaudeville tent performances, Netty Rodríguez*, through her agringada (Anglicized) persona, vigorously resisted her mate’s exhortations to conform to the feminine role prescribed by working-class Mexican culture. But the clearest example of Hispanic feminism dates to the beginning of the twentieth century, when, again, in deed and practice Puerto Rican labor* organizer Luisa Capetillo* disseminated her spirited break with all social constraints on women in her treatises, plays, and poems. All of these women writer-activists presented powerful models of thought and expression that inspire their spiritual descendants today. For the Hispanic immigrant communities, defense of civil and human rights extended to protecting their enclaves from the influence of Anglo American culture and the very real dangers present in the workplace, in the schools, and in public policy. Editorial discontent has dominated the publications of Hispanic immigrants in the major cities since the beginning of the century. Joaquín Colón,* president of the Puerto Rican and Latin League and brother to Jesús Colón, used the bully pulpit in the Liga’s newspaper during the 1930s to chastise the Hispanic community for its failings. His memoir, Pioneros puertorriqueños en Nueva York (Puerto Rican Pioneers in New York), is a chronicle of the community’s struggles against political and economic odds to organize for its defense and progress. The editorial pages of most Hispanic newspapers resounded with cries for equality and freedom from discrimination and segregation; defense of the community was not just a theme to be displayed on their mastheads. Editorialists in the Southwest, too, from Nemesio García Naranjo to the Idar family and Rodolfo Uranga, were vigilant of abuses of the immigrant and native communities and often lodged protests through their columns. Uranga decried one of the greatest injustices perpetrated on Mexican immigrants and on numerous natives, as well: widespread deportations during the Depression. Today’s Spanish-language newspapers continue in the same tradition, repeatedly criticizing discrimination and deportations by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Immigrant authors—in editorials, poems, essays, and stories—continue to erect a bulwark of vigilance and defense of their communities. However, because Puerto Ricans have been citizens since 1917, deportation for their political or labor-organizing activities—or for being “burdensome” to the welfare system—has not been part of their imaginary. Thus, once again, the distinction between the “immigrant” legal status and the “immigrant” cultural experience is clear. Puerto Ricans in the 700


continental United States have immigration and migration deeply imbedded in their collective experience, but the fear of deportation as a form of discrimination and oppression has, for the most part, been absent. Since the beginning of Hispanic immigrant literature, authors have felt it their duty to insulate the community from the influence of Anglo American culture and the Protestant religion. This explains in part Díaz Guerra’s moralistic attack on the big city (New York) and his depiction of the American Eve as representing all of the ills of American society. Mexican publishers and writers in the Southwest, moreover, were almost unanimous in developing and promoting the idea of a “México de afuera” or Mexican colony existing outside of Mexico, in which it was the duty of individuals to maintain the Spanish language, keep the Catholic faith, and insulate their children from what community leaders perceived as the low moral standards practiced by Anglo Americans. Such expatriate writers and editorialists as the Mexican intellectual Nemesio García Naranjo emphasized over and over that not only were immigrants and exiles part of this “México de afuera,” but so was the native Hispanic population of the Southwest. However, this ideology promoted an objective that was not held by natives: return to Mexico as a premise for its nationalism. This premise maintained that Mexican national culture was to be preserved in exile in the midst of iniquitous Anglo Protestants, whose culture was seen as immoral yet aggressively discriminatory against Hispanics. The ideology was expressed and disseminated by immigrant and exile writers alike, some of whom were political and religious refugees from the Mexican Revolution. They represented the most conservative segment of Mexican society in the homeland; in the United States, their cultural leadership was exerted in all phases of life in the colonia (colony), solidifying a conservative substratum for Mexican American culture for decades to come. Even though many of the writers were educated and came from middleto upper-class backgrounds, the largest audiences for the plays, novels, and poems were made up of the working-class immigrants who were crowded in urban barrios—audiences hungry for entertainment and cultural products in their own language. Thanks to the expanding American economy, they had the greenbacks to pay for these cultural representations of their lives. Among the various types of literature that were published in the Hispanic immigrant newspapers was a genre that was more traditionally identified with and central to Hispanic newspapers everywhere and that was essential in forming and reinforcing community attitudes—the crónica,* a short, weekly column that commented humorously and satirically on current topics and social habits in the local community. Rife with local color and inspired by oral lore of the immigrants, the crónica was narrated in the first person, from the masked perspective of a pseudonym. Cronistas surveyed life in the enclave and served as witnesses to the customs and behavior of the colony— whose very existence was seen as threatened by the dominant Anglo Saxon culture. Influenced by popular jokes, anecdotes, and speech, their columns registered the surrounding social environment. It was the cronista’s job to fan 701


the flames of nationalism and to sustain ideologies such as “México de afuera” and “Trópico en Manhattan,” the latter signifying the transformation of the metropolitan landscape into home by Caribbean Latinos, as proclaimed by such writers as Bernardo Vega* and Guillermo Cotto-Thorner.* Cronistas harped on the influence of Anglo Saxon “immorality” and worried about the erosion of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture with equally religious fervor. Sometimes their messages were delivered from the bully pulpit through direct preaching, as in crónicas signed by Jesús Colón as “Miquis Tiquis” (To Me and To You). But Alberto O’Farrill,* under the guise of “O’Fa,” and Julio G. Arce, under the mask of “Jorge Ulica,” often employed a self-deprecating humor and a burlesque of fictional characters in the community to represent general ignorance or adoption of what their characters believed to be superior Anglo ways. Although these two writers entertained their audiences with the misadventures of working-class immigrants, the autodidact Colón seriously set about elevating the level of education and culture in the Hispanic community. Colón became one of the most important Hispanic columnists and intellectuals in the New York Hispanic community for more than fifty years. A cigar worker from an early age in Cayey, Puerto Rico, he moved to New York as a teenager and eventually became one of the most politicized members of the community of cultural workers and union organizers. Colón made the transition to writing in English and, in the mid-1950s, became the first Puerto Rican columnist for The Daily Worker, a newspaper published by the Communist Party of America. Colón was a life-long progressive thinker and, later in his career, in the 1950s, even penned feminist-type essays. Because Puerto Ricans were U.S. citizens and, legally and politically, not immigrants, at least not in the traditional sense, nevertheless, the texts of most of the working-class writers who had migrated to the city during the twentieth century exhibit many of the classic patterns of Hispanic immigrant literature, including the emphasis on returning to the Island. Even non-working-class artists whose residence in New York was not as prolonged as Vega’s and Colón’s—for example, René Marqués, José Luis González,* and Pedro Juan Soto*—nevertheless employed the double gaze and culture conflict in their works. The whole object of Marqués’s La carreta was to construct an argument for the return of the Puerto Rican working classes to the Island. Although José Luis González and Pedro Juan Soto identified themselves politically and sympathized with the uprooted working-class Puerto Ricans, their texts nevertheless repeated the trope of the metropolis as an inhuman, inhospitable place for Latinos. Even the title of González’s book En Nueva York y otras desgracias (1973, In New York and Other Disgraces) announces the trope that has persisted since Díaz Guerra’s turn-of-the-century writing. Thus, even though Puerto Ricans are not immigrants in the legal sense of the word, the characteristics exhibited in much of their writing—particularly the authors’ profound sense of uprootedness and desire to return to the homeland—justify, although not transparently nor free of contradiction, their inclusion in this category. 702


Whether the immigrant texts stress a return to the homeland or concentrate on registering life in the immigrant enclaves, contact with other cultures in the metropolis and conflict with them are the stuff of immigrant literature—from the texts of Alirio Díaz Guerra and Daniel Venegas to those of more contemporary writers such as Ernesto Galarza,* Guillermo Cotto-Thorner, Wilfredo Braschi,* Roberto Fernández,* and Mario Bencastro.* Although Bencastro focuses on the interaction of Central American immigrants with their foremen, bosses, and authority figures in Washington, D.C., Roberto Fernández* satirizes the double gaze of residents in Miami’s Little Havana—their obsession with reproducing and continuing life as it once was for them in Cuba, along with their failure to realize how they are truly living culturally hybrid lives. Because of the political status of Cuban refugees in the United States, return to Cuba is impossible for the near future and has been so for more than forty years. Thus, writers such as Iván Acosta,* Roberto Fernández, Dolores Prida,* Cristina García,* Virgil Suárez,* and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat* find ways for the community to accommodate in the United States. For Acosta in El super, accommodating means accepting Miami as an imperfect copy of the homeland. For Dolores Prida in Botánica (The Herb Shop, 1990) and Pérez-Firmat, the secret lies in accepting and sustaining hybridization; for others, it lies in tropicalizing the environment or otherwise transforming the urban landscape, as had been done earlier in the “México de afuera” and “Trópico en Manhattan” generations. But even in today’s writers there are cries of desperation, as in Suárez’s protagonist, who, at the end of his novel Going Under (1996), jumps into the ocean to swim back to Cuba. Another trend that began in the early twentieth century was the sporadic and intermittent acceptance of works by Hispanic authors in Englishlanguage mainstream publications. Mexican immigrant author María Cristina Mena* saw her stories, based on the old country, published in Century and Harpers, among others. Luis Pérez,* another Mexican immigrant, saw his novel Coyote published by Holt in 1947 (Pérez’s other literary works remain unpublished to date). Today, there is a notable cadre of immigrant writers, who, like Mena, were relocated as children to the United States and have been able to write and publish their works in English, quite often in mainstream, commercial houses: Cristina García, Virgil Suárez, Julia Alvarez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, and a handful of others. Each of these is part of a generation of writers who were educated in American colleges and, for the most part, embarked on professional writing careers; indeed Cofer, Suárez, and Alvarez were trained in university creative writing programs. But each has made the immigrant experience the grist of a well-crafted literary art; the audience is not the immigrant enclave of many a Spanish-language writer, past or present, but the general Englishspeaking reader, who is more likely to purchase these works in a chain bookstore than through a mail-order catalog in a Spanish-language newspaper. Acculturated in the United States from youth and preferring to write in 703


English for a broad general public, these authors assume many of the stances of native writers, but their predominant theme and their double gaze are distinctly immigrant in nature.

Exile Literature The study of Hispanic exile literature in the United States is the examination of the great moments in the political history of the Hispanic world, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward: the Napoleonic intervention in Spain, the movements of the Spanish American colonies for independence from Spain, the French intervention in Mexico, the War of 1898, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Cuban Revolution, the recent wars in Central America, and the numerous struggles in Spanish America against autocratic regimes and foreign interventions, including the many incursions into the domestic affairs of these countries by the United States. At times, the very act of U.S. partisanship in the internal politics of the Spanish American republics directed the expatriate streams to these shores. All of these struggles contributed hundreds of thousands of political refugees to the United States throughout its history. Because of U.S. territorial expansion and Hispanic immigration, the United States gradually became home to large communities of Spanish speakers that continually received the expatriates. Thus, the refugees found familiar societies where they could conduct business and eke out a living while they hoped for and abetted change in the lands that might someday welcome their return. Much of the literary expression of the exiles has traditionally emerged from their hopes and desires for the political and cultural independence of their homelands, be that from the Spanish empire or from U.S. imperialism. Much of this literature, particularly that of the nineteenth century, is highly lyrical and idealistic in its poetry and often elegant in its prose. However, it is also characterized by its aggressive and argumentative tone because of its commitment to political change in the homeland. Printing and publication by Hispanics began at the turn of the nineteenth century in three cities: New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York. Judging from the number of political books published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming motive for the Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other Spanish Americans in the United States bearing the cost of printing and distribution of their written matter was their desire to influence the politics in their homelands. Spanish-speaking political refugees from both Spain and the Spanish American countries have, as part of their political culture, repeatedly taken up exile in the United States to gain access to a free press and thus offer their compatriots uncensored news and political ideology, even if their writings had to be smuggled on and off ships and passed surreptitiously by hand back home. In many cases, the exile press also engaged in political fundraising, community organizing, and revolutionary plotting to overthrow regimes in their countries of origin. The raison d’être of the exile press has always been to influence life and politics in 704


the homeland: by providing information and opinion about the homeland, changing or solidifying opinion about politics and policy in the patria, or assisting in raising funds to overthrow the current regime. The freedom of expression available in exile was highly desirable in light of the repression that existed in the homelands. The historical record is rife with examples of the prison terms, torture, and executions of writers, journalists, publishers, and editors during the struggles to establish democracies in Spanish America in the wake of Spain’s colonialism. Numerous exile authors suffered torture in prisons and death on battlefields in the Americas. Numerous authors, viewing themselves as patriots without a country, were forced to live in exile or wander from country to country, creating their literary works and spreading their political doctrines. This ever-present base for the culture and literature of Hispanic communities in the United States exemplifies how U.S. Hispanic literature is transnational (see Transnationalism) and can never truly be understood solely from within the geographical and political confines of the United States. Hispanic communities in the United States have never really been cut off from the rest of the Americas or from the world of Hispanic culture and the Spanish language; the influence and impact of U.S. Hispanics, regardless of their language preferences, have never been limited to their immediate ethnogeographic communities. Certainly, the literature written on U.S. soil, even if written by exiles, is part of the U.S. Hispanic literary heritage. The first political books printed in exile by Hispanics were written by Spanish citizens protesting the installation of a puppet government in Spain by Napoleon; these exiled writers published poetry and novels in addition to their political treatises. For the most part, these early books of protest were typeset and printed in the shops of early American printers; typical of these titles was the attack on Napoleon in España ensangrentada por el horrendo corso, tyrano de la Europa . . . (Spain Bloodied by the Horrendous Corsican, Tyrant of Europe . . .) published in 1808 in New Orleans by an anonymous author. Shortly thereafter, the wars for independence of the Spanish colonies from Spain were supported by numerous ideologues who had assimilated the teachings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and John Quincy Adams and adopted them to the Hispanic world. Cuban filibusterer José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois,* in his Objeciones satisfactorias del mundo imparcial (Satisfactory Objections from the Impartial World), militated from Baltimore as early as 1812 for Caribbean and Mexican independence; in 1813, he was one of the founders of the first newspaper in Texas, La gaceta de Texas (The Texas Gazette), as part of the revolutionary movement led by Miguel de Hidalgo for independence from Spain. By 1822, Hispanics began operating their own presses and publishing houses. One of the first to print his revolutionary tracts on possibly his own press was Ecuadorian Vicente Rocafuerte,* who issued his Ideas necesarias a todo pueblo . . . (Ideas Necessary for All Peoples . . .) in Philadelphia, in 1821, as part of an effort to export the liberal ideas of the newly founded American republic in support of the South American wars of independence against Spain. By 1825, Carlos Lanuza’s press (Lanuza, Mendía & Co.) was operating in New York, 705


printing and publishing political tracts as well as creative literature. In the 1830s, they were joined by the Imprenta Española of Juan de la Granja and the press of José Desnoues, both in New York; New York and Philadelphia newspapers, such as El Mensagero (The Messenger), El Reflector (The Reflector), and El Mundo Nuevo (The New World) were also printing and publishing books. Most of these Hispanic printers and publishers were rather short-lived, but eventually two enterprises appeared with strong enough financial bases and business acumen to last for decades and provide some of the most important books by Hispanics in the nineteenth century: the houses of Cubans Nestor Ponce de León* and Enrique Trujillo,* from whose presses were issued some of the renowned classics of the Spanish-speaking world, authored by exiled authors José María Heredia,* José Martí,* Lola Rodríguez de Tió,* and Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín,* among many others. The longest-lasting independence movement in the Western Hemisphere was that of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and many of their independence struggles were plotted, funded, and written about from U.S. shores. One of Cuba’s first and most illustrious exiles was philosopher and priest Félix Varela,* who founded El Habanero newspaper in Philadelphia in 1824 and moved it to New York in 1825. Subtitled “papel político, científico y literario” (political, scientific, and literary paper), El Habanero openly militated for Cuban independence from Spain. Varela set the precedent for Cubans and Puerto Ricans of printing and publishing in exile and having their works circulating in their home islands. Varela’s books on philosophy and education, most of which were published in the United States, were said to be the only “best sellers” in Cuba, and Varela himself was the most popular author there in the first third of the nineteenth century—despite the “conspiracy of silence,” according to which his name could never even be brought up in public on the Island (Fornet 73–74). While still residing in Philadelphia, Varela also authored the first historical novel ever written in the Spanish language, Jicoténcal (named after the protagonist), which illustrated the Spanish abuses of the Native Americans in Mexico and thus bolstered the arguments for independence of the Spanish colonies, which now were made up of people who saw themselves as creatures of the New World. For the most part, the expatriate journalists and writers founded and wrote for Spanish-language or bilingual periodicals—some politically oriented newspapers were bilingual because they aspired to influencing Anglo American public opinion and U.S. government policy regarding Cuba and Puerto Rico. Very few of the exiled intellectuals found work in the English-language press, except as translators. One notable exception was Miguel Teurbe Tolón,* who, in the 1850s, worked as an editor for Latin America on the Herald in New York. Teurbe Tolón had been an editor of La Guirnalda (The Garland) newspaper in Cuba, where he also had launched his literary career as a poet. In the United States, besides working for the Herald, he published poems and commentary in both Spanish- and English-language periodicals and translated Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Emma Willard’s History of the United States 706


into Spanish. One of the most important pioneers of Hispanic journalism in the United States, Tolón was also one of the founders of the literature of Hispanic exile, not only because of the exile theme in many of his poems, but also because his works figure most prominently in the first anthology of exile literature ever published in the United States, El laúd del desterrado (1856, The Exile’s Lute), issued a year after his death. Since the writings of Heredia, Varela, and Teurbe Tolón and their colleagues, exile literature has been one of the continuing currents in Hispanic letters and culture in the United States. Many of the writers to follow in the next century and a half became steeped in that tradition, building on the work of their predecessors, who used their literary art to promote their political causes. Exile writers also influenced immigrant and native writers. To this date, some of the commonplaces of exile literature remain, even among the most recent exile writers from Central America and Cuba. In general, the literature of exile is centered on the homeland, la patria, rather than on the fate of the exile community in the United States. Always implicit is its premise of return to la patria, and thus there is no question of assimilating into the culture during the temporary sojourn. Despite this desire, throughout history, many exiles and their families have taken up permanent residence, never to return. Because return is always pending, however, the vision of the homeland culture is static and therefore seldom reflects the evolution of culture in the homeland during the exiles’ absence; this literature is nostalgic for the patria as remembered before the authors left; on foreign soil, these authors seek through their writing to preserve the language and culture in their communities to facilitate the easy reintroduction into the home culture. The writing does not support the mixing of Spanish and English, because it seeks to emulate the best cultural forms in the elevation of their political ideologies; the stories tend to be epic in nature and the heroes larger than life, even in their tragic downfalls. Often, the metaphors that characterize these lives far from home relate to the Babylonian captivity and to “paradise lost”; both fiction and nonfiction writings emphasize the strangeness of the new social environment and the dangers that it poses for cultural survival. The nineteenth-century authors engaged in the movements for independence from Spain, often cultivating the “Spanish Black Legend”* (propaganda about the Spanish abuses of the Amerindians, spread by the English and Dutch in their competition with Spain for New World colonies) and identifying themselves with the Native Americans suffering the inhuman abuses of the Spanish conquistadors; these exile writers sought to construct their own New World identity. Thus, the literature was not only nationalistic culturally, but often politically as well, in attempting to construct the nation and its identity; the impact of this literature is affected by the fact that many of these writers were actually engaged in armed revolutionary and political struggles. In the world of literature and journalism, the creative and publishing activity of exiled Cubans and Puerto Ricans rivaled the productivity of writers in the homeland. Many of the leading writers and intellectuals of both islands 707


produced a substantial corpus of their works in exile rather than in the repressive environment of Spanish colonial rule. Their substantial legacy includes not only political thought in a remarkable corpus of elegant and exquisite essays, such as those of Josá María de Hostos,* Lorenzo Allo,* Enrique José Varona,* and José Martí, but also books on pedagogy, natural sciences, technology, and history. Some of the most important Cuban and Puerto Rican literary figures were to follow the examples of Heredia, Varela, and Teurbe Tolón: writing, publishing, and militating from exile in Philadelphia, New York, Tampa, Key West, or New Orleans until the outbreak of the Spanish American War in 1898. Many of them were journalists and publishers as well as prolific poets of exile: Bonifacio Byrne,* Pedro Santacilia,* Juan Clemente Zenea,* and, later but most important, José Martí. They all studied the works of their model, José María Heredia, whose wanderlust far from his native soil is recorded in some of the most evocative romantic verse of the nineteenth century. In El laúd del desterrado (The Lute of the Exiled), homage is paid to Heredia by opening with his poems. In 1887, José Martí, publisher Nestor Ponce de León, and Colombian immigrant poet Santiago Pérez Triana founded the influential literary club Sociedad Literaria Hispano-Americana de Nueva York (Spanish American Literary Society of New York), which brought together Hispanic literary enthusiasts and writers from throughout the city; this club was separate from the political clubs that were organized to raise funds to support the armed revolution. From the late nineteenth century to the present, Hispanics have sustained literary societies in all of the major cities of their residence in the United States. These clubs offered an intellectual environment in which literary works could be read and discussed, speeches made, and visiting authors received and celebrated. Puerto Rican intellectuals joined the expatriate Cubans who established revolutionary clubs and supported book and newspaper publication. In clubs such as Las Dos Antillas (The Two Antilles), cofounded by the Afro Puerto Rican bibliographer Arturo Alfonso Schomberg,* they pronounced eloquent speeches printed in newspapers that were circulated throughout the exile communities and smuggled back into Puerto Rico. Serving as an important convener of the group at her home in New York was the thrice-exiled Doña Lola Rodríguez de Tió,* whose nationalistic verse frequently appeared in local periodicals. In addition to the illustrious philosophers, essayists, and poets that made up this group of expatriate Puerto Ricans, there were two craftsmen whose work was essential to the revolutionary cause and to the literature of exile: typesetters Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín* and Sotero Figueroa,* who were also exponents of exile poetry. Marín brought his revolutionary newspaper El Postillón (The Postilion) from Puerto Rico, where it had been suppressed by the Spanish authorities, to New York in 1889. In the print shop he set up in New York, Marín published his paper, as well as books and broadsides for the Cuban and Puerto Rican expatriate communities. His shop became a meeting place for intellectuals, literary figures, and political leaders. In New York, Marín published two volumes of his 708


own verse that are foundational for Puerto Rican letters: Romances (1892, Ballads) and En la arena (c. 1895, In the Arena). Sotero Figueroa was the president of the Club Borinquen and owner of the print shop, Imprenta América, which provided the composition and printing for various revolutionary newspapers and other publications, including Borinquen (the indigenous name of the island of Puerto Rico), a bimonthly newspaper issued by the Puerto Rican section of Cuban Revolutionary Party. But, more important, Figueroa worked closely with José Martí on both his political organizing (Figueroa was the board secretary for the Cuban Revolutionary Party) and his publishing projects; Figueroa provided the printing for one of the most important organs of the revolutionary and literary movements, New York’s Patria, which, after being founded by Martí, became the official organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and in which Martí and Figueroa published essays, poems, and speeches. In addition, Figueroa’s Imprenta América probably prepared the books and pamphlets that were issued for Patria’s publishing house. Sotero Figueroa also printed books for the Cuban exile newspaper El Porvenir, appropriately entitled “The Future.” One product of the press was the Album de “El Porvenir” (issued beginning in 1890), a monumental five-volume biographical dictionary memorializing the expatriate community and providing it with a firm sense of historical mission. Many other publications indicate that the exiled Cubans were actively engaged in the process of nation building. One of the most important was the extensive biographical dictionary, Diccionario biográfico cubano (Cuban Biographical Dictionary), compiled by Francisco Calcagno, published in part in New York by printer Nestor Ponce de León in 1878. The 728-page text was a veritable storehouse of information about accomplished Cubans in all fields of endeavor, many of whom resided in exile. The dictionary complemented the efforts of newspapermen and creative writers who were actively writing their nation’s colonial history and independent future. Writers such as Francisco Sellén* were not only attacking Spaniards in their prose and poetry but also laying down a mythic and ideological background on which to construct their nation’s culture. In his published play, Hatuey (1891), Sellén, like Varela in Jicoténcal, identified Cubans with the indigenous past by writing about the last rebel Amerindian chief in Cuba and glossing on Bartolomé de Las Casas’s documentation of Spanish inhumanity during the Conquest. This work not only attempted to create a mythological base for Cuban ethnicity and nationhood but also indicted the immorality of the Spanish colonialists. Although Cubans and Puerto Rican expatriates had to endure passage by ship and inspections by customs authorities to enter as refugees into the United States, Mexican exiles crossed the border with relative ease to establish their press in exile. There was no Border Patrol until 1925, so they simply walked across what was an open border for Hispanics—as opposed to Asians who were barred by various exclusionary laws—and installed themselves in the longstanding communities of Mexican origin of the Southwest. For decades, the relatively open border had served as an escape route for numerous criminal or 709


political refugees from both the northern and southern sides of the dividing line. The Mexican exile press began around 1885, when the Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico became so repressive that scores of publishers, editors, and writers were forced north into exile. Publishers such as Adolfo Carrillo,* who had opposed Díaz with his El Correo del Lunes (The Monday Mail), crossed the border, hoping to smuggle their papers back into Mexico. Carrillo ended up in California, where he established La República (The Republic) in 1885 and remained for the rest of his life. Carrillo became so identified with the Hispanic tradition in California that he set his short stories in California’s Hispanic past. Notwithstanding Carrillo’s example, most of the exiled Mexican literati of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eventually returned to Mexico when the environment was once again safe for their respective political ideologies. By 1900, the most important Mexican revolutionary journalist and ideologue, Ricardo Flores Magón,* had launched his newspaper Regeneración (Regeneration) in Mexico City. An anarchist militant, Flores Magón was jailed four times in Mexico for his radical journalism. Following a sentence of eight months in jail, during which he was prohibited from reading and writing, Flores Magón went into exile in the United States. He had again begun publishing Regeneración in San Antonio by 1904, in Saint Louis in 1905, and in Canada in 1906; he founded Revolución in Los Angeles in 1907 and once again revived Regeneración there in 1908. Throughout these years, Flores Magón and his brothers employed every possible subterfuge to smuggle their writings from the United States into Mexico, even stuffing them into cans or wrapping them in other newspapers sent to San Luis Potosí, where they were distributed to sympathizers throughout the country. They also became leaders of labor union and anarchist movements among minorities in the United States; for their revolutionary efforts, they were persistently repressed and persecuted by both the Mexican and U.S. governments. Numerous Spanish-language periodicals in the Southwest echoed the ideas of Flores Magón and were affiliated with his Mexican Liberal Party, which was promoting revolution. Among them were La Bandera Roja (The Red Flag), El Demócrata (The Democrat), La Democracia (Democracy), Humanidad (Humanity), 1810, El Liberal (The Liberal), Punto Rojo (Red Point), Libertad y Trabajo (Liberty and Labor), and La Reforma Social (Social Reform), which were located along the border from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas to Douglas, Arizona, and west to Los Angeles, California. Among the most interesting newspapers were those involved in articulating labor and women’s issues as part of the social change to be implemented with the triumph of the revolution. Notable among the early writers and editors associated with the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party) and Flores Magón was school teacher Sara Estela Ramírez,* who emigrated from Mexico to teach in Mexican schools in Laredo, Texas, in 1898. With her passionate and eloquent speeches and poetry performed at meetings of laborers and community people, she spread the ideas of labor organizing and social reform in both Mexico and Texas. Ramírez wrote for two important Laredo newspapers, La Crónica 710


(The Chronicle) and El Demócrata Fronterizo (The Border Democrat), and, in 1901, she began editing and publishing her own newspaper, La Corregidora (The Corrector), which she printed in Mexico City and in Laredo and San Antonio, Texas. Later, in 1910, Ramírez founded a literary magazine, Aurora, which was short-lived; she died that same year of an illness suffered over a long period. Other periodicals under the direction of women not only furthered the revolutionary cause but also articulated gender issues within that cause: Teresa Villarreal’s* El Obrero (1909, The Worker), Isidra T. de Cárdenas’s* La Voz de la Mujer (1907, The Woman’s Voice), Blanca de Moncaleano’s* Pluma Roja (1913–1915, Red Pen), and Teresa and Andrea Villarreal’s La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman), affiliated with the feminist Club Liberal “Leona Vicario.” Unfortunately, there are not many extant copies of their writing The Mexican exile press flourished into the 1930s, with weekly newspapers siding with one faction or another and publishing houses, often affiliated with newspapers, issuing political tracts as well as novels of the revolution. More than any other literary genre published in book form, the novel of the Mexican Revolution flourished: more than 100 novels poured forth from the presses of newspapers and their affiliated publishing houses, such as Casa Editorial Lozano in San Antonio. Through the novel of the revolution, such expatriate authors as Teodoro Torres* and Manuel Arce* sought to come to terms with that cataclysm that had disrupted their lives and caused so many of their readers to relocate to the southwestern United States. The authors represented the full gamut of revolutionary factions in their loyalties and ideologies, but, for the most part, the genre was characterized by a conservative reaction to the socialistic change in government and community organization that the Revolution had wrought. One of the first to establish this genre was the now-classic work of Latin American literature, Mariano Azuela’s* Los de abajo (The Underdogs), which was not counterrevolutionary. Los de abajo appeared as a serialized novel in an El Paso Spanish-language newspaper and was later published in book form in that city in 1915. From that time on, literally scores of these novels were published—from San Diego to San Antonio. By no means were the press and the publishing enterprise as liberal as the exile press was prior to the outbreak of the Revolution. To the contrary, many of these novels were typical of the exile culture that was promoted by conservatives who had been dislodged from Mexico by the socialist revolution; they came, with resources in hand, to well-established Mexican American communities and became entrepreneurs in cultural as well as business enterprises. Some of them founded newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses to serve the rapidly expanding community of economic refugees, and their newspapers eventually became the backbone of an immigrant rather than an exile press; their entrepreneurial spirit overtook their political commitment to change in the homeland. The large U.S. Hispanic communities could reproduce the culture of the homeland for enclaves of working people who had the financial resources to sustain business and culture. Most of these people were economic refugees— immigrants whose ethos differed from that of the political exiles. 711


With the Cristero War (1926–1929), resulting from government attempts to limit the power of the Catholic Church, based on the anticlerical tenets of the 1917 Mexican constitution, a fresh batch of political refugees founded newspapers and publishing houses to attack the Mexican government and to serve the needs of the religious community in exile. During the buildup of conflict between church and state in Mexico, numerous religiously based periodicals and publishing houses were founded in El Paso, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the Southwest. El Paso became a publishing center for many Hispanic religious presses, not just the Catholics; the Mexican Baptists, Methodists, and others took refuge from the persecution in Mexico. The influence of the Cristero refugees was felt in many secular publications and in much of the literature written, not just in the religious writing. The already conservative counterrevolutionary papers naturally focused on the religious persecution in Mexico and the atrocities committed by the government of bolcheviques (Bolsheviks). Numerous memoirs by expatriate religious, preachers, and bishops issued from presses in El Paso, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and San Antonio. Also, memoirs of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who achieved religious conversion became popular, such as José Policarpo Rodríguez’s* memoir of his path to becoming a Presbyterian minister, The Old Trail Guide, first published in 1898 but reprinted various times in the twentieth century. This religious, conservative background has left an indelible mark on the Mexican American literary tradition in the United States. The next large wave of Hispanic political refugees to reach these shores came from across the Atlantic: the liberals defeated by Spanish fascism. Hispanic communities across the United States embraced the refugees and sympathized with their cause; many were the Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican organizations that held fundraisers for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish expatriates themselves were fast to establish their own exile press. Their efforts hit fertile soil in Depression-era communities, which were hotbeds for union and socialist organizing. Manhattan and Brooklyn were centers of Hispanic anti-fascist fervor and contributed such titles as España Libre (1939–1977, Free Spain), España Nueva (1923–1942, New Spain), España Republicana (1931–1935, Republican Spain), Frente Popular (1937–1939, Popular Front), and La Liberación (1946–1949, The Liberation). Many of the Hispanic labor and socialist organizations, in which Spanish immigrant workers were prominent, published newspapers that also supported the Republican cause: the long-running anarchist paper Cultura Proletaria (1910–1959, Proletarian Culture), El Obrero (1931–1932, The Worker), and Vida Obrera (1930–1932, Worker Life). During this period and the years of the Francisco Franco regime that followed, some of Spain’s most famous writers took refuge in the United States and Puerto Rico, including novelist Ramón Sender* and poet Jorge Guillén, as well as poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who, while living in Puerto Rico, won the Nobel Prize. The focus of protest writing shifted somewhat during the twentieth century to attacking modern dictatorships and authoritarian regimes, as well as to criticizing the repeated intervention of the United States in the Latin republics’ 712


domestic politics, quite often on the side of dictators and their repressive regimes. The pseudonymous writer Lirón was one of the most outrageously graphic in his attacks on Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Salvadoran Gustavo Solano,* who used the pseudonym of “El Conde Gris” (The Grey Count), consigned Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the Guatemalan dictator, to hell in his play Sangre (1919, Blood); before residing for many years in exile in the United States, Solano had been incarcerated for his revolutionary activities in Mexico and had become persona non grata in almost all of the Central American republics for his pursuit of a united and democratic Central America. From their distant perspective in the United States, other Central American writers, such as Nicaraguan Santiago Argüello, reinvigorated Simón Bolívar’s ignored vision of a united Spanish America, not only to stave off the imperialist threat of the United States, but also to integrate fully the economies and cultures of Central and South America. Puerto Ricans Juan Antonio Corretjer* and his wife, Consuelo Lee Tapia,* militated through their newspaper Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples) and their individual writings for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Corretjer, who had been imprisoned in an Atlanta federal penitentiary for his nationalist activities on the Island, took up residence in New York after being prohibited by federal authorities from returning to Puerto Rico. The U.S. military administration of the island colony was far more repressive than authorities in New York and in other cities on the continent. The Puerto Rican dissidents enjoyed greater freedom of association and were less noticed—writing in Spanish and organizing in the Hispanic communities of New York, Tampa, and Chicago—than in full view of their vigilant government at home. Corretjer and Tapia were at the center of a cadre of Puerto Rican nationalist writers in New York; many of their compatriots, even the more radical ones, such as Jesús Colón, also writing in Pueblos Hispanos, were staking out claims on New York as their rightful home. But while Corretjer and Tapia indicted the U.S. military government of Puerto Rico, Dominican journalist Carmita Landestoy* eloquently unmasked the Rafael Trujillo regime in her homeland, a regime that was also supported by the United States, which had administered a military government in the Dominican Republic for most of the early twentieth century. Thus, the ironic situation of the Caribbean and Central American writers was that of being exiled in the belly of the beast that they accused of causing many of the ills in their homeland. Exiles and political refugees have continued to make up an important segment of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. As a result of the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. strategy of fighting much of the Cold War through involvement in the civil wars in Central America and Chile, large-scale immigration of political refugees has continued to the present day, and the dictatorships in these countries and Argentina have arisen as themes in the literature of Hispanic exile. Beginning in 1959, a new wave of refugees from the Cuban Revolution established a widespread exile press, as well as a more informal network of hundreds of newsletters. Chileans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and other Spanish American expatriates all contributed to a literature of exile. 713


What is different today is that many of these exiled voices have been readily translated into English, and the works of liberal writers—such as Argentines Luisa Valenzuela,* Manuel Puig, and Jacobo Timmerman; Chileans Emma Sepúlveda* and Ariel Dorfman*; and Guatemala’s Arturo Arias*—are published alongside the more conservative voices of Cuban exiles, such as Heberto Padilla* and Reinaldo Arenas.* As the Hispanic population of the United States continues to grow—estimated to be one-fourth of the total population by 2050—and as the U.S. economy becomes more integrated with those countries south of the border through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), U.S. culture will become even more directly linked to the internal politics of Spanish America. The culture of Hispanic exile will continue to be part of the overall culture of the United States into the foreseeable future. The United States will continue to be a preferred base from which political refugees express their opposition to governments in their homelands by using the press, the electronic media, and U.S. popular culture, the Internet, and even recent film hits, such as Death and the Maiden and The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Moreover, Hispanic political refugees, through their use of the press and their leadership in community organizations and churches, have left indelible marks on the ethos and philosophy of Hispanic communities within the United States. Their knowledge and perspectives live on in Hispanic culture today, regardless of refugees having returned to their homelands. Many who remain, and their children, intermarry with other Hispanic natives and immigrants, and their children are eventually blended into the grand community that is recognizable today as a national ethnic minority

Sin Frontera: Beyond Boundaries Because Hispanic literature of the United States is transnational (see Transnationalism) in nature, it emerges from and remains intimately related to the crossing of political, geographic, cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries. Hispanic peoples in the United States are the result of the United States expanding its borders and then conquering, incorporating, and importing peoples from the Hispanic world—a world that has existed not only immediately outside of the United States but within its ever-expanding geographic and economic borders. Hispanic culture in the United States exists on a continuum with the Hispanic world. Through family relationships, ethnic bonds, travel, and communications, Hispanic peoples in the United States have neither severed, nor felt the need to sever, their ties to the rest of the Hispanic world. Likewise, life in the United States has transformed Hispanic culture from within and influenced Hispanic culture beyond the U.S. borders. U.S. Hispanics have created their own cultural patterns, which, in turn, have influenced the rest of the Hispanic world through travel and communications. The paradigm of native, immigrant, and exile cultures and literatures is meant to be dynamic: it allows for the ebb and flow of new cultural inputs into U.S. Hispanic culture 714


and for cultural change over generations. It allows for entrances and exits and for evolving cultural stances, language preferences, and identities of individuals, such as Jesús Colón, Américo Paredes, and Adolfo Carrillo and many others, who, in one moment, saw themselves as immigrants or exiles and in another as naturalized citizens or natives identifying greatly with the long history of Hispanic culture in the United States. Given that immigration and exile are still very much part of the daily life of Hispanic communities in the United States and promise to remain so for a long time, the transnational and borderless nature of Hispanic culture in the United States will become only more apparent and characteristic as the media also continue to cement the relationship of Latinos in the United States to the rest of the Spanishspeaking world. The three U.S. Spanish television networks function hemispherically by satellite. Spanish-language book and magazine distribution is everyday more hemispheric. Forty years of bilingual education in the United States, often imparted by immigrant teachers, has solidified cultural bonds with nearby Spanish American countries. Moves toward the economic integration of the Americas through such agreements as NAFTA will further consolidate the interdependence of the nation states of the Americas and the Spanishspeaking populations. Air travel is cheaper and more accessible to all populations and will continue to contribute to a borderless America/América. Among the many writers who have been able to identify the transnational and borderless nature of Latino culture are the visionaries Luis Rafael Sánchez and Guillermo Gómez Peña.* Sánchez responded to the cultural circumstances of Puerto Ricans: defined by their colonial status on the Island and migrantcitizen status on the continent. He chose La guagua aérea (The Airbus) as the symbol of Puerto Rican culture, a patent symbol of migratory status and culture engendered from that existential condition. It proclaims borderlessness and intercultural fluidity; it does not abandon Puerto Rican ethnicity but acknowledges its dynamism and its ability to evolve, incorporate, and, most of all, to survive. Writer and performance artist Gómez Peña sees the cultural dynamism of borders—hybridity, fluidity, syncretism, and synthesis—overtaking and becoming the common communication style, not only for the United States and Spanish America but for the entire world. Postmodernity for the United States and much of the world—including the European Union—will bring the erasure of borders and the disappearance of separate political and economic systems, more synthesis of language and cultural ways, and more racial blending. This alteration of the world may be the overriding lesson and example of Hispanic literature of the United States. Further Reading Fornet, Ambrosio, El libro en Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994). Kanellos, Nicolás (with Helvetia Martell), Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Meléndez, Gabriel, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevo Mexicano Communities (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).

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Meyer, Doris, Speaking for Themselves: Neo-Mexicano Cultural Identity and the SpanishLanguage Press, 1880–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Park, Robert E., The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922).

Nicolás Kanellos Little Havana. When thousands of exiles fled the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s, many came to Miami, Florida, and settled in a four-square-mile area southwest of the central business district that became known as “Little Havana” (also known as La Sauesera [Southwester] and Calle Ocho [Eighth Street]). The new influx dramatically expanded an already existing Cuban neighborhood that housed Cuban- and Latino-owned drugstores, bodegas (grocery stores), and other businesses where the new arrivals could obtain familiar goods. In addition, the newcomers had access to low-cost housing and public transportation, allowing convenient commuting to their jobs in the central business district of the city. Moreover, the main refugee assistance centers were located there: the Centro Hispano Católico (Hispanic Catholic Center) and the Cuban Refugee Center. Central Miami, like a lot of American cities in the 1960s, was expiring with the advent of suburban development, but Cubans established their own businesses and renovated old buildings on what became the main thoroughfares of Little Havana along Flagler Street and Southwest 8th Street (Calle Ocho). Essentially, the influx of Cubans transformed what was becoming a dilapidated and decaying inner city into a lucrative commercial and residential district. Fourteen percent of the total Cuban population in the United States resided in Little Havana by 1970. Nonetheless, social mobility and overcrowding prompted many Cuban Americans to move west and south into other residential areas or to adjoining cities in Dade County. Little Havana residents moved mainly to Hialeah, because many of the exiles found jobs at Miami International Airport and the Hialeah race tracks. The town’s population was seventy-four percent Latino by 1980. It became the first city in south Florida to elect a Cuban-born mayor. Higher income Cubans moved in large numbers to Coral Gables and Miami Beach, but Little Havana remains to this day the symbolic center of the Cuban exile community in the United States. Many celebrations, organizations, and political activities of the Cuban American community are based in this section of Miami. In the imagination of Cuban exile and immigrant writers, as well as that of the Cuban American writers, Little Havana is the home base of their culture outside of Cuba. For the Cuban American writers, it is often the only geographic and cultural source. Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales Lleras, Lorenzo María (1811–1868). Colombian poet, educator, journalist, and political figure, Lorenzo María Lleras was born in Bogotá 716

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September 7, 1811, into a well-known and distinguished family. As a youth, Lleras was sent to study in the United States, where he became associated with liberal intellectuals and revolutionary figures. In New York, he became a journalist and initiated his career writing for Félix Varela’s* and José Antonio Saco’s El Mensagero Semanal (The Weekly Messenger), which was published from 1828 to 1831. He became fluently trilingual, adding English and Spanish to his French, which allowed him to translate French and American writers for publication in Spanish. Lleras also began his career as a published poet in New York, where he issued his first book of verse, Versos juveniles (1831, Juvenile Verses), which is made up of patriotic and nationalistic poems. Lleras was also a playwright and director, credited with pioneering Colombian theater—not only professionalizing it but also opening it up to European playwrights, including Shakespeare. Lorenzo María Lleras. After his return to Colombia, he continued his journalistic career, writing for a number of newspapers. More important, he introduced many of the principles of American education that he had witnessed and studied in the United States and is thus remembered in his homeland as an important educational reformer and pioneer. Lleras was also elected to the national assembly various times and appointed to diplomatic posts. Lleras died June 3, 1868, in Bogotá. He had fathered fifteen children. Further Reading López de Mesa, Luis, “Lleras, Lorenzo María” in Gran encyclopedia de Colombia (http:// www.lablaa.org/blaavirtual/biografias/llerlore.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos La Llorona. The legend of La Llorona, or Weeping Woman, is one of the oldest and most widely known folk tales among Mexicans and Mexican Americans. According to many scholars, the kernel story dates to the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards in 1521. These scholars view the popular legend as a mythic version of the important role of La Malinche in the pivotal events following Columbus’s four voyages to the Americas. Still flourishing in the urban centers where most Chicanas and Chicanos and immigrant Mexicans now reside, the legend traditionally operates as a parable to teach young people, especially girls, to behave according to strict moral conventions. The account of La Llorona varies by region, but the core plot normally concerns a poor, downtrodden peasant woman who abandons or kills her children in retaliation for their father’s unfaithfulness to her. For her actions, she is condemned to suffer the eternal punishment of wandering in grief-stricken agony in search of her abandoned or murdered children. Her name comes from the mournful wailing of her cries of grief as she searches endlessly for her children. 717

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Many variants describe her as sexually promiscuous, perhaps as revenge for her husband’s premeditated infidelities. She is sometimes used as a bruja (or witch tale) to coerce obedience from children, who are told that she might kidnap them to replace her own destroyed babies. La Llorona has been compared to other mythic characters such as Medea, Lilith, Pandora, and similar madwomen in the attic of patriarchal traditions. In the late twentieth century, many Chicana and Chicano writers and scholars have reexamined La Llorona persistence in folklore and popular culture; several concluded that she represents an important voice of dissent and folk resistance to unjust power. In this view, La Llorona’s actions, like those of other resisting women (Antigone, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, and others) are considered symbolic of the agency of a tyrannized woman who, instead of subjecting her children to live as victims of classist and sexist cruelties, decides her destiny by choosing merciful death for them and eternal suffering for herself. Whether traditional or modern, the Llorona stories persist as cultural instances of unignorable female complexity that have traces in later portraits of Chicana and Latina girlhood, such as those in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s* novel The Squatter and the Don (1885), Helen Hunt Jackson’s romance Ramona (1888), Katherine Ann Porter’s 1939 Miranda stories, Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits of the artist as a girl and woman beset by an adulterous husband, and the depictions by many contemporary Chicana and Chicano writers and artists—including the work of Alurista,* Rudolfo Anaya,* Yolanda López, Estela Portillo Trambley,* Ana Castillo,* Helena María Viramontes,* El Zarco Guerrero, and others. Further Reading Anaya, Rudolfo, The Legend of La Llorona: A Short Novel (Berkeley: TonatiuhQuinto Sol International, 1984). Pérez, Domino Renee, “Caminando con la llorona: Traditional and Contemporary Narratives” in Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, eds. Norma Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Loisaida. Based on the Spanish pronunciation of “Lower East Sider,” Loisaida is a resident in a neighborhood that has traditionally hosted immigrants to New York City. Puerto Ricans and other Latinos who have lived or performed there have staked their claim to this part of Manhattan as having become a Nuyorican* creative stronghold. The greatest promoters of the Loisaida identity have been Miguel Piñero,* Miguel Algarín,* and Tato Laviera.* The neighborhood has also been home to other important figures in the Nuyorican movement, such as Jorge Brandon,* Lucky Cienfuegos, and Bimbo Rivas. Piñero popularized the Loisaida identity in such poems as “Bury My Ashes on the Lower East Side,” often recited dramatically at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café,* run by Algarín on the Lower East Side. Laviera’s poem, “Doña Cisa y Su 718

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Anafre” (Doña Cisa and Her Brazier), firmly places the birth of Nuyorican identity as taking place on the Lower East Side. After Piñero’s death, Algarín and a number of other poets and artists gathered in a Lower East Side park in a ceremonial spreading of Piñero’s ashes; the event became part of a documentary film, which—added to the success of the Hollywood feature film Piñero—further popularized the identity of Piñero, Nuyoricans, and the Lower East Side. It is precisely this sense of place that Latino writers and artists have been striving for in much of their work since the uprooting of their families through immigration or territorial conquest by the United States. Similar sentiments are held regarding the New York City neighborhoods of El Bronx and El Barrio (Spanish Harlem/East Harlem), as well as the Chicano “homeland” of Aztlán.* These are places where Latino hybrid culture has developed, bilingualism and biculturalism reigns, and Latinos have stamped their identity on the social and physical environment. Historically, they are the outgrowth of what were immigrant neighborhoods, ports of entry that offered temporary and transitional accommodation and were often characterized as “Little San Juans,” “Little Havanas,” and “Little Mexicos.” It is with pride that today’s Latinos declare them permanent homes where their hybrid cultures can thrive. Further Reading Algarín, Miguel, Love Is Hard Work: Memorias de Loisaida/Poems (New York: Scribner’s, 1997). Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos López, José Heriberto (1871–1942). José Heriberto López, whose pen name was Jorge Borge, was a Venezuelan statesman and novelist who spent various years of his life in the United States. Born in Caracas in 1871, López rose in the ranks of the government and was assigned to the consulate in New York. He nevertheless broke with the government, most specifically with the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, and organized opposition to the regime from New York, even to the extent of writing broadsides such as “El mensaje del Tirano” (1924, The Tyrant’s Message), which was printed in that city but must have circulated to expatriate Venezuelan communities throughout the United States. Like many other writers in exile, López took advantage of the free press in the United States to pen editorials, write feature articles and letters to the editor, and publish political tracts and books. In addition to broadsides, López published two books: Por qué tanto egoísmo entre los corresponsales mexicanos en Nueva York? Por culpa de ellos es hasta hoy desconocida la labor de un bilingüe escritor mexicano (1922, Why So Much Selfishness among the Mexican Correspondents in New York? It’s Their Fault That the Work of a Bilingual Mexican Writer Remains Unknown) and Cuentos de acero: Anecdatario satirico, época del gomezalato (1924, Stories of Steel: Satirical Collection of Anecdotes from the Gómez Era). López 719

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continued his exile in Havana, where he published Veinte años sin patria: historia panfletaria de los tiranuelos más feroces de la América Hispana: Juan Vicente Gómez y Gerardo Machado (1933, Twenty Years without a Homeland: Pamphlet History of the Most Ferocious Spanish American Tyrants: Juan Vicente Gómez and Gerardo Machado). López eventually returned to Caracas and died there April 15, 1942. Further Reading Diccionario general de la literatura venezolana, 2 vols. (Mérida, Venezuela: Editorial Venezolana/Universidad de Los Andes, 1987).

Nicolás Kanellos López, Josefina (1969–). Having experienced playwriting success while still a teenager, Josefina López has had her works performed by grassroots Chicano theaters and made into Hollywood movies. Born March 19, 1969, in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and settling in East Los Angeles with her parents in 1975, López went to barrio schools. In 1987, through the Amnesty Program, she became a Temporary Resident in 1987, which relieved the fears of deportation that she had grown up with. López began writing plays in the fifth grade and continued while attending Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, with the hopes of eventually becoming an actress. Her writing as a teenager was motivated by the lack of female roles in Latino theater. From 1985 to 1988, she participated in the Los Angeles Theater Centre’s Young Playwrights’ Lab. Her first play to be produced was Simply María, or the American Dream, staged by the California Young Playwrights’ Contest in 1988. She went on in 1998 to participate in María Irene Fornés’s Hispanic Playwrights-inResidence Laboratory in New York City. It was in Fornés’s lab that López developed the first draft of her most successful play to date, Real Women Have Curves, which not only enjoyed productions by women’s theaters and Latino community theaters but also was made into a Hollywood feature film. After a brief period at New York University, López went on to the undergraduate program at the University of California, San Diego, where her next play, Food for the Dead, was staged; she later obtained an MFA in playwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles. In all of her early plays, López criticizes Mexican patriarchy and confronts women’s liberation as part of the American Dream. In 1989, López once again staged Real Women Have Curves, this time in El Teatro de la Esperanza’s workshop under famed Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido. From then on, it became one of the most popular and produced plays by a Latino in the United States. López’s 1994 play Unconquered Spirits is somewhat of a departure from the foregoing ones in that it examines Mexico’s dualistic national archetype: La Llorona/La Malinche. Included among her other plays are Confessions of Women from East L.A., Boyle Heights, Lola Goes to Roma, Food for the Dead, and Queen of the Rumba. In addition to working as coscreenwriter on the film version of Real Women Have Curves, which won the 720

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Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival (2002), López has written for other small- and large-screen productions, including Fox-TV’s “Living Single” (1993–1994), Fox’s “Culture Clash.”* Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Louisiana Purchase. During the late eighteenth century, Spain’s most vulnerable area, threatened by the land aggrandizement aspirations of the newly formed United States, was the far northern frontier of New Spain (Mexico). It was vulnerable partly because Spain had difficulty in peopling this vast territory on the empire’s periphery. Spain’s forces in the interior of New Spain were occupied with squelching the independence movement that had started on September 16, 1810, with the insurrection of Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. So, to augment their forces, the Spaniards withdrew their troops from the frontier presidios. This further weakened the lines of defense in the North, inviting incursions from the newly independent but aggressive North Americans. The danger of Yankee encroachment was apparent to the Spaniards much earlier, however. In 1803, a powerful France under Napoleon Bonaparte acquired from Spain the Louisiana Territory, which had been ceded during the Seven Years War in the previous century. Napoleon, who was vying for dominance in Europe and needed revenue quickly, sold the vast territory to the United States by the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, thus violating an understanding that it was not to be alienated. After the sale, the borders of the dangerous infant nation connected directly with New Spain. Various areas in the purchased territory, nevertheless, retained their Hispanic populations and influence. New Orleans, in particular, remained a trilingual city (English, French, and Spanish) throughout the nineteenth century and was a center of Hispanic periodical and book publication, as well as base for exiles from Mexico, Cuba, and Spanish American republics. Further Reading Weber, David J., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

F. Arturo Rosales Lozano, Ignacio E. (1886–1953). Among the most powerful of the political, business, and intellectual figures in the Mexican immigrant community before World War II was Ignacio E. Lozano, founder and operator of the two most powerful and well-distributed daily newspapers: San Antonio’s La Prensa (The Press), founded in 1913, and Los Angeles’ La Opinión (The Opinion), founded in 1926 and still publishing. Lozano was from a successful business family in northern Mexico; he was born in Marín, Nuevo León, November 15, 1886, and then relocated to San Antonio in 1908 with his mother and sister in search of business opportunities. He opened a bookstore 721

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and gradually learned the newspaper business via on-the-job experience while working for San Antonio’s El Noticiero (The News) and later for El Imparcial de Texas (Texas’s Impartial Reporter). With the business training and experience he had received in Mexico, Lozano was able to contribute professionalism and business acumen to Hispanic journalism in the United States, resulting in his successfully publishing two of the longest-running Spanish-language daily newspapers. His sound journalistic policies and emphasis on professionalism were reflected in his hiring of well-trained journalists, starting at the top—with his appointment of Teodoro Torres,* “the Father of Mexican Journalism,” to edit La Prensa. Because of the sound marketing system that Lozano was able to set up, he also became the most important publisher of books in the Southwest: under his Casa Editorial Lozano imprint, he not only published Ignacio E. Lozano. writers associated with his newspapers, such as Teodoro Torres, but numerous other novelists, political commentators, and authors for middle-class leisure reading (see Publishers and Publishing). The ideas of Torres and Lozano reached thousands—not only in San Antonio, but throughout the Southwest, Midwest, and northern Mexico— through a vast distribution system that included newsstand sales, home delivery, and mail. La Prensa also set up a network of correspondents in the United States, who were able to report on current events and cultural activities of Mexican communities as far away as Chicago, Detroit, and New York. When, in 1920, Mexican President Alvaro Obregón’s presidency took more liberal stances toward the expatriate community, La Prensa began to circulate freely in northern Mexico, gaining a large readership from Piedras Negras west to Ciudad Juárez. Lozano was even able to travel to Mexico City and meet with the president himself. Unlike the publishers of many other Hispanic immigrant newspapers, Lozano also set about serving the long-standing Mexican American population in San Antonio and the Southwest. In his business and marketing expertise, he sought to reach broader segments and all classes, in part by not being overtly political or partisan of any political faction in Mexico and by recognizing the importance of the Mexicans who had long resided in the United States. He and his staff sought to bring the Mexican Americans within the “México de afuera”* ideology—which promoted preservation of the Spanish

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language, Mexican cultural identity, and opposition to what was seen as the looser morality of Anglo Americans and their Protestant religion. La Prensa was able to evolve with the community into ethnic minority status within the United States and provide ideological and political analysis for the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement. Unfortunately, La Prensa did not survive long enough to see the Chicano Movement in the late 1960s. La Prensa suffered a slow death beginning in 1957, when it reverted to a weekly and then was sold repeatedly to various interests until it was shut down in 1963. Unlike Los Angeles, where La Opinión still thrives, San Antonio did not continue to attract a steady and large enough stream of immigrants to sustain the newspaper because the children of immigrants became English-dominant. Lozano died in San Antonio on September 21, 1953. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás (with Helvetia Martell), Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

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M Machado, Eduardo (1953–). Cuban American playwright Eduardo Machado came to the United States when he was eight years old as a member of Operation Peter Pan,* sent with his brother to the United States to escape the indoctrination their parents feared they would suffer under the communist regime. In Los Angeles, he graduated from high school; his only advanced formal education was an acting class in Van Nuys. His formal training as a playwright took place under the tutelage of María Irene Fornés* at INTAR,* and he had three plays workshopped at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City after he moved there in 1981. His family fled revolutionary Cuba. When the family was reunited, it settled in the Los Angeles area, where Machado received his schooling far from the large exile community of Miami. To some extent this explains Machado’s aversion to being classed as a Latino playwright and lumped with the other marginalized artists of the Latino community in the United States. He once said, “I never thought of myself as a Latino until I became an actor”—that was how Machado made his way into theater in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He wrote his first play in 1980. As a playwright, Machado has made his way into mainstream regional theaters of the United States, but it must be confessed that his production in most of these theaters arises from directors’ wishes to represent the Latino community. Machado believes, furthermore, that he is rarely produced by Latino theaters because his dramas usually deal with middle- and upper-class Cubans before and after the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, Machado has had more different plays produced over a twenty-year period than any other Latino playwright and has even seen them staged by Latino companies, despite his aversion to being considered “ethnic.”

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Among his plays are Rosario and the Gypsies (1982), Broken Eggs (1984), Fabiola (1985), When It’s Over (1986), Why to Refuse (1987), Wishing You Well (1987), Don Juan in New York City (1988), A Burning Beach (1988), Gardel (1988)—a musical biography of the famous Argentine singer and movie star produced first in Philadelphia and then in New York City by Teatro Repertorio Español*—Cabaret Bambu (1989), Stevie Wants to Play the Blues (1990), Perricones (1990), They Still Mambo in Havana (1998), Crocodile Eyes (1999), Havana Is Waiting (2001), When the Sea Drowns in Sand (2001), The Cook (2003) at INTAR, and Kissing Fidel (2005), also at INTAR. A number of his plays have been published by the Theater Communications Group in anthologies, as well as by script services. Among his most famous works are The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa (1983), which is an evocation of the complex caste system in Cuba before the outbreak of the revolution, Once Removed (1992), which explores the conflicts and expectations of a family uprooted and forced into exile in the United States, and The Eye of the Hurricane (1991), which presents a family dealing with the nationalization of their bus company under the new revolutionary government in Cuba. Machado has published two collections of his works in Once Removed (Plays in Process) (1992) and The Floating Island Plays (1991). In 1999, Machado also wrote and directed a feature film, Exiles in New York, in 2007 publishing a part-cookbook, part-memoir of his exile with Michael Dimitrovich, Tastes like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home. What is evident from Machado’s record as a playwright is that, like so many other children of the Cuban diaspora, he has found meaning and material in his archetypal Cuban American experience. And, despite his sentiments about Latino theater companies and the need for Latino plays to not be seen as ethnic or minority, Machado became the artistic director of INTAR in 2004. In addition, he teaches the playwriting workshop at Columbia University. Further Reading Alvarez-Borland, Isabel, and Isabel Borland, Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez La Malinche. One of the most legendary and important of the historic figures involved in the conquest of México, La Malinche was a native woman who served as interpreter, guide, and concubine to the Spaniard who became known as the Conquistador de México—Hernán Cortés. She is the only female associated with the conquest (1519–1521) whose name survived on the historical record of Spanish colonialism in the “New” World. Many historians and other scholars credit her participation as singularly crucial in making Cortés, of all the invading Spaniards, the successful military leader who toppled the Aztec hegemony over central Mesoamerica. The dominion of the Aztec (Nahua) ruler Motecuhzoma (variously written as Moctecuzoma and Montezuma) had been weakened internally by drought and famine and externally by other tribes rebelling against the practice of human sacrifice, thereby greatly 726

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facilitating the Spanish takeover. La Malinche, believed to be of Nahua or Aztec origin, showed great linguistic proficiency in quickly learning Spanish, something that, with her native speaker’s skill in Náhuatl and in Yucatán dialects, proved indispensable to Cortés. The ability of a Spanishspeaking European to communicate with tribal caciques (chiefs) enabled him to acquire allies who La Malinche as depicted in the Aztec codices. could contribute armies of indigenous warriors and greatly facilitate his triumphant march to Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. The word “Aztec” is believed to stem from the name, “Aztlán,”* an allusion to the original homeland of the Aztecs that some scholars believe lies in today’s northern Mexico extending north to the southwestern United States and that others trace back to the primeval migration from Asia. Whatever the source, among the Mesoamerican populations Aztlán was also equated with a mythical paradise, like Eden or Atlantis, considered to be the haven or geographical home of their founding gods. Hundreds of years later both La Malinche and Aztlán have worked their way into the American cultural lexicon because of the influence of the 1960s and 1970s Chicano Movement. Movement artists, writers, and other intellectual and political leaders adopted both as part of its manifesto of mestizo pride, cultural nationalism, and—through Malinche— women’s rights for equality, feminism, and local indigenous agency as a source of global power and impact on history. At the time of the European arrival in the 1490s, Aztec cultural, political, and military dominance was widespread over numerous tribes, and Motecuhzoma’s power extended in all directions from Tenochtitlán. When Cortés arrived in 1519 with his small army, he was intent on claiming the territory and its inhabitants for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela. The girl who was to become legendary in the Americas as La Malinche was at that time living in the area known today as the Yucatán peninsula. According to the famous firsthand account written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496–1584), one of Cortés’s soldiers, La Malinche’s given name was Malinalli Tenepal, and she was baptized “Marina” by the priests accompanying Cortés’s army. Díaz’s memoir, Verdadera historia de la conquista de la Nueva España (True History of the Conquest of New Spain), published in 1632 and widely distributed in Europe, also indicates that the Spaniards began to address Marina by the respectful 727

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title, “doña,” because soon after their arrival in the Yucatán, they came to admire her intelligence, virtue, and grace (Díaz, 55). Also according to Díaz, during the events of the conquest the pronunciation of Marina’s baptized Christian name appears to have elided with her original Nahua given name, Malinalli, in the languages spoken by the native people, hence producing the “Malinche” appellation. Linguistic anthropologists acknowledge that this kind of phonological elision is a natural linguistic transformation that commonly occurs when diverse peoples come into contact and their languages and cultures begin to adapt to the new social environment. One of the most striking revelations of Diaz’s Verdadera historia/True History is that the Indians addressed Cortés himself by the name of his interpreter and guide. That is, the native Náhuatl-speaking Mesoamericans also elided the conqueror’s name identity into that of his interpreter’s appellation. He was identified as “Malinche,” and she was differentiated as “La Malinche.” Even the emperor Motecuhzoma addressed him as “Malinche” in their monumentally historic first meeting in 1520 when the Spaniard and his expanded army of thousands of allies arrived in the capital. This merging of their public identities may signify at least in part the critical importance in an oral culture of an interpreter, especially one who stands at the center of the major political and powergenerating nucleus of the age. In addition, La Malinche’s talents as a native speaker, bilingual interpreter, and multicultural guide contributed immensely to Cortés’s shrewd military planning, as well as to the day-to-day carrying out of his strategy. Few documentable facts are known about her personal biography beyond those provided by Bernal Díaz, which he describes as taken from his notes and recollections of his conversations with her during the conquest. He states that she was born a Nahua in Tenochtitlán in, he speculates, circa 1502. As a child she was given by her mother to a coastal tribe (probably Mayan) whose cacique, in turn, gave her to Cortés along with a group of other girls to provide sexual and domestic services. Only a teenager when the Spaniards arrived, these details explain why she spoke both her mother tongue, Náhuatl, and also other dialects of the Yucatán. The ease and alacrity with which she learned Spanish, a language completely foreign in every sense of the word, suggests that she was a natural polyglot. Díaz observes that she served Cortés dutifully and skillfully as an interpreter and guide and that she bore him two sons. In reclaiming in the twenty-first century the indigenous, Mexican, and mestizo elements of Chicana and Chicano* history, it is noteworthy that many past historians and traditional historiography long ignored La Malinche’s pivotal place in one of the watershed events of the western hemisphere. Díaz’s firsthand account of the conquest explicitly points out that his military captain was called by his female interpreter’s name. Moreover, he is effusive in praising her fine qualities when he introduces her into his chronicle, even though he carefully avoids mentioning her too prominently or too often throughout the account, scholars think, because Cortés was a husband, father, and orthodox Catholic; furthermore, the social conventions of the period required that her female 728

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presence be minimized. Later accounts diminish her presence further, and in time the conquest and the conqueror, Cortés, became synonymous in the received public record, leaving La Malinche virtually excluded from the histories of the Americas in yet another example of the masculinist and Eurocentric gaze that erased women and other marginalized people as actors in the histories of their times. When she was mentioned, reference was primarily to her role as his “mistress” and secondarily (if at all) to her participation as translator. This curious and highly significant historiographical treatment reflects the reality of patriarchy that has been challenged and corrected in the late twentieth century. It is instructive to recall that Díaz, an unscholarly soldier, acknowledged that he wrote his Verdadera/True History as a protest against what he viewed as inadequate “academic” accounts by indoor historians whose versions couldn’t compare with his as a direct actor and eyewitness of the explorations and military trials. Also relevant to this discussion of historiography is that her multiple names reflect her lack of power as a woman within either the Spanish Catholic or the Aztec patriarchal caste systems that subsumed her. Malinalli Tenepal. Marina. Doña Marina. La Malinche. The given and the imposed names represent the (lack of) agency and power into which fate cast her—and the women around her. In reality she was powerful, even if she not was recorded as so in the historiography. Because of her remarkable role at this singular crossroads in history, she was perhaps the first “American” to confront on a public stage what the twenty-first century recognizes as the gender, ethnicity, race, and class issues of mestizo cultural identity, bilingual consciousness, and transnational discourse. That she lived these landmark events as a girl speaks both to the patriarchal perception of females of any age as chattel for male use and to what the Spaniards described as her exceptional intelligence and resilience. La Malinche is believed to have died in 1527 at the age of twenty-five. Some consider La Malinche as the historical source for the La Llorona legend. Through a male gaze she appears frequently as a traitor and scapegoat (the Mexican term for “betrayal” is malinchismo), but feminists in the late twentieth century have reclaimed her biography as a woman and girl who played a central role in the western hemisphere’s formation. She also appears throughout literary and artistic history in the work of many, including muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, poets Archibald MacLeish, Octavio Paz, Alurista,* and Lucha Corpi,* playwrights Estela Portillo Trambley* and Cherrie Moraga,* and novelists Marina Warner and Margaret Shedd. Like other pivotal historical women—Pocahontas, Joan of Arc, Sacajawea, and Margaret Fuller—whose lives and destinies intersected major watershed moments in history, La Malinche was a central actor in one phase of the conquest of Mexico. Her bicultural awareness, multilinguality, and role as interlocutor for the opposing Nahua and Spanish sides may qualify her as the first “Latina” to contend directly and publicly with issues of colonial appropriation, loss of indigenous culture, New- versus Old-World identities, and female marginalization. To confront the historical figure of Malinalli Tenepal/Doña Marina/La Malinche is to gain crucial insight into the complex history and present dynamic pluralism of the Americas. 729

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Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia, “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype” reprinted in Frontiers Classic Edition: Chicana Studies Reader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002: 1–10). Candelaria, Cordelia, “Latina Women Writers: Chicana, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican Voices” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, eds. Francisco Lomelí, et al. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 134–162). Candelaria, Cordelia, and Kathi George, eds., “Chicanas in the National Landscape” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 1980; first feminist special issue on Chicanas published). Castillo, Ana, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (New York: Penguin, 1995). Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ed. Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (Mexico City: Biblioteca Porrúa, 1960). Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, and Tomas Ybarra Frausto, Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/o Sexualities (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Idell, Albert, The Bernal Díaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957). Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude; Life and Thought in México (New York: Grove Press, 1961). Pérez. Emma, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Manifest Destiny. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was an expression of American nationalism used to justify, rationalize, and explain United States expansionist efforts during the nineteenth century. In essence, Anglo Americans wanted to fulfill a destiny manifested to them by God to expand their country all the way to the Pacific coast—some propagandists and politicians even wanted to expand as far south as Tierra del Fuego. Indeed, many Americans believed that God had provided signs that these lands could be taken from Mexico with impunity. After the annexation of Texas in 1845, President James K. Polk sent John Slidell to Mexico with an offer of twenty-five million dollars for Mexico and California, but Mexican officials refused to even see him. Polk then sent General Zachary Taylor across the Nueces River to blockade the mouth of the Rio Grande River at Port Isabel. On April 25, 1846, Mexicans retaliated by crossing the river and attacking U.S. troops, inflicting casualties. Now able to justify war immediately, Polk went to Congress and obtained a declaration of war against Mexico. John L. O’Sullivan, the journalist who had coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” felt that Mexicans in the northern provinces would welcome U.S. rule because they had come to despise the neglect by Mexico’s centralized rule and because ‘an irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon[s] would bring with them ‘the plough and the rifle . . . schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting houses.’” Some scholars see adherence to this ideology by 730

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Anglo Americans as a reflection of their religious traditions, including “predestination,” the notion that God only selected successful, enterprising individuals to go to heaven. Faced with this racist ideology, many intellectuals in what became the U.S. West and Southwest created a “fantasy heritage”* that proclaimed them the original introducers of European civilization to these areas. Others, such as editor Francisco Ramírez* of Los Angeles’s El Clamor Público (The Public Outcry) sought to safeguard their linguistic and cultural rights by appealing to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo* and the U.S. Constitution. To this day, much literature has been generated in countering the culturally dangerous implications of Manifest Destiny. Further Reading Gutiérrez, David G., Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Weber, David J., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

F. Arturo Rosales Manrique, Jaime (1949–). Jaime Manrique, a Colombian-born writer who moved to the U.S. as a teenager, has made a significant contribution to gay and lesbian Latino/a literature with his novels, criticism and memoirs. His autobiographical novel Latin Moon in Manhattan (1992) depicts the life of a young Colombian boy, Santiago Martínez (a.k.a. Sammy) who comes to New York City with his mother. The novel discusses the problems Sammy faces after being transported from Bogotá to Times Square. These problems include drugs, violence, his adaptation to a new culture, his relationship with his family, and his sexuality. For Sammy there is a conflict between being gay and Colombian. During the course of the novel, his difficulties are explored, and we witness his evolution as a gay man discovering that it is possible to be gay and Latino at the same time. Manrique’s second novel, published in English in the United States, Twilight at the Equator (1997), is a transnational novel that takes place in Colombia, the U.S., and Spain. The protagonist is Santiago Martínez, who continues dealing with homophobia, fighting against it. In his most recent book, Eminent Maricones (1999), Manrique takes on an extremely important project, tracing what could be called a genealogy of literary maricones in the United States—a historical tract that explores expressions of queer male sexuality in several Latin American (and one Spanish) authors, all of whom lived for critical periods in the U.S. Manrique recounts his own interactions with Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas and Argentinian author Manuel Puig, both of whom he met while they were living in New York. He also examines what he sees as the internalized homophobia and repressed yearnings of Federico García Lorca. Manrique provides us with an important genealogy of U.S. Latino authors that he uses as the foundation for his own holistic acceptance of himself and his many, sometimes conflicting, identities. 731

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Further Reading Foster, David William, and Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Mares, Ernesto Antonio (1938–). Ernesto Antonio Mares is a native New Mexican poet and translator who has taken on the Appollonian task of approaching history as a muse and enticing her to sing. He owes his considerable success as a playwright and New Mexico’s premier Chicano essayist to the rare talent of entwining poetry and history without betraying either. Born on May 17, 1938, in Old Town Albuquerque to Ernesto Gustavo Mares and Rebecca Devine, Mares is a product of cultural contradictions that he later became the first to conceptualize through the picaresque New Mexican concept of the Coyote, a colonial caste term for mixed-breed. His mother’s family is Hispanicized Irish. Through his father, he is related to the illustrious and controversial nineteenth-century priest, Padre Antonio José Martínez,* of Taos, who defined for later generations the meaning of cultural resistance under the American occupation. With a widely performed play, “I Returned and Saw under the Sun” (1988), and an edited collection of essays, Padre Martínez, New Perspectives from Taos (1989), Mares was a catalyst in the rehabilitation of Padre Martínez as cultural hero, eclipsing the ignominious light in which Willa Cather had cast him in her famous novel, Death Comes to the Archbishop. Mares’s most significant early publications as a poet and essayist in the 1970s were with the Academia de la Nueva Raza* (Academy of the New People) in Dixon, New Mexico, and its journal, El Cuaderno (The Notebook), a foundational forum that gave shape to the Chicano Movement in New Mexico. First founded as Academia de Aztlán (The Academy of Aztlán*) in 1968, it was the first Chicano group in the Southwest to use the term Aztlán. Mares’s pioneer 1973 essay, “Myth and Reality: Observations on American Myths and the Myth of Aztlán” was another first. The Academia and its founder Tomás Atencio developed and put into practice culturally based community forum models of political, cultural, and social work known as La Resolana (Shady Place). An early alliance with Paulo Freire and inspiration in his model of concientización, or political and cultural consciousness-raising, resulted in the group’s name change to Academia de la Nueva Raza. A recent collaboration between Atencio, Mares, and sociologist Miguel Montiel has produced Resolana for a Dark New Age (2008), a community-based antidote to the ravishes of globalization. As Mares insists, poetry is at the core of his creative visions and the source of all his cultural work. His poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. Unicorn Poem (1980) is an expansive personal and cultural geography, amplified again in 1992 as Unicorn Poem & Flowers and Songs of Sorrow. The 1994 There are Four Wounds, Miguel is a poetic conversation with Spanish poet martyr, Miguel Hernández in which Mares adds Silence to the cosmic fatal 732

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wounds of Love, Life, and Death. His 2004 book With the Eyes of a Raptor is his most ambitious and far-ranging yet. With a Ph.D. in history and extensive research on the Spanish Civil War, Mares has culminated in an enduring collaboration with the great post-war Spanish poet Angel González, and is arguably his finest translator, in Dawn Tango/Tango de Madrugada (2006) and Casi toda la música/Almost All the Music (2007). Mares’s career as a poetic translator also includes two anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry with Enrique Lamadrid. The themes of cultural resistance and ideological independence, leavened with the picaresque humor of the coyote, are constants in the work of E. A. Mares, who has written a major chapter in the Chicano intellectual and poetic history of New Mexico and the Southwest. Further Reading Lamadrid, Enrique, “Ernesto Antonio Mares” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman Inc., 1992: 164–169).

Enrique Lamadrid Mariel Generation. In April 1980, a dramatic incident in Havana, Cuba, received worldwide attention: a bus carrying a load of discontented Cubans crashed through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana, where the passengers received political asylum from Peru. When it became apparent that what the gate-crashers really wanted was to leave Cuba, Castro began to revise his policy of gradually allowing Cubans to leave. In a calculated move, the Castro government announced that whoever wanted to leave Cuba should go to the Peruvian embassy. Immediately, ten thousand people crowded in. The Cuban government then processed and gave exit documents to those who came forth. Cuban exiles who happened to be on the island at the time of the embassy gate-crashing returned to Miami and organized a flotilla of forty-two boats. With Castro’s blessing, they began round-the-clock evacuation of the “Havana Ten Thousand.” President Jimmy Carter, like presidents before him, decided to welcome the new influx of Cuban exiles. Since the flotilla converged at Mariel Harbor to pick up passengers, whose number totaled over 125,000 by the time the boat-lifts ended in 1980, the refugees became known as the Marielitos. The explanation given by Fidel Castro for this whole phenomenon was rather simplistic. He charged that his policy of allowing exiles to visit the island had contaminated many erstwhile revolutionaries with the glitter of consumerism. It is probably true that travelers from the United States to the island did tempt Cubans with their abundance of consumer products, convincing many that life in a capitalist society was easier than life in Cuba. Nonetheless, Castro had to accept that socialism was at this point experiencing many difficulties and not delivering on many of the promises made some twenty years earlier. The new refugees differed significantly from the earlier waves of displaced Cubans. Few were from the middle and upper classes of pre-Castro Cuba, unlike most exiles then living in the United States. There were also racial differences: 733

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Cuban boatlift during the Mariel exodus.

the new arrivals were more reflective of the general racial composition of Cuba, with many blacks and mulattos in their ranks. Furthermore, in a crafty move, Castro had deliberately cast out many political and social misfits during the boat-lift, an act that unfairly stigmatized the majority of 1980 émigrés, who were generally normal, hard-working Cubans. However, among these political dissidents and “misfits” were numerous writers who had been jailed for their political expression. These writers further diversified the Cuban literary culture in the United States. The writers who came during this last, large immigration are often referred to as the Mariel Generation writers, artists, and intellectuals. Many of them had been raised during the triumph and institutionalization of the Revolution, and their escape to the United States signified a failure of the communist system in Cuba. The Mariel Generation is characterized by a resistance to socialism and outright rebellion in Cuba as well as by distinguishing themselves and 734

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showing some discomfort in associating with the previous generations of antiCastro Cubans. The generation was led by many refugee poets, especially those who published in the Revista Mariel (Mariel Review). The most distinguished figure to emerge from this group was Reynaldo Arenas,* who was seen as a writer blazing a trail to international recognition. Like Arenas, most of the group members had been harassed, persecuted, or jailed in Cuba and, while in Cuba, many had become acquainted with each other through clandestine readings and recitals. Among the important poets in the Mariel generation were Reynaldo Arenas, of course, and many others who were born in the 1950s, including Juan Abreu (1952), Jesús Barquet (1953), Rafael Bordao* (1951), Roberto Valero (1955), and others. These poets consider themselves “el fruto bastardo de la Revolución” (The bastard fruit of the Revolution) who broke the boundaries imposed by censure and repression that stemmed from the Communist regime. Further Reading Bordao, Rafael, “Los Poetas del Mariel: Fruto Bastardo de la Revolución” (http://www. hispanocubana.org/revistahc/paginas/revista8910/REVIS TA7/ensayos/poetas.html). García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Masud-Piloto, Félix, From Welcomed Exiles to Illegal Immigrants (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Marín, Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” (1863–1897). Puerto Rican patriot and literary figure Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín was born in Arecibo, where he received a rudimentary elementary education. Marín learned the trade of typesetter, which provided a living for him throughout his life. It was through this trade that he developed into an intellectual and literary figure. In 1884, he published his first book, Flores nacientes (Newborn Flowers). In the late 1880s, he became an advocate of Puerto Rican independence from Spain and dedicated his second book, Mi óbolo (1887, My Little Bit), to the apostle of independence Román Baldorioty de Castro. In 1887, he founded the newspaper El Postillón (The Postilion), an organ for the anti-Spanish group La Torre del Viejo (The Old Man’s Tower). This made him persona non grata and led to his exile to Santo Domingo, Caracas, and, in 1891, New York City, where he opened a print shop and served as one of the main printer/publishers for the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movement. In fact, his print shop served as a meeting place for the intellectuals and writers who were the primary plotters of the revolt against Spain. In 1892, Marín published what would become a foundational work for Puerto Rican letters, his book of poems Romances (1897, Ballads). The same year the book was published, he joined the revolutionary forces in Cuba and died in battle at Turiguanó. Before dying, however, he was able to write his last book, En la arena (In the Sand), published posthumously in 1898. In Marín’s literary corpus is also a play, El 27 de febrero (February 27), that takes 735

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the independence of the Dominican Republic as a theme. “Pachín” Marín is considered one of Puerto Rico’s national heroes. Further Reading Figueroa de Cifredo, Patria, Pachín Marín—Héroe y Poeta (San Juan: Instituto de Culture Puertorriqueña, 1967). Figueredo, Danilo H., Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Marqués, René (1919–1979). Considered Puerto Rico’s foremost playwright and writer of short fiction, René Marqués was born on October 4, 1919, in Arecibo into a farming family. Marqués studied Agronomy at the College of Agriculture in Mayagüez and actually worked for two years for the Department of Agriculture. But his interest in literature took him to Spain in 1946 to study the classics. Upon his return to Puerto Rico, Marqués founded a small theater group dedicated to producing and furthering the creation of Puerto Rican theater. In 1948, he received a Rockefeller Fellowship to study playwriting in the United States, which allowed him to study at Columbia University and the Piscator Dramatic Workshop in New York City. After his return to San Juan, he established the Teatro Experimental del Ateneo (The Atheneum Society Experimental Theater). From that time on, Marqués maintained a heavy involvement not only in playwriting, but also in the development of Puerto Rican theater. He also produced a continuous flow of short stories, novels, essays, and anthologies. Although Marqués’s best known work is still the allimportant play “La Carreta” (The Oxcart, which debuted in 1953 and was published in 1961), he published numerous works after 1944, when he published his first collection of poems, Peregrinación (Pilgrimage). His published plays include El hombre y sus sueños (1948, Man and His Dreams), Palm Sunday (1949), Otro día nuestro Poster for the production of “La Carreta.” 736

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(1955, Another of Our Days), Juan Bobo y la Dama de Occidente (1956, Juan Bobo and the Western Lady), and El sol y los MacDonald (1957, The Sun and the MacDonalds), as well as a collection, Teatro (1959), that includes three of his most important plays: “Los soles truncos” (The Fan Lights), “Un niño azul para esa sombra” (A Blue Child for that Shadow), and “La muerte no entrará en palacio” (Death Will Not Enter the Palace). There are many other published plays, novels, collections of short stories, and essays. Marqués is one of the few Puerto Rican writers who has had international audiences and impact—he is truly one of the high points of all Latin American drama. La Carreta, like no other play to that time, captured the ethos and culture of Puerto Ricans who had to leave the countryside to find work in the big city and eventually on the continental United States. As such, it is a model of the literature of immigration.* Marqués was able to dramatize in the simplest but most poetic terms the theme that would dominate much of Hispanic life in the second half of the twentieth century: migration. Produced repeatedly in the United States by such companies as Miriam Colón’s* Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, as well as numerous college productions, La Carreta was the first Puerto Rican play to be translated to other languages and to be produced in Europe. It has served as continuing inspiration to Nuyorican literature,* as well as giving the theme of the jíbaro its most definitive and memorable treatment as the archetype of the Puerto Rican nation. René Marqués died in 1979. Further Reading Martin, Eleanor Jean, René Marqués (Boston: Twayne, 1979).

Nicolás Kanellos Martí, José (1853–1895). Through tireless organizational efforts in New York, Tampa, Key West, and New Orleans, through fund-raising and lobbying of tobacco workers, and through penning and delivering eloquent political speeches and publishing a variety of essays in Spanish and English, José Martí was the Latin American quintessential intellectual “man of action,” simultaneously becoming a pioneer of Spanish American literary Modernism. Martí, born on January 28, 1853, in Havana, Cuba, invested his freedom and his life in the cause of Cuban independence from Spain, ultimately losing his life on a Cuban battlefield in 1895 at the age of forty-two. Before his death, however, Martí was a key figure in the revolutionary press movement, especially in New York, where he was the founder of the important newspaper of the last phase of the revolution: Patria (1892–19?, Homeland). Martí’s experience as a revolutionary journalist dated back to his youth in Cuba, where he had been imprisoned for ideas contained in an essay and in a play he had published in the newspaper La Patria Libre (The Homeland Free). He later was sent to study in Spain, where he obtained his law degree and published a political pamphlet, El presidio político en Cuba (Political Imprisonment in Cuba). In 1873, Martí moved to Mexico, where he edited Revista Universal (Universal Review); in 1877 he served as a professor in Guatemala and edited the official state newspaper there. In 1879, he 737

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José Martí.

returned to Cuba and was promptly exiled to Spain. From 1880 on, he began the first of his various residencies in New York. In Caracas in 1881, Martí founded and edited the Revista Venezolana (Venezuelan Review), which only lasted for two numbers, and then promptly returned to New York. In the grand metropolis, Martí maintained an active life as a writer, publishing books of poetry and numerous essays and speeches. Probably his most famous and influential book, establishing him as a master of Modernism, was his poetry collection, Versos sencillos (1891, Simple Verses). The most curious of his publishing feats was the founding and editing of La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) in 1889, a monthly magazine for children (he had earlier published a book of children’s verse, Ismaelillo [1881?, Little Ismael]), written for his son). In all his organizing and his countering of annexationist impulses with demands for independence and self-determination for Cuba, Martí warned of the imperialist tendencies of the United States. He did not live to see his fears become reality: the United States declared war on Spain, and, after signing the peace with Spain, unilaterally forced a constitution on the Republic of Cuba that depended on U.S. intervention, as called for in the Platt Amendment. On May 19, 1895, Martí lost his life in battle in Cuba. One of Martí’s greatest virtues was his ability to bring the various classes and factions together in the revolutionary cause; this virtue included extending open arms to Puerto Rican intellectuals to unite their efforts with those of the Cubans. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006). Martí, José, José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas (New York: Ocean Press, 1999). Poyo, Gerald Eugene, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Martin, Patricia Preciado (1939–). Patricia Preciado Martin was born in the small mining town of Humbolt, Arizona, on July 6, 1939; she received her early education in Tucson, where her love of reading made her excel as a 738

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student. Martin’s early love of folklore and fairy tales, often narrated by her mother, led her to write and to study literature at the University of Arizona. Her interest in folklore and collecting tales led her to begin her own writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From then on she authored numerous stories for children and young adults, many of them based on the folklore she studied. Her first book came out of this effort: The Legend of the Bellringer of San Agustín (1980), which recalls a quaint and somewhat idealized past in Mexican history and culture. In 1988, Martin published a well-received book of short stories, Days of Plenty, Days of Want, whose eight stories capture the flavor and deep culture of a Mexican barrio in Arizona. Two of Preciado’s books are collections of oral interviews that she conducted in the Tucson barrio: Images and Conversations: Mexican Americans Recall a Southwestern Past (1983) and Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (1992). The former is accompanied by artistic photographs of the interlocutors taken by Louis Carlos Bernal. Martin published two additional story collections, El Milagro and Other Stories (1996) and Amor Eterno: Eleven Lessons in Love (Eternal Love), that once again use personal-experience narratives of the elderly as an inspiration for creative fiction. However, Amor Eterno is the most lyrical and intimate of Martin’s books. In 1997, Patricia Preciado Martin was named Arizona Author of the Year. She was also the winner of the University of California–Irvine Award for Chicano/Latino Literature in 1989 for her short story “María de las Trenzas” (María of the Braids). Further Reading Ponce, Merrihelen, “Patricia Preciado Martin” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: The Gale Group, 1999: 222–225).

Nicolás Kanellos Martínez, Antonio José (1793–1867). New Mexican priest, politician, and rebel Father Antonio José Martínez was born in Abiquiu into a politically powerful family. Ordained a priest in 1882, Martínez served as a parish priest and teacher in Taos for most of his career. After establishing his own grammar school in 1883, he bought a printing press that was delivered to him from St. Louis over the Santa Fe Trail; it was the first press west of the Mississippi except for in Texas, which had one as early as 1812. Martínez acquired and learned to run the press principally to print catechisms and exercises for his classes, but he also used it to issue pamphlets and other miscellanea, including his own essays and communiqués to Church and federal authorities in Mexico City. Most important for the development of culture in the Southwest, Martínez used his printing press to publish New Mexico’s first newspaper, El Crepúsculo de la Libertad (The Dawning of Freedom), in Taos, in 1834. Under Mexican rule, Martínez served as the territorial deputy. Prior to the Mexican American War, he was the main adversary to the imminent American civic, cultural, and political takeover. After the war, however, he tried to help his people accommodate as best they could, 739

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Cover of a report printed by Father Antonio José Martínez.

becoming a member of the territorial legislature and the 1848 statehood convention, of which he was elected president. Martínez was also famous for his opposition to the new bishop, Jean Baptist Lamy, who introduced numbers of French and Spanish priests into New Mexico—priests who were not sympathetic to the religious culture of the Nuevo Mexicanos. Martínez’s 740

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continued dispute with the bishop led to his excommunication in 1857. In response, Martínez founded his own church and led a congregation there until his death on July 28, 1867. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, Pasó Por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Sánchez, Pedro, Memories of Padre Antonio José Martínez (Santa Fe, NM: Rydal Press, 1978).

Nicolás Kanellos Martínez, Demetria (1960–). Activist, journalist, and creative writer Demetria Martínez was born on July 10, 1960, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Princeton University in 1982 and began publishing her poems in 1987. The very next year, she was indicted for smuggling refugee women into the United States, and the government attempted to use one of her poems against her as evidence: “Nativity for Two Salvadoran Women.” Martínez was acquitted, based on first amendment rights. In 1990, she became a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter in Kansas City but soon lost interest and returned to poetry and creative writing. Her plan soon came to fruition as her first novel, Mother Tongue, won the Western States Fiction Award, the tale of a young woman who comes to know herself through her love of a Salvadoran refugee smuggled into the United States during the Sanctuary Movement. Her two books of poetry, Breathing between the Lines (1997) and The Devil’s Workshop (2002), address good and evil in the human condition. Her Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005), winner of the 2006 International Latino Book Award, is a collection of passionate essays, newspaper columns, speeches, and poems that reveal Martínez’s ethos for activism: from prayer to social and political intervention. Martínez addresses a broad array of contemporary themes, from undocumented workers to the war in Iraq. Further Reading Goldberg, Judith, “In Her Own Voice: Politics and Poetry” Santa Fe Reporter (Oct. 26, 2005) (http://sfreporter.com/articles/publish/demetria-martinez-interview-102605.php).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita” (1925–). Born in Washington, D.C., to Manuel Guillermo and Ruth Phillips Martinez, Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez has been an author and activist for almost fifty years. In her writing, she has documented the Chicano struggle for social justice since the 1960s. She received a B.A. with honors from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (the only student of color at the time) in 1946 and an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore in 2000. In the 1960s she worked in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), where she was one of two Latino staff members. Her first book, Letters from Mississippi (1965, reissued in 2003) came out of that experience. In 1968, Martínez was asked to move to 741

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New Mexico to support the land grant movement being led by Reies López Tijerina. Putting her considerable writing talent to good use, she soon began publishing the Chicano movement newspaper El Grito del Norte (The Northern Shout); the newspaper was published until 1975. While an activist in New Mexico, Martínez attended the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver in 1969 and La Raza Unida Party’s (The United People) national convention in El Paso, Texas, in 1972. Martínez has written numerous articles and books, including 500 Years of Chicano History, a bilingual, pictorial history. Since moving to San Francisco in 1976, where she lives in the Mission District, Martínez has worked on community issues, such as health care, immigrant rights, and anti-racist training, as well as serving as a consultant and mentor to Latino youth groups. In 1997, she cofounded the Institute for MultiRacial Justice, a resource center to help build alliances among peoples of color that she now directs. She has received eighteen awards for leadership, scholarship, and service from professional organizations, and many more from student and community groups. She has also been an adjunct professor of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies in the California State University system and has been a guest lecturer on more than 200 campuses. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

F. Arturo Rosales Martínez, Max (1943–2000). Born on May 10, 1943, in Gonzales, Texas, a farm town some forty miles from San Antonio, Max (Maximiano) Martínez was raised in a rural, agricultural community similar to the one depicted in his three novels, Schoolland (1988), White Leg (1996), and Layover (1997). After graduating high school, he sought to escape the country life, where his lot as a Mexican American was limited, and he went to sea as a merchant marine. He was able to see a good portion of the world, including Spain, which left an indelible impression on his young mind. He returned to San Antonio and studied English and philosophy at St. Mary’s University, graduating with a B.A. in 1972. By December 1973, he had finished a master’s degree in comparative literature at East Texas State University in Commerce, but rather than becoming a teacher, his wanderlust took him away once again, this time to New York to work as a stockbroker. This, however, lasted almost no time at all. Having lived the life of a sailor, a stockbroker, and freelance writer, Martínez tried to settle down in 1975 into a more stable intellectual environment by studying for his Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver and, beginning in 1977, pursuing a career as a college professor at the University of Houston. But it turned out that neither was for him: he never finished his dissertation and he abandoned the tenure track at the university by the mid-1980s to dedicate himself to serious writing. This he did until his death (in 2000, from a series of strokes). Aside from numerous stories published in a variety of literary magazines, as well as hundreds of “man-on-the-scene” commentary and thought pieces that he wrote 742

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for trade journals, the fruits of Martinez’s labors have been five books. In addition to the three novels mentioned above, there are two collections of short stories. In The Adventures of the Chicano Kid and Other Stories (1983), he experiments with a variety of styles to depict the variety of Chicano life: a farm worker; a middle-class suburban businessman (what would today be called a yuppie); an educated, self-confident, modern Chicano in a face-off with traditional rural prejudice in the person of a Texas “redneck” (a frequent portrait of blue-collar racism in most of Martinez’s books); an old man snoozing on a park bench and bemoaning how things have changed; and others. The title story is a satire of nineteenth-century dime novels. Schoolland (1988), Max Martínez’s autobiographical novel is a young boy’s first-person account of the year of Max Martínez. the great drought (1953), the same year that his beloved grandfather foretold his own death and began making preparations for it. The novel is a coming-of-age tale but is also a social protest that details the tragedy of bank takeovers of farmland—both boy and reader lose their innocence. Not only does the grandfather die, so does a Texas–Mexican way of life on the land. Martínez’s second collection of stories, Red Bikini Dream, also includes some autobiographical tales but offers stories of non-Chicano experiences as well. The stories’ characters include successful lawyers, drunken sailors, and even a middle-aged Jewish American couple on a dude ranch in Texas. The tension between “civilized” behavior and the desire to experience life unbridled and wild holds the varied stories together. Martínez again gives us glimpses of his own life as a struggling writer in New York, as a sailor, and as a child growing up in a fatherless home. White Leg and Layover are well-crafted mystery novels set in the small rural towns of Central Texas. Sharing some of the same characters, they are both a powerful evocation of the dangerous politics and culture of small-town life. Martínez’s works have been praised for capturing the rhythm and nuance of rural Texas life, for their sensitive evocation of past times in central Texas, and for their array of interesting and diverse characters. They have been censured at times for their scenes of explicit sex 743

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and violence and for what has been seen as their victimization of women. Martínez wields a powerful pen that cuts so close to the bone of the reader that it is often hard to arrive at an objective judgment. Further Reading Fuente, Patricia de la, “Max Martínez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, First Series (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Martínez, Michele (19?–). Crime/legal thriller author Michele Martínez is the daughter of a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish Russian mother. Born and raised in New York, she graduated from Stanford University with honors and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard University. Subsequently she worked for a top law firm in New York City but decided to perform public service by becoming an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, an area of rampant gang and illegal drug activity. Martínez spent the next eight years prosecuting criminals, became a mother of two children, and sought a change of career, dedicating herself to writing about the subject that had recently dominated her professional life: crime. Martínez thus invented her literary surrogate, Melanie Vargas, a prosecutor who not only takes on criminals in court but becomes involved in solving murder mysteries, putting her own life at risk. Vargas has become the protagonist so far in a series of five novels: Most Wanted (2005), dealing with the murder of a prosecutor colleague and the arson of her house, The Finishing School (2006), named Best Mystery & Suspense Novel by Romantic Times Magazine, dealing with two teen murders in an elite private school, Cover-Up (2007), investigating the murder in Central Park of a ruthless society reporter, and Notorious (2008), in which Vargas brings a rap star to jusMichele Martínez. 744

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tice and witnesses a car bombing. Martínez’s books have ascended the bestseller charts and been translated to other languages. Further Reading Rodríguez, Ralph, Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Martínez, Rubén (1962–). Martínez, a nonfiction writer of Salvadoran and Mexican heritage, was born on July 9, 1962, in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. He has distinguished himself as a journalist as well as an author of feature articles and books. An associate editor of the Pacific News Service and a Loeb Fellow of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Martínez is also a pioneer in what has been called the “nonfiction novel,” a narrative that recreates lives and events based on historical and journalistic research. His most renowned work in this genre is Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail (2001), which traces the lives of an extended family of migrants during several years and through thousands of miles of their treks. Among Martínez’s other works are The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City and Beyond (1992), a collection of poetry and essays, and Eastside Stories: Gang Life in East Los Angeles (1998). In 2004, he published four essays on immigrant life in the United States in The New Americans, coauthored with Joseph Rodríguez, to accompany a PBS series of the same title. His reportage, opinion pieces, and essays have been published nation-wide in publications from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, as well as in Mexico. Martínez was awarded an Emmy for hosting the politics and culture series Life & Times (1995) on Los Angeles’s KCET-TV. He is also the recipient of the Freedom of Information Award from the American Civil Liberties Union (1994), the University of California–Irvine prize in poetry (1990), and the Lannan Literary Fellowship (2002). As a poet, Martínez has had many spoken-word performances and has participated in public schools as an artist-in-residence. Further Reading Aldama, Arturo J., and Naomi Helena Quiñónez, Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Martínez, Rueben (1940–). Born in Miami, Arizona, Rueben Martínez became a barber in Los Angeles in 1960 and is famous for turning his barbershop into a bookstore and art gallery in 1993, promoting Latino literature as well as literacy among children. Because of his idealism and entrepreneurial talent, Martínez has been able to expand his bookstore and create a small chain serving Latino communities, a consumer often neglected in the book trade. Beginning with Librería Martínez Books & Art Gallery and Libros Para Niños, a children’s bookstore, Martínez has been able to expand the number of stores he owns, even establishing himself in airports. In 2004, Martínez was awarded a $500,000 745

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MacArthur fellowship for fusing the roles of business and community center. This fellowship has underwritten further expansion by Martínez, who is known as one of the prime movers in the Hispanic literary world, ensuring audiences for Latino writers on tour. Martínez’s mission statement reads as follows: “The mission of Librería Martínez Books and Art Gallery is to promote Latino literature and art. At the heart of our mission is the commitment to inspire in schools and communities a greater appreciation for education, art, and culture. By showcasing top-notch regional, national and international Latino authors and artists, we are building a business which provides educational value to our society and fosters long-term relationships with customers and friends.” Further Reading Kiser, Karin, “The State of the Market” Críticas: An English-Speakers’ Guide to the Spanish-language Book Market (Sep. 1, 2004) (http://www.criticasmagazine.com/article/ CA451381.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Martínez, Tomás Eloy (1934–). Novelist and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, born on July 16, 1934, in Tucumán, Argentina, went into exile in 1973 in Venezuela and later Mexico to escape the military dictatorship in his homeland. He came to the United Status to teach at the University of Maryland in 1984. Since 1995, he has taught at Rutgers University and continues to be an active columnist for periodicals in Spanish America and also writes for the New York Times syndicate. His exile began after he was fired from his position as director of Panorama for reporting on an uprising by political prisoners; his book on the same event was banned. Among his credits as a distinguished journalist in Argentina was his directorship of the cultural supplement to the major newspaper, La Nación (The Nation). Martínez is an accomplished novelist whose books often deal with the culture and politics of his homeland. His most famous novel, Santa Evita (1995), evokes the era when Juan Perón and Eva Duarte de Perón reigned supreme in Argentina; the book has been translated into some thirty-two languages and published in fifty countries. Among his other books translated to English are: The Perón Novel (1985), The Hand of the Master (1991), The Memoirs of the General (1996), Common Place—Death (1998), The Argentine Dream (1999), True Fictions (2000), The Flight of the Queen (2002), Requiem for a Lost Country (2003), The Lives of the General (2004), and The Tango Singer (2004). Even in his latest novel, The Tango Singer, Martínez returns to his old obsession in chronicling the return of a now sick and senile Juan Perón in 1973 from his long exile in Spain; as Martínez revisits the rise and fall of the dictator, he even inserts himself as a journalist into the narrative. Further Reading Waisbord, Silvio, Watchdog Journalism in South America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Zelarayn, Carolina, Deseo, desencanto y memoria: la narrativa de Tomás Eloy Martínez (Tucumán, Argentina: University of Tucumán, 2003).


Marzán, Julio

Marzán, Julio (1946–). Puerto Rican poet, translator, and academic Julio Marzán was born on February 2, 1946, and came to New York when he was four months old. Despite receiving his education in English-dominant schools, Marzán maintained his Spanish and today is completely bilingual in his poetry, one of the few translators who can translate equally well from one language to the other. After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School, Marzán went on to receive a B.A. from Fordham University (1967), an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University (1971), and a Ph.D. from New York University (1986). He has taught English at Nassau Community College for many years, except during the 2006 school year, when he was a visiting professor at Harvard University. Marzán, who has published poems and translations in magazines and anthologies far and wide, has also published two books of poems: Translations without Originals (1986) and Puerta de tierra (1998, Gateway), which may not fit the mold of Nuyorican* writing in its classical/canonical referents and command of craft as perfected in the academy. In 2005, Marzán published his first novel, The Bonjour Gene, dealing with a generational curse of womanizing among the members of the Bonjour family in both the island of Puerto Rico and New York. Marzán’s first major translation project was Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry (1980). However, his greatest translation feat was that of taking the onomatopoetic works of poet Luis Palés Matos and rendering them in a sonorous English rendition in Selected Poems/Poesía Selecta: The Poetry of Luis Palés Matos (2001). As a scholar, he has published three very innovative works: The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (1994), The Numinous Site: The Poetry of Luis Palés Matos (1995), and Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish and Latino Literature (1997). Marzán, a lifelong resident of Queens, New York City, was recently named poet laureate of Queens County from 2007 to 2010. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos

Julio Marzán.

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Mas Pozo, María (1893–1981). María Mas Pozo was a Puerto Rican journalist and writer who advocated women’s moral education. She and her writing offer us a glance at the conservative side of Puerto Rican women’s discourse in the early twentieth-century New York Hispanic intellectual community. Mas Pozo was born on August 10, 1893, in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Although from the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s she wrote several articles and essays for newspapers and magazines, such as Gráfico (Graphic) and Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters), no biographical sketch of her has ever appeared; nor has anyone studied her writing. Still, traces left by her writing lead us to acknowledge that María Mas Pozo was a well-educated woman whose contrary stance on women’s emancipation and their equality to men was supported by her readings and understanding of the psychological and sociological discourses that sought to analyze women’s behavior and place in society in the midst of feminists’ claims and social achievements. She often quoted such authorities as Alfred Adler, Daniel Carson Goodman, Fernando Nicolay, and Rex Beach in support of her arguments. Her contributions to Gráfico’s women’s column, “Charlas Femeninas” (Feminine Chats), give us priceless insight into the disputes that were taking place among the Hispanic intellectual women regarding their place in society. Contrary to Clotilde Betances Jaeger’s* celebration of the New Woman’s social and personal achievements, Mas Pozo’s writings were not as progressively feminist. She encouraged the protection of family life and moral education as the way out of the corruption, social demoralization, and women’s materialistic freedom that characterized her contemporary society. Mas Pozo’s writing was infused with the fear brought on by women’s emancipation, which, according to her, was the reason for moral vices and family disintegration: “Women’s claim for equality to men has done nothing but contribute to the home’s decline,” Mas Pozo pointed out in her article “La Mujer en las Edades” (Feb. 17, 1929, Women across Time). Despite her insistence on the need for moral education, she did not deny women professional access and educational achievements; nor was she against feminism, which to her meant the practice of women’s responsibilities for the family and the home, performances that guide society to its progress. Her writing and criticism should be considered representative of upper-tomiddle-class sentiment, because women’s positioning in traditional male jobs seemed to her not a need but an option. Therefore, her advocacy for women’s moral education—regarding sex, married life, and maternity—as well as her support of women returning to their homes, was to support raising and educating children, leaving aside issues such as domestic violence, women’s racial segregation, and discrimination in the job place, as well as mothers’ economic instability. Mas Pozo defended the idea that women were different from men and that such difference ought to be preserved. As she argued in “La Mujer y El Alma” (Apr. 13, 1929, Woman and Her Soul), women taking traditional male jobs

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had led to moral degradation, family disintegration, and the deterioration of women’s responsibility. Mas Pozo considered family a woman’s duty, explaining delinquency, wars, and immorality as consequences of the displacement of women’s responsibilities as mothers and wives. Her pledge to emphasize the differences among women and men was also supported by her disagreement with socialist ideologies, as she subtly mentioned in her response to Clotilde Betances Jaeger’s “La Mujer Nueva” (June 22, 1929): “Why should my money be given out to others lazy by nature?” she asked, concluding later that seeking total equality among human beings, women and men, would produce social progress. At the same time that María Mas Pozo defended women’s will to act and not to follow men’s wishes and demands, she conceived women’s actions as a powerful means of avoiding wars and restoring societal order. In her article “Los Problemas Femeninos” (July 20, 1929, Feminine Problems), she calls Hispanic women to attend to social, political, and economic issues, pointing out that achievements such as the right to vote had not led to improvements in education, the economy, and morality, the three areas where women’s power should be exerted. This was the subject of another of her articles, “Recogiendo firmas contra la Guerra” (Mar. 1936, Passing a Petition against the War), published in Artes y Letras, in which she criticizes Miss Heloise Brainerd, Chairwoman for Latin America of the People’s Mandate, who was collecting signatures to protest against the war and urge peace. Here, Mas Pozo calls for action that would force governments to consider women’s decision in national as well as international affairs, insisting that women not vote or cooperate with anything contributing to war. Mas also proposed founding the Liga de Mujeres Hispanas (Hispanic Women’s League) to defend the family and children, as well as advocate for education, domestic economy, and moral health, all of which would help avoid future wars. Her writing, like that of Clotilde Betances Jaeger, condemned United States imperialism and colonialism over Puerto Rico and the Latin American countries. In another of her Gráfico articles, “Bajo las Garras del Águila” (Dec. 13, 1930, Under the Eagle’s Claws), she promotes the Sandinista cause against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and attacks U.S. imperialism by arguing that all the revolutions taking place in Latin America are caused by the Americans for their own economic benefit. In the same subject, “Dejadlos Venir” (Nov. 16, 1929, Let Them Come) manifested her open opposition to Puerto Rican immigration to the United States and supported Puerto Rican independence, holding on to their Spanish civilization, cultural heritage, and the moral tradition of dignity and honesty. In 1938, María Mas Pozo married Puerto Rican independence leader José Enamorado Cuesta, of whose movement it is assumed she was a member. She was also a member of the Asociación de Escritores y Periodistas Puertorriqueños (Association of Puerto Rican Writers and Journalists). In 1973, she published in Puerto Rico what seems to be her only book, El camino de la violencia (The

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Road of Violence), which from a communist position condemns the reasons for violence and wars in the world: capitalism, consumerism, religion, and U.S. imperialism—not only in Puerto Rico, but also in the rest of the world. Mas Pozo died in June 1981 in her native Bayamón. Further Reading Vega, Bernardo, Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: a Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, trans. Juan Flores, ed. César Andréu Iglesias (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).

María Teresa Vera-Rojas Matas, Julio (1931–). Julio Matas is a playwright, poet, and fiction writer. Born in Havana, Cuba, on May 12, 1931, Matas was encouraged to follow in the steps of his father, a judge, and thus obtained his law degree from the University of Havana in 1955. But he never practiced as an attorney. He had enrolled in the University School for Dramatic Arts and by the time of his graduation in 1952, he had already organized a drama group, Arena. In his youth he worked on literary magazines and film projects with some of the figures who would become outstanding in these fields, such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Nestor Almendros, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. In 1957, Matas enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a Ph.D. degree in Spanish literature. However, he remained active as a director, returning to Cuba to work on stage productions. It was during the cultural ferment that accompanied the first years of the Communist regime in Cuba that Matas saw two of his first books published there: the collection of short stories Catálogo de imprevistos (1963, Catalog of the Unforeseen) and the three-act play La crónica y el suceso (1964, The Chronicle and the Event). In 1965, Matas returned to the United States to assume a position in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, a position he has not left. Matas’s plays and short stories have been published widely in magazines, anthologies, and textbooks. One of his most popular plays, Juego de Damas (The Game of Checkers), has been performed often and has been published in both Spanish and English. In most of his fiction and drama, Matas poses the individual in conflict with society as his plays verge on the theater of the grotesque. One of Matas’s most successful collections of stories, Erinia (1971), has been interpreted as the author’s desire to surprise the reader with his realistic situations and characters. However, for the most part, his stories and plays have been published in literary anthologies and such magazines as Latin American Literary Review and Linden Lane Magazine. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo J., “History and Development of Cuban American Literature: A Survey” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61). González-Cruz, Luis F., “Julio Matas” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).


Mayo, Wendell

Mayer, Oliver (1965–). Oliver Mayer is a Los Angeles playwright, born on April 25, 1961, the son of a Mexican American mother, an actress who gave up the theater for marriage, and his late father, Alexander, a film and television art director and boxing enthusiast. Mayer’s education includes studies at Cornell, a B.A. from Oxford, and an M.F.A. in theater from Columbia University. In addition, Mayer trained as an amateur boxer, inspired by his Mexican grandfather and his own father—this passion reveals itself in the subject of various plays, including his most famous, “Blade to the Heat” (1994). His other inspiration, which led him to the stage, was seeing the works of Luis Valdez* and El Teatro Campesino; he was especially taken by the Los Angeles production of “Zoot Suit.” Today, however, rather than thinking of himself as a Chicano dramatist, he identifies more generally as a Latino playwright. Among his numerous other produced plays are “José Louis Blues” (1992), “Conjunto” (1999, Band), “The Road to Los Angeles” (2000), “Joy of the Desolate” (2000), “Ragged Time” (2002), “Young Valiant” (2004), and “A Pesar de Todo” (2006, In Spite of Everything). They have enjoyed productions on both coasts, from the Mark Taper Forum to Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. A play that takes Mayer back to the days of incipient Chicano theater, however, is “Conjunto,” his study of Mexican, Japanese, and Filipino farm workers in the post–World War II period. He is the recipient of an Obie award and two Drama Critic Circle awards, among many others. Mayer is also a scriptwriter; his screenplays and teleplays include Boxing Illustrated, Sins of the City: The Hurt Business, and The Wetback Academy. Mayer has served as a literary associate at the Mark Taper Forum from 1989 to 1997, has lectured at numerous universities, and is a faculty member in theater at the University of Southern California. Further Reading Svich, Caridad, and María Teresa Marrero, eds., Out of the Fringes: Contemporary Latina/ Latino Theatre and Performance (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Mayo, Wendell (1953–). Wendell Mayo was born in 1953 at the naval base in Corpus Christi, Texas, while his father was on tour during the Korean War. In Corpus Christi, Mayo spent his boyhood in a Mexican American community off Old Brownsville Road with his mother in the household of his grandmother, whose family originated in Veracruz, Mexico. After Mayo’s father returned from duty at sea, took a B.S. degree in nuclear physics from the University of Texas, and found a position with the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), he moved the family north to Cleveland, Ohio. From this point on, Mayo lived in a household of two cultures—the dominant one (his father’s) of European origins and his mother’s more hidden one, although the cultural practices of Mexican Americans living in the Southwestern U.S. were evident everywhere in his mother’s beliefs, superstitions, and longing for her home in Corpus Christi. 751

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Wendell Mayo.

“My father seemed very comfortable with the homogenization of lifestyles after the Korean War—all that seemed very ‘American’: the single-family dwelling in the suburbs (yes single, no room for extended families there); the fear of Communism, and of nuclear war; the space race—all those distractions that lead one away from wondering about one’s unique cultural past and traditions. But my mother resisted this; she never forgot them, and so neither did I.”

In 1975, Mayo completed his B.S. in chemical engineering at Ohio State University and worked as an engineer. In 1980 he began to pursue his life-long ambition to write and finished his B.A. in journalism at the University of Toledo. He published his first two short stories in 1984. In 1991, he completed his doctoral studies in English at Ohio University. Mayo has published his stories in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, New Letters, and Western Humanities Review. In 1995, Centaur of the North (1996) was selected as the finalist from a field of 421 entries in the Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Short Fiction. “I write to explain or to understand a mystery for myself, so when I wrote the stories in Centaur of the North, I simply wrote them to honor and to understand my mother, her heritage, my heritage–-so much of her life she lived in silence, a kind of cultural fear of the dominant culture. “I can never hope to give my mother and family ‘voice’ in the rather overused sense of the word; but what I hope to affirm in these stories, and stories yet to

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come, is the absolute value, the cultural necessity of storytelling in cultural recovery. I think cultural recovery begins with personal recovery, for instance through reading, writing, listening–-one person at a time. And I have come to writing because of this. I still have far to go, so much to understand, so many more tales to listen to and to tell.”

Mayo’s second collection of stories, B. Horror: And Other Stories (1999), is comprised of twelve stories set in Middle America and loosely based on cheap horror films. Many of the stories published in his two collections saw first light in numerous literary magazines, such as New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Yale Review. Mayo counts among his various distinctions 1995 first prize for fiction in the Mississippi Review, 1994 finalist in the Faulkner Prize for Fiction, and 1994 first runner-up for the New Letters Literary Award in Fiction. In 1996, Mayo was awarded the Premio Aztlán, a national literary honor created by author Rudolfo Anaya* (Bless Me Ultima) for literary excellence in works by Chicano writers that explore aspects of Chicano culture and experience. Mayo is former director of the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. He joined the creative writing faculty of Bowling Green State University in the fall of 1996. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Mayor Marsán, Maricel (1952–). Born in Santiago, Cuba, and a refugee of the Cuban Revolution, Maricel Mayor Marsán is a poet, literary critic, and professor. A graduate in political science from Florida International University, Mayor has published books in Spanish, in bilingual editions, and as audiobooks. Her collections of poems include Lágrimas de papel (1975, Paper Tears), 17 poemas y un saludo (1978, 17 Poems on Health), Errores y horrores (2000, Errors and Horrors), Un corazón dividido/A Split Heart (1998), Rostro cercano (1986, Close Face), Poemas desde Church Street/Poems from Church Street (2001), and El tiempo de los dioses (2003, The Time of the Gods). She also edits her own online poetry magazine: www.poemas.net. Mayor’s poems have been widely anthologized in the United States and abroad; some have been translated to Chinese, Italian, and, of course, English. Mayor has published her plays in Gravitaciones teatrales (2002, Theatrical Gravitations) and her short stories in Dutch magazines such as Baquiana. Further Reading Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla, poesiá cubana del exilio (Nashville, TN: Betania, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos McPeek Villatoro, Marcos (1962–). Born on February 20, 1962, in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee to an Anglo father and a Salvadoran mother, Marcos McPeek Villatoro has comically elaborated his unusual biography 753

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in stand-up comedy routines and in his autobiographical novel, The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones (1999). After studying for the priesthood for a while, McPeek Villatoro married and worked in various relief organizations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, at times during the heat of civil war conflicts. After returning to the United States and working with Latino immigrant communities in the South, he earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa (1998). He then moved his wife and four children to Los Angeles and became the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair in creative writing at Mount St. Mary’s College. Even before attending the Iowa Workshop, McPeek Villatoro was an accomplished writer, publishing his monumental epic of Salvadoran history, A Fire in the Earth, in 1996. His reportage of living and working in Central America, Walking toward La Milpa: Living in Guatemala with Armies, Demons, Abrazos and Death followed in 1996. A diverse writer, he has published two bilingual collections of poems on the themes of identity, Salvadoran culture and politics, as well as immigrant worldview, They Say that I Am Two (1997) and On Tuesday, When the Homeless Disappeared (2004). His first effort after the workshop, The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones, was the finalist in the Independent Publisher Book Award.

Marcos McPeek Villatoro.

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In 2001, McPeek Villatoro created his Salvadoran American female detective, Romilia Chacón in the first installment of a series, Home Killings, that was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. The intelligent and intrepid Chacón had now solved mysteries in two sequels, Minos: A Romilia Chacón Mystery (2005) and A Venom Beneath the Skin (2006). McPeek Villatoro’s short stories—both in English and Spanish—have appeared in such literary magazines as Brownbag Press, Crossworlds and Latino Stuff Review. He also writes feature articles for magazines as diverse as the National Catholic Reporter, Southern Exposure, Request Music Magazine, American Iron, and The Journal of Workforce Diversity. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, McPeek Villatoro founded and hosted a literary talk show in Pacifica Radio, “Shelf Life.” Marcos is a regular commentator for National Public Radio’s Day to Day. Further Reading Gosselin, Adrien, Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the Other Side (New York: Routledge, 1998). Rodríguez, Ralph E., Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos MEChA. See Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán Medina, Pablo (1948–). Pablo Medina is a memoirist, poet, and novelist whose works echo the loneliness and melancholia of exile. He was one of the first Cuban American writers to switch from writing in Spanish to English. Medina was born in Havana on August 9, 1948, into a middle class family of Spanish descent. He spent the winters and summers of his childhood visiting the farm where his grandparents lived. There, he tailed the sugar-cane workers, idled away hours in the fields or riding horses, and observed such practices and traditions as pig-slaughtering and cockfighting. At home, he lived in an affluent neighborhood surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins. Growing up in Havana during the 1950s, events of the Cuban Revolution unfolded before him: sabotages, dictator Fulgencio Batista’s henchmen rounding up suspects, and dead bodies at a park. All of these images he depicts in his memoirs, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (1990). After Fidel Castro’s triumph in 1959, Medina and his parents went into exile, settling in New York City in 1961. He attended public school for one year and then went to Fordham Preparatory School, a Jesuit institution located in the Bronx. After graduation, he matriculated at Georgetown University, where he earned a B.A. in Spanish (1970) and an M.A. in English (1972). Early on in New York City, he experienced the emptiness that other exiles from the Caribbean have experienced in the United States and elsewhere and have written about: a knowledge that he belonged neither to Cuba (the past) nor the United States (the present and future): “The past confronts me on a daily basis and much as I try to avoid it by taking a walk, reading a book,

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or writing a poem, the country of my childhood is always in front of me, just beyond my reach. Nostalgia reaches me in the most unexpected moments,” he wrote in 2006 (Indiana Review, 2006). In 1975, according to Virgil Suárez* in Little Havana Blues (1996), Medina penned the first collection of poems written directly into English by a Cuban-born writer, titling it Pork Rind and Cuban Songs. This was followed by two poetry collections, Arching into the Afterlife (1991) and Floating Island (1999). In 1994, he published his first novel, The Marks of Birth. Although he does not identify the country of the novel’s setting as Cuba, it is nevertheless a novel about the revolution and Castro’s dictatorship. In 2000, he published his second novel, The Return of Felix Nogara. Other titles include: Todos me van a tener que oír/Everyone Will Have to Listen (1990), translations from Spanish, with poet Carolina Hospital, of Cuban dissident Tania Diaz Castro; Puntos de Apoyos (2002, Supporting Points), poems written in Spanish; a new and updated edition of Exiled Memories (2002); The Cigar Roller: A Novel (2005); and Points of Balance, a bilingual poetry collection (2005). In 2007, Medina teamed up with Mark Statman to create a new translation of Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece Poet in New York, which may have attracted Medina because of the circumstances he has shared with the Andalusian poet: exile, the strangeness and aggressiveness of the Metropolis and American culture. Medina’s poetry is clear, accessible, and heart-wrenching. The experience of exile has made him aware of the uncertainties of life and the ending of all things. But through words he attempts to delay that ending by recapturing the past, for him, metaphorically, his house in Cuba: “As long as there is blood in my veins, as long as there are words on my tongue, stories to be told, the house stands.” In 2005, Medina and other Cuban intellectuals visited Cuba to lend support to librarians and writers establishing independent libraries that collected books not approved by the revolutionary government. Medina is a member of the creative writing faculty of the New School University in New York City. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo J., “History and Development of Cuban American Literature: A Survey” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61). Medina, Pablo, Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Suárez, Virgil, ed., Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

D. H. Figueredo Medina, Rubén (1954–). Rubén Medina is a poet and scholar. Born and raised in Mexico, he was part of the literary group Movimiento Infrarrealista (Infra-Realist Movement) in Mexico City from 1976 to 1978. After coming to the United States to study, he received a Ph.D. in literature from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1991, Medina has been a professor of Latin 756

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American and U.S. Latino literatures at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 1991 to 2003 he was also a faculty member in the Chicana/o Studies program. Included among his poetry books are Báilame este viento, Mariana (1980, Dance This Wind for Me, Mariana), which was awarded first prize in the 1980 Chicano Literary Contest at the University of California–Irvine, and Amor de Lejos . . . Fools’ Love (1986), which was a finalist in the 1984 Casa de las Americas Literary Prize held in Cuba. His most recent project is a new book of poems written in Spanish, English, and Spanglish: Nación Nómada/ Nomadic Nation. Medina’s most acclaimed work, Amor de lejos, is series of poems that gazes at life in the United States from the vantage point of an itinerant poet, who sees everything though working-class* eyes: working in kitchens and factories, travRubén Medina. eling the interminable highways, always feeling like an outsider. It is a sophisticated and innovative literature of immigration* that speaks to current issues in American and Mexican cultures. Further Reading Mendoza, Louis, and Subramanian Shankar, eds., Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (New York: The New Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Megía, Félix (1776–1853). Born in Ciudad Real, Spain, in 1776, the future journalist, playwright, and historian was born into a working-class family. He nevertheless was able to obtain an education—probably at the University of Toledo—and some minor government offices. Megía was a liberal who opposed the French intervention in Spain and later was part of a conspiracy to declare in 1820 a liberal constitution in opposition to the monarchy of Fernando VII. Throughout the early century, Megía expressed his liberal ideas in his journalistic writing for such newspapers as La Colmena (The Hive), Periodicomanía (Periodical Mania), and El Constitucional (The Constitutional). He edited 757

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Cajón de Sastre (Tailor’s Drawer), in which he published short stories and poems. In 1821, he and Benigno Morales founded the immensely popular, militantly political newspaper El Zurriaga (The Whip), in favor of establishing a Spanish republic, for which he was jailed for almost a year, received challenges to duels, survived an assassination attempt, and had his house in Seville razed. Finally, he was sent to almost certain death at a prison in the Canary Islands but was able to escape on English vessel, winding up in Philadelphia in 1824. In Philadelphia, he conspired with the Spanish American intellectuals, many of them Masons like himself, who were preparing for the independence of their nations. In the City of Brotherly Love, Megía became an even more productive writer, writing a history of the liberal revolution in Spain, a biography of his now executed fellow revolutionary, Rafael del Riego, and biographies of William Tell and Francisco Pizarro. To celebrate and promote what he learned of democracy and republicanism in the United States, Megía wrote a play and published it in both Spanish and English: Lafayette en Mount Vernon (1825, Lafayette at Mount Vernon). In this play, as well as in his No hay union con los tiranos morirá quien lo pretenda o sea la muerte de Riego y España entre cadenas (1826, There is No Uniting with Tyrants, or The Death of Riego and Spain in Chains), Megía produced political allegory in romantic style, even personifying the liberal constitution as a woman. He also anonymously published two books attacking the Spanish monarch: Vida de Fernando VII (1826, Life of Fernando VII) and Retratos políticos de la revolución de España (1826, Portraits from the Spanish Revolution). Some scholars have attributed the historical novel Jicoténcal to his authorship, but it was most certainly written by Félix Varela.* Megía left Philadelphia to support the liberal war in Guatemala, where he promptly founded the newspaper Diario de Guatemala (Guatemala Daily) in 1827. In Guatemala, he had various offices in the liberal government until the dictator Carrera took power. Megía escaped to Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1838. After publishing various plays and other works in Cuba, he returned to Spain in 1841. After having plays produced on the stages of Madrid, but not continuing his journalist writing, he died there in 1853. Further Reading Coscio, Elizabeth, The Dramatic Political Allegories of the Spanish Exile Félix Mexía Published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1826: Refugees from the Inquisition (New York: The Mellen Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Mena, María Cristina (1893–1965). María Cristina Mena was the first Mexican American woman author to publish English-language stories in major U.S. magazines. Born in Mexico, she received a literary education typical of the upper class in Mexico City. She immigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen, before the onset of the Mexican Revolution, and lived in New York City, where she published a series of short stories in Century Magazine between 1913 and 1916. Her work also appeared in American, Cosmopolitan,

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and T. S. Eliot’s Monthly Criterion. Her Century stories provide glimpses of several sectors of early twentieth-century Mexican society: indigenous, elite, and revolutionary. She addresses the ongoing struggle for identity and independence, especially for women, during the Porfiriato, the thirty-four year period of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency. She uses popular literary forms of local color fiction, folklore, and romance while playing on the cross-cultural dynamic of text and audience in characterization, conflict, and symbolism. Articles surrounding her short stories reveal U.S. concerns about political involvement and increased immigration, along with attitudes of condescension toward and fascination with Mexicans both inside and outside U.S. borders. Familiar with both cultures, Mena plays a subtle but important literary role as interpreter and critic. Her first story published in Century, “John of God, the WaterMaría Cristina Mena. Carrier” (November 1913), was included in The Best Short Stories of 1928 after its republication in The Monthly Criterion in 1927. In this story, Mena modernizes the legendary “John of God,” demonstrating the tensions between rural and urban life as the protagonist struggles to maintain his family traditions and his livelihood. Mena introduces her reader to central religious and cultural figures, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Juan de Dios, even as she reveals racial and class stereotypes of the period. Although this story subtly addresses the influence of U.S. capitalism, “The Gold Vanity Set,” published in American Magazine (November 1913), and “The Education of Popo” (Century, March 1914), explore the problems of perspective in cross-cultural encounters with wealthy Americans. Following these stories of social struggle and misperception, “The Birth of the God of War” (Century, May 1914) returns to oral traditions as a grandmother retells the legend of Huitzilopochtli to her granddaughter. After this introductory phase of her literary career, she explores women’s roles more directly in tales of social and political rebellion. In both “The Vine Leaf”

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(Century, December 1914) and “The Sorcerer and General Bisco” (Century, April 1915), she uses the genre of romance to tell a more complex story of hierarchy and subversion. “The Vine Leaf,” the story that has garnered the most critical attention, introduces a marquesa whose identity remains both veiled and suspect, inferring her involvement in an affair, and, possibly, a murder. Her elusive yet knowing character intrigues the reader and intimates a delicate connection between art and life, writing and interpretation. “The Sorcerer and General Bisco,” a romance in a revolutionary setting, incorporates elements of magical realism, representing the final phase in Mena’s career as a writer, as her characters subvert political authority. In this story and “A Son of the Tropics” (Household Magazine, January 1931), women play significant roles as visionaries and revolutionaries. In 1916, she married playwright and journalist Henry Kellett Chambers and lived in Great Neck, New York, until his death in 1935. There, she continued to write stories and essays and developed several literary relationships. She corresponded with D. H. Lawrence after the republication of “John of God, the Water-Carrier” in The Monthly Criterion and supported the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover during the period of its censorship. Her article, “Afternoons in Italy with D. H. Lawrence,” published in The Texas Quarterly (1964, Vol. 7, No. 4), recalls a visit to the ailing author and his wife, Frieda, in the summer of 1929. Her essays also reveal her admiration of William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, José Juan Tablada, and President John F. Kennedy. In the final decades of her life, she moved to Brooklyn, where she published five works of children’s literature under her married name, María Cristina Chambers: The Water-Carrier’s Secrets (1942), The Two Eagles (1943), The Bullfighter’s Son (1944), The Three Kings (1946), and Boy Heroes of Chapultepec: A Story of the Mexican War (1953). These works draw on mythology, history, and legend. In her final years, she published two essays, “Easter in Mexico” (The Texas Observer, March 27, 1964), which reminisces about her final Easter week before emigration, and “María de los Angeles” (Old Castle Garden, n.d.), which contemplates her first Communion. Both essays recall memories of her childhood in Mexico and evoke a sense of loss. Yet her experience also led to her cultural diplomacy, as revealed in a draft of an essay, “My Protocol for Our Sister Americas,” and in her New York Times obituary, which stated that she “dedicated her work ‘to bringing to the American public the life of the Mexican people’” (August 10, 1965). Her short stories, recovered in a critical edition published by Arte Público Press in 1997, have earned the attention of scholars in Latino and Latina and American literatures. Her personal papers, preserved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project archives, reveal that she maintained her identity as a writer until her death. Photographs, correspondence, drafts of stories, and articles demonstrate that she lived her life as a modernist writer, maintaining a self-conscious presentation of her bicultural identity. She considered “borderland” topics, although the narratives exist in fragments. In her published work, she addressed the border imaginatively, complementing

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the political and commercial perspectives of Mexico with explorations of cultural authority and identity. Like Latina writers before and after her time, she includes Spanish and different registers of English, references the Virgin of Guadalupe along with Aztec figures, and explores the tensions between the U.S. and Mexico as well as the consequences of cultural tradition and subversion. Her short stories, children’s literature, essays, and personal papers continue to inform contemporary literary criticism, offering new insight into social and literary history, and the challenges facing a Mexican American woman writer in the early and mid-twentieth century. Further Reading Mena, María Cristina, The Collected Short Stories of María Cristina Mena, ed. Amy Doherty (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997). Simmen, Edward, ed., North of the Rio Grande: The Mexican-American Experience in Short Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1992: 39–84).

Amy Doherty Méndez, Miguel (1930–). Born on June 15, 1930, in Bisbee, Arizona, into a working-class family during the Great Depression, Méndez’s family moved back and forth across the border in search of employment. Méndez received six years of grammar schooling in Sonora, Mexico, the only formal education he received in his entire life. Nevertheless, Méndez loved reading books and became an omnivorous reader and a self-taught writer, all the while working as a laborer, farm worker, and brick layer, since his preteen years back in Tucson. By the age of eighteen, he was already outlining novels and trying his hand at writing stories, but his career as a writer did not really take off until the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s. After the publication of his stories in periodicals and anthologies, most notably those issued by Editorial Quinto Sol, Méndez was hired as a teacher of writing at Pima Valley College in 1970. He later became a distinguished professor at the University of Arizona and in 1984 received an honorary doctorate from that university. Méndez’s greatest work is Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974, Pilgrims in Aztlán, 1993), in which he faithfully depicts border culture and class strife in a baroque Spanish style full of neologisms and regional dialects, as well as elevated diction. His most famous story, “Tata Casehua,” was written by him in Yaqui as well as Spanish. Among his many other publicaMiguel Méndez. tions are Los criaderos humanos (épica de los

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desamparados) y Sahuaros (1975, Human Flesh Pots [An Epic of the Wretched] and Saguaro Cacti), Tata Casehua y otros cuentos (1980, Tata Casehua and Other Stories), Que no mueran los sueños (1991, Don’t Let the Dreams Die), El sueño de Santa María de las Piedras (1993, The Dream of Saint Mary of the Stones), Los muertos también cuentan (1995, The Dead Also Matter), and Río Santacruz (1997, Santa Cruz River). Méndez has had three of his books translated to English and a pair of them published in Mexico. He also has produced stories for children, such as those included in his Cuentos para niños traviesos: Stories for Mischievous Children (1979). Included among his awards are the José Fuentes Mares National Award for Mexican Literature. Further Reading Keller, Gary D., ed., Miguel Méndez in Aztlan: Two Decades of Literary Production (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1995). Rodríguez del Pino, Salvador, La novela chicana escrita en español: cinco autores comprometidos (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Mestre, Ernesto (1964–). A novelist and creative writing professor at Brooklyn College, Ernesto Mestre was born in Guantánamo, Cuba, one of five brothers who fled to Spain in 1972 and later moved to Florida with their refugee parents. He graduated from a Catholic high school and later received a B.A. in English literature from Tulane University before settling in New York. He is the author of two acclaimed novels that recapitulate the oft-told tale of life in Cuba just prior to the outbreak of the Castro revolutionary takeover. Presumably autobiographical in general orientation, The Lazarus Rumba (2000) is a family saga as seen through the eyes of Alicia Lucientes. Lucientes’s life becomes a living Hell because of incest and her involvement in political dissidence, as a sense of impending doom builds in the narrative. The novel is rife with torture, murder, passion, and love. His second novel, The Second Death of Unica Aveyano (2004), reviews the epic of Cuban exile as remembered by Unica, an escapee from a Miami nursing home. Her memories and flashback stretch from the lives of her parents in 1930s Guantánamo to the life of her son, who refused to leave Cuba with the rest of the family after the Castro Revolution, to her life in New York City and Miami. In 2004, Mestre was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Mestre has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Sarah Lawrence College. Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Mestre, José Manuel (1832–1886). Cuban writer, philosopher, and political figure José Manuel Mestre was exiled in New York, where he not only collaborated with Cuban revolutionaries but also coedited one of their most important newspapers, El Mundo Nuevo (The New World). Born in Havana in 762

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1832, Mestre earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1853, a law degree in 1855, and a doctorate of jurisprudence in 1863, all from the University of Havana. He was then appointed a professor of philosophy at the university. In 1863, he transferred to become a professor of law at the university. While serving as a professor and in the government as well, he also conducted a career in journalism, writing for such periodicals as Faro Industrial (Industrial Light), El Siglo (The Century), La Idea (The Idea), and Revista Crítica (Critical Review), published by Nestor Ponce de León.* He was also the editor of Revista de Jurisprudencia (Jurisprudence Review). Because of his support of the independence movement, Mestre was forced in 1869 to go into exile in New York, where he continued working for the cause, editing El Mundo Nuevo (The New World) with Enrique Piñeyro and collaborating with the Cuban Junta of revolutionaries. He also wrote for América Ilustrada (Illustrated America), one of the new-style magazines with feature stories and photos. Mestre became a naturalized American citizen, graduated from Columbia Law School in 1876, joined a distinguished New York firm, and became prosperous. A few years later, he returned to live out his life in Havana. He died on May 29, 1886. Further Reading Poyo, Gerald Eugene, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Mexía, Félix. See Megía, Félix Mexican American Movement (MAM). The Mexican American Movement (MAM) was the name of a youth organization that emerged in southern California during the 1930s under the auspices of the YMCA. The members were made up of upwardly mobile youth, mostly college students who had committed themselves “to improve our conditions among our Mexican American and Mexican people living in the United States” and to pursue “citizenship, higher education . . . and a more active participation in civic and cultural activities by those of our national descent.” The organization propagated these views through its newsletter, the Mexican Voice. Issue after issue of the newsletter bombarded its readers with the ideal of progress through education and hard work. It minimized racism as a major detriment to success. In a July 1938, issue of the Mexican Voice, Manuel Ceja wrote a piece entitled, “Are We Proud of Being Mexicans?” that came very close to the rhetoric of identity used by Chicanos in the 1960s. An exemplar of MAM’s professed ideals, Ceja was born in Los Angeles in 1920 to immigrant parents. He attended Compton Junior College and graduated from the Spanish American Institute, a leadership incubator for Mexican Americans. He was also a volunteer coach at the local chapter of the Mexican American Pioneer Club, a boys club within the MAM. 763

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In the article, Ceja claims to have overheard a boy respond to a query about his ethnicity by saying he was Spanish. He asks, “Why are we so afraid to tell people that we are Mexicans? Are we ashamed of the color of our skin, and the shape and build of our bodies, or the background from which we have descended?” He emphasized that the bilingual and bicultural attributes of Mexican Americans could open up innumerable doors. “Then why is it that we as Mexicans do not command respect as a nation? Are we doing justice to our race when we do not endeavor to change this attitude?” Although members like Ceja extolled the virtues of being Mexican, when confronted with a situation where they had to choose between Mexicanness and being American, they chose the latter. MAM ideology equated with Americanism. The Mexican Voice continuously posited the belief that Mexicans needed to improve themselves to be accepted and to succeed in the United States. Paul Coronel, in an “Analysis of Our People,” wrote that Mexico’s poverty and its corrupt and weak political leadership created a deficient culture, but that education was the solution to this problem. In another article, Coronel observed that Mexican girls married whites who had better jobs and could provide a better life. He then chided a friend who angrily derided the women for turning their backs on fellow Mexicans, saying, “We are not good enough for them.” Coronel concluded that he did not blame the women, because Mexican Americans need to wake up and work harder so that they can also make good husbands. Some of MAM’s most dynamic leadership came from its female members. Like their male counterparts, they also held strong beliefs of progress through self-improvement. Importantly, they advised this for women also. Particularly active was Dora Ibáñez. Born in Mexico, she attended public schools in Texas and worked her way through college in Iowa and Arizona, where she received a teacher’s certificate from the Arizona Normal School (now Arizona State University) in Tempe. In a 1939 Mexican Voice essay entitled, “A challenge to the American Girl of Mexican Parentage,” she praised the direction MAM males took towards education and Americanization. But she feared that the group aimed this message mainly at men. She also encouraged Mexican American females to strive for education and professional careers, urging them to greater participation in MAM activities. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

F. Arturo Rosales

The Mexican Voice. See Mexican American Movement México de afuera. Historically, a special role that most Hispanic immigrant newspapers claimed for themselves was the defense of the community. For the Mexican immigrant communities that were established in the Southwest with 764

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the outpouring of political and economic refugees of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, defense meant protecting immigrants’ civil and human rights, but, just as important, also meant protecting the community from the influence of Anglo American culture and Protestantism. The publishers, editorialists, and columnists were almost unanimous in developing and promoting the idea of a México de afuera or a Mexican colony existing outside of Mexico—in which it was the duty of immigrants to maintain the Spanish language, keep the Catholic faith, and insulate their children from what community leaders perceived as the deleterious example of low moral standards practiced by Anglo Americans. In the canon of México de afuera, the highest niches in the pantheon, in fact, were reserved for preserving the Spanish language and preserving the Mexican culture and Catholicism. Mexican Catholicism in the United States was further reinforced by the persecution of the Catholic Church that led up to the Cristero War (1926–1929), which produced a flood of refugees, including those of the Church hierarchy, into the U.S. Southwest. Basic to the belief system of Mexican culture in exile was the return to Mexico when the hostilities of the Revolution were over, the chaos had subsided, and order was re-established in its pre-Revolutionary form. All that the community fathers recognized nostalgically as Mexican national culture was to be preserved while in exile in the midst of iniquitous Anglo Protestants whose culture was aggressively degrading. The ideology was most expressed and disseminated by cultural elites, many of whom were political and religious refugees from the Revolution. They represented the most conservative segment of Mexican society in the homeland. In the United States, their cultural and business entrepreneurship exerted leadership in all phases of life in the colonia (colony) and solidified a conservative substratum for Mexican American culture for decades to come. And it was educated political refugees who often played a key role in publishing. The México de afuera ideology was markedly nationalistic and militant to preserve Mexican identity in the United States. In a philosophical, anthropological, and spiritual sense, the ideology ensured the preservation of the group in an environment where Hispanic women were in short supply and seen as subject to pursuit by Anglos, where the English language and more liberal or progressive Anglo American customs and values were overwhelming, and where discrimination and abuse against Mexicans existed. Inherent in the ideology of México de afuera as it was expressed by many cultural elites, including writers and playwrights, was an upper-class, bourgeois mentality that ironically tended to resent association with the Mexican immigrant working class. To them, the poor braceros and former peons were an uneducated mass whose ignorant habits only gave Anglo Americans the wrong impression of Mexican and Hispanic culture. On the other hand, Mexican Americans and other Hispanics long residing in the United States were little better than Anglos themselves, having abandoned their language and many cultural traits in exchange for the all-mighty dollar. It was therefore important that la gente de bien, this educated and refined class, grasp the leadership of the 765

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community—down to the grassroots, if need be—in the holy crusade to preserve Hispanic identity in the face of the Anglo onslaught. Among the most powerful of the political, business, and intellectual figures in the Mexican immigrant community was Ignacio E. Lozano,* founder and operator of the two most powerful and widely distributed daily newspapers: San Antonio’s La Prensa (The Press), founded in 1913, and Los Angeles’s La Opinión (The Opinion), founded in 1926 and still published today. Lozano, aware of the diversity of the Mexican and Mexican American community, sought to appeal to all segments and all classes—in part by not being overtly political or partisan of any political faction in Mexico, and by recognizing the importance of Mexicans who had long resided in the United States. He and his cohorts, his editorialist Teodoro Torres* and his intellectual mentor Nemesio García Naranjo,* also sought to bring within the México de afuera ideology all Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Nemesio García Naranjo summarized Lozano’s ideological vision regarding both the Mexican Americans and México de afuera in the founding and running of a newspaper in what García Naranjo viewed as the culturally impoverished environment of San Antonio: Unable to find direction in a directionless environment, Ignacio E. Lozano made the indisputably correct decision of basing his work on the Mexicans that had resided for many years outside of the national territory. They were humble and barely educated people, but in spite of having existed far from Mexican soil, had preserved intact the traditions and customs of our ancestors. Without going into detailed analysis, they felt that there was something that does not sink in a shipwreck, that is not shaken by earthquakes nor burned in fires, and that immutable and eternal something is the soul of the Fatherland, which is always there to uplift the fallen, forgive the sinful, console the children who because they are absent cannot take refuge in their mother’s lap. That’s why, while I appealed to expatriates, Lozano united with that simple crowd he liked to call the “México de afuera” which had nothing to do with our political and social convulsions. . . . Because he united with a permanent public, Lozano had given “La Prensa” a solid base that, at that time, was unmovable.

Bruce-Novoa has suggested an alternative reading of the México de afuera ideology, speculating that the Mexican expatriates began to see themselves— and perhaps the Mexican Americans—as more authentically Mexican than those people who had remained in the country during and after the Revolution: La Prensa, molded and controlled by men who were continually living the trauma of exile, reflected the disenchantment, especially in the first two decades of its existence. It was not until the mid-1930s that a general amnesty was declared for exiles by the president of Mexico Lázaro Cárdenas; so until then many of the editors and writers who had fled were not welcomed back in Mexico. And when exiles cannot return, they dedicate themselves to justifying their

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existence in a dual manner: they manipulate the image and significance of their residence outside their country by discrediting what the homeland has become; and two, they set about proving that they are the authentic bearers of the true tradition of the homeland and even of the ideals of the attempted revolution. Thus, they must declare the revolution a failure, at least temporarily, because only they have remained faithful to the true patriotic ideals. Eventually this exercise in self-justification leads to the claim that the homeland has actually moved with the exiles, that they have managed to bring it with them in some reduced form, and that if the opportunity should arise, they can take it back to replant it in the original garden of Eden. This explains how the Lozano group dared call themselves “El México de Afuera,” a term coined by one of the editors. (153)

From the 1920s through the 1940s, San Antonio’s La Prensa was the most influential Hispanic newspaper in the United States. Lozano and many of his prominent writers and editorialists became leaders of the Mexican American communities they served in the United States, precisely because they were able to dominate the print media while serving the interests of a diverse community. Businessmen such as Lozano captured an isolated and specialized market. They shaped and cultivated their market for cultural products and print media as efficiently as others sold material goods and Mexican foods and delivered specialized services to the community of immigrants. The Mexican community truly benefited in that the entrepreneurs and businessmen did provide needed goods, information, and services that were often denied by the larger society’s official and open segregation. And, of course, the writers, artists, and intellectuals provided the high, as well as popular, culture and entertainment in the native language of the Mexican community that was not offered by Anglo American society or was off-limits to Mexicans—movie houses and theaters just two of the venues that were segregated. Both the businessmen and the artists constantly reinforced the ideology of México de afuera. (See also Immigrant Literature.) Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, “La Prensa and the Chicano Community” Americas Review Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4 (Winter 1989): 150–156. Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals of the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography in the United States (Houston: Arte Público, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Mireles, Oscar (1955–). Oscar Mireles has been writing and reciting his poetry in and around Wisconsin and Illinois for more than two decades. Born in Racine, Wisconsin, on July 2, 1955, the eighth of the twelve children of Félix and Micaela Mireles, Oscar worked as a community activist and poet long before finishing his B.A. at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh in 1996. Mireles’s commitment to Latino culture and community service has earned him numerous awards, including recognition by the Wisconsin State Journal in 2002 as “One of Ten Who Make a Difference” in Wisconsin and by the United Migrant Opportunity Service as “Wisconsin Hispanic Man of the Year” in 1988. 767

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Mireles is employed as principal/executive director of Omega School, an alternative school that helps young people prepare for the general education diploma (GED) in Madison. Mireles has published his poetry in journals and anthologies throughout the United States, including Gathering Place of the Waters: 30 Milwaukee Poets (1983), Revista Chicano-Riqueña (1985), Visions and Voices against Apartheid (1987), Viatzlán, A Journal of Arts and Letters (1992), Dreams and Secrets, Woodland Pattern (1998), and Alt. Literature (2003). He has also edited such anthologies as I didn’t know there were Latinos in Wisconsin: 20 Hispanic Poets (1989) and I didn’t know there were Latinos in Wisconsin: 30 Hispanic Writers (1999). His writing has been supported by grants from the Wisconsin Humanities Committee, the Wisconsin Center for the Book, and the Wisconsin Arts Board, among others. He also received a fellowship to work on a writing project at the Vermont Studio Center. He is also an active member of the Minds Eye Radio collective, which produces a radio show of spoken-word poetry each month. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Mistral, Gabriela (1889–1957). In 1945, Chilean Gabriela Mistral’s poetry made her the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. After becoming a Nobel laureate, she spent many years in the United States as an ambassador to the League of Nations and the United Nations for Chile. Mistral was born on April 7, 1889, in Vicuña, Chile, and trained as a teacher. As she became well known in the world of letters, she left teaching to serve as a consul and, later, as an ambassador. As Latin America’s first Nobel laureate, she traveled extensively throughout the Americas and became known as a great humanitarian, an active promoter of public education, and a wonderful speaker. Mistral’s poetry reveals her as a great humanitarian of broad erudition in world literature and the classics. But her overriding theme was always love. Her work was also rooted in deep religiosity and the condition and circumstances of women, spanning the gamut of preoccupations from maternity to sterility. Mistral’s first book, Desolación (Desolation), was published in New York by the Hispanic Institute in 1922. Of twenty-some books of poetry, Desolación and Gabriela Mistral. 768

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Tala (1938) are considered her best works. She died in Hempstead, New York, on January 10, 1957. Further Reading Ryan, Bryan, Hispanic Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Hispanic Authors (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Moheno, Querido (1874–1933). An untiring essayist and political theorist who opposed the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, Querido Moheno published numerous essays and opinion pieces in the periodicals of the Southwest, as well as books, during his exile—which began under the presidency of Venustiano Carranza. Born in Pichucalco, Chiapas, on December 3, 1874, Moheno was raised in Chiapas and Tabasco, finishing law school in Mexico City in 1896. While still a law student in 1892, he led a movement against the re-election of the dictator Díaz, for which he was imprisoned for five months. Upon his release, he and other students founded the El Demócrata (The Democrat) newspaper, which opposed the government. He was again jailed—this time for a year and a half. He was later elected to the Mexican Congress and, after Díaz’s overthrow, became a member of President Victoriano de la Huerta’s cabinet. When Venustiano Carranza took over the government, Moheno went into exile in the United States, Cuba, and Central America, forwarding a continuous stream of articles to periodicals in the Southwest. After seven years, he returned to Mexico and continued to publish articles, mostly in the newspaper El Universal, in opposition to the government. Of all of Moheno’s books, the one most relevant to Latino literature was the result of his exile in the United States, Cosas de Tío Sam (1916, Things about Uncle Sam), a collection of essays that demythologize life in the “Colossus of the North,” with Moheno’s caustic commentaries on everything from American literature to cuisine. The book was published by his close political associate and fellow exile Nemesio García Naranjo,* through Naranjo’s Revista Mexicana (Mexican Review). In 1920, Moheno published a collection of his journalistic crónicas* and essays in Cartas y crónicas (Letters and Chronicles), many of which were written in Washington, D.C., and Cuba and sent abroad for publication. Moheno died in Mexico City on April 12, 1933. Further Reading Argudín, Yolanda, Historia del periodismo en México desde el Virreinato hasta nuestros días (Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1987).

Nicolás Kanellos Mohr, Nicholasa (1938–). Nicholasa Mohr was the first U.S. Hispanic woman in modern times to have her literary works published by major commercial publishing houses, and she has developed the longest career as a creative writer of any Hispanic female writer. Only José Yglesias* published more works than she, and for a longer period of time. Mohr’s books for such publishers as Dell/Dial, Harper & Row, and Bantam in both the adult and children’s literature categories 769

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have won numerous awards and outstanding reviews. Part and parcel of her work is the experience of growing up a female, Hispanic, and a minority in New York City. Born on November 1, 1938, in New York City, Nicholasa Mohr was raised in Spanish Harlem. Educated in New York City schools, she finally escaped poverty after graduating from the Pratt Center for Contemporary Printmaking in 1969. From that date until the publication of her first book, Nilda (1973), Mohr developed a successful career as a graphic artist. Nilda, a novel that traces the life of a young Puerto Rican girl confronting prejudice and coming of age during World War II, won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award and was selected by School Library Journal as a Best Book of the Year. It was the first book by a U.S. Hispanic author to be so honored. The Society of Illustrators presented Mohr with a citation of merit for the book’s jacket design. After Nilda’s success, Mohr was able to produce numerous stories and scripts and the following titles, Nicholasa Mohr. among others: El Bronx Remembered (1975), In Nueva York (1977), Felita (1979), Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985), Going Home (1986), A Matter of Pride and Other Stories (1997). In 1975, El Bronx Remembered was awarded the New York Times Outstanding Book Award in teenage fiction and received the Best Book Award from the School Library Journal. El Bronx Remembered was also a National Book Award finalist in children’s literature. In both In Nueva York and El Bronx Remembered, Mohr examines through a series of stories and novellas various Puerto Rican neighborhoods and draws sustenance from the common folks’ power to survive and still produce art, folklore, and strong families in the face of oppression and marginalization. Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio, in five stories and a novella, portrays six strong women who take control of their lives, most of them by liberating themselves from husbands, fathers, or families, who attempt to keep them confined in narrowly defined female roles. Mainstream houses would not publish Rituals, wanting to keep Mohr confined to what they saw as immigrant literature and children’s literature, as in her Felita and Going Home. 770

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In 1995, Mohr penned her autobiography, from her birth to age fourteen, growing up poor in Manhattan, in In My Own Words: Growing Up Inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination (In my own words), a book directed to young readers. Despite not joining groups or collectives, Mohr has been one of the most influential of the Nuyorican* writers because of her sheer productivity and accomplishment. She has also led the way to greater acceptance of Nuyorican and Hispanic writers in creative writing workshops, such as the Millay Colony, in PEN and on the funding panels of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. In later years of her career, Mohr has written a number of children’s picture books based on Puerto Rican culture, including Old Letivia & the Mountain of Sorrows (1996), The Song of El Coqui & Other Tales of Puerto Rico (1995), The Magic Shell (1995). On June 19, 2007, Mohr was honored with the Puerto Rican Family Institute Award for integrity and excellence in writing. Further Reading Rivera, Carmen S., Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Moncaleano, Blanca de (1880s?–?). Colombian journalist and anarchist Blanca de Moncaleano immigrated to Cuba with her husband, Professor Juan Francisco Moncaleano, during the first decade of the twentieth century, her husband having been jailed in Colombia in 1911 for his political activities. There they taught in anarchist schools and raised their children in the same ideology. Inspired by the outbreak of a socialist revolution in Mexico in 1910, they moved to the Aztec republic in June 1912 and became involved to prepare a firm ideological basis for the reconstruction of Mexican society, in part by founding and operating an anarchist society and school, Luz (The Light). They were expelled from Mexico by the Francisco Madero regime but continued their activism while in exile in Los Angeles, California. In Cuba, Blanca had written for the anarchist periodical ¡Tierra! and, in the United States, founded Pluma Roja (Red Pen), which she edited from 1913 to 1915. It was an anarchist periodical that supported the revolution. Her many signed articles in Pluma Roja frequently espoused forming a new society in which women would be treated as equals of men. In fact, Moncaleano saw the women’s struggle as key to the economic, political, and social revolution; women had to be liberated from the oppression of the State, the Church, and Capital. She also beseeched men to allow their women to become educated. Moncaleano criticized men for their treatment of women, especially those men who fought for liberty but did not realize that they also caused women’s slavery. She accused men of taking away the natural rights of all women (“el verdadero ladrón de los derechos naturales de la mujer.”) In anarchism, Moncaleano saw the solution to many of the most difficult problems of gender and class. In addition, Moncaleano did not believe in political borders between states and nations, instead seeking a classless, borderless society. 771

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Further Reading Hart, John, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). Lomas, Clara, “Transborder Discourse: The Articulation of Gender in the Borderlands in the Early Twentieth Century” Frontiers Vol. 24 (2003): 51–74. Shaffer, Kirwin, “The Radical Muse: Women and Anarchism in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba” Cuban Studies Vol. 34 (2003): 130–153.

Catalina Castillón Monge-Rafuls, Pedro (1943–). Playwright, critic, speaker, educator, and founder and director of the Ollantay Center for the Arts in Queens, New York, Pedro Monge-Rafuls was born in Central Zaza, Cuba. In 1961, he went into exile, escaping from Cuba by boat. After living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Medellín, Colombia, he moved to the United States. While in Chicago, he cofounded the Círculo Teatral de Chicago (Chicago Theatrical Circle), one of the first Latino, Spanish-language theater groups in the Midwest. In 1977, he founded the journal Ollantay and the Ollantay Center in Queens, where he often offers theater seminars, conferences, exhibits, and recitals. Monge-Rafuls is also very active on the theater conference circuit in North and South America and Europe. In 1991, he became the first recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Very Special Arts Award in the category of “Artist of New York.” To date, he is the only Latino to have received this prestigious Washington, D.C., honor, awarded for his comedy Noche de ronda (Serenade Night), which was staged in three different off-Broadway productions in less than a year (and later produced in the New York Festival de Candilejas). Monge is a theater and arts activist and promoter of artistic debate as well as of artistic, political, and social reflection. He is among the better known of the generation of exiled Cuban playwrights and is praised among them for his skillful use of language in differentiating his characters. His writing reflects a preoccupation with the life of immigrants and other marginalized people in New York and creates a relationship between traditional and new theatrical techniques using images and other kinds of visual effects. The issue of Cuban exile is another constant in many of his plays. His play Nadie se va del todo (1991, No One Is Completely Gone) has become a classic on the subject of the Cuban re-encuentro (rapprochement) and has been translated and published in German. In 1994, he initiated the “El autor y su obra” (The Author and His Work) program in the prestigious Festival of Cádiz, Spain, which is now studied at a number of universities in the United States, Venezuela, and Spain. Among his other published and staged plays are Cristóbal Colón y otros locos (1986, Christopher Columbus and Other Crazy Men), Easy Money (1989), Solidarios (1989, In Solidarity), Limonada para el Virrey (1989, Lemonade for the Viceroy), El instante fugitivo (1989, The Fugitive Instant), Trash (1989), Recordando a mamá (1990, Remembering Mother), La oreja militar (1993, The Military Ear), Las lágrimas del alma (1994, Tears from the Soul), Soldados somos y a la guerra vamos (1995, We’re Soldiers and We’re Marching Off to War), Una cordial dis772

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crepancia (1996, A Cordial Discrepancy), Se ruega puntualidad (1997, Punctuality Is Demanded), Madre sólo hay una (1997, Mother, There Is Only One Moon), Y todo por un cochino pedazo de papel verde (1998, And All because of a Green Slip of Paper), Simplemente Camila (1999, Simply Camila), and Pase adelante si quiere (1999, Come on in, If You Wish). His plays have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Lima, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Rome, Cambridge, and London. Further Reading Adler, Heidrun, “Pedro R. Monge Rafuls: Una coma entre las culturas” Extraños en dos patrias (2003): 121–131. Febles, Jorge, “Continuidad desde la ausencia: Enajenación, familia y rito en Recordando a mamá de Pedro R. Monge Rafuls” Explicación de Textos Literarios Vol. 31, No. 1 (2002–2003): 59–70. Nelson, Bradley J., “Pedro Monge-Rafuls and the Mapping of the (Postmodern?) Subject in Latino Theater” Gestos: Teoría y Práctica del Teatro Hispánico Vol. 12, No. 24 (Nov. 1997): 135–148. Rexach, Rosario, “Emigración, exilio y consecuencias culturales” in Lo que no se ha dicho. Ollantay Vol. 33 (1994): 324–328.

Kenya Dworkin y Méndez Montalvo, José Luis (1946–1994). Widely known as a Chicano Movement* poet of the 1970s, José Luis Montalvo was born in northern Mexico in the town of Piedras Negras on September 9, 1946. He came from a working-class family of border crossers who lived part of the time in his native town and frequently in Texas, eventually settling in San Antonio in 1959. He studied through elementary school in Mexico and then completed his secondary education in the Louis W. Fox Vocational and Technical School. In 1967, he joined the U.S. Air Force to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. During this time, he studied part-time in local community colleges in San Antonio and in the same year married Carmen Sánchez, with whom he eventually had four children. By 1973, Montalvo had left the Air Force after having been stationed in Amsterdam. Upon his return to Texas, his perspective on cultural politics and Chicano* identity changed in fundamental ways. He then became intimately engaged in community organizations to promote greater opportunities for his community, thus becoming a spokesperson for disenfranchised peoples while resorting to poetry as his most immediate way to communicate such anxieties. His political awareness developed extensively, which drove him in 1974 to run for state representative in the Raza Unida (United People’s) Party under the banner of an “ultra-nationalist.” He lost but gained greater perspective on what it took to advance a wider social agenda. Montalvo turned to poetry to more effectively capture his sentiments and to broaden his influence for the sake of a national Chicano cause. For example, in 1977 he published Pensamientos capturados: poemas de José Montalvo (Captured Thoughts: Poems by José Montalvo), in which he confronts complacency and entrenchment in acculturation. Divided into two sections (romantic and dreaming, and political and cynical), he delves into the nationalistic concepts 773

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of family, the carving out of a unique and modernized sense of identity for Chicanos, and numerous social issues that plagued that era. In the first section, the poetic voices tend to concentrate on male-centered topics in discussing idealism, love, war, and social criticism. Mainly lyrical in quality, he evokes family as a way of defining romance and sensuality with a social edge to his poetic manifestations. The second section, however, becomes more filled with cultural angst by exalting Chicanismo at the same time that he attacks the effects of capitalism and sellouts. In addition, he interrogates the meaning of militarism and commercialized patriotism. For example, in “Bicentennial Blues,” he writes: “Pendejos—todavía no se dan cuenta (Dumb idiots—they still don’t realize) that/This land is not our land; for:/manifest destiny robbed us of it.” In A mí qué? (1983, For Me, So What?), a collection of thirty-seven poems, he continues his testimonial critical stance. Metaphorically, he examines the internal dynamics of a Chicano couple in “Amor Chicano” (Chicano Love), which questions a misguided machismo that is aggressive within the family but meek outside of it. He also develops some humorous pieces (such as “Pendejismos sin fronteras” [Platitudes without Boundaries]), in which he combines social awareness with aesthetics: Pues para ser poeta hay que tener conciencia y hablar de todas cosas. No sólo de belleza y sueños muy hermosos y rosas rojas rojas.

(Well, to be a poet you must have a conscience and speak of many things. Not just beauty and very pretty dreams And red red roses.)

Although the poet indulges in humor, he also deals with serious topics, including his vanishing youth, and ends with the poem that lends its title to the collection, “A mí qué!” The poem undermines some of the seriousness with an underground cynicism about the social stagnation affecting Chicanos in the modern world. He suggests that there must be a way of shaking the malaise. His third book, Black Hat Poems (1987), consisting of thirty poems, attempts to unveil the poet in his many moods: from angry social criticism to biting mockery, and from melancholy of family times to sensuality. He displays a penchant for clever lyricism, such as in “Why Trying to Be a White Liberal Didn’t Work for Me!” and “My Abuela” (My Grandmother). Many pieces are inward examinations of a poet’s soul as he reflects on social problems plaguing Chicanos with satire, parody, warmth, self-pity, and disillusion. He again bitterly criticizes false patriotism, as in “Independence Day.” In his last book, The Cat in the Top Hat by Dr. Sucio (1990), a cartoon resembling Dr. Seuss, Montalvo once again addresses distortions emanating from American institutions and iconic figures, such as Uncle Sam. Through the technique of slapstick meant for adults instead of children, he magnifies his critique of a history of power politics in the United States through a sardonic vision of social contradictions. 774

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However, a crucial moment in his life occurred when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1990. From this experience emerged his book Welcome to My New World (1992), a collection of thirty-four poems. He now senses his life slipping away, thus toning down his sardonic tone with personal, introspective utterances. His imminent death is described in the poem “The Death of José Luis Montalvo”: “I saw the face of death/And shook her cold, cold hand/I looked her in the eye/But could not understand.” More and more we see his cynicism giving way to celebrating what life had to offer. In the poem “I am Not A Poet,” he downplays his previously messianic role, opting for saying that he is a trobador perverso (perverse troubadour): “I am the voice inside of you.” His voice becomes humble, remorseful, generous, appealing for a new world. He died on August 15, 1994. José Luis Montalvo was not the most refined poet in Chicano literature, but he knew how to function as a conscience for social issues, equity, and progress. He started with strong appeals for instilling change in his society and culture and ended with deep reflections on identity and his own mortality. Further Reading García-Camarillo, Cecilio, “Introduction,” Pensamientos capturados: poemas de José Montalvo (San Antonio: privately printed, 1977). Lomelí, Francisco A., “José Montalvo” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, 1999: 155–159). Sánchez, Ricardo, “Earthiness, Honesty, and Rusticity: The Poetics of José Montalvo; An Introduction,” in A mí qué! (San Antonio: Raza Cósmica, 1983: 8–10).

Francisco A. Lomelí Monte, Domingo Del. See Del Monte, Domingo Montes Huidobro, Matías (1931–). Matías Montes Huidobro is a Cuban writer who explores Cuban literary history, the revolution, and life in exile in his essays, plays, and fiction. In Spanish, he is best known for his numerous plays. In English, his reputation is based on his novel Qwert and the Wedding Gown (1992), about a Cuban exile emotionally paralyzed by his departure from the island. Born on April 26, 1931, in Sagua La Grande, Cuba, Montes Huidobro seemed destined for a successful career as a dramatist: he began writing as a teenager, won a writing contest for a play he wrote when he was eighteen years old, and had his second play, Sobre las mismas rocas (1951, Over the Same Rocks), staged by the age of twenty. The young playwright embraced the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and wrote three plays that celebrated the political change on the island: La botija (The Pitcher), El tiro por la culata (The Reverse Shot), and Las vacas (The Cows), all written between 1959 and 1960. By 1961, Montes Huidobro realized that the revolutionary government expected Cuban authors to support a socialist political agenda and that dissent would not be tolerated. Such was the theme of his next three plays, written in 1961, Gas en los poros (Gas in the Pores), La sal de los muertos (Salt of the 775

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Dead), and La madre y la guillotina (The Mother and The Guillotine)—only the last was staged in Cuba. Shortly after, Montes Huidobro went into exile; the Cuban government soon confiscated copies of La sal de los muertos. In 1962, Montes Huidobro, who had earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of Havana in 1952, found work as a teacher in Philadelphia before relocating to Hawaii to teach Spanish drama at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Although he was active in numerous cultural organizations, such as the New York-based Círculo de Cultura Latinoamericana (Latin American Culture Circle), he did not write a play again until 1979, almost twenty years after his promising beginning. The play was titled Ojos para no ver (Eyes That Do Not See) and was a symbolical and experimental retelling of the rise to power of Fidel Castro, although the ruler’s name is never mentioned. In 1988, Montes Huidobro wrote Exilio (Exile), which follows the trajectory of friends who meet in New York while in exile from Fulgencio Batista’s (1901–1973) dictatorship in the 1950s, return to Cuba after Castro seizes power, and escape from the island one more time. In 2006, his drama Un objeto de deseos (An Object of Desire) explored the tortured relationship between Cuban poet José Martí* and his wife Carmen Zayas Bazán, who did not share his commitment to Cuba’s independence from Spain. Exile was also the theme of his collection of short stories, La anunciación y otros cuentos (1967, The Annunciation and Other Stories) and the novels Desterrados al fuego (1975, Exiled to the Fire) and Segar a los muertos (1980, Harvesting the Dead). The first novel is considered his best. It is an autobiographical story about a novelist who is unable to adapt to his exile in the United States even as his wife embraces her new life in her new home; while she works in a factory, the novelist idles his days away in the park, longing for the past. The novel follows a stream-of-consciousness narrative with elements of magical realism and erotic passages. The English translation, Qwert and the Wedding Gown, was well received. Montes Huidobro has written dozens of essays, including the prologue to the 1995 republication of the Cuban classic poetry collection, El Laúd del Desterrado (The Lute of the Exile), originally published in 1858 in the United States, and Persona, vida y máscara en el teatro cubano (1973, Persona, Life, and Mask in Cuban Theater) a landmark of Cuban theoretical analysis. Further Reading Escarpanter, José A., “Una confrontación con trama de suspense” in Teatro Cubano Contemporáneo: Antología, ed. Moisés Pérez Coterillo (Madrid: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1992: 623–629). Febles, Jorge M., Matías Montes Huidobro: acercamientos a su obra literaria (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1997).

D. H. Figueredo Montoya, José (1932–). One of the celebrated poets of the early Chicano Movement, José Montoya was born on a ranch outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but moved to California in the 1940s when his father followed the 776

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migrant farm labor circuit. At Fowler High School, in California, he was encouraged to pursue art and writing, but nevertheless became a pachuco* whose scrapes with the law eventually pushed him into the Navy to serve in the Korean War as an alternative to reform school. After returning home, Montoya studied under the G.I. Bill and received a B.A. in art from California College of Arts and Crafts. After graduating he became an art teacher in 1962 and a respected graphic artist at the time when the Chicano Movement was in need of cultural leadership. In 1971, Montoya earned an M.A. in fine arts from Sacramento State University and began teaching in that university, climbing the ranks to full professor by 1981. In 1971, Montoya cofounded a Chicano art collective, the Royal Chicano Air Force, as a support for the Chicano Movement. It was also a time when his poetry began to attract attention. He had previously published well received poems in Editorial Quinto Sol’s ground-breaking anthology, El Espejo/The Mirror (1969), and he published his first collection of grassroots- and pachucoinspired poetry, El sol y los de abajo and Other R.C.A.F. Poems, in 1972. His second volume, Information: Twenty Years of Joda, did not appear until 1992. In the interim he had published in pamphlets, chapbooks, and small press collections. His most famous poem, “El Louie,” which memorializes the tragic life of a pachuco, was recorded dramatically on a 45-rpm record by Luis Valdez and circulated extensively throughout Chicano Movement circles. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Mora, Joseph Jacinto (1876–1940). Joseph Jacinto Mora, known as Jo Mora, was a sculptor, painter, muralist, illustrator, cartoonist, cartographer, photographer, author, and thespian born of a French of mother and Catalán father in Uruguay on October 22, 1876. In preparation for his work with the newspapers The Boston Traveler and The Boston Herald, he studied at the Cowles Art School in Boston and at the Art Students League in New York. After this, he took his first trip to Texas to work as a cowboy, a trip inspired by his exposure to the gaucho tradition of Uruguay and his father’s storytelling. After running out of funds, Mora returned to Boston to raise money for a second trip and during this time obtained a contract with the Dana Estes Company publishing house, for which he rewrote and illustrated such books as The Animals of Aesop and Reynard the Fox. He is known as the creator of the first comic strips in the United States, for the Boston Herald, entitled Animaldom. With all this success, Mora was able to gather the funds needed to return to the Southwest, leaving behind his coveted contract with the Dana Estes Company. He reached California and was able to observe the indigenous life of the Navajo and Hopis; as witness of a Hopi ceremony, Mora was so impressed that he decided to learn the natives’ language. He incorporated himself into the Hopi community with his indigenous name: Naljé (hunter). Mora’s photography 777

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of the natives is considered natural and is valued for respecting the natives by not romanticizing their conditions. In 1907, Mora married Grace Alma Needham and had two children in the San Gabriel mission: Joel and Patti. He was subsequently commissioned to work on the Golden West mural in a San Francisco building owned by the Native Sons organization. Amid the recognition for his work on this project as a sculptor, Mora had to face the death of this father, Domingo Mora. Yet it is after his work in San Francisco that Mora was seen as an important sculptor and was highly solicited for architectural projects throughout California. Once he moved to San Francisco in 1914, Mora continued to successfully show his artistic abilities and formed part of various groups, such as San Francisco Art Association, the Bohemian Club, and the Family Club. During the First World War, Mora enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the Zachary Taylor camp in Kentucky, where he advanced to the rank of major during 1918 to 1920. After the war, he continued to take various jobs and continued to earn national recognition with his many projects: the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, Pacific Mutual Building, Los Angeles Realty Syndicate, and Federal Post Office in Portland, among many others. In 1922, he became interested in theater, leading him to participate with Carmel’s Forest Theater; his presentation “Bad Man” was very popular. During this time, Mora also developed a career as a writer documenting the life and details of horsemanship and raising cattle in the West. His books have become classics for aficionados of the “Old West,” Hispanic heritage, and horsemanship, including A Log of the Spanish Main (1933) and Trail Dust and Saddle Leather (1946). Mora’s last book, Californios: The Saga of the Hard-riding Vaqueros, America’s First Cowboys (1949), was written and illustrated in 1947, three weeks before his death. Joseph Mora is remembered as a “Renaissance Man” who documented the history of the natives and cowboys of the Southwest. Many scholars point to the fact that Mora was never influenced by any type of mystification of the west because of the respect and admiration he had for the people of that area. His artistic contributions, ranging from sculptures to cartoons to books documenting the culture of the West, left an important legacy in various places of the United States for the history of this country. Further Reading Burton-Carvajal, Julianne, Back to the Drawing Board with Artist Jo Mora: Illustrated Chronologies of His Life, Works, and Exhibitions (Monterey, CA: Monterey History and Art Association, 2003). Grandeau, Joss, and Don Shorts, Collecting Jo Mora (Ventura: Old California Store, 1995). Mitchell, Stephen, Jo Mora: Renaissance Man of the West (Ketchum, ID: Dober Hill, 1994).

Luziris Pineda Mora, Pat (1942–). Pat Mora has developed the broadest audiences for her poetry of all of the Hispanic poets in the United States. Her clean, crisp narrative

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style and the healing messages in her verse have allowed her poetry to reach out to both adults and young people. Mora’s poems have been reprinted in more elementary-, middle-, and high-school textbooks than any other Hispanic poet’s. Although Mora has often been considered a regional poet who celebrates life in the desert, or a soft-spoken feminist, she is actually a lyric, romantic poet who offers a healing embrace for many diverse segments of the reading public. This universality has led her to write poetry that explores the condition of women not only in the Southwest but also in Third-World countries and has also led her to pen deeply humanistic essays, and even to create a richly diverse literature for children that encompasses Mexican folk traditions (as in The Gift of the Poinsettia) and even such modern, perplexing topics as adoption (in Pablo’s Tree). Pat Mora was born on January 19, 1942, in El Paso, Texas. She underwent all her higher education, including college, in this border city. After graduating from the UniPat Mora. versity of Texas at El Paso in 1963, she worked as an English teacher in public schools and college. A writer since childhood, Mora published her first, awardwinning book of poems, Chants, in 1984. It was followed by other poetry collections: Borders (1986), Communion (1991), Agua Santa/Holy Water (1995), Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints (1997), and My Own True Name (2000). Mora is also well known for her children’s picture books, including A Birthday Basket for Tía (1992), Listen to the Desert (1993), Pablo’s Tree (1994), The Gift of the Poinsettia (1995), The Big Sky (1998), The Rainbow Tulip (1999), The Night of the Full Moon (2000), The Bakery Lady (2001), A Library for Juana: The World of Sor Juana Inés (2002), Doña Flor: A Tall Tale about a Giant Woman with a Great Big Heart (2005), and The Song of Francis and the Animals (2005). A number of her children’s works, such as The Desert Is My Mother (1994), Delicious Hullabaloo (1999), The Big Sky (2002), Adobe Odes (2004), and Yum! Mmmm! ¡Qué Rico! America’s Sproutings (2007), are made up of poems instead of the narrative used in most of her other children’s books. In 1993, she published autobiographical essays in Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle and, in 1997, issued an unconventional memoir of her family, House of Houses, in which she uses the voices of her ancestors and family members to tell their own stories.

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Mora’s awards include fellowships from the Kellogg Foundation (1986) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1994), Southwest Book Awards (1985 and 1987), and the Skipping Stones Award (1995). In 2002, A Library for Juana was a “Commended” title of the Americas Award for Children and Young Adult Literature. That same year, she received the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship from Umbria, Italy. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Pat Mora” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 160–163). Murphy, Patrick D., “Conserving Natural and Cultural Diversity: The Prose and Poetry of Pat Mora” MELUS Vol. 21 (1996): 59–69.

Nicolás Kanellos Moraga, Cherríe (1952–). The works of Cherríe Moraga have opened up the world of Chicano literature to the life and aesthetics of feminism and lesbians (see Gay and Lesbian Literature). Moraga’s works are well known in both feminist and Hispanic circles for their battles against sexism, classism, and racism. Born in Whittier, California, on September 25, 1952, to a Mexican American mother and an Anglo father, Moraga was educated in public schools in the Los Angeles area, after which she graduated from Immaculate Heart College with a B.A. in English in 1974. In 1980, she earned an M.A. in literature from the California State University in San Francisco. While working as a teacher she discovered her interest in writing and in 1977 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she became acquainted with the Anglo lesbian literary movement. In part to fulfill the requirements for a master’s degree at San Francisco State University, Moraga collaborated with Gloria Anzaldúa* in compiling the first anthology of writings by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), which has become the most famous and best-selling anthology of its kind and has inspired a movement of Hispanic feminist and lesbian writers. In her writings here and in other books, Moraga explains that her understanding of racial and class oppression suffered by Chicanas only came as she experienced the prejudice against lesbians. In 1983, Moraga edited another ground-breaking anthology with Alma Gómez and Mariana Romo-Carmona: Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. Cuentos attempts to establish a poetics or canon of Hispanic feminist creativity, a canon with room, and, indeed, respect, for the insights of lesbianism. In 1983, Moraga published a collection of her own essays and poems dating back to 1976: Loving in the War Years: (lo que nunca pasó por sus labios) (Loving in the War Years: [what never passed through her lips]), in which she explores the dialectical relationship between sexuality and cultural identity. The breadth of her literary genius was revealed in her diverse collection of nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction, The Last Generation (1993). Her conclusion here, as elsewhere, is that women must be put first. Moraga is also an outstanding playwright; among her most famous works are Giving Up the Ghost, produced in 1984 and published in 1986, and

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The Shadow of a Man, published in 1991. Both, while exploring the same themes as her other writing, reveal a deft and sensitive handling of theatrical realism in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill. In 1994, Moraga began publishing collections of her stage-produced plays with Heroes & Saints and Other Plays, which treats themes of lesbianism, AIDS, the pesticide poisoning of farm workers, the crossing of borders, and otherwise transgressing. In 2001, Moraga published a collection of two plays, The Hungry Woman/Heart of the Earth, which presented her own Mexican/Chicana interpretations of the myths of Medea/La Llorona, as well as the Mayan legend of the pre-human world. In 2002, Moraga departed from her usual path in publishing a collection of two plays, Watsonville/Circle in the Dirt: Some Place Not Here/El Pueblo De East Palo Alto, in which she confronted social and political issues transforming California in the 1990s: the backlash against immigrants, English-only legislation, the changing racial demographics of the state, the resistance of communities of colors against domination and incursions from the white power structure, all documented as the multiple voices of these communities bear witness. Using documentary theater techniques, Moraga developed the plays after extensively interviewing residents of Watsonville and East Palo Alto. In 2008, Moraga again departed from the previous direction of her work with the publication of Warriors of the Spirit: Children’s Plays of Protest and Promise and recently finished writing a memoir, Send Them Flying Home: The Geography of Memory. Moraga’s many awards include the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (1986), the PEN West Literary Award for Drama (1993), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993), and the American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award (2002). To date, Moraga remains one of the most militant and controversial Hispanic literary figures. She has been an artist in residence at Stanford University, the University of California–Berkeley, and other institutions of higher learning. Further Reading Arrizón, Alicia, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, “The Female Subject in Chicano Theater: Sexuality, ‘Race,’ and Class” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. SueEllen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Morales, Alejandro (1944–). Alejandro Morales is one of the leading Chicano novelists, having published substantial novels in both Spanish and English in the United States and Mexico and having created through them a better understanding of Mexican American history, at least as seen from the vantage point of working-class culture. Born in Montebello, California, on October 14, 1944, Morales grew up in East Los Angeles and received his B.A.

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from California State University, Los Angeles. He went on to complete an M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) in Spanish at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Today Morales is a full professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department at the University of California–Irvine. Morales is a recorder of the Chicano experience, basing many of his narratives on historical research, and is also an imaginative interpreter of that experience by creating memorable and dynamic characters and language. His first books were written in Spanish and published in Mexico because of the lack of opportunity in the United States. Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975, translated as Old Faces and New Wine in 1981) examines the conflict of generations in a barrio family. La verdad sin voz (1979, translated as Death of an Anglo in 1988) is a continuation of the earlier novel but is created against the backdrop of actual occurrences of Chicano–Anglo conflict in the town of Mathis, Texas. The novel also includes autobiographical elements in Alejandro Morales. the form of a section that deals with racism in academia, which comes to a head when a Chicano professor goes up for tenure. Reto en el paraíso (1983, Challenge in Paradise) is based on more than a century of Mexican American history and myth, centering on a basic comparison of the decline of the famed Coronel* family of Californios and the rise of the Irish immigrant Lifford family. The novel charts the transfer of power and wealth from the native inhabitants of California to the gold- and land-hungry immigrants empowered by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.* The Brick People (1988) traces the development of two families connected with the Simons Brick Factory, one of the largest enterprises of its type in the country. Again, Morales uses the technique of comparing the lives of two families: those of the owners of the factory and those of an immigrant laborer’s family. Morales’s novel The Rag Doll Plagues (1991), while still incorporating a historical structure, follows the development of a plague and a Spanish Mexican doctor who is forever caught in mortal battle with this plague in three time periods and locations: colonial Mexico, contemporary Southern California, and the future in a country made up of Mexico and California united together. Through782

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out his works, Morales has explored the theme of death, at times morbidly so; this preoccupation continues in his latest novel, The Captain of All These Men of Death (2007). In all, Morales is a meticulous researcher and a creator of novelistic circumstances that are symbolic of Mexican American history and cultural development. His novels have an epic sweep that is cinematic and highly literary. Further Reading Gurpegui Palacios, José Antonio, Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, Future Perfect (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1996). Lewis, Marvin A., “Alejandro Morales” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, eds. Lomelí, Francisco, and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989: 178–183). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Moreno-Hinojosa, Hernán (1948–). Hernán Moreno-Hinojosa was born on October 24, 1948, and grew up in the region south of old San Antonio, north of the magical Rio Grande Valley, east of the streets of Laredo and west of Corpus Christi. As a child growing in the fold of those four cardinal directions, Moreno-Hinojosa heard the stories that would captivate him as an adult: the folk stories of the people of South Texas, tales of apparitions, spook lights, improbable events, witches, and shapeshifters. Moreno-Hinojosa says, “I write because it is something I enjoy and would write even if I were never published. Writing is communication, expression, art, and immortality.” In 1994, he sold his first short story, “Candelaria’s Sorrow,” to Texas magazine. This true ghost story, told in the tradition of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, that most famous of Mexican apparitions, led to a flood of comments from people, including one who claimed to be related to the unfortunate Candelaria. Moreno-Hinojosa had found Candelaria’s final resting place exactly where the legends said it would be—not a hundred feet from where she drowned, buried in unconsecrated soil. A lone grave surrounded by a wrought iron fence and marked with a tombstone dating back to the mid–eighteen hundreds, the final resting place for a seventeen-year-old girl who refused to live in an arranged, loveless marriage of convenience. What of the other tales that old-timers told artfully around the campfire? Were these tales merely intended to entertain, or could they too have some measure of veracity? By 1999, Moreno-Hinojosa had written a collection of the stories that had gripped him as a child. South Texas is an area sharing much of the history, lore, and charm of the greater Southwest, but it is an area largely neglected by the writing community. With his debut collection of short stories, The Ghostly Rider and Other Chilling Tales (2003), Moreno-Hinojosa redresses this omission. He brings the echo of the voices around the crackling campfire onto the written page. Moreno-Hinojosa is a Metro policeman living and working in Houston, Texas, patrolling the freeways and byways of the greater metropolitan area. The highlight of his career as a Metro policeman came in January of 2001, when 783

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the Houston Police Department Chief presented him with a letter of commendation in recognition of successful efforts to rescue an endangered child. Moreno-Hinojosa and his wife, Linda, have four children. Further Reading Paredes, Américo, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

Carmen Peña Abrego Morín, Raúl R. (1913–1967). Raúl R. Morín was born in Lockhart, Texas, but grew up in San Antonio. Before World War II, Morín served in the Civilian Conservation Corps. When the war started, he joined the U.S. Army as an officer and was injured in combat. Like many other Mexican American war veterans, he was concerned about the continued discrimination that greeted them after the war; in many places in the Southwest, Mexicans were still subjected to segregation and barred from public facilities in schools, theaters, swimming pools, restaurants and housing tracts. As others of his generation, Morín strove to achieve political power and social status by making good use of his people’s war Raúl Morín with Dr. Garcia, president of the G.I. Forum. record. His book, Among the Valiant, chronicles the feats of Mexicans in World War II and the Korean War, making the much-accepted claim that Mexican Americans were the most decorated ethnic group because of heroic action. The book, in fact, had a great impact, which has lasted to this day, when the issue of the disproportionate service of Latinos in the military is still debated. After his discharge, Morín participated in many Mexican American organizations as a civil rights activist and as a member of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Advisory Committee. The city of Los Angeles erected a Raúl R. Morín Memorial in East Los Angeles in honor of Hispanic war veterans. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican-American Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2007).

F. Arturo Rosales Morton, Carlos (1947–). Born on October 15, 1947, in Chicago to Mexican American parents who hailed from Texas (his paternal grandparent was a Cuban newspaper publisher who resided in Corpus Christi), Carlos Morton became a journalist, poet, and playwright during his years as a university student 784

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at the University of Texas at El Paso, during the days of the early Chicano Movement. It was then that he became exposed to Luis Valdez’s* El Teatro Campesino and began a trail of studying with Valdez, emulating his style and, ultimately, studying for and earning his M.F.A. in playwriting at the University of California, San Diego (1979) and his Ph.D. in drama at the University of Texas (1987). Known for his experimentation with bilingual dialogue based on Chicano argot, Morton articulated a style and esthetic depending on high satire of Mexican and Chicano history, especially focusing on the conflict of culture—first between Spaniards and Indians and later between Chicanos and Anglos, exploiting all the humor that can be derived from outrageous stereotypes and linguistic and cultural misinterpretation. As a playwright, Morton has seen his works produced at campuses around the country and by some of the most prestigious Latino theaters, including the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and New York ShakeRancho Hollywood, the Mexican edition of Carlos Morton’s speare’s Festival Latino, which awarded him plays. first prize in its playwriting contest in 1986 for The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales. Morton’s plays have also won such awards as the Southwestern Playwriting Contest (1977) and second prize at the James Baldwin Playwriting Contest (1989). Morton has won residencies and fellowships and in 1989 became a Fulbright Lecturer at the National University of Mexico in Mexico City. In 2006, he once again became a Fulbright Lecturer, this time in Poland. He is one of the very few Latino playwrights to have his works published in more than one volume: The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales and Other Plays (1983, 1987, 1994), Johnny Tenorio and Other Plays (1992), Rancho Hollywood y otras obras del teatro chicano (1999, Hollywood Ranch and Other Chicano Theater Works) and Dreaming on a Sunday in the Alameda and Other Plays (2004). In addition, many of his plays have been anthologized. Morton is a tenured full professor of drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).


Motta, Jacob de la

Motta, Jacob de la (?–1877). The first great eulogy recorded by a Hispanic in U.S. history was that of Captain Jacob de la Motta, a Sephardic Jewish doctor who resided in Charleston but spoke in New York City in 1821 in memory of the famed Reverend Gershom Mends Seixas, also a Sephardic Jew. The eulogy was of particular relevance to Hispanic Jews because of its comparison of the freedom that Jews encountered in the United States with their persecution in Europe. Many of Charleston’s Jews were immigrants or descendants of immigrants who had to leave Spain and Portugal, where they were persecuted by the Inquisition. Like de la Motta, who was a medical doctor and army surgeon who had served with distinction in the War of 1812, many of the Sephardics became founding and leading citizens in South Carolina and Georgia (parts of which had previously belonged to Spanish Florida). So effective and moving was de la Motta’s eulogy that two former presidents, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, congratulated him on it in writing. Further Reading Simonhoff, Harry, Jewish Notables in America, 1776–1865 (New York: Greenberg, 1956).

Nicolás Kanellos Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA, Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán*) is the most widespread and largest Chicano student organization. There are literally hundreds of MEChA chapters in universities scattered across the United States. MEChA was born in 1969 when California Chicano students met at the University of California, Santa Barbara in a conference that became one of the most crucial events in the Chicano Movement. It was sponsored by the Coordinating Council on Higher Education, a network of students and professors who earlier had attended the Chicano Youth Conference in Denver and had returned full of enthusiasm and energy. By now, the Chicano student community was ready to implement a higher education plan that would go beyond previous pronouncements. A major objective was the creation of college curriculum that was relevant and useful to the community. Higher education, the students judged, was a publicly funded infrastructure that nevertheless enhanced the business community and other white bastions of power even as very little was expended on the needs of the tax-paying Chicano community. The students at the Santa Barbara meeting wrote El Plan de Santa Barbara (The Plan of Santa Barbara), a cultural and political message articulating the ideology that would be used by future Chicano studies programs and students. A major tenet of the document emphasized a mildly separatist nationalism that members of MEChA had to embrace. This meant a rejection of assimilation into American culture. Mechistas (members) still strove to better the Chicano community through education through collective efforts, not just individual success that came from rejecting the roots of Chicanos. As such, the group decided to bring all California Chicano student groups under one standard, called El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán. Before the creation of this 786

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symbolic nomenclature, most student groups employed the term “Mexican American” when naming their organizations. For example, in southern California, a number of United Mexican American Students (UMAS) chapters existed on university campuses. Bay-area campuses were home to various chapters of the Mexican American Student Confederation (MASC), and many other such groups existed in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. By the late 1970s, most of these organizations had been replaced by MEChAs or had changed their names to MEChA. Chicano student organizations, both before and after appropriating the name MEChA, succeeded in bringing about numerous and significant changes in institutions of higher education. Since the 1960s, most Chicano/Mexican American studies programs were initiated after pressure was brought to bear by these groups. Cultural awareness projects and events, the promotion of multiculturalism on and off campuses, and remaining vigilant to see that these gains were maintained, often fell under the purview of Mechistas. Official MEChA activities often included poetry readings and teatro chicano* performances. Many of the MEChA chapters supported their own theater groups. Today, although MEChAs still exist in many colleges and even high schools, and they hold national conferences, their influence has waned. Hundreds of Mexican American student groups still celebrate cultural pride but just as zealously promote the political and economic success of Hispanics through education and integration into mainstream society. Indeed, the ideological stance taken by early organizations has been diminished somewhat; often MEChA chapters are very similar to their more tame counterparts. Perhaps one of the most significant accomplishments of the earlier militant groups is that they served as a training ground for a generation of politicians who, after the zeal of the Chicano Movement began to wane, succeeded in entering mainstream electoral politics. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

F. Arturo Rosales Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS). Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS, Women Active in Literature and Social Change) is an organization of Latina activist women in higher education in the United States. With a membership made up of scholars and writers organized in colleges and universities in seven regional groups, MALCS fosters research and writing on Hispanic women with the objectives of fighting racism, classism, and gender oppression at universities, and bringing about social changes. MALCS came about as a response to the collective amnesia that occurred with regard to the important role played by women in the Chicano Movement.* According to the MALCS Web page, “Sensing this collective loss of voice, feeling highly isolated, eager to extend their knowledge to other women, and desiring to change society’s perceptions, a group of Chicana/Latina academic women gathered at the University of California, Davis, in spring 1982.” 787

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MALCS conducts a summer research institute (established in 1985) and publishes Noticiera de MALCS, a tri-quarterly newsletter, and Trabajos Monográficos (a working paper series changed in 1991 to the Series in Chicana Studies). The series later became the Voces: The Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies. MALCS also helped establish a permanent research center at the University of California, Davis, in March 1991, to develop Chicanas/Latinas as scholars. It was to be a center for knowledge by, for, and about Chicanas/Latinas. MALCS organizes panels of writers and scholars for scholarly conferences and conventions, sponsors literary readings, and, in general, promotes Latina feminism.* Further Reading Sosa-Riddell, Adaljiza, “MALCS: Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social” (http:// www.malcs.net/history.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Mujica, Barbara (1943–). Novelist and literary critic Barbara Mujica was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and received her primary and secondary education there. She went on to study French literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and later at Middlebury and the Sorbonne, receiving her B.A. and M.A. in French. At the doctoral level, she switched to Spanish and received her Ph.D. from New York University (1974), specializing in early modern Spanish theater. After launching and maintaining a very successful career as a professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, where she even served in the leadership of learned societies, Mujica turned her hand to writing historical novels, including The Deaths of Don Bernardo (1990), Sister Teresa (2007)—based on the life of mystic St. Teresa of Avila, Spain—and Frida (2001), based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. She also has published two collections of short stories: Sanchez across the Street (1997) and Far from My Mother’s Home (1999). Her stories have also appeared in periodicals and anthologies, most notably in Marjorie Agosín’s* What Is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women (1995). In 2003, Mujica won The Trailblazer’s Award for Frida and her other writings; in 1998, she won the Pangolin Prize for Best Short Story of the Year. In 1992, she was the winner of the E. L. Doctorow International Fiction Competition. Mujica’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and many other publications. In 1990, her essay “Bilingualism’s Goal” was named one of the best fifty op-eds of the decade by The New York Times. Further Reading Gonzales, Deena, and Susana Oboler, Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos

El Mulato. Issues of race and slavery were central to the Cuban independence movement and were interrelated with the politics of race in the United States (see also African Roots). One of the more interesting Cuban revolutionary newspapers was El Mulato (The Mulato, 1854–?), which was published in New York before the U.S. Civil War and had as its mission the uniting of the 788

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Front page of El Mulato.

Cuban revolutionary movement with the antislavery movement. Founded by Carlos de Colins, Lorenzo Allo,* and Juan Clemente Zenea,* it sounded a contrary note to the Cuban annexationist movement and its newspapers. The reaction to El Mulato among the Creole elite leaders of the annexationist movement was bitter. Editorials attacked El Mulato, and mass meetings were called to condemn the newspaper for promoting social unrest. Proudly 789

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proclaiming the paper’s Afro-Cuban identity, El Mulato editor Carlos de Colins challenged the leadership of the revolution to consider Cuba’s Africans (he did not permit the euphemism “colored classes”) as worthy of freedom, just as their country was worthy of liberty. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Muñoz, Elías Miguel (1954–). Born on September 19, 1954, in Cuba, and raised in the United States, where he earned a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of California–Irvine (1984), Muñoz is one of the most accomplished bilingual novelists, penning original works in English and Spanish that are based on the accommodation of Cuban immigrants to life in the United States. Within that overarching theme of culture conflict and synthesis is the conflict of homosexual identity with societal norms in Hispanic and Anglo American cultures. After receiving his Ph.D. and becoming a professor of Spanish at Wichita State University, Muñoz gave up on the restricted world of university teaching in 1988 to become a full-time writer. He has been a prolific writer of poetry, stories, and novels. His books include Los viajes de Orlando Cachumbambé (1984, The Voyages of Elías Miguel Muñoz. Orlando Cachumbambé), Crazy Love (1988), En estas tierras/In This Land (1989), The Greatest Performance (1991), and Brand New Memory (1998). In all, the joys and fears of sexual awakening are set to the backdrop of popular music and film during the time period evoked. In the 1990s, he began publishing textbook readers in various editions for learners of Spanish, such as Ladrón de la mente (Mind Thief), Viajes fantásticos (Fantastic Voyages), and Isla de luz (Island of Light), employing his usual poetically rich vocabulary and imagination. In his latest novel, Múñoz has returned to writing in Spanish. Vida Mía (2006, Life of Mine) is a highly autobiographical novel of first love and a chronicle of life in Cuba during the 1960s, evoking the music and popular culture of the times. Further Reading Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla, poesiá cubana del exilio (Nashville, TN: Betania, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Murguía, Alejandro (1949–). Prose fiction writer, poet, and editor Alejandro Murguía was born in California but raised in Mexico City. He returned to the United States and, after two decades of being a literary and social activist, obtained a B.A. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1990 and 1992, respectively. One of the prime

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movers of the Latino cultural movement in the San Francisco Bay area during the early 1970s, Murguía was one of the funding editors of the iconic literary and arts magazine, Tin-Tan: Revista Cósmica (1975–1979, Cosmic Review), in which various pioneers of Latino poetry published their works, such as Victor Hernández Cruz,* Rafael Jesús González,* and Roberto Vargas. He also participated in the Editorial Pocho Che publishing group, in which Cruz participated, as well as José Montoya* and Raúl Salinas.* Murguía and Nicaraguan Vargas became involved in the Nicaraguan liberation movement and became soldiers in that civil war. This experience was reflected in his collection of short stories, Southern Front (1979), winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award. But his first book was a collection of poems, Oración a la Mano Poderosa (1972, Prayer to the Powerful Hand). In 1980, he published another collection of short stories, Farewell to the Coast, and, in 2002, This War Called Love: Nine Stories. His latest offering is The Medicine of Memory: A Mexican Clan in California (2002), a book of creative nonfiction in which Murguía traces his family history back to the eighteenth century in an attempt to reconstruct the Chicano-indigenous history of California. Murguía’s stories and poems have also appeared in magazines, both nonprofit and commercial, around the country, as well as in anthologies. Murguía has taught in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University since 1997, the same year that his manuscript won honorable mention in the Casa de las Américas literary competition in Havana. His other distinctions include first prize in the San Francisco Guardian Short Story Competition (1995) and an editor’s fellowship from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (1980). Further Reading Heide, Rick, ed., Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (San Francisco: Heydey Books, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Murrieta, Joaquín (c. 1823/1828–c. 1853). One of California’s most enduring legends is that of Joaquín Murrieta (or, alternatively, Murieta), who has served as a symbol of resistance to Anglo American dominance among Mexican Americans and South Americans alike. According to one version of Murrieta lore, he joined thousands of his compatriots who poured into California from the state of Sonora during the Gold Rush of the 1850s. Chileans, on the other hand, see Murrieta as one of theirs (the Gold Rush also attracted thousands of Chileans and Peruvians). Whatever his nationality (his birth and death dates are estimated in the period from 1823 to 1853), according to legend, Murrieta mined gold peacefully until Anglos jumped his claim, killed his brother, and raped his wife. In his attempts to avenge himself on the “gringos,” Murrieta became the scourge of the mining country in northern California. Any crime committed by a Mexican seemed to be attributed to Joaquín, often including deeds committed on the same day in opposite sides of the state.

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The California legislature in the spring of 1853 posted a $1,000 reward for his capture and sent an organized force of California Rangers to track him down. The rangers killed a Mexican who was thought to be Joaquín Murrieta after months of chasing bandits across the mining country. The rangers brought back a head preserved in whisky and, to collect their reward, obtained the testimony of numerous individuals who swore that the head belonged to Joaquín Murrieta. This legend, which has remained vital until this day, was given its modern-day contours by the publication in 1854 of a semi-fictional biography by John Rollin Ridge. Ridge, who was a Cherokee Indian, probably empathized with the repression of Latin Americans and presented Joaquín as a Robin Hood, driven to crime by an evil Anglo society. Murrieta has often resurfaced in corridos,* poetry, and even a novel written by Isabel Allende.*

Cover of the Recovery edition of the Joaquín Murrieta story.

Further Reading Pitt, Leonard, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the SpanishSpeaking Californios, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

Nicolás Kanellos El Museo del Barrio. In 1969, a group from East Harlem’s Spanish-speaking parents, educators, artists, and community activists founded El Museo del Barrio in a school classroom as an adjunct to the local school district. The founding of the museum reflected the rise of the Puerto Rican civil rights movement as well as a campaign in the New York City art world that called for major art institutions to have greater representation of non-European cultures in their collections and programs. El Museo’s main goal was to become an educational institution and place of cultural pride and self-discovery for the Puerto Rican community. Soon, El Museo became a founding member of the Museum Mile Association, along with some of the city’s most distinguished cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim 792

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Museum, Jewish Museum, and Museum of the City of New York. Today, the original educational mission of El Museo still guides its collections and programs, but it has also broadened its mission, collections, and programs in response to substantial growth in the Mexican, Central and South American, and Caribbean communities both in New York and nationally. The Museo is a space used for many cultural activities, and it has sponsored literary readings as well as panel discussions among authors and publishers. Further Reading “El Museo del Barrio” (http://www.elmuseo.org).

F. Arturo Rosales Mutual Aid Societies. Mutual aid societies, often named mutualistas or sociedades benéficas, were organizations set up by immigrants to provide the types of worker benefits that today are often expected from large employers. The mutualistas provided workers with life insurance for a premium of a few dollars a month so that, upon death, a dignified funeral would be provided. These societies also provided a modicum of workplace protection but over time expanded their concerns to include the cultural, political, social, and economic well-being of their members in both countries. Common among the mutualistas was the establishment of health clinics, as well as halls for dances and patriotic and religious festivals and celebrations; the mutual aid societies even offered Spanish classes and other subjects so that the children of the immigrants would not forget their home culture. Many mutual aid societies published newsletters and even newspapers, in which much literature was published. Mexican immigrants in the Southwest and Midwest, as well as Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Spanish immigrants in New York and Florida in the early twentieth century, often banded together among themselves according to their home province or region. Among Tampa’s tobacco workers in the late nineteenth century, the separate ethnic or regional groups set up separate societies for Asturians, Spanish, Cubans, and Afro-Cubans. In New York City in the early twentieth century, separate societies were founded for people originating from southern Spain, Galicia, Cataluña, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. In Mexican mutual aid societies in the Southwest and Midwest, people from Michoacán, Texas, and other areas set up their separate societies, often naming them for a favorite son of their region, such as Benito Juárez, Cuauhtémoc, or José María Morelos. This was an example of expatriate nationalism as well as of pride in their place of birth or even of their identification with their indigenous or mestizo past. Others, such as Tucson’s Alianza Hispano Americana, did not adhere to Mexican nationalism as closely and even ventured into the area of protecting the civil rights of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Established in 1894 as a political and mutual aid organization, by the 1920s it had become an important protector of civil rights for Mexicans. Sometimes the societies formed larger umbrella groups to address issues of protection. For instance, at El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (The First Mexicanist Congress), convened in 1911 under the leadership of Nicasio Idar, 793

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the editor of La Crónica, four hundred Mexican leaders, mostly from the middle class, came together and developed strategies to deal with segregation, lynching, land ownership, police brutality, and the unusual punishment of Mexican people in the Southwest. The death sentence of one youth, León Cárdenas Martínez, and the earlier lynching of Antonio Gómez had incited the meeting of these leaders. An umbrella organization for thirty-five Chicago mutual aid societies, La Confederación de Sociedades Mexicanas de los Estados Unidos de America (The Federation of Mexican Societies in the USA), was founded in Chicago on March 30, 1925. Finding jobs and offering temporary shelter and protection from the police emerged as the core objectives of this ambitious undertaking. Mutual aid societies often sponsored dances, cultural events, and publications, including magazines in which much literary fare was included. They also sponsored patriotic and cultural celebrations, such as those of Mexican Independence Day, Puerto Rico’s Shout for Independence, and Mothers Day, at which local writers recited poems and made eloquent speeches. Puerto Ricans in New York City organized mutual aid societies from the early 1900s on. Tobacco workers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Chelsea districts organized themselves into Cofradías and Hermandades (Fraternities and Brotherhoods) of urban workers and artisans of Puerto Rican extraction. They, too, came together, often in allegiance to their home town or region in Puerto Rico. Artisan organizations on the island of Puerto Rico had existed since the mid-nineteenth century. The founders patterned these early self-help organizations, called gremios, on the Spanish guild system. By 1900, at least fifteen gremios regulated artisan markets, controlled conditions of employment, and provided fairs for the exchange of merchandise. These organizations also provided medical and hospital aid, and other forms of aid, such as burial insurance and family dowries. The gremios competed with each other when celebrating the anniversary of their patron saints, trying to outshine each other in the grandiosity of the event. Islanders instinctively brought this organizing tradition when they migrated to the mainland, a factor that helped foster unionization and significant degrees of self-help. In 1926, the Porto Rican Brotherhood of America, a Manhattan-based community association, was formed with basically the same objectives as the gremios, and soon Brotherhood chapters sprang up in various Eastern Seaboard cities and the Midwest with large Puerto Rican populations. One of the most important umbrella groups to emerge among the Puerto Ricans was the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Puerto Rican and Hispanic League). It supported one of the most important periodicals and vehicles for the publication of literature, Boletín de la Liga Puertorriqueña e hispana, founded in 1927 and edited by writer Jesús Colón.* When Cubans took refuge in Miami en masse after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, they too followed the pattern set up by prior Hispanic immigrants and created modern versions of these societies, often aligned with and supported by

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the Catholic Church. Although the Cuban societies were growing in the 1960s and 1970s, most of the Mexican and Puerto Rican societies were waning. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002). Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

F. Arturo Rosales Múzquiz Blanco, Manuel (1883–1933). Poet, playwright, and journalist Manuel Múzquiz Blanco was born in Monclova, Coahuila, Mexico. Unlike many of his contemporaries who took refuge in the Southwest during the Mexican Revolution, Múzquiz went to Havana, Cuba, when the government of Victoriano Huerta fell. Múzquiz was a prolific writer of political essays as well as of poetry, many of which were published and reprinted numerous times in the Mexican exile press in the United States. In fact, his book, En casa ajena: páginas del destierro; impresiones y semblanzas (1916, In Someone Else’s Home: Pages from Exile; Impressions and Sketches) was issued by the most important publishing house in the Southwest, Casa Editorial Lozano, and became very popular. This was followed by Lozano’s issuing of his novel El Tesoro de Axayacatl (1920, Acayacatl’s Treasure). Meant to be a first installment that Lozano planned of national narratives, the novel deals with the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. In the 1920s, he returned to Mexico and by 1925 became the administrator of the Mexican penal system under Plutarco Elías Calles. In Mexico, he published the travel book Sonora-Sinaloa. Visiones y sensaciones (1923, Sonora-Sinaloa: Visions and Sensations); his collection of journalistic writings and speeches, Crónicas, entrevistas y conferencias (1925, Chronicles, Interviews, and Speeches); the poetry collection Huerto cerrado (1928, Closed Garden); a collection of testimonios collected from prisoners in Mexico City, cocompiled and coedited with Felipe Islas, La casa del dolor, del silencio y de la justicia (1930, The House of Pain, Silence, and Justice); and the collection of political chronicles related to the Mexican Revolution, De la pasión sectaria a la nación de las instituciones (1932, From Sectarian Passion to a Nation of Institutions). Further Reading Lerner Sigal, Victoria, “Algunas hipótesis generales a partir del caso de los mexicanos exilados por la Revolución Mexicana (1906–1920)” University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies Mexican Studies Program (Working Papers Series No. 7, 2000).


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N Nadal de Santa Coloma, Juan (?–?). Probably the grandest Puerto Rican figure on the New York stages before World War II was Juan Nadal de Santa Coloma, who consciously set about developing a Puerto Rican national theater. Nadal abandoned his schooling at San Juan’s Instituto Civil (Civil Institute) in 1898 to begin a career on the stage, which was especially disconcerting to his mother, who wanted him to become a priest. During the next few years, he worked his way through various theatrical companies—including those of Cristóbal Real, Miguel Leisabasas, and Miguel Medrano—that toured the Antilles and the coastal areas of South America. With the Miguel Medrano’s company, he became a leading man in Venezuela. In 1902, Nadal founded his own Compañía de Zarzuela Puertorriqeña (Puerto Rican Zarzuela Company). Over the years, he had the typical ups and downs of the trade in Spain, the Caribbean, and South America and even administered for a time the great Teatro Principal in Mexico City and the Teatro Eslava in Madrid. From 1927 to 1929, Nadal was back in Puerto Rico developing a national theater at the head of several companies. In 1930, Nadal went to New York and spent four years acting, forming companies and working with Puerto Rican actor Erasmo Vando* and composer Rafael Hernández* at the Park Palace, Cervantes, Variedades, and other theater houses. It was in 1930 that Nadal wrote and staged his musical comedy Día de Reyes (Three Kings Day), with a score by Rafael Hernández, which celebrated Puerto Rican regional customs. Día de Reyes had 156 performances in New York City alone. It opened at the Park Palace in May, staged by the Compañía Teatral Puertorriqueña and directed by Erasmo Vando. In 1932,

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Nadal began touring his company through the theaters of New York, often performing Día de Reyes as well as Luis Llorens Torres’s patriotic drama El Grito de Lares (The Lares Shout). In April, 1934, Nadal staged Gonzalo O’Neill’s* Bajo Una Sola Bandera (Under One Flag Only), a light comedy of manners that promotes Puerto Rican independence while also exhibiting many of the characteristics of immigrant theater. Nadal would later debut the play in San Juan. In 1935, Nadal returned to Puerto Rico after what he described as “the cold shower” that was New York. On the island, he directed the Compañía Teatral PRERA, a government-sponsored company charged with performing plays by Puerto Ricans. He later went on to form other companies to tour the island. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Najera, Rick (1958–). Creative, complex, wise, funny, skillful, and perceptive are just some of the adjectives used by various critics to describe this rising star. The only Latino listed in Variety magazine’s ninety-first anniversary issue (September 1996) as one of “Entertainment’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch,” he was named “one of America’s leading humorists” by Latin Style magazine and was honored with the 1996 Golden Eagle Award for “Best Writer.” Born in San Diego, California, Najera earned an M.F.A. from the American Conservatory Theater and went on to receive recognition as one of Hollywood’s top comedy writers, having written for Fox television’s “In Living Color,” “The Robert Townsend Show,” “Culture Clash,” and Showtime’s “Latino Laugh Festival.” Najera has also developed various comedy pilots for television over the last decade. “An American Family,” his most recent pilot, cocreated with Tim O’Donnell and filmed for the U.P.N. network, ended a ten-year quest to develop a Latino series that portrayed Latinos with dignity and offered a fresh point of view. Najera is probably best known to Latino audiences as one of the original members of the hilarious sketchcomedy group Latins Anonymous. He Rick Najera on the cover of his book. 798

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began his career in theater and has performed on some of America’s leading classical stages, including La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Repertory, San Diego Repertory, Los Angeles Theater Center, El Teatro Campesino, and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. His theatrical experience led him to starring and recurring roles on television, including appearances on “General Hospital,” “China Beach,” “Falcon Crest” and “Columbo.” The classically trained actor eventually married his love of theater with his writing skills and became a playwright and performer. This successful combination gave birth to such instant hits as “Latins Anonymous,” “The Pain of the Macho” and “Latinologues,” which have been published as Latins Anonymous: Two Plays (1996) and The Pain of the Macho and Other Plays (1997). It also gave him the opportunity to direct some of the biggest Latino stars—Edward James Olmos, Maria Conchita Alonso, and Erik Estrada, to name a few—when they performed the now famous Latin monologues (“Latinologues”) for Showtime’s “Latino Laugh Festival.” Despite his numerous successes and commitments, the multi-faceted Najera remains committed to live performances, touring his oneman show, “The Pain of the Macho,” around the country. Further Reading Svich, Caridad, and María Teresa Márquez, Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance (New York: Theater Communications Group, 2000).

Carmen Peña Abrego National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS). In 1972, the National Association of Chicano Social Scientists (NACSS) was formed by an emerging cadre of Chicano graduate students and entry-level professors. Later, the group became the National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS) in order to accommodate a broader base of academic disciplines. Eventually, its main framework of analysis, the internal colony model, lost favor. More recently, NACS has reflected postmodernist trends, which radically reconstruct European intellectual thought, including Marxism (from which the internal colony model acquired its analytic tools). Postmodernism has revived interest in the cultural positioning of the 1960s, especially among intellectuals in literature and the arts. NACS still exists today, although it is undergoing a critical transition, motivated primarily by a debate over gender in Chicano society. Reflecting this orientation, it is now entitled the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS). NACCS’s only activity is its yearly convention of professors who teach university courses related to Mexican Americans. Literature professors are always well represented in the more than 100 panels of scholarly papers delivered. Since the late 1970s, literary readings have become a mainstay of the convention, often featuring leading fiction and poetry writers. Further Reading “National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies” (http://www.naccs.org/ naccs/Default_EN.asp).


National Association of Latino Arts and Culture

National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC). Based in San Antonio, Texas, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) was founded in 1989 to provide the national Latino cultural and art community with expert guidance, in-service training, opportunities for advancement in their arts, and promotional services—needs that neither public nor private mainstream arts service organizations addressed. NALAC operated with part-time or temporary staff, but in 1998, after becoming fully staffed with assistance from the Ford Foundation and other underwriters, the organization greatly expanded its activities and programs. More than 300 Latino arts organizations in the United States are now served by NALAC in the Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, and South American communities. NALAC provides direct services to its constituency through regional meetings, publications, and programs. In the literary arts, NALAC affords book exhibit space and opportunities for writers to confer and perform their works. NALAC programs have included such opportunities as internships with Arte Público Press* for fledgling publishers. Representatives of NALAC organizations meet biennially at a NALAC-sponsored national conference to discuss current issues that affect Latino Arts and to attend workshops on technical assistance and capacity-building. Further Reading “National Association for Latino Arts and Culture” (http://www. nalac.org).

F. Arturo Rosales National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. When Chicano Movement* leader Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales* called the National Chicano Liberation Conference for March 1969 in Denver, Chicanos throughout the country knew who he was. More than one thousand young people attended and engaged in the most intense celebration of Chicanismo to date—most of them from California. The most enduring concept that came out of this meeting was El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), which proposed Chicano separatism, a position justified because of “brutal Gringo invasion for our territories.” Poet Alurista* was among the framers of the document. Many Chicano writers participated in the conference, as did theater director and playwright Luis Valdez.* The conference, held in the headquarters of the Crusade for Justice, was an ambitious attempt to achieve self-determination for Chicanos. Although it was more a celebration than a strategic planning meeting, no other event had so energized Chicanos for continued commitment. The idea of a national protest day against the Vietnam War emerged from the conference and became a reality in the National Chicano Moratorium against the war. In addition, the assembly also provided one of the earliest attempts to deal with the role of women in Chicano society. Chicanas in attendance insisted on addressing their oppression by males. The movimiento had been dominated by males, many who asserted that the priority of the Chicano Movement was to liberate the males first. The women delegates held an impromptu workshop that issued a 800

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statement condemning chauvinism within the Chicano Movement. Unfortunately, when workshop leaders read the results of their particular sessions, Crusade for Justice women hushed up the complaints and concurred with the prevailing male idea: that women were not ready for liberation. Many Chicanas, needless to say, were not deterred from pursuing the issue. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

F. Arturo Rosales Native Literature. Native Hispanic literature develops first out of the experience of colonialism and racial oppression. Hispanics were subjected to more than a century of “racialization” through such doctrines as the Spanish Black Legend and Manifest Destiny (racist doctrines that justified the appropriation of lands and resources by English and Anglo Americans). Hispanics were subsequently conquered or incorporated into the United States through territorial purchase and then treated as colonial subjects—as were the Mexicans of the Southwest, the Hispanics of Florida and Louisiana, the Panamanians of the Canal Zone and in Panama itself, and the Puerto Ricans of the Caribbean. (Cubans and Dominicans may be considered as peoples who developed their identities under United States colonial rule during the early twentieth century.) Adding to the base of Hispanics already residing within the United States was the subsequent migration and immigration of large numbers of people from the Spanish-speaking countries to the continental United States over a century-long period. Their waves of emigration were often directly related to the colonial administration of their homelands by the United States. Their children’s subsequent U.S. citizenship created hundreds of thousands of new natives with cultural perspectives on life in the United States that have differed substantially from those of immigrants and exiles. Hispanic native literature developed as an ethnic minority literature first among Hispanics already residing in the Southwest when the U.S. appropriated it from Mexico—there are very few extant Hispanic texts from Louisiana and Florida from U.S. colonial and early statehood days. Native Hispanic literature has specifically manifested itself in an attitude of entitlement to civil, political, and cultural rights. From its very origins in the nineteenth-century editorials of Francisco Ramírez* and the novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,* Hispanic native literature in general has been cognizant of the racial, ethnic, and minority status of its readers within U.S. society and culture. The fundamental reason for the existence of native Hispanic literature and its point of reference has been—and continues to be—the lives and conditions of Latinos in the United States. Unlike immigrant literature, it does not have one foot in the homeland and one in the United States; it does not share that double gaze forever contrasting experience in the United States with experience in the homeland. For native Hispanic peoples of the United States, the homeland is the United States; there is no question of a return to their ancestors’ Mexico, Puerto Rico, or Cuba. 801

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Thus, this literature exhibits a firm sense of place, often elevated to a mythic status. Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, referenced Aztlán, the legendary place of origin of the Aztecs, supposedly in today’s Southwest, which gave them—as mestizo people—priority over Euro Americans. In this place, syncretic cultures developed and reigned supreme, as in the Nuyoricans’ “Loisaida” (the Lower East Side of New York), so eulogized by poet-playwright Miguel Piñero* and “El Bronx,” as in Nicholasa Mohr’s* El Bronx Remembered. This sense of belonging to a region or place or just the barrio, where their culture has transformed the social and physical environment, is only one manifestation of the general feeling of newness, that is, of a new culture derived from the synthesis of the old Hispanic and Anglo cultures that had initially opposed each other. The “Chicanos”* and “Nuyoricans”* appeared in the 1960s along with the civil rights movement to claim a new and separate identity from that of Mexicans (even from Mexican Americans) and Puerto Ricans on the island. They proclaimed their bilingualism* and biculturalism and mixed and blended the English and Spanish in their speech and writing to create a new interlingual and transcultural esthetic. The construction of this new identity was often explored in literary works that examined the psychology of characters caught between cultures, pondering the proverbial existential questions, as in four foundational works on coming of age: Piri Thomas’s* autobiography Down These Mean Streets (1967), Tomás Rivera’s* Spanish-language novel . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973). But the process of sorting out identity and creating a positive place for themselves in an antagonistic society was at times facilitated only by a cultural nationalism that promoted opposition to Anglo American culture and maintained a strict code of ethnic loyalty. No other artist explored the question of image and identity more than playwright Luis Valdez* did throughout his career, most of all in his allegory of stereotypes Los Vendidos (1976, The Sell-outs), in which he revisited the history of Mexican stereotypes, the products of discrimination, and culture clash. In the 1960s and 1970s, native Hispanic literature was closely associated with the civil rights movements of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans on the continental United States. Literary works tended toward the militant, often emphasizing working-class* roots, language dialects, and audiences over academic and commercial subjects. Today, native Hispanic literature is characterized by academic preparation and readership as well as publication by large commercial publishing houses. In the works published by mainstream publishers, English is the preferred language, and university-prepared authors are those most often published. Political ideology and working-class culture have been almost entirely eliminated in an attempt to appeal to broader audiences. Further Reading Hospital, Carolina, ed., Cuban American Writers: Los Atrevidos (Princeton: Linden Lane Press, 1988).

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Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction,” Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, eds. Nicolás Kanellos, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Rivera, Carmen S., Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Nativism. In the United States, large-scale outbursts against immigration began in the nineteenth century when Anglo American nativists reacted first to the influx of Catholic Irish and German newcomers and then to Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans. Nativists feared that these foreigners posed a threat to Anglo American culture and values. The Know-Nothing Party emerged in the 1850s to curtail political inroads being made by Catholics. In Texas, members of this group were blamed for denying Mexicans their rights and for perpetrating crimes against them. The Civil War and internal divisions put an end to the Know-Nothings at the same time that many Irish and German Catholics slowly achieved a degree of acceptance. But with the rise of industrialism, a large influx of Eastern and Southern European laborers revived nativist sentiment against immigrants who did not speak English, were not Protestants, and possessed an array of customs and values that seemed diametrically opposed to Anglo American culture. In addition, low wages and underemployment kept the newcomers in a constant state of poverty, a condition that provoked attendant social problems and made immigrants even more undesirable. As a consequence, organized labor made up of nativists sought immigration restrictions. Employer lobbying efforts proved more formidable than those of restrictionists, however, and immigration policy of the United States throughout most of the nineteenth century remained among the most liberal in the world. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 became the only victory that nativists and their allies achieved. The twentieth century brought a more opportune climate for restrictionists. Because World War I had stalled immigration from Europe, employers became less vigilant about protecting a source that seemed in decline. In addition, a wartime fear that foreigners could be disloyal and dangerous provided the ideal climate for pushing legislation that would at last curtail the influx of unpalatable newcomers. Federal legislation in 1917 required literacy as a prerequisite for legal entry into the United States, a restriction designed to keep out Eastern and Southern Europeans, who had higher illiteracy rates than did more desirable immigrants from Northern Europe. In 1921, a quota act was passed that favored Northern Europe and then, in 1924, another act lowered the quota even further for the undesirable “New Immigrants.” Asian immigrants were totally banned. Curiously, Mexicans received special treatment during this era. For example, Congress waived the 1917 literacy requirements for 803

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Mexican immigrants, and the quota acts of 1921 and 1924 excluded the Western Hemisphere; Mexicans and a fewer number of Canadians and Cubans were the only immigrants entering from these areas in the 1920s. The Jones Act of 1917, which tightened the control that the United States had over Puerto Rico, provided citizenship to all Puerto Ricans. On the surface it appeared that nativists did not target Latinos on their list of undesirable immigrants. The main thrust of anti-immigrant fervor was centered in the urban Northeast and the Midwest. Although nativists did not want Puerto Ricans, they could not be banned. Cubans migrated primarily to Florida, and Mexicans, who worked primarily in the Southwest and West, did not enter the nativist field of vision. Nonetheless, many groups and individuals who saw foreigners as a threat to the American way of life cast Mexicans as undesirables. In the 1920s, such nativists as Roy Garis, a professor at Vanderbilt University, and John C. Box, a congressman from Texas, led campaigns to restrict the immigration of Mexicans, calling this group the most reprehensible new arrival. But powerful employers, who now used Mexican labor as a replacement for vanishing European immigrants, blocked restrictions. Besides, because Mexico bordered the United States, Mexicans returned home more regularly than other immigrants, thus easing the threat they posed to the “natives.” Also, most nativists saw the Chinese and Japanese immigrants as the greatest problem in the West. As a consequence, Mexicans received a reprieve. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, production in all sectors of the American economy almost came to a standstill, and the Mexican labor so assiduously recruited in the past became unwanted. Because they were no longer needed, Mexicans lost the support of employers, who in the past had provided the only protection from those wishing to halt their influx. A massive repatriation program, funded by local municipalities, employers, and private charities, returned almost half of the 1.5 million Mexicans to Mexico, including many who had been born in the United States. During the 1930s, nativist groups almost succeeded in halting immigration from Mexico, a ban of the same sort that they had successfully imposed on Asians a century earlier. But Mexican Americans managed to prove their loyalty to the United States during War World II and achieved significant social mobility as well. AntiMexican sentiment based on the influx of new arrivals would have probably faded, as it had for the descendants of such groups as the Italians, Jews, and Polish—the so-called “new immigrants.” But the return of American prosperity after the war resulted in a need for Mexican labor. An influx of unassimilated Hispanic newcomers, not just from Mexico but from Central America and the Caribbean as well, entered in increasing numbers, reaching a crescendo in the 1990s. Again, nativism seems to have risen. English-only campaigns and public referendums that try to ban social services to immigrants without documents have proliferated in the last decades. Hispanic literature has reflected nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments, beginning with Francisco Ramírez’s* editorials against the Know-Nothings and 804

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continuing even up to the present day with such works as Alicia Alarcón’s* La migra me hizo los mandados (2002, The Border Patrol Ate My Dust, 2004). Oral and folk literature* has also registered the constant resistance to Hispanic culture and immigration, from such corridos* as “Los Repatriados” (The Repatriated Ones) to the songs of such popular recording artists as Los Tigres del Norte. Further Reading Reisler, Mark, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). Rosales, F. Arturo, Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

F. Arturo Rosales Nattes, Enrique (1871–1932). Born in Guanabacoa, Cuba in 1871, Enrique Nattes became a noted journalist, columnist, and poet. Before going into exile in the United States for political reasons, Nattes worked in cultural magazines such as La Habana Elegante (Elegant Havana) and in such newspapers as El Fígaro, Cuba, and Smart. As a chronicler of upper-class life in Havana, Nattes wrote the gossip column for the most famous Cuban daily, Diario de la Marina (The Waterfront Daily) and published the Guía Social de la Habana (Havana Social Guide). While he was in exile, the New York Press Club supported Nattes’s founding of El Americano (The American), a magazine that promoted Latin American culture and that included in its pages some of the most distinguished Latino writers, including José Martí* and Nicanor Bolet Peraza.* Nattes was an intimate of Martí and collaborated in Martí’s newspaper, Patria. While in New York, Nattes published a collection of his poems, Flores silvestres: poesías dedicadas a las mujeres de América Latina (1893, Wild Flowers: Poetry Dedicated to the Women of Latin America), for which José Martí* wrote an introduction. The poetry in this volume is replete with nostalgia for the homeland and longing to be reunited with the women of his family; although full of romantic sentimentality, the poems reveal the tragedy of exile. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Nava, Michael (1954–). Prominent mystery writer Michael Nava was born on September 16, 1954, in Stockton, California. Growing up in Sacramento and having lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Nava’s personal history surfaces in all of his writing. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Colorado College with a degree in history, Nava spent some time in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on a Watson Fellowship. Returning to the U.S., Nava went on to law school at Stanford University, earning his J.D. in 1981. Early in his career as a lawyer, Nava worked as a prosecutor for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, as well as for a private law firm, before writing his 805

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first mystery novel in 1986. Nava began his literary career with the publication of The Little Death, the first in what was to become the Henry Rios detective fiction series. As the series developed, Rios becomes an increasingly complex emotional and psychological character, whose personal life interacts more directly with the novel’s driving plot line and, as critics have stated, resonates more directly with Nava’s biography. In The Little Death, the series’ main protagonist, Henry Rios, an openly homosexual Chicano lawyer in the midst of a personal crisis, leaves his position as public defender to open his own law practice. When a romantic partner is found dead of accidental overdose, Rios, in disbelief, sets out to uncover the truth, initiating his career as a detective. Nava’s second novel, Goldenboy (1988), more explicitly addresses issues of homosexuality in the course of its plot. Following the success of the first two novels, Nava switched to a major publisher with the publication of his third Henry Rios mystery, How Town (1990). The next in the series, Hidden Law (1992), brings issues of ethnicity and sexuality to the forefront as Henry Rios struggles to come to terms with his failed romantic relationship and memories of a troubled childhood. The Death of Friends followed in 1996 and the sixth novel, The Burning Plain (1997), expands the cast by exploring L.A.’s entertainment industry. The series concluded in 2001 with Rag and Bone. In the final installment, Rios copes with his declining health as he struggles to form a family with his nephew Angel while solving a domestic abuse/homicide case. Ultimately, the series ends on a note of absolution and hopeful reconciliation, and Henry moves from his law practice to a possible judgeship. Throughout the series, Rios often becomes emotionally invested in his work, exploring his own character along with the cases he investigates, making him a moving and provocative protagonist. In writing about a gay Chicano male, Nava’s writing is often paired with or compared to that of other prominent gay Latino writers, Arturo Islas* or John Rechy* (see Gay and Lesbian Literature). Although Henry Rios is Chicano, his emphasis is largely on the individual and the family rather than on the character’s investment in the Chicano community. While some have criticized Nava for failing to engage more explicitly with the larger Latino community, the Henry Rios series poignantly interrogates Chicano masculinity. The series also deals with issues that transcend the detective genre: marginalized communities, sexuality, disease, social justice, and socially unsanctioned love. Nava’s novels unabashedly tackle difficult or even controversial subjects, such as Rios’s battle with alcoholism, the trauma of living with AIDS, and the complex intimacies of a broken family. Nevertheless, Nava adeptly adheres to the expectations of the mystery genre when portraying his characters. Indeed, one of the advantages of genre fiction is that the generic conventions provide a forum for imbedded social commentary. In some way, Nava’s mysteries also continue in the tradition of fictionalized political activism of the Chicano Movement, although through overlapping generic crossings. Taken as a whole, the Henry Rios series can be read as a spiritual or emotional journey that in many ways reflects Michael 806

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Nava’s own personal development. Some critics have even classified the series a “bildungsroman”* in which Henry Rios confronts and conquers his personal demons to assume a confident social position in Latino and mainstream society. Although Nava is known mostly for his mystery fiction, he began his literary career in poetry and has since written nonfiction works advocating gay rights. In 1994, Nava coauthored with Robert Dawidoff the book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America. In Created Equal, Nava attempts to present the arguments against gay and lesbian rights and then provide a compelling defense against such claims. Over the course of his career, Nava has been awarded five Lambda Literary Awards. He currently serves as a judicial staff attorney, reviewing criminal petitions, for the California Supreme Court under Associate Justice Carlos Moreno. Further Reading Gambone, Philip, Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Sotelo, Susan Baker, Chicano Detective Fiction: A Critical Study of Five Novelists (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2005).

Alberto Varón Navarro, Gabriel (?–?). Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, Gabriel Navarro moved to Los Angeles as an actor and musician in the Compañía México Nuevo (New Mexico Company) in 1922. In Los Angeles, he developed into a playwright and also worked as a journalist and theater critic. During the Great Depression, with the demise of the theater industry, he became a movie critic. In 1923, he launched a magazine, La Revista de Los Angeles (Los Angeles Magazine); it is not known how long it lasted. In 1925, he became associated with a newspaper in San Diego, El Hispano Americano (The Hispanic American), which that same year published his novel, La señorita Estela (Miss Estela). As a playwright and composer, Navarro experimented with all of the popular dramatic forms, from drama to musical revue. Navarro’s favorite genre was the revista (musical comedy revue), which allowed him to put to use his talents as a composer and writer, in addition to the technical knowledge he accrued as an actor and director. In the revista, Navarro celebrated Los Angeles nightlife and the culture of the Roaring Twenties. His known works include the following revues: Los Angeles al Día (1922, Los Angeles to Date), coauthored with Eduardo Carrillo,* La Ciudad de los Extras (1922, The City of Extras), Su Majestad la Carne (1924, Her Majesty the Flesh), also coauthored with Carrillo, La Ciudad de Irás y No Volverás (1928, The City Where Gabriel Navarro pictured on the cover of You Go and Never Return), Las Luces de Los Angeles his novel. 807

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(1933, The Lights of Los Angeles), El Precio de Hollywood (1933, The Price of Hollywood), Los Angeles en Pijamas (1934, Los Angeles in Pajamas), and La Canción de Sonora (1934, The Song of Sonora). His dramas include La Señorita Estela (1925), Los Emigrados (1928, The Émigrées), La Sentencia (1931, The Jail Sentence), El Sacrificio (1931, The Sacrifice), Loco Amor (1932, Crazy Love), Alma Yaqui (1932, Yaqui Soul), and Cuando Entraron los Dorados (1932, When Villa’s Troops Entered). Navarro’s serious works drew upon his growing up in Guadalajara and his twelve years in the army in Veracruz and Sonora during the Mexican Revolution. El Sacrificio and La Sentencia use California as a setting; Los Emigrados examines the expatriate status of Mexicans in Los Angeles and shows the breakdown of family and culture as an Anglo–Mexican intermarriage ends in divorce and bloody tragedy. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Navarro, José Antonio (1795–1871). An early Texas political leader and the author of one of the first Mexican American memoirs, José Antonio Navarro was born to Corsican-born army officer Angel Navarro and to María Josefa Ruiz y Peña in San Antonio on February 27, 1795. Without much formal education, he worked in his father’s business and became a respected merchant, who was elected to the legislature of Coahuila-Texas in 1828. Navarro was a signer of the Texas declaration of independence and helped draft the constitution of the Republic of Texas. After the war, returning to his business and ranches, Navarro participated in the ill-fated filibustering expedition to New Mexico in 1841; when the Mexican authorities captured the filibusters, Navarro was condemned to life in prison in Mexico City. However, Navarro was able to escape and return to San Antonio. Upon his return, he was elected to the state senate after Texas joined the Union, but he withdrew from politics in 1849, disillusioned by the racist treatment of Mexicans and the dispossession of their lands and properties that ensued as Anglo American migration overwhelmed the native population. Navarro dedicated the rest of his life to his family, ranches, and business interests, as well as to writing articles for the press and penning his Apuntes históricos interesantes de San Antonio de Béxar (1869, Interesting Historical Notes from San Antonio de Béxar), in which he expresses his considerable disillusionment with life under the Anglodominated republic and state, especially the rampant racism against Mexicans. In fact, his writing of articles and José Antonio Navarro. 808

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this memoir must be seen as an effort to recall the culture and living conditions before the separation from Mexico before his death of cancer in 1971. Further Reading Dawson, Joseph Martin, José Antonio Navarro, Co-Creator of Texas (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1969). Navarro, José Antonio, Defending Mexican Valor in Texas: José Antonio Navarro’s Historical Writings, 1853–1857, eds. David R. McDonald and Timothy M. Matovina (Austin: State House Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Niggli, Josephina (1910–1983). Novelist, playwright, and children’s book writer Josephina Niggli was born on July 13, 1910, in Monterrey, Mexico, where she lived until the first years of the Mexican Revolution. In 1913, she and her mother relocated to San Antonio. She returned to Mexico in 1920 with her parents, but further revolutionary turmoil caused the family to leave Mexico again in 1925, returning to the United States, where Josephina completed her formal education. In spite of the scant eight years that she actually spent in Mexico, the subject of her country of birth, particularly its people and traditions, is an important theme in her literature. Indeed, Niggli considered herself a “halfway” child, connected to two worlds. This sense of dual consciousness regarding her Mexican and American experiences situates her between two cultures and two countries; her literature is a direct expression of the way in which she dealt with a dual identity. Niggli began her work in the area of playwriting at the University of North Carolina, where she published a number of plays. Mexican Folk Plays was published in 1938 by the University of North Carolina Press and includes “Tooth or Shave,” “The Red Velvet Goat,” “Azteca,” “Sunday Costs Five Pesos,” and the well-known “Soldadera.” “Tooth and Shave,” a folk comedy, is based on her childhood experiences and focuses on the life of Mexican village people. The theme of small-town village life is also evident in the comedy, “Sunday Costs Five Pesos.” “The Red Velvet Goat” is a type of Spanish drama known as sainete, which presents comical, popular figures to the audience. “Azteca,” on the other hand, takes place one hundred seven years before the arrival of Cortés in México and deals with the ancient ritual involving the sacrifice of a young girl to the Earth Goddess. “Soldadera” popularized the Mexican Revolution and its focus on the important role of the Adelitas who followed their men onto the battlefield. This emphasis on the Mexican Revolution is in keeping with one of her earlier plays, “Mexican Silhouettes” (1928). Niggli has been recognized for her role in the development of Mexican folk drama and has been compared to Mexican lyrical dramatists, such as Celestina Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia, as well as to dramatist Amalia de Castillio Ledón, whose plays deal with the psychology of Mexican women. Niggli was awarded two Rockefeller Fellowships in Playwriting and a New Play Fellowship from the Theatre Guild in 1938. She also authored two works, Pointers on Playwriting (1945) and Pointers on Radio Writing (1946). 809

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It is precisely Niggli’s capacity to accurately capture and define what is Mexican that stands out in her later works, Mexican Village (1945) and Step Down Elder Brother (1947). In both texts, she presents her vision of Mexico through the heroes of these works, who are situated in two related regional spaces in Nuevo Leon—Hidalgo and Monterrey. Mexican Village focuses on the cultural sphere of Nuevo Leon, and it is through the character of Bob Webster that Niggli presents the reader with her perspective regarding identity and the mixing of blood. Bob, who is considered a Yanqui, as the boss of the quarry, is in fact the grandson of a Castillian woman, Isabella Castillo, who dared marry a man of Indian blood. Although Bob is rejected by his Anglo father, who calls his son an “Indian,” he ultimately comes to terms with his mixed ancestry. It is through this particular character that Niggli seems to be commenting on her own sense of mixed identity. Step Down Elder Brother presents Niggli’s vision of the future of her beloved Mexico. Within this narrative she is critical of Creole dominance in the metropolis of Monterrey and she suggests that the old way of life must find new expression. Mateo, like Bob Webster, is a mestizo and represents potential for change, particularly in terms of breaking down the traditional class lines so entrenched in Mexican life. Mexican Village, with its emphasis on situations of romantic love, town traditions, and folklore, shares some of the themes of Niggli’s early playwriting. However, it is in Step Down Elder Brother that she writes of her place of birth—of Monterrey as a symbol of Mexican progress. On the basis of the themes dealt with in these works, Niggli can be seen as a forerunner of Chicana writers, someone intent on speaking to an Anglo audience as a means of dispelling racist impressions regarding her place of birth. Further Reading Kabalen de Bichara, Donna, “Josephina Niggli as a Regional Voice: A Re-examination of Mexican Village and Step Down Elder Brother” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 6, eds. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Kenya Dworkin y Mendez (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006).

Donna Kabalen de Bichara Niño, Raúl (1961–). With his one small book, Breathing Light (1991), and a recent chapbook, A Book of Mornings (2007), Raúl Niño has positioned himself as an emergent Chicago Chicano poet committed to exploring dimensions of individual experience and intimacy—cultural concerns, as opposed to more specifically social and political ones. Perhaps the least public and extroverted of the Mexican poets who called themselves “Chicano” in Chicago, he has come to represent an important dimension of contemporary Chicano writing in Chicago as it moved away from its more political thrust stemming from its militant roots and uses in the 1960s. Born of a Mexican mother and Portuguese father in 1961, Niño moved back and forth between Monterrey, Mexico, and Texas (San Antonio, Houston, and Corpus Christi) until his mother settled in the Chicago area, finally landing a job as a housemaid for a wealthy family. Almost all of the next several years of Niño’s life were spent in well-to-do surroundings, but always as the son of the 810

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maid. Indeed, almost all of Niño’s Chicago area years were lived and felt as discrepancy, difference, inauthenticity, absence, marginality, and lack. Graduating from Hanaka High School in 1980, he was at a loss in thinking about the future. Instead of going to college, he bummed around for a year, riding the Greyhound down to Texas to hang out with relatives in Corpus Christi. Finally returning to the city, he enrolled in Loyola University, where he was encouraged by a young, aspiring Chicana writer, Sandra Cisneros,* herself recently out of the Iowa Writing Program and on the verge of publishing her first book. Soon after meeting Cisneros, he began to participate in a writer’s workshop she ran, and he began to attend readings with Cisneros and her friend, poet Carlos Cumpián.* He finally joined the Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH, Chicano Artistic Movement) and began to write with greater frequency. Dropping out of Loyola and then the University of Illinois at Chicago, he found work as a researcher and sometime reviewer for the American Library Association, which gave him a chance to extend his knowledge of the book and publishing business, to see and review the latest books in many fields, and to make the living that enabled him to rewrite and rework his poems. Niño soon came into the public view when his work appeared in such magazines as Ecos and Tonantsín. His appearance in the MARCH mini-anthology, Emergency Tacos (1989), was probably instrumental in some of his poems being picked up by Charles Tatum’s first volume of New Chicana/Chicano Writing (1991). The publication of Breathing Light led to presentations in Chicago art galleries and nightspots. Breathing Light is the poetic autobiography of Niño’s early and young adult experiences, feelings, and imaginings; as such, it is a documentation of different phases and aspects of his development. But, above all, it is a record and laboratory of his personal and literary identity struggles. Among the main themes are ones centered on young-adult life and dreams, love, and fantasy, as well as on place (Chicago’s neighborhoods, trains, and suburbs, and Monterrey’s hills, dry winds, and factories); poetry, memory, and questions of being. A variety of forms appear, with several experiments in poetic expression set out for display. Most predominant are slender, short-lined lyrics, etching out situations, feelings, and moods with a minimum of words. But there are others that take other kinds of risks, with broader lines that are more narrative than lyrical. And we even have one extended prose poem effort—his “Monterrey Sketches,” the work most overtly focused on questions of Mexican and Chicano identity. In recent years, Niño has worked at the Northwestern University library in Evanston while writing short book reviews and exploring new directions in poetry and fiction, as in the case of his recent chapbook. Further Reading Zimmerman, Marc, “Raúl Niño” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 167–169). Zimmerman, Marc, U.S. Latino Literature: An Essay and Annotated Bibliography (Chicago: MARCH/Abrazo Press, 1992).

Marc Zimmerman 811

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Niza, Fray Marcos de (1495–1558). Missionary, explorer, and chronicler Fray Marcos de Niza was born in Nice, Italy, in 1495. He became a Franciscan friar and moved to Spain. In 1531, he left for the New World to explore the coasts of Peru in an expedition led by the famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Fray Marcos de Niza was part of the group of conquistadors and missionaries who conquered the Inca Empire, including the Pizarro brothers and Hernando de Soto. Unlike Pizarro, Fray Marcos de Niza treated the Incas with respect and always fought for their rights and for those of other indigenous groups. After five years in Peru, he traveled to Guatemala, where he stayed briefly before leaving for New Spain. In July 1536, while Niza was still in Mexico, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,* Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Esteban (also known as Estevañico or Estebán the Moor) came back from their eight-year exploration of Florida. The accounts they brought to Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza about the wealth in those exotic lands piqued the interest of the explorers and missionaries in Mexico’s capital and caused Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to appoint several commissions to explore the northern territories in search of the wealthy lands Cabeza de Vaca had described. The commissions were charged with obtaining information about this other coast, exploring land routes, landscape, vegetation, natural resources, minerals, and populace. Niza explored the area of Sinaloa, where he was instrumental in liberating a group of Native American slaves. During that time, he encountered a Pueblo tribe called the Zuñi. Niza left Sinaloa in 1539 accompanied by Estevañico (who claimed to be familiar with the rich lands of the north) to explore the western part of what is now New Mexico and Arizona in search of the “Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola” referred to by the Zuñi. (Contemporary scholars now claim that Cíbola was the name of one of the Zuñi villages.) During this exploration, Estevañico was killed by the natives in Hawikuh, New Mexico. Under these circumstances, Fray Marcos de Niza was forced to return to Mexico City immediately. Once in Mexico City, he published an account of his journey entitled Descubrimiento de las siete ciudades (Discovery of the Seven Cities). According to this account, the areas that he explored were extremely rich in natural and mineral resources. He was impressed even with Cíbola, the smallest of the cities, which was as big as Tenochtitlán. Besides the wealth of those territories, he was intrigued by the native practices. His Descubrimiento inspired Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to begin his well-known expedition to the Zuñi Pueblo villages, located in the area which is now New Mexico. Fray Marcos described the cities as “the seven cities of gold.” He claimed that they had more gold than the indigenous peoples of Peru had. Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition was commissioned by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who was very enthusiastic about the region (what is now the Southwestern United States). Coronado directed the expedition, and Fray Antonio was the official guide. They brought along more than 1,000 people—about 340 Spaniards, 300 Indians and mestizos, and 1,000 slaves—as well as 1,000 horses and 6 swivel guns. The expedition had two purposes: exploration and colonization. After several days and weeks, they 812

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found the city of Cibola, the smallest of the seven cities, which according to Niza had more gold than any city in Mexico or Peru. Unfortunately, the city did not have as much gold as Niza had claimed. In fact, Niza had only seen Cíbola from a distance, because he was afraid that he would suffer the same fate as Estevañico, and so had misinterpreted what he saw. Scholars also know now that much of his information came from hearsay and Zuñi legends. When Coronado realized that there was no gold, he discharged Niza and sent him back in to Mexico City. Fray Marcos arrived in Mexico City in disgrace, but soon after he came to hold the highest local office in the Franciscan order and continued to explore and evangelize. According to some sources, Fray Marcos de Niza was the first nonindigenous man to explore what is now New Mexico and Arizona. Fray Marcos de Niza died in Mexico City on March 25, 1558. Further Reading Hallenbeck, Cleve, The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, [1949] 1987). Rodack, Madeleine T., ed. and trans., Adolph F. Bandelier’s The Discovery of New Mexico by the Franciscan Monk, Friar Marcos de Niza, in 1539 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981).

Guillermo de los Reyes Heredia Noloesca, Beatriz “La Chata.” See Escalona, Beatriz Nombela y Tabarés, Julio (1836–1919). Novelist, nonfiction historian, and journalist Julio Nombela y Tabarés was born and died in Madrid, serving during his lifetime as a chronicler of life in his native city. He published crónicas in numerous periodicals and was the author of various voluminous novels that were serialized in periodicals, including Desde el cielo (1857, They Appear from the Skies), Historia de un minuto (1862, The History of a Minute), and El amor propio (1889, Self-Love). His best-known work was a memoir, Impresiones y recuerdos (1909–1912, Impressions and Memories), published in four volumes. An acknowledged humorist, Nombela y Tabarés founded and edited the popular magazine La Vida Alegre (The Happy Life) in Madrid. He was so productive that the prolific Spanish novelist Azorín called him the “laborer” of Spanish literature. One of his lesser known works is his minutely detailed, two-volume, eyewitness account of the California Gold Rush, La fiebre de riquezas: Siete años en California, descubrimiento del oro y explotación de sus inmensas filones: Historia dramática en vista de datos auténticos e interesantes relaciones de los más célebres viajeros (1871–1872, The Fever for Riches: Seven Years in California, Discovering Gold and Exploiting Its Immense Veins: Dramatic History Reported with Authentic Facts about Interesting Relationships of the Most Famous Travelers). Nombela y Tabarés’s account of this momentous event in Latino history is not only unique for its testimonial perspective but also because of its authorship by a man of literary letters. 813

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Further Reading Pitt, Leonard, Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Novás Calvo, Lino (1905–1983). One of the most distinguished writers of short fiction, Lino Novás Calvo was born on September 22, 1905, in Granas del Sor, Galicia, Spain. At the age of sixteen he emigrated to Cuba with his parents, where he worked as a laborer and became a self-taught intellectual. By 1927, he was publishing poems in magazines. In 1931, he was sent as a correspondent to Madrid by Orbe magazine, where he wrote for various periodicals and published his first novel: Pedro Blanco, el Negrero (1933, Pedro Blanco, Slaver). A fictional biography of a slave trader, El Negrero anticipates many of the new novelistic techniques that would characterize the novels of the Latin American Boom. From 1936 to 1939, he served as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. He returned to Cuba in 1940 and picked up his journalistic career again, as well as that of fiction writer, winning a number of important awards, including the important Henández Catá Prize and translating into Spanish the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Lawrence. In 1942, Novás Calvo published one of his most acclaimed collections of stories, La luna y la nona y otros cuentos (The Moon and the Grandmother and Other Stories), for which he was awarded the national prize for literature. After the Communist takeover, Novás Calvo was one of the first prominent writers to go into exile* in the United States (in 1960), where he was able to work as a professor at Syracuse University, beginning in 1967, and continue writing. Some critics believe that Novás Calvo’s career was renewed in exile, which gave him the freedom to explore new themes and styles. His writing in the United States took on the topics of prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Cuba, as well as indirectly and by allusion treating the experience of living as an exile in a foreign culture. Nevertheless, he is most known for the universal themes he elaborated upon in his short stories. He was prolific in his U.S. setting and was a respected teacher. Novás Calvo was forced to retire from teaching in 1973 when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Additional cerebral hemorrhages left him paralyzed, and he died in New York City on March 24, 1983. Many scholars believe that Novás Calvo should be considered one of the greatest short fiction writers of the Latin American Boom. His neo-realist stories appeared and were highly esteemed in scores of anthologies, but some believe that he has been excluded from literary distinction by leading writers and intellectuals because of his anti-Castro editorials and political resistance to the Communist regime. Novás Calvo was the father of novelist Himilce Novás. Further Reading “Lino en Tercera Persona” (http://www.cubaliteraria.cu/autor/lino_novas_calvo/ biografia.html). National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies” (http://www.naccs.org/naccs/ Default_EN.asp).

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Souza, Raymond D., “Exile in the Cuban Literary Experience” in Escritores de la diáspora cubana, Manual biobibliográfico/Cuban Exile Writers: A Biobibliographic Handbook, eds. Daniel C. Maratos and Mamesba D. Hill (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1986: 1–11).

Nicolás Kanellos Novel. The novel is a genre that has not been cultivated by Latinos as much as other genres that have greater potential for distribution and consumption, such as poetry (which can be performed in front of audiences large and small), essays and short stories (which can be read or performed in one sitting before an audience and later published in local newspapers), or even drama (especially short skits and plays that directly affect audiences and offer immediate monetary rewards). The novel requires a much larger investment not only from the writer (who must labor long hours and days in its writing and perfection) but also from the printing and publishing industry, as well as from the communications and distribution system. For these reasons, perhaps, the novel was the last of the genres to develop among Latinos in the United States. Whereas no novels were published by Mexicans or Mexican Americans in the Southwest until after the printing press became commonplace and steamships plied the California coast and stagecoaches criss-crossed the landscape before the construction of railroads in the late nineteenth century, Hispanics in the early American Republic found a culture that very much depended on communications and the printing press, and that had already produced novels. In addition, the ports and waterways of the East Coast readily linked Hispanic authors in Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans to port cities in the Caribbean and Central and South America. With a flourishing printing industry in operation, and with these communication links and highly educated Hispanics in these cities, the stage was set for the appearance of the first Spanish-language novels to be written in the United States. The first such novel was one that emulated the structure and style of the historical novels pioneered in England and the United States by such authors as Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper: Félix Varela’s* Jicoténcal (1826), named for the indigenous protagonist who struggles against the Spanish conquest in Mexico—in fact, Jicoténcal bears the distinction of being the first historical novel written in the entire Hispanic World. Much like many novels that followed it in the nineteenth century, Varela’s was a novel of thesis, presenting a political and cultural argument for the independence of Spain’s colonies in the Americas and decrying Spanish abuses of the native populations. Many novels by exiles (see Exile Literature) were to follow during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most sustaining political theses as underpinning for their authors’ and communities’ various struggles, whether movements for independence, for the abolition of slavery, or for the overthrow of dictators. Among the highlights of this exile tradition are Cirilo Villaverde’s masterful abolition novel Cecilia Valdés, o La Loma del Angel (Cecilia Valdés, or Angel’s Hill) which was begun as a short story in Cuba in 1839 but grew 815

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into a 590-page novel published in New York in 1882 during the author’s exile and revolutionary activism. Beginning with Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (1915, The Underdogs), the genre known as the Novel of the Revolution flourished among Mexican exiles in the United States, producing well over one hundred examples before World War II. Included among these were Como perros y gatos: o las aventuras de la sena democracia en México, historia cómica de la Revolución Mexicana (1924, Like Cats and Dogs: or, the Adventures in Mexico from the Seat of Democracy, a Comic History of the Mexican Revolution) and Pancho Villa, una vida de romance y tragedia (1929, Pancho Villa, A Life of Romance and Tragedy), written and published in San Antonio by journalist and editor Teodoro Torres.* The Casa Editorial Lozano, part of the La Prensa (The Press) newspaper conglomerate, published Torres’s novels along with many others, including Miguel Arce’s* ¡Ladrona! (1925, Female Thief) and Sólo tú (1928, Only You) and Julián S. González’s* Almas rebeldes (1932, Rebel Souls). So popular was the genre that the novels went into multiple editions, often promoted in the pages of the Lozano newspapers. The genre’s popularity is further reflected in its’ giving rise to novels of the revolution that promoted religious messages, such as Alberto Rembao’s* Lupita: A Story of the Revolution in Mexico (1935) and Jorge Gram’s (Jorge Ramírez) Héctor, novela de ambiente mexicano (1934, Hector, Novel with a Mexican Setting). Rembao’s novel, as well as Luis Pérez’s El Coyote, The Rebel (1947), were among the few to be written and published in English for an American audience. The novel of exile continues to this day as a product and reflection of the political history of Spain and Spanish America. The most recent installments relate to the Cuban Revolution and the communist regime of Fidel Castro, as well as to the civil wars in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s and the installation of military dictatorships supported by the United States in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. What is new and distinctive about these later creations is their immediate translation to English and publication by major publishing houses in the United States. Thus, the works of such writers as Reinaldo Arenas,* Isabel Allende,* Ariel Dorfman,* and Tomás Eloy Martínez,* among others, have gone beyond their audiences in their respective homelands and the Spanish-speaking communities in the United States to raise the level of conscience of mainstream American readers, as well as fulfill the perennial intentions of influencing policy makers in the United States to exert pressure on the governments in their homelands. As a result of the large communities of Hispanic immigrants that have grown up in the United States beginning in the early twentieth century, another discrete genre has developed, created on one hand by intellectuals to reflect this reality, and, on the other, by the immigrants themselves to engage their fellow members of the working class (see Immigrant Literature). Before the penning of the first novel of immigration, Alirio Díaz Guerra’s Lucas Guevara (1914), immigration narrative existed and flourished in the oral lore of the immigrants themselves and even ascended to the comic stages of the 816

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East Coast and Southwest, as well as to the newspaper crónicas,* local color columns satirizing and censuring the urban culture of Latinos. Díaz Guerra’s novel is an example of narratives written by intellectuals to unmask the American Dream and to warn immigrants of the potential for loss of morals and identity in the grand Metropolis of the North. Later installments in the genre, such as Daniel Venegas’s* Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (1928, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000), written by the working-class immigrants themselves, seek to create solidarity and a sense of community among the immigrants while satirizing both the motives for leaving the homeland and the pernicious American culture that greets them as they seek to make a living for themselves and their families. The latter were published in inexpensive, pulp editions in hopes of reaching popular audiences and entertaining them while furthering their brand of nationalism, which always exhorted the reader to maintain Spanish language and Hispanic culture and to return to the homeland. The genre continues today in such authors as Salvadoran Mario Bencastro,* Honduran Roberto Quesada,* and Peruvian Eduardo González-Viaña.* Since the publication of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s romance Who Would Have Thought It? in 1872, a novelistic literature has developed that reflects the history, identity, and social and political concerns of authors who see themselves as natives of the United States (see Native Literature). These novels display a sense of place and belonging as well as a sense of loss of heritage and political disenfranchisement; in the Southwest, they often yearn for a return to the days before the coming of the Yankees and the struggle against modernity. Along these lines, Ruiz de Burton’s second romance, The Squatter and the Don (1885), as well as Eusbio Chacón’s Hijo de la Tempestad (1893, Son of the Tempest) and Tras la tormenta la calma (1893, The Calm after the Storm), as well as Jovita González’s for-decades-unpublished Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996), must be mentioned. However, the most important of these early native novels is, without a doubt, Américo Paredes’s for-decadesunpublished novel George Washington Gomez (1990), which, although written in 1936, is a predecessor of the Chicano literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Like the novels that appeared at the height of the Chicano Movement,* such as Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1973), and Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), culture conflict and the struggle for identity are foremost in the development of the protagonists who are growing up in lands that are historically and culturally part of Mexico. From these foundational, male-oriented, and male-dominated works spring two generations of Chicano novelistic art that from the mid-1980s to the present expanded to include the perspectives and sensibilities of women writers, such as Sandra Cisneros, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Graciela Limón, and Helena María Viramontes,* who, it must be said, dominate the Chicano novel today. Following the lead of the Chicanas of the 1990s, other native Latina writers have followed suit from within their own ethnic backgrounds, such as the Dominican 817

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American Julia Alvarez,* the Cuban American Cristina García,* and the Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago.* The phenomenon of Latinos writing in English, however, is also a symptom of greater assimilation and integration into the intellectual and cultural life of the United States. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed the appearance of numerous novels with an ethnic autobiographical plot, following the path of earlier generations of ethnic novels written by Americans of Italian, Jewish, Polish, and German descent and such African American novels as those of Richard Wright. Along with this structure and its implicit ethos of achieving success in the land of opportunity came the embrace of American individualism and belief in the American Dream; having their novels published by mainstream American publishing houses was substantive proof of their acceptance and success. Unlike the novel of immigration, which challenges the American Dream and the melting pot, as does the early Chicano novel, many of the works of Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros,* Oscar Hijuelos,* Nicholasa Mohr,* Esmeralda Santiago, Piri Thomas,* Edward Rivera, and many others, only see the culture of poverty or authoritarianism and misogyny in the alluded-to “homeland” (which is not really theirs or their characters’) as something to escape while pursuing the opportunities in the United States. Further Reading Calderón, Hector, and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–455. Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003). Quintana, Alvina E., Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Rivera, John-Michael, The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Saldívar, Ramón, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar (c. 1490–c. 1557). Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was born in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, around 1490 (some sources give his birth date as 1507) into a prominent military and political family. Educated by a tutor, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became part of the managerial staff of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia in the port of Sanlúcar de Brameda, a port of departure for voyages to the Americas. He later secured a position as treasurer for an armada that set sail in June 1527, to explore Florida under the leadership of Pánfilo de Narváez. After a disastrous voyage through a hurricane, attacks by hostile Amerindians during landfall near Tampa Bay and sickness, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of two hundred survivors out of the six hundred that had initiated the expedition. After building barges to continue their 818

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exploration, Núñez’s barge became shipwrecked at the mouth of the Mississippi, whereupon he and fourteen others were taken in by Amerindians. He gained a reputation as a healer among the aborigines and for six years traveled among the many Amerindian populations along the Gulf coast and inland as far as present-day New Mexico. Finally, in 1536, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and four other marooned soldiers encountered Spanish troops in what is today northwest Mexico and were rescued. Upon his return to Spain in 1537, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote what may very well be the first narrative in a European language about life in an area that would become part of the United States, his La relación y comentarios (The Account and Commentaries), which documented the details of his journey and the peoples Frontispiece of Núñez Cabeza de he encountered in a readable, direct style. Published in 1555, Vaca’s Account. the memoir may be the first ethnographic study of the Americas, as well as a literary masterpiece. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca died in Seville in 1557 (other sources give the date of death as 1559 or 1564). Further Reading Brandt, Keith, and Sergio Martínez, Cabeza de Vaca: New World Explorer (New York: Scholastic/Troll Communications, 1993). Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, eds. Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Nuyorican Literature. Nuyorican literature is produced by Puerto Ricans born or raised in the continental United States. Although the term “Nuyorican” derives from “New York Rican,” today the term follows Puerto Ricans wherever they live in a bilingual–bicultural environment outside of the island (author Jaime Carrero* even promoted the term “Neo-Rican” as a further denotation of bicultural evolution). Puerto Rican writing in New York dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, and creative writing in English dates back to the 1940s, when newspaper columnist Jesús Colón* made the transition to English in the Daily Worker. This seems to be a rather appropriate beginning for Nuyorican writing and identity, given that Colón was highly identified with the Puerto Rican working-class and staking out a piece of Manhattan as part of Puerto Rican cultural identity, as have many of the writers who followed him and who were influenced by his highly regarded book, A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961). Unlike the writers of the island of Puerto Rico, who are members of an elite, educated class and many of whom are employed as university professors, the New York writers who came to be known as Nuyoricans are products of parents transplanted to the metropolis to work in the service and manufacturing industries. These writers are predominantly bilingual in their poetry and English-dominant in their prose and hail from a folk and popular tradition heavily influenced by roving bards, storytellers, salsa 819


Nuyorican writers Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, and Miguel Piñero.

music composers, and the pop-culture commercial environment of New York City. Thus Nuyoricans are typically the children of working-class Puerto Rican migrants to the city. Because they are generally bilingual and bicultural, so is their literature. During the ethnic roots and civil rights movements of the 1960s, young Puerto Rican writers and intellectuals began using the term “Nuyorican” as a point of departure in affirming their own cultural existence and history as divergent from that of Island Puerto Ricans and of mainstream America. A literary and artistic flowering in the New York Puerto Rican community ensued in the 1960s and early 1970s as a result of greater access to education and the ethnic consciousness movements. By the early 1970s, a group of poet-playwrights working in the Lower East Side of Manhattan (“Loisaida”) gathered around a recitation and performance space, the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, and generated exciting performances and publications. Included in the group were Miguel Algarín* (the founder of the café), Lucky Cienfuegos, Tato Laviera,* and Miguel Piñero,* frequently accompanied by Victor Hernández Cruz,* Sandra María Esteves,* Pedro Pietri,* and Piri Thomas,* all of whom became published writers and literary activists. Cienfuegos, Piñero, and Thomas, three of the core Nuyoricans, were ex-convicts who had begun their literary careers while in prison and while associating with African American prison writers; all three influenced the development of Nuyorican writing by concentrating on prison life, street culture, and language and their view of society from the underclass. Algarín, a university professor, contributed a spirit 820


of the avant-garde for the collective and managed to draw into the circle such well-known poets as Alan Ginsberg. The Nuyorican Poets’ Café was often successful at re-establishing the milieu and spirit of the Beat Generation cafés. Tato Laviera, a virtuoso bilingual poet and performer of poetry (declamador), contributed a lyrical, folk, and popular culture tradition that derived from the island experience and Afro-Caribbean culture but that was cultivated specifically in and for New York City. It was Miguel Piñero’s work (and life, memorialized in the Hollywood film Piñero), however, that became most celebrated, his prison drama Short Eyes having won an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play in the 1973–1974 season. His success, coupled with that of fellow Nuyorican Piri Thomas, as well as that of Pedro Pietri, who developed the image of street urchin always high on marijuana, resulted in Nuyorican literature’s and theater’s frequent association with crime, drugs, abnormal sexuality, and generally negative behavior. Thus, many writers who in fact were asserting Puerto Rican working-class culture did not want to become associated with the movement. Still others wanted to hold onto their ties to the island and saw no reason to emphasize differences, instead wanting to stress similarities. Exacerbating the situation, the commercial publishing establishment in the early 1970s quickly took advantage of the literary fervor in minority communities, issuing a series of ethnic autobiographies that insisted on the criminality, abnormality, and drug culture of the New York Puerto Ricans. Included in this array were Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets (1967, issued in paper in 1974), Seven Long Times (1974), and Stories from El Barrio (1978), Lefty Barreto’s Nobody’s Hero (1976), and, in a religious variation on the theme, Nicky Cruz’s* Run Nicky Run. So well worn was this type of supposed autobiography that it generated a satire by another Nuyorican writer, Ed Vega,* as he relates in the introduction to his novel The Comeback (1985): I started thinking about writing a book, a novel. And then it hit me. I was going to be expected to write one of those great American immigrant stories, like Studs Lonigan, Call It Sleep, or Father. . . . Or maybe I’d have to write something like Manchild in the Promised Land or a Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets. . . . I never shot dope nor had sexual relations with men, didn’t for that matter, have sexual relations of any significant importance with women until I was about nineteen. . . . And I never stole anything. . . . Aside from fist fights, I’ve never shot anyone, although I felt like it. It seems pretty far-fetched to me that I would ever want to do permanent physical harm to anyone. It is equally repulsive for me to write an autobiographical novel about being an immigrant. In fact, I don’t like ethnic literature, except when the language is so good that you forget about the ethnic writing it.

More than anything else, the first generation of Nuyorican writers was dominated by poets, many of whom had come out of an oral tradition and had 821


found their art through public readings. Among the consummate performers of Nuyorican poetry were Victor Hernández Cruz, Sandra María Esteves, Tato Laviera, and Miguel Piñero. Like many of his fellow poets, Cruz’s initiation into poetry was through popular music and street culture; his first poems have often been considered jazz poetry in a bilingual mode, except that English dominated his bilingualism and thus opened the way for his first book to be issued by a mainstream publishing house: Snaps: Poems (1969). It was quite a feat for a twenty-year-old inner city youth. In Snaps were the themes and styles that would flourish in his subsequent books. In all of Cruz’s poetry, sound, music, and performance are central. His experimentation with bilingualism includes the search for graphic symbols to represent the orality of both languages and music. His next two books were odysseys that take his readers back to Puerto Rico and to primordial Amerindian and African music and poetry (Mainland, 1973) and across the United States and back to New York, where the poet finds the city transformed by its Caribbean peoples into their very own cultural home (Tropicalization, 1976). By Lingual Wholes (1982) is a consuming and total exploration of the various linguistic possibilities in the repertoire of a bilingual poet, and Rhythm, Content and Flavor (1989) is a summary of his entire career. Tato Laviera’s bilingualism and linguistic inventiveness have risen to the level of virtuosity. Laviera is the inheritor of the Spanish oral tradition with all of its classical formulas and of the African oral tradition, which stresses music and spirituality. In his works he brings not only the Spanish and English languages together but also Manhattan and Puerto Rico in the dualities constant in his works. His first book, La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), uses René Marqués’s* La carreta as a point of departure but redirects Puerto Ricans back to the heart of New York rather than to the island, as Marqués desired—for Laviera believes that Puerto Rican culture can flourish in New York. His second book, Enclave (1981), is a celebration of diverse heroic personalities, both real and imagined, who have been important for Puerto Rican art and culture. AmeRícan (1986) and Mainstream Ethics (1988) are surveys of the poor and marginalized in the United States and challenge the country to live up to its promises of equality and democracy. One of the few women’s voices to be heard in this generation is the very strong and well-defined voice of Sandra María Esteves, who from her teen years has been very active in the women’s struggle, in Afro American liberation, in the Puerto Rican independence movement, and in the performance of poetry. In 1973, she joined El Grupo (The Group), a New York-based collective of touring musicians, performing artists, and poets associated with the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. By 1980, she had published her first collection of poetry, Yerba Buena, which involves a colonized Hispanic woman of color’s search for identity in the United States as the daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean. Her three books, Yerba Buena, Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour, and Bluestown Mocking Bird Mambo (1990), affirm that womanhood is what gives unity to all of the diverse characterizations of her life. 822

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Nicholasa Mohr* is one of the most productive Nuyorican prose writers. Her works include Nilda (1973), El Bronx Remembered (1975), In Nueva York (1986), Rituals of Survival: A Woman’s Portfolio (1985), and A Matter of Pride and Other Stories (1997), in addition to numerous works for children. Her best-known novel, Nilda, traces the coming of age of a Puerto Rican girl living in New York during World War II. The highly autobiographical novel depicts a girl who becomes aware of the plight of her people and of her own individual problems by examining the racial and economic oppression that surrounds her and her family. In El Bronx Remembered and In Nueva York, Mohr examines through a series of stories and novellas various Puerto Rican neighborhoods, drawing sustenance from the common folks’ power to survive and to produce art, folklore, and strong families in the face of oppression and marginalization. In Rituals and A Matter of Pride, Mohr portrays women who take control of their lives, most by liberating themselves from husbands, fathers, or families that attempt to keep them confined in narrowly defined female roles. In the 1990s, these themes were revisited in Esmeralda Santiago’s* memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), and in her autobiographical novels America’s Dream (1997) and Almost a Woman (1999). A Nuyorican writer who has not benefited from the collective work done by the Nuyoricans is Judith Ortiz Cofer,* who grew up in New Jersey and has lived most of her adult life in Georgia and Florida. Cofer is the product of university creative writing programs, and her poetry and prose are highly crafted as well as capturing some of the magic and mystery of the Latin American Boom. Her first book of poems, Reaching for the Mainland (1987), is the chronicle of the displaced person’s struggle to find a goal, a home, a language, and a history. In Terms of Survival (1987), she explores the psychology and social attitudes of the Puerto Rican dialect and how it controls male and female roles, in particular carrying on a dialogue with her father. In 1989, Cofer published a highly reviewed novel of immigration, Line of the Sun, and in 1990 an even more highly received collection of autobiographical essays, stories, and poems, Silent Dancing: A Remembrance of Growing Up Puerto Rican. Cofer followed with another highly regarded novel, The Latin Deli, in 1994 and a collection of stories for young adults, The Year of Our Revolution, in 1999. Further Reading Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (New York: Morrow, 1975). Mor, Eugene V., The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). Rivera, Carmen S., Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Nuyorican Poets’ Café. See Algarín, Miguel; see also Nuyorican Literature

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O Obejas, Achy (1956–). Havana-born Alicia Achy Obejas is a widely published poet, fiction writer, and journalist. She and her family left Cuba clandestinely on a boat when she was only six years old. After spending a brief time in Miami, she and her family were relocated to Michigan City, Indiana, where Obejas was raised. In 1979, she moved to Chicago, where she became a journalist for The Chicago Sun-Times. Before publishing her novels, Obejas saw her poetry and short stories published widely in small magazines and in anthologies. As a poet, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1986. For more than a decade, Obejas was the author of a weekly column, “After Hours,” for the Chicago Tribune, contributing regularly to other Chicago periodicals as well as to national, mainstream ones such as Vogue and The Voice. In 1993, Obejas obtained an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, using a collection of short stories as her master’s thesis. In 1994, Obejas published her first book, We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress like This: Stories, which, despite the title, is made up of personal memoirs, essays, and fiction; the book is held together by the constant perspective of the outsider, political exile, or economic refugee. In her two novels, Memory Mambo (1996) and Days of Awe (2001), Obejas explores the themes of identity conflict from ethnic, religious, and sexual perspectives—not only is Obejas Latina and gay but also a member of the Jewish minority within Latino culture. Both Memory Mambo and Days of Awe were honored with the Lammy for Best Lesbian Fiction. In addition to her awards for fiction, Obejas has also received a Pulitzer Prize for team investigation for the Tribune, the Studs Terkel Journalism Prize, and the Peter Lisagor Award for political reporting from Sigma Delta Chi/Society for Professional 825

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Journalists. She has also received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry and earned residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Arts. Obejas’s most recent offering is her editing of a collection of noir detective/mystery stories, entitled Havana Noir, in 2007. Further Reading Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban American Literature of Exile (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez O’Farrill, Alberto (1899–?). Cuban actor, playwright, and newspaper columnist Alberto O’Farrill was born in Santa Clara and began his career as an actor and playwright in Havana in 1921. Thereafter he immigrated to the United States and became one of the most popular figures on the Spanishlanguage stages of New York City. His specialty was playing the satirical negrito (“black-face”) in the obras bufas cubanas (Cuban farces) and Cuban zarzuelas. O’Farrill was an intensely literate man who had been the editor of the Havana magazine Proteo (Proteus). In 1927, he became the first editor of Gráfico* newspaper, which became the principal organ for the publication and commentary of literature and theater. In Gráfico, O’Farrill also published various stories and crónicas* (satirical columns), under the persona and pen name of Ofa, a picaresque ne’er-dowell mulatto. He also used a number of other pseudonyms in the magazine and drew illustrations for the cover as well as for his crónicas. Although he penned many dramatic works, none were ever published, their primary reason for existence having been for stage production. In 1921, O’Farrill debuted two zarzuelas at the Teatro Esmerlada in Havana: “Un Negro Misterioso” (A Mysterious Black Man) and “Las Pamplinas de Agapito” (Agapito’s Adventures in Pamplona). His other known works all debuted in 1926 at New York’s Apollo Theater: “Un Doctor Accidental” (An Accidental Doctor), “Los Misterios de Changó” (The Mysteries of Changó), “Un Negro de Andalucía” (A Black Man from Andalusia), “Una Viuda como No Hay Dos” (A Widow Like None Other), and “Kid Chocolate,” the latter in honor of the famous boxer of the same name. In most of these, as in his acting, he seems to have been concerned with AfroCuban themes. (See also African Roots.) Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Alberto O’Farrill.

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Ollantay Center for the Arts

Olivas, Daniel (1959–). Born on April 8, 1959, and raised near downtown Los Angeles, Daniel A. Olivas is the middle of five children and the grandson of Mexican immigrants. He attended twelve years of parochial school before entering Stanford University. Olivas majored in English literature and graduated in 1981, after which he commenced his legal studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. As a law student, Olivas became editor in chief of the UCLA Chicano Law Review and was elected cochairperson of the La Raza Law Students Association. While in law school, he met his future wife, Susan Formaker, whom he married in 1986. Olivas converted to Judaism in 1988. In 1989, they settled in the San Fernando Valley, where they have lived to this day. In May 1990, they had a son, Benjamin Formaker-Olivas. After practicing law first with a small-plaintiffs’ civil rights firm and then a large civil litigation firm, Olivas was hired by the California Department of Justice in 1990 to work in its Antitrust Section. In 1991, he transferred to the Land Law Section, where he works today, specializing in environmental enforcement and land use. During the 1990s, Olivas wrote many legal articles but no fiction or poetry. In 2000, Olivas published his first work of fiction, The Courtship of María Rivera Peña: A Novella. Two other books quickly followed: Assumption and Other Stories (2003) and Devil Talk: Stories (2004). In 2002, Olivas started writing fiction for children as well and became a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times’s Kids’ Reading Room section, which features short stories for children up to the age of nine. One of those stories, Benjamin and the Word, was published by Arte Público Press (2005). His writing has appeared in publications that include the Los Angeles Times, Bilingual Review, MacGuffin, Exquisite Corpse, Latino LA, THEMA, and Pacific Review. His writing has been featured in several anthologies, including Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican American Writers, edited by Rob Johnson (2001) and Love to Mamá: A Tribute to Mothers, edited by Pat Mora (2001). Olivas writes book reviews for several publications, including the Multicultural Review, Southwest Book Views, Daily Journal, and various online publications. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego

Ollantay Center for the Arts. Founded in 1971 by the Cuban writer Pedro Monge-Rafuls,* the Ollantay Center for the Arts has fostered creation and discussion of Latino arts in the Jackson Heights section of New York City. In addition to hosting numerous symposia on the arts and literature, and bringing together authors, publishers and scholars, Ollantay has published a theater magazine as well as anthologies. Ollantay has also organized and offered theater workshops for Latino playwrights. 827

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Further Reading Marrero, Maria Teresa, “Out of the Fringe? Out of the Closet: Latina/Latino Theatre and Performance in the 1990s” TDR: The Drama Review Vol. 44, No. 3 (Fall 2000): 131–153.

Nicolás Kanellos

O’Neill, Ana María (1894–1981). Born in Puerto Rico on March 7, 1894, Ana María O’Neill was a prolific essayist and educator in both the United States and her native country. She was born into an affluent family that also contributed to the literary history of Puerto Rico. Her father, Luis O’Neill y Martínez de Andino, and her two brothers, Luis and Arturo O’Neill, wrote poetry and articles for several of Puerto Rico’s leading newspapers. Her mother, Tudela de Milán, came from a wealthy aristocratic family. Ana María’s early education was handled by both of her parents, who eventually acceded to her wishes to continue her education in a formal setting. After obtaining a diploma from the “Escuela Normal de Puerto Rico” in 1925, O’Neill moved to New York to enroll at Columbia University and received a master’s degree in 1929. O’Neill published articles in magazines and newspapers in both the United States and in Puerto Rico, including the essay “Intangible Frontier” (1938), which won an award from Northwestern University in Illinois. Among her numerous essays are the following: “A Hair Perhaps Divides the False and True” (1950), in which she critiques Alfred Kinsey and his findings on sexual behavior in human beings, and “La historia de cuatro centavos” (1951, The History of Four Cents), which suggests the importance of cooperativism in America. Her books include many whose main preoccupation lies in the use of ethics and morality in contemporary society. Among them, Ética para la era atómica (1972, Ethics for the Atomic Era), strongly proposes the use of ethics in business, and “Psicología de la comunicación” (1971, The Psychology of Communication) studies the importance of adequate communication both in writing and orally. Comunismo, capitalismo y cooperación (1956, Communism, Capitalism and Cooperation) was based on a speech she gave at the University of Puerto Rico; the short book proposes that cooperativism gives a lesson in morality to the capitalist United States. Her bibliography comprises several books and an extensive number of philosophical and theoretical articles. She continued her pedagogic lifestyle by teaching at the University of Columbia, the University of Arizona, and the University of Puerto Rico and received many awards—most important of which was an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Puerto Rico in 1974, seven years before her death of natural causes. Further Reading Babín, María Teresa, Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña (New York: Las Americas Publishing House, 1958). Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1917–1948 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983).

Ana-María Medina 828

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O’Neill, Gonzalo (1870–1942). Gonzalo O’Neill, an immigrant who became a successful businessman in the United States before the Spanish–American War,* became somewhat of a godfather to the community of Puerto Rican writers and artists. O’Neill had come to the United States immediately upon graduation from Puerto Rico’s Instituto Civil (Civil Institute), but from his youth in Puerto Rico, he had been initiated into literary life as an author of romantic poetry. On the island, he and a group of writers founded the literary magazine El Palenque de la Juventud (The Forum for Youth), which published the poetry of Puerto Rico’s leading writers. In New York, he became a devotée of the theater and had the resources necessary to self-publish his poetic dialogs, such as La indiana borinqueña (1922, The Puerto Rican Indians), which revealed O’Neill as intensely patriotic and a supporter of independence for his homeland. His second published book was the three-act play Moncho Reyes (1923), a biting satire of the eponymous Mont Riley, then the American military governor of Puerto Rico. Although both these plays enjoyed stage producGonzalo O’Neill. tions, Bajo Una Sola Bandera (1928, Under One Flag Only) became the most widely known and staged, debuting in New York in 1928 and in San Juan in 1929. In Bajo Una Sola Bandera the political options facing Puerto Rico are personified in down-to-earth flesh-and-blood characters. The daughter of a middle-class Puerto Rican family residing in New York is directed by her mother toward a young American naval officer and by her father toward a young native Puerto Rican, whom she loves. On a symbolic level, the daughter must choose between two costumes for a masquerade ball: Columbia, representing the United States, and a jíbara,* representing Puerto Rico. She chooses the latter and drapes herself in the Puerto Rican flag. The play ends with sonorous patriotic verses that underline the theme of independence for Puerto Rico under one flag alone. A glowing review in San Juan’s La Democracia (Democracy) on April 16, 1929, marveled at O’Neill’s retention of perfect Spanish and his Puerto Rican identity, despite having lived in the United States for forty years. In 1937, O’Neill became an investor in and member of the management of the Teatro Hispano (Hispanic Theater). Besides allowing him to maintain his involvement in the theater, his relationship with the Hispano also translated into his being able to write topical poems and publish them in the playbills of the Hispano, as well as to see his works staged at this theater. O’Neill’s last dramatic work was Amoríos borincanos (1938, Puerto Rican 829

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Loves), probably a type of zarzuela or musical comedy. How many other plays he wrote and produced is not known. It is presumed that a number of plays and poems were either never published or may have appeared in periodicals now lost to time. One such unpublished work is a one-act farce that comments on New York City politics, “Que Lleven al Muerto” (1928, Take the Dead Man Away), which is listed in a Teatro Hispano playbill. The plays that have been preserved through time have come down to us because O’Neill himself had the financial resources to publish them. At his funeral in 1942, the entire Puerto Rican artistic community turned out to tender its regard for its beloved father figure. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Oñate, Juan de (c. 1550–1630). In the mission to colonize New Mexico led by Juan de Oñate in 1598 were literary men who imported the first Europeanstyle drama and poetry to an area that would someday become part of the United States. Among these men was an amateur playwright, Captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos,* who wrote a play based on their colonizing adventure, which the soldiers themselves performed. This was the first play in a European language written and performed in what became the present-day United States (although a similar phenomenon may have transpired earlier in the colonization of Florida, there is no documentation of such an event). The soldiers also had in their repertoire the folk play Los moros y los cristianos (The Moors and the Christians), which dramatized the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors during the Crusades. In addition, the poet Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá,* also one of Oñate’s soldiers, penned an epic poem memorializing the expedition, La conquista de la Nueva Méjico (The Conquest of New Mexico), which was later published in Spain and, being considered an important literary work in the Hispanic world, is still studied today. This was one of the first epics written in a European language, though preceded by Father Jerónimo de Escobedo’s epic, which dealt in part with the exploring and colonization of Florida and was entitled La Florida. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, ed., Pasó por aquí: Critical essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Operation Bootstrap. Operation Bootstrap, or, as it was called in Spanish, Manos a la Obra (Let’s Get to Work), was a campaign created in 1948 to economically develop Puerto Rico. The campaign included rapid industrialization on the island, achieved in part by creating tax shelters for American industries that relocated to Puerto Rico. Brainchild of the popular governor Luis Muñoz 830

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Marín, the plan emphasized investment—primarily American—in light industry and in manufacturing. The official assessment made by the United States government and planners in Muñoz Marín’s administration of this program is that in a little more than four decades, much of the island’s crushing poverty was eliminated. To a large degree, the process did provide more technical employment for some Puerto Ricans. But as investors turned away from sugar production, agricultural employment declined, and Operation Bootstrap did not adequately provide replacement jobs. Thus even more Puerto Ricans were forced to migrate to the American continent in search of work. In the 1960s, petrochemical plants and refineries, industries that required even less labor than light industry, pervaded much of the economy. The net result was as inevitable: more migration. Operation Bootstrap had wide social and political effects on Puerto Ricans both in the island and in the continental United States. As such, it has become a direct subject of—and has often provided background for—such diverse literary works as poems by Tato Laviera* and stories by José Luis González.* In particular, Operation Bootstrap helps writers to explain the Puerto Rican diaspora and the sense of the loss of homeland that many Puerto Ricans living in the United States feel. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Dictionary of Hispanic Civil Rights History (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006).

F. Arturo Rosales Operation Peter Pan. As a result of the panic that took place once Fidel Castro had consolidated his Communist overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba, parents sought ways to protect their children against Communist indoctrination in schools and supposed collective farms. Since 1959, wild rumors, abetted by American officials, had circulated in Cuba and the refugee community in the United States that children were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to the Soviet Union to receive a Communist education. Operation Peter Pan was developed by parents and authorities, including many Catholic leaders in the United States, to bring thousands of Cuban children to the United States. Within three years, 14,048 children, mostly males, left Cuba and were fostered in America by various groups, including Catholic charitable organizations. Most of these youngsters were scions of the middle and upper classes, and because many were nurtured further in this country, they became fairly well educated. As a consequence, today there are countless middle-aged Cuban professionals who were not rejoined with parents and other family members until their adult years, if at all. The loneliness and dislocation that resulted from the uprooting of children at such an early age has pervaded much Cuban American literature even to the present day. The works of such “Peter Pan generation” authors as Carlos Eire* and Eduardo Machado* bear the indelible imprint of this singular experience. Other authors, such as Nilo 831

“Operation Wetback”

Cruz,* who were not Peter Pan children, have nevertheless adopted the theme in some of their works. Further Reading García, Cristina, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

F. Arturo Rosales “Operation Wetback.” After World War II, the influx of Mexican immigrant workers entering the United States both legally and illegally increased dramatically. By June 1954, the increase in illegal immigration outdistanced the use of Mexican contract labor, provoking governmental enforcement of immigration legislation. “Operation Wetback,” referring to the migrants swimming across the Rio Grande River (in Spanish common parlance, the undocumented workers of this era were called mojados, or “wet ones”) was an Immigration and Naturalization program to round up and deport undocumented Mexican workers en masse. In 1953, the year of the program’s institution, the INS deported 865,318 Mexican undocumented immigrants. In the years immediately following, large numbers were expelled: 1,075,168 in 1954, 242,608 in 1955, and 72,442 in 1956. Some observers assessed that “Operation Wetback” benefited union organizers attempting to establish unions among Mexican Americans, because the deportation campaign removed undocumented workers from competing in labor sectors where they worked. But the campaign often harmed native, naturalized, or permanent residents of Mexican descent. Often, the basic civil rights and liberties of Mexican Americans were either abridged or ignored intolerably as authorities apprehended them, or employers shunned them, as suspected “wetbacks.” Many Mexican aliens suffered physical and emotional abuse by sometimes being separated from, and not allowed to communicate with, their families after their apprehension. The program’s success is a matter of dispute, for it did very little to curb the increasing flow of undocumented workers into the United States, in large part because it failed to provide sanctions for violations committed by employers. The sheer massiveness of the undocumented population and the reprisals against it deeply affected popular culture, giving rise to many songs, tales, and even theater productions dramatizing the conflicts and suffering during this era. What is more, the conflicts were not only between Anglos and undocumented Mexicans; Mexican Americans at times rejected mojados for taking their jobs and for creating in the minds of Anglos the idea that all Mexicans and Latinos were undocumented or illegal. Tomás Rivera, for example, recounts the murder of a mojadito in the chapter entitled “Con la Mundo en la Bolsa” (With His Hand in His Pocket) in . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him). Further Reading Ramón García, Juan, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).


Orality

Orality. Orality in literature is the preservation or reproduction of everyday speech patterns in composing works and often duplicates local and class dialects, representing the author’s identification, whether conscious or unconscious, with the human subjects about whom he or she writes. Orality is also inextricably linked with the oral performance of literature. Many writers of Hispanic literature in the United States—perhaps the majority of poets; to a lesser degree, prose writers—compose their work for oral performance. In one of the cases studied below, this performance objective is exclusive; in the others, publication and distribution to a primarily reading audience is the aim. Walter Ong’s nine principles of orality, as identified in his book Orality and Literacy, help us identify a commonality that Hispanic writers have with poets and storytellers from primary, secondary, and residual oral cultures around the world, quite often from cultures emerging from colonialism. The common denominator of their orality may not be a worldview but rather a need to perform, accompanied by the physical and social exigencies of performance itself. Furthermore, the need to perform may be determined more by Hispanics’ marginal or minority status in the United States than by any other cultural factors, as shall be illustrated below. To understand the phenomenon of orality and performance, we will study the works and audiences of four writers who run the gamut from street-corner poet to the novelist who creates in a secluded studio. Regardless of the physical distance of their intended audiences, oral performance is central to each of these writers. No matter how educated or integrated any of them may be into the society, their need to interact with their audiences and communities and to keep close to the “human life world,” to use Ong’s terminology, forces them to rely on oral modes of presentation. The first of these is a street bard whom many would identify as a folk poet or a minstrel. Jorge Brandon was a Puerto Rican poet who spent much of his life performing in the public plazas of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Central America, and Mexico before settling in New York’s Lower East Side. His proud calling was always to be a poet; for him there was no greater rank or position in society. The only function of the poet of which he could conceive was direct, oral communication to a public audience. He is perhaps one of a few left in a long line of declamadores—performers of their own compositions and of those of others: of both oral and literate, famous and unknown writers. In fact, part of his repertoire features the works of poets who exist only in the oral tradition, poets he places alongside Cervantes and Rubén Darío. Brandon, who does not allow anyone to see his work written or to publish any of his poems, performs his poems, nothing else. He gestures, acts out the passages, and projects his trained voice, reliving the emotional nuances so deeply that he is sometimes thought to be eccentric. In this, he is emphatic and participatory in the material, criteria identified by Ong. Moreover, his epic poem “La Masacre de Ponce” (The Ponce Massacre), composed from first-hand observation, is one of the unknown masterpieces of Puerto Rican literature, in which virtually all of the formulas and characteristics identified by Ong are displayed. 833

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Up to this point, I have described the oral poet of any nineteenth-century Spanish American country, roaming the countryside, gracing the town plazas during festivals and feast days, eulogizing heroes, mourning the dead. Brandon is distrustful of Broadway, Wall Street, and Madison Avenue—the world of entertainment, finance, and publishing. He performs his works for money but—fearful that recording and publishing companies may pirate his works—transcribes his poems in mnemonic patterns. He continually goes over these in memorizing and planning his performances. I have seen his book of codes and personally observed him rehearsing, using a tape recorder to listen to himself and to analyze his delivery. He stands on street corners wearing a World War I army helmet with a sign stating in English and Spanish that he recites the one hundred best poems of the Spanish language. As a gimmick to attract an audience, he places a small speaker inside a coconut that has a face painted on it, reciting his poems into a microphone so that the head appears to be performing (coconut is casually used to mean head in Spanish). His pitch is “el coco que habla,” or the “talking coconut.” Brandon’s astonishing memory, his performance style, and his commitment to poetry and art inspire the most sophisticated writers. He considers himself an Artist in the highest sense of the word. His language and diction are impeccable; at the same time, he is a linguistic innovator and a creator of neologisms. Although Brandon’s English is as elegant as his Spanish, he never mixes the two languages. His favorite poet in the English language is Edgar Allen Poe— probably because of the oral qualities of Poe’s works. What most characterizes Brandon’s performances, however, is the delight of the public and other poets as well. No festival or public celebration in the Puerto Rican community of the Lower East Side is complete without him. Tato Laviera,* author of several books of poetry and produced plays and the composer and lyricist of commercially recorded songs, is an important Hispanic writer in the United States. As Brandon’s apprentice, he committed to memory much of that poet’s (as well as his own) work and adopted some of Brandon’s performance styles. He, too, considers poetry essentially an oral art, one that must be shared in performance with a group or a community—a commitment that comes from his observation of the power of oral poetry to move the listener. To overcome the distance between the individual performer and the group, Laviera believes, the poet must master certain physical and emotional postures and declamatory techniques. As a writer who also depends on published works to reach an unseen audience, he is wary of the physical and intellectual demands of the written tradition in both English and Spanish. But, in Laviera, even the written word is the product of an effort to re-create the oral performance. The process is so evident in his published poems that without the gestures, the enunciation, the physical and oral nuances, and the music that are an integral part of their oral performance, many of them lose their essence and their power. Laviera writes in English, Spanish, and what he calls “Spanglish” (see Bilingualism in Literature*)—the blending of two European tongues by a poet 834

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with roots in the African and American continents. His work is emphatic, situational, and homeostatic, feeding from the “human life world.” Contentious, proud, and often “agonistic,” as Ong would put it, Laviera is by all accounts a virtuoso in the use of language. Perhaps relying on the Puerto Rican oral tradition of the bomba and the décima* debates, he is ready to engage anyone in contests of improvisation or presentation. His second work, Enclave (1981), is the other side of the agonistic, however; it celebrates such imaginary personalities who embody his community as Tito Madera Smith, half southern Black and half Puerto Rican, and the barrio gossip, Juana Bochisme; he also sings in praise of such real cultural heroes as John Lennon, Miriam Makeba, the Cuban ballet dancer Alicia Alonso, Suni Paz, and the writer Luis Palés Matos. One of the poems in the work “Jesús Papote” is a modern epic, a long monologue sung by a fetus struggling to be born on Christmas Day from the womb of a dying drug addict (Enclave 12–21). The fetus personifies the future of Laviera’s people in the United States. As a black Puerto Rican living in New York’s Lower East Side, Laviera incorporates themes from several cultures but remains marginalized, like his own community. His poems may speak to his native Santurce, Puerto Rico; to Spanish Harlem; to black Harlem; to Africa; and to white America and Europe—but always from his particular racial, political, and cultural perspective. Laviera’s bilingual poems, like those of Chicano writers Abelardo Delgado,* Alurista,* Ricardo Sánchez,* and Evangelina Vigil,* are obviously aimed at a specialized audience. For the most part, they use the language of the people whose daily lives are articulated through a continuous exchange of Spanish and English. But, like Alurista, Sánchez, and Vigil, he goes beyond the simple reproduction of recognizable speech patterns to explore the aesthetic possibilities of contrasting and mixing the sound and sense of the two languages, even stretching both linguistic systems to the point of virtually creating a new one. An example of Laviera’s blending of the popular and standard dialects of both languages and his creation of a new poetic experience is his poem “velluda: alliterated y eslembao” (with fine body hair: alliterated and delicious), in which he demonstrates his alliterative virtuosity while acting out a seduction and consummation of sex. Like many black poets whose works incorporate musical structures such as the blues, Laviera has written poems to be sung in part or in full. His inspiration comes from the native plena lyric and rhythmic structures of Puerto Rico, which rely on rhymed couplets improvised by a leader and repeated by a chorus or counterpointed by a choral refrain. His purpose is not to discover roots; rather, the plena represents a pattern of expression that he has heard in popular music his entire life. The dividing line between song and poetry is elusive to Laviera and, I think, should be for poets of residual orality. An example of his sung poetry is “Unemployment Line” (Enclave 29), in which phrases are repeated as many as seven times and sung with slightly varying melodic lines. 835

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Miguel Algarín,* a poet, playwright, and prose writer, professor of English at Rutgers University, links the worlds of avant-garde American writing and grassroots folklore. He goes from the halls of academia, where he teaches Shakespeare, to poetry festivals in Amsterdam and Rome to the streets of the Lower East Side, where he lives and where he runs the Nuyorican* Poets Café, a center for the performance of literature. In New York, Algarín has been intimate with Amamu Imiri Buraka, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Joseph Papp. He has written for television and screen, translated Neruda and, with Miguel Piñero,* compiled the anthology Nuyorican Poetry, the first of its kind. Algarín acknowledges the imperative of orality and performance in poetry in his article, “Volume and Value of the Breath in Poetry.” Algarín is a consummate performer, a master of diction, creator of musical verse, and exposer of the most intimate and shameful corners of the psyche— an exorcist. For all his sophistication, his graduate studies at Princeton, and his work at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute, Algarín is an oral poet. As a writer, his task is to create in his poetry the emotional impact of his oral performance. The way that poetry is understood and taught in English in America presents an obstacle that Algarín’s writing must overcome: he must sensitize the English reader to the re-creation of the oral performance of the poem. His poetry is alive primarily in performance, as is Laviera’s and Brandon’s. Algarín’s poetic bilingualism is not as extensive as Laviera’s, perhaps because of his need to address the American literati. His bilingual poems generally use more standardized language and are less situational than Laviera’s, though every bit as agonistic in tone and content. Algarín’s first book, Mongo Affair (1979, Impotent Affair), follows up its bilingual title with a text that creates a linguistic, emotional, and philosophical tension between English and Spanish usage. On Call (1980), his second work, is aimed at a national English-speaking and bilingual audience; the last section of the book emerges from his travels in the Southwest. His third book, Body Bee Calling from the Twenty-First Century (1982), is Algarín’s interstellar exploration of existence in a bionic future; the book, written entirely in barebones English, is the furthest removed from the communal, oral mode, which is partially regained in Times Now/Ya es tiempo (1985), written in separate English and Spanish versions of the same poems in an effort to unite the local with the universal. The stories and novels of Rolando Hinojosa,* a celebrated prose writer in Spanish and English, consist predominantly of monologs, dialogs, and firstperson narratives, all of which suggest verbal performance by the individual characters. The novels and stories are part of a continuing, complex mosaic of life in a mythical South Texas town, Klail City. Written in Spanish, English, and bilingual text, the hundreds of portraits in the novels are created through the characters’ ideolects (personal dialects) in talking about themselves and others. Many of the portraits are, in fact, dramatic monologues similar to the poetic monologues of Tato Laviera’s characters in Enclave and AmeRícan 836

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(1985). Hinojosa’s Mi querido Rafa (1981) departs in structure from his three previous books in that the first half is epistolary and experiments with the graphic representations of speech by the two main characters. But the second part of the novel uses techniques similar to those in his other books: testimony, interviews, storytelling in bars, gossip—the types of speech of small town social settings, in which people can paint individually inaccurate pictures of characters and events. Rites and Witnesses (1982) was his first novel totally written in English. The choice of language was determined by the work’s focus on the Anglo American landowners, the big ranchers—and much of the text is articulated in a dialog style that approaches drama. After Rites and Witnesses, Hinojosa published a re-creation of Mi querido Rafa entitled Dear Rafe (1985) and of his prize-winning Klail City y sus alrededores (1976), entitled Klail City (1987). In the last decade, Hinojosa has continued to write and publish in English in a search of a broader audience. Klail City y sus alrededores, the pivotal book in Hinojosa’s generational series, best exhibits the orality of culture in Hinojosa’s novelistic world. The work itself is a mosaic of oral performance styles, including everything from Protestant sermons and hymns to pitches by traveling salesmen, jokes, tales, and corridos, or folk ballads. The central performance piece, however, is a speech by an aging patriarch of the Rio Grande Valley that underscores the ideology of Hinojosa’s orality and, perhaps, provides insight into that of Hispanic literature in the United States. In the monolog entitled “Echaverría tiene la palabra,” critic Yolanda Broyles in “Hinojosa’s Klail City y sus alrededores: Oral Culture and Print Culture,” sees the act of speech granted the status almost of a hallowed rite, comparable in English to the respect shown to the Gospel according to St. John (115). She further states that Echevarría . . . is the voice of collective memory. Historical memory is transmitted through verbal performance, not through written materials. Events of significance in the Mexicano community are the guideposts of Echavarría’s narrative. His dramatic and emotive narrative in the bar El Oasis recounts the violence perpetrated by the rinches (Texas Rangers) and the gullibility of raza (Mexican Americans). It is a subversive history for it contradicts the official Anglo record upheld by the courts and disseminated in history books. (114–115)

This particular monologue is one of the most popular selections requested of Hinojosa, the performer, when reading his works in public. Through inflection, subtle facial expressions, and gestures, Hinojosa adopts the character of Echavarría and becomes the official purveyor of the alternative history and worldview that his community embodies. Unlike Brandon and Laviera, Hinojosa is an academically trained intellectual with a Ph.D. in literature, having experience as a professor in both the Spanish and English departments of major universities. His works, despite their orality, are clearly anchored in the Hispanic and Anglo American written traditions. Ong would probably recognize a residual orality in the works derived 837

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from Hinojosa’s socialization in the bilingual communities of the Rio Grande Valley, where residual and secondary orality shape popular culture. What Ong would perhaps be unfamiliar with is the region’s combative folktale and balladry tradition, in which intense feelings of Mexican and Anglo nationalism clash and are often articulated in the dialectic of English versus Spanish, literate versus oral, official institution versus popular culture, Anglo official history and authority versus collective memory and resistance by the Mexican dispossessed. Thus for Hinojosa—despite his academic training and employment—and the other writers studied here, the oral mode is more than just a style, a conditioning from their backgrounds, a romantic attitude, a search for roots. It is the only authentic and, to a great degree, unselfconscious posture for them as creators of the literature of their community. Were the Hispanic community in the United States to possess the means of production, promotion, and distribution of its literature in printed form, were it to control its history and image in print, then Hinojosa’s and the other writers’ works might be more print-bound and less performance-oriented. It is the very marginality of Hispanic communities in the United States, and of their lack of political and economic power, that determines the need for and popularity of orality and performance. Hinojosa, Laviera, and Algarín reach more people through the spoken word than through their books, which are published exclusively by small, noncommercial presses; and their published materials in Spanish are even more marginalized in the United States, where Spanishlanguage and literature teachers and the book industry snub them in favor of canonical culture from abroad. As is clearly demonstrated by Jorge Brandon, orality and performance are conscious choices, determined by the economics, politics, and culture of the community and the individual artist. All four of these writers are highly literate, and most in their audiences are literate. The currency of their exchange, however, is neither the printed page nor the book. It is the spoken word, alive and painfully throbbing as an expression of communitas, commonality, communion. Orality and performance are conscious technical and ideological choices. The writers we have examined are not limited by these modalities but liberated by them. They are freer to communicate directly with a known audience, to control the destiny and impact of their works. Even prose writers like Hinojosa are consummate readers and performers of their material. Hinojosa sees the effects of his works, sees the audience react and recognize themselves in his literature, sees it reenter popular culture in a thousand ways. The complexities of orality and performance are many. I have not mentioned the poets of salsa verse, such as Héctor Lavoe, whose commercial recordings reach millions through the Hispanic world, or Rubén Blades, also a recording star, who has composed two albums of narration in song that deal with three generations of a family in an attempt to do in music what Gabriel García Márquez has done in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). I have not analyzed poetic works that are recited on commercial 838

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recordings between cuts of music or the continuation of the corrido tradition on disks mainly heard on early-morning Spanish-language radio broadcasts. The study of prison writers is a task unto itself: of the genre and styles, the commitment of large audiences of prisoners to poetry, and the poets—such as the late Miguel Piñero and the late Ricardo Sánchez*—who emerged from that oral tradition. There are also street theaters and farm worker theaters, the jazz poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz,* Ana Castillo,* and David Hernández,* as well as many other writers and forms that depend on orality and performance. All of them find orality a powerful engine for their literature. Further Reading Broyles, Yolanda Julia, “Hinojosa’s Klail City y sus alrededores: Oral Culture and Print Culture” in The Rolando Hinojosa Reader, ed. José David Saldívar (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985: 109–132). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Orality and Hispanic Literature of the United States” in Redefining American Literary History, eds. A. Lavonne Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990: 115–123). Limón, José, “Oral Tradition and Poetic Influence: Two Poets from Greater Mexico” in Redefining American Literary History, eds. A. Lavonne Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990: 124–141). Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos Oratory. Eloquence of expression has become ingrained in Hispanic culture through education and oral tradition since the emergence of the Spanish language in the Middle Ages. Much of the university curriculum at that time consisted of lecture and oral debate in Latin, and this tradition passed into Spanish when it became the official tongue of Spain during the Renaissance. Spanish subsequently became the language of governmental, educational, and religious institutions throughout Spain’s colonies in the Americas. Educational methodology in Hispanic countries has been criticized for relying too much on oral recitation. But few outsiders have understood the value that the culture places on the oral performance itself, and upon improvisation. The product of a Hispanic education is expected to be able to compose and deliver extemporaneously a beautiful, enlightening, precise speech on any topic. The same is true in folk culture (see Folklore and Oral Tradition), in which improvisation and elegance of expression have always ranked very high, integral to the creation of epics, songs, and stories. This tradition of oration also highly influenced the tradition of declamación, or oral performance of poetry (see Orality), which has maintained its vigor up to the present day in Latino literature. Hispanic audiences of all kinds—whether students in university classes, townsfolk at patriotic celebrations, or churchgoers listening to sermons—have typically expected and delighted in long compositions that reflect in both their style and their content the weightiness of the subjects under discussion. 839

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It is in the political realm, however, that Hispanics have produced their most memorable and celebrated oratory. What may be considered the golden age of Spanish oratory occurred during the nineteenth century, when Spain’s colonies in the New World began seeking their freedom. The powerful speeches of Venezuela’s Simón Bolivar, Argentina’s José San Martin, Mexico’s Benito Juárez, and scores of others who led independence movements and founded republics live on in legend and in history and are still studied throughout the Americas as examples of both literature and oratory. As early as the first decade of the nineteenth century, expatriates from Spain established themselves in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and used their oratorical prowess to raise funds for the effort to oust French invaders from the Iberian Peninsula. Later, various Spanish American independence movements—particularly the century-long struggle to win freedom for Cuba and Puerto Rico—were financed and planned in part in New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, New Orleans, and other cities. In the Southwest, the speeches of actor Gerardo López del Castillo in his service as president of the Mexican Patriotic Society of San Francisco were noteworthy not only for their eloquence but also for their effectiveness in raising funds for the effort to oust Maximilian and the French from Mexico and to provide welfare for widows and orphans of the war. Later, the speeches of Pablo de la Guerra, one of the first California state legislators, were noteworthy for their pathos and lyricism in their depiction of the unfortunate situation of the Hispanics displaced and maligned by Anglo American migrants to the state. During the period of massive immigration of Mexicans to the United States that followed the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, numerous orators appeared on the scene to practice their art during patriotic holidays, at political rallies, and even on Mother’s Day. Just as so many other customs and practices were transplanted from Mexico to the United States during this period, the practice of lending solemnity and art to any congregation was similarly instituted in Mexican communities, especially throughout the Southwest. Of all the Mexican orators in the Southwest, the one who was most popular and who seems to have established a circuit was the irrepressible conservative exile Nemesio García Naranjo,* who through his speeches sought to reinforce the preservation of Mexican culture and the Spanish language, as well as of Catholicism, among people of Mexican-origin living in the United States. As editor of the conservative Revista Mexicana (1915–1920, Mexican Review) and a former government minister under dictator Porfirio Díaz, he was considered an intellectual in his own right and was treated with the highest respect wherever he performed. For him, the mere performance of a Mexican song on the bandstand was ample inspiration to launch a highly nostalgic exposition invoking the entire history of Mexico and the exodus of its people, whom he considered el México de afuera,* the Mexico abroad. However, of all of the orators who have articulated the needs and aspirations of the Hispanic communities in the United States, probably the most famous 840

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was José Martí,* the lawyer, poet, and leader of the Cuban independence movement during the late nineteenth century. He spent much of his life in the United States working as a journalist and gathering support for his cause among members of Hispanic communities from New York to New Orleans. The topics of Martí’s speeches ranged from the right of Cubans to selfdetermination to an examination of the cultural conflicts between Anglo Americans and Hispanics. He also spoke out against racism and prejudice in the United States and around the world. One of his most important speeches, one that has become mortar in the building of Latin American identity in the Western Hemisphere, is “Nuestra America” (Our America), which he delivered in New York around 1891. Like many of the other important addresses given by Hispanic leaders in the United States, Martí’s speeches were originally transcribed and published in local Spanish-language newspapers, and some have since been reprinted in history books and textbooks. In general, however, Spanish-speaking orators in the United States have not been well served by schools, libraries, publishers, and other institutions. Most of the speeches Hispanic Americans have given over the last two centuries have been lost to us forever, sometimes because they were never recorded and other times because librarians and archivists failed to save newspaper accounts of addresses or of speakers’ personal notes. Even publication in a Spanish-language newspaper did not guarantee that a speech would be preserved, for out of an estimated 2500 Hispanic periodicals published in the U.S. between 1800 and 1960, only incomplete runs of some 1,300 have been located to date. Despite the loss of this rich heritage, the spirit of José Martí and others like him live on in today’s Hispanic expatriate and immigrant communities across the United States. It is a pattern that also repeats itself among public servants and the leaders of various civil rights organizations. The eloquent and forceful declaration of organizing principles for the community, the call for unity and solidarity, the appeal to divine or human rights for inspiration, and the motivation to take action all figure prominently in the speeches of activists and political figures such as Henry G. Cisneros and César Chávez.* As in most European cultures, women in Latin America were historically not encouraged to pursue higher education or participate in public life. Nevertheless, Hispanic culture is replete with the names of women who emerged as leaders in education, politics, unions, the arts, and many other areas; and in doing so they became outstanding orators. Especial cases in point are such fiery and inspirational labor leaders as Lucía González Parsons,* Luisa Capetillo,* Emma Tenayuca (prior to World War II), and Dolores Huerta of today’s United Farm Workers. As mass communication, literacy, and education have more and more made us dependent on printed and electronic texts, the capacity not only to deliver long, eloquent speeches but also to comprehend and appreciate them has for all intents and purposes passed in the United States. To witness the vestiges of this tradition it is necessary today to travel to societies where the sound bite 841

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and instant electronic communications have not transformed society as much as they have in the United States. Further Reading Jaksic, Ivan, The Political Power of the Word: Press and Oratory in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila (1939–). Born in Los Angeles in 1939 into a Mexican American family, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor began writing poetry and plays in junior high school. One year after starting high school, she left school to get married and moved to Iowa, where she had two children. She later returned to Los Angeles and was able to major in English and graduate cum laude from California State University, Northridge (1963). She went on to obtain her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1964 and 1972, respectively. Ortiz-Taylor has spent her entire career as a professor at Florida State University, where she became an endowed professor; she is now a professor emeritus. Ortiz-Taylor is the author of what is believed to have been the first novel to feature an outed Chicana lesbian as the protagonist: Faultline (1982). This was the first of six novels written by Ortiz-Taylor and was followed by Spring Forward/Fall Back (1985), Southbound: The Sequel to Faultline (1990), Coachella (1998), Outrageous (2006), and Assisted Living (2007). In 1996, OrtizTaylor published Imaginary Parents (1996), a literary and artistic collage executed with her sister Sandra. It is a mystery novel set in the California desert and populated by a host of unlikely idiosyncratic characters. Her novels run the gamut from mystery to Outrageous, which features a motorcycle-riding lesbian professor of poetry at a rural Florida college. Slow Dancing at Miss Polly’s (1998) is Taylor’s only book of poetry. Ortiz-Taylor has won numerous awards, including the Martin Luther King, Jr., Distinguished Service Award (1997) and the Alice B. Award for writers of outstanding lesbian portrayals in literature (2007). In 2008, Taylor was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Further Reading Foster, David William, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Ortiz-Vargas, Alfredo (1895?–?). Alfredo Ortiz-Vargas, one of the few South American writers living in New York to have a book of poetry published not only in his native Spanish but also in translation in English, was a Colombian, probably born in Cundinamarca. Very little is known about Ortiz-Vargas except that he received a bachelor’s degree from St. Thomas College in 1920 and a master’s in Spanish from Boston College in 1944. His master’s thesis studied medieval Spanish poetry, an affinity of his that may have led him to attempt the genre of epic poetry in his book Las torres de Manhattan (1939, The Towers of Manhattan, 842

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1944), first issued by a commercial publisher, Chapman & Grimes, and later by the University of New Mexico Press in its English translation. The original Spanishlanguage book, a long epic poem celebrating the Metropolis with all of its technological advances and modernity, as well as its ugliness and oppression of workers, was panned by a reviewer in Modern Language Notes in 1941 for its overblown view of the city and its pedestrian poetic style. Ortiz-Vargas published a number of articles of literary criticism in academic journals, which probably indicates that he made a living as a college professor somewhere in the United States. In 1948, Ortiz-Vargas published a collection of poems in Bogotá: Crepúsculos lluviosos (Rainy Twilights). He was also the author of a monograph studying a famous American poet: Perfiles angloamericanos: Edgar Lee Masters (1941, AngloAmerican Profiles: Edgar Lee Masters). Other profiles of American writers by him appeared in the journal Revista iberoamericana (Ibero-American Review) during the 1940s and 1950s. Just as Ortiz-Vargas’s view of the Metropolis in his epic poem is mostly admiring, from the vantage point of an immigrant, so, too, is his appreciation of American writers in the profiles he penned. In his Crepúsculos, Ortiz-Vargas dedicates many poems to places he has visited; in that sense, the gaze of the traveler is somewhat similar to that of the immigrant admiring Manhattan, but the poems are similarly uninspired and uninspiring. Further Reading Moore, Ernest R., “Las Torres de Manhattan by A. Ortiz-Vargas” The Modern Language Journal Vol. 25, No. 7 (Apr. 1941): 584–585.

María Teresa Vera-Rojas Otero, Miguel A., Jr. (1859–1944). Territorial governor Miguel A. Otero, Jr., was born on October 17, 1859, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, into the distinguished family of his namesake, an outstanding business and political figure. Educated in St. Louis, Annapolis, and at Notre Dame University, Otero acquired his business acumen in the offices of his father’s company, Otero, Sellar & Co., which served him well when he took the major role in the firm after his father’s death. With significant business interests in mining, ranching, real estate, and banking, Otero entered politics as a Republican. During the course of his early career, he held various elected and appointed positions and was a candidate for the vice presidential nomination in 1894. In 1897, Otero was appointed by President William McKinley to the governorship of the New Mexico Territory. Because he opposed President Theodore Roosevelt’s National Forest Project, Otero was not reappointed to a second term as governor. At this point, Otero switched to the Democratic Party. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Otero was appointed United States Marshal of the Panama Canal Zone in 1917. He remained active in politics into the 1920s. Otero was the author of a series of autobiographies considered foundational works in Mexican American literature: My Life on the Frontier, 1864–1882 (1935), My Life on the Frontier, 1882–1897 (1939), and My Nine Years as Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, 1897–1906 (1940). He also authored 843

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a biography of the infamous bandit Billy the Kid, The Real Billy The Kid, With New Light on the Lincoln County Wars, in an effort to dispel wrong information and outright myths about the outlaw, as well as to document the clash of cultures that formed the background for the Lincoln County Wars in New Mexico. Four years after the publication of his last book, he died in Albuquerque, aged eighty-four. Other books published by Otero were Conquistadors of Spain and Buccaneers of England, France and Holland (1925) and Colonel José Francisco Chaves, 1833–1924 (1926), which commemorated the life of his close friend, who was assassinated. Otero died on August 7, 1944. In 1974, his books of memoir were combined and reissued as Otero: An Autobiographical Trilogy; in 1998, his The Real Billy the Kid was reissued by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage* program. Further Reading Crocchiola, F. L. Stanley, The Otero, New Mexico Story (Pantex, TX: PanMiguel A. Otero, Jr. tex, 1962). Padilla, Genaro, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Rivera, John-Michael, The Emergence of Mexican America: Recovering Stories of Mexican Peoplehood in U.S. Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Otero Warren, Nina (1881–1965). María Adelina Isabel Emilia (Nina) Otero was born on October, 23, 1881, in La Constancia, New Mexico, to a family that traced its origins back to eleventh-century Spain. At the age of sixteen, Otero moved with her family to Santa Fe, the city she called home until her death at eighty-three. There she was to become a pioneering suffragist, educator, politician, homesteader, writer, and business entrepreneur. Otero was educated at Maryville College of the Sacred Heart, a finishing school in 844

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St. Louis, Missouri, from 1892 to 1894. Her marriage in 1908 to Rawson Warren, a lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, lasted a year, after which she dedicated her life to her extended family and to social activism. In 1915, she became state chair of the legislative committee for the Federation of Women’s Clubs. For the next five years, she was a leader in the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, founded by Alice Paul, which later became the National Women’s Party. From 1917 to 1929, she worked as superintendent of public schools in Santa Fe County. During those years, she also held many other public positions: chair of the State Board of Health in New Mexico, member of the executive board of the American Red Cross, chair of the women’s auxiliary board of the New Mexico State Council of Defense in the First Judicial District, chair of New Mexico’s Republican Women’s Organization, inspector of Indian services in the Department of the Interior, and interpreter and liaison officer with the Pueblo Land Board. She was also a Republican Party nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922. Little of this activism filtered through overtly to her one published book, Old Spain in Our Southwest (1936). The collection of folkloric stories intended to preserve the heritage of the Spanish colonials and reveals Otero’s ambivalence about the capitalist commoditization of the region’s natural resources and cultural practices. As part of the “cultural preservation” effort of the Santa Fe colony of Anglo artists and writers during the 1930s, the text was a welcome addition to a mainstream publisher. The book stands as one of the most effective ideological devices of a discursive movement focused on the New Mexican landscape and the exoticism of native cultures. Otero died in January 1965. Further Reading Padilla, Genaro, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Whaley, Charlotte, Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

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P Pachuco. The term pachuco was applied in the 1940s and 1950s to Mexican American youths in the urban Southwest who adopted a certain lifestyle that included the wearing of zoot suits, the tattooing of a cross on one hand, the use of a Spanish–English argot called caló, and membership in gangs. The etymology of the term is unclear, but it is thought to have derived from smugglers’ name for El Paso, a city known to them as El Pachuco. Because of their odd, “foreign” customs, pachuco youths were scapegoated during World War II, especially in Los Angeles, by Anglo Americans who saw them as a criminal threat. Some observers even linked this youth culture to Mexican sinarquistas (Fascists). Although they deplored the violence and harassment sometimes inflicted on these youths by police and servicemen, especially during the infamous “Zoot Suit Riots,” many parents and Mexican American leaders did not approve of pachucos. The phenomenon elicited a great amount of hand-wringing among Mexican American leaders, who saw deteriorating Anglo attitudes towards pachucos and Mexicans in general as a setback to gains in acceptance that they thought they had achieved during the 1940s. The scholar George I. Sánchez* saw pachuquismo as a breakdown in family structure, but he blamed economic exploitation and blatant racial and ethnic discrimination against Mexican Americans for its rise. In the 1960s, many writers and artists in the Chicano Movement* saw in the pachuco a primitive rebellion against discrimination, as well as an existentialism that defied American and Mexican national identity. Poets, especially during the militant phase of the Chicano Movement, invoked the pachuco as a model for creating

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a hybrid culture and for embodying vestiges of inherited indigenous culture. Most pronounced was Alurista’s* poetry recalling Aztec warriors resuscitated in the gang culture of the pachucos. Many of these writers resuscitated the argot in their own speech and in their literature; Tino Villanueva* was one of the writers who was able to create a lyrical language using this argot. The greatest exponent of pachuquismo was Luis Valdez,* who wrote the famous play Zoot Suit, which romanticized the pachuco for a broad segment of the population. Nevertheless, not all of the literary recreations of the pachuco were celebratory or positive. The most famous pachuco in Chicano literature was depicted in José Montoya’s* poem “El Louie,” which highlighted the futility of the pachuco lifestyle. Tomás Rivera’s* short story, “On the Road with Pete Comic actor Tin Tan (right) as Pachuco. Fonseca,” very much recalled the pachuco as a pariah, and Mary Helen Ponce’s* novel, The Wedding (1989), is a raucous satire of a pachuco wedding. Further Reading Mazón, Mauricio, Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

Nicolás Kanellos Padilla, Benjamín (1877–1963). Benjamín Padilla became famous as a journalist and as a cronista* using the pseudonym of Kaskabel (an Anglicized spelling of “rattlesnake”). A successful manufacturer of chemicals in Guadalajara, Mexico, he founded as a hobby the successful satirical magazine Kaskabel in Guadalajara, and this quickly became his nickname. The periodical became so successful that by the time he published his first collection of crónicas by Kasakabel, entitled Un puñado de artículos (1912, A Handful of Articles), he was selling as many as 10,000 copies. The following year, he published another collection, Otro puñado de artículos (segunda serie) (Another Handful of Articles [Second Series]). In 1923, he followed with a second edition of the first book; it included crónicas written during, and relating to, life in the United States during his exile in San Francisco during the second decade of the twentieth century. Kaskabel’s columns often appeared under the title of Crónicas Festivas (Festive Chronicles) and appeared in the Southwest from 1910 to 1926, probably even before (as well as after) he went into exile. In his columns, Kaskabel satirized all segments of society and various professions, but it was his mordant satire of 848

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the government that resulted in his need to take political refuge in the United States, where he was able to syndicate his columns through the Spanish-language press of the United States and even saw a couple of his plays staged in Los Angeles and San Antonio—the zarzuelas ¡Sangre Azul! and ¡Así Es la Vida!— which had originally debuted in Guadalajara in 1906 and 1907, respectively. Padilla was a friend of the newspaper empresario and cronista Julio G. Arce,* with whom he shared an affinity for satirizing the acculturation of Mexican American women. Padilla returned to Mexico after the Revolution and started up his business again; he also continued writing. Further Reading Goff, Victoria, “Spanish-Language Newspapers in California” in Outsiders in XIX Century Press History: Multicultural Perspectives, eds. Frankie Hutton and Barbara Strauss Reed (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995: 55–70).

Nicolás Kanellos Padilla, Camilo (1865–1933). Camilo Padilla, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1865, contributed a great deal to the Spanish-language press in the Southwest. Padilla’s early education was in the public schools. He went on to graduate from St. Michael’s College in Santa Fe and later attended Jesuit College in northeastern New Mexico. He learned the printer’s trade in the offices of the Santa Fe New Mexican and entered public service as the private secretary to Antonio Joseph, New Mexico’s delegate to Congress in 1890. While in Washington, he worked as a translator for the State Department but returned to New Mexico in 1901 to edit La Gaceta de Mora (The Mora Gazette) and El Mosquito (The Mosquito), two weekly newspapers he published in Mora, New Mexico. Padilla, a member of the Anthropological Society, maintained cordial relations with such Santa Fe notables as L. Bradford Prince, ex-governor and founding member of the New Mexico Historical Society; historian Ralph Twitchell; Governor Bronson Cutting; and Willard Johnson, editor of Laughing Horse Magazine. In 1907, Padilla moved to El Paso, where he issued La Revista Ilustrada (The Illustrated Review), a magazine dedicated to presenting the creative work of Mexican Americans in literature and the arts. Launched in an era when specialized publications on art, history, archeology, and literature were first introduced in the Southwest, the magazine showcased the cultural life of the region’s Spanish-speaking residents. Padilla was likely inspired by La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (The Illustrated Review of New York), issued by Nicanor Bolet Peraza* in the late nineteenth century. A typical edition of Padilla’s magazine contained poems, short stories, and historical articles and was gracefully illustrated with photographs, woodblock prints, and engravings. Padilla published the magazine in Santa Fe and El Paso. Despite its frequent moves, the magazine seldom missed an issue. Although never compiled in a collection, several of Padilla’s writings were novel and original. In 1890, he published “Historia Original Neo Mexicana: Pobre Emilio” (Original New Mexico History: Poor Emilio), a remarkable piece of short fiction that comments on the political and social boundaries that 849

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set Mexican Americans apart from Anglo society. “Pobre Emilio” tells the woeful saga of a Hispano living in Washington, D.C., who is spurned by an Anglo woman he fancies. She rejects him out of hand as a suitor because of his race and religion. Padilla’s essays, published in the 1890s, examined Anglo American attempts to consolidate power over native Hispano interests in the Southwest. His exhortations to unity are best seen in his 1892 essays: “La unión neomexicana” (New Mexico Unity), “A la juventud neo-mexicana” (To the Youths of New Mexico), “Nuestro patrio suelo” (Our Homeland), and “Nuestra única salvación” (Our Only Salvation). In the years before his death on November 23, 1933, Padilla worked to establish El Centro Cultural, a cultural center in Santa Fe that he envisioned would foster Hispanic literature and art. Padilla’s visionary idea followed a lifetime commitment to bringing literature and literacy to impoverished communities in his region. Further Reading Meléndez, A. Gabriel, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834–1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).

Gabriel Meléndez Padilla, Heberto (1932–2000). Poet and journalist Heberto Padilla was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba, on January 20, 1932, the son of a lawyer and a homemaker. After college, Padilla sought to participate in the construction of a new Cuba with the triumph of the Castro Revolution. From 1959 to 1968, he worked for the state-sponsored newspaper Revolución (Revolution) and then for the government newspaper, Granma. As the Castro government progressively restricted and controlled artists—especially writers—Padilla became more and more disillusioned with it. As Padilla was singled out for his resistance to government esthetic and ideological dictums, Padilla lost his job with Granma in 1969, after which his poetry fell into relative obscurity, afforded no outlet for publication. In 1971, Padilla was imprisoned for one month after reading some of his works in public, which led to hundreds of protests internationally and his example enshrined because of the “Padilla Case.” In 1980, with the assistance of U.S. author Bernard Malamud and Senator Edward Kennedy, Padilla was exiled to the United States, where he continued to write poetry and founded the literary magazine Linden Lane. Among his most successful works published in the United States are Legacies: Selected Poems (1982), Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden (1984), Self-Portrait of the Other (1990), and A Fountain, a House of Stone: Poems (1991). Self-Portrait is a memoir of his life from 1959 to 1981, charting his estrangement from Communism in Cuba, his persecution under Castro’s regime, and his exile. All three have had original Spanish-language editions in Spain. He died on September 25, 2000, in Auburn, Alabama. Further Reading Johnson, Scott, The Case of the Cuban Poet Heberto Padilla (Bath, UK: Gordon Press, 1977).

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Rodríguez-McCleary, Berthica, The Evolution of Heberto Padilla’s Poetry, dissertation (University of Montana, 1986).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Padilla, Mike (1964–). Short-story writer Mike Padilla was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, into the second generation of a Mexican American family. His early love of literature and writing led him to earn a B.A. and an M.A. in English and creative writing at Stanford University (1986, 1999) and Syracuse University (1988), respectively. At Stanford, his first published story received the Dorret Sibley Award for fiction. After his degrees, his stories began appearing in magazines around the country, including Sequoia, Indiana Review, The Americas Review, and Up Front. He was anthologized in Hot Type: Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary Fiction, in which Tobias Wolf wrote, “Promising is the usual word, but Padilla’s talent has already gone beyond promise. Padilla has a unique angle of vision on the world, and a language supple enough to carry his surprising movements from farce to heartbreak and make them seem not only natural, but inevitable.” To keep life and limb together while developing his writing career, Padilla has worked as a proposal writer in the development offices of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, University of California, Los Angeles Hammer Museum, and development office of the University of California. He is the recipient of fellowships (1997, 2000) to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers for fiction and screenwriting, and, in 2000, Padilla’s novel-in-progress, Southland, was a finalist for the James Phelan Literary Award. Padilla’s first collection of short stories, Hard Language: Short Stories, was published in 2000, after having won the University of California, Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Award in 1996 and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award in 1997. From pill-popping surfer dudes to cholo lowriders to immigrants carving out a piece of the American Dream to Hollywood power-grabbers, his characters are Chicanos in varying degrees of assimilation, always doing what they need to survive in California, the Golden State. Hard Language spins the tales of a diverse selection of Latinos struggling to find themselves. Padilla’s recent foray into script writing has covered a broad range of contemporary issues as well, including abortion, AIDS, and date rape. Although his work is never afraid to grapple with difficult issues, he never loses sight of the elements of good story-telling: interesting characters, sharp dialogue, and compelling situations. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Palacios, Mónica A. (1959–). Los Angeles playwright and lesbian activist Mónica A. Palacios has performed her monologues, one-woman shows, and performances and produced her plays in theaters and across a wide array of performance spaces, including conferences, happenings, cabarets, and universities. Palacios 851

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was also a founding member of the highly regarded comedy troupe Culture Clash (1984–1985). A Mexican American born on June 14, 1959, in Santa Cruz, California, Palacios earned a B.A. in film with a concentration in screenwriting. She is so recognized for her writing and performing against homophobia that in 2002 she was named to OUT Magazine’s “OUT 100” lesbian–bisexual–transgender success stories. That same year, she performed a twenty-year retrospective of her work in various venues: “Queer Soul.” The Latin Pride Foundation, among other institutions, has also honored Palacios. Palacios has been a playwright-in-residence at the Mark Taper Forum and was awarded a Postdoctoral Rockefeller Fellowship from the Center for Chicano Studies at UCSB for the academic year 2003–2004. Palacios tours the United States presenting such one-woman shows as “Besame Mucho” (Kiss Me Much), “Greetings From a Queer Señorita,” and “Latin Lezbo Comic.” Palacios’s work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she is also a columnist for The Lesbian News. Palacios’ plays and productions include Latin Lezbo Comic (1991), Confession . . . A Sexplosion of Tantalizing Tales (1994), La Llorona (1994, The Crying Woman), Clock (1996), My Body and Other Parts (1998), Greetings from a Queer Señorita (1999), and Bésame Mucho (2000, Kiss Me Much). In addition to performing at universities around the country, she has also lectured at them. In Los Angeles, she is an adjunct faculty member in Theater at Pomona College and the University of California, Los Angeles. Further Reading Carla Trujillo, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Pantoja, Antonia (1922–2002). Antonia Pantoja was one of the major leaders of the Puerto Rican community in the United States. In her autobiography, Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja, published just one month before her death, she revealed the details of her upbringing in dire poverty in Puerto Rico and the many struggles she faced to receive an education. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1922, she came to New York City in 1944 after working as rural teacher for two years after her graduation from the University of Puerto Rico’s Normal School. It was while working as a welder in a furniture factory that she first encountered the depressed economic conditions of New York Puerto Ricans. This experience motivated Pantoja to dedicate her life to community organizing to strengthen the ability of Puerto Ricans to deal with their own problems. Pantoja realized that racism and discrimination, political powerlessness, and limited access to education and economic opportunity combined to keep the community poor. She began her reform work in the factory, providing information to other workers about their rights and how to organize a union. In the meantime, understanding that a formal education would make her more effective, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College on a scholarship in 1952 and later received an M.A. in social work from the same institution in 1954 and a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1973. 852

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While in New York in the early 1950s, she attended graduate school at Columbia University and joined with other Latino students and formed the Hispanic Youth Adult Association, which later became the Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA). As an assistant professor at Columbia University, Pantoja was appointed to the Bundy Panel, a group that oversaw the decentralization of the New York public schools. Pantoja also organized the Puerto Rican Forum Antonia Pantoja receives the Medal of Freedom from and, in 1961, created and directed President Bill Clinton. ASPIRA, a community organization devoted to the education and leadership development of youth in the city of New York. In 1968 ASPIRA became a national organization. Essentially, by the mid-1960s, Pantoja had been a catalyst for establishing the most influential Puerto Rican organizations in the New York City. Pantoja also instituted the Universidad Boricua in 1970, a research and resource center in Washington, D.C., and Producir, an economic development project in Puerto Rico. In 1973, after receiving her Ph.D., she became chancellor of the Universidad Boricua. Then, in the late 1970s, while an associate professor at San Diego State University, the University Graduate School for Community Development was created largely through her efforts. In 1996, President Bill Clinton bestowed on Pantoja the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive from the United States government. Without a doubt, she can be described as the quintessential foe of poverty and racial discrimination. Pantoja died in New York City of cancer in April 2002. Further Reading Pantoja, Antonia, Memoir of a Visionary: Antonia Pantoja (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

F. Arturo Rosales Paredes, Américo (1915–1999). Famed folklorist, writer, and academic Américo Paredes was born on September 13, 1915, in Brownsville, Texas. His experiences while growing up on the border between Texas and Mexico provided Paredes with the intellectual material that she articulated during a lifetime of writing about the complicated, bicultural society that characterized this region. Paredes’s early educational experience was shaped by Brownsville’s public schools and at the local community college. He produced his first pieces of poetry and fiction in the late 1930s; in 1935, he published his first collection, Cantos de adolescencia (Adolescent Songs). Paredes served overseas in the U.S. Army during World War II, working as a reporter for The Stars and Stripes. After the war, Paredes went on to receive his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas in 1951, 1953, 853

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and 1956, respectively. After working at a variety of jobs, including as a journalist, and serving in the armed forces, Paredes received an advanced education later in life and became one of the most distinguished Hispanic scholars in U.S. history. Paredes taught English, folklore, and anthropology at the University of Texas from 1951 until his retirement. He was instrumental in the development of the field of folklore in academia as well as in the field of Mexican American studies. He served as president of the American Folklore Society and was recognized for his leadership internationally. In the United States, he was awarded one of the nation’s highest awards for a humanist, the Charles Frankel Prize, given by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989), and in Mexico, the highest award given to a foreigner by the Mexican government, the Aguila Azteca (the Aztec Eagle) medal (1991). In addition to publishing numerous research articles, he is the author of With Américo Paredes. His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), Folktales of Mexico (1970), A Texas Mexican Cancionero (1976), and Uncle Remus con chile (Uncle Remus with Chile, 1992). His most famous scholarly study, With His Pistol in His Hand, provided the historical background and analysis of an unwitting hero celebrated in folklore. Because of Paredes’s book, the story that Paredes first heard sung as a corrido* when he was growing up was enshrined as symbol of resistance during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s. Paredes was also the author of two novels, George Washington Gomez (1990) and The Shadow (1998), both of which were written decades before their publication. The former is today considered a forerunner of Chicano literature because of its analysis of the protagonist as caught between two cultures and forced to Americanize. The latter won a national award for novel-writing in 1954, but Paredes was unable to find a publisher. He is also the author of numerous stories published in newspapers and magazines, some of which were collected in his The Hammon and the Beans (1994). Likewise, Between Two Worlds, a selection of poetry in Spanish and English that was published in newspapers in the Southwest from the 1930s to the 1960s, was issued as a book in 1991. Paredes died on May 5, 1995. 854

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Further Reading Saldívar, Ramón, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Raleigh/Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Parsons, Lucía (Lucy) González (1853–1942). In an article published in Alarm, a radical socialist newspaper in 1884, Lucía (Lucy) González Parsons encouraged the “35,000 now tramping the streets of this great city,” the downtrodden, disinherited, and unemployed, to “learn the use of explosives!” Feared by the authorities because of her charismatic fiery speeches and intellect, the first AfroLatina woman of color to engage prominently in the history of the Leftist American labor movement was labeled as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” by the Chicago Police Department. Her speeches, it is said, provoked police to repeatedly arrest the woman in an effort to silence her “revolutionary voice.” A product of African, Mexican, and Native American ancestry, González Parsons was born in Johnson County, Texas, in 1853. Little is known of her early years, but in 1873 she and her white husband, Albert Parsons, a journalist and Confederate veteran, fled Texas because of their interracial marriage. Devoted to promoting the struggle of the wage-earning working class, they made their home in Chicago, where Lucía González Parsons. they gravitated to socialist-oriented organizations, joined the Workingmen’s party in 1876, and helped found the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) in 1883. They were parents to two children, although the youngest, Lulu, died at the age of eight of lymph adenoma. A radical activist, González Parsons wrote articles for the Socialist and frequently spoke out on behalf of working women, also protesting substandard working conditions, the class and capitalist systems, and racial violence. A dressmaker by trade, she hosted meetings of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) and began organizing workers to strike against 855

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social injustice, emerging in the process as a powerful incendiary speaker and labor leader at a time of oppressive gender and racial prejudice. Anarchism, which sanctioned a stateless and classless society based on mutual cooperation in the means of production and exchange of goods, attracted the Parsons and opened a defining chapter in Lucy’s life. Nine members of the IWPA, Albert Parsons among them, key figures in the organization of a massive general strike demanding an eight-hour work day on May 1, 1886, were arrested and incarcerated for deadly assaults on the police during the infamous Haymarket Square demonstration. Drawn into a frenetic international campaign to free the anarchists, González Parsons devoted herself to the cause, but they were executed by the state for their beliefs in 1887. For the rest of her life, González Parsons fervently embraced the anarchosocialist cause, aligning herself with militant labor activists committed to promoting anarchosyndicalist movements against capitalism and the exploitation of the working class. Through her writings and speeches on behalf of anarchist and socialist issues, she gained worldwide recognition, which enabled her to address audiences in Europe and America. For decades, González Parsons would commemorate November 11, the anniversary of the Haymarket nine’s deaths by hanging (the riot was on May 1, the original Labor Day), defending their deeds and ideology in countless articles that appeared in local presses throughout the country. In 1889, she published The Life of Albert R. Parsons, exposing the complicity of the state in erroneously accusing her husband of bombing Haymarket Square when he was not in the vicinity. She published and edited the newspaper, Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, and the Liberator, where she focused on the roles of famous women. In an address at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905, she admonished men for making a “mess of it in representing us.” “We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us.” She believed that contested issues of nationality, religion, and politics would be erased in a workers’ socialist society; racism and sexism would be a thing of the past. A legendary figure by the early twentieth century, González Parsons continued to grow in infamy because of her leadership on behalf of the homeless and unemployed. She cofounded the Communist-oriented International Labor Defense, which spoke out in defense of political prisoners, labor organizers, and other controversial persons, including the Scottsboro Boys and the McNamara brothers. Eventually, she joined the Communist Party at the age of eighty-three. In 1942, Lucy González Parsons lost her life in a fire that destroyed her home, many of her Alarm publications, articles, letters, and personal journals, as well as memorabilia attesting to her pioneering leadership in workers’ and women’s rights. Once noted largely because of her involvement in the Haymarket incident, Lucia González Parsons is now recognized as an important participant in the American labor movement in her own right. Many of Parsons’ writings were collected and published in 2004 as Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity—Writings & Speeches, 1878–1937. Included are many of her most memorable speeches, edi856

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torials, and essays expressing her views on anarchism, the KKK, the Wobblies, the U.S. government, and social injustice. In particular, her calls for prioritizing the union organizing of housewives and minorities still resonate today. Further Reading Acosta, Teresa Palomo, and Ruthe Winegarten, Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Ashbaugh, Carolyn, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1976). Mirandé, Alfredo, and Evangelina Enríquez, La Chicana: The Mexican American Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Virginia Sánchez Korrol Pau-Llosa, Ricardo (1954–). Poet and painter Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana in 1954 into a middle-class family that had struggled to emerge from poverty in Cuba. After the Cuban Revolution, his family went into exile in 1960, when Pau-Llosa was just six years old—first to Chicago and later to Tampa. Although he was educated in American schools, Pau-Llosa continues to cultivate the theme of exile* in his poetry and art and to balance nostalgia for the homeland he barely knew with the overwhelming reality of a U.S. culture that has made him feel foreign since his childhood. His poetry collections include Sorting Metaphors, which won the national competition for the first Anhinga Poetry Prize (1983), Bread of the Imagined (1992), Cuba (1993), Vereda Tropical (1999), The Mastery Impulse (2003), and Parable Hunter (2008). He has also published individual poems in numerous magazines throughout the United States. In addition, Pau-Llosa has published essays and short stories in magazines and anthologies and is a renowned critic of the visual arts, particularly twentieth-century Latin American painting and sculpture. His essays in particular explore the exilic identity as experienced by all Cuban/Cuban American artists in the United States. In 1984, Pau-Llosa was awarded the Cintas Fellowship for Literature and, in 1998, Miami News Times named him “the best local poet.” He also won the Linden Lane Magazine English-Language Poetry Prize (1987). Pau-Llosa works as a professor of creative writing at Miami-Dade College. Further Reading Dick, Bruce Allen, “A Conversation with Ricardo Pau-Llosa” in A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla, poesiá cubana del exilio (Nashville: Betania, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Pazos Kanki, Vicente (1779–c. 1852). During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore attracted Spanish American intellectuals from as far away as Buenos Aires and La Paz who came to learn about the nascent American Republic, translating the books of the founding fathers, as well as the Constitution, smuggling this knowledge back 857

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into their homelands to create a firm basis for their struggles for independence from the Spanish Empire. Although the majority of intellectuals to visit, write, and print their books and pamphlets in these cities were creoles, ethnically white Spaniards born in the Americas who otherwise had access to education and privileges far beyond the indegenes and mixed castes of the Empire, one figure stood out among them: Vicente Pazos Kanki. The natural son of an Aymara woman and a Spaniard, he was born in what today is Bolivia (Alto Perú), was educated by the Church, and became a priest. He moved to Buenos Aires and wrote for newspapers, especially La Crónica (The Chronicle) and became involved in conspiracies in support of South American independence from Spain. A defender of indigenous rights, Pazos Kanki also for a time advocated in his writings the restoration of the Incan ruling dynasties. In 1817, he went into exile and spent time in both the United States and England. Pazos Kanki left the Catholic priesthood for Protestantism while in exile in London, where he also became a member of the secret Hispanic Masonic lodge of revolutionaries known as Lautaro. In exile in the United States, he became an important participant in the conspiracy to free the southern cone from Spain. A journalist, translator, and statesman, Pazos Kanki (he refused to use the last name of his father, Silva, who had abandoned him and his mother) became a member of the Hispanic Masons on Philadelphia and made use of early American printers in publishing his revolutionary tracts in both Spanish and English. In South America, Pazos Kanki is known as one of the first intellectuals to translate the Bible into an indigenous language, the Aymara of his mother’s people; this he accomplished while living in London in 1829. Pazos Kanki’s writings in the United States include a Manifiesto he issued from Baltimore with some of his fellow conspirators in June 1817; the manifesto was smuggled into South America and circulated in support of the independence movement. Pazos Kanki was also one of the first to translate Thomas Paine’s Common Sense into Spanish. In 1818, he published in English The exposition, remonstrance and protest of Don Vincente Pazos: commissioner on behalf of the republican agents established at Amelia Island, in Florida, under the authority and in behalf of the independent states of South America: with an appendix: presented to the executive of the United States, on the ninth day of February, 1818 / translated from the Spanish. In 1919, he also issued Letters on the United Provinces of South America, addressed to the Hon. Henry Clay: speaker of the House of Representatives of the U. States/by Don Vicente Pazos; translated from the Spanish by Platt H. Crosby. Around 1820, Pazos Kanki issued in Philadelphia a comprehensive history from classical times up to the independence wars in South America: The Beauties of modern history: commencing with the life and achievements of Alexander the First, emperor of all the Russias; with the campaigns of Bonaparte: Also, a correct history of South America, by Don Vincente Pazos. To which is added, The admirable works of nature, and The rights of women investigated. In 1825, he had published in New York one of the first histories of the United States, which included translations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: Compendio de la historia de los Estados Unidos de América puesto en castellano: al que se han añadido la Declaración de la 858

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independencia y la Constitución de su gobierno (Compendium of the History of the United States of America written in Spanish: to which has been added the Declaration of Independence and its government’s Constitution). In London in 1834, Pazos Kanki published a history of the Napoleonic intervention in Spain, the restoration of the monarchy under Fernando VII, and the independence of the South American states under the title of Memorias socio-políticas (Sociopolitical Memories). He died in Buenos Aires sometime between 1851 and 1853. Further Reading Bowman, Charles, Vicente Pazos of Upper Peru: His Travels, thesis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 1973).

Nicolás Kanellos Pedreira, Antonio Salvador (1899–1939). Born in San Juan on June 13, 1899, Antonio Salvador Pedreira became one of Puerto Rico’s most distinguished and influential intellectuals in struggling to deal with the legacy of colonialism and bring his homeland into the twentieth century. After having studied medicine briefly in the United States, he returned home to receive a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Puerto Rico in 1926; he later received an M.A. from Columbia University and went on to study for his doctorate at the University of Madrid. While a graduate student, and throughout his life as a teacher, Pedreira was a successful bibliographer and essayist of Puerto Rican and Spanish culture. His Insularismo; Ensayos de interpretación puetrorriqueña (1934, Insularism: Essays Interpretative of Puerto Rico), despite its many shortcomings, became the most influential book or treatise on Puerto Rican culture probably ever written. The mature product of the rapid political and cultural changes experienced by Puerto Ricans as they passed from one colonial master to another in the early twentieth century, Insularismo sought to plumb the depths and intra-history of Puerto Rican conscience by addressing the educational, moral, esthetic, and social problems of Puerto Ricans. By the time Pedreira had penned his landmark book-length essay in 1934, he had already renewed Puerto Rican letters and opened up new avenues for the forging of a Puerto Rican national identity in four previous books examining the history of the island and its relationship to old- and new-world cultures: De los nombres de Puerto Rico (1927, About the Names of Puerto Rico), Aristas (1930, Edges), Hostos, Ciudadano de América (1931, Hostos,* Citizen of the Americas), and Bibliografía puertorriqueña (1932, Puerto Rican Bibliography). His decades-long engagement with the definition of Puerto Rican identity also included his editorship of Indice (Index) magazine and the penning of scores of newspaper columns for the popular press. Pedreira went on to write another handful of books and some 200 articles and essays for diverse periodicals. It was with Insularismo, however, that Pedreira became the leader of the generation of writers who would dominate the intellectual circles of the island from the 1930s through the 1950s. Pedreira’s approach to nonfiction writing and his incisive prose style led writers away from the poetic and impressionistic—and, worse, bombastic and outlandish—essays of the immediate past and onto 859

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expository writing more based on research, documentation, and analysis. He earned respect for the essay as a genre of serious intellectual query as well as literary art. Pedreira proved that the genre could provide information while helping in the construction of a national history and cultural identity. This is not to say that Insularismo does not go overboard on the speculative. To the contrary, many of its premises and assertions about race, ethnicity, and colonialism have been challenged by today’s scholars, who attribute Pedreira’s prescriptions and conclusions more to his own white racial identity and bourgeois class interests than to impartial social scientific observation and clear understanding of the new capitalist world formed after World War I and the imperial grip of United States on the island. Although Pedreira’s and Insularismo’s impact among recognized artists and intellectuals on the island cannot be doubted—artists and intellectuals may be characterized pre- and post-Insularismo—it is not clear just what impact Pedreira’s thought had on working-class artists and writers, many of whom became economic refugees and had to migrate to New York, where they published their own working-class and racially sensitive interpretations of Puerto Rican culture and identity. Jesús Colón,* Joaquín Colón López,* and Bernardo Vega* do not mention Pedreira or his book and in fact would probably have rejected many of its teachings. Whereas Pedreira and his followers were enjoying the security and celebrity of island canonization at the very time when Puerto Rican nationalism was responding to U.S. hegemonic pressures, the racialized and economically disadvantaged classes of Puerto Rico were embarking on their own flesh-and-blood experiment in building a cultural identity, one to be forged out of uprootedness from traditional life, economic, and power relationships, a separation and even severing of the linguistic and cultural bonds of their families and communities, two concepts of race and ethnicity in conflict from island to mainland, and, of course, classism and marginalization in both island and continental spaces. Other, more formally educated writers who spent a part of their writing lives in New York, such as José Isaac De Diego Padró,* Clotilde Betances de Yaeger,* Juan Antonio Corretjer,* and Clemente Soto Vélez,* most certainly read Pedreira and reveal the influence of, or at least confront, his ideas. Most Puerto Ricans were never truly engaged in the debates engendered by Insularismo, but most of the people, in one form or another, whether directly or indirectly, experienced the rapid socioeconomic transformation of Puerto Rico under U.S. colonial administration and the emigration to the continent that it occasioned. Insularismo’s legacy must be examined once and for all by examining its impact on such working-class stateside writers as Jesús and Joaquín Colón, as well as, for instance, the Nuyoricans* who followed them in the sixties and seventies—not just the elites whose works became canonized on the island during the years subsequent to the publication of Insularismo. Further Reading Pedreira, Antonio S., Insularismo: An Insight into the Puerto Rican Character, intro. and trans. Aoife Rivera Serrano (New York: Ausubo Press, 2005).


Pelados, Peladitos

Pelados, Peladitos. In nineteenth-century Mexico there existed a poor man’s circus that traveled poor neighborhoods of the city and the provinces. It set up a small tent, or carpa, to house its performances. It was in these carpas that an English-influenced clown or hobo–clown (later epitomized by Charlie Chaplin) emerged and eventually became a Mexican national figure: the pelado, literally “skinned” (meaning “naked” or “penniless”). Best exemplified later by Cantinflas (Mario Moreno), the peladito improvises a dialog that brings to the scene working-class perspectives (see Working-class Literature), especially complaints and criticism, while riffing on current events and local news. The pelado’s humor is at times slapstick but mostly ingeniously verbal as he develops his repartee with the audience. Often the pelado, also affectionately called peladito in the diminutive, becomes the principal character in series of revistas (musical comedy reviews) that dramatize his misadventures as an underdog and outsider (see Tirado, Romualdo). The carpas often functioned as popular tribunals, repositories of folk wisdom, humor and wisdom, and were incubators of Mexican comic types and stereotypes. They continued to function in this way in the U.S. Southwest, especially in San Antonio, which had become, especially after the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, a home base and wintering ground for many of the carpas. As in Mexico, the pelados became a principal attraction of the carpas in the Southwest, with such famous interpreters as Romualdo Tirado, El Niño Fidencio and even a female peladita: “La Chata Noloesca” (see Beatriz Escalona). The three of these became very popular on the stages of the Southwest rather than in the more humble carpas. The carpas were the type of circus and theatrical tradition that survived longest in the Southwest, during and after the Depression. Probably because of their small size, bare-bones style and organization around a family unit, the carpas could manage themselves better than larger circuses and especially better than live theatrical companies that were driven from the theaters during the Depression. Furthermore, they were able to cultivate smaller audiences in the most remote areas. The carpas became in the Southwest an important Mexican American popular culture institution. Their pelados and comic routines provided a sounding board for the culture conflict that Mexican Americans Leonardo García Astol as a pelado. 861

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felt in language usage, assimilation to American tastes and lifestyles and discrimination. Out of these types of conflicts and themes arose the figure of the pachuco,* atypically Mexican American figure embodying hybridity and alienation. The carpa preserved these cultural perspectives and typical characters, such as the pelado and the pachuco, for the post-war generation that would forge a new relationship with the larger American culture. The carpas, their pelados and pachucos, were resuscitated in Chicano theater of the 1960s and 1970s and found their greatest representation in the works of Luis Valdez* and El Teatro Campesino. The most important play in this vein was Valdez’s La Carpa de la Familia Rascuachi (Valdez’s own translation as “The Tent of the Underdogs”), featuring the misadventures of Jesús Pelado and his immigrant family. The pachuco also has figured prominently from Valdez’s very first play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964), to his apotheosis of the figure in his commercial hit play Zoot Suit (1979). More than the pelado, the pachuco has served as model of early rebellion for such poets as Alurista,* José Montoya* and Tino Villanueva.* However, Chicano foundational writer Tomás Rivera* focused a more critical eye on the pachuco, reflecting what many communities felt: that he was a minor gangster and pariah. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Kanellos, Nicolás, “The Mexican Stage in the Southwestern United States as a Sounding Board for Cultural Conflict” in Missions in Conflict: US-Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture, eds. Juan Bruce-Noboa and Renate Bardelaben (West Germany: University of Mainz, 1986: 87–92). Kanellos, Nicolás, “The Mexican Circus in the United States” The Journal of Popular Culture Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1985): 78–84.

Nicolás Kanellos PEN Club de Cubanos en el Exilio. In 1984, Cuba applied for a chapter of PEN in Havana. It was fought by the exiled writers’ community and, consequently, denied by PEN International. Signing the letter of opposition were Reinaldo Arenas,* Antonio Benítez Rojo, Ricardo Bofill, Rafael Bordao,* Reinaldo Bragado Bretaña, Lydia Cabrera,* Uva Clavijo,* Esteban Luis Cárdenas, Isabel Castellanos, Angel Cuadra,* Belkis Cuza Malé,* Vicente Echerri, Eugenio Florit, Carlos Franqui, Ariel Hidalgo, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Heberto Padilla,* Julián Portal, Jorge Ulla y Armando Valladares. The issue lay somewhat dormant for years until 1996, when Angel Cuadra mobilized a group of exiled writers in Miami to pursue the establishment of a special affiliate of PEN for exiled Cuban writers. In 1997, PEN International authorized the chapter, with its headquarters to be Miami. Decades earlier, in 1946, the London headquarters had authorized a PEN Club for Cuba, and the club practically ceased to exist during the 1950s under the Batista dictatorship. Its last president, Octavio R. Costa, had always nurtured the idea of re-establishing the affiliate in exile. Along with Cuadra, he and others were able to prevail precisely dur862

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ing the time that the Castro government was applying for an affiliate and attempting to stymie the exiles’ application. Cuadra went in person to the 64th International Congress of PEN, held in Edinburg, Scotland, and got the unanimous support of the delegates. The only proviso in PEN International’s concession of affiliate status was that the members struggle for freedom of expression and creativity in Cuba. Since its founding, PEN Club de Cubanos en el exilio has sponsored numerous activities and publications. A sign of its vibrancy is that in 2007, Edicones Universal* of Miami published the anthology Los Poetas del Pen Club de Escritores en el Exilio (The Poets of the Cuban PEN Club Writers in Exile), edited by Armando Alvarez Bravo. Further Reading “Cuban Writers in Exile P.E.N. Center” (http://groups.msn.com/LiteraturaCubana enelExilio/angelcuadra.msnw).

Nicolás Kanellos Peña, Terri de la (1947–). Born on February 20, 1947, in Santa Monica, California, Terri de la Peña is a novelist and prolific short story writer who explores the Chicana* and Lesbian identity through her works. A graduate of Santa Monica Community Collage, Peña is a self-taught writer who, although she began writing during her teens, did not publish her first work until alter her fortieth birthday. Her first novel, Margins: A Novel (1992), narrates the gradual self-awareness of Verónica, a graduate student who begins to deal with her lesbian and Chicana identity. In a type of interior duplication, Verónica begins to come to terms with herself through writing a series of short stories; the novel climaxes with Verónica’s coming out as a lesbian and accepting the culture of her Mexican American family. In Latin Satins (1994), Peña deals with the world of four Chicana singers who make a living satirizing “golden oldies”; enriched by lyrics in Spanish and English, the novel deals with racial discrimination, the mass media and the Chicano and lesbian communities, and does not retreat from exploring racism and homophobia within the Chicano community itself. Faults: A Novel (1999) charts the troubled waters of five Chicanas united by blood or love and trying to make their way through various types of social and psychological problems, including spousal abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. Terri de la Peña’s short stories have been published widely in magazines and such anthologies as Lesbian Bedtime Stories (1989 and 1990), Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), Lesbian Love Stories (1991), Childless by Choice: A Feminist Anthology (1992), Out of the Closet (1994) and Dyke Life (1995). In 1986, Peña won the University of California-Irvine Chicano/Latino Prize for her short story “A Saturday in August.” In 1990, she also won an Artistic Excellence in Writing Award from VIVA: Lesbian and Gay Latinos in the Arts and, in 1993, the Distinguished Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts, Academia, and the Community, from the National Association of Chicano Studies. 863

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Further Reading Fernández, Salvador C., “Terri de la Peña” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Lomelí, Francisco, and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 194–201).

Nicolás Kanellos Perales, Alonso (1898–1960). Alonso Perales played one of the most important roles in protecting the civil rights of Mexican Americans during the twentieth century. Born in Alice, Texas, on October 17, 1898, his parents Susana (Sandoval) and Nicolás died when Perales was only six. Although he had to work at a very young age, Perales nevertheless finished public school in Alice. After marrying Marta Pérez, he went to business college in Corpus Christi and was later drafted when the United States entered World War I. After his discharge, he obtained a civil service position with the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. While there, he continued his education and received a B.A. and, in 1926, a law degree from the National University. Perales then worked for the Department of State and served on thirteen diplomatic missions to the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, and the West Indies. After returning to Texas to practice law, in 1945 he again worked in the diplomatic service in the United Nations conference as legal counsel to the Nicaraguan delegation. In the 1950s, he also worked with the Department of State under Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration. In the busy life of law and diplomacy that Perales led, he also found time to write numerous op-ed pieces, speeches, and even books. His first book, El mexicano americano y la política del sur de Texas (1931, The Mexican American and Politics in South Texas), describes and analyzes thirty-five years of Mexican–Anglo relations in Texas. But Perales, who became one of the most influential Mexican Americans of his time, will best be remembered for his work in defending “la raza,” a term he used in the title of one his books, En defensa de mi raza (1936–1937). This two-volume anthology contains those of his own essays, letters, and speeches, as well as of his contemporary activists, that focused on dispelling charges that Mexicans were an inferior people who constituted a social problem. In his own writings, Perales responded to a series of civil rights abuses in the 1920s, including lynching. He urged Mexican Americans to demand their constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. To do this, Perales insisted, Mexicans in the U.S. need not reject their cultural background. Perales was also a founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in 1929. With José Tomás Canales and Eduardo Idar, he helped write the LULAC constitution. In 1930, he served one term as the organization’s second president and then went on to organize Council 16 in San Antonio. In his role as defender of La Raza, Perales testified before a United States Congressional hearing on Mexican immigration, an effort by immigration restrictionists to stop immigration from Mexico. Despite being a stalwart of the Democratic Party, Perales helped found the Independent Voters Association, a 864

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Mexican American political club in San Antonio in the early 1930s that supported New Dealers—mainly from the Democratic Party. In the 1940s, he worked to introduce the Spears Bill in the Texas legislature to prohibit discrimination based on race. Also in the 1940s, Perales worked on a State Department survey of the extent of discrimination that Mexicans Americans faced during a time when the United States could not afford to be accused by Fascists and Nazis of not combating racism. This experience gave birth to his next book, Are We Good Neighbors? (1948). A firm believer in integration, he joined mainstream organizations such as the American Legion and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce. Although he was born in the United States, his command of the Spanish language was impeccable, and he delivered many speeches in Spanish and wrote numerous columns in La Prensa and La Verdad of San Antonio, as well as in other Spanish-language newspapers. Perales passed away in San Antonio on October 21, 1960. Further Reading Orozco, Cynthia E., “Perales, Alonso S. (1898–1960)” in The Handbook of Texas (http:// www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online). Rosales, F. Arturo, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican-American Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Sloss-Vento, Adela, Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican-Americans (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1977).

F. Arturo Rosales Pereda, Prudencio de (1912–1985). Novelist and short-story writer Prudencio de Pereda was born the son of Spanish cigar workers in Brooklyn, New York, on February 18, 1912. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1933 with a Spanish major and published his first story in 1936, when he was engrossed in the Republican cause of the Spanish Civil War. During this time, he met Ernest Hemingway and collaborated on two films with him: Spain in Flames and The Spanish Earth. Involved with many activists in the United States for the Republican cause, Pereda published numerous stories of leftist inclination for such magazines as Commentary, The New Republic, and Nation. His stories were selected for O. Henry Memorial Prize Volume (1937) and O’Brien’s Best Short Stories (1938, 1940). Pereda served in the U.S. Army during World War II as a language censor reading letters and after the war wrote advertising copy and also worked as a librarian. He soon began producing novels, in addition to stories: All the Girls We Loved (1948), Fiesta, a Novel of Modern Spain (1953), dealing with a failing marriage during the Spanish Civil War, and Windmills in Brooklyn (1960). Fiesta was so successful that it was adapted as an opera and a radio play. All the Girls We Loved is an interconnected group of short stories that follows soldier Al Figueira and his comrades in training for World War II and talks about the girls they thought they loved. The highly autobiographical Windmills of the Mind is a comic novel that reminisces about the Spanish colony in Brooklyn just before World War I and features a wise old grandfather, Agapito, who tells 865

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his grandson, the narrator, about the adventures and misadventures of selling cigars door to door. De Pereda retired to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, and died in 1985. Further Reading Cassill, R. V., ed., Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (New York: Norton, 1987). “Prudencio de Pereda: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Research Center” (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/uthrc/00033/hrc-00033.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Perera, Victor (1934–2003). Guatemalan-born novelist and journalist Victor Perera was the son of Sephardic parents who had moved from Jerusalem to Guatemala City in the 1920s. The family moved to New York City when Perera was twelve years old, but his early nurturing and Guatemalan youth stayed with him through his reporting and creative writing into his memoir, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey (1995). His novels and stories have been filled with the world of ancient Central American tribes and rain forests as well as an apocalyptic vision for modern civilization. Perera authored what is considered the definitive book about the Native Americans of southern Mexico, The Last Lords of Palenque (1995). Perera graduated from Brooklyn College and later received a master’s degree in English from the University of Michigan. After returning to New York City, Perera began a long relationship with some of the most renowned forums for creative and intellectual writing in the United States: The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine. He taught journalism and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1972 to 1979 and at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1998. Although Perera was somewhat ambiguous about his Jewish heritage, three of his books were an attempt to explain to himself why his family had ended up in Guatemala. The first, The Conversion (1970), was a historical novel. The second, Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood (1986), was an early memoir, and The Cross and the Pear Tree was his final inquiry into that question. But The Cross and the Pear Tree is not just a family autobiography, but also an entire history of the Sephardim. Through this and other writing, Perera is considered to have had an immense impact on Sephardic culture in the United States. He was the cofounder of Ivri-NASAWI, a national Sephardic cultural organization, and served as a volunteer adviser to the University of California, Santa Cruz quarterly magazine Leviathan. Perera’s two other books focused on the Guatemalan Civil War and the Lacandon Mayas: Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy (1995) and The Last Lords of Palenque: The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest (1995). Further Reading Lockhart, Darrell B., ed., Jewish Writers of Latin America: A Dictionary (New York: Garland, 1997).


Pérez, Emma

Pérez, Emma (1954–). Emma Pérez is a highly respected historian and theorist of gender, as well as a novelist; in both incarnations she has revolutionized Chicano and Chicana and Third-World literary and historical discourse. Born on October 25, 1954, in the small, rural, Anglo-dominated town of El Campo, Texas, where she received most of her primary and secondary education, Pérez escaped the provincialism of her intellectual environment to relocate to Los Angeles, where she was liberated to live her life pursuing academic study at the highest level. At the University of California–Los Angeles, Pérez received her B.A. in political science and women’s studies (1979) and her M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1988) in history. Subsequently, as a professor at various institutions, including the University of Texas–El Paso (1990–2003), where she served as chair of history, and the University of Colorado, where she has served as chair of ethnic studies from 2003 to the present, she has specialized in Chicano and Chicana history and feminist studies. As a historian, Pérez has written one of the fundamental texts of ThirdWorld feminism in the United States, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), in which she argues that the writing of Chicano history, like that of most other narratives of people emerging from colonialism, adopts the theoretical tools and perspectives formerly used by the colonial masters and eliminates gender considerations from the historiography; in addition, she provides new tools for identifying women’s voices and writing them into history. Although Pérez was interested in literature since her childhood and had, in fact, written creatively on and off during the years, it was precisely the failure of history to record women’s voices that drove her to begin writing novels. As she herself has stated, “I write fiction not only because I have a passion for literature, but also because I am frustrated with history’s texts and archives. I’ve always wanted to find in the archives a queer vaquero [cowgirl] from the midnineteenth century whose adventures include fighting Anglo squatters and seducing willing señoritas.” In addressing the motives for writing her historical novel, Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory (2009), she states, “Impatience led me to create a Tejana baby butch, named Micaela Campos, who must avenge her father’s death at the battle of San Jacinto, just a month after the fall of the Alamo.” Nevertheless, Pérez’s first novel, Gulf Dreams, issued by the feminist Third Woman Press in 1996, is highly autobiographical in lyrically recreating the struggles of a young woman growing up in South Texas while trying to find her own identity amid the constraining gender roles foisted upon her by her family and society. In addition to her books, Pérez has produced a solid body of essays on Chicana and lesbian culture that have highly influenced academics as well as creative writers across ethnicities in the United States. Further Reading Torres-Pérez, Rafael, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).


Pérez, Loida Maritza

Pérez, Loida Maritza (1963–). Born in the Dominican Republic, Loida Maritza Pérez writes about what she knows: a poor Dominican family migrating to the United States and attempting to adjust to the new culture in the big city, in this case Brooklyn. Her highly autobiographical novel, Geographies of Home (1999), deals with the stress that the recently arrived family feels and with the strains upon relationships that ultimately become abuse: mental, physical, and sexual. Rape, mental illness, and family disintegration are shown not only to be part of life in the big city but are also traced back to the abuse that existed in the Dominican Republic under dictator Rafel Leonidas Trujillo. Another theme in the novel is one that Pérez has struggled with herself: being Afro-Dominican, she has had to struggle to identify herself within the United States as either Afro American or Latina. Pérez discovered literature in high school and went on to get a degree in English from Cornell University (1987). Included among her awards are a New York Foundation for the Arts grant (1991), a Ragdale Foundation grant (1994), and a Pauline and Henry Gates fellowship (1996). Pérez has published a number of short stories in such magazines as Bomb, Latina, and Callaloo. Further Reading Sandín, Lyn di lorio, Killing Spanish: Literary Essay on U.S. Latina/o Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos Pérez, Luis (1904–1962). Born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1904, Luis Pérez migrated to Los Angeles (probably as a teenager) during the Mexican Revolution and graduated from Hollywood High School in 1928. He attended Los Angeles City College until 1933 and then returned to earn a B.A. in 1956. For most of his life, Pérez worked as a Spanish teacher at Los Angeles City College and in high schools, and as a translator of Spanish and Italian. Pérez is the author of the first novel of Mexican immigration written in the English language: El Coyote: The Rebel (1947), which was issued by a mainstream publishing house, Henry Holt. In addition, he authored other unpublished novels, stories, and children’s works. The novel itself is an important contribution to the development of Hispanic literature because of its insights into revolution and immigration, two themes that dominate Mexican American culture. Furthermore, El Coyote was written in English and crossed into the mainstream at a time when such outstanding writers as Jovita González* and Américo Paredes* were not successful in having their English-language novels published. Further Reading Flores, Lauro, “Introduction,” Luis Pérez, El Coyote: The Rebel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Luis Pérez.

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Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis”

Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis” (1957–). Rámon Pérez is commonly known as “Tianguis,” a shortened version of his hometown’s name, San Pablo de Macuiltianguis, a town in Oaxaca located in the region of the Sierra Juárez. On December 29, 1957, he was born to a family of cabinetmakers. He speaks both Zapotec and Spanish. As a child, he was taken to Oaxaca City to be educated in primary school. During the 1970s, Pérez spent part of his youth following the peasant leader Florencio Medrano Mederos, who had been trained in China and who became a successor to better-known guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas. Medrano and his followers sought to reclaim land that once had been communal property but that had passed to the control of agribusiness. Pérez worked as a courier and traveled between various towns in the states of Oaxaca and Veracuz, and to Mexico, D.F., to organize the movement. Medrano Mederos lived on the run until “white guards,” or militiamen hired by big landowners, assassinated him outside a settlement where he was holding a meeting with peasants. Pérez and other followers of Medrano were jailed and tortured after their leader’s death, after which Pérez traveled to and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Among the places he has lived are Oaxaca City, Mexico City, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and the fields of Oregon. Pérez went to each of these places in search of work; his first trip to the United States was in 1979. A series of his articles about his migration to the United States appeared in Texas Monthly and in the San Antonio Light. Dick J. Reavis, who was then a senior editor at Texas Monthly, asked Pérez to write about the guerrilla movement in Oaxaca and about his travels to the United States. Reavis translated Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant and arranged for the publication of the manuscript through Texas Monthly Press. When Gulf Publishing Company bought Texas Monthly Press, Reavis then turned to Arte Público Press, which first published Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant in 1991 in its English translation. Pérez gives his account of what it was like to travel to the United States and live and work as an undocumented immigrant and unskilled laborer. This testimonial is unique in that it describes how migrant networks function, how they affect their home communities, and how the migrants maintain their connections to their hometowns despite living in the United States. Once again with Reavis’s translation, Pérez wrote Diary of a Guerrilla (1999). Of the two books, only Diario de un mojado (2003), the original title of the first book, was published in the Spanish version written by Pérez. Apart from his writing, Pérez has held several jobs—as a carpenter, a bus boy, and as agriculture laborer—as a means of survival. Currently, he lives in Xalapa, Veracruz, where he works as an ambulatory Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez. 869

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photographer, taking pictures of people on the street and at events such as weddings and first communion services. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the U.S.” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2007): 438–455.

Christina L. Sisk Pérez, Raymundo “Tigre” (1946–199?). One of the prime movers of the Chicano poetry movement in south Texas, Raymundo “Tigre” Pérez was an angry, militant activist whose personal experience of racial and judicial oppression dominated his poetry. Born in utter poverty on March 15, 1946, in a garage in Laredo, Texas, to a Mexican American boxer and stevedore father and a Tarascan Indian mother from Michoacán, Mexico, Pérez was a street urchin who, out of force of will and interest in poetry from his junior high school days, managed after various false Raymundo “Tigre” Pérez. (photo by Michael Barth) starts to earn a bachelor’s degree in political science from Oberlin College in Ohio. Pérez used his poetry as a rallying cry for the Chicano Movement* and became a roving troubadour who lent his poetic voice to demonstrations and boycotts throughout the Southwest during the early 1970s. He also published his poems in many ephemeral magazines and community newspapers as well as in such venues as Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Caracol, and other Chicano journals. Pérez himself founded and edited a number of underground newspapers, including Los Muertos Hablan (The Dead Speak), Valley of the Damned, and Tierra Caliente (Hot Earth). Often associated with other such movement poets as Abelardo Delgado,* Nephtalí de León, and Ricardo Sánchez,* who at times assumed similarly militant stances, Pérez saw some of his books published with the aid of these writers. His books include Free, Free at Last (1970), Los Cuatro (1970), Phases (1971), and The Secret Meaning of Death (1972). Free, Free at Last, written after his tour of duty in Vietnam, was dominated by his protest against the war and the military. The other collections monitor and respond to the progress of the Chicano movement, including the farm workers’ struggle; the last installment becomes

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more intimate and personal in its dealings with his motivation, his hopes, and his own impending death. Pérez disappeared for awhile from the annals of Chicano literature and resurfaced in the 1980s as part of a Native American movement, now under the name Chief Raymundo “Tigre” Pérez; he is credited with founding the yearly “Kanto de la Tierra” (Song to the Earth) festival. Further Reading Morales, Arcadio, “Raymundo ‘Tigre’ Pérez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Second Series, eds. Lomelí, Francisco, and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 194–197).

Nicolás Kanellos Pérez Bonalde, Juan Antonio (1846–1892). Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde, poet and translator of Heinrich Heine, began by following his father’s lead into a political career in Venezuela. It was during this period that Pérez Bonalde began writing political prose under the pseudonyms of “Pólux” and “Llaguno.” Later, in Barcelona, Spain, he worked as a journalist with the newspaper La Aurora. In 1867, Pérez Bonalde wrote the sonnet “La tumba del tirano” (The Tomb of the Tyrant), which focused on the tragedy of Emperor Maximilian and the glory of Benito Juárez. Pérez Bonalde was forced into exile by a change in government in Venezuela while on a visit to New York. During his exile in New York, he met and began a lasting friendship with José Martí.* During the approximately twenty years that Pérez Bonalde lived in New York, he published Estrofas (1877, Stanzas), Ritmos (1880, Rhythms), and El poema del Niágara (1883, The Niagara Poem). According to Ernest Johnson, Pérez Bonalde wrote El poema del Niágara in recognition of all the good experiences he had while living in exile those twenty years in New York. El poema del Niágara was originally published as part of Ritmos, but in 1883 it was reissued separately with an introduction by José Martí. The first two volumes included not only original poetry by Pérez Bonalde, but also the translations from German to Spanish that he produced of Heinrich Heine’s poetry. Angel Esteban in his critique of Hispanic poets who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century assures us that Perez Bonalde’s El Poema del Niágara presents the basis for a clear definition of Modernism as a global epoch of change. The importance of this comment lies in the fact that this work predated Rubén Darío’s Azul (Blue) by eight years. Esteban classifies Pérez Bonalde’s work as premodernist. In 1879, Pérez Bonalde married Amanda Schoonmaker, a New York resident. With the exception of the birth of his daughter, Flor, in 1880, the marriage was an unhappy one, made worse by Flor’s unexpected death in 1883. Pérez Bonalde was inconsolable. In 1884, he traveled to Madrid, where he was elected corresponding member for America of the Spanish Academy, a special honor and distinction. Back in New York, because of his continued depression over the loss of his daughter, he confined himself in a sanitarium. In 1890, Pérez Bonalde returned to Venezuela to live with a niece in La Guaira, the port city for the capital, Caracas. He died there two years later, in 1892, at the age of forty-six.

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Further Reading Esteban, Ángel, Bécquer en Martí y en otros poetas hispanoamericanos finiseculares (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2003). Johnson, Ernest A., Juan A. Pérez Bonalde: los años de formación, documentos 1846–1870 (Mérida, Venezuela: Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, Escuela de Letras, 1971).

Norma Mouton Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar (1555–1620). Born in Puebla, Mexico, into a distinguished Spanish family, and a graduate of the University of Salamanca in Spain, Pérez de Villagrá was a captain in the colonizing mission to New Mexico led by Juan de Oñate in 1598. He served as the official chronicler for that mission and carried out other military duties as well, such as those of quartermaster. He seems to have also served as a right hand to Oñate and distinguished himself as a soldier in the Battle of Acoma Pueblo. While participating in the founding of the first European settlements in what later became the U.S. Southwest, Pérez de Villagrá penned the first epic poem in a European language in that territory: Historia de la Nueva México (History of New Mexico); in 1610, it was published in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, where he was living in forced exile from Mexico. Because of Villagrá’s straightforward narrative, many of the historical details, including news of poetry and theatrical performances during the settlers’ expedition, have been documented. Further Reading Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar, Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 [by] Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, a Critical and Annotated Spanish/English Edition, trans. and eds. Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodríguez, and Joseph P. Sánchez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos

Frontispiece for Pérez de Villagrá’s Historia de la Nueva México.

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Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo (1949–). Poet, fiction writer, and scholar Gustavo Pérez-Firmat is the author of ten books and over seventy essays and reviews. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Pérez-Firmat earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan (1979). His books of literary and cultural criticism include Idle Fictions (1982), Literature and Liminality (1986), The Cuban Condition

Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo

(1989), Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990), Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), which was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994, and My Own Private Cuba (1999). Pérez-Firmat was born in Havana, Cuba, on March 7, 1949, and relocated with his family to Miami after Castro came to power in Cuba. Pérez-Firmat received most of his formal education in Miami, obtaining a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish from the University of Miami in 1972 and 1973, respectively, before going on to study for his Ph.D. Miami and the life of Cuban Americans remained central to his consciousness, however, even when he became a professor of Spanish and literature at Duke University in 1978. Pérez-Firmat’s basic condition—born in Cuba and transplanted to American soil in his youth—has made him a member of the new “Cuban American” generation and has led to his theories about the dual perspective held by what he terms a “transitional” generation. For this poet/theorist, Cuban Americans of his generation can be equally at home or equally uncomfortable in both Cuba and the United States. They are cultural mediators who are constantly translating not only language but the differences between the Anglo American and Cuban/Cuban American world views. Because they have the unique ability to communicate with and understand both cultures, these Cuban Americans have taken on the role of translator not only for themselves but for society at large. In his groundbreaking book-length essay, Life on the Hyphen: the Cuban-American Way (1993), Pérez-Firmat maintains, however, that this is only a transitional stage and that the next generation will follow a path similar to that of the children of European immigrants, who are simply considered ethnic Americans and are more American than they are anything else. The book was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994 and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award. Themes of biculturalism are everpresent in Perez-Firmat’s three collections of poetry—Carolina Cuban (1987), Equivocaciones (1989), and Bilingual Blues (1995)—which are full of codeswitching and bilingual–bicultural double entendres and playfulness. His tour-de-force exploration of bilingualism* and biculturalism as a critic and writer, Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo- Hispanic Literature, was published in 2003. Although biculturalism forms the framework for Pérez-Firmat’s poetry, it is not his sole theme. He is an expansive poet: a poet Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. 873

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of love, eroticism, and the daily, tedious rhythms of life. He chronicles both growing up and growing old, battles with family and battles with illness. In his book-length memoir, Next Year in Cuba (1995), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Pérez-Firmat documents the tension his generation feels between identifying with other Americans their age and identifying with their parents, who always looked forward to returning to Cuba. True to form, PérezFirmat re-created the memoir in Spanish in 1997 as El año que viene estamos en Cuba. Pérez-Firmat’s latest novel, Anything but Love (2000), is a tour de force of culture conflict revolving around love, marriage, and sex roles, all articulated with the inimitable rhapsodic excess that is the author’s trademark. In 2005, Pérez-Firmat published a memoir, Scar Tissue, in prose and verse in which he chronicles his dealing with the death of his father and with his own prostate cancer. Pérez-Firmat is currently the David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. Further Reading Montes, Rafael Miguel, Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature: Making Places/hacienda lugares (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006). Muñoz, Elías, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (Madrid: Betania, 1988).

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Album cover of Pedro Pietri performing his poetry.

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Pietri, Pedro (1944–2004). Pedro Pietri is famous for the literary persona of street urchin or skid-row bum that he created for himself. His works are characterized by the consistent perspective of the underclass in language, philosophy, and creative and psychological freedom. Pietri was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on March 21, 1944, just two years before his family migrated to New York. He was orphaned of both parents while still a child and was raised by his grandmother. Pietri attended public schools in New York City and served in the Army from 1966 to 1968. Other than his having taught writing occasionally and participated in workshops, very little else is known about this intentionally mysterious and unconventional figure. Pietri published collections of poems and poetry chapbooks: The Blue and the Gray (1975), Invisible Poetry (1979), Out of Order (1980), Uptown Train (1980), An Alternate (1980), Traffic Violations (1983), and Missing Out of

Pineda, Cecile

Action (1992). But it was his first book of poetry, Puerto Rican Obituary (1971), that brought him his greatest fame and a host of imitators, making him a model for the Nuyorican* school of literature. In 1973, a live performance by him of poems from this book was recorded and distributed by Folkways Records. In 1980, Pietri’s short story Lost in the Museum of Natural History was published in bilingual format in Puerto Rico. Pietri also had numerous unpublished, but produced, plays, as well as two published collections: The Masses Are Asses (1984) and Illusions of a Revolving Door: Plays Teatro (1992, Illusions of a Revolving Door: Theater Plays). Among those of Pietri’s plays that have been produced are “Lewlulu” (1976), “What Goes Up Must Come Down” (1976), “The Living-Room” (1978), “Dead Heroes Have No Feelings” (1978), “Jesus Is Leaving” (1978), “Mondo Mambo? A Mambo Rap Sodi” (1990), and “Act One and Only” (2001). Always a master of the incongruous and surprising, Pietri created unlikely but humorous narrative situations in both his poetry and plays, such as that of his poem “Suicide Note from a Cockroach in a Low Income Housing Project” and in a dialogue between a character and her own feces in his play Appearing in Person Tonight—Your Mother. Pietri’s work is one of a total break with conventions, both literary and social, and is subversive in its open rejection of established society and its hypocrisies. On March 3, 2004, Pietri died of stomach cancer. Further Reading Mohr, Eugene V., The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos Pineda, Cecile (1932–). Born on September 24, 1932, in New York City’s Harlem, the daughter of a Mexican political refugee father and a Swiss immigrant mother, Cecile received her early education in Catholic schools and went on to graduate with honors from Barnard College in 1964. In 1966, Pineda married Felix Leneman, a French national, and had two sons. In the late 1960s, Pineda moved to San Francisco. She received a master’s degree in theater from San Francisco State University in 1970 and promptly began a career as a director and playwright. Before her career as a novelist, Pineda worked extensively in theater. She had already founded Theatre of Man, a poet’s theater based on works of archetype, symbol, and dream; she directed the ensemble from 1969 to 1981. Alongside the works of other playwrights, Pineda staged her own: “Murder in the Cathedral” (1960), “Vision of the Book of Job” (1970), “After Eurydice” (1972), “Stoneground” (1974), “The Trial” (1975), “Medea: A Legend for the Theater” (1976), “Threesome: A Clown Play” (1977), “Time/Piece” (1978), and “Goya” (1979). She also participated in the construction of various other works written and staged by the collective. When her theater disbanded, in part because of a lack of funding, Pineda turned to writing fiction. Pineda is the author of Face (1985), Frieze (1986), Love Queen of the Amazon (1991), Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood (2001), Bardo99 (2002), and Redoubt: A Mononovel (2004). 875

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Fishlight, a nonfiction memoir, was written with the assistance of a National Endowment Fiction Fellowship and named Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Both Frieze and Face won the gold medals from the Commonwealth Club of California. In style, Pineda’s novels bear the influence of playwrights Beckett and Artaud, revealing existential angst and often experimenting with minimalism, monotony, and the isolation of lonely, anxious characters, whether they are stranded in a desert tundra, as in Bardo99, or nameless and of indefinite gender and pure consciousness imprisoned by the body, as in Redoubt. In her award-winning debut novel, Face, a social outcast takes to the hinterland to reconstruct his disfigured face with needle, thread, and razor blades; this alienated, marginalized spectre of a man eventually works his way back into society. Frieze is a total departure from the other novels in that it goes back in time to the courtly society of Java and follows the life of a sculptor of friezes; as such, it is an exploration of the life of someone who lives totally for art. The Love Queen of the Amazon is a departure as well in its clever parody of magical realism; a story of unrequited love set in the Peruvian Amazon, it is full of adventure, danger, and intrigue and displays the richest use of language in Pineda’s writing. Fishlight is a highly autobiographical novel following the episodes of Pineda’s sad life as a child reared in a small apartment in New York City by a cruel Swiss mother and an irresponsible mystic of a Mexican father. Pineda has been a creative writing teacher and visiting professor at many universities, from California to Madras, India. Further Reading Johnson, David E., “Face Value: An Essay on Cecile Pineda’s Face” The Américas Review Vol. 19 (Summer 1991): 73–93. Lomelí, Francisco A., “Cecile Pineda” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 202–211).

Nicolás Kanellos Pinkola Estés, Clarissa (1943–). Born in northern Indiana on January 27, 1943, Clarissa Pinkola Estés is a poet, psychoanalyst, and nonfiction writer whose books have risen to the top of the best seller lists in the United States and have been translated to many languages. Born to Mexican farm workers, she was adopted and raised by a Hungarian American couple close to Lake Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Union Institute and University and in 1960 began her practicing as a posttraumatic specialist. By the 1970s, she had begun teaching writing in prisons in Colorado and other southwestern states. Pinkola Estés became the first U.S. Hispanic author to have her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype (1992), make it to the New York Times best seller list, making the list just five weeks after it was published. The book also remained on the list longer than any other book written by a Hispanic. Women Who Run with the Wolves contains original stories, folk tales, myths, and legends, along with psychoanalytical commentary based on women’s lives. Hispanic magazine hailed it as the 876

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“feminine manifesto for all women, regardless of age, race, creed, or religion, to return to their wild roots.” Pinkila Estés founded and directs the C.P. Estés Guadalupe Foundation, which has as one of its missions the broadcasting of strengthening stories, via shortwave radio, to trouble spots around the world. In 1994, Pinkola Estés was awarded the Associated Catholic Church Press Award for Writing, and in 1995 she won the National Association for Advancement of Psychoanalysis Gradiva Award. Her other books include The Gift of Story: A Wise Tale About What is Enough (1993), The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die (1996), a fifty-page introduction to Tales of the Brothers’ Grimm, Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (2004), La danza delle grandi madri: The Dance of the Grand Madris (published in Milan, Italy, in 2004), and The Dangerous Old Woman (2007). Further Reading Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kemp, Latinas! Women of Achievement (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Piñero, Miguel (1946–1988). Miguel Piñero, the most famous dramatist to come out of the Nuyorican* school, was born in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, on December 19, 1946. He was raised on the Lower East Side of New York, the site of many of his plays and poems. Shortly after moving to New York, his father abandoned the family, which had to live on the streets until his mother could find a source of income. Piñero was a gang leader and involved in petty crime and drugs while an adolescent; he was a junior-high dropout and by the time he was twenty-four had been sent to Sing Sing Correctional Facility for armed robbery. While at Sing Sing, he began writing and acting in a theater workshop there. By the time of his release, his most famous play, Short Eyes (published in 1975), had already been prepared in draft form. The play was produced and soon moved to Broadway after getting favorable reviews. During the successful run of his play and afterward, Piñero became involved with a group of Nuyorican writers in the Lower East Side and became one of the

Cover portrait of Miguel Piñero.

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principal spokespersons and models for the new school of Nuyorican literature, which was furthered by the publication of Nuyorican Poets: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, compiled and edited by him and Miguel Algarín in 1975. During this time, as well, Piñero began his career as a scriptwriter for such television dramatic series as Baretta, Kojak, and Miami Vice. In all, Piñero wrote some eleven plays that were produced, most of which are included in his two collections, The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon, Eulogy for a Small-Time Thief (1983) and Outrageous One-Act Plays (1986). Piñero is also the author of a book of poems, La Bodega Sold Dreams (1986). Included among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play, an Obie, and the Drama Desk Award, all in 1974 for Short Eyes. Piñero died of sclerosis of the liver on June 17, 1988, after many years of hard living and recurrent illnesses as a dope addict. Piñero’s life was memorialized in a Hollywood feature film, Piñero (2001), starring Benjamin Bratt as the poet-playwright. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Piñeyro, Enrique (1839–1911). Distinguished educator, writer, and editor Enrique Piñeyro edited one of the most important periodicals of the Cuban independence movement in New York. The son of a university professor, Piñeyro was born on December 19, 1839, in Havana, received his education there, graduated from the University of Havana Law School, and became an educator. Piñeyro is considered Cuba’s first literary critic. In 1856, he published a piece on Victor Hugo and soon began publishing original literary works and literary criticism in such forums as Álbum Cubano de lo Bueno y lo Bello (Cuban Album of the Good and the Bad). He founded and edited two magazines: Revista Habanera (Habanera Review), along with Juan Clemente Zenea,* and La Revista del Pueblo (The People’s Review). At the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War in 1869, he was forced into exile in New York, where he became known as a fiery orator in support of Cuban independence and edited La Revolución (The Revolution), the main organ of the Cuban and Puerto Rican Central Junta. He also coedited, with José Manuel Mestre,* El Mundo Nuevo (The New World), an illustrated magazine affiliated with Leslie’s. In New York he began writing his monumental Historia de la litereatura española (History of Spanish Literature). In 1872, he published a biography of the revolutionary leader Morales Lemus: Morales Lemus y la revolución de Cuba (Morales Lemus and the Cuban Revolution). For his political activities, Piñeyro was tried in absentia by the Spanish authorities in Cuba and condemned to death. After the Ten Years’ War, Piñeyro was able to return to his homeland, but he only stayed there briefly. He moved to Paris, where again he associated with expatriate revolutionaries and edited Hojas Literarias (Literary 878

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Leaves) and Revista Cubana (Cuban Review). After Cuba separated from Spain, he decided to remain in Paris, where he died in 1911. His most important book, Bosquejos, retratos y recuerdos (1912, Sketches, Portraits, and Memories), was published posthumously. Further Reading Poyo, Gerald Eugene, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Pirrín, Eusebio (1912–?). Eusebio Pirrín (Pirrín was a stage name; his real family name may have been Torres) was born into a circus and vaudeville family that toured principally the U.S. Southwest and somewhat in South America. Born in Silao (some sources say Guadalajara or Celaya), Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1912 (some sources say 1910 or 1911), Eusebio developed his famous Don Catarino act on the Los Angeles stage; “Don Catarino” was named for a character in a comic strip that ran in Los Angeles’s El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald). Although Eusebio was only an abnormally short teenager at the time, “Don Catarino” was a tiny old man with a bushy moustache. “Don Catarino” became so famous that he spawned many imitators of his dress, speech, and particular brand of humor throughout the Southwest and Mexico. The Pirrín family troupe enjoyed great fame and fortune and was able to continue performing in the Southwest from the early 1920s throughout the Depression and World War II. Although “Don Catarino” was a rural ranch type, most of his humor was urban; Eusebio Pirrín wrote or created all of the revues and music in which his character took center stage. Eusebio Pirrín’s revues are too numerous to list here, but many of them celebrated urban nightlife in Los Angeles, and others commented on and satirized such important political and social themes as the Depression, exile, and the use of alcohol and drugs.

Eusebio Pirrín as Don Catarino.

Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Plan de Santa Barbara. In April 1969, one month after the National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference adjourned at the Crusade for Justice Center in Denver, Colorado, Chicano students met at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a conference that became one of the most crucial Chicano events in California. It was sponsored by the Coordinating Council on Higher Education, a network of students and professors who had returned from Denver full of enthusiasm and energy. By now, the Chicano student community was 879

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ready to implement a higher education plan that would go beyond previous pronouncements. A major objective was the creation of college curriculum that was relevant and useful to the community. Higher education, the students reasoned, was a publicly funded infrastructure that enhanced the business community and other white bastions of power; very little was expended on the needs of the taxpaying Chicano community. The students incorporated El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), the ultimate ideological expression of Chicanismo, formulated at the Denver meeting, into the design so that it would be used by future Chicano studies programs and students. As such, the group decided to bring all California Chicano student groups under one standard called El Movimiento Estudiantil de Aztlán (MEChA—The Aztlán Student Movement). The term “Chicano” became canonized after this meeting, especially among the Mexican-origin intelligentsia. Curiously, although the term has at times almost disappeared as a self-reference term, it is as strong as ever at universities. More importantly, at the conference, El Plan de Santa Barbara (The Santa Barbara Plan) was formulated, a design for implementing Chicano studies programs throughout the California university system. The Plan eschewed assimilation and produced the most resounding rejection of Mexican American ideology to date. According to the Plan, Chicanismo involves a crucial distinction in political consciousness between a Mexican American and a Chicano mentality. Mexican Americans are people who lack respect for their culture and ethnic heritage. Unsure of themselves, they seek assimilation as a way out of their “degraded” social status and consequently remain politically ineffective. In contrast, Chicanismo reflects self-respect and pride in one’s ethnic and cultural background. The Chicano acts with confidence and has a range of alternatives in the political world. These programs contained a curriculum intended to train a vanguard of future Chicano leaders that demonstrated how American capitalism and racism had colonized their people: The liberation of his people from prejudice and oppression is in his hand and this responsibility is greater than personal achievement and more meaningful than degrees, especially if they are earned at the expense of this identity and cultural integrity.

The Plan did not ask for specific commitment to physical action—e.g., to unionize or to strive for a separate country. Nor did it ask students to drop out of school. The Mexican American emphasis on getting a good education remained integral to the Chicano Movement, but a good education did not mean becoming an Anglo and forgetting about the community. The Plan also asked that students control Chicano studies programs—e.g., the power to select and fire professors in accordance with criteria established by Chicanos, not by the university administration.

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After the meeting at Santa Barbara, a spate of programs was pushed into existence through student militancy. The largest and the most intellectually dynamic was the UCLA Chicano Studies Center, founded primarily to conduct research. Most of the these centers and teaching programs—practically all of the California state colleges and universities instituted them— remained traditional and did not adhere to a radical departure from academicsas-usual to teach liberation, impart cultural nationalist interpretations, or train activist cadres to organize in the community. Perhaps the program that came the closest to these ideals was the one directed by the activist-scholar Rodolfo Acuña, at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge). Nonetheless, its fame depended more on Acuña’s national recognition than on following the radical precepts demanded by students. In 1972, Acuña published the most widely read survey of Chicano history, Occupied America, which contained the radical interpretation expected by Chicano students. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

F. Arturo Rosales Playwriting. In the heyday of Spanish-language theater in the Southwest during the 1920s, theaters competed for audiences, especially in Los Angeles, where five main theaters operated daily and at least twelve others played intermittent shows. Theater impresarios implemented many strategies for drawing audiences, including hosting contests on stage, having raffles, and hiring some of the best playwrights and musicians to employ their arts at their theaters. One of the most popular strategies was to host playwriting contests, producing the works of the contesting playwrights in separate debuts accompanied by much fanfare and awarding a prize to the winner. The audiences were not only enthralled with the opportunity to see new works staged but also with meeting playwrights and actually debating the merits of each play; it was even better when the plays related directly to their lives in Los Angeles, San Antonio, or elsewhere. In 1921, the Teatro Principal in Los Angeles became the first Hispanic theater in the United States to establish a playwriting contest. Following this lead, playwriting contests sponsored by the many Los Angeles Spanish-language theaters gave rise to a boom in original works written for the stages of the Southwest. Many of the plays were based on local themes, and some even elaborated plots based on Hispanic culture in the Southwest dating back to missionary and colonial times. Locally written plays became so popular in Los Angeles that the largest crowds were registered at the playhouses every time that new plays by local writers were featured. The Teatro Principal invited local playwrights to submit works in any theatrical genre in prose or in verse. The winning works were chosen for production by director Romualdo Tirado,* and their authors were paid royalties based on the box office sales. At the end

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of the run, the newly produced plays competed in an additional contest in which the plays were judged by a panel and by audience acclamation. The firstand second-place winners were awarded prizes of $100 and $500, respectively. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States, Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Poetry. Latinos have been writing poetry in the lands that became the United States since the late sixteenth century. Despite having cultivated all types of written and oral literature during the ensuing centuries of incorporation into the United States through conquest, territorial purchase, and immigration, many of Latinos’ literary traditions persisted to preserve their cultural identity within an expanding and overwhelmingly aggressive “national” culture that did not recognize Spanish speakers as part of an ever-evolving “America.” Despite the centuries of Hispanic literacy and literary production in the United States and in other lands of origin, such as Puerto Rico, that were incorporated into the United States, it was not until the emergence of a Latino literary movement as part of civil rights struggles in the 1960s that scholars, critics and writers gained some awareness of Latino poetry, its traditions and practices, albeit only in the poetry accessible to them through the English language. The poetry of the social movement was produced in Spanish and English or in a mixture of both (see Bilingualism in Literature). Like the civil rights struggles themselves, the literary movement was highly identified with working-class communities and mores and was unselfconsciously derived from and nurtured by folk literary practices and rituals, but most importantly by the tradition of the roving bards and musical performers responsible for the continuation of centuries-old public, poetic performance. The “primitivism” and oral performance, above all, seems to have been what was most noteworthy to those observers outside of Hispanic culture, whose only reference for understanding it was jazz poetry or the recitations of the Beat Generation. The first poets involved in the Chicano Movement* hailed from these grassroots traditions and were not influenced by academic conventions and expectations. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales,* the author of what has been acknowledged as the Chicano epic poem, I Am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín, was a boxer and political activist. I Am Joaquín disseminated a cultural-nationalist esthetic that provided a model for grassroots and student-activist poets. The poem, self-published bilingually in 1967, summarized Mexican and Mexican American history, reviewed the exploitation of the mestizos from colonial times to the present, and shaped a nationalist ideology for activism, using the model of the nineteenth-century social rebel Joaquín Murieta. The short bilingual pamphlet edition of the poem was literally passed from hand to hand in communities, read aloud at rallies, dramatized by Chicano theaters, and even produced as a slide show on a film with a dramatic reading by the major dramatist/activist of the times, Luis Valdez.* All of this spurred further grass882

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roots poetic creativity and pointed to poets as spokespersons for their disenfranchised communities. Another community-based poet, Abelardo Delgado,* was a Spanish-dominant bilingual writer steeped in the performance styles and the intimate relationship of declamadores to their local audiences; instead of merely performing his works at holiday celebrations, on Mother’s Day, and as part of poetic debates (things that he was perfectly capable of and Abelardo Delgado conducting a poetry workshop. very willing to do), his performances now took place at political rallies, strikes, and marches to articulate community perspectives and inspire community action. Unlike many a traditional declamador, however, Abelardo allowed his poems to be printed and circulated in local barrio newspapers throughout the Southwest, where community folk and activists found them, copied them, and circulated them by hand. Out of practicality, and to spread the word of the Chicano Movement, Abelardo began to self-publish books of his own poetry, such as Chicano: 25 Pieces of Mexican American Mind (1969), that became the first bestsellers in the barrios and the early ethnic studies courses at universities. The word of the political and social movement, accompanied by artistic expression of all types, from mural painting to street theater, quickly spread to those warehouses of the victims of racism and miseducation: the prisons. From prison cells emerged self-taught voices that again returned to their barrio upbringings for inspiration and passionately declared that their previous violence on society would be redirected toward revolution or reform in the name of their community. From behind the bars emerged some of the most lasting and inspiring poets: Ricardo Sánchez,* Raúl Salinas,* and, later, Jimmy Santiago Baca.* (See Prison Literature.) In fact, Salinas made the prison experience the central metaphor for Chicano life in the barrios in his Un Trip through the Mind Jail (1973). The influence and social impact of I Am Joaquín, Chicano, Trip, and the works of the other poets who wrote for and from the grassroots in the militant stage of the Chicano Movement are inestimable. This period was one of euphoria, power, and influence for the Chicano poet, who was sought after— almost as a priest—to give his or her blessings in the form of readings at all Chicano cultural and movement events. In New York and the Midwest, a similar grassroots movement emerged, also led by poets of the spoken word who were inspired by folk poetry and music— in this case salsa music and performance. From the prisons emerged Piri Thomas,* Miguel Piñero,* Lucky Cienfuegos, and numerous others. (See 883

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Prison Literature.) Community bards, such as Jorge Brandon, who performed from memory his poems on corners in the Lower East Side, served as models of artistic and cultural commitment for these writers, as did the Afro American jailhouse poets. Tato Laviera* even apprenticed himself to Brandon, who had traveled the countries rimming the Caribbean basin reciting his works and collecting the words and styles of other declamadores from Colombia to Mexico. A very young Victor Hernández Cruz* studied the relationship established by salsa composers and performers with their audiences and emulated their artistry, hoping to reproduce the Afro-Caribbean sounds and ethos of Ray Barreto, Eddie Palmieri, and Tito Puente. In Chicago, David Hernández likewise took street and salsa rhythms and diction and even performed with Afro-Caribbean jazz ensembles. Nuyorican* writing made its appearance in the United States with a definite proletarian identity, emerging from the working-class, urbanized culture of the children of migrants. It arose as a dynamic literature of oral performance based on the folklore and popular culture within the neighborhoods of the most cosmopolitan and postmodern city in the United States: New York. Even the name “Nuyorican” was derived from “New York Rican.” Victor Hernández Cruz’s urban jazz poetry and Piri Thomas’s black-inflected poetry and prose in the late 1960s, and, later, Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero’s Nuyorican Poetry anthology (1975)—all issued by mainstream commercial presses about the same time they were reprinting I Am Joaquín and publishing Ricardo Sánchez’s Canto y grito mi liberación (1971)—led the way toward the establishment of a new cultural and literary Nuyorican identity that was as hip as salsa and as alienated and seethingly revolutionary as shouts from urban labor camps and the prisons in which many of the first practitioners of Nuyorican poetry learned their craft. Ex-con and ex–gang leader Miguel Piñero and the Nuyorican group of poets, some of whom were outlaws in the literal as well as figurative sense, embellished on the theme of urban marginalization and repression and made it the threatening dynamic of their bilingual poetry and drama— Piñero was successful in taking it even to the stages of Broadway and to Hollywood films. Their works threatened the very concept of literature cultivated by the academy as highly crafted art based on literate models selected from the classical repertoire of Western civilization. The Nuyorican writers created a style and ideology that still dominates urban Hispanic writing today: working-class, unapologetic, and proud of its lack of schooling and polish—a threat not only to mainstream literature and the academy but also, with its insistence on its outlaw and street culture elements, to mainstream society. Poets such as Tato Laviera, Victor Hernández Cruz, Sandra María Esteves,* and Pedro Pietri* did not seek written models for their work. They were far more attuned to and inspired by urban argot, salsa lyrics, and the recitations of the folk poets who had always performed the news, history, and love songs in the public plazas and festivals of small-town Puerto Rico—often in the form of décimas* and the refrains of bombas and ple-

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nas, the prevalent folk-song frameworks on the island. From capturing the sights and sounds of their “urban pastoral,” it was an easy and natural step to cultivating bilingual poetry, to capturing the bilingual–bicultural reality that surrounded them, and to reintroducing their works into their communities through the virtuosity that live performance demands in folk culture. El Barrio, the Bronx, and Loisaida (the Lower East Side) neighborhood audiences, made exigent by the technical sophistication of salsa records and live performance, as well as television and film, demanded authenticity, artistic virtuosity, and philosophical and political insight, and Laviera, Hernández Cruz, Esteves and Pietri reigned as masters for almost two decades. That they are accessible to far more people through oral performance than publication is neither an accident nor a sign of lack of sophistication; it was their literary mission— their political and economic stance. It was Miguel Algarín,* however, a university-educated poet and professor at Rutgers University also raised in the Puerto Rican barrios, who insisted on the publication of Nuyorican poetry in anthologies and magazines and through Arte Público Press* books. He further showcased Nuyorican performance art at his Nuyorican Poets Cafe in “Loisaida” and took troupes of writers on national tours and poetry slams. Besides authoring outstanding avant-garde poetry himself (somewhat indebted to the Beat Generation), Algarín helped solidify the Nuyorican literary identity and foster its entrance into the larger world of contemporary American avantgarde poetics. The 1970s saw the emergence of the first generation of U.S. Hispanics to have greater access to college, largely because of the Kennedy–Johnson initiatives to democratize education. For Chicano literature, the decade of the 1960s was a time of questioning of all the commonly accepted truths in the society, foremost of which was the question of equality. The grassroots movement was soon joined by one in academia as university-educated writers and universitybased magazines and publishing houses continued the development of Latino literature (mostly in the English language). Precedents were set for Algarín founding a Nuyorican Press, professor Samuel Betances in Chicago founding a journal, The Rican: Journal of Contemporary Puerto Rican Thought (1971), professors Nicolás Kanellos* and Luis Dávila in Indiana founding the first national literary magazine dedicated to Latino writing in general, Revista ChicanoRiqueña (1973), and professor Gary Keller initiating The Bilingual Review* (1974), when two University of California–Berkeley social science professors started publishing El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought (1967) and their canonizing publishing house, Editorial Quinto Sol.* The Berkeley professors also issued their own first anthology of bilingual–bicultural Chicano literature, El Espejo/The Mirror (1969), which helped to launch the career of the important pioneer and transitional writer, Alurista* (Alberto Baltasar Urista), who combined the activism of the grassroots poet with a literate tradition that went back to Aztec and Maya writers in trilingual poems. Alurista’s Floricanto en Aztlán (1971) was the first poetry

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collection to be issued by a university (UCLA’s) ethnic studies program, and he later became the greatest experimenter and innovator of bilingual poetry, creating a meta-language of sound and symbol with conflicting connotations and denotations, especially in Spik in glyph? (1981). In 1976, the Chicano Studies Program at UCLA followed with a tome of fluid, inventive bilingual poetry, Hechizospells: Poetry/Stories/Vignettes/Articles/Notes on the Human Condition of Chicanos & Pícaros, Words and Hopes within Soulmind, by Ricardo Sánchez. Tino Villanueva* and Tomás Rivera,* professors of Spanish hailing from Texas, also helped the transition to academia, grounded in contemporary Spanish Peninsular poets while rescuing the migrant-worker argot of their upbringing; however, Rivera is most known for his foundational Chicano novel . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987) and Villanueva for his first book Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1972, There Is Another Voice: Poems) and his compiling of the first Spanish-language anthology of Chicano literature, Chicanos: antología histórica y literaria (Chicanos: Historical and Literary Anthology), published in Mexico in 1980. As ethnic studies courses and student activism grew during the 1970s, numerous Chicano, Nuyorican, and even Cuban writers developed at universities from coast to coast. In general, they were not educated in creative writing programs, which up until the 1990s remained aloof from and reproving of what their professors believed to be uneducated doggerel. Rather, many of the Latino poets were Spanish majors. If students of English, their models remained outside the academy, for the most part, including the literate models from Spain and Latin America. Among the politically committed authors making the transition from the activist poetry of the 1960s and the learned university environment were José Antonio Burciaga,* Martín Espada,* Cecilio García Camarillo, Leroy Quintana,* Luis Omar Salinas* (whose early works in the 1960s were highly influential in the Movement), Juan Felipe Herrera,* Leo Romero,* and the first women writers to finally break through what had been a maledominated and testosterone-fueled movement: Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Lucha Corpi* (writing only in Spanish), Inés Hernández Tovar, Angela de Hoyos,* Pat Mora,* Marina Rivera, Carmen Tafolla,* Gina Valdés,* Alma Villanueva,* Evangelina Vigil,* and Bernice Zamora. Like Sandra María Esteves in New York, who started performing her works with the Puerto Rican independence movement musical company El Grupo, San Antonio’s Vigil, El Paso’s Mora, and Chicago’s Ana Castillo* emerged in the mid-1970s with strong roots in public performance. But despite publishing their poems in such Latino literary magazines as Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Mango, San Antonio’s pulp Caracol (edited by Cecilio García Camarillo), and Revista Chicano-Riqueña (later to become The Americas Review [1981] and, in 1979, to spawn Arte Público Press), Cervantes, Mora, and Vigil were not able to publish books until the early 1980s. Cervantes brought to literature a clear and passionate commitment to human rights born of her own experience of poverty and oppression, along with personal family tragedy. Mora translated within her own clean and spiritual verse

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the emotions and worldview of border dwellers, very much preserving a sense of spoken Spanish, but within an English-language framework. Much like Esteves and Laviera, Evangelina Vigil captured the internal history of cultural and linguistic conflict within her bilingual poems, which celebrated life in the barrios. Castillo very early took up the women’s struggle within Latino culture as a dominant theme, and the other writers mentioned pressed their feminism as an orientation for a diverse array of sociopolitical themes. (It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that a fully developed feminist and lesbian poetics developed in such writers as Gloria Anzaldúa,* Alicia Gaspar de Alba,* Cherríe Moraga,* Aurora Levins Morales,* and Luz María Umpierre-Herrera.* [See Gay and Lesbian Literature.]) All of these writers served as transitions to the first generation of Latino writers to gain attention from a national culture that was finally becoming aware of its diversity. To borrow a term from minority music criticism, the first generation of Latino poets to “cross over” to the English-language academy was in place by the mid-1980s. For the most part, they were the beneficiaries of a democratized university and of greater access to Latino models as well as to mainstream literate ones and were predominantly the products of creative writing programs. Something new had occurred in the history of Hispanic literature in the United States: Latinos were going to college and graduate school to become professional writers. Furthermore, a Latino could actually make a living by writing about his or her own cultural upbringing; Latino life was an adequate subject for “high art”—or so their creative writing professors had counseled them. Among the ranks of graduates from MFA programs were Alberto Ríos,* Julia Alvarez,* Denise Chávez,* Sandra Cisneros,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Gary Soto,* Virgil Suárez,* and Helena María Viramontes,* among a number of others. To those looking in on Latino literature from the outside, these writers of well-crafted English were Latino literature. Most of these authors were recognized by some of the academy’s most prestigious awards, from Walt Whitman prizes, Guggenheims, and NEA fellowships to a MacCarther Prize. Many of their books were published by prestigious university presses, including Pitt and Georgia, and their prose works were issued or reissued (after first appearing in Latino presses) by the large commercial publishers, including Norton, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Some of them were able to sustain their writing with faculty positions in creative writing at such prestigious institutions as UC–Berkeley, Cornell, and Vanderbilt. The literature of this generation is the Hispanic or Latino literature that is most known by non-Latino readers in the United States today and that has the greatest possibility of entering and influencing mainstream culture. However, this is also the Hispanic literature that has emerged from and been influenced most by mainstream culture and its institutions; therefore, it is the most accessible to a broad segment of English speakers and has the greatest access to publishing houses and critics. On the other hand, this literature is the literature of a minority of Hispanic writers (a very select few, indeed),

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and tends to distance itself from its indigenous communities as the writers often live within university communities and target non-Hispanic readers, especially those that make up the creative writing establishment. Theirs is a contemporary manifestation of a long-standing Latino heritage, the very tip of an iceberg whose body is made up of centuries of writing in Spanish as racialized natives of the United States or as immigrants sought for their cheap labor or who were the children of political exiles. Because more than eighty percent of Latinos in the United States are working-class and without advanced education, this elite cadre of poets and writers finds itself today in the position of some of their counterparts in the Third World, where, given the poverty and illiteracy of their countries, they must find their audiences outside of their immediate national communities. However, the history of Latino culture in the United States, even among the working class, has never been one of illiteracy, and Latino audiences have always been accessible to their writers. Today, all of these trajectories continue to produce poetry, although the fervor and opportunities for politically engaged poetry have abated considerably since the 1970s. Few writers have been able to cross from one writing culture to another in Latino literature. Lorna Dee Cervantes is an exception in her ability to maintain the passion and the craft and to continue to develop her art while finding a permanent place for herself in a creative writing program (at the University of Colorado). Others, such as Judith Ortiz Cofer, have attained endowed chairs and prestigious awards while remaining faithful to their bicultural upbringing and culture; in part Cofer has accomplished this not just through the authenticity and frankness of her voice, but also by reaching out to young Latino audiences through young adult literature—without prejudice as regards genre. Distinguished writers outside the academy who continue to be a mainstay of the literature include Pat Mora, who has become the most reprinted Latino poet in language arts and high school textbooks. In addition, she has produced poetry collections for young adults, such as her My Own True Name (2001), and even introduced her poetry in children’s picture books. Rafael Campo,* a physician, has become one of the most distinguished voices of the gay community in his poetry and, in addition, has successfully captured the attention of academia by winning prestigious awards. Somewhat distanced from the Puerto Rican populations in the Northeast and the Midwest, Gloria Vando* has produced two outstanding book collections of poems reflective of imperialism of and colonized peoples around the world. Her Thorpe Menn Prize-winning Promesas: Geography of the Impossible (1993) is appropriate to read alongside Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Patterson Prize–winning From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger (1992). Finally, a new writer has come up through university training but maintained the authentic voice and class stand of her people: police officer and poet Sarah Cortez,* whose How to Undress a Cop (2001) has attracted significant critical response from The Hudson Review and academic journals. 888

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During the last few decades, an important segment of Latino poetry has been created by immigrant writers who write in Spanish or English and deal with feelings of alienation, exile, and uprootedness in American society. Among them are Marjorie Agosin, José Corrales,* Isaac Goldemberg,* Guillermo Gómez Peña,* Carolina Hospital,* José Kozer, Rubén Medina,* Jaime Montesinos, Heberto Padilla,* Gustavo Pérez-Firmat,* Emma SepúlvedaPulvirenti,* Iván Silén* (a Puerto Rican writing in New York as an exile), Virgil Suárez, and a number of others. Of these, Guillermo Gómez Peña has been the most experimental and daring, fully exploring the transnationalism of Latinos and other populations around the postmodern world. His poems are part of a multimedia happening that extends to theater, essay, painting, and music in bilingual performance. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). Mohr, Eugene V., The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (Madrid: Betania, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Pompa, Aurelio (1901–1924). The prosecution, court trial, and death of Mexican immigrant Aurelio Pompa became the motive for the writing and singing of numerous corridos,* or ballads, as well as hit plays that were produced in the Southwest for years after his death. On the morning of October 19, 1922, at the site of the new Los Angeles post office, twenty-one-year-old Aurelio Pompa killed William McCue, the carpenter for whom Pompa served as a laborer. The prosecution contended that Pompa used tools against McCue’s wishes; in an ensuing argument McCue struck the ambitious young Mexican with his fist and the side of a saw blade. Pompa went home, returned with a revolver and shot McCue twice without warning, once in the heart. Mexican witnesses, however, swore that a second argument ensued before Pompa took out a gun and shot McCue. Police arrived just in time to prevent white workmen from lynching Pompa. In April of 1923, Pompa was convicted of first-degree murder and given the death sentence. In November, attorney Frank E. Domínguez appealed the sentence, citing errors and stating that the verdict was contrary to law, but Superior Court Judge Russ Avery affirmed the original judgment. The Mexican community perceived the slaying as self-defense. An editorial appearing in Hispano América captured the highly charged pro-Pompa sentiment: The threat of the gallows is being brandished in the case of another Mexican whose name is Aurelio Pompa. Never mind that he had to kill to protect his own life and, on top of that, half of the jury was in favor of finding him innocent. For

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the sake of humanity and love of justice, we must mobilize to save that unfortunate man.

This sentiment prompted a campaign that netted $3,000, even before the Mexican consul decided to help coordinate fund raising. Jesús Heras, editor of El Heraldo de México,* was among the most ardent supporters. The California Mexican community, Pompa’s mother, and even Mexican president Alvaro Obregón’s mother pressured the Mexican president to intercede. Although President Obregón sent an appeal to Governor Friend William Richardson and supporters gathered 12,915 signatures petitioning for clemency, Richardson did not commute the sentence. Pompa’s execution on March 3, 1924, shocked and grieved the Mexican community, and he became an instant folk martyr. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, ¡Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

F. Arturo Rosales Pompa, Elías Calixto (1836–1887). Born in Guatire, Venezuela, the self-educated popular poet Elías Calixto Pompa, who often wrote under the pseudonym “K. Listo,” was the son of one of the founding fathers of the Venezuelan Republic, Colonel Gerónimo Pompa. Pompa is known as the poet of family values and of epigrammatic moral teachings—so much so that his name now adorns schools in his native land. Besides writing simple, sincere poetry, Pompa also penned plays, essays, and newspaper articles. Active in liberal politics, Pompa was jailed in 1876 and then exiled in 1878, and again in 1879. It was in his New York exile that he published his collection of poems, Versos de K. Listo (1879, Verses by K. Listo). Pompa published poetry Elías Calixto Pompa. and essays extensively in newspapers in Venezuela and somewhat in the Spanish-language periodicals of the United States. After his death, more and more editions and studies of his work were issued in Venezuela. Three of his simple yet profound poems are to this date included in many of Venezuelan primary school textbooks: “Estudia,” “Trabaja,” and “Descansa.” Further Reading Pineda, Rafael, Elías Calixto Pompa (Caracas: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Cultura y Bellas Artes, 1958).

Nicolás Kanellos Ponce, Mary Helen (1938–). Born on January 24, 1938, in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley of California, May Helen Ponce first began writing in grammar school and in eighth grade wrote a play that was produced. Continuing to envision herself as a writer throughout her education, Ponce received a B.A. and M.A. in Mexican American studies at California State University in 1978 and 1980, respectively. She earned a second M.A. in history in 1984 from the University of California–Los Angeles and eventually a Ph.D. at the 890

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University of New Mexico in 1988. Throughout these years she developed her literary career and taught at colleges in the Los Angeles area. From her very first self-published collection of stories, Recuerdo: Short Stories of the Barrio (1983) to her later books published by university-based press, Ponce has been faithful to the people with whom she grew up, especially the women, to record and immortalize their lives in fine stories and novels. Taking Control (1987) followed in the same vein while The Wedding (1989) studied in depth with humor and empathy the community folklore, rituals, and expectations involved in a Pachuco wedding. Ponce penned her autobiography, Hoyt Street: Memories of a Chicana Childhood in 1993. Beyond recounting the details of her own upbringing, Ponce’s memoir is particularly acute in portraying the racial tensions that dominated her community of Pacoima during the 1940s. In 2001, Mary Helen Ponce received the Lifetime Commitment to Literacy Award from the Friends of the San Fernando Library and, in 2002, the Latino Spirit Award from Governor Grey Davis of California. Further Reading McCracken, Ellen, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Ponce de León, Nestor (1837–1899). Nestor Ponce de León, born in Ingenio Meced, Cárdenas, Cuba in 1837, became a prominent Havana editor and literary figure and was forced into exile in 1869. He had graduated with a degree in law from the University of Havana in 1858, but even before becoming a lawyer, he had entered the publishing world. In 1853, he founded and edited the literary periodical Las Brisas de Cuba (The Breezes of Cuba) and published the poetry collection Joyas del Parnaso cubano (Gems of the Cuban Parnasus); in 1868, he founded Revista Crítica de Ciencias, Literatura y Artes (Critical Revue of the Sciences, Literature, and Arts). He wrote for various newspapers and also edited the important newspaper La Verdad during a brief period of the freedom of the press on the island. In April 1869, he escaped the colonial police on the island when they discovered a cache of arms in his house, and he fled to the United States. Upon going into exile in New York, he promptly established a press and coauthored, with José Ignacio Rodríguez, and published in English, The Book of Blood, an Authentical Record of Policy Adopted by Modern Spain to Put an End to the War for the Independence of Cuba (1871), documenting Spanish barbaric treatment of Cubans in an attempt to influence the U.S. government to intervene against Spain. He also served as the Secretary of the Cuban Central Revolutionary Junta; for these and other revolutionary activities, Ponce de León was condemned to death in absentia in Havana by the colonial government. By the mid-1870s, Ponce’s press was publishing a wide variety of books in Spanish, and not only political tracts: technological dictionaries, histories of Cuba, biographies, medical and legal books, novels, and books of poetry, as well as translations of Moore, Byron, and Heine by Antonio* and Francisco Sellén,* 891

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among others. In fact, Ponce was the principal publisher of the most celebrated Cuban poet of the time, the exiled José María Heredia y Heredia,* who has since been canonized as one of the greatest poets of the entire Hispanic world. Ponce also printed Spanish-language periodicals and, in 1876, began editing El Educador Popular (The Popular Educator) and was the proprietor of the most important Hispanic bookstore in the Northeast. Ponce’s colleague and fellow publisher, Enrique Trujillo stated, “There is no place on earth where Spanish is spoken that the name of Nestor Ponce de León is not known,” such was his fame as a publisher (Trujillo, Apuntes 32). Trujillo further stated that Ponce’s own nonfiction writing, represented by his Diccionario tecnológico (1883–1893, Technological Dictionary) and his two books on Christopher Columbus, published in 1892 and 1893, were the best studies and reference works to be had in the Spanish language on those subjects. In 1887, along with José Martí* and Colombian immigrant Santiago Pérez Triana, Ponce founded the influential literary club Sociedad Literaria HispanoAmericana de Nueva York (Spanish American Literary Society of New York) that brought together all Hispanic literature enthusiasts and writers from throughout the city, except for the Spaniards, who were seen as the enemy (Trujillo, Apuntes 52); this club was separate from the political clubs that were organized to raise funds for and promote the revolution. Like the many literary societies formed by Hispanics from the late nineteenth century to the present, the Sociedad Literaria was the forum where literary works would be read and discussed, speeches would be made, and authors visiting the cities would be received and celebrated. After the War of 1898, the American government named Ponce de León as Director of the Nacional Archives in Havana, where he died in 1899. Further Reading Calcagno, Francisco, Diccionarios biográfico cubano (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 1996). Kanellos, Nicolás, and Hevetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Trujillo, Enrique, Apuntes históricos (New York: Imprenta del “El Porvenir,” 1896).

Nicolás Kanellos Popular Culture. Because so much of Latino literature emerges from workingclass communities (see Working-class Literature), both native and immigrant, its most natural references and models derive from the social, economic, and linguistic environment in which writers have been reared. Of course, oral literature (see Orality) and folklore* have always provided a background and general orientation for Latino creativity, precisely because of (1) the dearth of schooling and institutions of literacy on the frontier during the colonial period, (2) the segregation and proletarization of Hispanics that reigned in the Southwest once it became part of the United States, thus forcing the Latinos to rely on oral and folk knowledge outside of the society’s official institutions, and (3) the persistent lack of schooling for many Hispanics even today, while they are bombarded with popular media as the most pervasive avenue to relating to the world. It may be said that the literature for rural farm workers has traditionally 892

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been oral in the form of songs, legendary tales, personal experience narratives, and family histories told and retold. For urban working-class Latinos all these genres also had their places in their conscious development, but so, too, have had print and electronic media, all subject to latter-day commercial manipulation, whether by radio, phonograph, television, or film. Early in the twentieth century, a working-class anarchist such as Luisa Capetillo was cognizant of the class structure of the media messages of her time and attempted to appropriate them and undermine them. This she did, for example, by writing short plays based on the nineteenth- century melodrama that was so popular on the immigrant stage and by transgressing and debunking the separation of the social classes as represented in the dramatic structure of these works. When the Hispanic immigrant communities in the early twentieth century experienced culture clash, their immediate targets of satire were the ubiquitous flapper, Jazz Age culture and such dances as the Charleston. Puerto Rican writers such as Jesús Colón,* Cuban writers and graphic artists such as Alberto O’Farrill,* and cronistas and novelists such as Mexicans Julio G. Arce* and Daniel Venegas* all poked fun at these symbols of Gringo culture in their efforts to preserve their own ethnic identities. Many a Nuyorican* writer of the 1960s and 1970s, most of whom were self-taught literally on the streets of the Lower East side, or in prison, was more likely to quote commercial jingles and to refer to sports figures, subway signs, and television characters than to talk of Shakespeare and the western literary canon. For writers like Miguel Piñero* and Pedro Pietri,* the underclass and the nightlife around 42nd Street— the drug dens and pimp bars and the social dialects in use in these environments—were a natural inspiration. In Piñero’s poetry, references to Sears, Scene from “El Corrido de Juan Endrogado.” 893

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Coke, the blues, Hollywood movies, and rock and roll classics of the 1960s form a steady stream of referents that in many ways represent his world and that of his audience, especially because his poems were meant to be performed before a barrio or prison audience rather than read. Tato Laviera, another consummate oral performer, has also been highly influenced by such popular media as the Spanish soap operas on television. In his “The Song of an Oppressor,” the theme song for the immensely popular telenovela (soap opera) Simplemente María (Simply María), forms a counterpoint to the bilingual poetry contrasting the the life the narrator’s mother leads as a sweat shop worker with the idealized lives of the soap opera’s characters. However, for the Nuyorican poets of the seventies, there was no higher canon than that represented by salsa lyrics, music, and performers, even to the extent of transforming their verses into percussion instruments, attempting to reproduce the sounds of the conga, bongo, and güiro. In fact, Victor Hernández Cruz’s first three books of poems not only reverberate with salsa sounds and rhythms but develop an ideology and structure in which the poet gradually returns to the source of all music and poetry: Africa. Likewise, Tato Laviera creates a gallery in homage to salsa verse improvisers such as Celia Cruz and Ismael Rivera; he, too, reproduces the sound of percussion instruments and creates poetic suites as if composing a salsa ballet. Completely bilingual, Laviera admits such composer-singers as John Lennon and Miriam Makeba into his canon. For all of these poets, the greatest height is achieved in wedding their verse seamlessly to jazz–salsa rhythms. Perhaps the genre that has been most inspired in American popular culture and made the most literary and ideological use of it is Chicano theater. Chicano theater as practiced by the teatros of the Chicano theater movement, which lasted up to around 1980, was closer to the pulse and heartbeat of working-class Mexican Americans than any other art form or communications medium was. Its development was closely linked to the various social and political struggles of the people of Mexican descent in the United States: among others, farm workers’ efforts to organize agricultural labor unions, working class parents’ attempts to make the schools responsive to their children’s linguistic and cultural needs, and Chicano students’ movement toward forging an identity and leading the American civil rights battle. Teatro Chicano has at each step served as a vehicle for sensitizing Mexican American communities and involving them in these and other struggles for their sociopolitical needs, cultural identity, and movement strategies. After Luis Valdez* founded El Teatro Campesino in 1965 to propagandize the farm worker strike in Delano, California, this basic link of a people’s theater with a labor or social movement was duplicated from coast to coast. The Teatro de la Gente and the cannery workers in San Jose, the Teatro Alma Latina and the Puerto Rican tomato pickers in South Jersey, the Teatro Trucha and the St. Luke’s hospital workers in Chicago were but three of the more than one hundred such groups operating throughout the country.

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Scene from Teatro Urbano’s “Anti-Bicentennial Special.”

While using the basic dramatic format created by El Teatro Campesino, each theater in its own way reflected the total cultural and sociopolitical makeup of its community. The work of the individual Chicano theater basically consisted in motivating its community audiences to carry on the movement for a Mexican or Chicano cultural identity in the face of attempted homogenization by the dominant Anglo American culture. Not only was Chicano theater a Mexican American popular culture medium, then, but also a battleground for Mexican cultural integrity as challenged by American popular culture. In answer to the English language and the American Dream, Chicano theater proffered the Spanish language and a host of Mexican values, customs, and myths. The popular media’s stereotype of Mexicans as lazy, fat bandits, for example, was countered by the theater’s stereotypes of Anglo Americans and by the dynamism of such folk heroes as Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, and César Chávez.* The ever-present popularized history surrounding the Davy Crocketts and Sam Houstons was debunked by the rewriting of the conquest of the Southwest on the Chicano stages. For every hamburger there was a taco, for every John Wayne a Tony Aguilar (Mexican singer and movie star), for every John Denver hit a corrido,* for every nostalgic item in the Anglo popular mentality a Mexican American counterpart. According to Luis Valdez* in Actos by Luis Valdez y El Teatro Campesino (1971), the basic unit of Chicano theater is the acto, a short, satirical sketch with a particular design: “Inspire the audience to social action. Illuminate specific points about social problems. Show or hint at solution. Express what

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people are feeling.” The acto was developed by Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino in 1965 and was quickly adopted by the Chicano theaters that were emerging everywhere. Actos were the theatrical weapons that Chicanos used to challenge the stereotypes that were promoted in the popular media. Actos, in response to these stereotypes, promoted a positive Mexican American or Chicano identity by questioning the credibility of the American Dream and by reinforcing Mexican American popular culture, including popular dialects of Spanish, popular and folk music, folk heroes, traditional foods, and numerous cultural alternatives to the established “American way.” In many cases, outand-out warfare between the two systems of existence took place on the Chicano stages. Basically a propagandistic and agitational dramatic instrument, the acto was related to various types of Mexican folk theater. Nevertheless, the acto also received the influence of the propagandistic dramatic sketch par excellence, the television commercial. Not only did Chicano theaters at times borrow promotional techniques from television, they also succeeded in turning the television commercials against themselves. Commercials that denigrated Mexican identity or shrewdly exploited Anglo American identity were inverted by teatros. The Frito Bandito, the Clairol Lady, the Mexican in the Marlboro commercial—all suffered this fate. A typical treatment was that accorded to the Radio Free Europe commercial that featured a blank-eyed child with a padlock and chain on his head being brainwashed by messages through a blaring loudspeaker. The Teatro Chicano de Austin usurped the commercial’s basic dramatic structure and inverted its message by showing three Chicano children being brainwashed in American schools by two militaristic, drill instructor-teachers. The three zombie-like children with padlocks and chains on their heads mechanically repeated the following statements dictated to them by the teachers: “All good Americans speak English. César Chávez is a Commie. Lettuce each day keeps the doctor away. Mexicans are thugs and Pachucos.* Mexicans should work in the fields because they are built close to the ground. White is right. Blonds have more fun.” After this brainwashing, the children and teachers rose to attention as another character appeared and addressed the audience: “There are over fifteen million Chicanos in the United States. First they stole our land and now they want to steal our minds.” Another acto that borrowed heavily from television commercials was Man from Huelga (strike), inspired by the Glad-Wrap commercial. The acto, performed by the Teatro de Ustedes from Denver, El Teatro de la Revolución from Greeley, and many others, depicted a family sitting down to a lunch that included boycotted lettuce, Gallo wine, and Coors beer. An argument ensues when one of the characters tries to persuade the others to stop consuming the boycotted products. From backstage someone shouts, “Man from Huelga, Man from Huelga, trouble brewing at the Romero residence,” whereupon the Man from Huelga appears attired in a Superhero outfit and delivers the following statement: 896

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I am the Man from Huelga. And I would like to let you know that the basis of this argument is because you don’t know why the boycott is happening. You, with that iceberg head lettuce, didn’t you know that the United Farmworkers are struggling for better wages, for better working conditions, and the right to their own union? Get rid of that lettuce and try some leaf lettuce. The audacity to drink that Coors beer when Coors has been dumping waste in the gulches and has destroyed acres of potato fields in the San Luis Valley with his weather modification! You should be ashamed of yourself, young lady. And you with the Gallo wine, the same struggle as with the lettuce. Don’t you know there’s blood on them grapes?

Here the “Man from Glad” commercial, itself inspired by characters like Superman and the Man from U.N.C.L.E., was transformed into a propagandistic vehicle for workers’ strikes and boycotts. Teatros most often performed bilingually, although they did perform solely in English or Spanish under certain circumstances. Chicano theaters addressed their linguistically heterogeneous audiences by continuously switching from English to Spanish, as is common in every day speech in the barrios. Furthermore, teatros employed common dialects of Spanish and English but often exhibited a particular predilection for the use of caló, an argot commonly used by young Chicanos throughout the Southwest. Besides maintaining the tension between English and Spanish in their own theatrical language, the teatros depicted in their scenes the common language conflicts that Chicanos experience in dealing with the society’s public institutions: schools, hospitals, welfare departments, and so on. In some Southwestern states, for instance, speaking Spanish on school grounds was prohibited to Mexican American children. The linguistic conflict that this caused was dramatized in such actos as Escuela (School), performed by the Teatro Chicano de Austin, the Teatro Desengano del Pueblo from Gary, and the Teatro del Piojo from Seattle. The acto is set on the first day of school in a kindergarten whose enrollment is mainly Chicano. Upon realizing that his students speak only Spanish, the teacher immediately admonishes, “You are in the United States now. And in the United States everybody speaks English. And in the United States everyone has an American name. So if your name is Juan, why we change that to John. Or if your name is Ricardo, well, that becomes Richard, you see.” He then proceeds to change each child’s name: Juan Paniaguas to John Bread and Water, María Dolores de la Barriga to Mary Stomach Pains, Casimiro Flores to I Almost See Flowers, and Domingo Nieves to Ice Cream Sunday. The acto continues with a series of humorous misinterpretations and reaches its climax when Ice Cream Sunday urinates in his pants because the teacher refuses to find out what his needs are unless he expresses them in English. Like hundreds of other actos, Escuela gives its audiences some insights into discrimination in the form of the teacher rejecting the Chicano children’s food and clothing and checking them over for lice. 897

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American society received an even more direct indictment in works like The American Dream, by Chicago’s Teatro del Barrio, and El Corrido de Juan Endrogado (The Ballad of Drugged Johnny), by San Jose’s Teatro de la Gente. Both works attacked the commonly held beliefs that constitute the American Dream: opportunity, freedom, and equality. The American Dream is a modern allegory that features the American Dream as a central character. She is the Statue of Liberty draped in an American flag and emerges from a long line of flag-waving, death-masked, allegorical figures that represent the United States in teatro. In this acto, a Mexican American searches for his identity in this land of plenty. He becomes associated with other Americans who are also searching for theirs. When he is with blacks, he is pursued by the Ku Klux Klan. With the hippies, he is beaten by the Chicago police. Finally, his odyssey takes him into military service, where he is given a one-way ticket to Vietnam and death. Throughout the acto, the American Dream character manipulates the action while deriving immense pleasure from observing the misfortunes of the Mexican American. El Corrido de Juan Endrogado, written by El Teatro de la Gente’s Adrián Vargas, deals with the addiction of poor people to the attractive material symbols of success that the American Dream dangles before the eyes of poor people. The main character, Juan Endrogado (John Drugged), is a down-and-out Mexican American who looks for work in vain. He feels the need for the big and powerful cars, the fast women, and the high-paying jobs that are indexes of success in this society. But he only obtains his dreams through the stupor of drugs. In Juan Endrogado, Vargas has merged the world of sexual fantasy with the consumer ethic in his two characters, Chevy Impala and K-Mart, two prostitutes that approach Juan: American Dream: Say there, boy, I can see that you’re looking for the life America has to offer. Well, I’m that American Dream pimp. I can turn you on to any one of these divine symbols of American progress. Now don’t say nothing before you have a chance to meet each one and make up your mind. (The Chevrolet theme song is played in the background.) Chevy: Hi there, honey, my name is Impala and you can drive me anywhere you want to. Dig my sleek body lines and style. Performance? Oh, baby, you’ll just love the way I handle! A strong man needs something fast, something he can feel powerful with. I’m it, baby. How about taking me for a ride? Juan: Well, I can dig it, honey. But you look too expensive for me. Narrator-Singer (singing): Put on your fine threads, Johnny, ’cause we’re going out tonight. Put on your red dress, baby, ’cause we’re going out tonight. K-Mart: Hey, Johnny, how about trying me on for size? I’m not as expensive as she is, but I can still show you a good time.

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Johnny: All right!! K-Mart: We’ll sit together and drink our Gallo wine. You’ll look very impressive with me around. I’ll clothe you with my colorful personality. And, you know what they say, clothes make the man. Johnny: Well, hey baby, what’s your name? K-Mart: Well, some call me Macy’s, others call me Emporium, but you can call me K-Mart. Johnny: Well . . . ah . . . (Both prostitutes begin to fight over him.) Wait a minute, wait a minute! To tell you the truth, I can’t afford either of you. I’m broke. Chevy and K-Mart: Broke?!!

A third lady of the night, however, wins out over the other two that Juan cannot afford. She is Hunger, who later converts to Death. Thus we can see how in El Corrido de Juan Endrogado American status symbols and materialistic consumption in the guise of Chevy Impala, K-Mart, Macy’s, and Emporium are satirized. The alternatives given by the acto to the onslaught of this addiction to American materialism is the unity of the Chicano family. In the end, Juan’s family succors him and Death is turned against the system: the pimp and the two prostitutes. Closely related to these visions of the American Dream are Chicano theater’s demythologizing of American history, especially the popular version of “how the West was won.” Contemporary Chicano identity takes as its critical origin the Mexican–American War and the incorporation of previously Mexican lands into the American nation. The stigma of being a conquered, colonized, and racialized people has afflicted Mexican Americans throughout this century. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the Chicano theaters in the Southwest tried to penetrate the layers of mythology that fill textbooks, movies, and television programs concerned with the “opening of the West.” Historic shrines such as the Alamo, toponyms like Austin and Houston, and movies and television programs based on the lives of legendary figures such as Davy Crockett are ever-present reminders of the defeat, colonization, and anti-Mexicanism that has in part shaped Chicano identity. But the Chicano theaters are not so much concerned with rewriting the official history of the Southwest as in combating the popular myths that have arisen from political and racist motives. Beside the image of the fearless Texas Ranger stands the image of the cowardly and treacherous Mexican in the popular mentality. To be raised under the influence of these stigma is powerfully demoralizing and must be seen as partially responsible for contemporary Chicano social and political reactions. Quite reasonably, Chicano theaters in Austin and San Antonio, the historic seats of Texas fervor and anti-Mexicanism, were among the first to re-examine 899

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the Texas Revolution on stage. In Papá Mexico, the Teatro Chicano de Austin conceptualized Old Mexico as the loving father of five daughters: California, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. Father Mexico befriends “the first wetback in history,” Stephen F. Austin, who manages to cross the Mississippi into Mexico looking for land and opportunity. Austin pays back Mexico’s kindness by calling over a couple of drunken friends, Sam Houston and Kit Carson, who join him later in stabbing Father Mexico in the back and raping his daughters. In another acto, High School, the Teatro Chicano de Austin portrayed high school students correcting their teacher’s misconceptions and prejudices by pointing out that the Texas Revolution was a rebellion of both Anglo and Mexican residents of Texas against the central government of Mexico. They argue that there were Mexicans who died defending the Alamo and that a Mexican, Lorenzo de Zavala,* was the first vice president of the Texas Republic. The Teatro de los Barrios came out from beneath the shadow of the historic Alamo, the perennial symbol of Anglo Texan glory and Mexican humiliation, to write and perform their El Alamo in 1973. Hector F. González, the director and author of the play, explained the reasons for creating the work: This work was written because for many years in the United States we have been taught a biased history. We have always been taught that the Mexicans were assassins; later we were converted to cowards, liars, and lazy people. These are the descriptions that the Gringo uses when discriminating against Mexicans. That is why we Chicanos also suffer at the hands of the Gringo oppressor. In school, they always teach us that Davy Crockett died gallantly and that he was a superman too great for the Mexicans (like John Wayne killing many Mexicans single handedly). But in truth, those heroes of the Alamo were made of flesh and blood, just like anyone else. They never talk about or show the racism that existed in the mentality of the men of the Alamo. Nor do they talk about how they were just interested in Mexico and Texas for their riches. The history of the Alamo is always seen as an act of democracy and morality. They say that the Gringos went to free Texas from the tyrannous hands of Santa Ana. They never explain that Mexico had no way of maintaining Texas or that Mexico did not allow slavery. But the streets of Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, ran red with the blood of chained slaves. Neither do they explain that Mexico only allowed them to enter Texas without slaves and that Mexico gave them plenty of land without telling them that the lands belonged to the Indians. The Gringos only came to make Texas another slave state for the union. We, the Mexicans and Chicanos, have suffered because of these prejudices in the schools (they say we are assassins), at work (because we are inferior; there were two hundred fifty Gringos against thousands of Mexicans at the Alamo), and in the economy (because the Gringos stole our ancestors’ lands and riches).

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This is why this play was written: to tell everyone about the other side of what happened at the Alamo. And this is closer to the truth of what happened at the Alamo.

El Alamo goes beyond demythologizing the figures of Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis. It consciously exploits the shock value of discrediting the hallowed personages of the Texan Pantheon. Crockett is portrayed as a political opportunist who wanted to use Texas as a stepping stone in his career. Crockett, the fierce Indian fighter, introduces himself with the following: “I’m Davy Crockett from Tennessee. When I fought against the Injuns in Florida, I ate fried taters, fried in Injun flesh. Yes, sir, I’m as strong as a bear! And I hates INJUNS!” James Bowie, who supposedly killed fifty men with his famed knife, introduces himself in the following manner: “I’m from Kentucky. I was a gambler and I had lots of money, dinero! Then in Galveston, Texas, I sold blackies (slaves) with false papers to a pirate. Then in Kansas I sold land with false papers to rob people. Things were getting hot in Kansas . . . (offstage someone yells “Silver mines found in Texas!”) I guess I’ll go to Texas and make me some money.” Worst of all, Travis is accused of having killed a man in South Carolina and of having shifted the blame to his slave. Thereafter, he escaped to Texas to avoid further repercussions from the killing. It is also insinuated in the play that Travis committed suicide at the Alamo instead of fighting to the death. The Mexicans, on the other hand, are no longer shown as cruel and inhumane but as hungry, poorly clad, and forcefully conscripted. The Mexican army is depicted as suffering from lack of finances, poor organization, and low morale. Moreover, the play emphasizes the opportunities given to the Texans to surrender and leave Texas without bloodshed. It is pointed out later that Houston did not give the Mexican army at San Jacinto the same chance that Santa Ana gave the Texans. As can be seen in El Alamo and in other historical actos, Chicano theaters at times counter Anglo distortions of Mexican history and culture with some distortions and exaggerations of their own. The Anti-Bicentennial Special, by Los Angeles’s Teatro Urbano, is a zany burlesque on such popular figures as Uncle Sam, George Washington, Betsy Ross, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and George Armstrong Custer. The piece is performed to a soundtrack made up of World War II movie songs à la Dick Powell and George M. Cohan. The heavily made up and masked characters each present a monologue through which is seen their failure to live up to the glorious ideals behind the founding of this nation. Of course, Custer’s inhumanity toward the Native Americans and George Washington’s ownership of slaves are highlighted, but such figures as Betsy Ross are used to call attention to women’s inequality throughout the history of this country. The whole affair is performed in front of a ten-foot high American flag as a backdrop. Bicentennial, created by the younger members (ages six to fifteen) of the Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo from Gary, is a thoroughly sophisticated attack on the commercialism and chauvinism that characterized the bicentennial 901

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celebration. The characters make their entrance in a parade singing the jingle from the Yankee Doodle fast food commercials: “It’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy day, a Yankee Doodle Dandy day. Come on down where the good times are. Yankee Doodle Dandy. Yankee Doodle Dandy.” An announcer explains that they are going to celebrate the bicentennial with the presentation of historic figures from the American Revolution. The first actor is supposed to do an impression of Paul Revere but mistakenly does one of the popular rock and roll group, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Next, John Hancock is shown signing the Declaration of Independence. But immediately after this act, the announcer begins to auction off to the audience the Declaration of Independence, John Hancock’s plumed pen, his tennis shoes, a lock of his hair, and even John Hancock himself. But the coup de grace is the presentation of this conversation between Betsy Ross and George Washington: Betsy: I’m almost done with your flag, George. George: What do I want a flag for? I want guns. Betsy: Guns? What do you want guns for? George: So I can shoot some cans, of course. Betsy: Cans? What kinds of cans? George: Some Mexicans, some Puerto Ricans, and some Africans. Betsy (admiringly): Oh, George, you’re so violent!

Although Chicanos have been left out of American history textbooks and classes, and the bicentennial celebration helped to alienate them even more, clearly they are not without history or tradition. Chicano theaters have reconstructed a Mexican people’s history for themselves. It is an alternative to the formalized history of colonization and exploitation. The teatros’ version of Mexican-Chicano history begins in Pre-Columbian Mexico and tells of the birth of the mestizo and his endurance and survival in the face of wars with European powers, revolutions and mass migrations of epic proportions. This tale of the Chicanos is that of the children of the earth and the sun, the Indian converts to Christianity through the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the rebellious followers of Hidalgo, Zapata, and now Chávez, and the millions of Mexican American workers who trace their ancestry to the Aztecs, their language to the Spaniards, and their livelihood to the United States. At the fifth annual Chicano theater festival, held in Mexico City in 1974, Chicano identification with Aztec and Mayan roots came to a head with the festival’s overriding theme being a Chicano return to pre-Columbian origins. Quite fittingly, the opening ceremonies and the first performances were held at the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, and numerous teatros had specially prepared for the occasion mitos or dramatizations of Aztec and Mayan myths relevant to contemporary life. The festival also fostered a massive exchange with more than forty Latin American theaters and thus solidified the Chicano’s relationship with not only the indigenous cultural past but also contemporary Latin America. Repeatedly the mitos examined life before the 902

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coming of the Spaniards and then explored the all-important act—the birth of the mestizo. Often recalling Malinche’s illicit relationship with Cortés, at times depicting Spaniards raping Aztec women, each teatro concurred in envisioning the birth as a tremendous trauma. Some teatros, such as El Teatro Campesino, were somewhat more esoteric in their presentations by delving into the mysteries of Mayan cosmology with its Baile de los Gigantes (The Dance of the Giants). Others were more practical. El Teatro de la Gente, for example, applied the myth of Quetzalcoatl to U.S. imperialism and even cast Coca-Cola as one of the villainous characters in the myth. But the acto that best completed the picture of the Chicano theaters’ view of history was El Teatro Campesino’s La Gran Carpa de la Familia Rascuachi (The Tent of the Underdogs), for it fully integrated the cultural past with the contemporary development of the Chicano. The Gran Carpa (The Great Tent) does consider the birth of the mestizo as well as the miraculous apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, but it also deals with the experiences of Chicanos in the United States by following three generations of the Pelado* (naked, poor) family through migration, farm work, the birth of children, Vietnam, and a complete series of archetypal experiences. Chicano history as seen by the teatros was not only a recounting of the preColumbian cultural past and the trials and tribulations of the Mexican American workers like Jesus Pelado in the Gran Carpa. It also sang in praise of the people’s victories and of their heroes: Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, the Adelitas, César Chávez, and others. Chicano theaters attacked the mythology surrounding popular, anti-Mexican American heroes and at the same time augmented the folk traditions surrounding such figures as Zapata, Villa, and other historical and contemporary personages. One of the primary vehicles for the continuation of this tradition has been the corrido,* or ballad, which recounts the adventures of these larger-than-life figures. But of even greater importance for Chicano theaters was the continuation of the corridos fronterizos, or border ballads, that deal with the conflict of Anglos and Mexicans along the Southwestern frontier with Mexico. Many of the heroes of these Mexican ballads were considered by the Chicano theaters to be social bandits or primitive revolutionaries. And in these corridos the Mexican “bandits,” such as Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, Gregorio Cortez, Jacinto Treviño, and Joaquín Murieta, almost always emerge victorious from their clashes with the Anglo establishment. Among the many teatros that have dramatized these corridos was the Teatro Chicano de Austin with its version of the Corrido de Jacinto Treviño (The Ballad of Jacinto Treviño). The cowardly Texas Rangers, depicted as mongrel dogs trained to protect the interests of Anglo ranchers who have stolen Mexican lands, are humiliated and killed by the daring Jacinto Treviño. Both the original corrido itself and the acto embody the type of culture clash that results in the dehumanization of both Anglos and Mexicans, although the sense of an epic struggle between two peoples is still conveyed through this type of heroic balladry and drama. But Teatro Chicano de Austin presented an even more vivid portrayal of the sanguinary strife between Anglos and Mexicans in their 903

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singing of one of the oldest extant corridos, El Corrido de Joaquín Murieta (The Ballad of Joaquín Murieta), which takes the form of a boast by the eponymous hero, who explains how he confronts and kills Anglos while protecting both natives and Hispanics in California. The culture conflict that is part and parcel of Chicano theater is also an indication of the interior psychological conflict of Mexican Americans, who are increasingly faced with the decisions of accepting an “American” lifestyle or carrying on traditional Mexican behavior patterns. Young Mexican Americans often feel they must choose between speaking English or Spanish, living in the suburban melting pot or in the barrio, and even such seemingly insignificant things as eating hamburgers or tacos. In most cases, the conflict is resolved by choosing a biculturalism that permits both modes of behavior where possible. Often, teatros did not emphasize this enough, opting to over-protect the Mexican side of their cultural heritage because of the real dangers of acculturation and assimilation. “Mexico Americano,” a song composed by Rumel Fuentes, former member of the Teatro Chicano de Austin, was one of the few cultural statements in teatro that asserted this dual allegiance: Por mi madre yo soy mexicano. Por destino soy americano. Yo soy de la raza de oro. Yo soy méxico-americano. Yo te comprendo el inglés. También yo hablo el castellano. Yo soy de la raza noble. Yo soy méxico-americano. Zacatecas a Minnesota, de Tijuana a Neuva York, dos países son mi tierra. Los defiendo con my honor. Dos idiomas y dos países, dos culturas tengo yo. Es mi suerte y tengo orgullo porque así lo manda Dios. (Mexican by parentage, American by destiny, I am of the golden race. I am Mexican American. I know the English language. I also speak Spanish. I am of the noble race. I am Mexican American. Zacatecas to Minnesota, from Tijuana to New York, two countries have I.

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Povod, Reinaldo

I’ll defend them with my honor. Two languages and two countries, two cultures are mine. It’s my fate and I’m proud, for it’s the will of God.)

In summary, teatro chicano, while it lasted, functioned as a Mexican American popular culture medium that attempted to reinforce the survival of a Mexican or Chicano identity in the face of the threat of Anglo American cultural domination. Teatro was in the forefront of the Chicano political and cultural movement, serving as a combative cultural weapon in attacking stereotypes of Mexicans, countering popularized anti–Mexican American history, and satirizing those facets of the American Dream that have been false promises to poor people and that obliterate a people’s ethnic identity. On the other hand, Chicano theaters reconstructed and popularized their own Mexican–Chicano history as an alternative to “American” history for Chicanos: a proud indigenous past, the survival and adaptation of the mestizo, and the people’s victories and folk heroes in Mexico and the United States. It is also evident that the culture conflict that teatros exhibited was the result of the long history of real-life warfare, discrimination, and misunderstanding. Only rarely did teatros succeed in demonstrating a true resolution to the cultural conflict that had had deep psychological repercussions on individuals. The song “Mexico Americano” was one of the few teatro statements that affirmed a pride and confidence in Chicano biculturalism by emphasizing American as well as Mexican heritage. Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia, Peter J. García, and Arturo J. Aldama, eds., Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004). Valdez, Luis, Luis Valdez Early Works: Actos, Bernabe and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Porto Rican Brotherhood. See Mutual Aid Societies Povod, Reinaldo (1960–1994). In his short life, Nuyorican playwright Reinaldo Povod produced two highly acclaimed plays: Cuba and His Teddy Bear (1986), and the trilogy of one acts, La Puta Vida (1988, Life Is a Bitch), which included “South of Tomorrow,” “Nijinsky Choked His Chicken,” and “Poppa Dio!” Not much is known about the life of Povod, other than he was a twentysix-year-old prodigy, when his first play went to Broadway after debuting at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater with Robert Nero in the lead role. It is also known that he was a protégé and lover of fellow Nuyorican playwright Miguel Piñero. His untimely death in 1994 has been attributed to tuberculosis or AIDS. Like Piñero, Povod depicted the gritty street life and drug culture of New York’s Lower East Side; like Piñero, Povod was also addicted to drugs. In 905

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fact, Cuba and His Teddy Bear deals with the life of a small-time drug dealer whose only reason for living was his pride and joy of a sixteen-year-old son, who himself becomes a heroin addict. The play also contains a portrait of a street poet, thought to have been fashioned after Piñero. In 2005, Latino College Expo staged a tribute to Povod, including the staging of previously unproduced material, as a fundraiser for future Latino playwrights. Further Reading Antush, John V., Nuestro New York: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Plays (New York: Signet, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Preciado Martin, Patricia (1939–). A creator of diverse works based on the oral and documentary history of Mexican American life in Arizona and the Southwest, Patricia Preciado was born on July 6, 1939, in the town of Humboldt, Arizona, which is close to Prescott. Although often immersed in rural life, Preciado Martin received her elementary and secondary schooling in Catholic schools in Tucson. She went on to graduate summa cum laude with a degree in elementary education from the University of Arizona in 1960. She traveled throughout the Southwest, Mexico, Spain, and Belize, the latter during her stint in the Peace Corps. In 1963, she married Jim Martin; the couple has raised two children. Because of her interest in children’s literature as an elementary teacher, Preciado took on oral history projects, collecting folk tales and eventually writing her own children’s stories. In The Legend of the Bellringer of San Agustín (1980), Preciado relates how the church bell actually celebrated the landscape and culture of a small town. In Images and Conversations: Mexican Americans Recall a Southwestern Past (1983), Preciado composed the text to accompany the photodocumentation of traditional ways in the Tucson area. Preciado’s first collection of original short stories, Days of Plenty, Days of Want (1988), follows the interrelated lives of eight characters in a Mexican American barrio of Tucson and their struggles with encroaching modernity and progress. Not until some years later was she able to take time from her other projects to publish new collections of original stories, El Milagro and Other Stories (1996) and Amor eterno: Eleven Lessons of Love (2000, Eternal Love). Her largest documentary project to date has been her Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (1992), the fruit of her collection of stories from three generations of Mexican American women from the same families. The resulting collection cuts across class lines and educational levels to give a broad understanding of southwestern history as seen from long-time gendered stake-holders. In 2004, Preciado once again teamed up with a photographer, José Galván, to document the folk ways of her community in Beloved Land: An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southwestern Arizona, which was named Southwest Book of the Year and won a Glyph Award in the category of History in 2005. Over the years, Preciado’s efforts have been recognized by a number of honors, including being named Arizona Author of the Year in 1997 and receiving the Distinguished Public Scholar 906

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Award of Excellence from the Arizona Humanties Council in 2000 and the University of Arizona Alumni Achievement Award in 2003. Further Reading Ponce, Merrihelen, “Patricia Preciado Martin” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 222–225).

Nicolás Kanellos Pregones Theater. Founded in 1979, Pregones Theater is a Puerto Rican producing and presenting company. Based in the Bronx, New York, its main mission is to create and perform contemporary theater, rooted in Latin American and Latino artistic and musical expressions. Through its major programs—Main Stage, Summer Tour, Residency/Touring, and Visiting Artist Series—Pregones offers Latino communities an artistic venue to challenge and enhance their participative roles in society. The Pregones ensemble has performed in more than 400 venues around the United States. The Pregones artistic team of professional actors, directors, technicians, and musicians plans out its season on a yearly basis and invites visiting artists who are compatible with the theater’s mission. Pregones has debuted more than forty new plays by Latinos and hosted some eighty companies for audiences in the Bronx. Pregones specializes in stage adaptations of literary and nonliterary sources, often developing plays in collective creation; it also works with its own musicians, who create original works for the performances. Included among the authors whose works have been adapted are Ruth Behar,* Pura Belpré,* Juan Antonio Corretjer,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* José Luis González,* and Manuel Ramos Otero.* Many of the most renowned Latino playwrights have seen their works produced on the Pregones stages, including Edward Gallardo, Dolores Prida,* and Cándido Tirado.* Among the many projects taken on by Pregones is its Asunción Playwrights Series, which sponsors plays by Latinos that challenge assumptions about gender and sexuality. Asunción organizes three to four readings of plays at its La Casa Blanca space that are followed by discussions with the audiences. Further Reading Vásquez, Eva C., Pregones Theatre: A Theatre for Social Change in the South Bronx (New York: Routledge, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Premio Aztlán. See Awards Premio Quinto Sol. See Editorial Quinto Sol; see also Awards Prida, Dolores (1943–). Dolores Prida is a playwright and screenwriter whose works have been produced in various states and in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Born on September 5, 1943, in Caibairén, Cuba, Prida immigrated with her family to New York in 1963. She graduated from Hunter College in 1969 with a major in Spanish American literature. Upon graduation she 907

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Dolores Prida.

Book cover featuring scenes from plays by Dolores Prida.

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began a career as a journalist and editor, first for Collier-Macmillan and then for other publishers, often making use of her bilingual skills. In 1977 her first play, Beautiful Senoritas, was produced at the Duo Theater. Since then she has seen some ten of her plays produced. Prida’s plays vary in style and format from adaptations of international classics, such as The Three Penny Opera, to experiments with the Broadway musical formula, as in her Savings (1985), to her attempt to create a totally bilingual play in Coser y cantar (1981, To Sew and to Sing). In Coser y cantar Prida creates two characters representing, respectively, the Americanized part of a woman’s psyche and her “old-country” consciousness to illustrate the tensions and contradictions that need to be resolved by Hispanics everywhere in the United States. In other plays, Prida’s themes vary from an examination of the phenomenon of urban gentrification, as in Savings (1981), to the generation gap and conflict of culture, as in Botánica (1990). Since 1993, Botánica has won a permanent place in the repertory of Spanish Repertory Theater in New York, which through 1996 was continuing to alternate it on its programs, especially for schools. Prida’s plays, which are written in Spanish or English or bilingually, have been collected in Beautiful Senoritas and Other Plays (1991). Among her other produced plays are “Pantallas: Comedia apocalíptica en un acto” (1983, Screens: An Apocalyptic Comedy in One Act) and “Four Guys Named José and Una Mujer Named María” (2000), which ran for nearly one year off-Broadway. Prida is also a talented poet who was a leader in the 1960s of New York’s Nueva Sangre (New Blood) movement of young poets. Her books of poems include Treinta y un poemas (Thirty-one Poems, 1967), Women of the Hour (1971), and, with Roger Cabán, The IRT Prayer Book. Among her awards are an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College (1989), Manhattan Borough President’s Excellence in the Arts Award (1987), and a Cintas fellowship (1976). In 1981 Prida became the first U.S. Hispanic to receive a Special Award from the Third World Theatre Competition in Caracas,

Prison Literature

Venezuela, for her play “La era latina” (The Latin Era). Written and first produced in 1980, this bilingual musical comedy toured to more than thirty Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City for open-air staging by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre. Further Reading Ramos-García, Luis A., The State of Latino Theater in the US (New York: Routledge, 2002). Taylor, Diana, and Juan Villegas Morales, Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latina/o America (Raleigh Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Prison Literature. As a direct result of the consciousness-raising that took place among people of color during the civil rights movement and the analysis of their relationship to being sent to wars overseas, such as the Vietnam War, numerous convicts became aware of and studied the social upheavals taking place in their communities during the 1960s and 1970s. Many prisoners began to see themselves as victims of social and racial oppression that had imprisoned them on the outside in ghettoes and barrios, labor camps and military service to serve dominant white society and its capitalist motives. Numerous inmates spent their time behind bars reading voluminously, forming study groups with likeminded inmates, and even forming writing and theatrical groups for their own edification. The dynamic was also furthered by the visits of poets and writers to prisons and in the literature classes, even taught at university level, that were beginning to be offered as part of prisoner-rehabilitation programs. Many prisoners found that reading and writing served not only as means for self-improvement and possible keys to their rehabilitation and parole but also as means for understanding social structures and their own roles and identities in them. For many, writing was a way to survive their long, isolating, and dehumanizing incarceration. As Mendoza points out, for these prison writers, “writing becomes a tool of resistance against psychological and physical containment” (42). The first to gain recognition for their writings from behind bars, their social and political activism, were African American memoirists Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and others, whose writings greatly impacted liberal discourse and the prison-reform movement. In this tradition came such writers as Piri Thomas* and Miguel Piñero,* who interacted with black writers and their politically conscious workshops. Piñero even benefited from a racially integrated drama workshop that allowed him to stage-test early versions of his hit play Short Eyes. “Pinto” in Chicano street dialect means convict; pinto literature has become a subgenre of Chicano literature,* with such primary exponents as Judy Lucero, Raúl Salinas,* Ricardo Sánchez,* and the recent and celebrated Jimmy Santiago Baca.* Fortunately, many of these authors began sending their work out for publication while they were still behind bars. Sánchez, who had a major collection published by the University of California, Los Angeles and another by a major commercial house in New York shortly after his release, penned numerous poems espousing the nationalist ideology of the Chicano Movement* and 909

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expressing his desire to join in the activism as soon as he was free. Salinas, in particular, became so committed to social justice and prison reform while behind bars that, because of his writing, prison authorities eventually considered him a political prisoner and transferred him to the primary penitentiary for terrorists and political prisoners in Marion, Illinois, principally because of his writing. It is Salinas’s poetry in many instances, furthermore, that explores the metaphor of “jail” as thought and education as prisons. As a free man, Salinas went on to a productive life as a counselor and advocate for pintos, as well as a productive poet and bookstore owner and operator. But these positive outcomes do not always rule the day. There are also stories of recidivism and further criminality. Roberto Ignacio Solís,* known as the poet Pancho Aguila, experienced early and quick success as a writer shortly after his release from prison, but went on to commit a bold and brazen heist of $3 million from an armored car in Las Vegas in 1993 and is still at large. Further Reading Mendoza, Louis, “The Re-Education of a Xicanindio: Raúl Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation” MELUS Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2003): 39–60. Pérez-Torres, Rafael, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Publishers and Publishing. After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, printing presses were finally allowed in the frontier areas where they had been previously prohibited by the Spanish Crown. Both California and New Mexico obtained presses in 1834. The first California press was a government press, but the first New Mexican press was held in private hands by a Father Antonio José Martínez,* who printed catechisms, law books, and textbooks, as well as New Mexico’s first newspaper, El Crepúsculo (Twilight), beginning in 1835. The printing press had already made its way into Texas in 1813 as part of the movement for Mexico’s independence from Spain. Hispanics settling in the thirteen British colonies, however, always had access to printing. In the mid-seventeenth century, the first Spanish-speaking communities were established in the Northeast of what would become the United States by Sephardic Jews. They were followed by other Hispanics from Spain, New Spain, and the Caribbean who, by the 1790s, were printing and publishing books in Spanish, principally in New York City and Philadelphia (but also in Spanish Louisiana). By the 1800s, numerous publishing houses issued not only political and commercial books but also original creative literature written principally by Cuban and Spanish immigrants and political refugees. Among the first books written and published by Hispanics here, beginning with Giral de Pino’s New Spanish Grammar in 1795, were textbooks, Spanish readers, and anthologies, reflective of two cultures coming more and more into contact with each other in the early Republic. This educational publishing soon blossomed into an industry that issued grammars, Spanish–English dictionaries, and text910


books that would canonize Spanish language and literature in the curriculum of schools and colleges to the present day. The history of Hispanic literate culture in the United States, however, has existed quite beyond the need for Spanish-language education. By the 1800s, Hispanic communities in the Northeast, South, and Southwest were substantial enough to support trade and communications among themselves, thus requiring printing in the Spanish language. The first Spanish-language newspapers published in the United States were El Misisipi (1808) and El Mensagero Luisianés (1809, The Louisiana Messenger), both in New Orleans; La Gaceta de Texas (The Texas Gazette) and El Mexicano (1813, The Mexican) in Nacogdoches, Texas/Natchitoches, Louisiana. These were followed by Florida’s El Telégrafo de las Floridas (1817, The Telegraph of the Floridas), Philadelphia’s El Habanero (1824, The Havanian), New York’s El Mensajero Semanal (1828, The Weekly Messenger) and numerous others in Louisiana, Texas and the Northeast. Despite the existence of Spanish-language book publishing during the nineteenth century, the newspaper was the principal publishing enterprise in Hispanic communities in the United States and northern Mexico (most of the West and Southwest as we know it today). Literally hundreds of newspapers carried news of commerce and politics as well as poetry, serialized novels, stories, essays and opinion both from the pens of local writers as well as reprints of the works of the most highly regarded writers

Buying La Prensa at a news stand in New York.

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and intellectuals of the entire Hispanic world, from Spain to Argentina. And when northern Mexico and Louisiana were incorporated into the United States, this journalistic and intellectual discourse, rather than abating, intensified. The newspapers took on the task of preserving the Spanish language and Hispanic culture in territories and states where Hispanic residents were becoming rapidly and vastly outnumbered by Anglo and European migrants. The newspapers became forums for discussions of rights both cultural and civil, the libraries and memories of the small towns in New Mexico, the “defensores” (defenders) of Hispanics in the large cities, and quite often the only Spanish-language textbooks to help with learning to read and write Spanish in rural areas—and excellent textbooks at that. Many of the more successful newspapers grew into publishing houses by the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Hispanic newspapers in the United States have had to serve functions hardly ever envisioned in La Voz de la Mujer. Mexico City, Madrid, or Havana. Most of the newspapers, if not functioning as bulwarks of immigrant culture, have at least had to protect the language, culture, and rights of an ethnic minority within the framework of a larger culture that was at best unconcerned with Hispanic ethnic enclaves and at worst openly hostile to them. Whether serving the interests of immigrants or an ethnic minority community, it was always incumbent on the press to exemplify the best writing in the Spanish language, to uphold high cultural and moral values, and, of course, to maintain and preserve Hispanic culture, a mission that often extended to the protection and preservation of the Catholic religion within the larger Protestant-dominated cultural environment. Quite often, too, Hispanic-owned newspapers took on the role of contestants, challenging and offering alternative views and reports to publications in the English-language press, especially as regarded their own communities and homelands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literate culture of Hispanics began assuming the expressive functions that have characterized it up to the present day. These have been predominantly three distinctive types of literate culture: that of the exiles, the immigrants, and the natives. Although there has existed a native literate culture in the Southeast and the Southwest since the days of Juan Ponce de León and Juan de Oñate, the exiles and immigrants were the first to have access to the printing press. The world of books, libraries, and education was introduced by the Spanish to North America, but their banning of the printing press in their frontier territories 912


retarded the development of printing and publishing in what became the Southwest of the United States—the strongest base of native culture.

The Exile Press Hispanic book and periodical publication began in three cities: New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York. Judging from the number of political books published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming motive for the Spaniards and Cubans in the United States bearing the cost of printing and distribution of their written matter was their desire to influence the politics in their homelands. They established the model of the Hispanic exile community producing publications to be shipped or smuggled back into their homelands or distributed among other expatriate communities in the United States and abroad. Spanish-speaking political refugees from both Spain and the Spanish American countries have as part of their political culture repeatedly taken up exile in the United States to enjoy its protected freedom of expression, including that of the free press. The raison d’être of the exile press has always been the influencing of life and politics in the homeland: providing information and opinion about the homeland, changing or solidifying opinion about politics and policy in the patria, assisting in raising funds to overthrow the current regime, and providing the ideological base for that overthrow—all while maintaining a foreign point of reference. Over time, the exile press eventually made the transition to an immigrant and ethnic minority press as their communities became more permanent in the United States or as the return to the homeland became no longer feasible or of particular interest. The first political books printed in exile by Hispanics were written by Spanish citizens who were protesting the installation of a puppet government in Spain by Napoleon. For the most part these early books of protest were typeset and printed in the shops of early American printers, such as those of John Mowry, Thomas and William Bradford, Mathew Carey, J.F. Hurtel, and Thomas and George Palmer. However, by 1822, Hispanics began operating their own presses and publishing houses. One of the first to print his revolutionary tracts on his own press was Vicente Rocafuerte in Philadelphia; by 1825, Carlos Lanuza’s press (Lanuza, Mendía & Co.) was operating in New York, printing and publishing political tracts as well as creative literature by Hispanic authors. In the 1830s, they were joined by the Imprenta Española (Spanish Press) of Juan de la Granja and the press of José Desnoues, both in New York, but it bears repeating that newspapers, such as El Mensagero (The Messenger), El Reflector, and El Mundo Nuevo (The New World) were also printing and publishing books there. Most of these Hispanic printer-publishers were rather short-lived, but eventually two enterprises appeared with strong enough financial bases and business know-how to last for decades and provide some of the most important books by Hispanics in the nineteenth century: the houses of Cubans Nestor Ponce de León* and Enrique Trujillo.* 913


The longest-lasting independence movement in the Hemisphere was that of Spain’s Caribbean colonies, Cuba and Puerto Rico; and much of their independence struggle was to be plotted, funded, and written about from U.S. shores. One of Cuba’s first and most illustrious exiles was the philosopher-priest Félix Varela,* who founded El Habanero newspaper in Philadelphia in 1824 and moved it to New York in 1825. Subtitled “political, scientific and literary paper,” El Habanero openly militated for Cuban independence from Spain. Varela set the precedent for Cubans and Puerto Ricans of printing and publishing in exile and having their works circulating in their home islands. Varela was also among the expatriates who were actively translating the American liberalism and government organization, as in his 1826 translation and annotation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual de práctica parlamentaria: para el uso del Senado de los Estados Unidos (Practical Parliamentary Manuel for Use by the United States Senate). That Varela would launch El Habanero and that other Cubans and Puerto Ricans would continue the exile press in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Key West, and Tampa is remarkable, given the scant tradition of newspaper publishing on these islands under Spanish government control and censorship. Licenses to publish in the Spanish colonies had to be obtained directly from the Spanish crown, and materials were subject to review and censorship by both state and religious authorities. As the tide of revolutionary fervor rose in Cuba and Puerto Rico, so too did the censorship, repression, and persecution of the press as the intellectuals of both islands suffered imprisonment, exile, or worse: death by garrote. Following Varela was a host of publishers and printers who relocated to New York, Philadelphia, Tampa, and New Orleans to write and publish political tracts and literary works. One of the most notable Puerto Ricans was Francisco GoNzalo “Pachín” Marín,* who brought his revolutionary newspaper El Postillón (The Postilion) from Puerto Rico, where it had been suppressed by the Spanish authorities, to New York in 1889. In the print shop he set up in New York, Marín published his paper, as well as books and broadsides for the Cuban and Puerto Rican expatriate community. His shop became a meeting place for intellectuals, literary figures, and political leaders. A poet in his own right, in New York he published two volumes of his own verse that are now foundational for Puerto Rican letters: Romances (Ballads) and En la arena (In the Sand). Sotero Figueroa* was the president of the Club Borinquen (Puerto Rican Club) and owner of another print shop, Imprenta América (America Press), which provided the composition and printing for various revolutionary newspapers and other publications, including Borinquen, a bimonthly newspaper issued by the Puerto Rican section of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. But, more important, Figueroa worked closely with the Cuban patriot, philosopher, and literary figure José Martí* on both his political organizing (Figueroa was the board secretary for the Cuban Revolutionary Party) and his publishing projects, providing the printing for one of the most important organs of the revolutionary movement, New York’s La Patria (The Fatherland), founded by Martí as the official organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. In addition, Imprenta América probably prepared the books and pamphlets that were issued 914


for La Patria’s own publishing house, Ediciones de La Patria, as well as for the book-publishing arm of El Porvernir (The Future), which, beginning in 1890, issued the monumental five-volume biographical dictionary Album de “El Porvenir,” which memorialized the expatriate community and provided it with a firm sense of historical mission and national identity. One of the most active and important publishers was Nestor Ponce de León, a Havana editor and literary figure who was forced into exile in 1869. In New York, he promptly founded a publishing house. By the mid-1870s, Ponce was publishing a wide variety of books in Spanish, not just political tracts: technological dictionaries, histories of Cuba, biographies, medical and legal books, novels, and books of poetry, as well as translations of Moore, Byron, and Heine by Antonio and Francisco Sellén,* among others. In fact, Ponce was the principal publisher of the most celebrated Cuban poet of the time, the exiled José María Heredia,* who has since been canonized as one of the greatest poets of the entire Hispanic world. Ponce also printed some of the leading Spanishlanguage periodicals in New York and was the proprietor of the most important Hispanic bookstore in the Northeast. In 1887, along with José Martí and Colombian immigrant Santiago Pérez Triana, Ponce founded the influential literary club Sociedad Literaria Hispano-Americana de Nueva York that brought together all Hispanic literature enthusiasts and writers from throughout the city, except for the Spaniards, who were seen as the enemy. Like the many literary societies formed by Hispanics from the late nineteenth century to the present, the Sociedad Literaria was the forum where literary works would be read and discussed, speeches would be made and authors visiting the cities would be received and celebrated. Enrique Trujillo, on the other hand, was principally a newspaperman who was deported to New York in 1880 in retaliation for his revolutionary activities. After working on various revolutionary newspapers and having edited El Avisador Hispano-Americano (1889, The Spanish American Advisor) in New York, Trujillo founded in 1890 what became an immensely influential newspaper, El Porvenir, which was printed in his own shop. Trujillo also participated in laying the intellectual foundations for a Cuban national culture by publishing his biographical magazine, Album del Porvenir, and Apuntes históricos (1896, Historical Notes), which documented the effort of the expatriate community in the struggle for independence leading up to the Spanish–American War. Thanks to the four printer-publishers mentioned above (as well as various others, such as A. da Costa Gómez, M.M. Hernández, R. De Requenes, Modesto A. Tirado, and Viuda de Barcina), hundreds of books and pamphlets were issued in New York and distributed openly to expatriate communities throughout the United States, as well as to at least ten Spanish American republics and to Cuba and Puerto Rico. During the four years preceding the Spanish–American War, some eighty titles on Cuba alone poured forth from the exile press, located mainly in New York but also represented in Tampa, Key West, Philadelphia, and abroad. Some of these titles were issued in printings of five and ten thousand copies. When this voluminous outpouring is added to the hundreds of thousands 915


of pages of periodicals produced by the expatriates, as well as the hundreds of books on diverse subjects that were published, one can form a better judgment of not only the passion and intensity of the literate discourse, but also the commitment to the printed word in these communities. Cuban and Puerto Rican expatriates had to endure passage by ship and inspections by customs authorities to enter as refugees into the United States, but Mexican exiles crossed the border with relative ease to establish their press in exile, simply walking across a border or over a bridge and installing themselves in long-standing Mexican-origin communities of the Southwest. In fact, the relatively open border had for decades abetted refuge for numerous personae non grata from both sides of the dividing line. The Mexican exile press movement was begun around 1885, when the Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico became so repressive that scores of publishers and editors were forced north into exile. Publishers such as Adolfo Carrillo,* who had opposed Díaz with his El Correo del Lunes (The Monday Mail), crossed the border, hoping to smuggle their papers back into Mexico. Carrillo ended up in San Francisco, where he established La República (The Republic) in 1885. A General Martínez went into exile in Brownsville to launch El Mundo in 1885, organizing insurgent groups from there until an assassin’s bullet terminated his activities in 1891. Paulino Martínez established his El Monitor Democrático (The Democratic Monitor) in San Antonio in 1888 and his La Voz de Juárez (The Voice of Juárez) and El Chinaco in Laredo in 1889 and 1890, respectively. By 1900, the most important Mexican revolutionary journalist and ideologue, Ricardo Flores Magón,* had launched his newspaper Regeneración (Regeneration) in Mexico City and was promptly jailed. After another four stints behind bars for his radical journalism, at times prevented from reading and writing in jail, Flores Magón went into exile in the United States. In 1904, he began publishing Regeneración in San Antonio, in 1905 in Saint Louis, and in 1906 in Canada; in 1907, he founded Revolución in Los Angeles, and once again in 1908 revived Regeneración there. Throughout these years, Flores Magón and his brothers employed any and every subterfuge possible to smuggle the newspapers from the United States into Mexico, even stuffing them into cans or wrapping them in other newspapers sent to San Luis Potosí, where they were then distributed to sympathizers throughout the country. Ricardo Flores Magón* emerged as one of the major leaders in the movement to overthrow the Díaz regime, founding the Liberal Reformist Association in 1901. Flores Magón’s approach was somewhat different in its wedding of his ideas about revolution in Mexico with the struggle of working people in the United States, which in part accounted for his newspaper’s popularity among Mexican and Mexican American laborers engaged in unionizing efforts in the U.S. Pursued by Porfirio Díaz’s agents in San Antonio, Ricardo and his brother Enrique moved to St. Louis but corresponded with a chain of chapters across the Southwest that spread their revolutionary ideology, largely through meetings, fund-raising events and, of course, the publication of newspapers,

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pamphlets, and books. Numerous Spanish-language periodicals in the Southwest thus echoed the ideas of Flores Magón and were affiliated with the PLM, including La Bandera Roja (The Red Banner), El Demócrata (The Democrat), La Democracia (Democracy), Humanidad (Humanity), 1810, El Liberal (The Liberal), Punto Rojo (Red Point), Libertad y Trabajo (Freedom and Work), and La Reforma Social (Social Reform), which were located along the border from South Texas to Los Angeles. Among the most interesting of the affiliated papers were those involved in articulating labor and gender issues as part of the social change that should be implemented with the triumph of the revolution. The most notable were Teresa Villarreal’s El Obrero (1909, The Worker), Isidra T. de Cárdenas’s* La Voz de la Mujer (1907, The Woman’s Voice), Blanca de Moncaleano’s* Pluma Roja (1913–1915, Red Pen) and Teresa and Andrea Villarreal’s* La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman). The Mexican exile press flourished into the 1930s as weekly newspapers sided with one faction or another and publishing houses, often affiliated with newspapers, issued political tracts as well as novels of the revolution. In fact, more than any other literary genre published in book form, the novel of the Mexican Revolution flourished, more than one hundred issuing from such presses as San Antonio’s Casa Editorial Lozano. And by no means was the press in the 1920s and 1930s as liberal as the exile press prior to the outbreak of the Revolution. To the contrary, what sprang up was an exile press founded by exiles of the different warring factions who often opposed those in power in Mexico. Some of them founded newspapers to serve the rapidly expanding community of economic refugees, and their newspapers eventually became the backbone of an immigrant rather than an exile press as their entrepreneurial spirit overtook their political commitment to change in the homeland. With the Cristero War (1926–1929), caused by governmental persecution of the Catholic Church that built upon the anticlerical tenets of the 1917 Mexican constitution, a fresh batch of political refugees also founded newspapers and publishing houses to attack the Mexican government and to serve the needs of the religious community in exile. During the build-up of conflict between church and state in Mexico, such periodicals as La Guadalupana: Revista Mensual Católica (1922, The Guadalupan: Catholic Monthly Magazine) and El Renacimiento: Semanario Católico (1923, The Renascence: Catholic Weekly) were founded in El Paso and La Esperanza (1924, Hope) in Los Angeles. In fact, El Paso became the destination of choice for many Hispanic religious presses, not just for the Catholics, as the Mexican Baptists, Methodists, and others took refuge in Texas. The influence of the Cristero refugees was felt in many of the immigrant newspapers, not just in specialized publications; the already conservative counter-revolutionary papers naturally focused on the religious persecution in Mexico and the atrocities committed by the government of bolcheviques. A spate of books appeared defending the Church and decrying the atrocities committed against the clergy in Mexico. But, more important, a Hispanic religious

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publishing industry that issued books and periodicals in both languages became cemented in El Paso, where it still functions today. The next large wave of Hispanic political refugees to reach the shores of the United States came from across the Atlantic: the liberals defeated by Spanish fascism in the 1930s. And the Spanish expatriates were fast to establish their own exile press in Depression-era Hispanic communities that were hotbeds for union and socialist organizing. From Manhattan and Brooklyn alone issued the following titles: España Libre (1939–1977, Free Spain), España Nueva (1923–1942, New Spain), España Republicana (1931–1935, Republican Spain), Frente Popular (1937–1939, Popular Front), and La Liberación (1946–1949, The Liberation). Many of the Hispanic labor and socialist organizations, in which Spanish immigrant workers were prominent, published newspapers that also supported the Republican cause: the long-running anarchist paper Cultura Proletaria (1910–1959, Proletarian Culture), El Obrero (1931–1932, The Worker), and Vida Obrera (1930–1932, Worker Life). Working- class writers, publishers, and printers were not the only intellectuals to come to these shores as refugees of the Spanish Civil War. A whole cadre of exiled Spanish writers found work at colleges and universities throughout the United States, now that Spanish-language courses had become an important part of the curriculum. Included among these were major writers such as Jorge Guillén and Ramón Sender,* the latter of whom remaining permanently in the United States and produced the largest body of his work here. Exiles and political refugees have continued to make up an important segment of Hispanic immigrants to the United States. Because of the Cuban Revolution and the United States’ policy of fighting much of the Cold War by involvement in the civil wars of Central America and Chile, large-scale immigration of political refugees has continued to the present day. Beginning in 1959, a new wave of refugees from the Cuban Revolution established a widespread exile press as well as a more informal network comprising hundreds of newsletters. Along with the political periodicals, such literary magazines as Linden Lane have also flourished. The largest and longest-lasting publishing house for the Cuban exiles, Ediciones Universal* (Universal Editions), is still very active in Miami. Chileans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and other Spanish American expatriates have all issued political newspapers and magazines in recent years. The celebrated playwright and novelist Matías Montes Huidobro was a literary leader who founded and edited for many years a publishing house headquartered in Hawaii (where he was a professor), dedicated to the publication of Cuban exile theater. A notable Chilean literary magazine was the Revista del exilio chileno, founded and edited by Fernando Alegría.* In 1990, Alegría and fellow Stanford Professor Jorge Rufinelli compiled and published an important anthology of exile literature, entitled Paradise Lost or Gained: The Literature of Hispanic Exile. However, perhaps because of the United States’ furthering of the Cold War during the 1970s and 1980s, many Cuban, Chilean, Argentine, and Central American writers in the United States did not have to

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rely on their own exile presses for publication. Many of them, such as Heberto Padilla, Jacobo Timmerman, and Ariel Dorfman,* readily found mainstream U.S. publishers for translations of their works.

The Immigrant Press Since the mid-nineteenth century, Hispanic immigrants have founded publishing houses and periodicals to serve their enclaves in their native language, maintaining a connection with the homeland while helping the immigrants to adjust to a new society and culture in the United States. Although El Mercurio de Nueva York (1829–1830, The New York Mercury) and El Mensagero Semanal de Nueva York (1828–1831, The New York Weekly Messenger) may have served immigrant populations and functioned somewhat along the lines described above, it was not until much later, when larger Hispanic immigrant communities began to form, that more characteristic immigrant newspapers were founded. Among these, San Francisco’s Sud Americano (1855, South American), El Eco del Pacífico (1856, The Pacific Echo), La Voz de Méjico (1862, The Voice of Mexico), and El Nuevo Mundo (1864, The New World) served a burgeoning community of immigrants from northern Mexico and throughout the Hispanic world (even from as far away as Chile) who had been drawn to the Bay Area during the Gold Rush and its accompanying industrial and commercial development. From the 1850s through the 1870s, San Francisco supported the most, longest-running, and most financially successful Spanish-language newspapers in the United States. In fact, San Francisco was able to support two daily Spanish-language newspapers during this period: El Eco del Pacífico (1856–?, The Pacific Echo) and El Tecolote (1875–1879, The Owl). The San Francisco Spanish-language press covered news of the homeland, which varied from coverage of Spain and Chile to Central America and Mexico and generally helped immigrants adjust to the new environment. Very closely reported on was the French Intervention in Mexico, with various newspapers supporting fund-raising events for the war effort and aid for the widows and orphans, in addition to working with the local Junta Patriótica Mexicana, even printing in toto the long speeches made at the Junta’s meetings. The newspapers reported on the discrimination and persecution of Hispanic miners and generally saw the defense of the Hispanic colonia, or colony, as a priority, denouncing abuse of Hispanic immigrants and natives. Hispanic readers in the Southwest were acutely aware of racial issues in the United States and sided with the North during the Civil War, another event that was extensively covered in the newspapers. Although San Francisco’s Hispanic population was the state’s largest demographic group during the nineteenth century, it was Los Angeles that received the largest number of Mexican immigrants with the massive exodus of economic refugees from the Revolution of 1910. It was thus Los Angeles in the twentieth century that, along with San Antonio and New York, supported some of the most important Spanish-language daily newspapers, periodicals

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that began as immigrant newspapers. Between 1910 and 1924, some halfmillion Mexican immigrants settled in the United States; Los Angeles and San Antonio were their most popular destinations. These two cities attracted an entrepreneurial class of immigrants who came with sufficient cultural and financial capital to establish businesses of all types to serve the rapidly growing Mexican enclaves, constructing everything from tortilla factories to Hispanic theaters and movie houses. Their cultural leadership in mutual aid societies, churches, theaters, and newspapers made them able to disseminate a nationalistic ideology that ensured the solidarity and insularity of their community or market. The flood of Mexican workers into both cities spurred the founding of numerous Spanish-language newspapers from the 1910s until the Depression; both cities supported more Spanish-language newspapers during this period than did any other cities in the United States. El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald), founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by owner Juan de Heras and publisher Cesar F. Marburg, was considered a “people’s newspaper” because of its focus on and importance to Mexican immigrant workers in Los Angeles. It often proclaimed its working-class identity, as well as its promotion of Mexican nationalism. Through its publishing house it issued in 1928 the first novel narrated from the perspective of a “Chicano,” or Mexican working class immigrant: Daniel Venegas’s* Las aventuras de Don Chipote o Cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed). With its circulation extending beyond 4,000, it was the most popular Mexican newspaper at this time. Like many other Hispanic immigrant newspapers, El Heraldo de México devoted the largest proportion of its coverage to news of the homeland, followed by news directly affecting the immigrants in the U.S.; this was followed by a representation of news and advertisements that would be of interest to working-class immigrants. El Heraldo de México defended immigrant working-class interests by publishing editorials and devoting considerable space to combating discrimination against and the mistreatment and exploitation of immigrant labor. El Heraldo de México went a step further in 1919 by attempting to organize Mexican laborers into an association, the Liga Protectiva Mexicana de California (Mexican Protective League of California), to protect their rights and interests. For the Mexican immigrant communities, defense of civil and human rights also extended to protecting Mexican immigrants from the influence of Anglo American culture and Protestantism. The publishers, editorialists and columnists were almost unanimous in developing and promoting the idea of a “México de afuera,”* or a Mexican colony existing outside of Mexico, making it the duty of each individual to maintain the Spanish language, keep the Catholic faith, and insulate Mexican children from what community leaders perceived as the low moral standards of Anglo Americans. Basic to this belief system was an expectation of imminent return to Mexico as soon as the hostilities of the Revolution subsided. Mexican national culture was to be preserved while in exile in the midst of iniquitous Anglo Protestants, whose culture was aggressively

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degrading even as it discriminated against Hispanics. The ideology was most expressed and disseminated by cultural and business elites, who exerted leadership in all phases of life in the colonia and solidified a conservative substratum for Mexican American culture for decades to come. Among the most powerful of the political, business, and intellectual figures in the Mexican immigrant community was Ignacio E. Lozano,* founder and operator of the two most powerful and well distributed daily newspapers: San Antonio’s La Prensa (The Press), founded in 1913, and Los Angeles’s La Opinión (The Opinion), founded in 1926 and still publishing today. Lozano, part of a successful business family in northern Mexico, relocated to San Antonio in 1908 in search of business opportunities. The business training and experience that he had received in Mexico made Lozano able to contribute professionalism and business acumen to Hispanic journalism in the United States, reflected in his hiring of well-trained journalists, starting at the top with his appointment of Teodoro Torres* to edit La Prensa. The ideas of men like Torres and Lozano reached thousands not only in San Antonio but throughout the Southwest, the Midwest, and northern Mexico by means of a vast distribution system that included newsstand sales, home delivery, and mail. La Prensa also set up a network of correspondents in the United States who were able to regularly issue reports on current events and cultural activities of Mexican communities as far away as Chicago, Detroit, and even New York. When around 1920 Mexican President Alvaro Obregón took more liberal stances toward the expatriate community, La Prensa began to circulate freely in northern Mexico, gaining a large readership from Piedras Negras west to Ciudad Juárez. Unlike the publishers of many other Hispanic immigrant newspapers, Lozano also set about serving the long-standing Mexican American population in San Antonio and the Southwest, reaching a broader market and all social classes. He and his staff also sought to bring Mexican Americans within the “México de afuera” ideology. Unfortunately, La Prensa did not survive long enough to see the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, the civil rights movement that promoted a cultural nationalism of its own. Unlike Los Angeles, where La Opinión still thrives today, San Antonio did not continue to attract a steady or large enough stream of immigrants to sustain the newspaper when the children of the immigrants became English-dominant in their consumption of information. But La Prensa was indeed influential in its day. Lozano and many of his prominent writers and editorialists became leaders of the Mexican/Mexican American communities. They shaped and cultivated their market for cultural products and print media as efficiently as others sold material goods and Mexican foods and delivered specialized services to the community of immigrants. The Mexican community truly benefited from the entrepreneurs’ provision of needed goods, information, and services that were often denied by the larger society by means of official and open segregation. Of course, the writers, artists, and intellectuals provided the high as well as popular culture and entertainment in the native language of the Mexican community, something also

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not offered by Anglo American society: Spanish-language books and periodicals, silent films with Spanish captions, and Spanish-language drama and vaudeville, among other entertainment and popular art forms. Some of the most talented writers from Mexico, Spain, and Latin America earned their living as reporters, columnists, and critics in the editorial offices of La Prensa, La Opinión, and El Heraldo de México, including such writers as Miguel Arce,* Adalberto Elías González,* Esteban Escalante, Gabriel Navarro,* and Daniel Venegas.* They and many others used the newspapers as a stable source of employment and as a base from which they launched their literary publications in book form or wrote plays and revues for the theater that was flourishing in Los Angeles and San Antonio. Various newspaper companies operated publishing houses, as did both Lozano papers and El Heraldo de México. They also imported books and published reprint editions under their own imprints. The largest of these, Igancio Lozano’s Casa Editorial Lozano (Lozano Publishing House), advertised its books in the family’s two newspapers for sale via direct mail and in the Lozano bookstore in San Antonio; El Heraldo de México also operated a bookstore in Los Angeles. In addition to the publishing houses owned by the large dailies, in the same cities and in smaller population centers many other newspapers were publishing books as well. Without a doubt, however, San Antonio became the publishing center for Hispanics in the Southwest, housing more Spanish-language publishing houses than any other city in the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s, San Antonio was home to the Casa Editorial Lozano, Viola Novelty Company, Whitt Publishing, Librería de Quiroga (Quiroga Bookstore), Artes Gráficas (Graphic Arts), and various others. They unanimously dedicated themselves to both publishing and importing books and printing catalogs for mail order. Lozano and Viola Novelty, which were connected to newspapers, also published book listings in their parent newspapers, La Prensa, La Opinión, and the satirical El Fandango. Those that were proprietors of bookstores, such as Lozano, Quiroga, and Librera Española, of course, had a ready sales outlet. Among the San Antonio publishers’ offerings was everything from the practical, such as Ignacio E. Lozano’s manual for (male) secretaries, El perfecto secretario (The Perfect Secretary), to autobiographies by exiled political and religious figures to sentimental novels and books of poetry. The Whitt Company (exiled publishers from northern Mexico) issued religious plays appropriate for parish Christmas festivities, along with numerous other books of Mexican folklore and legendry. The Librería de Quiroga seems to have dedicated itself to supplying the leisure-reading market for housewives, especially those of the middle class, with such sentimental fare as María del Pilar Sinués’s novel El amor de los amores (The Love of Loves), Rafael del Castillo’s novel Amor de madre (A Mother’s Love), Joaquín Piña’s novel Rosa de amor (Rose of Love), Stowe’s La cabaña de Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and Antonio Plaza’s poetry collection, Album del corazón (Album of the Heart). A fiction genre that almost all of these houses had in common was the novel of the Mexican Revolution, as numerous expatriate intellectuals fictionalized 922


their personal experiences of the whirlwind that was the Revolution in Mexico, seeking to come to terms with the cataclysm that had disrupted their lives and that had caused so many of their readers to relocate to the southwestern United States. The authors represented the full gamut of the revolutionary factions in their loyalties and ideologies, but for the most part the genre was characterized by a conservative reaction to the socialistic change in government and community organization that the Revolution had wrought. One of the first to establish this genre was the now-classic work of Latin American literature, Mariano Azuela’s* Los de abajo (The Underdogs), which first saw the light as a serialized novel in an El Paso Spanish-language newspaper before being published in book form in the same city in 1915. However, the majority of these novels were issued from San Antonio; and of course the house that issued the most titles was Casa Editorial Lozano. In fact, many of the novels were authored by writers employed by Lozano on La Prensa and La Opinión: Miguel Arce,* Julián González,* and Teodoro Torres,* whose Pancho Villa, una vida de romance y de tragedia (1924, Pancho Villa, a Life of Romance and Tragedy) ran into three editions. With the flurry of immigrant publishing that existed in the Spanish language before World War II developed another trend that did not survive long after the war: the sporadic and intermittent acceptance of works by Hispanic immigrant authors in English-language mainstream publications. Mexican immigrant author María Cristina Mena,* who married American playwright Henry Kellet Chambers and became a protégé of D. H. Lawrence, saw her old country–based stories published in Century, American, and Cosmopolitan, among others. Nicaraguan immigrant Salomón de la Selva worked his way into Emily Dickinson’s circle and saw his poetry published in English. Josephina Niggli* saw her novels, stories, and plays issued by mainstream houses in their English originals. Of course, George Santayana* seems not to have been perceived as an ethnic, embraced as he was by the Northeast establishment and even by the nominators for the Pulitzer Prize. Even a Mexican immigration novel was published by a mainstream house: Luis Pérez’s* El Coyote: The Rebel, published by Holt in 1947 (Pérez’s other literary works remain as yet unpublished). In the Northeast, the large daily and weekly newspapers flourished and also published books, as did small, ephemeral presses. In 1913, José Campubrí founded La Prensa in New York City to serve the community of mostly Spanish and Cuban immigrants in and around Manhattan’s 14th Street, little knowing then that La Prensa would become the nation’s longest-running Spanishlanguage daily newspaper (in 1962 it merged with El Diario de Nueva York). One of the main reasons La Prensa survived so long was that it was able to expand and adapt to the new Spanish-speaking nationalities that immigrated to the city, especially to the Puerto Ricans who migrated from their island en masse during and after World War II, becoming the largest Hispanic group in the city. In 1948, El Diario de Nueva York (The New York Daily) was founded by Dominican immigrant Porfirio Domenici, specifically appealing to the Puerto Rican community and giving La Prensa competition for this growing 923


readership—El Diario de Nueva York’s slogan was “Champion of the Puerto Ricans.” Publisher Domenici hired as its first editor Vicente Géigel Polanco, a well-known journalist and political figure from Puerto Rico; in 1952, he replaced Géigel with José Dávila Ricci, a journalist associated with Puerto Rican governor Luis Múñoz Marín. Over the years, El Diario de Nueva York conducted many campaigns and programs on behalf of the Puerto Rican community. It researched and then published exposés of the abuse and inhuman conditions endured by Puerto Rican workers and created a counseling and referral center for the community, offering many other services as well. In 1962, O. Roy Chalk, owner of El Diario de Nueva York, purchased La Prensa and merged the two journals. From the 1970s to the present, the Hispanic ethnic balance in the city and metropolitan area have shifted repeatedly because of the immigration of Cuban refugees, as well as Central Americans and the always-steady flow of Dominicans (who today form the largest Hispanic group in the city). Following its well-tested formulas, El Diario–La Prensa has repeatedly adjusted its focus to embrace the new groups and reflect their concerns and interests. In 1981, the Gannett newspaper corporation bought El Diario–La Prensa; in 1989, it was sold to El Diario Associates, Inc., a corporation founded by Peter Davidson, a former Morgan Stanley specialist in the newspaper industry. In 1990, the Times Mirror Corporation purchased a fifty percent interest in La Opinión (San Antonio’s La Prensa had ceased to exist in 1963). In 1976, the Miami Herald founded El Miami Herald; in 1987 it was transformed into the new and improved El Nuevo Herald. Both the Spanish- and English-language Miami dailies are subsidiaries of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. Thus, today, the three major Hispanic dailies are owned and controlled by American (non-Hispanic) multimedia corporations. How this has affected their functioning in service of immigrants has not yet been assessed. There are, however, other smaller dailies that in varying degrees remain independent. Hispanic immigrant publishing houses since the 1950s have been small and rather shortlived, not faring as well as the newspapers, which do not themselves publish literature in any proportion comparable to that of their pre–World War II predecessors. Another important facet of immigrant publishing is represented by the cultural magazines that have existed since the nineteenth century. Although workers’ periodicals obviously served the immigrant working class, Hispanic elites felt the need to reproduce the cultural refinement that was the product of their education and breeding in the homeland. Whether to remain connected to the cultural accomplishments of the greater international Hispanic community or to fill an intellectual void that existed in the foreign land, a number of high-quality periodicals were established in the Northeast and Southwest. Some of them, such as the New York monthlies El Ateneo: Repertorio Ilustrado de Arte, Ciencia y Literatura (1874–1877, The Athenaeum: Illustrated Repertoire of Arts, Science, and Literature) and El Americano (1892–?, The American), retained the newspaper format but primarily published literature 924


and commentary, along with illustrations. Others looked much like the cultural magazines being published at the turn of the century, such as Harper’s Magazine and Cosmopolitan. What was most distinctive about them was that they placed the Hispanic immigrant community of the United States on the international cultural map, drawing their selections from essayists and writers of prose fiction and poetry from Spain and Spanish America, as well as from the United States. Pan-Hispanism and hemispheric integration, in fact, formed the basis of El Ateneo’s and El Americano’s ideological stance. And they both had a circulation overseas as well as in the United States. While these two magazines were celebrating the art and culture of the Americas, another New York periodical, Ambas Américas: Revista de Educación, Bibliografía y Agricultura (1867–1868, Both Americas: Educational, Bibliographic and Agricultural Magazine), set a task for itself of informing the people and institutions in Central and South America of educational, scientific and agricultural advances in the United States so that they would be emulated in the Spanish American countries. From within a similarly internationalist perspective developed the most important illustrated Hispanic magazine, La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (1882–?, The Illustrated Revue), which at a subscription price of $3 explicitly targeted the middle and upper classes of educated Hispanics in the U.S. and abroad. Despite its generally positive stance on Anglo American civilization and the wonders of its science and technology and the stability of its government, the magazine nevertheless called for pan-Hispanic unity in resisting the expansionism of the American empire during a time characterized by American filibustering and interventionism in Spanish America. Thus, despite its elitism, La Revista felt the same necessity of protecting language, culture, and Hispanic interests felt by the working-class Hispanic newspapers. Since World War II, book publishing by immigrants has relied on myriad tiny, often short-lived, publishers. Two of the longest-lived, Alejandro Otero and Joseph Otero’s Spanish American Printing and Gaetano Massa’s Las Américas Publishing House in New York City published or printed a wide variety of books for the Hispanic immigrant community. The former began early in the twentieth century, catering to Hispanic immigrants and Puerto Ricans, and lasted into the 1980s, printing with a subvention from such authors as Puerto Rican José Cuchi-Coll, Peruvian Carlos Johnson, and Puerto Rican Violeta Riomar. Spanish American also did the printing for Las Americas Publishing House and numerous local Spanish-language magazines and Spanish mutual aid societies. Las Américas, on the other hand, survived from the 1940s through the 1980s as an importer of texts for Spanish and Spanish American literature classes and universities on the East coast; it began publishing books when various texts went out-of-print. It issued some of the important texts of such critics as Pedro Henríquez Ureña but also published original literature, such as the works of José López Heredia. With the stepped-up migrations that began in the 1970s, many authors from the Caribbean and South America relocated to the United States and needed publishers for their works. Some of these, such as Chilean Hugo Hanriot Pérez and Peruvian Carlos Johnson established 925


their own houses in the 1980s, such as New Jersey’s SLUSA (Spanish Language Publishing in the United States) and New York’s Ediciones Jilguer, respectively, in order to issue their own works and those of their literary circles. Another active publisher during the late 1970s and 1980s was New York’s Senda Nueva de Ediciones (New Path Editions), which published some of Marjorie Agosin’s* first works, and Editorial Mensaje, which published Tino Villanueva’s* and Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s first books of poetry. Some Cuban immigrants published their works through Ediciones Universal, which at first was primarily a publisher of exile literature; it is still very much in existence today and continues to publish works that are underwritten by the authors. A noteworthy magazine issued in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s was Areito, edited by scholar and creative writer Lourdes Casal* and published by Ediciones Vitral, Inc.; it was the first publication of the children of exiled Cubans who sought to forge a rapprochement with Cuba and the Castro cultural institutions. Another effort by young Cuban, Puerto Rican, and South American immigrants to forge a literary identity within New York was the writers collective La Nueva Sangre and its magazine and book publications, founded and run by such authors as Dolores Prida* and Cristóbal Roger Cabán in the late 1960s. For more than a decade, beginning in the 1980s, Ediciones del Norte issued works by some of the leading Spanish American exiles and immigrants out of Hanover, New Hampshire, and was the first press to issue an anthology dedicated to the Latino immigrant writers: Las paraguas amarillas (The Yellow Umbrellas), edited by Isaac Goldemberg* and Iván Silén.* From the 1980s, Pittsburgh’s Latin American Review Press, under Chilean director Yvette Miller, has published books and a magazine dedicated to Hispanic literature translated to English. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Arte Público Press* of Houston, the nation’s largest Hispanic publisher, was issuing numerous immigrant works by authors of varied Latin ethnicities, quite often publishing the English translation before the Spanish original of a work to introduce their authors to the American buying public, thus establishing a track record for institutional buyers, including libraries and schools. At the same time, Arte Público also began issuing works by such Central American immigrant authors as Mario Bencastro* and Roberto Quesada,* reflecting the changing nature of Hispanic demographics in the United States. In addition to those named above, numerous sporadic and short-lived publishers have existed, including Editorial Persona in Hawaii; Ediciones de la Frontera in Los Angeles; Cruzada Spanish Publications, Editorial Arcos, Editorial Sibi, and LS Press in Miami, Contra Viento y Marea in New Jersey, and El Libro Viaje, Libros del Maitén, Peninsula Publishing, and Prisma Books in New York, among many others.

The Native Hispanic Press A Hispanic native or ethnic minority perspective developed first among Hispanics already residing in the Southwest when the U.S. appropriated it 926


from Mexico. It has specifically manifested itself in the political realm and in Hispanic attitudes toward civil and cultural rights. The ethnic-minority or native press that developed among Hispanics has been cognizant of the racial, ethnic, or minority status of its readers within U.S. society and culture. This press has made use of both Spanish and English. It has included immigrants in its readership and among its interests, but its fundamental reason for existence, and its point of reference, has been its readership’s life and conditions in the United States. Unlike the immigrant press, it does not have one foot in the homeland and one in the United States. Many of the Hispanic newspapers, books, and other publications that appeared in the Southwest after the end of Mexican War in 1848 laid the basis for the development of Hispanics throughout the United States viewing themselves as an ethnic minority within this country. Although the origins of their journalistic endeavors date well before the all-important signing of the peace treaty between the United States and Mexico, it was the immediate conversion to colonial status of the Mexican population in the newly acquired territories of California, New Mexico, and Texas that made of their journalistic efforts a sounding board for their rights—first as colonials and later as “racialized” citizens of the United States. Although the printing press was not introduced to California and New Mexico until 1834, the society there, as in Texas, was sufficiently literate to sustain a wide range of printing and publishing once the press was been allowed. Newspaper publication in the southwest of what became the United States originated in 1813 with papers published to support Mexico’s independence movement from Spain. In 1834 and 1835, almost contemporary with the introduction of the press to California and New Mexico, Spanish-language newspapers began to appear in these northern provinces of Mexico: Santa Fe’s El Crepúsculo de la Libertad (1834–?, The Dawn of Liberty) and Taos’s El Crepúsculo (1835–?, Dawn). Prior to the U.S. conquest, still other newspapers were published in New Mexico: La Verdad (1844–1845, The Truth) and its successor, El Payo de Nuevo México (1845, The New Mexico Countryman). Beginning with the American presence in New Mexico and California during the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, many newspapers began publishing bilingually in English and Spanish there; in Texas, numerous newspapers had been publishing bilingually since just before the proclamation of the Texas Republic in 1836, and some dating as far back as 1824. In New Mexico, publishing only in Spanish or bilingually was a necessity for the Anglo owners of the newspapers, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of the territory were Spanish speakers. In California, newspapers received a subsidy from the state as well as from some cities for printing laws in Spanish, the state constitution requiring laws to be issued in both languages. It is easy to envision how this initial motivation developed into a profitable enterprise once the Spanish-language market was identified and cultivated. Indeed, the Spanish-language section of Los Angeles’s Star grew into La Estrella de Los Angeles and then into a separate newspaper: El Clamor Público (1855–1859, The Public Clamor). From San 927


Francisco’s The Californian (1846–1848), the first Anglo American newspaper in Alta California, to New Mexico’s Santa Fe Republican (1847–?) to Brownsville’s La Bandera (184?–1863?) and The Corpus Christi Star (1848–?), the Anglo-established press was a bilingual institution. After a long scarcity of printing presses during the Spanish and Mexican periods in what became the U.S. Southwest, it was the coming of the Anglo American with technology and equipment that brought printing presses into Hispanic hands as never before and facilitating the subsequent founding of more and more Spanish-language newspapers and publishing houses to serve the native Hispanic population of the Southwest. By the 1880s and 1890s, books were also issuing from these presses (in fact it should be noted that books written in Spanish were printed from the very arrival of the printing press in 1834). A native literature in manuscript form had existed since the colonial period, and when the printing press became available, this literature made the transition to print. And when the railroad reached the territories, dramatic changes occurred as a consequence of greater access to machinery and technology as well as to better means of distribution for print products. The last third of the century thus saw an explosion of independent Spanish-language publishing by Hispanics. It was during this last third also that a native literature in book form helped to develop a sense of ethnic and regional identity for Hispanics in the Southwest. Autobiographies, memoirs, and novels appeared, specifically treating the sense of dislocation and uprootedness, the sense of loss of patrimony, and the fear of persecution as a racial minority in the United States. In 1858, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín* published his Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguín, the first autobiography written by a Mexican American in English. Seguín, the embattled and disenchanted political figure of the Texas Republic, was personally persecuted and ultimately experienced great disillusionment in the transformation of his Texas by Anglo Americans. In 1872, the first novel written in English by a Hispanic of the United States was selfpublished by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton:* the domestic novel Who Would Have Thought It?, which critiqued American ideas about race and egalitarianism. In 1885, Ruiz de Burton published another novel, this time from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of the Southwest. The Squatter and the Don documented the loss of lands to squatters, banking, and railroad interests in Southern California shortly after statehood. In 1881, the first Spanish-language novel written and published in the Southwest was published, Manuel M. Salazar’s* La historia de un caminante, o Gervacio y Aurora (The History of a Traveler on Foot, or Gervasio and Aurora), which created a colorful picture of pastoral life in New Mexico at the time. As the century ended, numerous native texts were finding their way into book form. However, as immigration from Mexico increased in the Southwest, and from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Spain in the Northeast, and as immigrant newspapers and publishing houses were established, the opportunities for establishing large native publishing outlets soon disappeared as the immigrant culture overwhelmed the native Hispanic populations. Although Hispanic 928


native writing persisted and laid the foundation for today’s bilingual, bicultural citizenry, native authors most frequently either self-published or worked through the immigrant newspapers and publishing houses to get their works into print. Although a number of immigrant and exile authors found their way into the mainstream press during these years, such an important native writer as Américo Paredes* of Brownsville was unsuccessful in placing his early works in English; his 1936 novel George Washington Gómez did not make it into print until 1990. The 1930s Texan writer Jovita González* never saw her two novels in print: Caballero and Dew on the Thorn were published posthumously in 1995 and 1998, respectively. It was not until the 1960s that such writers as Puerto Rican Nicholasa Mohr,* Cuban American José Yglesias,* and Mexican Americans José Antonio Villarreal* (Doubleday actually issued his Pocho in 1959) and Floyd Salas saw their works issued by the large commercial houses in New York. The Hispanic civil rights movements and the entrance of a broad sector of Hispanics into universities helped to usher in the flourishing of Hispanic American literature in the English language that began in the 1970s and persists today.

New Mexico Because New Mexico drew comparably fewer Anglo settlers and entrepreneurs than California and Texas, and because of its vastly larger Hispanic population—only in New Mexico did Hispanics maintain a demographic superiority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—New Mexico was the first territory to develop a widespread independent native Hispanic press. Hispanics in New Mexico lived in a more compact area and with comparably less competition and violence from Anglo newcomers. The Nuevomexicanos were able to hold onto more lands, property, and institutions than were the Hispanics of California and Texas. Control of their own newspapers and publications became essential in the eyes of Hispanic intellectuals and community leaders in the development of Nuevomexicano identity and self-determination in the face of adjusting to the new culture that was foisted upon them during the territorial period. Nuevomexicanos were living under a double-edged sword: they wanted to control their own destiny and preserve their own language and culture while enjoying the benefits and rights of advanced civilization as a state of the American Union. But the Nuevomexicanos immediately became aware of the dangers of Anglo American cultural, economic, and political encroachment in New Mexico. According to Meléndez (24–25), many of the intellectual leaders—especially newspaper publishers—believed that the native population would only advance, learning to protect itself and to merit statehood through education, seeing newspapers as key to the education and advancement of the natives as well as to the protection of their civil and property rights. Nuevomexicanos felt the urgency of empowering themselves in the new system—and of retaining some of the power they had under Mexico—as Washington delayed statehood for more than fifty years, biding its time, most 929


historians agree, until Anglos achieved a numerical and voting superiority in the territory. In the decade following the arrival of the railroad in 1879, native Hispanic journalism increased dramatically in the New Mexico territory and, according to Meléndez (26), a true flowering of Nuevomexicano periodicals followed in the 1890s, when some thirty-five Spanish-language newspapers were in publication. From 1879 up to New Mexico’s admittance as a state of the Union in 1912, more than ninety Spanish-language newspapers were published in New Mexico (Meléndez, 29). By 1891, native Hispanic journalism had become so widespread and intense that a newspaper association was founded, La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana, to set up a network of correspondents, share resources, and facilitate reprinting items from each member newspaper in a type of informal syndication. Thus, in a few short decades, a corps of the native inhabitants of what had been a backwater province under Mexico and a frontier colony under the United States had been transformed into intellectuals and activists using the written and published word through print and transportation technology, taking the lead in ushering their community into the twentieth century and into statehood. In his book, Meléndez proceeds to amply document how the Nuevomexicano journalists set about taking control of their social and cultural destiny by constructing what they saw as a “national” culture for themselves, using and preserving the Spanish language and formulating their own version of history and their own literature, all of which would ensure their self-confident and proud entrance as an American State. From within the group of newspaper publishers and editors sprang a cohesive and identifiable corps of native creative writers, historians, and publishers who were elaborating a native and indigenous intellectual tradition that still forms the basis of much of the intellectual and literary work of Mexican Americans today. In addition, the young journalists and publishers quite often went on to become leaders in New Mexican trade, commerce, education, and politics—a legacy that is still felt today. Thus, the development of the New Mexican Hispanic press at that time followed a very different pattern from that of New York’s Hispanic press, which received publishers, writers, and journalists trained abroad who saw themselves as exiles or immigrants. The cultural nationalism of these native journalists, of course, sprang from the necessity to defend their community from the cultural, economic, and political onslaught of the “outsiders.” Their newspapers were to provide “la defensa de nuestro pueblo y nuestro país” (the defense of our people and our homeland) and “buscar preferentemente el mejoramiento y adelanto del pueblo hispano-americano” (preferably seek the improvement and progress of the Hispanic American people), according to El Nuevo Mundo (The New World, 8 May, 1897). In keeping with their community leadership, their defense of cultural and civil rights was often issued in front page editorials that in no uncertain terms made it clear that Nuevomexicanos had to assume a posture of defense to survive, and that part and parcel of the defense was the 930


furthering of education and cultural solidarity. To combat the American myth of civilizing the West—of subduing the barbarous and racially inferior Indians and Mexicans—that empowered the United States and its “pioneers” to encroach and dispossess Indians and Nuevomexicanos of their lands and patrimony, the Nuevomexicano journalists began elaborating their own myth of the glorious introduction of European civilization and its institutions by the Spanish during the colonial period. Prior achievement legitimized their claims to land as well as to the protection and preservation of their language and culture. In their rhetoric the Nuevomexicano editorialists were able to turn the tables on the Anglo American settlers and businessmen who had “invaded” the territory by claiming their own higher breeding and Catholic religion over the low morality, vicious opportunism, and hypocrisy of the Protestant interlopers and adventurers. In the construction of their history, the editors included historical and biographical materials regularly, even in weekly columns, covering the full gamut of Hispanic history, from the exploration and colonization of Mexico (including what became the U.S. Southwest) to the life histories of important historical figures, such as Miguel de Hidalgo y Costilla, Simón Bolívar, and José San Martín. They also began to publish history books and biographies documenting their own evolution as a people. Even in their newspapers, biographies became standard fare in the documentation of the contributions of their own forebears and even contemporaries in New Mexico and the Southwest. One institution stands out in its furthering of the ethnic nationalist goals of the Nuevomexicanos: the Revista Ilustrada (The Illustrated Review), which New Mexican Camilo Padilla founded in El Paso, Texas, in 1907 and continued to publish in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1917 to 1931(?). The Revista Ilustrada was ahead of its times in identifying and furthering a Hispanic ethnic minority culture in the United States. Unlike New York’s Revista Ilustrada, which envisioned an international, pan-Hispanic readership, New Mexico’s magazine squarely situated itself in the home. In addition to publishing poetry, stories, and history—often graphically illustrated—the magazine offered space to Nuevomexicano intellectuals to ponder the fate of their culture. Among the collaborators were such notables as Nuevomexicano historian Benjamin M. Read, poet and novelist Eusebio Chacón,* and linguist and professor Aurelio M. Espinosa. In its furtherance of the Spanish language and Hispanic culture, Padilla included the works of some of the outstanding Spanish American literary figures of the time and advertised books of European and Latin American literature in Spanish that could be bought directly from the magazine. After 1925, Padilla’s cultural work went far beyond the pages of the magazine to the founding and administration of El Centro de Cultura in Santa Fe, a center for cultural, literary and social events, but foremost a place for native art and culture practice (Meléndez, 198). As Meléndez asserts, the promotion of a “national” literature and a “national” history by these editors and writers demonstrates that as early as the late nineteenth century the Nuevomexicanos were seeing themselves as a national minority of the United States. This idea was furthered by the region-wide 931


Hispanic American Press Association, by exchanges with newspapers in Texas and California, and by awareness of region-wide dispossession and proletarization of the Mexican-origin population. That they recognized the value of their own local history, folklore, and literature and had elevated it to print was a conscious part of this minority identity formation that was taking place.

California Soon after the influx of Anglo Americans occasioned by the California Gold Rush and statehood in 1850, the native Hispanic population of California became overwhelmed and was quickly converted to minority status. During the post–Civil War years, immigration of Anglos increased dramatically, as did the arrival of the railroads, the breaking up of the Californio ranches, and the conversion of the economy to American-style capitalism; the native population was quickly converted to a proletarian one as the Californios and Hispanicized Indians became displaced from farms and ranches and were assimilated into the new economy as laborers on the railroads and in mines and fields. Almost as soon as newspaper ownership came into the hands of the native Hispanic population of California, an ethnic minority consciousness began to develop. When Francisco P. Ramírez* took over the Spanish section from the Los Angeles Star and founded a separate newspaper, El Clamor Público (The Public Clamor, 1855–1559), he created a landmark in awareness that Hispanics in California had been and were being treated as a race apart from the Euro Americans who had immigrated into the area. Even the wealthy Californios who had collaborated in the Yankee takeover saw their wealth and power diminish under statehood. In addition to covering California and U.S. news, El Clamor Público also maintained contact with the Hispanic world outside California and attempted to present an image of refinement and education that demonstrated the high level of civilization achieved throughout Hispanism; this, in part, was a defensive reaction to the negative propaganda of Manifest Destiny,* which had cast Mexicans and other Hispanics as unintelligent and uneducated barbarians incapable of developing their lands and the natural resources of the West, a sort of justification for wresting these lands and resources from their hands by the superior newcomers. As stated earlier, El Clamor Público depended on subsidy from the city of Los Angeles and had strong ties to the Anglo American business community in the city; in addition, it was aligned with the Republican Party. Ramírez and his paper were also staunch supporters of learning English, important not only for business, but also for protecting Californios’ rights. These pro-business and pro–Republican Party stances, however, did not stop Ramírez from leading in the defense of the native population. Ramírez was also a great supporter of the United States Constitution, but his indignation became greater and greater as the civil and property rights of the Californios failed to be protected by that Constitution he loved so much. He became a consistent and assiduous critic, attempting to inspire the Hispanics to unite in their defense and the authorities to protect 932


the Hispanic residents of California who were being despoiled and even lynched. Ramírez seems to have been the first Mexican American journalist of the West and Southwest to consistently use the press to establish a native perspective and to pursue civil rights for his people. In the three decades after statehood was established, El Clamor Público, La Crónica, and most of the other Spanish-language newspapers of California insisted on integrating into the American education and political system and promoted learning the English language for survival. In doing so, they created a firm basis for the development not only of an ethnic minority identity, but also of biculturation—that is, a bicultural and bilingual citizenry for Mexican Americans: precisely what Hispanics advocate today in the United States. In California, as in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest, the mass of immigrants that came as economic and political refugees during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 overwhelmed the native populations. The large immigrant daily newspapers, such as El Heraldo de México, La Prensa, and La Opinión, focused most of their attention on serving the needs of the expatriate communities even while intending to accommodate Hispanic native issues and culture, as was Ignacio E. Lozano’s* desire. The effect of this overwhelming population shift and the press that served it was that native interests became incorporated or subsumed in the immigrant press, which hindered, to some extent, the development of a separate Hispanic native press—especially in the big cities. Nevertheless, as the community matured and made the transition toward a Hispanic culture of the United States, those same immigrant newspapers also became more oriented to reflecting their communities as national ethnic minorities, not just as temporarily residing immigrants. By the time of the Great Depression and World War II, more and more Hispanic publications began to be issued in English, and a new generation saw itself as a citizenry, or at least as a permanent community, reflected in their pages. These new publications and this new consciousness existed side by side with immigrant and exile publications. In California, one such periodical was The Mexican Voice (1938?–1944), a publication of the Mexican American Movement* (MAM), the product of youths who had either been born or raised in the U.S. The Mexican Voice promoted citizenry, upward mobility through education and active participation in civil and cultural activities outside the barrio. Although hesitant to acknowledge racism as a factor hindering success, the magazine did promote pride in the pre-Colombian background and in Mexican mestizaje; this it accomplished in part by publishing brief biographies of high-achieving Mexican Americans in Southern California. The ideas expressed in The Mexican Voice were not far from those expressed in the Mexican American civil rights organizations, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and their publications at that time, nor from those expressed by Chicanos in their movement during the 1960s. In fact, these and other similar English-language periodicals formed a vital link to the attitudes that would find expression in the Chicano Movement,* which produced a flowering of politically committed newspapers and 933


magazines in the 1960s and 1970s and even scholarly journals based at universities. In California, the founding in 1965 of El Malcriado (The Brat), the organ of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, marked the beginning of publications of the modern-day Chicano civil rights movement. The founding of Con Safos (Safe Zone) literary magazine in Los Angeles in 1968 hailed a grass-roots Chicano literary movement, and the founding of the quarterly El Grito (The Shout), also in 1968 and of Editorial Quinto Sol* in 1970 by two University of California–Berkeley professors, Octavio Romano-V. and Herminio Ríos, initiated an academic and scholarly movement that continues to this day through a number of journals and publishing houses. In fact, the pressure placed on educational and cultural institutions by the Chicano Movement, and the example set by Editorial Quinto Sol and other early Chicano presses, led to the founding of numerous other small publishing houses and magazines in the 1970s and 1980s. In Los Angeles, such grassroots and student collaborative efforts as the Con Safos magazine helped writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta* come to the fore. The Bay Area gave rise to publishing houses that catered to the diverse Latino groups resident there, but especially to such Chicano-dominated efforts as Casa Editorial, Editorial Pocho Che, and Lorna Dee Cervantes’s* Mango magazine and publications. Later, Alurista, along with graduate students and professors in San Diego, produced Maize Publications, which not only launched such authors as Gina Valdés* but also began the work of recovering the literary past with its edition of the Crónicas Diabólicas de Jorge Ulica (The Diabolical Crónicas of Jorge Ulica). In the late 1970s, Quinto Sol broke up and gave rise to two other significant presses headed by each of the former partners: Justa Publications and Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol (later rebaptized TQS Publications). But from the 1980s on, the leadership in Chicano and Latino publishing passed out of California to Arte Público Press* in Houston and Bilingual Press* in Tempe, Arizona. Thanks to the efforts of these longlived (and currently thriving) houses, Chicano and Latino authors were able to cross over not only to mainstream commercial presses in the 1990s but also to university presses in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, and even to such formerly stodgy publishers as the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. Then, too, the 1990s saw myriad small, independent presses around the country begin to issue Chicano and Latino works, from Minneapolis’s Coffee House Press and Connecticut’s Curbstone Press to Boston’s South End Press and Albuquerque’s West End Press. Among the many other small and short-lived houses that Chicanos founded in California were Berkeley’s El Fuego de Aztlán, Oakland’s Floricanto Press, San Diego’s Lalo Press and Toltecas en Aztlán, and Santa Barbara’s Ediciones Aztlán and Ediciones Xalman. Many of these Chicano presses also published magazines.

Texas After Texas achieved statehood in 1850, and well into the period of intense Mexican immigration in the twentieth century, a number of newspapers 934


serving Texas Mexicans assumed activist roles in defining Mexican American identity and entitlement. Such newspapers as San Antonio’s El Bejareño (1855–18?, The Bejar County) and El Regidor (1888–1916, The Regent) saw protecting the rights of the Texas Mexicans as their duty, but it was the journalist Catarino E. Garza* of the border who made their civil rights the subject of a crusade. Born on the border in 1859 and raised in or around Brownsville, Garza worked on newspapers in Laredo, Eagle Pass, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio. In the Brownsville–Eagle Pass area, he became involved in local politics and published two newspapers, El Comercio Mexicano (1886–?, Mexican Commerce) and El Libre Pensador (1890–?, The Free Thinker), which protested violence against Mexicans and their dispossession of their lands. Beginning in 1888, when he confronted U.S. Customs agents for assassinating two Mexican prisoners, Garza became more militant and struck out at authorities on both sides of the border with a band of followers that included farmers, laborers, and former Texas separatists. A special force of Texas Rangers eventually broke up his force of raiders, and Garza fled in 1892 to New Orleans. Garza’s exploits were followed in detail in the Spanish-language newspapers of the Southwest and helped to coalesce feelings about exploitation and dispossession among the Mexican American population. This process was also abetted by the reprinting of Garza’s articles in newspapers throughout the Southwest. One of the most influential newspapers along the border was Laredo’s La Crónica (1909–?, The Chronicle), written and published by Nicasio Idar and his eight children. Idar had a working-class and union background, and he and his family took the forefront in representing the rights of Texas Mexicans through the pages of La Crónica and a magazine they also published, La Revista de Laredo (Laredo Magazine). Like many Hispanic newspaper publishers and editors who spearheaded social and political causes for their communities, Idar and his family led many liberal causes, including the establishment of Mexican schools for children in Texas as an alternative to subjecting them to segregated schools and prejudice. His daughter Jovita Idar* was at the forefront of women’s issues and collaborated in a number of women’s periodicals. La Crónica decried everything from racism and segregation in public institutions to negative stereotypes in Anglo plays and films. It was Idar’s overriding theme that humans in general, and, specifically, Mexicans in Texas, needed to educate themselves. Only through education would social and political progress come about, and he considered it the special role of the newspapers to guide the way, facilitating that education. Only through education would Mexicans in Texas lift themselves from their poverty and misery and defend themselves from the abuse of the Anglo Texans. Mexican families were thus exhorted to maintain their children in school so that gradually the conditions of Mexicans in the state would improve from one generation to the next (Oct. 11, 1910). The Idar family and their publications were as good as their words, heading up a successful statewide drive to import Mexican teachers, find them space in which to teach children, and support 935


them financially. Through this strategy two social ills began to be addressed: many schools’ nonadmittance or segregation of Mexican children and the stemming of the loss of the Spanish language and Mexican culture among the young. As mentioned above, although immigrant newspapers dominated the large urban centers, native papers continued to develop in the small cities and towns. One such newspaper was Santiago G. Guzmán’s El Defensor del Pueblo (1930–?, The People’s Defender), which promoted a Mexican American identity and supported the nascent civil rights organization League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Located in Edinburg, in impoverished South Texas, El Defensor del Pueblo became a watchdog over local politics, with a particular eye to political corruption and the disenfranchisement of Mexican Americans. However, the greatest concern of Guzmán and his paper was the development of a Mexican American conscience and the assumption of the responsibilities of citizenship and voting to vouchsafe the liberties and rights authorized by the U.S. Constitution. He envisioned his paper as a guardian of those rights and as a beacon for guiding Mexican Americans in combating racism and doing away with their sense of inferiority to Anglos. Guzmán called for a national voting bloc of Latinos, and on the local level a reversal of the political structure in South Texas, where a white minority held all of the positions of power and oppressed the Mexican American majority. In Texas, the process of Mexican Americanization, that is, the establishment of a firm identity as a U.S. ethnic minority, gave rise to the two most important, national civil rights organizations: LULAC and the American G.I. Forum. Founded in 1929, LULAC was at first made up mostly of middle class Mexican Americans and only accepted American citizens as members. LULAC early on targeted segregation and unfairness in the judicial system as primary concerns. Its main periodical—various local chapters had their own newsletters—was LULAC News (1931–1979), published monthly in English and Spanish for national distribution. The American G.I. Forum was founded in Corpus Christi by World War II veterans to protect the civil rights of returning Mexican American soldiers. It became actively involved in electoral politics and was responsible for creating a voting block within the Democratic Party that experts believe was responsible for winning the 1962 presidential election for John F. Kennedy. In 1948, the American G.I. Forum founded its periodical, The Forumeer, which still exists to cover civil rights issues. The types of newspapers and civil rights periodicals described above were not the only publications representing a native perspective in the Southwest. However, although there were no publishing houses that consistently issued books from that perspective, mainly because the Mexican immigrant press dominated the discourse, individual Mexican American writers self-published their works or were successful in having newspapers and immigrant publishers issue them. Such was the case of Alonso Perales,* one of the founders of LULAC, who selfpublished his El méxico americano y la política del sur de Texas (The Mexican American and Politics in South Texas) in 1931 but issued his En defensa de mi raza (In Defense of My People) through San Antonio’s Artes Gráficas in 1937. 936


These books, as well as LULAC News and The Forumeer, were predecessors of the hundreds of Chicano Movement publications that were issued in the 1960s and early 1970s. They kept the populace informed of the civil rights struggle and provided an ideological framework from which to consider social and political progress. The cultural front of the Chicano Movement gave rise to numerous literary and cultural magazines and presses, such as San Antonio’s El Magazín, Angela de Hoyos’s* M&A Editions, and Cecilio García-Camarillo’s* Caracol (Shell), which launched numerous writers, including Max Martínez* and Evangelina Vigil.* Student-related publications out of Austin included the magazine Tejidos and Place of the Herons Press. Lubbock’s Trucha Publications (Be Wary Publications and El Paso’s Dos Pasos (Two Paces) were also publishing in Texas during the 1970s and 1980s. The only press of its type (small, regional and independent) that survives today is El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press (Five Points Press). All these publications reinforced the entitlement of Mexican Americans as citizens of the United States to the rights and benefits of American society, without racial, class, and linguistic discrimination. At their root, they were patriotically American, exhibiting great faith in the American Constitution, the Congress, and the judicial system to remedy discrimination and injustice. It is interesting to note that in the year 2000 the nation’s largest Hispanic publisher, Arte Público Press,* located at the University of Houston, has reassumed the function initiated by LULAC and the Chicano Movement presses in the 1960s by establishing two retrospective series: (1) a Civil Rights Series to publish documents, histories, and memoirs of Hispanic civil rights struggles, including biographies of Dr. Hector García, founder of the American G. I. Forum, and memoirs of such Chicano and Puerto Rican activists as Reies López Tijerina and Antonia Pantoja and (2) the Pioneers of Hispanic Literature Series to issue reprint editions of the out-of-print works of such movement authors as Lucha Corpi,* Cecilio García Camarillo, and Raúl Salinas,* among others, including such Nuyorican authors as Piri Thomas* and Cuban American authors as Jose Yglesias.* In its civil rights effort, Arte Público has also published histories of the Hispanic civil rights struggle from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as histories of individual organizations, such as the American G. I. Forum and ASPIRA, Inc.

New York Although New York has been the principal port of entry for immigrants from Europe and the Caribbean and has been a center for immigrant publishing and culture, various publications have reflected their communities’ evolution toward Americanization and citizenship status. Even Gráfico* (Graphic), which in most respects was a typical immigrant newspaper, began to recognize the American citizenship of its readers, mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans residing in East Harlem, to demand the rights guaranteed under the Constitution and freedom from discrimination. Because of the Jones Act* of 1917, which extended citizenship to Puerto Ricans, these former islanders did not 937


have to acculturate or assimilate to become citizens—it was automatic. And, with the advent of the Depression, New York did not experience the massive repatriation of Hispanics that occurred in the Southwest. Instead, the opposite was true. Hard economic times on the island brought even more Puerto Ricans to the city, a trend that intensified during World War II as Northeastern manufacturing and services industries experienced labor shortages and recruited heavily in Puerto Rico. The massive influx of Puerto Ricans during and just after the war further intensified the community’s identity as a native citizenry, and community members were appealed to as citizens by their local newspapers to organize politically and to vote. As early as 1927, a league was formed in New York City to increase the power of the Hispanic community by unifying its diverse organizations. Among the very specific goals of the Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) were the representing of the community to the “authorities,” working for the economic and social betterment of the Puerto Ricans and propagating the vote among Puerto Ricans. The Liga founded a periodical in 1927 entitled Boletín Oficial de la Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana (The Official Bulletin of the Puerto Rican and Hispanic League) that evolved into much more than a newsletter, functioning more like a community newspaper and including in its pages essays and cultural items as well as news. Mainly supported at first by the Puerto Rican Brotherhood, a mutual aid society, the Liga’s goals included providing information and education to the Hispanic community and promoting suffrage among Puerto Ricans. The biweekly was influential in raising the level of awareness of Puerto Ricans as an electorate and of their need to associate and form political coalitions with other Hispanic groups for their political and economic betterment. Pueblos Hispanos: Seminario Progresista (1943–1944, Hispanic Peoples: Progressive Weekly) was through its director, Juan Antonio Corretjer,* affiliated with both the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and the Communist Party of America. Although Pueblos Hispanos’s main reason for existence was to support national liberation movements throughout Latin America, but especially Puerto Rico’s independence movement, it voiced many Puerto Rican nativist ideas, encouraging political involvement in the Democratic Party of New York by Hispanic citizens and openly endorsing candidates to office—including the reelection of FDR through front-page editorials. As its name indicated, Pueblos Hispanos promoted pan-Hispanism and the future integration of the Latin American countries. Edited by the important Puerto Rican poet and delegate to the Communist Party of America, Juan Antonio Corretjer, the newspaper promoted socialist causes around the globe, ran weekly columns on politics and culture in Russia and socialist movements in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere, and covered in detail Puerto Rican politics on the island and in New York. It may appear as a paradox that Pueblos Hispanos was so concerned with safeguarding the civil rights and promoting the political participation of Puerto Ricans in New York and in federal politics even as it advocated the island’s separation from the United States. But this 938


confidence in the safeguards of freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to organize even dissenting political parties only underlines the degree of confidence that the editors and community felt in their status as American citizens. They were exercising their rights fully and openly, assuming stances that were unheard of in immigrant newspapers. Despite the press for civil rights and the movement among young people to recover and celebrate their Hispanic roots, no significant publisher of native Hispanic literature has developed in the New York area from the 1960s to the present. Perhaps this is partly because of the overwhelming, continuous flow in Hispanic immigrants and exiles, with a significant sector of intellectuals who have dominated Hispanic publishing, especially in the Spanish language. It may also be because New York is the center for U.S. publishing and, for a long time, U.S. television. The publishing and entertainment industries’ efforts to reach mass audiences have all but ignored the minority voices in their midst, except for the handful of writers launched by major presses during the height of the civil rights struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jesús Colón’s modest press was silenced well before he died in 1974. The Nuyorican Poet’s Café Press only issued one volume, although its effort was continued by Arte Público Press in Houston. It was not until the 1990s that major publishing houses began opening their doors to Latino writers, first by obtaining rights to and reprinting the books that Arte Público* and Bilingual Press* had launched into the college market—the commercial houses were very interested in taking over this lucrative market. Later, as Hispanic demographic growth and consequent market pressure increased, the mainstream presses began issuing new works by such writers as Rudolfo Anaya,* Ana Castillo,* Sandra Cisneros,* and Victor Villaseñor,* who had been successful Latino press authors, and then published and promoted some of their own discoveries, such as Julia Alvarez, Cristina García,* and Richard Rodriguez.* As the twenty-first century opened with projections of Latinos constituting a quarter of population of the United States by 2030, such houses as Harper Collins and Random House were establishing their specific Latino publishing lines to encompass both English- and Spanishlanguage publishing, both fiction and nonfiction. The emphasis among the large commercial houses from the outset has been on assured sellers, such Sandra Cisneros, Oscar Hijuelos,* and Victor Villaseñor, as well as on new authors who are television, sports, and movie personalities; these presses expand their Latino list with translations of best sellers and important works of such leading Latin American authors as Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Hevetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Meléndez, A. Gabriel, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). Somoza, Oscar, and Armando Miguélez, Literatura de la Revolución Mexicana en el exilio: Fuentes para su estudio (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1997).


Puerto Rican Traveling Theater

Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. See Colón, Miriam Pursifull, Carmen (1930–). Carmen Pursifull may be the Illinois-based Puerto Rican writer who most represents New York qualities even as she has come to express a nonurban, Midwest sensibility. Pursifull is also probably the most prolific Puerto Rican author in Illinois, having written several books. Intense, erotic, ironic, sometimes direct, flat, uneven, at times highly evocative, witty, mystical, and haunting, Pursifull’s poetry portrays the full range of her life. That life starts with her childhood in New York, continues with her entry into the world of Latino music, and, after a series of short-term marriages, culminates with her settling with her fourth husband in Champaign, Illinois, the site of her rebirth as poet gradually becoming aware of her Latina identity, politics, and mystical identifications. Carmen was born in New York City in 1930 to a Spanish mother and Puerto Rican father, Pedro Padilla. Her poems indicate that her parents were mainly Spanish-speaking at home; they were also conservative and strict. Although she did well in school, Carmen rebelled early against family discipline. At age fifteen she married a Latino sailor and had two children by the time she was eighteen, only to get divorced and become part of the glittery show-business world of the New York club scene at twenty. Early on, she teamed up with famed Italian American Latin dance teacher Joe Pirri, demonstrating and teaching the latest mambo and cha-cha moves. Then she became an interpretative dancer with an Afro-Cuban troupe making the rounds in the New York area. Gravitating toward the jazz scene at the moment of the great Caribbean–Harlem jazz fusion, Carmen married a drummer and became a band singer, going on a tour that took her to Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Then, guilt-ridden about leaving her children in her parents’ care, she tried to leave show business behind her. Carmen picked up several jobs as a dancer and bartender, divorcing her second husband (a heroin user), marrying again (this time to a wife-beater), divorcing again, and finally meeting and marrying her current husband of many years, John Pursifull, a career Navy man who took her to live in California. In 1970, the family moved to Champaign, Illinois, where Carmen worked for Kraft Foods as a line worker, a forklift driver, and a sanitation worker. In 1974, after heavy surgeries and serious emotional crises, she joined the Rosicrucians “and learned how to modulate [her] behavior and . . . thinking.” At this point she began writing as “a therapeutic way to purge negative feelings” and joined the Red Herring Poetry Workshop, a local writers’ group. In 1975, Carmen began publishing her early work, and in 1982, she published the largest volume of poetry by any Illinois Puerto Rican poet, Carmen by Moonlight. Much of this book charts the author’s real and imaginary adventures through the different phases of her life. Although each of the eight sections of the book has a title in Spanish, and although some poems have Spanish titles, English by far predominates throughout. The first poems take us through memories of her parents before moving through her first adult relations, her erotic adventures, and her entry into New York’s mambo world of sex, 940

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danger, and commercialized glamour, to her eventual flight from New York— the transformation of her initial Latinness through her painful and reluctant acceptance of “a subtleness alien to me.” After travels here and there, we end up in “Campiña, Illinois,” while additional poems tell the grim story of a terrible accident and her recovery with macabre (and strained) humor. The final section holds out some sense of hope in its image of life as an undated journey toward a death that is no more than a “transition,” a movement to another state of being. The narrator has traveled “through a space with many faces/to find a planet green and blue/where the air is sweet/where the earth bears fruit.” Indeed, the volume as a whole is the spectral dance of Carmen “determined to ward off/the horror of her death”; and this process of dying seems to begin as the character leaves behind her world and adjusts to a life pattern leading toward loss of being and desire in the cold Midwestern world. After this first work, Pursifull went on to write five subsequent books on her own and then two with Dr. Edward L. Smith. Among her individually written books are Dreamscapes (1987), Manhattan Memories (1989), The Twenty-four Hour Wake (1989), Elsewhere in a Parallel Universe (1992), and The Many Faces of Passion (1996). Manhattan Memories focuses fully on Carmen’s life as a nightclub dancer in the 1950s. In addition, with Dmitri Mihalas, she has published Cantata for Six Lives and Continuo (1992) and If I Should Die before I Wake (1993), as well as coediting with him Dream Shadows (1994) and Life Matters (1995). Many of the poems go into more graphic detail about phases of her life already treated in her earlier book. More concretely than in Carmen by Moonlight, we experience the young girl’s break from family, and the story of her first husband. Then we see her working at the Palladium, dancing to Afro-Cuban beats, going to New Jersey. Next we see her dancing with Killer Joe for the tourists, then returning to be with her children. Next it’s the 1950s jazz scene, where she “snapped [her] fingers / to a pulse alien to [her] Latin veins.” Still another poem portrays her work in the Ray Almo band, her encounter with the “super cool . . . charmer” who would be her second husband and her discovery that Prince Charming was a drug user. In subsequent work, Pursifull has generally distanced herself from overtly Latino and Latina and ethnic themes to develop the more metaphysical and mystical sides of her opus. Published in the same year as Manhattan Memories, The Twenty-four Hour Wake is an interesting formal experiment constituted by a series of poems tracing the hours of the day seen as life phases. The poems deal with such themes as time, space and energy, desire, hope, resignation, and death. Above all, they show the influence of quantum theory and mysticism on a woman whose Nuyorican roots and rhythms are here overlaid by Midwestern Anglo life. In a similar vein, Elsewhere in a Parallel Universe is a book of memories and meditations, imaginings and speculations, quantum physics and mystic revelations. It is a book centered on subliminal communications with a “parallel universe,” on calls and responses—with much family and personal musing, some politics, and a few (though very few) Latino references. 941

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Many of Pursifull’s recent poems can be read in function of relativity, indeterminacy, and those dimensions of modern physics from which we may generalize about our unfixed, undulating world. One could see these universalist concerns as Latino and Latina and Puerto Rican “evasions” and “displacements.” What is clear is that Carmen Pursifull was not satisfied with writing on purely ethnic themes. Instead she threw off older identities to become the Americanized Latin woman who could then achieve in poetry a dance in which she is able to actualize her evolved self. The intensity and vivacity of her verse perhaps corresponds to and struggles against the ebbing of other life energies. Her life in the Midwest led her to imagine and create a wider world. Her accident in the 1970s, which made it impossible for her to dance, led her to dance on paper and even gave birth to her intent to understand the dance and energy of the stars. In sum, her movement from dance to poetry was a logical development within the sphere of U.S. Latina feminine performance, as a frame for relative self-actualization and achievement. Actively working away at her poems, still attempting to grow as a poet and human being, even as she paints, quilts, crochets, knits, gardens, and cans, Carmen Pursifull represents those of her generation who sought to leave the problems of Latino and Latina identity behind and to integrate as best she could into U.S. society. Without giving up her belief in integration, she has honestly confronted and written of her continuing internal alienation, and she has responded in her poetry and life to the fact that things have not been equal, and are not equal, in the Land of Opportunity. In all of this, she has written a body of poetry that which is an often haunting testimony to one kind of Latino and Latina and human response to our times. By her dedication and achievement in attempting to forge a poetic universe and make sense of her experience, she has more than earned inclusion in any account of U.S. Latino and Latina literature as well as in any treatment of Puerto Rican diasporic writing and identity. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Marc Zimmerman

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Q Quesada, Aníbal (?–?). Born in Orosí, a province in Costa Rica, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Aníbal Quesada received his teacher’s diploma at the age of eighteen; three years later, he enrolled in the Costa Rican army to fight with Panama in the boundary dispute of 1921. He returned the same year to publish his first book of poems, Ruidos de polea (1921, Pulley Noises). In 1926, Quesada left Costa Rica for New York, presumably to gain access to education and economic progress. In 1929, Quesada obtained a diploma as a bakery chemist from the Chicago Siebel Institute of Technology and, in 1930, a diploma as a bakery technician from the New York Fleischmann Baking School. His bakery expertise and interests led to his third book, Pan. Tratado químico, técnico y práctico de panadería (1946, Bread: Bakery Chemistry, Techniques, and Practices), also published in New York, in which he approaches bread not just from a technical perspective but also from its historical importance in the everyday social, economic, and political lives of people. Aníbal Quesada’s life story illustrates the emergence of a new, many-sided, self-educated, modern immigrant intellectual, who found in a city such as New York a more liberated environment for the development of his writing. His publishing career and prolific writing give us insights about his personal and professional life, as well as his longevity—his last known book was published in 1978. Aníbal Quesada was the editor of Hogar (Home), a magazine that reached a broad audience in Latin America. He was also the author of at least seven poetry collections: Ruidos de polea, mentioned above, IndoAmérica y otros poemas (1939, Indo-America and Other Poems), Apocalipsis. Poemas (1942, Apocalypse: Poems), Payasadas de la vida. Poemas (1949,

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Clownishness of Life: Poems), Arco iris. Poemas (1958, Rainbow: Poems), Poemas a mi hija Sor María Elissa (1971, Poems for My Daughter, Sister María Elissa), and Sonetos y Madrigales (1977, Sonnets and Madrigals). He also penned a religious drama, El hijo pródigo. Drama en verso (1960, The Prodigal Son: Drama in Verse Form), a dictionary of mythology, Dioses de la tierra. Mitología (1967, Gods of the Earth: Mythology), and the collection of essays about baking mentioned above. In addition to representing a pan-Hispanist ideology with an eye toward the union of the Ibero American nations, Quesada’s texts were filled with a devoted Christianity that led him to write his religious drama and his dictionary of mythology. From his poetry it is possible to infer that he married and had a large family, members of which he honored in his verses. In addition to being a writer and a cultural agent, Aníbal Quesada was an engineer and in fact followed many other pursuits, as evidenced by his books, in which his name is followed by his titles and international memberships. His books were accompanied by critical notes and reviews of his poetry, writing, and personal career, which allows us to confirm Quesada’s cultural exchange and relationship with Hispanic intellectuals, professionals, and journalists not only in New York but in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Positioned as a committed pan-Hispanist and a promoter of the union of the Ibero American nations, Quesada in his poetry articulated the concerns, claims, and criticism of the pan-Hispanist members of New York’s Hispanic intelligentsia regarding the United States’ imperialistic interests in Latin America countries. In particular, this point of view underlies Indo-América y otros poemas, in which, from the first lines of the eponymous poem “Indo-América,” Quesada manifests his political and ideological rejection of United States imperialism: “¿Hasta dónde irá el águila norteña/Con su empeño de robo y de conquista?” (How far will the northern eagle go/in its intent to rob and conquer?). In addition to poems such as “El Libertador” (The Liberator) and “Eugenio María de Hostos,”* which are clearly infused by the building of a pan-Hispanist consciousness, IndoAmérica y otros poemas is also an example of the culture industry and mass culture influence on the writing of the early Hispanic intellectuals in New York City, for alongside poems celebrating Latin American national heroes are others in honor of contemporary political and popular culture figures: “Gardel,” “Musolini,” “Estrella Genta,” “Hitler,” “Douglas Corrigan,” “Stalin,” and “Taurina” (a bullfight). This incongruous mix would also characterize his subsequent poetry collections. His third book of poetry, Apocalipsis. Poemas, is a freedom hymn in the midst of the chaotic and apocalyptic war: the poem “Apocalipsis” hails the glories and progress of the Latin American countries and visualizes the union of the two Americas to fight the destruction and oppression of World War II. “Francia Eterna” is also a solidarity chant that questions the war’s destruction of France. The poems in Payasadas de la vida. Poemas are the manifestation of existentialist worries shaped by a Christian view. The poems of this collection speak of death and life, freedom, free will, and growth—concerns surrounded and moved by the violent and unfathomable 944

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war, as in “Payasadas de la vida” (Clownishness of Life), “De Los Años que Pasan” (On the Years That Pass), and “Amigo” (Friend), in which, from a Manichean perspective, life’s contradictions are displayed to compare good and evil as the precepts that govern life and death, poverty and richness, vanity and humbleness, childhood and old age. Despite its lack of the avant-garde esthetic impulses contemporary to his writing, Quesada’s poetry used its traditional constructions to nostalgically and patriotically represent Costa Rica, especially in such poems as “Costa Rica,” “Mi Bandera” (My Flag), “Santamaría” (St. Mary), “Quince de Septiembre” (September 15th), “Remembranza Natal” (Memory of Birth), and “The Port of Sand Point (Puntarenas).” They manifest a lyric voice that is placed between the remembered past (its place of origin) and the lived present. As an example of immigrant discourse, Quesada’s poetry represents admiration for North American historical subjects, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in “Sonriente Redentor” (Smiling Redeemer, from Payasadas de la vida), and the progress embodied in New York City, as in “Sobre el Hudson” (Over the Hudson, from Indo-América), “Nueva York” (New York, from Payasadas de la vida) and “Tríptico del Subway” (Triptych of the Subway, from Sonetos y Madrigales). Further Reading Quesada, Aníbal, Sonetos y Madrigales (Naranjito, PR: Berceo, 1978). Quesada, Aníbal, Payasadas de la vida. Poemas (New York: Editorial Berceo, 1949). Quesada, Aníbal, Apocalipsis. Poemas (Nueva York: Gomez Modern Press, 1942). Quesada, Aníbal, Indo-América y otros poemas (New York: Gomez Modern Press, 1939).

María Teresa Vera-Rojas Quesada, Roberto (1962–). Born in Olanchito, Honduras, and an immigrant to the United States in the 1980s, Quesada has become the humorist of immigrant literature, satirizing both the reasons that Latin Americans leave their home countries and the reception that they receive in the grand Metropolis. After relocating to the United States in 1989, Quesada has become one of the fortunate few immigrant writers to have access to English-language publishers in the United States, who have translated his novels to English: Los barcos (1988, The Ships), The Big Banana (1999), Never through Miami (2002), and The Ships: A Novel (1992). Quesada has also published works abroad, such as El desertor (1985, The Deserter) published in Honduras; El humano y la diosa (1996, The Human Being and the Goddess), which received the Latin American Writers Institute of the United States

Roberto Quesada.

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Award and was published in the Dominican Republic; Nunca por Miami (2001, Never through Miami), which was published in Spain; and La novela del milenio pasado (2004, The Novel of the Past Millennium), which appeared in Lima, Peru. Quesada has also been editor of the magazine Nosotros los latinos and, in 1986, founded the literary review, Sobre Vuelo (Over Flight), both based in New York. To date, his most accomplished work has been The Big Banana, a humorous picaresque novel in the tradition of immigrant literature* that focuses on the life of an aspiring actor who leaves his native Honduras to make it on the stage in New York City. Quesada is particularly deft at creating idiosyncratic characters obsessed with achieving their dreams. Never through Miami continues the same theme of coming to the United States to achieve dreams and confronting numerous barriers. The Ships is a love story set to the backdrop of the Nicaraguan revolution. Further Reading Labari, Nuria, and Darío Prieto, “¿Es ‘cool’ la literatura hispana?” (www.elmundo.es/ elmundolibro/2002/11/29/anticuario/1038516338.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Quiñónez, Ernesto (1969–). Born in 1969 in Ecuador of an Ecuadorian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Ernesto Quiñónez grew up in the New York Spanish Harlem neighborhood that was the focus of his two novels, Bodega Dreams (2000) and Chango’s Fire (2004). A fine chronicler of Latino urban life, Quiñónez’s diverse heritage and knowledge of the streets of El Barrio are clear in his depiction of its “fires, junkies dying, shootouts, holdups, babies falling out of windows” (Bodega 5), projects, schools, teachers, vacant lots, churches, museums, cultural centers, and (especially) bodegas (grocery stores) and botánicas (herb shops). Quiñónez’s bold and insightful representation of these spaces—the simultaneously distressed and dynamic barrio, facing gentrification, urban renewal, and displacement of its Latino population—is the driving force in both novels. Come to New York City as an infant and raised by a Communist father and a Jehovah’s Witness mother, Quiñónez captures the lives, struggles, and complex religiosity of residents of Spanish Harlem, tracing the community’s political history to the 1960s, when the Young Lords organized protests against City Hall’s neglect of health care, housing, and education. Contrasts between the 1960s and the 1990s, and the everyday strife created by ethnic, racial, and class conflicts, are central in Bodega Dreams; they play out in the hearts, minds, and tongues of Quiñónez’s Spanish Harlem, where Puerto Ricans and other Latinos have their “spiritual landmarks,” the “poor, holy places that speak to your soul, vibrant streets that tell you about those who came before you” (Chango’s Fire 53). A product of the New York public school system, Quiñónez attended City College of New York, where, after considering a life as a painter, he met his writing mentors Frederic Tuten and Walter Mosley and turned to words. His works have been both critical and commercial successes; a recognized writer by 946

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the age of thirty-five, his fiction is published by mainstream U.S. presses and optioned for film and translation rights. Quiñónez also writes regularly for magazines. With his first novel, he was immediately and widely regarded as a new voice to be reckoned with; Bodega Dreams appeared on numerous Books of Note lists in 2000, including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and the New York Public Library’s 25 Books to Remember. Since then, Quiñónez has been a fellow at the Wesleyan Writers (2001) and Breadloaf Writer’s (2002) conferences; in 2003 he was a visiting screenwriter at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Having taught in bilingual elementary schools in the Bronx for nine years, he now divides his time between writing and his duties as assistant professor in creative writing and Latino fiction at Cornell University. Bodega Dreams narrates the story of Willie Irizarry Bodega, once a smalltime thief and an ex–Young Lord, now a wealthy and powerful figure bent on changing the landscape of Spanish Harlem by renovating it and recovering it for Latinos. Arguing that the “men that built this country were men from the street,” Bodega is all too aware that millionaires’ fortunes are often built on illegal schemes, much like Joe Kennedy’s ilk, who could, after making enough money, “clean their names by sending their kinds to Harvard” (25). For Bodega, because “this country is ours as much as it is theirs,” Puerto Ricans have as much right as any other group to partake of the bounty and booty, by any means necessary. Bodega’s initial seed money comes from drug trafficking. With this he and his partner, lawyer Edwin Nazario, tap into the city’s urban renewal programs, renovating tenements and selling them to other Puerto Ricans. Bodega feels that his capital accumulation schemes can bring about social change and improvement for the neighborhood in a way social activism had not. In the barrio, finding cheap rent in safe and renovated buildings is a coup, as Julio, the college student who narrates this story is quick to recognize. Nicknamed “Chino” because of his purported Asian features, Julio admires Bodega, by then the godfather of Spanish Harlem, as “a lost relic from a time when all things seemed possible” (31) for helping those in need, handing out college tuition scholarships, setting up a Puerto Rican museum for the community, and funding his projects with profits from drug sales. All Bodega asks in return is people’s loyalty. Chino has misgivings concerning the selling of drugs but comes to see that Bodega’s enterprises can feasibly have an ultimately positive impact on the barrio: “it was dishonest people that brought change. It was paradoxical people like Bodega who started revolutions” (38). Bodega, the astute and charismatic seller of dreams, has, however, one weakness: Veronica, his ex-girlfriend who is about to come to New York and is now married to a rich Miami Cuban. The novel shows that Bodega’s dream of preservation and reconstruction of El Barrio is undermined from within; his misplaced loyalty in Nazario and Veronica lead to his murder, as well as to the murder of Veronica’s husband. In the end, Chino, intrigued by Bodega and his dream, discovers Nazario’s and Vera’s collusion and betrayal of Bodega’s project and the Latino community, vindicating Bodega’s death when he turns them in to the police. 947

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Part gritty urban chronicle, part bildungsroman, Quiñónez’s second novel, Chango’s Fire, like Bodega’s Dream, also presents dreams and disillusions. Weaving together personal relations and social issues, it continues to focus on the effects of urban renewal, gentrification, and the displacement of Puerto Ricans from Spanish Harlem. Tenants move from their buildings when they are burned down or declared unsafe; thereafter, the neighborhood is soon overtaken by Starbucks and white yuppies. In the novel’s powerful evocation of El Barrio, its life and language, the narrator, again named Julio, is a college student, part-time construction worker, and arsonist, hired as part of Eddie’s arson-for-hire crew. While in the 1970s and 1980s the practice of torching Spanish Harlem property was principally aimed at gentrification with its potential for high rents, now insurance fraud provides additional incentives for arson. Julio receives payment for the owner-approved fires set for Eddie, pay that helps him buy an apartment for his parents with the aid of Papelito, a santero (follower of the Santería religion) and owner of the botánica next door, who serves as front-man for the purchase. On the first floor of the building is a church run by Julio’s friend Maritza, a radical activist who has discovered that the church is a good front for helping recent immigrants. Her find of a cabinet full of blank naturalization certificates that Maritza makes available to immigrants leads to scrutiny by the authorities. The novel has several secondary plots, including Julio’s falling in love with Helen, the white young woman who has bought the second floor in his building; Julio’s protection of his friend, Trompo Loco, Eddie’s disavowed retarded son; the exploitation of undocumented laborers at Eddie’s construction site by the owners of social security numbers the workers use; and Julio’s interest in becoming a Santería minister like Papelito. Julio decides to stop setting fires, but Eddie makes clear to him that he does not have that option; his attempt at saving a cat in the last fire cost Eddie a great deal of money. To pay for the losses, Julio is given the option of setting fire to a building in Washington, D.C., for Eddie’s partners or else seeing his own building torched. Faced with this dilemma and unwilling to risk the lives of his family, Julio tries to ensure that no one will be in the building the day of the arson, but his efforts are fruitless when Trompo Loco, hoping to please his father, sets the fire himself. Julio arrives to find his building in flames; his parents are saved at the last minute by Papelito, who dies in the fire. Thereafter, Helen leaves Julio, and Maritza disappears. No facile, happy endings are possible here, but despite a series of tragedies, the novel ends by highlighting the protagonists’ resiliency. Julio, now on parole, works at a pizzeria, has gone back to school, and, having lost the apartment, is again living in the projects with his parents; Helen has moved to a brownstone; and Trompo Loco is coming out of the mental ward. Julio, in the end, decides to learn more about Santería, as Papelito had hoped, and reconciliation with Helen is a possibility. Edgy, by turns stark and tender, Quiñónez provides an insider’s take on danger, love, and loss, on lives lived precariously, on utopian dreams in a dystopic reality. The relativity of notions of crime and justice, like the questioning of 948

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power relations and “the American Way,” are all part of the dense, vibrant, contradictory contemporary Latino cityscape that Quiñónez serves up for his readers. Bodega Dreams and Chango’s Fire have already assured this thirtysomething Latino writer a secure place in contemporary U.S. fiction. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).

Beatrice Pita Quiñónez, Naomi (1951–). A consummate performer of her spoken-word poetry, Naomi Helena Quiñónez was born on May 25, 1951, in East Los Angeles. After graduating from public schools in the Los Angeles area, Quiñónez studied English at San Jose State University and received her B.A. in 1975. Later, she obtained an M.A. in public administration from the University of Southern California (1982). In 1996, she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont College and started teaching at California State University at Chico. Quiñónez’s writing is an extension of her teaching, and vice versa. In her poetry, she addresses some of the most pressing issues of our time, not only as a Chicana but as an intellectual: racism, poverty, gender inequality, and so forth. Since the early 1980s, Quiñónez’s poetry has been featured in periodicals and anthologies around the country. Her books include Sueño de Colibrí (1985, Hummingbird Dream), which deals with sensuality, gender, and ethnic identity, and The Smoking Mirror Poems (1998), which envisions women’s ascendancy to more powerful roles in society, creating their own images and mythology. Quiñónez invokes Aztec mythology and pre-Columbian culture in the regeneration of women. Further Reading Lomelí, Francisco, “Naomi Quiñónez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 226–231).

Nicolás Kanellos Quintana, Leroy V. (1944–). Leroy V. Quintana is one of the most renowned poets to memorialize Hispanic participation in the Vietnam War. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Quintana obtained a B.A. in English in 1969 from the University of New Mexico after serving for two years in the war. In 1974, he obtained a master’s degree in English from New Mexico State University and began publishing poems in literary magazines. By 1976, he published his first book, Hijo del Pueblo: New Mexico Poems (Son of the People: New Mexico Poems), a highly autobiographical collection of verse. While working as an English instructor in area colleges and universities, Quintana published his next book, Sangre (1981, Blood), which won the Before Columbus American Book Award. Quintana experienced a career change, and after obtaining a master’s in counseling from Western New Mexico University, he became a psychological counselor 949

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in San Diego, California. He continued writing and in 1990 published Interrogations, a collection of poems about the Vietnam War. In 1993, he published The History of Home, which memorialized growing up in poverty in New Mexico by casting each poem in the voice of a hometown personality. The History of Home was Quintana’s second American Book Award–winner. His My Hair Turning Gray among Strangers (1996) explores emotional and spiritual exile and the need to return home to New Mexico. His Great Whirl of Exile (1999) again explored New Mexican life and war experiences. His collection of short stories, La Promesa and Other Stories (2002, The Promise and Other Stories), follows protagonists Mosco Zamora and Johnny Barros through a series of interrelated tales set in the fictional New Mexico town of San Miguel and in Vietnam. Quintana teaches at Mesa College in San Diego, California. Further Reading Benson, Douglas K., “Leroy V. Quintana” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, First Series, Vol. 82, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989: 194–200). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Quintana, Miguel Matías de (1677–1748). Miguel Matías de Quintana was a religious poet writing in early eighteenth-century New Mexico. He came to New Mexico as part of Don Diego de Vargas’s colonizing mission in 1693. In addition to tending to souls and possibly evangelizing Native Americans, Quintana worked at diverse jobs, including as farmer, notary, and scribe. As a writer, Quintana penned Christmas dialogues for performance and a solid body of poetry. His work is both personal and intimate, bordering on the mystical, as well as social and documentary. The poet’s verses came under suspicion on March 17, 1734, when he was formally denounced to the Inquisition in Mexico City by two friars for writing unauthorized poetry that revealed disobedience to the Church and the State. His work and habits were investigated thoroughly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and transcripts and examples were furnished to the Holy Office in Mexico City. The Inquisition found Quintana’s transgressions to have resulted from mental incapacity as well as distractions, and the case was closed definitively in 1737. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, ed., Pasó por aquí: Critical essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Quintero, José A. (1829–1885). Journalist, poet, translator, and diplomat José Agustin Quintero went through as many changes of nationality as he did professions. Born in Havana in 1829 to a criollo planter and his English 950

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wife, Quintero was bilingual from childhood and came to Massachusetts for his secondary education. Upon his father’s sudden death, he resorted to giving Spanish lessons in Cambridge, where he got to know the most famous U.S. poet of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; they began a correspondence that would endure for fifteen years. Returning to Havana in 1848, he studied law and became involved in Cirilio Villaverde’s* pro-independence circle, which supported the military expedition of Narciso López. He began circulating the poems that would see him sentenced to prison for treason: “A Miss Lydia Robbins” (To Miss Lydia Robbins), which explains to a norteamericana why Cuba should be free, and “El banquete del destierro” (The BanJosé Agustín Quintero. quet of Exile)—among others that would later be collected in El laúd del desterrado (1858, The Lute of the Exiled), an important collection of revolutionary poetry. Quintero translated numerous poems, especially of Longfellow’s, that he thought would inspire his countrymen to fight for their sovereignty. He felt poetry should be “a civilizing agent”: “understandable, powerful, and above all progressive and innovative.” After escaping from Morro Castle, he arrived in New Orleans in 1852, where he courted the French Creole woman he would later marry. Three years later, he headed for Texas with the patronage of Mirabeau B. Lamar, former president of the Texas Republic, hoping to find editorial work. He wrote Longfellow that Austin was “destitute of literary taste” but soon founded a newspaper in San Antonio, El Ranchero, where the local Know-Nothing Party campaigned virulently against Catholics and Mexicans. He urged his “méjico-tejano” readers to unite politically based on the common Hispanic identity he shared with them through “race, blood, and memories.” For his organizing efforts, he was attacked by the Know-Nothings and run out of town in July 1856. Afterward, Quintero traveled around Texas translating land titles and helping to mediate the property disputes that disadvantaged so many Spanish speakers. He also published a biography of John Quitman, a Texan who had supported the Cuban cause. The year 1859 found him in New York working on various Spanish-language publications, but when the Civil War broke out, he returned to New Orleans, perhaps out of allegiance to his wife’s family. He enlisted in his old ally Quitman’s regiment but was soon transferred to the diplomatic service and became an important Confederate agent in Mexico. His 951

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missions included maneuvering cotton shipments around the Union blockade through Matamoros, securing supplies and munitions for the Confederate army, and possibly encouraging support for Cuban independence within the Juárez administration, where he made lifelong friends. In 1865, Quintero briefly returned to Havana hoping for amnesty, but the colonial government forbade him to practice law or publish. After petitioning Washington for an official pardon, he returned to New Orleans, where he remained until his death in 1885. As “Joseph” Quintero, he rose to be chief editorial writer at the Picayune, a staunch crusader against perceived Yankee incursions. Although no poems appear to have survived from Quintero’s later years, he published a pamphlet on the dueling code that helps explain his support for the Confederate cause despite his youthful alliance with antislavery Whigs in Boston. Anglo Americans cannot understand the duel, he writes, because “they do not occupy a plane lifted above mundane affairs.” During the Reconstruction era, New Orleanians, like Mexican Texans under U.S. rule or habaneros under the hated Governor Tacón, felt themselves oppressed by a colonizing power that was hostile to their culture. Quintero consistently identified with these underdogs, united in his mind by their common “Latin” heritage. Considered a patriotic Cuban poet, Quintero’s place in literary history is minor. His journalistic work in Louisiana, Texas, and New York is arguably more significant, for he began to articulate the framework of a shared Latino identity that would transcend divisions of class and national origin (though not necessarily of race). He saw the Spanish-language press as crucial in building this common cause, but he also used his bilingual and bicultural abilities to mediate between his culture and that of Anglo-America. Crossing land and sea, language and nationality, with remarkable facility, Quintero eludes precise characterization. From city to country—from Cuba to the northeast, from Texas to northern Mexico, and across the Gulf south—he lived the life of a transnational border dweller. Further Reading Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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R Race. The great Cuban writer and patriot José Martí stated in an 1894 speech he gave in New York City: “There are no races. There are only a number of variations in Man, with reference to customs and forms, imposed by the climatic and historical conditions under which he lives, which do not change that which is identical and essential.” Despite U.S. thinkers, writers and propagandists having for the preceding century proclaimed the superiority of Anglo-Saxons and “Americans” as a race over all other peoples in the world. Cuban culture having been cleaved by black slavery for most of its existence, Martí sustained this position. He would be vindicated by twentieth-century biologists and anthropologists, who proved beyond a doubt that there are no species of men—that all peoples are identical in their basic genetic makeup and their intellectual potential, that only culture and history have produced different customs and lifestyles, and that, in reality, all peoples descend from the same pre-historic Cro-Magnon progenitors in Africa and later migrated to the various regions of the world. Unfortunately, it was only after most of the world’s population had been colonized and stigmatized as inferior by Europeans, and after Jews and Gypsies had suffered genocide under the perverse delusions of Nazi superiority, that the intellectual and scientific bases of racism have eroded. But as is evident to all socially conscious individuals, racism is still very much a part of popular thought and attitudes and still very much a part of societal institutions in the United States and other countries. Latinos in the United States occupy a precarious position, for a great part of their very existence is the negation of racism; as a whole they have developed out of the conscious interbreeding of distinct peoples from geographically and culturally

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separate parts of the world. On the other hand, in the United States, Latinos are often perceived as a race—usually by European Americans, but at times even by themselves. Of all Europeans, it was the Spaniards of the Renaissance who were truly aware of their having developed as a people out of the cohabitation and mixing of culturally and religiously distinct peoples. On a base of prehistoric peoples that had inhabited the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish identity developed out of conquest and colonization by Romans, Germanic peoples, Celts, and the diverse peoples of northern Africa. During 700 years, Spanish culture evolved under one of the most tolerant theocracies: early Islam. Latinized Visigoths lived side by side with Moors and Jews, intermarrying and eventually developing the basis of what became one of Europe’s first nation-states. The considerable mixing and hybridization that took place over those 700 years, it is believed, later influenced and even facilitated the hybridization that took place under the Spanish in the New World. This notable tolerance ended, however, with the process of nation-building, which was spearheaded and carried out by Christian monarchs who rallied their kingdoms to rid the peninsula of infidels—that is, Muslims and Jews, especially those in kingdoms ruled by Muslims. Thus the reconquest and eventual national unity of the Iberian Peninsula was brought about by a crusade by Christians on their own soil. When the two strongest Christian kingdoms united in 1492 through the marriage of the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabel and defeated the last Moorish stronghold, Granada, Ferdinand and Isabel created a nation-state that was politically and religiously unified. They then set about consolidating their nation by making Castilian Spanish the official language, suppressing the political power and ethnic diversity of the other Visigothic kingdoms they had conquered in the peninsula, and forcing the Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity or abandon the peninsula. The Spanish Inquisition (actually of Italian origin) was used to ferret out people who practiced Judaism and Islam underground, and a social environment of suspicion and persecution developed in which people’s ethnoreligious lineage became a cause for doubt of their loyalty to State and Church. However, such doubts could easily be assuaged through the purchase of certificates from the Church that verified “purity” of lineage—more a cultural and religious assessment than a racial one. The Spanish term raza among the Renaissance Spaniards was more akin to our use today of the term culture and is still used frequently with that meaning. At the time of the exploration and colonization of the Americas, there was no belief that Spaniards were biologically or even culturally superior to other peoples. In fact, their history contradicted any such sentiments: the peninsula had continuously been overrun by diverse peoples who not only conquered the residents militarily but also brought the residents advanced institutions of modern government, science, education, commerce, and the arts—especially in the cases of the Moors and Jews. What the Spanish believed was fundamental, if not superior, was their religion, destined to be shared by all peoples of the 954

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world. They continued the Crusades against the Moors in Africa and the Turks in the Middle East and, of course, set about the immense task of evangelizing the inhabitants of the Americas. In the conquest and colonization of the Americas, they unknowingly facilitated the hybridization of peoples from several of the world’s continents: Africa, Europe, and North and South America. Although Spanish policy and law toward the American Indians evolved over a period of some 300 years, the common denominator of official positions and actions was that the Amerindians were seen as human beings whose souls could be saved through the Catholic religion. Following the customs instituted during the reconquest of the peninsula, the Spanish claimed the lands conquered from the Indians, as they had those lands conquered from the Muslim caliphates, and set about converting the natives of the New World to Catholicism. What is also clear is that over time both policy and practice encouraged intermarriage among Spaniards and Indians: at the elite levels of society among the Spanish captains and the Amerindian royalty in order to facilitate the transfer of power, and at the lower levels at least to further the Hispanization of the Amerindians as well as to inhibit illegitimacy and stabilize the colonies by building families. Conquest and colonization introduced many free Africans into the Americas by the Spaniards. When the diseases brought by the Europeans (as well as abuse of the natives) took extremely high tolls upon the native populations, African slaves were increasingly introduced. Again, interbreeding was fostered indirectly for the slaves and directly for the free Hispanicized Africans and mulattos. By the sixteenth century, mixed “castes” had grown so large and complex with all the diverse interbreeding that it became practically impossible to perceive or track the genetic lineage of the mixed Spanish, Africa (mostly West African), and American Indian peoples residing together. The Hispanic peoples that settled in Florida and the Southwest of what later became the United States not only brought this varied genetic legacy with them but also continued to interbreed with the resident indigenous groups. One of the greatest features of Hispanic culture over the ages has been the ability to incorporate people from various other ethnic or national cultures and still maintain its Hispanic identity—although freely acknowledging and proclaiming an African, Amerindian, or Asian subculture within its Hispanism. All of the above is not to say that there were no class distinctions between the Europeans, Indians, Africans, and mixed castes in colonial Spanish America. Although the medieval distinction between Christian and heathen had facilitated the conquest and colonization, as well as servitude and enslavement, of native peoples, as the natives became Christianized this distinction became undermined, simply reverting to the classic colonial distinction of conqueror and conquered: masters, servants, and slaves. The Negro and mulatto were stigmatized for being or having been descended from slaves, and many of the mixed castes were stigmatized because of the predominance of illegitimacy in so many people of mixed ancestry. Because of the makeup of Spanish laws and the distribution of work in colonial society, both Spaniard and Indian were privileged in 955

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many ways that mixed castes and African slaves were not. In the course of development of colonial society, it was the Spaniards born in Spain, however, who enjoyed the most privileges and occupied the highest positions. They were followed by the Criollos, Spaniards born in the Americas, who were somewhat discriminated against. In practical terms, there appeared only three definable groups: Spaniards, castes (mestizos), and Indians. But in reality there were hierarchical subdivisions to these, evident in both law and social status: Legal condition: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

“Spaniards” Indians Mestizos Free Negroes, mulattos, zamboes (African-Indian) Slaves

Social status: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Peninsular Spaniards Criollos Mestizos Mulattos, zamboes, free Negroes Slaves Indians (if not chiefs or royalty, etc.)

In the breakdown of social functions, the peninsular Spaniards headed the institutions of the society and were the bureaucrats and merchants. Criollos were large landowners, and mestizos were artisans, shopkeepers, and tenants. Mulattos were urban manual workers, and Indians became peasants and unskilled laborers. African slaves, of course, served as manual laborers as well as artisans and soldiers. It is worth noting that slavery in Spanish American was not rigidly defined and maintained as it was in the United States; Hispanic slaves enjoyed written rights and more liberal customs and access to manumission—even the widespread ability to earn money to purchase manumission—than did slaves in the United States. Also, it became a practice to free the children of master–slave unions. Furthermore, no ideology was ever developed asserting the inferiority of the African slaves to justify their enslavement as occurred in the United States. Slavery was abolished in the Spanish American republics almost immediately after their independence from Spain. The Criollos (Spaniards born in the Americas) and mixed castes (mestizos), however, eventually became resentful enough of their limited opportunities in society to lead the fight for independence from Spain. In Mexico, this independence movement was forged through an alliance with the Indians. (In Cuba and Puerto Rico, the independence movement was not merely linked to the movement to abolish slavery but in fact led by such free blacks as General Antonio Maceo.) The history of most of the countries of Latin America really can be traced as the ascendance of the 956

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mestizo population to be the largest segment of the society—with Argentina and southern Chile the two most obvious exceptions. At first, the mestizo population grew dramatically in comparison to the indigenous and the Spanish segments because of the demographic disaster that came about as European diseases devastated indigenous populations at the precise moment when the greatest interbreeding was beginning. But, over the course of centuries, the mestizo identity came not to be based on genetic or physiological features of individuals but on their assimilation to or participation in the national culture. Thus, the ranks of mestizos grew as Amerindians and freed slaves became acculturated. For example, a “full-blooded” Indian was considered a mestizo if acculturated enough to speak Spanish, use the national dress, and participate in common national life outside the tribe (this is especially relevant to the development of Mexican American heritage among descendants of Indians who had been acculturated at missions throughout the Southwest). Likewise, blacks and mulattos were “whitened” as they ascended to positions of greater economic and social prestige. Although prejudice existed against the mestizo during colonial times because of a background of illegitimacy, today no significant prejudice in this regard remains in the countries of large indigenous or African populations, such as those that are the origins of the majority of U.S. Latinos: Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Rather, Mexico, in particular, has made the mestizo its national archetype and has forged a national culture that is mestizo—even though the greatest genetic base of the population is indigenous. (The legendary figure of La Llorona/La Malinche has become a national archetype to reinforce this identity in Mexican and Mexican American folklore and literature.) Likewise, because of the large plantation economy that developed in the Spanish Caribbean, the long history of cohabitation and mixing of Africans and Spaniards has given rise to societies that have a mixed culture as well as mixed genetic ancestry. In the same Cuban or Puerto Rican family live individuals that are perceived by Anglo Americans as either black or white—not to mention the vestiges of Taíno ancestry that may still remain in the physical features of the individuals. In the course of the ascendancy of mestizos (including mulattos), the highest governmental and entrepreneurial levels of society were attained not only in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but also in what was to become the southwestern United States. Even Pío Pico, the governor of California just before the U.S. takeover, had African ancestry. Despite the claims of Californio (especially in testimonial literature) and New Mexican founding families when faced with Anglo American race and class systems, their ancestry is just as mixed as that of the people in central Mexico. Through this process of the ascendancy of the mestizo, ethnic and genetic lines were blurred and a class system was established along economic lines. Nevertheless, throughout Spanish America ethnic and physiological features can still be seen as important to class divisions, the most obvious of which result in unassimilated Indians and poor blacks predominating at the bottom of the social ladder. 957

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Although “race” distinctions and prejudice exist in Spanish America, they do not take—nor have they ever taken—the form of institutionalized discrimination as they have in the United States, being on the whole more subtly expressed (although some glaring exceptions are to be found in the history of Cuba and Puerto Rico under U.S. domination). Among the English who colonized North America was no overriding desire to evangelize the Indians or to intermarry with them or with African slaves or free men; on the contrary, laws were passed prohibiting intermarriage. Both Indians and Africans were seen as savages whose inferiority justified their enslavement or, as in the case of the Indians, their expulsion. In the ideology and imagery that developed as slavery grew in the British colonies, dark skin color soon became a symbol of savagery and heathenism, as well as many other negative attributes, and the savagery of the dark-skinned peoples was intrinsic and terminal; it could not be mediated or changed. By the late eighteenth century, precisely the time when the American Republic was being founded, race was seen not just as a division of the diverse populations who were in contact in the colonies but as (1) an intellectual construct about human differences and power relationships, and (2) a novel and unprecedented quality introduced into structuring social status. Keeping blacks, Indians, and whites socially and spatially separated and enforcing endogamous mating made sure that the visible physical differences would be preserved as the premier insignia of unequal social statuses. In this way, exclusive group membership was institutionalized and the way paved for later rationalizations of group distinctiveness in terms of natural, inbred inequality. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anglo-Saxon theorists, pseudo-scientists, and legislators furthered a concept whose origins date back to the Germanic tribes of the Middle Ages: God had chosen the northern European peoples to be the most intelligent and physically robust, and to be the practitioners of the highest forms of government. The apex of this northern European race was thought to be the Anglo-Saxon, whose providential mission was to supplant the other, inferior peoples of the world—or to bring them under enlightened Anglo-Saxon domination. In the nineteenth century, this doctrine of Manifest Destiny* was popularized by both statesmen and the press and institutionalized as the basic philosophy of American expansionism southward and westward. In the path of the Americans lay not only vast populations of Indians but also Spaniards and the mixed breeds they had forged: what the Anglo-Saxon ideologues came to call “mongrel races.” Later, after the United States had won the Mexican War and incorporated northern Mexico into its territories and states, social Darwinist theories of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” also helped to justify dispossessing, subduing, and controlling the native populations of the Southwest. It is this ideology that many of the first Mexican American writers, such as Francisco Ramírez* and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton* often refute in their works. In the Anglo-Saxon cosmology of peoples, Spaniards had already been to some extent racialized by the time of the Renaissance. The British brought 958

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with them to North America an image of the Spaniards as inordinately cruel, greedy, and lazy, as well as highly interbred with Jews and infidels while supporting a papist, obscurantist religion. In rejection of Spain’s imperial reach over the Lowlands and Italy, British and other northern European writers constructed their case for Spanish brutality on the abuses of Spanish soldiers in Europe as well as on the abuses visited on the Indians in the Caribbean. Propagandists wishing to justify British rights to challenge Spain’s colonial hegemony in the New World latched onto Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas’s written exposés of Spanish enslavement and torture of the Indians and built them into what has come to be known as the “Spanish Black Legend.”* England and Spain continued to be rivals, if not enemies, well into the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment in Europe conveniently chose Spain and its Catholicism as targets for derision and symbols of obscurantism. Of course, these attitudes were passed on to England’s colonies in North America, and even despite Spain’s assistance to the thirteen colonies in their war of independence, the intellectuals in the newly founded United States not only harbored the Hispanophobic attitudes of their ancestors but also proceeded to treat Spain and its New World colonies as rivals if not outright enemies— rivals for hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Upon the rise of the American Republic, the Spanish Black Legend provided the ugly image of the Hispanic enemy that fueled hateful speeches in Congress as well as the animosity of yellow journalism and popular culture to justify the expansion of the United States westward and southward. In the intellectual modes that crystallized in the United States during the nineteenth century and often have extended to the present, there are several main lines in which the popularization of Hispanophobic biases can be clearly seen. Some frontier clashes were still, irritatingly, with the Spanish (or Mexicans). In the Texan–Mexican struggle and then in war with Mexico, the United States transferred some of its ingrained antipathy toward Catholic Spain to Spain’s American heirs. Worse, Spain continued ruling and fighting rebellions in nearby Cuba, leading to disagreeable incidents that kept alive ancient antagonisms. This abrasive proximity to persons of Spanish speech, especially a darker-hued Mexican (reminiscent of German disparagements of the smaller, darker men of Iberia), encouraged faith in Nordic superiority. It was a small step from “Remember the Armada” to “Remember the Alamo.” Highly intemperate utterances in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere in public life continued abusive references to Latin America’s Spanish past and advocated the takeover of those lands as far as Panama, and sometimes beyond. At the century’s end, a heady mix of Darwinism, war with Spain, and faith in a kind of Nordic “manifest destiny” heightened superior race concepts in the Anglo American mind. The early Americans soon found an ideology to replace the “iniquitous Spanish” and their bastard progeny, at least in North America—Manifest Destiny. And this doctrine inevitably and permanently—to the present day— racialized all Hispanics and Latinos except a thin veneer of upper-class, 959

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wealthy, powerful (often landholding) families in California who were thought to have exclusively European ancestry. The racial superiority of the AngloSaxons not only allowed them to conquer and incorporate northern Mexico into the Union but also to colonize part of the Hispanic Caribbean and imperialistically determine and intervene in the internal politics of the other nations of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. It further allowed the great entrepreneurs of the society to develop immigration policies and programs that facilitated the importation of Hispanic American laborers to work in the factories and fields that would make the United States the agricultural and industrial powerhouse that it is today. The late nineteenth-century history of the Southwest is dominated by themes of the conversion of Mexican Americans into a proletariat, and the twentieth century by that of Mexican— and later Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Central American—mass migration to the United States, determined by economic cycles dependent on cheap labor and a foreign policy designed to ensure Spanish American dependency on the United States. Latinos, with their mixed racial heritage, entered the racial system of the United States, polarized between whites and nonwhites. Without a doubt, Hispanics became nonwhites, despite laws, court decisions, census descriptors, and even pronouncements by civil rights groups that have stated the contrary at one time or another. It was during the period of territorial expansion west that many of the stereotypes of Mexicans were solidified in the literature of travelers and pioneers—and, later, politicians and policy makers—and also in popular entertainments and media, such as dime novels. Mexicans were depicted as a mongrel race: cowardly, cruel, lazy, superstitious, and shiftless. This, of course was, an inheritance of the stereotypes created in the Spanish Black Legend. The process of dehumanizing the people of the Southwest preceded the expropriation of their lands. The next Hispanics to become the subjects of U.S. expansionism resided close to the borders of the United States: in the Caribbean. In 1898, the United States fought a war to liberate Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain and ended up taking possession of both islands, plus others in the Caribbean and the Pacific, as its own colonies. Unwittingly, these islands had traded one colonial ruler for another. In one felt swoop, the United States became a colonial empire; its Manifest Destiny had brought it to the doorstep of the Far East; it would now govern the various and disparate races that had been feared earlier. Objections to governing territories that were filled with “black, mixed, degraded, and ignorant, or inferior, races” had lost out to more important geopolitical concerns and issues of trade. The ideology, however, that sanctioned this change from expanding borders to appropriation of the colonial model was that the United States had a moral obligation to extend the benefits of Anglo-Saxon culture to backward areas of the world. The Panama Canal Zone was soon added to the list of colonies, and, although most of the other islands remained in a colonial relationship with the United States, in 1917 American citizenship was extended to Puerto Ricans. Of all the Spanish 960

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Americans, the Puerto Ricans became the freest to come and go from the United States. Although Mexicans outside the United States did not enjoy citizenship, the border patrol to monitor and control their migration was not established until 1925, and the first wholesale deportations did not take place until the Depression. During the twentieth century, further expansionism came by trade and investment, not territorial expansion, and was always protected by the “big sticks” of gunboat and dollar diplomacy. In the twentieth century, the moral imperative of the Anglo American empire became the incorporation and maintenance of the Spanish American countries within the U.S. economic and political sphere while fashioning an immigration policy that treated the inferior races of these societies as the unskilled manpower with which to develop the agribusiness and manufacturing industries at home so as to further support the economic miracle that was the United States. In essence, the greatest resource that Mexico, Puerto Rico, and, to some extent, Cuba had to offer the United States was the low-wage labor needed to supplant the great institution that had enriched the South and Northeast: slavery. Also, during times of war, the resident Hispanic population and the entire male citizenry of Puerto Rico would make an excellent noncommissioned fighting force. The United States system of races had effectively converted the African, Indian, and mixed-blood working and peasant classes of its nearest Hispanic neighbors into a caste of laborers on which it could base its economic development. Ubiquitous segregation practices in housing, education, and employment ensured that the Hispanic caste, from the turn the early 1900s to the present, would remain available in times of economic expansion; in times of recession, the Hispanics were easily deported. As previously mentioned, the United States is racially polarized among whites and nonwhites. Whites are attended by privileges, and nonwhites by disadvantages. The nonwhite category is further divided by tradition and such institutions as the census into four subcategories: black, red, yellow, and brown. Race is strictly genealogical in the United States and permanent, as long as one drop of nonwhite blood persists in the family line. In Latin America, however, race, if taken into account at all, is seen as a continuum with no fixed demarcation between categories, and there are many more categories perceived, based on class, education, and many other social variables. Thus Hispanics, from a culturally and genetically racial mixed background entered a biologically based biracial structure in the United States, where European Americans were at one end of the pole and African Americans at the other. Native Americans and Asians occupied ambiguous intermediate positions, and Hispanics were expected to fit into the same space. Under the influence of this racial system, Hispanics in the United States perceive themselves along a color line in reference to three poles: more white, more Indian, or more black, with the perception of greater stigma being attached going from extreme white to extreme black. And it is believed that greater discrimination is experienced the closer an individual’s 961

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skin color approaches the black pole. Hispanics are helpless within the racial system to define themselves. Living in the United States means being defined by color rather than by culture for the majority of Latinos. Only those very few who are perceived as completely white are approached by Anglos as culturally rather than racially distinct. But in either case—that of being perceived as white or black—Latinos experience a great deal of confusion and anger, for the resultant identification can isolate them from their families or communities on purely superficial grounds. This color identification has great implications for education, employment, housing, and other social opportunities. Moreover, occupying the intermediate ground in the polarized racial field can make individuals feel that no place remains for them, who are not part of the national identity. As might be expected, race with all its dynamics has been a major theme of Latino literature even before Hispanic peoples became incorporated into the United States. Cuban intellectuals and creative writers struggled with conflicting concepts of race in the early nineteenth century as the plantation and slave-owning classes in both Cuba and the U.S. South pushed for U.S. annexation of the island as a slave state, an issue played out in many of the periodicals published stateside, such as El Mulato* and Revolución. The issue became moot after the U.S. Civil War, and such intellectuals as José Martí* were able to breach the racial divisions of Cubans to forge a unified movement for independence—Martí had studied U.S. racial ideology and practice and persistently debunked it in his speeches and essays. Mexican Lorenzo de Zavala’s* analysis of the United States, Viage a los Estados Unidos de Norte America (1834, Voyage to the United States of North America), although admiring of the concepts of liberalism and democracy, severely criticized American hypocrisy regarding race and slavery. Francisco Ramírez,* in his El Clamor Público (1850–1860, The Public Outcry) consistently attacked slavery in the United States and the racialization of Hispanics in California. In the 1870s and 1880s, the editorialists for Spanish-language periodicals in the New Mexico territory launched a new discourse, “the fantasy heritage,”* which used claims of direct and exclusive Iberian heritage as self-defense against the racist ideology of Manifest Destiny. It is no wonder that the first Mexican American novel, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton,* deconstructed American racial attitudes toward blacks, Indians, and Hispanics before, during, and after the Civil War, exploring the perception and treatment of mixed-race and colored peoples in northeastern Yankee society. The literature of Latino natives has since then plumbed the depths of racial identity and discrimination, going from outright protest of injustice to exploration of the effects of racism and ambiguous racial identity on the inner psyche. During and immediately after World War II, such essayists as Alonso Perales* prepared the way for what would be an outright revolt against racial discrimination. The height of the civil rights protests against discrimination in the 1960s and 1970s also saw a turning inward in exploration of the psychological damage of racism on Latinos and the alienation 962

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individuals felt with their indeterminate and ambiguous racial identities, as in Piri Thomas’s* memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Richard Vásquez’s* autobiographical novel Chicano (1970). At the same time that many writers were supporting the civil rights struggle against racism with their poetry and drama, many of them were also recovering and celebrating their indigenous or African roots. Alurista* developed a poetry reviving the mythology and lyric concepts of the Mayas and Aztecs; Miguel Méndez* not only created Yaqui Indian characters in his Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974, Pilgrims from Aztlán) but even wrote stories, such as “Tata Casehua,” using the Yaqui language. Moreover, a substantial part of the Chicano* nationalist movement relied on developing a myth of the Aztec peoples’ return to their ancestral lands in what became the southwestern United States and a flowering of their culture to be embodied in present-day Chicano arts. Many of the most distinguished exponents of Chicano literature, such as Alurista, Luis Valdez,* and Rodolfo Anaya,* cultivated and promoted this myth. Festivals, magazines, and publishing houses, such as the Flor y Canto festival,* Editorial Quinto Sol,* and Aztlán journal, made this part of their mission. Despite this obvious and ideological return to indigenous roots, other writers, such as Graciela Limón* and Alfredo Véa*—and Luis Valdez in his Mummified Deer—penetrate the psychology of Yaqui and Tarahumara Indians, for example, in exploring a nonmythic, nonidealized indigenous heritage. Nuyorican* writers similarly undermined racial discrimination by identifying with their African heritage (see African Roots) and especially by celebrating the spiritual and communal in the santería religion, salsa music, and lyrics, as well as commonalities with African American literature and history. Thus Tato Laviera,* Sandra María Esteves,* and Victor Hernández Cruz* not only celebrated their African roots conceptually but also developed a “jazz poetry” related to salsa music. Further Reading Almaguer, Tomás, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Barrera, Mario, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). Graham, Richard, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). Horseman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Morner, Magnus, Race and Class in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Powell, Philip Wayne, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with Latin America (New York: Basic Books, 1971). Rodríguez, Clara, “Challenging Racial Hegemony: Puerto Ricans in the United States” in Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994: 131–145). Smedley, Audrey, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).


Racial Segregation

Racial Segregation. Racial segregation has left an indelible mark on Mexican American literature, as it has on the Mexican American population. The separation of Mexican school children from Anglo American ones existed for years after the U.S. incorporation of the lands that became the southwestern United States. However, segregation became more intense as Mexican immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought larger numbers of students to southwestern schools. Even then, segregation was not uniform and was not justified by the “separate but equal doctrine” that affected African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians. To some degree, Mexicans in the United States accepted the rationale that Mexican children were separated because they did not know English. But when bilingual children were still being separated in the 1920s, that argument wore thin. Stability and permanency were required, however, before the community was ready to mount formal desegregation efforts. High-quality education for their children became more important the longer the immigrants lived in the United States. Challenges to school segregation, either through the courts or through confrontation of school boards and administrators, were mounted by Mexican immigrant leaders as early as the 1920s. One of the first successful desegregation courts cases took place in Tempe, Arizona, in 1928. Mexican families, many of whose ancestors helped settle the city since its 1870s founding, challenged and succeeded in overturning a segregation policy in effect since 1915. One reason for this success is that Tempe Mexicans had a well-developed family network with roots in the Mexican state of Sonora and had acquired the legal ability and capital necessary to make the challenge. Unfortunately, segregation continued for children of recently arrived or poorer families until the 1940s. Only some of the offspring of well-established Mexican American families were able to integrate Anglo schools. More successful was the 1930 undertaking in Lemon Grove, California, a community near San Diego, where Mexican parents successfully sued the school board for placing their children in separate facilities. The community in Lemon Grove had a tight-knit group of immigrants from Baja California who had been in the United States a great number of years, working in the local citrus fruit industry. In San Bernardino, in 1929, students, parents, and the Mexican government objected to efforts by the school board to segregate Mexicans with Negroes at the De Olivera Elementary School. The community refused to accept the rationale given by Ida Collins, the County Superintendent of Public Instruction, who claimed the purpose for the separation was to help the children learn English. During 1924, Mexican parents, mainly from Guanajuato, and the consul protested to the school board when white parents petitioned to segregate Mexicans students in the Argentine, Kansas, High School. The Argentine community had greater cohesion than the larger but newer Midwest Mexican colonias in Chicago and Detroit during this same period because it had about a decade’s head start in its development. As a result of the protest, Mexican 964

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students were integrated into the high school, but segregation continued in elementary schools, a practice that neither parents nor the consul questioned. This compromise, which was not to the white parents’ liking, at least did not bar the Mexicans from attending high school, which was the case in many places in Texas. Through a League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)-sponsored initiative in 1946, attorneys from the Lawyer’s Guild succeeded in desegregating a number of southern California schools in the landmark Westminister v. Mendez case by arguing that segregation violated constitutional rights of Mexican children guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. At least 5,000 Mexican American children were affected. The Westminster decision had a momentous affect on the future of segregation of Mexican children. Texas Mexican American leaders waged the most intense efforts to desegregate schools. LULAC was in the forefront of this campaign and achieved successes even before World War II. During the 1930s, schools in Del Rio, Goliad, and Beeville were integrated, but the bulk of the battle was saved for later years. In 1948, lawyers commissioned by LULAC used the historic Westminster decision as precedent for challenging segregation policy in the Bastrop, Texas, schools. The court ruled in favor of prohibiting segregation either in separate schools or in separate rooms within the same school. In 1952, Sheely v. González abolished segregation in Tolleson, Arizona, a town in Maricopa County (where Phoenix is located). The successful integration decision came about because of the resolve that Tolleson parents demonstrated in organizing into a civic group to pursue this suit. Also essential in this endeavor was Ralph Estrada, a lawyer and president of the Alianza Hispano Americana. Two years later, in nearby Peoria, the school board voluntarily ended segregation of Mexicans in local schools—the last holdout in the state. The initiative foiled the desires of school officials who stubbornly clung to the idea that Mexican Americans required separate and different teaching methods. As in the Texas cases, the Westminster decision also played a crucial part in the Tolleson case. But these court victories were only as good as the desire of school administrators to carry out the judicial mandates. In Texas, officials were not very prompt in issuing desegregation orders, and it took continuous prodding from people in the community to bring about true integration. An example of community pressure was applied in Hondo, Texas, in 1950, when the American G.I. Forum asked new lawyer Albert Peña to help end segregation in the Hondo schools. Peña requested that the superintendent persuade the board to end segregation because it was unconstitutional. Mexican children were only able to attend through seventh grade, after which they were prohibited from attending school. Peña’s request was turned down by the school board and the Department of Education at the state level, whereupon Peña and members of the G.I. Forum persuaded all the Mexican American parents in Hondo to attend the school board meeting and complain. Eventually the board capitulated. 965

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Segregation in housing and the use of public facilities, including funeral homes and cemeteries, was likewise de facto and de jure in many areas of the Southwest. Mexican and Mexican American opposition to segregation in public places arose not only because separate facilities were always inferior, but also because they found the practice humiliating. Often it was the newspapers and the Mexican consulates who led the protests. For example, in San Francisco, in August 1919, Mexican Consul Gerónimo S. Seguín protested that 113 Mexicans were forced to live in the Negro section and that they had to sit with Negroes in cinemas and other public places. Chicago’s El Nacional (The National) in 1935 inveighed against Mexicans being forced to use Negro undertakers. It urged its readers to use white funeral parlors because intimacy with blacks only brought them down to that level in the eyes of white society. But prejudice and rejection have persisted even up to today, even though official segregation no longer exists. However, Mexican Americans, now more integrated into mainstream society, display much more capability in their efforts to break down obstacles to economic and social mobility. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos Ramírez, Francisco P. (1837–1908). Born in Los Angeles in 1837, publisher and editorialist Francisco P. Ramírez created a landmark in awareness that Hispanics in California were being treated as a race* distinct from Euro Americans. In 1855, when only seventeen years old, he took the Spanish section from the Los Angeles Star and founded a separate newspaper: El Clamor Público (The Public Outcry). Ramírez was from the start an advocate of Mexicans’ learning of English, as well as of California statehood—and a supporter of the United States Constitution. But his indignation grew as the civil and property rights of Californios went unprotected by the Constitution that he loved so much. He became a consistent and assiduous critic, attempting to inspire Hispanics to unite in their own defense and to spur the authorities to protect the Hispanic residents of California. Ramírez became more bitter as time progressed, at times calling democracy a “lynchocracy” because of the number of lynchings of Californios and Hispanics by authorities and vigilantes, advising Hispanics to abandon California; in 1859, he took his own advice and closed El Clamor Público down. By the time he ended publication of the newspaper, he had Francisco P. Ramírez. 966

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become one of the first Latinos in history to analyze U.S. imperial expansion and the threat it represented to all of Latin America, something he achieved by reading some fifty newspapers a week—in three languages, for he was trilingual in Spanish, English, and French—delivered by steamship to Los Angeles from throughout South and Central America, also coming west via stagecoach. Ramírez emigrated to Ures, Sonora, Mexico, where he continued working as a journalist and publisher. In this analysis, he anticipated José Martí’s* concept of living “in the belly of the beast” by decades. In 1862, however, he returned to California to work as a journalist and editor in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where he espoused a pan-Hispanism, reflecting the increasing diversity of California’s Latin American population. After experiencing some difficulties with his employers, he turned to the law and then to politics. He ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature on the Republican ticket. Ramírez fled Los Angeles after being charged with fraud and returned to Sonora. He lived out his final years in Ensenada, Baja California, where he worked as a lawyer until his death in 1908. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “El Clamor Público: Resisting the American Empire” California History Vol. 84, No. 2 (Winter 2006–2007): 10–18, 69–70.

Nicolás Kanellos Ramírez, Sara Estela (1881–1910). Born in Villa del Progreso, Coahuila, Mexico, in 1881, Ramírez was orphaned of her mother while receiving her early education in Monterrey; she graduated as a teacher from Ateneo Fuentes, a normal school for teachers in Saltillo. At the age of seventeen, Sara Estela Ramírez came to Laredo, Texas, in 1898, a time when Mexican teachers were recruited by Mexican Americans for their own schools to preserve language and culture, as well as to protect their children from the ravages of segregation and discrimination. During her short, very productive life in the border city, she not only taught class but also founded and edited the newspapers Aurora and La Corregidora (The Corrector), assisted in organizing labor, and became an active member of Ricardo Flores Magón’s* movement against the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico. A sought-after poet whose verses were, for the most part, published in Laredo’s Spanish-language newspapers, El Demócrata Fronterizo (The Border Democrat) and La Crónica (The Chronicle), Ramírez was equally sought after for her passionate speeches on behalf of labor and liberal causes at organizing meetings for farm workers, miners, industrial workers, and women. Ramírez joined with like-minded women intellectuals in establishing feminist organizations in Laredo and in Mexico and is considered a precursor of Mexican feminism. Ramírez died in 1910 before fully developing her potential as a writer. Today, only some two dozen of her poems and a handful of her essays have been located, most of which deal with philosophical, political, and feminist themes. She is also known to have written a play, “Neoma,” although it is not known if it was ever staged. She died in Laredo of a long-suffered but as-yet-unidentified illness on August 21, 1910. 967

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Further Reading Acosta, Teresa Palomo, “Ramírez, Sara Estela” in Handbook of Texas Online (http://www. tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/RR/fra60.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Ramírez de Arellano, Diana (1919–1997). Puerto Rican poet, literary critic, and respected academic Diana Ramírez de Arellano is also known as one of the founders and guiding hands of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York* (The Puerto Rican Atheneum of New York), an organization that served to develop and foster Puerto Rican cultural arts. Born on June 12, 1919, in New York City into a family of the cultural elite and raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Ramírez graduated in 1941 from the University of Puerto Rico with a degree in education. She became a high school teacher but in 1944 went on to graduate school at Teachers College of Columbia University. Upon receiving her master’s degree in 1946, she began a long career as a college professor, first teaching at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and then at Douglas College of Rutgers University. In 1951, she began studying at the University of Madrid for her Ph.D. in Spanish literature, which she obtained in 1952. Upon her return to the United States, she continued teaching at Douglas but shortly thereafter moved to City College of the City University of New York, where she spent the rest of her academic career. A life parallel to that of the academic was that of a poet. Included among her books are Yo soy Ariel (1947, I Am Ariel), Albatros sobre el alma (1955, An Albatross on the Soul), Angeles de ceniza (1958, Ash Angels), Un vuelo casi humano (1960, An Almost Human Flight), Privilegio (1965, Privilege), Del señalado oficio de la muerte (1974, From the Assigned Duty of Death), Arbol en vísperas (1987, Tree in Vespers), and Adelfazar (1995, Adelfa Grove). Ramírez also published poetry and essays in Latin American and New York Latino periodicals. Among her awards were gold medals from the Ateneo de Puerto Rico and from the government of Bolivia, as well as a Medal of Honor from the Sociedad de Autores Puertorriqueños de San Juan (Society of Puerto Rican Authors of San Juan). But the greatest award she received was being named poet laureate of Puerto Rico in 1958. Diana Ramírez de Arellano died on April 30, 1997. Further Reading http://www.centropr.org/lib-arc/faids/arellanof.html. Rosa-Nieves, Cesáreo, Biografías puertorriqueñas: Perfil histórico de un pueblo (Sharon, CT: Troutman Press, 1970). Ryan, Bryan, ed., Hispanic Authors: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Ramos, José Antonio (1885–1946). After receiving academic degrees in art, literature, and philosophy, and graduating from the consular and diplomatic seminar at the University of Havana, Havana-born José Antonio Ramos negotiated his first diplomatic assignment to the Cuban consulate in Madrid 968

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(1911), mainly because he was interested in seeing his plays staged: Almas rebeldes (1906, Rebel Souls), Una bala perdida (1907, A Lost Bullet), Nanda (1908), La hidra (1908, The Hydra), and Liberta (1911, Freed). He also wished to become better acquainted with Spanish theater of the time. This personal strategy of moving toward important cultural centers of Europe and America was also taken up by many other Cuban intellectuals of the so-called first generation of artists and writers in the early twentieth century. After Madrid and other capitals, he was posted in New York City’s consulate (1919–1921). It was then that he came into contact with American scholar Isaac Goldberg, who was at the time in the middle of preparing a first course of lectures on Latin American literature as an independent discipline from Spanish literature. Goldberg also developed an interest in translating Ramos’s feminist play “When Love Dies,” which he finally published in Frank Shay’s anthology Twenty-five Short Plays. Internationa (1926). Ramos considered that as it was, the play could be read but not acted, suggesting that this be advised when published. In 1922, José Antonio Ramos was transferred from New York to Philadelphia, where he stayed until 1932, when he suddenly abandoned this consulate, fearing reprisals caused by certain personal disagreements with Havana’s policies. While in Philadelphia he wrote his most important novels: Coaybay (1926), Las impurezas de la realidad (1929, The Impurities of Reality), and Caniquí. Trinidad, 1830 (1936). Making use of symbolic plots, places, and characters, they all contain penetrating, sociological, and critical analyses of Cuban society. Ramos was the first author to explore the effects of American meddling in Cuban affairs on the cultural, ideological, and psychosociological consciousness of individuals and institutions in the country. Also of importance were his firsthand observations of the impact of American society on the resulting behavior of younger generations of Cubans sent abroad to study. He personally encouraged patriotic attitudes and criticized all social conventionalisms. This and his realistic narrative account for his critics’ identification of important influences from Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekov in his work. Ramos had a close relationship with the University of Pennsylvania and especially with Professor J.P. Wickersham Crawford of the Romance Languages Department, where he became a Spanish instructor (1931). Ramos was also active in Philadelphia’s Club Hispanoamericano, where in 1924 he lectured on “Los Estados Unidos y el patriotismo” (The United States and Patriotism), a lecture later published in Havana’s Cuba Contemporánea (1924, Contemporary Cuba). Ramos also published various other articles on contemporary American literature in such Cuban magazines as Archipiélago (1924, Archipelago), Social (1930), and Revista de La Habana (1930, Havana Revue). In 1930, he was invited by the Institución Hispano Cubana de Cultura (Hispanic Cuban Cultural Institute) to lecture on American literature in Havana and other Cuban cities. By then, Ramos had developed not only a knowledge of his subject but also a strong and very positive feeling toward what he called the “pioneering spirit” of the American people, a spirit that he considered key element to the personal welfare of its citizens and the social wealth the country that emerged from what 969

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he defined as America’s “social experiment.” This enthusiastic attitude accompanied his literary lectures, but Cuban intellectuals at that time were very reluctant to accept his point of view, even in cultural matters (September 1930). Cuba was then living one of its deepest waves of anti-Americanism since the establishment of the Cuban Republic in 1902, the result of a complicated political process negotiated with the United States that many progressive social sectors of the Island (mainly intellectuals of a new generation) abhorred. Consequently, critics reviewing his lectures at the time attacked what they considered to be a weak ideological attitude on his part and were quite hard on Ramos, who left Havana only a few days before the outbreak of the first public confrontation between university students and local police, as a result of which one student died and many others were injured and sent to jail. Nevertheless, whatever the outcome may have been, this was the first direct scholarly action intended to make American modern literature and culture known in Cuba. These conferences, Ramos acknowledges, gave birth to the idea of writing his Panorama de la literatura norteamericana (1935, Panorama of North American Literature), in which he intended to enable Latin American universities to increase their interest in the subject. This unique book, a sociological approach to American literature, was the first written by a Hispanic in the United States in the twentieth century. More than a strictly academic work—for that was not Ramos’s intention—it constitutes an important evaluation of this literature’s aesthetic and social importance, considered from the perspective of a native of the New World in opposition to the traditional and underestimating evaluation of European critics. On the other hand, Ramos’s admiration for American cultural and domestic policies did not extend to his analysis of American foreign policy. Here, he strongly opposed American expansionism, both geographical and cultural, in the Latin American republics. In June 1932, Ramos fled to Mexico on board the S.S. “Baldbutte” and established himself in Veracruz, where he finished writing his Panorama. Now far from the University of Pennsylvania’s library— and thus unable to confirm new information—the resultant book was of uneven quality and had an abrupt ending. Eventually, in 1936, Ramos returned to Cuba and engaged in organizing two important libraries: that of the Ministry of State (Foreign Relations) and the National Library (1938–1946) as a member of an organizing commission. During these last years, he translated and adapted Dewey’s classification system, in use in Cuba until recent years, which he first presented in Havana in 1942 at the First International Congress of Archivists, Librarians, and Curators of the Caribbean, at which they were accepted for general implementation—see his Manual de biblioteconomía. Clasificación decimal, catalogación metódico-analítica y organización funcional de bibliotecas (1943, Library Science Manual: Functional Methodological, Analytical, and Organizational Cataloging for Libraries). José Antonio Ramos died in Havana on August 27, 1946, undoubtedly an important starting point for the study and modern evaluation of Hispanic identity and of American literature by Latin Americans for all times. 970

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Further Reading Bueno, Salvador, Los mejores ensayistas cubanos (Lima: Imprenta Torres Aguirre, 1959). Ortuzar-Young, Ada, “José Antonio Ramos: La tesis pragmática frente a las impurezas de la realidad” in Tres representaciones literarias de la vida política cubana (Montclair, NJ: Senda Nueva de Ediciones, Inc., 1979). Portuondo, José Antonio, El contenido político y social de las obras de José Antonio Ramos. Separata de la Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Havana, 1969). Smith, Octavio, “Travesía por José Antonio Ramos” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Sep.–Dec. 1975).

Ana Suárez Ramos, Manuel (1948–). Manuel Ramos is one of the most commercially successful Mexican American mystery writers. His series, featuring detective Luis Montez, has won awards and stayed in print for more than a decade. Born in Florence, Colorado, on March 6, 1948, Ramos benefited from a public education and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colorado State University (1970) and a law degree from the University of Colorado (1973). Ramos has practiced law since then. In the late 1980s, Ramos became more and more interested in literature, began reviewing books for the Denver media, and started writing. It was a natural for him to make the transition from his interest in the law to writing detective fiction; he also looked upon the medium as a way of understanding recent Chicano history and culture. In 1993, Ramos published the first book in the Luis Montez series, The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, in which the burned-out lawyer and middle-aged ex–Chicano Movement* activist Montez narrates his involvement in unraveling the mystery surrounding the murder of activist Rocky Ruiz some twenty years earlier. In the next installment, The Ballad of Gato Guerrero, Montez is called upon to protect a deceased friend’s family from a criminal gang. As in Rocky Ruiz, the setting is Denver and its Latino barrios, but the plot harkens back to the Vietnam War instead of to the Vietnam War. In The Last Client of Luis Montez (1996), Montez has to solve the murder of a legal client, which gives Ramos the excuse of reviewing and critiquing American life and culture in the 1990s. Despite the title of the former installment, Luis Montez lives on to continue detective work in Blues for the Buffalo (1997) as he searches for a Chicana writer, Rachel Espinoza, who has disappeared in Mexico; the plot takes a surprise turn for literary enthusiasts when her disappearance becomes linked to the real-life disappearance of Chicano writer Oscar Zeta Acosta* in 1974. In Brown-on-Brown (2006), Montez gets involved in the Anglo–Hispanic conflict over water rights in the Colorado sand-dune country. Ramos departed from the Montez mysteries in his Mooney’s Road to Hell (2002), which features private eye Danny Mora (Mooney) as he investigates the murder of an illegal immigrant in Denver, allowing Ramos to explore the whole underworld of labor smuggling, as well as to revisit themes from the Chicano Movement. Among the awards garnered by Ramos are the University of California Irvine Chicano/Latino Prize (1991), a nomination for the Edgar 971

Ramos Otero, Manuel

Allen Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America (1993), and a Colorado Book Award (1994). Soon after the Luis Montez series went out of print at St. Martin’s Press, Ramos was fortunate enough to have Northwestern University Press reissue the four first volumes in the series; the University of New Mexico Press has been issuing Ramos’s newer works. Further Reading Márquez, María Teresa, “Manuel Ramos” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Third Series, Vol. 209, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 232–235).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Ramos Otero, Manuel (1948–1990). Novelist, short-story writer, and poet Manuel Ramos Otero was born on July 20, 1948, in Manatí, Puerto Rico. He received a Catholic-school education in his home town and moved to New York City after graduating with a degree in social sciences from the University of Puerto Rico (1968) to pursue his literary and theatrical career as well as to experience the greater freedom for gays that existed in the United States (see Gay and Lesbian Literature). After studying with Lee Strasberg in 1970, Ramos Otero went on to establish his own theater workshop, Aspaguanza, where he worked with experimental Puerto Rican drama. In 1969, he earned an M.A. in Spanish and Latin American literature from New York University and began teaching in New York–area colleges and universities. From 1973 to 1975, Ramos Otero served as the editor of the literary magazine, Zona de carga y descarga (Loading and Unloading Zone). In 1976, he founded a small literary press, El Libro Viaje (The Book Trip), which published several books of poetry and Ramos Otero’s own experimental novel La novelabingo (1976, The Bingo Novel). His other books include El cuento de la mujer y el mar (1979, The Story of the Woman and the Sea) and El libro de la muerte (1985, The Book of Death). In 1990, he resettled in Puerto Rico and, shortly thereafter, died of AIDS, on October 7, 1990. In the last months before his death, he wrote a memoir of his life with AIDs and coming death, published in 1991 as Inviatación al polvo (Invitation to Dust). His last collection of stories and poems, Página en blanco y staccato (2000, Blank Page in Staccato), was published posthumously and given a special award by the PEN Club of Puerto Rico. Ramos Otero’s work was always very experimental and challenging to readers, often mixing literary genres in the same piece. Throughout his work, he addressed numerous themes of modernity: modern technology, ethnic consciousness and identity, and the rationality of the world only a few of the topics elaborated in his diverse universe. Further Reading Foster, David William, Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: a Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Rechy, John (1934–). One of the earliest of the contemporary Chicano novelists to gain a national following, and the first to base his narratives on gay 972

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life and culture, John Rechy was not at first recognized as a Chicano, in part, it seems, because of his un-Spanish-sounding surname and because his ethnicity was not evident in his themes and gay approach to writing. Born on March 10, 1934, to a Mexican mother who did not speak English and a Scottish musicianfather, Rechy was raised in poverty in El Paso, Texas. Rechy himself is believed to have become a male hustler, and his first novel, City of the Night (1963), is thought to be highly autobiographical. Today it is considered a classic among gay literature and has been named as one of the twenty-five all-time best gay novels. His rhapsodic style and his protagonist’s outlandish sexual adventures were very much ahead of their time in this graphic account of the underworld of gay prostitution; his “youngman” character seeks to find himself on the move from El Paso to New York and France. Among his many other works are Numbers (1967), The Day’s Death (1969), The Vampire (1971), The Fourth Angel (1972), Rushes (1979), Bodies and Souls (1983), Marilyn’s Daughter (1988), The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), Our Lady of Babylon (1996), The Coming of the Night (1999), and The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemes (2003). In 1977, Rechy published The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, a nonfiction book that alternates chapters of the author’s sexual experiences with analysis of homophobic laws, practices, and prejudices. The book was named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best 100 nonfiction works of the century. Rechy’s essays have been anthologized in Beneath the Skin (2004). Rechy has also published plays and short stories and has been recognized with a number of awards. He received the PEN-USA West’s Lifetime Achievement Award (the first novelist to be awarded the prize) and the Publishing Triangle’s William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2006, he was awarded the One Culture Hero Award in Los Angeles in recognition of writing, teaching, and activism in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. In 2000, a CD biography of his life, “Memories and Desires: The Worlds of John Rechy,” was produced and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California. In 2007, Rechy published his own memoir of growing up biracial and gay on the El Paso border, About My Life and the Kept Woman, examining the stresses and conflicts—both familial and societal—that led him to leave home and enter the homosexual underworld in New York City, ultimately producing such works as City of Night. Further Reading Casillo, Charles, Outlaw John Rechy (San Francisco: Advocate Books, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. The Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage program was founded in 1990 by an international group of literary historians, critics, and archivists resolved to reconstitute the literary legacy of Hispanics in the United States from colonial times up to 1960. It has since grown into a broader institution to recover and make accessible the entire written culture created by Hispanics in the country, including manuscripts and printed materials of all types, from letters, diaries, and sermons to historical 973


The international board for the Recovery Project.

and political documents, as well as to all print culture in all of the languages spoken and written by Hispanics, including Spanish, English, French, Italian, Catalan, Ladino, and Native American tongues. Directed by Nicolás Kanellos* and headquartered at the University of Houston, the program grew out of the work that the director and the original advisory board (the current board membership is listed at the front of this encyclopedia) had conducted for two decades in researching the Hispanic literature of the past. The board was convened in 1990 at the National Humanities Research Center in Triangle Park, North Carolina, to develop strategies to recover the written culture of Hispanics. The Rockefeller Foundation not only funded this initial planning meeting but contributed base funding for the project for the next eleven years. Over the years and to the present, other foundations came on board to provide support for the various and distinct Recovery projects: AT&T Foundation, The Belo Foundation, The Brown Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Houston Endowment, and the Meadows Foundation, among others. In 2005, The Brown Foundation of Houston provided a challenge grant that allowed the program to establish an initial endowment of more than $1 million. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage has to date located some 18,000 books and pamphlets written or published by Hispanics in what became the United States before 1960. It has also achieved bibliographic control of some 1,700 periodicals and digitized some 500,000 literary items from them. The project has also digitized more than 1,000 books. Recovery has accessioned archives, supported scholarly research with some two hundred grants, and published more than forty recovered literary books, two anthologies, and eight volumes of 974


research articles on the literature and its recovery. In addition, more than thirty university press monographs have been issued on Recovery subjects from coast to coast by such institutions as California University Press, University of North Carolina Press, and Princeton University Press, among many others. One of the most far-reaching results of the project was Oxford University Press’s publication of the first-ever comprehensive anthology of Latino literature, compiled and edited by the Recovery scholars: Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. Seventy percent of its material was translated from Spanish, and 30 percent was in its original English. Arte Público Press* simultaneously issued a companion volume made up only of Spanish-language originals: En otra voz: antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (In Another Voice: Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States). At the core of Recovery work is the U.S. Hispanic Bibliographic Database, Gaceta de Texas. which compiles and makes accessible all available information regarding U.S. Hispanic authors and their books, articles, and manuscripts. Recovery publishes specific thematic bibliographies online and in print and is in the process of making the entire database available over the Internet. The database makes Recovery’s Hispanic Periodical Literature Project possible, wherein all of the newspapers are researched, microfilmed for preservation if they exist on newsprint, and indexed and scanned for literary, historical, and cultural articles, serialized novels, poetry, drama, literary notices, essays, editorials, and so on. Digitized images of more than 2 million items are being prepared for delivery over the Internet. Because of the advanced work conducted in periodical research, recovery was able to publish Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Because so much of the writing of Latinos historically and to the present has dealt with or been derived from religious practices, recovery also established the Recovering U.S. Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice project to access, preserve, and make available the religious thought of Latinos before 1960 by accessioning collections of religious books, periodicals, sermons, and other documents and microfilming them. The archives that have been constituted cover 975

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Herencia.

all Hispanic religious groups, running the gamut from Sephardic periodicals published in Ladino to master’s theses on the history of various Protestant denominations to the memoirs of Catholic bishops in U.S. exile.* Recovery holds yearly conferences for scholars to report on their research and has published collections of the articles that derive from these conferences. Conferences are only one means of dissemination of the Recovery program’s work, the others being news stories, brochures, an online newsletter, and scholars who give papers and speak at a broad array of scholarly associations. To further integrate the findings and documents of Recovery, the program has brought curriculum writers and teachers together in a project to begin preparing materials for their adoption at the secondary education level throughout the country. At the University of Houston, the Recovery program and its affiliate, Arte Público Press,* have become the archive and laboratory for the only Ph.D. program in the United States offering a specialty in U.S. Hispanic literature, culture, and language. Many of the graduate students in the program work as research assistants or interns in Recovery or Arte Público and receive hands-on training in the subject matter itself, as well as in archival research and application of technology to the humanities. The Recovery program and its archives has also become a resource for scholars visiting and doing research from throughout the world. Further Reading Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vols. 1–7 (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992–2005).

F. Arturo Rosales Redondo, Antonio (1876–1837). Antonio Redondo was one of the most active Mexican American newspapermen in the first half of the twentieth century in both Arizona and California. Born in Altar, Sonora, in 1876, he immigrated to Tucson in 1887. There, he worked as an apprentice in El Fronterizo (The Border Paper), one of Arizona’s first Spanish-language newspapers, published by the Sonoran-born Carlos Y. Velásquez, one of the founders of the Alianza Hispano Ameri976

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cana (The Hispanic American Alliance). He also worked for the Tucson Citizen as a printer and editor. In 1899, he launched his own newspaper, El Siglo XX (The Twentieth Century). He later moved to Phoenix, where he married Luisa Parra and wrote for El Mensajero (The Messenger). In 1920, he moved to Los Angeles and he took charge of the Spanish section of the Los Angeles Record and concurrently served as the Los Angeles correspondent for El Tucsonense (The Tucsonian), Arizona’s premier Spanish-language daily, published between 1915 and 1957. In his columns, Redondo advocated political and civil-rights activism for Mexicans in the United States. Dismayed by the disproportionate numbers of Mexicans executed in the 1920s, Antonio Redondo became an ardent spokesperson against capital punishment, often using classic arguments of French and English writers of the previous two centuries to argue against this ultimate punishment. In the 1920s, he helped found a chapter of the Alianza Hispano Americana in Los Angeles and served as leader in other organizations, such as the Woodmen of the World. He died in 1937. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

F. Arturo Rosales REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking. Founded in 1971, REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking has 700 members in eight affiliates. Based in Chicago, Illinois, and associated with the American Library Association, REFORMA works for the improvement of the full range of library services to Hispanics of the United States. REFORMA advocates the creation of library collections in Spanish, the recruitment of bilingual and bicultural library personnel, and the development of specialized services for the Hispanic community. REFORMA offers scholarships for graduate library study and publishes the quarterly Reforma Newsletter. REFORMA’s Children’s Day/Book Day, also known as El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Día), spearheaded and promoted by children’s author Pat Mora,* is a celebration of children, families, and reading that is held annually on April 30. The celebration emphasizes the importance of literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Through a series of grants from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, REFORMA and the Association for Library Service for Children (ALSC) have worked with hundreds of libraries throughout the country to organize Children’s Day events and present the Estela and Raúl Mora Award, established by Pat Mora and her siblings in honor of their parents, to the libraries with the best Children’s Day programs. REFORMA gives a Librarian of the Year Award and, in conjunction with the Association of Library Services to Children, also awards the Pura Belpré* Medal for the best Latino children’s book author and illustrator. Further Reading “Reforma” (http://www.reforma.org).


Reid, Marita

Marita Reid (right) on stage in “Doña Diabla.”

Reid, Marita (1895–?). From the 1920s to the 1950s, Marita Reid was the most renowned primera dama (leading lady) of the Hispanic stage in New York, as well as a distinguished director. Born in Gibraltar to a Spanish mother and an English father, Marita Reid grew up bilingual and began her life on the stage at seven years old. Her early experience came when she performed on tours in extreme southern Spain. In the early 1920s, she made her debut in Spanish dramatic companies at the National and Belmont theaters of New York City. After 1922, she acted in the companies of Pilar Arcos, Narcisín, and others in a variety of genres, from serious drama to zarzuela (Spanish-style operettas). Some time later, she followed the example of many outstanding women of the stage, entrepreneurs as well as artists, and formed her own company. The Compañía Marita Reid performed steadily through a circuit of mutual aid societies, such as the Calpe Americano (Spain in America) and the Casa Galicia (Galician House), as well as at the Ateneo Hispano (Hispanic Atheneum), a cultural and intellectual center in Manhattan. When the Great Depression and World War II sharply curtailed the opportunities for live performances in theaters, Reid was one of the most responsible 978

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for keeping Spanish-language drama alive by producing works at numerous halls and mutual aid societies, as well as at conventional theater houses. Because of her perfect English and biculturalism, Reid was able to cross over to American, English-language mainstream theater. Her career extended to Broadway and to Hollywood, including movies and live television drama in the Armstrong Circle Theatre, the U.S. Steel Hour, and Studio One. During the course of her career, Reid found occasion to write some four plays, all of which have remained unpublished: Patio Gibraltareño (A Gibraltar Patio), Luna de Mayo (May Moon), Sor Piedad (Sister Piety), and El Corazón del Hombre Es Nuestro Corazón (A Man’s Heart Is Our Heart). These ran the gamut from comedic farce to serious drama, but Reid herself was very modest about her playwriting skills. In addition to being a leader in the Latino artistic community, Reid was a staunch activist in support of the Spanish Republic. She produced, directed, and acted in numerous anti-fascist plays, most of which were fund-raising efforts for the Republican army. The performances were usually followed by rallies of and speeches from the diverse ethnic elements in the Latino community of New York. The broadside for one such performance in 1934 openly proclaimed the producers’ and audiences’ political sentiments: “. . . la lucha entre el capital y el trabajo, entre el facismo y la libertad ha tomado los caracteres más trágicos en el suelo español. Los valientes campesinos españoles agobiados por el trabajo, se revelan pidiendo justicia” (. . . the struggle between capital and labor, between fascism and freedom, has assumed its most tragic character on Spanish soil. The valiant Spanish campesinos, overcome with work, are shown begging for justice). Reid’s commitment to the cause lasted throughout her life. In 1957 on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Republic (in exile), Marita Reid was paid homage at a special performance of one of the plays that she had made famous in New York: the Alvarez Quintero brother’s Lo que Hablan las Mujeres (What Women Talk About). Unfortunately, the evening was marred by supporters of dictator Francisco Franco, who barged in and attempted to disrupt the affair, requiring police to be called to the scene. Marita Reid died in New York, little noticed, sometime during the 1980s. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Religion. The primary role played by religion in the development of the Spanish nation in the Iberian Peninsula and its subsequent role in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas has been well studied. Similarly, Hispanics around the world and in the United States have been characterized in scholarship and popular opinion by the dimensions of their predominant Catholic faith. To date, neither their diversity of faith nor ethnic and racial diversity have been adequately addressed, contributing to a widely held perception of a monolithic culture with its own Catholic worldview, a worldview often categorized as obscurantist, mystical, and anachronistic. Most important 979

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Revista Católica, El Paso.

for the study of Hispanic culture in the United States, the role of religion—in all of its diversity and historical evolution—in building Hispanic culture and its literature in this country has not been adequately studied or understood. In the last decade, a number of studies have been conducted and published regarding religious thought and practice in the diverse Hispanic communities 980

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A photo from a Cristero exile book celebrating Catholic martyrs of the Mexican Revolution.

of the United States. They begin to document the role of Hispanics in building the Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Mormon churches, among others. They also investigate popular and alternative religious practices, such as santería among Caribbean-origin Hispanics, the Penitentes in New Mexican life and culture, faith healing, Hispanic festivals, and religious pageantry. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck’s Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S. (1994) points out the dearth of knowledge among the Catholic Church leadership, its theologians and scholars, regarding the nature of Hispanic communities and the history of the relationship to Catholicism and other religions in the United States. (Recent surveys estimate that some 75 percent of Hispanics are Catholic and 20 percent Protestant, 5 percent being “other”—and that numbers of conversions to Protestant denominations are growing.) The specific span of time least understood and researched in the history of Hispanics and their religious practices is the nineteenth century, when the United States incorporated lands and peoples by conquest and purchase, followed by the great periods of Hispanic immigration in the twentieth century. The most important of the historical events that resulted in the growth of the Hispanic population were the United States’ expansion south and west to occupy lands either expropriated or purchased from the Spanish empire—and, later, Mexico—during the course of the entire nineteenth century; the massive immigration of economic, political, and religious refugees from the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910; the Spanish American War of 1898 and the subsequent incorporation of Puerto Ricans as American citizens in 1917; and, throughout the twentieth century, the building of large enclaves of Hispanic immigrant and refugee communities (the immigration of refugees often as a 981

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result of United States foreign policy and interventionism), enclaves that became centers of U.S. Hispanic minority culture in the urban centers of Boston, Chicago, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Tampa. However, in the twenty-first century, Hispanics now reside virtually everywhere in the United States and have formed especially large communities throughout the Southwest, West, Midwest, and the Eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida. The religious affiliations and diverse religious practices of Hispanics have been critical to their evolution as ethnic or minority groups in the United States. The Church in the United States benefited from the learning, and theological and literary writings of Father Félix Varela* in much of the nineteenth century, even as Father Antonio José Martínez* in New Mexico struggled against a new version of the Church that accompanied westward expansionism. Part of the Americanization Cover of Angélico Chávez’s Cantares: Canticles and Poems of Youth. process Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland was their targeting by Protestant missionaries. An integral part of the practice of Mormonism is the conversion of Latin Americans and Native Americans, thus the need for missionary experience in Latin America for the Church of Latter Day Saints. During the Mexican Revolution, the Catholic Church set up its hierarchy in exile in El Paso and Los Angeles, which helped solidify the Catholic identity of Mexicans in the United States. The periodical writings and memoirs of exiled bishops such as Eulogio Gillow y Zavalza* helped reinforce a conservative culture in communities throughout the Southwest during the time that an entire war was fought in Mexico (funded in part by religious exiles and immigrant communities in the United States) over the role of religion in Mexican life: the Cristero War, 1926–1929. From the 1920s through the 1950s, churches and Church societies became the most stable and unifying institutions in the immigrant communities of Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and 982

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Spaniards. Quite often, the first institutions that immigrants constructed in their new home were churches named for their patron saints; affiliated with the churches were the numerous lay organizations they founded. Such societies as the Círculo de Obreros Católicos San José (San José Catholic Workers Circle), active in East Chicago, Indiana, in the 1920s and 1930s, preserved language, faith and culture by performing plays, sponsoring fund-raising dances and bazaars, publishing newspapers, and even organizing civil rights protests. Many of the church’s lay periodicals provided space where writers in the community could cultivate their prose and poetry. Indeed, one of the greatest poets of modern Catholicism arose from a New Mexico parish: Fray Angélico Chávez.* As much as the historical role of religion in building Hispanic communities is unrecognized, even the religious background of civil rights, land rights, and workers’ rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s are often ignored or minimized by political Pedro Vera y Zuria. scientists and historians. The beginning of the Chicano Movement,* with the farm worker strikes and boycotts, as well as the school walkouts, was largely successful not only because churches and religious personnel—both Catholic and Protestant—offered meeting facilities, guidance, and funding, but also because of the spirituality of the leaders and participants themselves, who often openly prayed and invoked religious symbolism to inspire and motivate the participants. Even the most militant struggle, to recover ancestral lands in New Mexico, was led by a Pentecostal minister, Reies López Tijerina, in the late 1960s. And the contemporary literary movement, which has helped define Hispanic identity in the United States, has done so by exploring the Hispanic spirituality and religious practices so clear in such foundational works as Piri Thomas’s* Down These Mean Streets and Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand, Tomás Rivera’s* . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), Pat Mora’s* Chants, and Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima. Numerous other cultural manifestations that have helped define a Hispanic or Latino identity have similarly emerged 983

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from or been inspired by Hispanic religious practices: the development of salsa music is inconceivable without santería, which also informs the Nuyorican* poetry movement—especially as practiced by Sandra María Esteves* and Tato Laviera*—as well as Cuban American visual arts, in the canvases of Paul Sierra. Similarly, the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe has informed much of Chicano easel and mural art, as practiced by Yolanda López and Judy Valdez, and Chicano theater, especially as pioneered by the movement’s founder, Luis Valdez,* in such works as La Carpa de la Familia Rascuachi (The Tent of the Underdogs) and La Pastorela (The Shepherds’ Play). But far and beyond works of literary celebrity, the Latino books that have gone into the most editions, been translated into the most languages, and sold more copies even than Victor Villaseñor’s* best-selling Rain of Gold, Oscar Hijuelos’s* Pulitzer Prize–winning The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, and Sandra Cisneros’s* ubiquitous The House on Mango Street, are the conversion narratives of Nicky Cruz* (Run, Nicky Run) and José Policarpo Rodríguez* (The Old Trail Guide). In sum, since 1492, considered by historians to be the very inception of Hispanic identity in Europe and the Americas, religiosity and institutionalized religion have been central to the historical, cultural, and social development of Hispanics and have played a very important role in all aspects of growth and persistence of Hispanic native, immigrant, and exile life in the United States. In an age when Latinos make up the largest minority in the United States and will make up as much as one fourth of the total population of the United States by mid-century, it is paramount that scholars understand the role of religion in the making of this important American community, beginning to disseminate that knowledge to the society at large. Now, thanks to a research project designed to locate, preserve, and make accessible the documentary heritage of Hispanics in the United States, “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage,”* the written culture created by Hispanics from the colonial period up until 1960 is being made available to scholars and students. Already the project has located more than 17,000 books written or published during this period, as well as some 1,700 periodicals. The project has also located a large body of religious thought written by U.S. Hispanics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that treasure trove of manuscripts and printed material are hundreds of religious periodicals, previously unknown to scholars, that circulated in Hispanic communities during this time: Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist newspapers for wide circulation, weekly newspapers by church-related groups that served as a major source of information for the ethnic enclaves, Catholic magazines for a general readership, and Sephardic* newspapers from New York and California written in Ladino, an archaic form of Spanish, but printed in Hebrew characters. The varieties of language expression— monolingual, bilingual, at times trilingual—reveal further diversity of the reading habits and abilities of the congregations over time. Equally unknown, and now unearthed for the first time, are the hundreds of Spanish-language books published by and for Hispanic faithful from such religious centers as El Paso, San Antonio, Kansas City, and Chicago, discovered 984

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by the Recovery Project. They run the gamut from Bibles, catechisms, and books of sermons in Spanish to autobiographies of converts and ministers, memoirs of political exiles in the United States, and books detailing the role of religion in social and political life. In addition, Recovery has brought into its archives thousands of manuscript sermons, hymnals, collections of religious songs and poetry, correspondence, book manuscripts, photographs, reports, studies, and so forth that will soon become the raw material for scholarly examination and commentary. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, ed., Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice in the United States (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Rembao, Alberto (1895–1962). Alberto Rembao was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1895. He was born into a family of political activists, followers of Ricardo Flores Magón,* that initiated the Mexican Revolution in that state. Rembao began his professional studies in the Institute of the State of Chihuahua,

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but while he was still a student, the Revolution started, and Rembao joined Pascual Orozco’s first army. After being injured in battle, Rembao moved to United States, where he continued his vocational training in theology at the University of California, Berkeley (1920–1924) and Yale (1927–1928). He directed the magazine La Nueva Democracia (1920–1963, The New Democracy), the official publication of the Committee of Cooperation for Latin America, a Protestant agency with headquarters in New York that promoted religious and cultural relations between the United States and Latin America. Rembao established his home in New York City, although he traveled continuously to Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and other countries, where he spoke at conferences and seminars. The author published various books, beginning in 1935, and wrote for diverse newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and the Southern Cone. He was also a member of the Hispanic Institute at the University of Columbia. Rembao’s main purpose when publishing was to extend Protestantism in Latin America as a way of life; his ideological position is fully represented by texts such as Mensaje, movimiento y masa (1939, Message, Movement, and Mass), Democracia Trascendente (1945, Transcendent Democracy), Discurso a la nación evangélica; apuntaciones para un estudio de la transculturación religiosa en el mundo del habla española (1949, Speech to the Evangelical Nation; Notes for the Study of Religious Transculturation in the Spanish-speaking World), Horseman of the Lord. Alfred Clarence Wright (1951), Pneuma. Los fundamentos teológicos de la cultura (1957, Pneuma: The Theological Basis of Culture), “The Reformation comes to Hispanic America,” and “The Growing Church and Its Changing Environment in Latin America” (1957). Even his only novel, Lupita. A Story of the Revolution in Mexico (1935), supports Protestant confrontation of Catholicism in Latin America. Throughout his writing, but especially in his essays, Rembao questioned the meaning of religion in the Hispanic cultures. Alberto Rembao also used pseudonyms to sign his articles; the bestknown one was James Gergson, which he used in La Nueva Democracia. Rembao died in New York on November 10, 1962. Nowadays, there are a number of libraries and institutes of Protestant teaching named after him. Further Reading Mondragón, Carlos, “Leudar la masa.” El pensamiento social de los protestantes en América Latina: 1920–1950 (Buenos Aires: Kairós, 2005).

Amira Plascencia-Vela Repatriation. Repatriation was a program run by various federal, state, local, religious, and social service agencies to facilitate the return of Mexicans to their homeland during the Great Depression; at its most benign, it helped destitute families return home, but at its most inhuman and racist, it served to indiscriminately round up Mexicans and Mexican American U.S. citizens and force them onto trains to be dumped across the border. When the economy was failing and did not have a chance of recovery, Congress passed the 1929 Immigration Act. It served as a partial victory for John C. Box and other nativists,* who had pressed for a specific Mexican immigration ban throughout the 1920s. Although it was not aimed specifically at Mexico, the Immigration Act 986

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Mexicans being repatriated from Houston, Texas.

became the most restrictive legislation affecting Mexicans up to this point. Its provisions called for imprisonment of one year for those caught without documents a second time and a one-thousand dollar fine. When William Doak was named Secretary of Labor in 1930 by President Herbert Hoover, he decided to use this new law against Mexicans. Throughout the country, Department of Labor agents zealously pursued Mexican undocumented immigrants, working hand in hand with local law enforcement officials. The Great Depression of the 1930s, which dislocated millions of Americans, presented the greatest challenge to Mexican immigrants as the collapsed economy left hundreds of thousands homeless or without jobs. During the worst of the crisis, industrial cities like Detroit were plagued with 75 percent unemployment. By 1932, transient camps ringed every city in the country. To eat, the inhabitants depended on soup kitchens, if they were lucky, or on foraging among garbage dumps. This terrible ordeal obviously changed the evolution of the Mexican colonias (Mexican immigrant communities) as well. Mexicans, so desirable as workers in the previous decade, were now discharged from their jobs by the thousands and then pressured to leave by community authorities. Between 1929 and 1936, at least 600,000 Mexican nationals and their children, many of whom were born in the United States, returned to Mexico—this represented about one third of the U.S. Mexican population. Economic downturns had been a constant factor in their lives, but nothing compared to the suffering created by this crisis. 987

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Out of work and unable to acquire adequate shelter and food, most Mexican immigrants wanted to return home. But they resented Americans’ attitude— that Mexicans had no right to be in the United States. In the past, opposition to Mexicans living in the United States—from nativists and white workers— had not been transformed into successful campaigns to expel them. This was mainly because of powerful employers who were anxious to protect the Mexican influx, but now nativists could do their worst. The movement to repatriate Mexicans was the most intense in large industrial cities ravaged by unemployment, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit. Similar conditions existed in Texas and Arizona mining communities, where the collapsed market for raw materials forced a drastic curtailment of production. In the industrial Calumet region of Indiana, southeast of Chicago, the steel mills, in tandem with local governments, systematically coerced unemployed Mexican workers and their families to take free train rides back to the border. Relief to the needy in the cities of East Chicago and Gary, both located in Lake County, Indiana, came from various sources, but much of it was controlled by the local government. The most zealous repatriation campaigns took place in Los Angeles. Even before the passage of the 1929 act, Los Angeles law enforcement officers conducted vagrancy sweeps to clear Los Angeles streets of unemployed workers, of which a disproportionate number were Mexicans. The 1929 restrictions provided Los Angeles officials with another weapon to get rid of Mexicans. Charles P. Visel, Los Angeles County coordinator for unemployment relief, worked hand in hand with federal agents sent to Los Angeles by Secretary of Labor Doak and local Los Angeles police to arrest as many undocumented Mexicans as possible. Officials knew that even with beefed-up police manpower, it would be impossible to corral all of the undocumented Mexicans. A strategy was devised to intimidate aliens into leaving on their own by publicizing raids where hundreds of Mexicans were rounded up, regardless of whether or not they carried documents. On February 26, 1931, Los Angeles County Deputies and Department of Labor agents took a number of newspapermen on a raid that netted 400 Mexicans at La Placita, the historic central plaza of Los Angeles. The next day, photographs of manacled Mexican men being led into paddy wagons appeared on the front pages of Los Angeles dailies. It turned out that only a small percentage of the Mexicans harassed in this manner were undocumented. In 1931, President Hoover implemented the President’s Emergency Committee for Employment (PECE), his solution to unemployment. It was no more than a public relations ploy to make people feel good about providing a marginal number of jobs through the private sector. But the PECE in Los Angeles, of which Charles Visel was a member, worked closely with county officials to coordinate the voluntary repatriation of southern California Mexicans—in other words, those not deportable under the 1929 act. In 1931, Visel traveled to Mexico, hoping to arrange a program to settle the thousands of Mexicans whom county officials and Visel hoped to repatriate. The Mexican government did cooperate with various groups in the United States, including Visel’s program in Los Angeles County that raised funds to 988

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send Mexicans to the border by promising to take responsibility for the repatriates once they crossed the border. Unfortunately, the engine of repatriation on the American side was more efficient than the one south of the border, resulting in bottlenecks that left thousands of the discarded Mexicans marooned in border towns with little to eat and nowhere to sleep. The effect of the Repatriation was to depopulate Mexican and Mexican American communities. That, coupled with the economic downturn, meant a curtailment of the cultural life offered by Hispanic theaters, newspapers and publishing houses. The majority of Spanish-language newspapers and publishing houses in the Southwest ceased publication; theater houses either shut their doors or converted to movie houses and laid off their actors, technicians, playwrights, orchestras, and other personnel. Needless to say, Repatriation is often referenced and remembered bitterly in much Mexican American literature. Further Reading Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymund Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

F. Arturo Rosales

Revista Chicano-Riqueña. Founded in 1973 at Indiana University Northwest, in Gary, Indiana, by professors Nicolás Kanellos* and Luis Dávila and their students, Revista Chicano-Riqeuña (Chicano-Rican Review) became the most nationally influential Latino literary magazine during its ten years of life in the Midwest as well as during its move to the University of Houston in 1980. During a time when very few Latino literary books were available, the quarterly RCR provided a forum and distribution for some of the foundational writers of the literature, including Miguel Algarín,* Rudolfo Anaya,* Ana Castillo,* Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Sandra Cisneros,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* Victor Hernández Cruz,* Sandra María Esteves,* Roberto Fernández,* Rolando Hinojosa,* Tato Laviera,* Miguel Mendez,* Nicholasa Mohr,* Pat Mora,* and many others. In addition to publishing poems, stories, plays, novel excerpts, and essays, RCR also served as a journal for the study of Latino literature by publishing articles of literary criticism and book reviews overseen by some of the leading scholars of that literature, including Edna Acosta-

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Belén, María Herrera-Sobek, Luis Leal,* Francisco Lomelí, Rosaura Sánchez, and many others who served on its editorial board. As a result of publishing special anthology issues of RCR, such as volumes dedicated to Chicago writers, women writers, the American bicentennial, and plays, the RCR staff and editors decided that launching a publishing house was feasible, especially because the cessation of Editorial Quinto Sol, its El Grito magazine, and The Rican magazine had left a vacuum by the late 1970s. In 1979, RCR launched its book-publishing arm, Arte Público Press,* which became the largest publisher of Latino literature in the United States and outlived its parent publication. As more and more Latino books became available, the need for RCR waned. From the mid-1980s onward, it struggled to maintain its individual subscription base, even changing its name to The Americas Review to attract a broader, more diverse audience and brought on a series of new editors, such as Julián Olivares, José Saldívar, and, ultimately, Lauro Flores. The magazine even reduced its issues to triquarterly, and then biannually. But after twenty-five years, in which it had launched so many new voices and even won such awards as the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Outstanding Editor Award (1979), the magazine ceased publication. In the end it was far easier and far more rewarding for Arte Público Press to publish books than to expend the time and resources needed to publish a literary magazine that, in addition to being a publishing venture, was the nurturing and maintenance of a community of thousands of correspondents sending in material to be evaluated, books to be reviewed, and letters of evaluation from referees. Further Reading “Arte Público: Publishing Latino Authors for a National Audience” Publishers Weekly (Nov. 28, 1986). Wilson, Wayne, “Profiles of Success” in Careers in Publishing and Communications (Bear, DE: Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001).

Cristelia Pérez Reyes, Guillermo A. (1962–). Prolific playwright Guillermo A. Reyes was born in Mulchen, Chile, in 1962, and immigrated with his mother to the Washington, D.C., area in 1971. The pair moved to Los Angeles in 1977, where Reyes attended high school. Reyes went on to study drama at the University of California, Los Angeles. Reyes later earned an M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of California, San Diego (1990). In 1988, he served as a dramaturg for the San Diego Repertory Theater. Included among his produced plays are “The Seductions of Johnny Diego” (1990), “Men on the Verge of an His-Panic Breakdown” (1994), “The West Hollywood Affair” (1994), “Chilean Holiday” (1996), “Deporting the Divas” (1996), “Miss Consuelo” (1997), “A Southern Christmas” (1997), “Heaven and Hell (On Earth): A Divine Comedy” (2001), “Sunrise at Montecello” (2005), “Suspects” (2005), “We Lost at the Movies” (2005), “Farewell to Hollywood” (2006), and “Allende by Pinochet” (2007). “Men on the Verge” won the Theater L.A. Ovation Award for Best World Premier Play and Best Production 1994. When “Deporting the Divas” played at the Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco, it won the 1996 Bay Area Drama-Logue 990

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for Playwriting and was nominated for Best Original Script by the Bay Area Critics Circle. “A Southern Christmas” was the winner of the 1997 Hispanic Playwriting Contest and the Nosotros Theater of Los Angeles Playwriting Award, and “Allende by Pinochet,” in which the Chilean dictator writes his memoir, won him the Hispanic Playwriting Award again in 2007. A gay Latino playwright, Reyes has treated the theme of gender identity and its conflicts within and without the Latino culture in a number of plays. In “Deporting the Divas,” he weds the theme to the issue of immigration and undocumented workers, here taking the metaphor of border-crossing to include sexual identity and transgression. His “Men on the Verge of an His-Panic Breakdown” is a series of nine monologues that reveal various forms of gay Hispanic identity. Reyes’s theater is entertaining while bringing home his messages—he is a master of employing irony and humor in his art. Reyes teaches playwriting at Arizona State University in Tempe. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Reyes, José Ascención (1884–?). Mexican journalist and novelist José Ascención Reyes was born in Durango in 1884. He developed a career as a journalist in newspapers in Puebla and elsewhere; aside from reporting, he also wrote a column under the pseudonym of “Anábasis,” Greek for his middle name, Ascención. His early vocation for writing was confirmed when he wrote a textbook on Mexican history: Nociones elementales de historia patria: escritas conforme al programa de la vigente ley de instrucción (1903, Elementary Notions on National History: Written in Accordance with the Current Educational Law). During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he relocated to the United States, where he found work as in the Editorial Lozano publishing house in San Antonio, Texas. His relationship with Ignacio Lozano’s* publishing* enterprises continued when Reyes moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote novels published by Lozano that related to the Revolution. El automóvil gris. Novela de los tiempos de la revolución constitucionalista (1922, The Grey Automobile: A Novel That Takes Place during the Constitutionalist Revolution) is an indirect criticism of the social disorder caused by the revolution; Reyes follows a band of robbers who take advantage of the social upheaval to rob the rich in Mexico City. So sensational was the well-known tale and so popular was Reyes’s book that it was made into a Spanish-language Hollywood film. His next novelistic venture, Heraclio Bernal (el Rayo de Sinaloa) (1949, Heraclio Bernal [The Sinaloa Flash]), followed the legendary exploits of a type of Robin Hood whose adventures extended up from Sinaloa into Texas and California. Further Reading Rodríguez, Blanca, “Fronteras y literatura: El periódico La Patria (El Paso, Texas, 1919–1925)” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2003): 107–125. Rutherford, John, An Annotated Bibliography of the Novels of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 in English and Spanish (Albany, New York: Whitston Publishing Co., 1972).

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Reyes Rivera, Louis (1945–). Nuyorican* poet Louis Reyes Rivera is known for the dramatic recitations of his narrative poetry, including his ability to recite from memory thousands of lines of his often epic-like compositions. The author of various poetry collections that attempt to capture the nuance and immediacy of his spoken verse, Reyes Rivera was born on May 19, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the African American community of Bedford–Stuyvesant there, thus relating to both the Puerto Rican and Afro American communities, both cultures reflected in the Englishlanguage diction and spirit of his poems. The outlets for his verse also reflect this duality, with his work appearing in such magazines as Areito (Arawak Dance–Drama–Poetry) and Black Nation. Reyes Rivera founded and edited his own press, Shamal Books, which also published poets from both communities, in addition to some of his own books. The graduate of the City University of New York (1974) was also a founder of the black Writers Union. In his poetry, however, Reyes Rivera is not just the poet of Nuyoricans and Afro Americans but extends his reach to Third-World peoples everywhere. His outrage at the oppression of the poor, as well as at racism, colonialism, and disenfranchisement is declaimed passionately in most of his work. In an interview for Chicken Bones, he has stated, “There’s no corner of this hemisphere that was not invaded, conquered, enslaved. There is equally no corner of this hemisphere, from the borders of Canada to the tip of Chile, where Africans were not kidnapped to, for purposes of supplementing and/or complementing slave labor forces.” Reyes Rivera is the author of three collections of poetry: Who Pays the Cost (1977), This One for You (1983), and Scattered Scripture (1996), a volume in which he attempts to translate history into poetry and includes thirty pages of notes to the poems, which won him the 1997 Poetry Award from the Latin American Writers’ Institute. Reyes Rivera has won some twenty other awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award (1995), a Special Congressional Recognition Award (1988), and the CCNY 125th Anniversary Medal (1973). Since 1996, Rivera has continued to host the bimonthly “Jazzoetry & Open Mic @ Sistas’ Place.” He also hosts his own weekly talk radio program, “Perspective,” on New York City’s WBAI. Further Reading Mullen, Edward, “Louis Reyes Rivera” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989). Reyes Rivera, Louis, “Scattered Scripture” Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes (http://www.nathanielturner.com/scatteredscripture6. htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Ríos, Alberto Alvaro (1952–). Born in Nogales, Arizona, on September 18, 1952, to a Mexican father and an English mother, Alberto Alvaro Ríos was one the first Latino writers to forge a respected career for himself in the academic creative writing establishment. He not only won prestigious awards for his poetry but also became a tenured professor at the University 992

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of Arizona. Ríos graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in English and creative writing (1974) and an M.F.A. in creative writing (1979). In 1975, he earned another B.A., this one in psychology. After achieving national success, Ríos earned tenure at Arizona State University in Tempe (1985) and in 1994 was appointed a Regent’s Professor. During his career, he has been a writer in residence at various colleges, including Vassar (1992). Ríos’s first poetry chapbook, Elk Heads on the Wall, was issued in 1979; his first full-length poetry book, Sleeping on Fists, published in 1981. Ríos is the author of about a dozen books of poetry and short stories, including Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), winner of the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award; The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (1984), winner of the Western States Foundation Award for Fiction; Five Indiscretions (1985); The Warrington Poems (1989); Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses (1990), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry; Pig Cookies and Other Stories (1995); The Curtain of Tress: Stories (1999); The Smallest Muscle in the Body (2002); and Theater of the Night (2006). In 1999, Ríos revisited his childhood in Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir. Ríos’s works have been selected for The Best American Poetry, 1996 and 1999, as well as The Best American Essays, 1999. He also bears the distinction of having won Pushcart Prizes in both poetry (1988, 1989, 1995) and fiction (1986, 1993, 2001). He is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, Ríos was presented with the PEN Beyond Margins Award and the Arizona Literary Treasure Award. Further Reading Ríos, Alberto Alvaro, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Risco, Eliazar (?–). Eliazar Risco came to Kansas from Cuba in the 1960s as a ministry student and eventually studied at Sacramento State University. From there he enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied under Ronald Hilton, a self-styled radical who published the Hispanic American Report, a journal that exposed CIA ties to anti-Castro Cubans training in the United States before the Bay of Pigs invasion. Luis Valdez,* a Chicano Movement pioneer and founder of El Teatro Campesino, whom Risco met in the Bay Area, convinced him to go to Delano and assist in César Chávez’s* efforts to organize farm workers. Risco dropped out of Stanford and, as part of the incipient farm worker union, began publishing the National Farm Workers Association’s newspaper, El Malcriado (The Brat). Although he was later sent by César Chávez to East Los Angeles in 1967 to help organize the grape boycott, Risco soon ventured into other activities. At first, he worked on a U.S. Department of Justice–financed project to prevent juvenile delinquency. While working on this and other issues, he became one of the 993

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founders of the Barrio Communications Project, which published La Raza (Our People) newspaper. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).

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Rivera, Beatriz (1957–). Cuban American novelist Beatriz Rivera was born on September 17, 1957, in Havana, Cuba, and went into exile with her parents at an early age. Rivera was educated in public schools in Miami and finished high school in Switzerland. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1968. Dedicated from childhood to education, she received the bachelor’s and master’s equivalents in philosophy from Paris IV–Sorbonne in 1977 and 1979, respectively. She had intended to remain in Paris, and it was there that she began writing her first novel, but her search for identity brought her back to the United States and went on for a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Interestingly, her dissertation topic was Challenging the Canon: A History of Latina Literature Anthologies, 1980–2000. Beatriz Rivera cleverly conveys the experience of the Latina woman attempting to reconcile her heritage and her existence within the greater construct of the American society in her short stories and novels. Rivera’s characters draw from their distinctive backgrounds to forge a bicultural image of themselves and their communities. Rivera’s short stories began appearing in magazines: the first, “Paloma” (Dove), appeared in The Americas Review, and another, “Life Insurance,” in Chiricu, Bloomington, Indiana. Three years later, Arte Público Press* published a collection of her short stories, African Passions and Other Stories (1995). Other short stories and poems appeared in reviews, such as The AfroHispanic Review, and such anthologies as Little Havana Blues and Floricanto, Si! Rivera’s four published books eloquently demonstrate her humor and spirit. Rivera followed African Passions with three novels: Midnight Sandwiches at the Mariposa Express (1997), Playing with Light (2000), and Do Not Pass Go (2006), the latter of which won the Paterson Prize. In each of these novels, Rivera creates a funny yet realistic portrait of Cuban Americans struggling to find their place in the American Dream. Playing with Light is really two novels in one, alternating a nineteenth-century story of women’s culture with a contemporary narrative. Her latest novel, Do Not Pass Go, is somewhat a departure, featuring

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an unlikely love affair between a former child prodigy and a newspaper reporter. Rivera is an assistant professor at Penn State University and lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Further Reading Alvarez Borland, Isabel, Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Sandín, Lyn di lorio, Killing Spanish: Literary Essay on U.S. Latina/o Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Carmen Peña Abrego Rivera, Carmen (1965–). Prolific Nuyorican* playwright Carmen Rivera was born in the Bronx, New York, and graduated in 1986 from New York University with a double major in Economics and Latin American Literature. While still a student, she published her first short story, “El Espejo” (The Mirror) in the university’s student magazine. Upon graduation, she worked as an insurance underwriter and continued writing stories and plays. She became a member of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s Professional Playwriting Unit and in 1990 left the insurance business to pursue graduate studies in playwriting and theater at the Gallatin School at New York University. Soon she then cofounded the Latino Experimental Fantastic Theatre with director Gloria Zelaya and her husband, playwright and director Cándido Tirado.* Soon after receiving her master’s in 1993, Rivera saw a number of her plays produced. Among the plays that were successfully staged at the Puerto Rican traveling theater were To Catch the Lightning (1997), Julia de Burgos, Child of Water/Julia de Burgos, Criatura del Agua (1999), Destiny (2001), and La Lupe: My Life, My Destiny (2002), for which she won an ACE Award. Her The Next Stop/La Próxima Parada (1997) and Under the Mango Tree (2004) were produced at INTAR.* For La Gringa, produced in 1996 at Teatro Repertorio Español,* she received the coveted Obie Award.

Scene from a Teatro Repertorio ad for a Carmen Rivera play.

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In 1995 and 1997, she was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship for New Dramatists. Besides having works produced at theaters around the United States, Rivera has seen her plays performed at festivals in Russia, Chile, Colombia, and Bolivia. Rivera has also served as a teaching artist with such organizations as Teachers & Writers, City Lights Youth Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, City Lights Youth Theatre, Teatro Repertorio Español, and INTAR. She has also taught playwriting at the City College of New York City. Among her plays published in anthologies and magazines are “El Espejo” (1985, The Mirror), “The Black Hole” (1991), “Julia” (1994), “Betty’s Garage” (2002), and “Delia’s Race” (2003). Further Reading Antush, John V., Recent Puerto Rican Theater from New York (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991). Arrizón, Alicia, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Nicolás Kanellos Rivera, José (1955–). José Rivera is one of the most successful Latino playwrights in the United States. A Puerto Rican who writes in English, Rivera was born in Santurce, but at the age of four his family moved to a small town in Long Island, New York, where he was raised and educated in the middleclass Anglo American tradition, receiving very little influence from the Latin American intellectual tradition. Thus, the early influences on his future playwriting were Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Moliere. However, when he began to discover Latin American literature, it was Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that truly affected him deeply. Later, he was to study with Márquez at the Sundance Institute. Along the way, Rivera was nurtured by many of the fellowships and workshops that during the 1980s and 1990s were opening up for Latino playwrights. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writing Award, a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Grant, and the Fulbright Arts Fellowship and saw his plays workshopped and developed in the South Coast Repertory Theater. He even served as a writer in residence at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Rivera’s plays have been produced on many of the leading stages in the United States, such as the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Goodman Theater in Chicago, and the Public Theater in New York. Among his plays are “The House of Ramón Iglesia” (1983), “The Promise” (1988), “Marisol” (1992), “Cloud Tectonics” (1995), “Each Day Dies With Sleep” (1995), “The Street of the Sun” (1996), “Sueño” (1998, Dream), “References To Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” (2000), “Sonnets for an Old Century” (2000), “School of the Americas” (2006), and “Massacre (Sing to Your Children)” (2007). Many of his plays have been published by Broadway script services, and two anthologies of his plays have been published: Marisol and Other Plays (1997) and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot and Other Plays in 2003. Rivera has also been a successful scriptwriter for the large and small screens. Most notably, he 996

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became the first Puerto Rican playwright to be nominated for an Oscar for his The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which was nominated in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay. Rivera, who engages such Latino themes as the struggle of an Americanized son to break away from his immigrant parents in “The House of Ramón Iglesia,” has also explored many more general and “universal” themes and subjects, such as loneliness and love in the big city in “Cloud Tectonics.” His works are also inspired in the broader Hispanic world culture in writing a musical adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, reinterpreting Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s classical Life Is a Dream in “Sueño” and in dealing with the life of Che Guevara in “School for the Americas.” Included among his awards are two Obie awards for “Marisol” and “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” and two Joseph Ketterling Award honorable mentions for “Marisol” and “The Promise.” “The House of Ramón Iglesia” won the FDG/CBS New Play Contest and was produced on the Public Broadcasting System’s American Playhouse. Rivera lives in Los Angeles, the setting for a number of his plays. Further Reading Ramos-García, Luis A., The State of Latino Theater in the US (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Rivera, Marina (1942–). Chicana poet Marina Rivera was born on February 9, 1942, in Superior, Arizona, to a Mexican American and German mother and a Mexican father, who became a naturalized American citizen. Raised and schooled for the most part in Phoenix, she and her brother were marginalized by the predominantly white students in her neighborhood and schools. Rivera nevertheless maintained her Mexican American identity and was an excellent student. With the help of a scholarship from the Mexican American Vesta Club, Rivera went to college and graduated with a major in English from Northern Arizona University in 1964. In 1966, she earned an M.A. in public speaking, and in 1981 an M.F.A. in poetry. During and after her studies, Rivera worked at colleges and high schools as a teacher of English and related subjects. Beginning in 1972, Rivera began publishing her poetry in such periodicals as Revista Chicano-Riqueña (The Chicano-Rican Review), Caracol (Shell), and La Palabra (The Word), among others. In her first, highly autobiographical book of poetry, Mestiza: Poems (1977), and her far more intimate and meditative chapbook, Sobra (1977), Rivera explored bicultural life and racial and cultural identity while also exploring the natural environment of the Southwest. However, Rivera’s poetry failed to receive adequate attention or review, perhaps the reason that she ceased to publish. Further Reading Johnson, Elaine Dorough, “Marina Rivera” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Second Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 224–229).


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Tomás Rivera.

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Rivera, Tomás (1935–1984). Mexican American novelist Tomás Rivera is one of the principal founders of the Chicano literary movement and is the author of one of the foundational works of that movement, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987). Born into a family of migrant workers in Crystal City, Texas, on December 22, 1935, Rivera had to fit his early schooling as well as his college education in between the seasons of work in the fields. He nevertheless obtained an outstanding education and became a college professor and administrator. He became chancellor of the University of California–Riverside in 1978, the position he held when he died of a heart attack on May 16, 1984. Rivera’s outwardly simple but inwardly complex novel is much in the line of experimental Latin American fiction, demanding that the reader take part in unraveling the story and in coming to personal conclusions about the identity and relationships of the characters, as well as the meaning of the work. Drawing upon his own life as a migrant worker from Texas, Rivera constructed a novel in the straightforward but poetic language of migrant workers in which a nameless central character attempts to find himself by reconstructing the overheard conversations and stories, as well as events, of a metaphorical year that actually represents the protagonist’s entire lifetime. It is the story of a sensitive boy trying to understand the hardship that surrounds his family and community of migrant workers; his path is first one of rejection of them only to embrace them and their culture dearly as his own at the end of the book. In many ways, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra came to be the most influential book in the Chicano search for identity. Before his death in 1984, Rivera wrote and published other stories, essays, and poems. Through his essays, such as “Chicano Literature: Fiesta of the Living” (1979) and “Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature” (1971), and his personal and scholarly activities, he was one of the prime movers in the promotion of Chicano authors, in the creation of the concept of Chicano literature, and in the creation of Chicano literature and culture as legitimate academic areas in the college curriculum. In 1989 his stories were collected and published under the title of The Harvest, also the title of one of his stories. In 1990, his poems were collected and published under the title of The Searchers. In 1990, all of his works were collected and published

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in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, the only volume of a Chicano author’s complete works published to date. By any account, Tomás Rivera remains the most outstanding and influential figure in the literature of Mexican peoples in the United States and deserves a place in the canon of Spanish-language literature in the world. Further Reading: Olivares, Julián, ed., International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985).

Nicolás Kanellos Rivera-Myrick, Luz Haydée (?–). A steadfast promoter of Puerto Rican culture in New York City, Luz Haydée RiveraMyrick was born in Comerío, Puerto Rico, and raised on a family sugar and tobacco farm. By the time she went to high school, her family had moved to Corozal, where she graduated as valedictorian. She went Scene from the film And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him. on to study and graduate in educational administration at the University of Puerto Rico. She later attended graduate school at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York. She obtained her master’s degree in personal and vocational counseling and served as a supervisor and counselor in the New York City schools. Rivera-Myrick soon became affiliated with the recently established Comité Cultural Puertorriqueño-Hispano de Nueva York (Puerto RicanHispanic Committee of New York), a cultural organization founded in 1965 by the German-born Peter Bloch to familiarize New York Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers in general with Puerto Rican and Hispanic American artists and culture. Rivera-Myrick became a member of the board of directors of the organization and helped organize conferences, poetry recitals, and concerts in churches, community centers, and schools. She also negotiated with the city’s Department of Education to commemorate Puerto Rico Discovery Week in city school districts with high Hispanic enrollment. This commemoration eventually led in the 1980s to New York State’s designation of November as Puerto Rican Heritage Month. Other board members included Puerto Rican poet and City College professor Diana Ramírez de Arellano,* playwright Dolores Prida,* and poet Angel M. Arroyo,* as well as other literary figures. During the 1960s and 1970s, Rivera-Myrick served as president of the New York chapter of the Lexicographic Institute, affiliated with the international organization based in Spain, with a chapter in Puerto Rico as well; the organization existed to protect the integrity of the Spanish language, a mission that often censured 999

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Spanish–English code-switching and “Spanglish.” She was also a leading member of both the Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York (Puerto Rican Atheneum of New York) and the Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores* (Puerto Rican Writers Association). Rivera-Myrick served as president of the latter organization for more than twenty years, leading the association in sponsoring presentations by some of the most distinguished writers from the Island, as well as professors from area universities. Rivera-Myrick is also a respected poet and short story writer whose works have been published. Among her awards for writing are the Julia de Burgos* Award given by the Asociación Pro-Cultura Hispánica/Puertorriqueña (Pro Hispanic/ Puerto Rican Culture Association). She was also the recipient of the Award for Distinguished Community Service given by the Instituto de Puerto Rico. Today, Rivera-Myrick is retired and still remains active in the community and the world of literature. Further Reading Babín, María Teresa, Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña (New York: Las Américas Publishing, 1958).

Nicolás Kanellos Rivera y Río, José (?–1891). Mexican journalist and novelist José Rivera y Río was a prolific writer who spent a period of time in New York in exile, during which he wrote a precursor of the novel of immigration,* Los dramas de Nueva York (1869, The New York Dramas). Rivera y Río’s date and place of birth are unknown, but he spent much of his literary life in Mexico City, where he was the founder of the political newspaper La Madre Celestina (Mother Celestina). In 1860, he was also one of the cofounders of El Movimento (The Movement); he later went on to start and direct other periodicals in Puebla and Mexico City. During the French intervention in Mexico, Rivera y Río was imprisoned, but he was able to escape and go into exile in New York in 1862. There, he lived the life of a poor immigrant, which highly influenced the writing of his romantic novel, Los dramas de Nueva York, set in the post–U.S. Civil War period. Rivera y Río had a fervent following in Mexico for most of his other novels, including Los misterios de San Cosme (1851, The Mysteries of St. Cosme), Fatalidad y providencia (1861, Fatality and Providence), Mártires y verdugos (1861, Martyrs and Hangmen), La virgin del Niágara (1871, The Virgin of the Niagara River), Memorias de un náufrago (1872, Memories of a Shipwrecked Man), and Pobres y ricos (1884, The Poor and the Wealthy). Despite his relative success, Rivera y Río struggled with poverty and was not treated well by literary historians’ penchant for devaluing romantic sentimentalism and moralizing. Further Reading Foster, David William, ed., Mexican Literature: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).

Nicolás Kanellos Rivero, Andrés (?). Born in Havana, Cuba, and exiled in the United States since 1959, Andrés Rivero is said to have published the first novel of 1000

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Cuban exile from the Castro regime, Enterrado vivo (Buried Alive), which details the first political firing squads under the new dictator. In reality, Rivero had started publishing political stories while still in Cuba and had them published clandestinely. Rivero went on to write another seven books, mostly stories based on Cuban local color. These were collected in Cuentos para entender (Stories to Understand). Rivero made a living as a Spanish teacher and developed numerous materials published for classroom use. At present he directs an Internet site, “SpanishUS.com,” on the Spanish language usage and education. Besides publishing many stories and essays in newspapers, he writes a column for El Diario de las Américas (The Americas Daily). Rivero is the founding director of the Revista Internética (Internet Review), an online journal about all things Hispanic. Among his collections of stories are 49 cuentos mínimos y una triste leyenda (1980, Forty-nine Minimalist Stories and One Sad Legend), Recuerdos (1980, Memories), Somos como somos (1982, We Are as We Are), and Niña malancholia (1993, Girl Melancholy). Rivero also maintains an Internet anthology of his stories: http://www.andresrivero.com/CUENTOS.htm. Further Reading Muñoz, Elías Miguel, Desde esta orilla: poesía cubana del exilio (Madrid: Betania, 1988).

Nicolás Kanellos Rivero Muñiz, José (1887–?). Born in Havana on June 10, 1887, in later years of his life José Rivero Muñiz became a distinguished historian in Cuba. But, by 1917, Muñiz was a tobacco worker in Tampa, laboring in the factories by day and writing in Spanish for the local newspapers by night. His experience as a tobacco roller steeped him deeply in the tradition of labor organizing and gave him a sense of the need for racial and social equity. Thanks to his book, Los cubanos en Tampa (1958, The Ybor City Story, 1976), much is known, and in great detail, about the Cuban–Spanish tobacco community in Tampa at the turn of the twentieth century. He especially highlighted the exploitation of the tobacco workers and their struggle against management. As such, the book may be considered an important contribution to the history of labor* literature as well as to the literature of immigration.* It is not known when Rivero Muñiz returned to Cuba, but his career there was characterized by the publication of some twenty books on the history of tobacco, labor organizing, socialism, and even Cuban theater. Further Reading Mormino, Gary R., The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa. 1885–1985 (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Rocafuerte Bejarano, Vicente (1783–1847). A future president of Ecuador (1834–1839), Vicente Rocafuerte Bejarano was one of the Spanish American intellectuals who spent significant time in the early American Republic learning about democracy, the U.S. Constitution, and other liberal 1001

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ideas in order to translate them to Spanish and for Hispanic culture as a basis for independence from Spain and for the institution of Spanish American republics. Born into a distinguished and well-to-do family in Guayaquil on May 1, 1783, he was educated in Spain and France, where in 1803 he met the future liberator, Simón Bolívar. He returned to Guayaquil long enough to be elected to the Spanish Cortes in Cádiz in 1812, where he renounced his position in protest of King Ferdinand VII’s setting up of an autocratic monarchy upon his restoration to the throne. From then on Rocafuerte became a plotter for Spanish American independence, in league with Bolívar. Thus he made his way to Philadelphia, the seat of American democracy, and in 1821 published his treatise Ideas necesarias a todo pueblo Americano independiente que quiere ser libre (Necessary Ideas for the Peoples of the Americas Who Want to Be Free), written as a prologue to his translations of essays by Thomas Paine, John Quincy Adams, the Articles of Confederation, and the U.S. Constitution. When Mexico gained its independence and José de Iturbide declared himself emperor of Mexico, Rocafuerte expressed his opposition to the tyrant in his second book, Bosquejo ligerísimo de la revolución en Megico, desde el grito de Iguala hasta la proclamación imperial de Iturbide (1821, Brief Outline of the Revolution in Mexico, from the Shout at Iguala to Iturbide’s Imperial Proclamation). Upon Iturbide’s fall, Rocafuerte was named secretary to the Mexican legation in London. While in London, he published Cartas de un americano sobre las ventajas de los gobiernos republicanos federativos (1826, An American’s Letters on the Advantages of Federal Republics as Governments). His career from then on was made up of a series of political positions in Mexico and later his home country of Ecuador, as Rocafuerte continued to write political tracts published in Mexico and New York. His last publications in the United States were his Ensayo politico, el sistema colombiano popular, electivo y representativo, es el que más conviene a la América independiente (1823, Political Essay: the Colombian System of Popularly Elected Representatives Is the One that Is Most Appropriate for the Independent Americas) and the elementary textbook Lecciones para las escuelas de primeras letras, sacadas de las Sagradas Escrituras . . . (1823, Lessons for Grammar Schools, taken from the Holy Scriptures . . .). Nevertheless, he continued producing a body of work that served as the intellectual underpinnings of Spanish American liberalism and constitutional government, including treatises on religious tolerance. Rocafuerte’s career had its low and high points, including a stint as a political prisoner and a term as president of Ecuador. He died on May 16, 1847, in Guayaquil. Further Reading Rodríguez O., Jaime E., The Emergence of Spanish America—Vicente Rocafuerte and Spanish Americanism, 1808–1832 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

Nicolás Kanellos Rodríguez, Abraham, Jr. (1961–). Born to Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx and raised there and in Spanish Harlem, Abraham Rodríguez, Jr., has experienced success at a young age in writing fiction based on the seedier side of poverty in the South Bronx. With a finely tuned ear for dialect, 1002

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Rodríguez has been able to create believable characters who fight to survive the mean streets, squalor, drugs, and poverty; it is precisely that naturalistic slice of life that has brought Rodríguez to the attention to mainstream publishers and even led to Hollywood film options on his books. An outspoken critic of other Puerto Rican and Nuyorican writers, Rodríguez actually benefited from an excellent education at the City College of New York—despite having been a high-school dropout who earned a high-school equivalency diploma. In 1993, Rodríguez published his first collection of stories: Boy without a Flag: Tales of the South Bronx. The book was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His novel Spidertown, published in 1995, won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was optioned by Columbia Pictures. In 2001, Rodríguez issued The Buddha Book: A Novel, continuing his favorite theme: of Puerto Rican teenagers searching for identity in the South Bronx. In the characters he creates, as well as in their desperation and often sordid pursuits and environment, Rodríguez offers very little that cannot be found in television crime drama that focuses on the culture of poverty in which poor Hispanic urban dwellers find themselves—the same cultural depictions that became commonplace after anthropologist Oscar Lewis documented them in La Vida and other books during the 1960s. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Rodríguez, Jesús. See Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús Rodríguez, José Policarpo (1829–1914). José Policarpo Rodríguez was born into an upper-class family in Zaragoza, Coahuila (near present-day Eagle Pass, Texas) on January 26, 1829. Like those who lived on or near the border in the nineteenth century, his life is filled with contradictions, many of which are revealed in his memoirs, “The Old Guide.” Although his father wanted him to become a priest, young José (or Polly, as he was nicknamed) was more of an outdoorsman than a holy man. By the age of twelve, he was apprenticed to a San Antonio gunsmith, James Goodman, an apprenticeship that lasted three years. When it ended abruptly, Rodríguez joined a team of surveyors working near San Antonio. In the 1840s, surveying was a hazardous occupation; the frontier was isolated, marked by treacherous terrain and wild animals. Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Anglo Americans clashed with Native Americans; Mexican Americans and Anglos fought against Mexicans; and Mexican Americans and Anglos struggled to live with each other in peace. In spite of these hazards (and despite being one of the few Mexicans working with Anglos), Rodríguez spent the next thirty-eight years working as a surveyor, guide, and scout, primarily for the U.S. Army. His memoirs document the many encounters he had during these years, from fighting a panther in the Leon River to scalping a Native American near Camp Verde. During 1003

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José Policarpo Rodríguez.

the Mexican–American War and the U.S. Civil War, he refused to fight for the United States and the Confederacy, respectively; in the latter, he chose instead to enlist in the Bandera Home Guards. After the Civil War, Rodríguez settled at his 360-acre ranch in Bandera County on Privilege Creek, where a small village was later founded. He converted to Methodism in 1872, and, partially fulfilling his father’s wish, received a license to preach six years later. His conversion drew scorn from some in the Mexican American community, including his first wife, who identified strongly with their Catholic heritage. In 1898, Rodríguez published his memoirs, one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of a Mexican immigrant to the United States. Like many other ethnic American autobiographies, it is a transcription of the author’s dictations to an amanuensis. Though it begins as a picturesque reminiscence of a frontiersman, it concludes as a religious confession in the Augustinian tradition. Rodríguez died on March 22, 1914; the epitaph on his tombstone reads, “Surveyor, Scout, Hunter, Indian Fighter, Ranchman, Preacher.”

Further Reading Austerman, Wayne R., “José Policarpo Rodríguez: Chicano Plainsman” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook Vol. 59 (1983): 52–74. Rodríguez, José Policarpo, “The Old Guide,” Surveyor, Scout, Hunter, Indian Fighter, Ranchman, Preacher: His Life in His Own Words (San Antonio: Maverick, 1968).

Thomas J. Kinney Rodríguez, Luis J. (1954–). In 1993, Rodríguez’s memoir of life on the streets, Always Running: Gang Days in LA, became the first Hispanic book to win the Carl Sandburg Award for Non-Fiction. It also won the Chicago SunTimes First Prose Book Award in 1994. Rodríguez, born on July 9, 1954, in El Paso, the son of Mexican immigrants, was raised in Los Angeles, where he became a gang member, petty thief, and drug addict. Rodríguez was sentenced to a six-year prison term, but through the intervention of community members, his sentence was reduced to a shorter term in county jail. Rodríguez escaped life on the streets out of the force of will and began working in heavy industry as well as keeping journals and writing. By the 1980s, he became active in Latino 1004

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arts and cultural circles and served as director of Los Angeles’s Latino Writers Association. He authored articles and stories that began to appear in mainstream magazines and newspapers. In 1985, he moved to Chicago and became the editor of the People’s Tribune, a weekly progressive newspaper. When he perceived the lack of access to publication for Latino and minority writers, Rodríguez 1989 founded Tía Chucha Press, at first a publisher of chapbooks. He published his own Poems across the Pavement with Tía Chucha that same year. His second book of poetry, The Concrete River, won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award in 1991. These were followed by Trochemoche (1989, Helter Skelter), a mélange of various styles of urban spoken-word, as well as more intimate and affecting verse, and My Nature is Hunger: New and Selected Poems (2005), a compilation of some of his earlier poems, along with twelve new ones. When Rodríguez noted that his son was being drawn into street gang life and culture in Chicago, he wrote Always Running: La Luis J. Rodríguez. Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. to document the wasted life and dead-end machismo that awaited his son if he continued on the streets. His The Republic of East LA (2003) assembles twelve stories of diverse characters who struggle to survive crime, poverty, and deprivation in East Los Angeles barrio. In recent years, Rodríguez has turned to producing children’s and young adult literature, including America Is Her Name (La llaman América) (1998), which won the Paterson Books for Young People Award, among other honors, and It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: A Barrio Story (No tiene que ser así: Una historia el barrio) (2004), a Parents’ Choice Approved Winner for Children’s Books and an Americas Award Commended Title. Both books deal with the evils and dangers of inner-city life. After returning to Los Angeles, in 2001 Rodríguez, his wife Trini, and his friend Enrique Sánchez opened Tía Chucha Café Cultural, a cultural arts center and bookstore. That same year, he published Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times, and in 2002 founded Dos Manos Records to produce music and poetry CDs. His next book, The Republic of East L.A.: Stories, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. In 2005, Music of the Mill: A Novel, his first historical novel, received the Latino Book Award for fiction. That same year, he also published My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, 1989–2004. 1005

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In May 2001, the Dalai Lama named Rodríguez one of fifty Unsung Heroes of Compassion. He has won numerous fellowships, a Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, and Illinois Author of the Year Award, among many other honors. Further Reading Castillo, Dina G., “Luis J. Rodríguez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 243–250).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Rodríguez, Netty (?–?) and Jesús (1900–?). Netty and Jesús Rodríguez performed as a song, dance, and comic team in Mexican vaudeville in the Southwest for nearly four decades. Their particular strength and intelligence lay in their ability to create vaudeville sketches that reflected the intercultural anxieties and bilingual humor of both native Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants of the working class. According to research and interviews conducted by Peter Haney for Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Jesús Rodríguez was born in 1900 in Concepción del Oro, Zacatecas, Mexico; Ernestina Edgel, or “Netty,” was born in Mazatlán, Mexico. At some point Rodríguez immigrated to the United States to work on the railroad but after a time became a singer in the Nelly Fernández vaudeville troupe. It was while performing with the Fernández company that he met and married Netty, after which they became a performing duo. They weathered the Depression performing with such actors as Leonardo García Astol, Beatriz “La Chata” Noloesca,* Eva Garza, and others between showing of films at San Antonio movie houses and on the road in tent theaters* touring South Texas. By World War II and into the 1950s, the pair performed in association with La Chata Noloesca in New York City theaters such as El Teatro Hispano. By the 1960s, they had made a transition to acting in Spanish-language radio soap opera. Netty and Jesús recorded on 78 rpm disks many of their most popular sketches for distribution throughout the Southwest. The sketches often presented Netty as an agringada (Gringoized woman) or pelona (flapper) who was becoming acculturated and losing the Mexican identity, much to the chagrin of Jesús, who comically exhorted her to be loyal to her nationality and to her man. Thus the skits were rife with culture conflict, reflecting the growing liberation of women in American society as a challenge to Mexican male dominance. Netty and Jesús often satirized Mexican American linguistic code-switching and inappropriate Spanish-language usage, also reflecting the bicultural lives that Latinos were living both in the Southwest and New York area. Haney states that there is evidence that Jesús’s and Netty’s comic dialogues were copied and entered the repertoires of other performing groups. Further Reading Haney, Peter, “Grant-in-Aid Report on Netty and Jesús Rodríguez” (University of Houston: Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, filed 2004). Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).


Rodríguez de Tió, Lola

Rodriguez, Richard (1944–). Essayist Richard Rodriguez was born on July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, the son of Mexican immigrants. Having begun school as a speaker of Spanish, he had to make the difficult transition to English in order to progress in school. As he recalled in his autobiographical book-length essay, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, he came to believe that English was the language of U.S. education and society and that the Spanish language and Hispanic culture were private matters, for the home. Rodriguez went on to have outstanding success in school and eventually received a B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1967 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1969. He began doctoral work at the University of California but never completed it, for his writing career had begun before he was ready to submit his dissertation. In 1981, Rodriguez published the above-mentioned autobiography, which received praise from mainstream critics across the nation for its elegant and passionate prose as well as for its rejection of bilingual education and Affirmative Action programs. Rodriguez immediately was seen by Hispanics as an Uncle Tom or Tío Taco for having bought success at the price of attacking Hispanic language and culture, as well as programs aimed to assist Hispanics in education and employment. To this date, despite a successful career as an essayist, television commentator, and opinion writer for newspapers, Rodriguez is not embraced by Hispanic critics as an authentic or valuable voice. His second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), which does not have the political content of Hunger of Memory, received fewer reviews—although generally good ones—and garnered very little criticism from Hispanic quarters. In 2003, he published Brown: The Last Discovery of America, a meditation on race and ethnic, as well as gender, identity in the United States. In addition to the usual tough subjects treated by Rodriguez, his gay identity is also pondered. Further Reading Browdy de Hernández, Jennifer, “Postcolonial Blues: Ambivalence and Alienation in the Autobiographies of Richard Rodriguez and V.S. Naipaul” AutoBiography Studies Vol. 12 (Fall 1997): 151–165. Rivera, Tomás, “Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory as Humanistic Antithesis” in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. Julián Olivares (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Rodríguez de Tió, Lola (1843–1924). On September 14, 1843, Puerto Rican patriot and poet Lola Rodríguez de Tió was born in San Germán, Puerto Rico. She received an education at religious schools and from private tutors and began to write poetry under the influence of poet Ursula Cardona de Quiñones. In 1865, she married Bonocio Tió, a journalist who shared Rodríguez de Tió’s desire for Puerto Rican independence, and they held literary and political meetings regularly at their home in Mayagüez. In 1868, Rodríguez de Tió wrote the nationalist lyrics that would become the Puerto Rican national anthem, “La Borinqueña.” In 1877, the government exiled 1007

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Rodríguez de Tió; she and her family took refuge in Venezuela for three years and then returned to Puerto Rico. In 1889, she was exiled once again, this time to Cuba, where she continued her revolutionary activities until 1895, when she was exiled again. This time she took up residence in New York, continuing to plot with the leading revolutionaries for Puerto Rican and Cuban independence, publishing her writings in Spanish-language periodicals in the Metropolis. In 1899, after the Spanish–American War, she returned to a hero’s reception in Cuba. She remained in Cuba and began to work on fashioning a new society, one in which women would have greater liberty and opportunity. In 1910, she was elected a member of the Cuban Academy of Arts and Letters. Lola Rodríguez de Tió was a romantic poet, as her three books of poems readily attest: Mis cantares (My Songs, 1876), Claros y nieblas (Clarities and Cloudiness, 1885), and Mi libro de Cuba Lola Rodríguez de Tió. (My Book about Cuba). Rodríguez de Tió is celebrated as a beloved patriotic and literary figure, as well as an early feminist, in both Puerto Rico and Cuba. She died on November 10, 1924, in Cuba. Further Reading Toledo, Josefina, Lola Rodríguez de Tió. Contribución para un estudio integral (San Juan: Editorial-Ateneo, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Romano-Vizcarra, Octavio I. (1923–2005). A true visionary of Chicano culture, Octavio Ignacio Romano-Vizcarra was a professor, publisher, and essay writer who helped shape the intellectual basis for the Chicano Movement.* Born in Mexico City on February 20, 1923, Romano was raised in National City, California, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1943, serving in Europe for two-and-a-half years during World War II. Upon his return, he went to college under the G.I. Bill and earned a B.A. (1952) and M.A. at the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1962). In 1967, with Nick C. Vaca, Romano, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, founded the pioneering and highly influential journal El Grito (The Shout) in Berkeley. Through its pages, the journal not only articulated the 1008

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need for Chicano liberation but also began providing academic research and literary creativity on which to base Chicano identity and cultural progress. In many of the issues of El Grito and its successor, Grito del Sol (Shout from the Sun), Romano penned well-documented, scientifically sound articles, as well as his own poetry and stories, as ideology (and example) for the growing movement among students and activists. Romano teamed up with another scholar and intellectual activist, Herminio Ríos to found Editorial Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun Publishers) in 1910; it subsequently became the most influential Chicano publishing house, issuing such foundational works as those of Tomás Rivera,* Rolando Hinojosa,* and Rudolfo Anaya. So powerful was the press that it was able to establish a Chicano canon that dominated literary publishing for at least a decade. The canon rested on such literary characteristics as bilingual writing and publishing and even code-switching, an emphasis on the rural and small-town origins for Chicanos, a progressive and even militant stance on civil rights and community organizing, a male-gendered literature, and the promotion of pre-Colombian—privileging Aztec and Mayan—roots for the literature and the culture as a whole (see Aztlán). Quinto Sol has also been credited with publishing one of the first and most influential anthologies of Chicano literature, El Espejo/The Mirror (1969), which featured the code-switching poetry of Alurista* and a Spanish–English–Yaqui-language story, “Tata Casehua,” by Miguel Méndez.* Among Romano’s many essays written the one that most stands out, reprinted numerous times, is “Goodbye Revolution, Hello Slum” (1968), which calls for the reform of the American academy, suggesting ways to construct Chicano history since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Romano and Ríos had a falling out in the mid-1970s, whereupon each went his separate way and founded his own new journal and publishing house. Romano’s was Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol (TQS Publications); neither one flourished or was able to attain the heights of their previous collaborative effort. Romano rose to the rank of professor emeritus of the University of California’s School of Public Health. He died on February 26, 2005. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature Theory and History (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990). Mariscal, George, “Octavio Romano” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Second Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992: 230–231).

Nicolás Kanellos Romero, Leo (1950–). Born on September 25, 1950, in Chacón, New Mexico, Romero has become the poet par excellence of rural New Mexican life, his verse inspired by the folklore and folk speech that hearkens back to life relatively untouched by Anglo Americans. In addition, Romero is a talented painter and muralist in the traditional vein who has exhibited his works throughout the state. Widely published in magazines and anthologized, Romero is the author of the chapbook During the Growing Season (1978) and four collections of poetry: Agua Negra (1981), Celso (1985), Desert Nights (1989), and 1009

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Going Home Away Indian (1990). Of these, Celso is the most known, made up of a series of mysteriously symbolic narrative poems often invoking the presence of death in a small New Mexican town where the anti-heroic, alcoholic Celso survives as a picaresque reminder of the pitfalls in life. The picaresque novel La vida inútil de Pito Pérez (The Useless Life of Pito Pérez), by Mexican novelist José Rubén Romero, left its mark on the characterization of Celso and the imprint of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca is a guiding force to the atmosphere and lyricism of the book Celso. The book was later made into a one-man play by playwright Rubén Sierra,* who toured it nationally. In 1995, Romero published his first book of fiction, a collection of magic realist tales set in the American West dealing with male–female relationships: Rita and Los Angeles. Romero’s poems have been published in various periodicals and anthologies, as well as on broadsides. Among Romero’s honors are a Wurlitzer Foundation Resident Artist Fellowship (1979), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1981), and National Hispanic Scholarship (1981). Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Romero, Levi (1961–). Born on April 5, 1961, Levi Romero grew up in the small northern New Mexico village of Embudo just off the Taos–Santa Fe tourist highway. Romero, a trained architect, completed an M.A. in architecture at the University of New Mexico in 2000. Since then, Romero has kept up his architectural practice while also teaching and publishing. He dubs his writing workshops experiences in “contextual bilingualism,” a concept he employs to encourage writing that examines dualities and borders in the human consciousness. Romero’s first book of poetry, In the Gathering of Silence (1996), combined new work with poems that had appeared in THE Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, Blanco Móvil, and River Styx. Romero’s poems draw on the regional Spanish of northern New Mexico and on community speech acts—an aesthetic he has 1010

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polished into electric spoken-work performances that he has delivered at the shrines of modern poetry (City Lights Bookstore, the Bread Loaf School of English). Yet, as he quips, he is not averse to reading “from the ladies lingerie section at Wal-Mart.” In Romero’s second book, A Poetry of Remembrance: New and Rejected Works (2008), he continues to evoke his rural, working-class childhood and early manhood. Sandra Cisneros* underscores the strong narrative strand of the collection in remarking, “Romero’s poetry is New Mexico, and not the postcard New Mexico either, but the real thing spoken from the real poets— old folks in old people’s homes, lowriders and farmers, the born-again and the walking wounded. Stories told with a beer at the river, stories . . . bound to other stories.” Literary scholar Genaro Padilla calls the collection “deeply intelligent in describing the nature of experience and consciousness” and adds, “Romero’s poetry, so carefully crafted, teaches us to see more precisely, to think more expansively and to feel more deeply.” Padilla identifies “Lowcura” as the centerpiece of the collection. Lowcura, a bilingual play of words, mixes the “low” of lowrider with locura, Spanish for “the crazies,” then unfolds to a series of jarring encounters that disturb the heart of Chicano youth culture. “Lowcura” leaves readers feeling as if they have breathed in deeply a vision of life in which social alienation compounds itself with the profound yearning of youth for acknowledgment and acceptance. Romero raises the question: “how come nothing in the great american poetry anthology reads like the america i know?” The theme of exclusion appears often in Romero’s work. In “Juxtaposition,” Romero comments on his work as a home designer for wealth amenity migrants to Taos and Santa Fe. Heaving with irony, the poem tells how the architect is mistaken for “the guy who mixed the mud and pushed the wheelbarrow.” Knowing he is viewed this way thwarts what otherwise would be the simply act of knocking on the door and being welcomed to review the genius of his design, nor can his double—Romero, the writer— joins his host in “/. . . discussing a reading/by the latest author come through/.” For Romero, poetry is about examining a set of unresolved social, class, and racial issues that bar real understanding between people. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos La Rosa, Pablo (1944–). Poet and short-story writer Pablo La Rosa was born in Cárdenas, Cuba. According to him, he was born in Cárdenas because that town was the only one that had a hospital. La Rosa was exiled from Cuba during the Castro regime, which led him to travel to Mexico, Spain, the Caribbean, Colombia, Brazil, and Australia and finally to settle in the United States, where he lives in Kansas and is assistant professor of Spanish at Baker University. His short-story collection Forbidden Fruit and Other Stories (1996) is a whimsical and experimental work that reflects the influence of Latin American 1011

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authors, such as José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar. The collection includes a variety of coming-of-age narrations in which characters nostalgically revisit the environment surrounding the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath. They are faced with a sense of loss and are left to face the uncertainty of a future in foreign lands, as is the case of “El Marielito” (The Mariel Exile), a black man who takes up exile in the United States and is marginalized by his race and the new community that receives him. La Rosa’s creative work has received various awards, including the Cintas Fellowship, and he was named finalist in the Letras de Oro Award (Golden Letters) for short stories and the Kansas Quarterly Fiction Awards. He also received an honorable mention for poetry in the New Letters Literary Award and the Seaton Poetry Awards. Further Reading Alegría, Fernando, and Jorge Rufinelli, eds., Paradise Lost or Gained: The Literature of Hispanic Exile (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).

Gabriela Baeza Ventura Rosario, Nelly (1972–). Born in the Dominican Republic in 1972, Nelly Rosario was raised on the south side of Williamsburg, a working-class Latino neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where she currently lives. She graduated in 1994 with B.S. in environmental engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also completed a minor in Latin American studies that enabled her to take formative courses on historical developments and issues of migratory movements in the Americas. As an undergraduate, she conducted studies of natural and cultural ecology in Belize, as well as planning and urban design in Cuba. Subsequently, she entered the creative writing program at Columbia University and, after obtaining an M.F.A., devoted herself to teaching and writing. Soon thereafter she began to garner recognition of various kinds, including a 1997 Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship, and The Bronx Writers’ Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship for 1999–2000. Apart from her participation in numerous literary readings at public schools, cultural centers, and institutions of higher education in the United States and abroad, Rosario’s early writings in fiction and nonfiction prose appeared in various scattered publications such as Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters (2000) and the collection Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation American Women (2000). In 2001 the Village Voice Literary Supplement named her “Writer on the Verge,” and the following year Pantheon Books released her first novel, Song of the Water Saints (2002), which earned her the PEN Open Book Award that year. Rosario’s wellreceived debut novel masterfully delineates the lives of Mai, Graciela, Mercedes, and Leila, strong-willed, spirited characters representing four generations of women struggling to assert themselves as masters of their own destinies against the backdrop of early twentieth-century Dominican history, starting with the 1916 military occupation of their country by the United States. The psychological makeup of the characters is unveiled in a manner 1012

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that seems to accord almost seamlessly with the tempo at which U.S.–Dominican relations evolve through the 1990s, when a large settlement of Dominican immigrants gains visibility in New York City. Rosario’s essays, primarily “On Becoming” (2000), “Chessin” (2004), and “Sliding up a Rabbit Hole into Wonderland,” published in The New York Times, November 21, 2004, and her second novel (in progress as of this writing), “Death According to Veda Torres,” cumulatively show a willingness to venture artistically into uncharted territory and reveal the cultivation of a language that grants distinctiveness to her voice. On the whole, her diction draws largely from painstakingly acute observation of empirical phenomena enriched by the vocabulary of the natural sciences. The intellectual and artistic hybridity of her profile, as she congruently combines her scientific training and her literary art, correspond to an ideological complexity that makes for a capacious view of her identity as a dynamic Dominican American writer at peace with multiple strands of racial and cultural difference. In 2006, Rosario received a National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Fund for the Arts award and an Urban Artists Initiatives Grant. In the spring of 2007, she became the Kaye Artist in Residence at the City College of New York–CUNY. Thematically diverging from the road she mastered in her successful first book, her unfinished novel organizes the sequence of events in the plot as a scrutiny of the patterns and behaviors of cells, war, and systems theory, thereby evoking questions of life, death, and the structure of existence. Nelly Rosario thus shows a greater commitment to expanding the scope of her expressive registers than any other member of her literary generation among Latino writers. Further Reading Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández, The Dominican Americans, The New Americans Series (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).

Silvio Torres-Saillant Roscio, Juan Germán (1763–1821). Venezuelan patriot and ideologue of Spanish American independence Juan Germán Roscio was born on May 27, 1763, in San Francisco de Tiznados, Venezuela. He studied Canon law at the Tridentine Seminary of the University of Venezuela and went on to obtain a law degree in 1795. He was one of the signers of the Venezuelan declaration of independence in 1811. After being imprisoned for his revolutionary activities the following year, Roscio was transferred to the military prison in Ceuta, Spanish North Africa. He escaped and made his way to Philadelphia, where he collaborated with the other Hispanic intellectuals and freedom fighters to plot the liberation of the Spanish colonies. Like José Alvarez de Toledo and so many others, he was a Freemason and used the structure of the society to forward liberal ideas; he is credited as one of the first Venezuelan Masons. While in the United States he was able to translate the works of Thomas Paine for introduction to Venezuela and to publish a number of treatises on liberalism and democracy through early American printers, including his most enduring and reprinted: El triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo en la confesión de un pecador arrepentido de sus errors 1013

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politicos, y dedicado a desagraviar en esta parte a la religion ofendida on el sistema de tiranía (1817, The Triumph of Liberty over Despotism in the Confession of a Sinner Repenting for His Political Errors, and Dedicated to Undoing the Offense to Religion by the System of Tyranny). Upon his return to Venezuela in 1819, Roscio became a vice president of the nascent republic and participated in the writing of the constitution for Gran Colombia. He died on April 13, 1821. Further Reading Venegas Fajardo, Pascual, Venezolanos del buen saber (Caracas, Venezuela: Fundación Juan Germán Roscio, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos

Ronald L. Ruiz.

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Ruiz, Ronald L. (1936–). Ruiz has become one of the most innovative and intellectual Latino writers while exploring in depth the themes that are most important to Hispanics: immigration and success in the United States, existence in an underclass, labor exploitation, and, of course, identity. Born and raised in northern California by Mexican immigrant parents, Ruiz became an outstanding student who achieved distinction in his university and law training. He has stated that when he graduated from high school, he had read only one novel, Wuthering Heights: “I knew nothing about books and could have cared less. They were simply a tool that would raise me out of my socioeconomic status.” Despite this, he went on to a successful college career and became a writer. It was in a Great Books program in Saint Mary’s College in California that he truly discovered and learned to love literature. He received his B.A. in 1957 and went on to earn a law degree from the University of San Francisco (1964), but he never gave up on reading literature and writing. Ruiz, now retired, practiced law as a defense attorney as well as a prosecutor, eventually serving as the district attorney for San Jose County. In much of his career, he dealt with some of society’s most hardened criminals, including many from Hispanic backgrounds. In 1984, Ruiz was named “Attorney of the Year” by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Ruiz also served as a board member for the Agricultural Labor Relations Board (1975–1982). In 1975, after ten years of practicing criminal defense law, Ruiz returned to writing, squeezing time in at lunch, at night, and on weekends. He began working on his critically acclaimed first novel, Happy Birthday Jesús, in 1976 and finally completed it in 1982. However, neither agents nor publishers were interested. He was told it was too brutal—that there was no market for it. He went on to other projects but kept revising Happy Birthday Jesús until Arte Público Press* published it in 1994. Happy Birthday Jesús is the powerful tale of the making of a Latino

Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo

sociopath, produced by the failure of all of the social institutions, from the family and the schools to the Church, the courts, and the penal system. Controversial because of its graphic violence and hard-hitting analysis, the novel was compared to Richard Wright’s Native Son and became a best seller in the West. “I wrote Happy Birthday Jesús because it has always been that type of case that, as a lawyer, has troubled me most,” says Ruiz. “The case begins with a senseless, brutal act of violence. As one gets closer, it’s clear that the brutality began years before the crime, ran through the crime, continued for years in our prison systems, only to go on, usually worse, upon the defendant’s release from prison.” Society’s answer, says Ruiz, has been to build more prisons. “We can do better.” Ruiz’s second novel, Guiseppe Rocco (1998), explores the rise and fall of two very American families named Rocco and Martínez, and their will to succeed in the United States through hard labor, scrounging, and saving. Giuseppe Rocco was the recipient of the national literary prize, the 1998 Premio Aztlán. The novel received the award, established in 1993 by award-winning novelist Rudolfo Anaya (Bless Me, Ultima), for its strong portrayal of characters, its intriguing plot, and the evocation of the American Dream in the Santa Clara Valley of California in the 1940s. Through sheer guts and steely determination, Sicilian immigrant Giuseppe Rocco reaps wealth and power from a scavenger business, carving out success from heaps of rags and rubble. In The Big Bear (2003), Ruiz turned his attention to farm labor within the context of a murder mystery and a lawyer’s struggle to come to grips with his own Mexican American identity. The Big Bear focuses on Gabby García, a Mexican American lawyer bitterly fighting his own sense of inadequacy to achieve success. Ruiz populates this tale of passion, crime, and politics with complex, vulnerable characters, each one struggling to solve his or her own mysteries. Kirkus Reviews stated, “Ruiz, a practicing California DA, creates a warts-and-all protagonist for his third outing: you may not always like Gabby, but you’ll probably find yourself rooting for him.” Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo (1832–1895). Born on July 3, 1832, in Loreto, Baja California, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton saw much of her homeland in Baja and Alta California transformed with the coming of Anglo America after the war with Mexico and the admittance of California to the Union. Raised in an upper-class ranching family, Ruiz de Burton was able to favorably negotiate the transition to American citizenship and culture as the wife of a captain in the United States Army, but she nevertheless lost lands and patrimony during the transition. Ruiz de Burton bears the distinction of having written and published the first novel in English by a Hispanic of the United States: Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). Originally published anonymously, the novel reconstructs antebellum and Civil War society in the North and engages the dominant U.S. myths of 1015

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An edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s letters.

American exceptionalism, egalitarianism and consensus, offering an acerbic critique of opportunism and hypocrisy as it represents Northern racism and U.S. imperialism. The novel is the first by a U.S. Hispanic to address the disenfranchised status of women. In 1885, Ruiz de Burton also produced the first fictional narrative, written and published in English, from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population of the Southwest: The Squatter and the Don. Self-published under the pseudonym of C. Loyal in San Francisco, the novel documents the loss of lands to squatters, banking, and railroad interests in southern California shortly after statehood. The Squatter and the Don is a historical romance that laments land loss and calls for justice and redress of grievances. The novel questions United States expansionism, the rise of corporate monopolies, and their power over government policy. In 2001, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s letters, plays and other writings were collected and published as Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Further Reading Sánchez, Rosaura, “Introduction,” María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001).

Nicolás Kanellos Ruiz-Flores, Lupe (1942–). Born on January 9, 1942, Lupe Ruiz-Flores considers herself a late bloomer. Growing up during the 1950s in a barrio in San Antonio, Texas, she comes from a large and close-knit family of ten brothers and sisters. Her happiest moments were spent in the school library where books transported her to faraway places, letting her imagination flourish. While still in elementary school, she knew she wanted to write stories that would make people happy, but her spirit was crushed when her teacher discouraged her from becoming a writer. “You need to go to college for that,” her teacher said. “Think about doing something else.” Ruiz-Flores believed her because she knew her chances of going to college were almost nonexistent, so she gave up on her dream for many years. Then, in 1996, Ruiz-Flores entered a writing contest for a national magazine and won. She received an all-expenses-paid trip to New York, where she attended a week-long writer’s workshop. From then on, Ruiz-

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Flores was hooked on writing—she still writes inspirational stories for that magazine. Ruiz-Flores received a B.A. in occupational education from Southwest Texas State University in 1986 and an M.A. in computer resources and information management from Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, in 1994. She was an engineering technician with the Department of Defense until her retirement in 1999, when she began to work as a staff writer at a Catholic newspaper for two years; she received the Eileen Egan Honorary Award for one of her stories. Since then, Ruiz-Flores has written numerous articles for local and national publications. Lupita’s Papalote/El papalote de Lupita is Lupe Ruiz-Flores’s first bilingual picture book. She has also written some children’s narrative passages for Harcourt Educational Measurement Center. Some of her poetry has been published in Voices Along the River, the San Antonio ExpressLupe Ruiz-Flores. News, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. Ruiz-Flores is a member of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and is currently working on a middle-grade novel. She enjoys reading and strolling through museums and works part-time as a staff writer for a local newspaper. Further Reading Webster, Joan Parker, Teaching through Culture: Strategies for Reading and Responding to Young Adult Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

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S Saco, José Antonio (1797–1879). José Antonio Saco, the famous promoter of annexing Cuba to the United States as a solution to Spain’s colonial hold on the island, was born in Bayamo, Cuba, on May 7, 1797. A student of philosopher, theologian, and separatist Félix Varela,* Saco was an outstanding student at the San Carlos Seminary, and upon graduating in 1821 began his teaching career there. He was exiled from Cuba during the rule of Spanish governor Tacón in 1824 and settled in Philadelphia, where he promptly continued writing and publishing tracts on politics, philosophy, and language. In New York in 1828, he founded the important liberal newspaper El Mensagero Semanal (The Weekly Messenger). He published a number of literary studies, including his positive criticism of the poetry of José María Heredia,* which launched him into a debate with Heredia’s literary detractor, Ramón de la Sagra.* He also devoted a great deal of time and effort to translating Roman law into Spanish, a project that brought him great fame in legal and political circles throughout Spain and the Americas. Saco traveled on and off between the United States and Europe and was able to compare the lifestyles, cultures, and governments of various countries, especially the United States and France, which can be seen in his Paralelo entre Cuba y algunas colonias inglesas (1838, Comparison of Cuba to Some English Colonies). Saco became obsessed with removing his homeland from the colonial yoke of Spain while devising strategies for abolishing slavery—in 1845, in Paris, he published Supresión del tráfico de esclavos en Cuba (Suppression of the Traffic of Slaves in Cuba)—but ensuring that Cuba remained a racially white nation. Saco was an inveterate opponent of annexing Cuba to the United States to

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José Antonio Saco.

free it from Spanish control. He promoted recruiting white immigrants from Europe to ensure the racial purity of his homeland once it gained its independence. In 1848, in Paris, he published Ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba a E.U. (Ideas on the Incorporation of Cuba to the U.S.), which was a head-on attack against annexationism, which precipitated a barrage of responses and invectives aimed at Saco by the large annexationist community residing in the United States. At the end of his intellectual career, Sac took on a monumental project: writing the Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días (History of Slavery from the Earliest Times to the Present) in various volumes from 1878 until his death. Saco, who spent the last forty-five years of his life in exile, died on September 26, 1879, in Barcelona, Spain.

Further Reading Calcagno, Francisco, Diccionario biográfico cubano (Miami: Editorial Cuba, 1996). Moore, Robin D., Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos Saenz, Benjamin Alire (1954–). Born in the farm town of Old Picacho, New Mexico, on August 16, 1954, Benjamin Alire Saenz is one of the few Mexican American novelists to see many of his works published by major, commercial presses in the United States. Raised by devout working-class parents near Mesilla, New Mexico, Saenz studied for the Catholic priesthood, earning a master’s degree in theology in 1980 from the University of Louvain in Belgium, and becoming ordained in 1981. Despite his life-long religiosity, Saenz left the priesthood and decided to pursue a career in writing. He received a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988 and later attempted a Ph.D. degree in English at Stanford University with a Stegner Fellowship, but never finished. Saenz published his first book, Calendar 1020

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of Dust (1991), a poetry collection commemorating the diverse peoples and their migrations in the borderlands, with Broken Moon, a small press located in Seattle. It immediately won the Before Columbus American Book Award and caused him to be awarded a Lannan Poetry Fellowship in 1992. That same year, Saenz published a collection of short stories, Flowers for the Broken, again exploring the peoples and culture of the U.S.–Mexico border. The prolific Saenz went on to publish another poetry collection, Dark and Perfect Angels, in 1995. The poems contained in this deeply spiritual and personal anthology eulogize deceased friends and relatives as well as fictionalized strangers. That same year, Saenz broke into publishing with a commercial house, Hyperion, for his novel Carry Me Like Water, which follows twelve disciple-like characters who go out into the margins of urban life in El Paso and San Francisco to learn of human trials and tribulations, to teach and to heal, and to deal with the ills of the spread of AIDS, sexual abuse, homophobia, racism, and poverty. As usual, the narrative and its symbols have direct references to the Old and New Testaments and are deeply spiritual in tone. In The House of Forgetting (1997), Saenz produced an even more commercially viable novel exploring the psychological thriller genre. In The House of Forgetting, the rearing of a kidnapped Chicana from the border leads to a police procedural drama as well as a consideration of the love–hate relationship the girl develops with the kidnapper, a professor who has held her captive in Chicago. Again, Catholic symbols and ritual enrich the narrative, which also positively identifies spirituality with Mexican culture. Saenz’s latest novel, In Perfect Light (2005), the first also to be issued simultaneously in Spanish translation, enters the world of child molestation, the Juárez underworld, and the breaking apart of an El Paso Chicano family. In 2002 and 2006, respectively, Saenz returned to small presses to issue his third and fourth books of poems, Elegies in Blue and Dreaming the End of War. The first of these is a series of twelve prose poems in elegiac tone dealing with issues of family, childhood, life, and death; the latter is a poetic examination of male identity, especially vis-à-vis violence and war. In recent years, Saenz has also published a number of bilingual picture books for children with El Paso’s Cinco Puntos Press. Saenz currently teaches in the bilingual M.F.A. program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Further Reading Buell, Lawrence, Rhonda Cobham Sander, Juan Flores, and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Columbia: University of Mississippi Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Sagra, Ramón de la (1798–1871). Spanish naturalist, economist, and political figure Ramón de la Sagra was born in La Coruña, Galicia, Spain, in 1798. From 1822 to 1835, he lived in Havana, Cuba, where he served as the director of the botanical garden. During this period, he published in Spain and Cuba a number of books promoting the importance of Cuba for the Spanish 1021

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crown and the Spanish nation. De la Sagra was attacked numerous times for having written about and taught botany without ever having studied the subject. Somewhat of an encyclopedist, de la Sagra also dallied in literary criticism, at one point publishing an arrack on Cuban José María Heredia’s* poetry, which only brought him derision from such writers as José Antonio Saco.* During 1835, he traveled throughout the United States, which resulted in his writing one of the most important volumes of travel literature of the United States penned by a Hispanic: Cinco meses en los Estados-Unidos de la América del Norte desde el 20 de abril al 23 de setiembre de 1835 (Five Months in the United States of North America from April 20 to September 23, 1835), which he published in Paris in 1836, shortly after Lorenzo de Zavala published in the same city his Viage a los Estados-Unidos del Norte de America (1834, Trip to the United States of North America). De la Sagra had previously published in the United States his Memorias para servir de introducción a la horticultura cubana (1827, Records to Serve as an Introduction to Cuban Horticulture), but he is most known for his Historia física, política y natural de la isla de Cuba (Physical, Political, and Natural History of the Island of Cuba), issued in Paris in thirteen volumes from 1838 to 1857. De la Sagra died in Cartaillac, Switzerland, on May 25, 1871. Further Reading Calcagno, Francisco, Diccionario biográfico cubano (Miami: Editorial Cuba, 1996). González López, E., Un gran solitario: Don Ramón de la Sagra (La Coruña, Spain: Caixa Galicia, 1983).

Nicolás Kanellos Salas, Floyd (1931–). Floyd Salas was born on January 24, 1931, in Walsenburg, Colorado, into a family tracing both its maternal and paternal lines back to the original Spanish settlers of Florida and New Mexico. When he was still very young, the family relocated to California and, in pursuit of work opportunities, moved around so much that Salas attended six different high schools in four years. One of the most tragic events of his early life was the death of his mother, Anita Sánchez Salas, from a protracted illness during his high school years. Following her death, Salas became a juvenile delinquent and wound up spending 120 days on the Santa Rita Prison Farm; it was a grueling experience that led him to foreswear his delinquent ways to avoid problems with the law. The experience also served as material for his first novel, which graphically depicts prison life. In 1956, Salas won the first boxing scholarship ever given to the University of California, Berkeley, where he discovered literature. A number of writing scholarships and fellowships followed, including a Rockefeller grant to study at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in Mexico City in 1958. Upon returning to California from Mexico, Salas worked on Bay Area campuses as a creative writing instructor, became active in the campus protest movement, and immersed himself in the drug and hippie subcultures. These experiences later became grist for his novels What Now My Love (1970) 1022

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and State of Emergency (1996). His first published book, Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), however, was made possible by his winning the prestigious Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a Eugene R. Saxton Fellowship, which were awarded him based on his early drafts of that novel. Tattoo the Wicked Cross is an expose of the brutality of juvenile jail, as seen by a street youth (pachuco) who is raped and abused; the brutalized protagonist ends up committing murder. The raw power and passion of Salas’s narrative left reviewers believing that Salas had experienced this brutality first-hand, but he actually based the story on tales he had heard at Preston Reform School. The overwhelming acclaim the novel received from reviewers led Salas into a career as a writer. Salas’s next novel was of modest proportions. What Now My Love? (1970) told Floyd Salas. the story of the escape of three hippies involved in a drug bust during which policemen were shot. The novel follows their flight to Tijuana and their penetration of the border town’s drug underworld. With Salas, life and literature are always closely entwined. His next years were occupied in chasing the drug culture: “I made the world’s pot scenes, following the hippy trail from San Francisco to Marakesh, writing a novel about my radical experiences in the Bay Area called Lay My Body on the Line.” The novel was eventually published by a small press in 1978 to negligible critical response. His personal battle with drugs, his dysfunctional family, and the break-up of his own marriage led Salas to a long hiatus from publishing. In the early 1990s, through writing his memoir, Buffalo Nickel, Salas came to terms with his family’s dramatic history of widespread drug addiction and suicides (a total of six). The work depicts his own agonizing love–hate relationship with his older brother, a small-time prize-fighter, drug addict, and petty criminal. The memoir leads the reader into the underworld of pimp bars, drugs, and crime and depicts Salas’s struggles to escape the chaos of his family life by becoming a writer. The work was so well received that Salas was awarded a California Arts Council Fellowship for 1023

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achieving excellence. Salas has also produced a body of poetry, published in periodicals as well as in two volumes: Color of My Living Heart (1996), highly romantic poems of love and desperation, and Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats (2006), a celebration of many types of love. Further Reading Haslam, Gerald, “Floyd Salas” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, First Series, Vol. 82, eds. Francisco Al. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989: 230–234).

Nicolás Kanellos Sálaz-Márquez, Rubén (1935–). Mexican American fiction writer Rubén Sálaz-Márquez was born on November 21, 1935, in the town of Belen, New Mexico. As a child growing up in rural New Mexico, he became fascinated with the traditional ways of life among the old Hispanic and Native American families, so much so that when he became a writer one of his dominant lamentations was for the passing of the old ways and the disruptions of modernity. Sálaz-Márquez received a B.A. in history and an M.A. in school administration from the University of New Mexico in 1958 and 1961, respectively. Sálaz-Márquez began writing years before the development of the Chicano Movement* and to some extent has been reticent at seeing his work as related to that movement. However, his first book, Heartland: Stories of the Southwest (1978), features stories set historically and in contemporary times, many of which highlight Hispanic–Anglo culture conflict and the loss of traditions, as well as lands and birthrights, with the coming of the Anglos. Sálaz-Márquez’s major writing project for the next few years was a complete departure from this beginning, although it is understandable from his primary interest in southwestern history. Sálaz-Márquez researched and published a detailed historical novel/fictional biography—some would say cultural history of the Shawnee nation in the Southwest—of the leader Tecumseh in I Am Tecumseh, Book 1 (1980) and I Am Tecumseh, Book 2 (1985). To date, his intended third volume in the trilogy has not appeared. Instead, he has published other history books, including New Mexico: A Brief Multi-History (1999, 2007) and Epic of the Greater Southwest: New Mexico, Texas, California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah, Nevada (2007). He has also been writing such plays as “Embassy Hostage” (1983), about a U.S. Marine held captive during the Iranian hostage crisis. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Salazar, Manuel M. (1854–). Manuel M. Salazar was author of one of the first novels written in Spanish in the Southwest. Born in Puertecito, New Mexico, on December 10, 1854, Salazar was educated at the College of San 1024

Salazar, Rubén

Miguel, in Santa Fe, and became a teacher in Mora County schools. After marrying, Salazar settled down in Springer, New Mexico, where he worked at a number of minor government jobs until his retirement in 1895, after which he opened a small store that he operated until his death in 1911. Throughout his youth and professional career, Salazar wrote poetry, some of which was published in Spanish-language newspapers but most of which remains in manuscript form. His novel, La historia de un caminante, o sea Gervasio y Aurora (The History of a Wanderer, or Gervasio and Aurora), although written in 1881, was not published (one chapter only) until 1980. The novel, which is pastoral in nature, hearkens back to a time in New Mexico before the arrival of Anglo American civilization and may therefore be seen as a form of nostalgia for the Hispanic life of the past and as indirect resistance to the overwhelming transformations occasioned by the colonization of New Mexico by the United States. For the most part, however, La historia de un caminante has more historical value than esthetic; the language is somewhat provincial and antiquated, as is the pastoral form itself. Further Reading Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, Pasó por aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Salazar, Rubén (1928–1970). During the Chicano Movement, one of the issues that most angered the community was the unnecessary killing of the popular journalist Rubén Salazar as he covered the Chicano Moratorium, an anti–Vietnam War rally, when a deputy sheriff shot a tear gas projectile into the Silver Dollar Cafe, where the journalist was sipping a beer. Born on the U.S.–Mexico border in Ciudad Juárez on March 3, 1928, Salazar’s family crossed the border into El Paso, where he was raised. After serving in the military, Salazar used his G.I. Bill benefits to pursue a journalism degree at Texas Western College, today’s University of Texas at El Paso. Throughout his early journalistic career, which spanned about fifteen years, he worked competently and quietly, remaining a dedicated husband and father to his Anglo wife and three children. Except for his journalistic subjects, he stayed aloof from direct political or civil rights commitments. Salazar’s forte became investigative reporting. During his first job with the El Paso Herald Post, for example, he had himself arrested and then wrote an exposé of drug trafficking and substandard conditions in the El Paso County Jail. Then he wrote a series of articles on border drug trade outlets known as “shooting galleries” after pretending to be a customer. In 1956, he moved to the California Bay Area and reported for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, next with the San Francisco News until he was laid off when the newspaper merged with another daily. However, Salazar soon landed a job with the Los Angeles Times, where, in 1959, he started covering events in the Los Angeles Mexican American community. 1025

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Salazar’s growing prestige within the Times earned him a position as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, where he covered the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. His reporting was conventional and not critical of American involvement. Certainly, his writing did not demonstrate the antiimperialistic tinge that was an important part of the Chicano Moratorium, where he perished. His next assignment was in Vietnam. The dispatches he sent home revealed that he felt the U.S. presence could bring peace, despite the small respect he had for the South Vietnamese leaders. Next, the Times sent him to Mexico City as bureau chief for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean, where he was somewhat critical of the antidemocratic character of Castro’s Cuba and the one-party system in Mexico. Salazar finally returned to Los Angeles in January 1969 and started covering the activism of Chicanos that had blossomed during his absence. Salazar covered the Mexican community dispassionately without incurring the wrath of unforgiving militants or alienating them, mainly because he sympathized with the goals of the activists even when he did not condone their tactics. Salazar left the Times to manage the Spanish-language station KMEX in February 1970 but continued writing a weekly editorial for the newspaper in which he expressed more subjective opinions. Increasingly, law enforcement abuses came to dominate the bulk of his commentary. He concentrated on exposing illegal procedures and police brutality, the absence of Mexicans on juries, and unwarranted spying on legitimate social service organizations. Such a stance certainly antagonized the law enforcement establishment and, understandably, many of his mourners felt that a conspiracy to silence him was what led to his death. Chicanos hoped the investigation would reveal their worst suspicions: that the LAPD had conspired to murder Salazar to end the attacks on the department. The coroner’s jury, however, decided that there was no cause for criminal action against the deputy who fired into the Silver Dollar Cafe. The decision outraged not only the community, but also many Anglos who saw Salazar as a mediating force between angry militants and a recalcitrant establishment. Rubén Salazar’s death transformed him into the most powerful martyr of the Chicano Movement. In 1995, a collection of Salazar’s articles was published as Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955–1970. Further Reading Salazar, Rubén, Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

F. Arturo Rosales Sales, Francis (1771–1854). Francis Sales was a partner in the Boston printing and publishing house of Monroe and Sales. As part of his duties there, he compiled some of the first anthologies of Spanish literature to be used in universities, most notably Harvard. Sales was also on the teaching staff at Harvard, beginning in 1817 as an instructor of French and Spanish—although Spanish had been taught at various academic institutions, Harvard’s employment of Sales 1026

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was the first serious and consistent instructorship. For his meritorious service, in 1835 Harvard awarded Sales an honorary M.A. Sales, a Frenchman who had lived in Spain, came to Boston in 1793. This was an important step toward canonizing these authors in the United States as the best of the Spanish-speaking world. In 1828, Sales compiled and published Selección de obras maestras dramáticas por Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega y Moreto (A Selection of Dramatic Master Works by Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and Moreto). These were three of the greatest playwrights of Spanish theatrical flowering in the Golden Age, running from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. The volume went through at least another four editions during the mid-nineteenth century. Sales went on to compile and publish other anthologies, such as Colmena española; ó, Piézas escogidas, de vários autóres españoles, moráles, instructívas, y divertídas; con la vária significacion en ingles de las partículas, vóces y fráses idiomáticas al pié de cada pieza, y tambien en el índice general; todo acentuado con el mayor cuidado al uso de los principiántes (1844, A Spanish Hive; Instructive and Entertaining Works of Various Spaniards; along with Their Meaning in English, or Selected of Parts of Speech and Idiomatic Phrases in the Footnotes of Each Work as well as in the General Index; all effected with the utmost care for use by beginners), which was obviously a textbook for students of Spanish. Sales also compiled and published works of individual authors, such as José Cadalso (1827) and Tomás de Iriarte (1846), that also went through multiple printings and editions. Upon his death in 1854, Sales left a will bequeathing a $1,000 endowment the interest of which was to be used for an annual prize to the best Spanish student at Harvard; the prize is still awarded today. Furthermore, the income from an endowment of Sales’s estate of nearly $10,000 was to be used annually to purchase Spanish books for the Harvard library (he also bequeathed his extensive personal library to Harvard). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Hispanic Intellectuals Publishing in the Nineteenth-Century United Status: From Political Tracts in Support of Independence to Commercial Publishing Ventures” Hispania Vol. 88, No. 4 (Dec. 2005): 687–692. Leavitt, Sturgis, “The Teaching of Spanish in the United States” Hispania Vol. 44, No. 4 (1961): 591–625.

Nicolás Kanellos Salinas, Luis Omar (1937–). Born in Robstown, Texas, close to the Mexican border, on June 27, 1937, Salinas spent some of his early years in Mexico and by age nine had moved to live with an aunt and uncle in California. He attended public schools and began college at Fresno State University, where he edited the literary magazine Backwash but never received his diploma. At Fresno State in 1966, Salinas took a creative writing course, but his writing education ended when he moved with his family to Sanger, California. During the 1960s, Salinas was hospitalized on various occasions for nervous breakdowns, which have recurred periodically since. His first breakdowns 1027

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were the result of the combined pressures of his involvement in the Chicano civil rights movement and his teaching of Chicano studies. In 1970 he published his first book of poetry, Crazy Gypsy, a highly artistic work that became an anthem for Chicano activists. Many of the poems were included in the first anthologies of Chicano literature and have become canonized in U.S. Hispanic literature: “Crazy Gypsy,” “Aztec Angel,” “Nights and Days,” and “Mexico, Age Four,” among others. In Crazy Gypsy Salinas introduces themes that are evident in all his works: alienation and loneliness, death, and the defamiliarization of the world around us. Salinas Luis Omar Salinas. offers a wealth of images in which the stark beauty of language, fed from the grand traditions of both Hispanic and Anglo American lyric poetry, convinces the reader of the possibilities offered by a synthesis gained from a complete understanding of two or more cultures. In Darkness under the Trees: Walking behind the Spanish (1982), and in the works that follow, Salinas heightens the note of sorrow and melancholy as he attempts to rationalize his unjust fate. The themes of love, death, and madness dominate. The second part of the book pays homage to the Spanish Civil War poets who have served as his models, including García Lorca. Salinas is the most lyrical and imaginative, deepest, and most humane Chicano/Latino poet. He is nevertheless generally overlooked by the academy, often passed by not only readers but by other Hispanic writers—perhaps because his illnesses have not permitted him to tour and engage in exchanges with editors and other writers, or perhaps because, being shy, he has not done anything to promote himself in a field that today quite often demands stellar oral performances and promotional campaigns. Salinas, who has supported himself with a variety of blue-color jobs, has won some of the most prestigious awards for writing, including the California English Teachers citation (1973), Stanley Kunitz Poetry Prize (for Afternoon of the Unreal) (1980), Earl Lyon Award (1980), and General Electric Foundation Award (1983). In 1986, Salinas’s best poems were collected in a hefty volume entitled The Sadness of Days: New and Selected Poems. This volume was followed by Sometimes Mysteriously (1997), Elegy for Desire (1997), a collection of odes, elegies and cantos, and another compilation, Greatest Hits, 1969–1996) (2002). Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). Pérez-Torres, Rafael, Movements in Chicano Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).


Sánchez, George I.

Salinas, Raúl (1934–2008). Born on March 17, 1934, in San Antonio, Texas, from age two Raúl Salinas was raised in Austin. In 1957, he moved to Los Angeles and the next year was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment at Soledad State Prison. He spent eleven of those years behind bars in Soledad, one of the most brutal prisons in the United States, during which time he grew in his political and social consciousness and discovered poetry as an outlet for his frustrations, the agony of memory, and his political commitment (see Prison Literature). In Leavenworth penitentiary, Salinas founded and edited two journals: Aztlán de Leavenworth and New Era Prison Magazine. During this time, and after his release, he became one of the most noteworthy self-taught prison poets, even elevating prison to a metaphor in his poetry. Appropriately, one of his most famous poems (originally published in Aztlán de Leavenworth in 1970) and the title of his first book reveal this esthetic: Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions (1980, A Trip through the Mind Jail and Other Excursions). Through assistance from students and professors at the University of Washington, Salinas was released early and in 1972 took courses at the university, becoming involved in the Chicano and Native American movements. In addition to publishing his work widely in magazines, Salinas is the author of a second book of poems, East of the Freeway: Reflections de Mi Pueblo (1995). In 1999, Arte Público Press* of the University of Houston reissued Un Trip and hailed Salinas as a pioneer of Hispanic literature in the United States. Currently, Salinas is the owner and operator of Resistencia Bookstore in Austin, Texas, and the publisher of Red Salmon Press, which he founded in 1983. In 2006, with the assistance of editor Louis G. Mendoza, Salinas published raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen, his collection of journalism and personal correspondence, especially focusing on the years of his incarceration. The collection is important as a document linking the struggles for humane treatment of prisoners to the civil rights movement that was taking place outside the correctional facilities. That same year, he published Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey through Indian Country. Since 2000, Salinas has served as an adjunct faculty member at St. Edward’s University in Austin. A consummate performance poet, Salinas continues to recite his poems at public forums and has issued CDs of his works in performance. Further Reading Mendoza, Louis G., “Introduction,” raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos

Sánchez, George I. (1906–1972). Born on October 4, 1906 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, into a family with a long history in the state and region, George I. Sánchez was probably one of the most effective social activistscholars of Mexican American descent. He grew up in in Jerome, Arizona, where his father worked as a copper miner, but he returned to New Mexico and graduated from high school. Later, he earned a B.A. in education from the University 1029

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of New Mexico (1930), then an Ed.D. in educational administration and an M.S. in educational psychology from the University of Texas (1931), and a doctor of education degree from the University of California, Berkeley (1934). In 1935, the Julius Rosenwald Fund in Chicago employed him as a research associate developing educational models that would effectively serve the needs of Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. Much of the theory and applicative aspects that he pioneered are still emulated as modern-day educators develop bilingual, bicultural education strategies. Sánchez’s research findings were published in countless books and articles, but his most important research, work funded by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in 1938, was published in Forgotten Americans, a book studying the economic, social, and political conditions of his fellow New Mexicans. As much of his other study of Southwest Mexican Americans, Forgotten Americans argues that the poverty and seeming lack of achievement of New Mexican Hispanos is caused more by external forces—such as an impoverished economy and lack of opportunity—than by intrinsic defects in their culture. Apart from his considerable contributions in education, Sánchez engaged throughout his life in battles against social and educational segregation. A stalwart of the pioneering civil rights League of United Latin American Citizens, he became the organization’s thirteenth president in 1941. While leading LULAC, he explored ways by which the federal government could guarantee Mexican Americans full civil rights. By any standard, Sánchez deserves the sobriquet of being the “most distinguished Mexican American scholar of the time.” His contributions as a scholar, writer, editor, social philosopher, civil rights leader, international administrator, and consultant on inter-American affairs, migrant education, and Indian affairs have few parallels. Before he passed away in 1972, he also supported the efforts of Chicano Movement* in providing solutions to the problems he confronted for over forty years. Further Reading “George I. Sánchez Papers, 1919–1986,” (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00069/ lac-00069.html).

F. Arturo Rosales Sánchez, Luis Rafael (1936–). Luis Rafael Sánchez is a prolific playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. He was born on November 17, 1936, in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Attracted to acting and theater since he was young, he earned a B.A. at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, whose Drama Department witnessed in 1958 the premiere of Sánchez’s first play, La espera (The Wait). Later, he moved to New York, where in 1963 he obtained an M.A. at New York University and attended theater workshops offered by the Actor’s Studio. In 1976, Sánchez received a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. His dissertation, Fabulación e ideología en la cuentística de Emilio S. Belaval (Fable and Ideology in Emilio Belaval’s Short Stories), was published by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Institute of 1030


Puerto Rican Culture) in 1979. Sánchez has been a professor of Latin American Literature at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and at New York University, where he was also appointed a distinguished professor. Since 2000, he holds the Julio Ortega Chair at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. His work as a writer has been recognized through international grants and fellowships, and he was resident writer at the Arts and Sciences Academy of Berlin, as well as at the Woodrow Center for Scholars in Washington. He also received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1979. Some critics, in their efforts to situate Luis Rafael Sánchez in the Puerto Rican literary history, have considered him a member of the Generation of 1940, but most of them regard Sánchez as a precursor of the more recent Generation of Luis Rafael Sánchez. 1970. Although Sánchez’s work, especially in some of his short stories, has echoed some of the elements found earlier in the narrative of such authors as José Luis González and René Marques, Sánchez has always intended to write against the canon. In doing so, he has introduced new narrative techniques that foreshadowed the work of younger authors such as Ana Lydia Vega. Luis Rafael Sánchez’s first narrative work was En cuerpo de camisa (1966, The Body Shirt), a masterpiece of a short story collection in which Sánchez initiated his experimentation by using an oral language rich in popular dialect and onomatopoetic terms. This populist use of language is also characteristic of his subsequent work, as are the blending of the discourses of the characters with that of the narrator, the concern for the urban proletarian world, and the humanism with which he presents his characters. Sánchez’s narrative style, often described as baroque and carnivalesque, has earned him the title of initiator of the new Puerto Rican narrative. However, narrative is not the only genre so affected by Sánchez’s innovative spirit. Some of his theater has also been portrayed as revolutionary, as is the case with Quintuples (1985), depicted by the author as a variety show, a comic sketch full of intrigues, and a parody of a suspenseful play. Other plays by Sánchez include Los Angeles Se Han Fatigado (1960, The Angels Have Tired), Sol 13, Interior (1962, Sun 13, Interior), 1031


O Casi el Alma (1965, Or Almost the Soul), and La Pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968, The Passion According to Antigona Pérez), considered by many as Sánchez’s first significant work. La Pasión según Antígona Pérez is a drama in defense of personal freedom and in opposition to the dictatorial regimes so common in Latin America at the time. In 1976, Sánchez published La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho’s Beat), a novel that immediately gained him international recognition. According to Juan Gelpí, La Guaracha is not only a superb description of the Puerto Rican colonial reality but also a much needed revision of Insularismo, the classic Puerto Rican text by Antonio S. Pedreira. Luis Rafael Sánchez’s second novel, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (The Importance of Being Named Daniel Santos), was published in 1988. As in the case of La guaracha, in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos Sánchez indulges in his obsession with Latin American popular myths and music. La importancia, which he defines as a hybrid narration, subverts the canon on several levels. One of them, as Frances Aparicio explains, is the way in which Sánchez devotes novelistic space to homosexual love. In addition to theater and narrative, Luis Rafael Sánchez is also a prolific essayist. He has published three essay collections to date: La guagua aérea (1944, The Airborne Bus), No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico (1997, Do Not Cry for Us, Puerto Rico), and Devórame otra vez: Artículos de primera necesidad (2004, Devour Me Again: Articles of the First Order). Many of his essays revolve around Puerto Rico’s culture and sociopolitical situation. But Sánchez often abandons local concerns to direct his poignant and often humoristic observations at cultural manifestations and political events that take place in other areas of the Caribbean, in Latin America and elsewhere. “La guagua aérea,” the text that produced the name of Sánchez’s first essay collection, is a hilarious reflection on Puerto Ricans’ circular migration between Puerto Rico and New York, as well as its effects on Puerto Rican identity. “La guagua aérea” is without doubt one of the most well-known works of contemporary Puerto Rican literature. Sánchez’s second book of essays, No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico, contains fifteen essays on Puerto Rican cultural and political vicissitudes and on the motives that inspire the author to write. Sánchez’s most recent collection of essays, Devórame otra vez: Artículos de primera necesidad, contains forty articles previously published in local and international newspapers. Here, Sánchez not only continues describing Puerto Rican daily life but also offers his opinions on the social and political events that affect other countries, such as Colombia or Spain. Luis Rafael Sánchez, whose work has been widely translated, is one of the most outstanding contemporary Puerto Rican writers. In a tradition initiated by his admired Emilio S. Belaval, Sánchez’s works offer his readers an analysis of Puerto Rican identities that reveals the ambiguities and difficult realities going well beyond simplistic touristy images of the astonishing country that is Puerto Rico. Further Reading Aparicio, Frances, Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

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Gelpí, Juan, Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994).

Virginia Adán-Lifante Sánchez, Ricardo (1941–1995). Ricardo Sánchez was the first Chicano writer to have a book of poetry published by a mainstream commercial publishing house when Anchor/Doubleday issued his Canto y grito mi liberación (1973, I Sing and Shout for My Liberation). It was also the first bilingual poetry book published by a major commercial publisher. Ricardo Sánchez was one of the most prolific Chicano poets, one of the first creators of a bilingual literary style, and one of the first to be identified with the Chicano Movement.* He was a tireless and popular oral performer (see Orality) and social activist whose creative power expressed itself in innovative uses of both Spanish and English in poetry, frequently through the creation of interlingual neologisms and abrupt linguistic contrasts. His verse was as overwhelming in its sheer power, as was his aggressive personality, forged in hard prison labor. Ricardo Sánchez was born the youngest of thirteen children in the notorious Barrio del Diablo (Devil’s Neighborhood) in El Paso, Texas, on March 29, 1941. He received his early education there and became a high school drop-out, an Army enlistee

Ricardo Sánchez.

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and later a repeat offender sentenced to prison terms in Soledad Prison in California and Ramsey Prison Farm Number One in Texas. At these institutions he began his literary career before his last parole in 1969 (see Prison Literature). Much of his early life experiences of oppressive poverty and overwhelming racism, as well as his suffering in prisons and his self-education and rise to a level of political and social consciousness, are chronicled in his poetry, which although very lyrical, is the most autobiographic of all the Hispanic poets. Thus, all of his books serve as a chronicle of the ups and downs of his life and his wide-ranging travels: Hechizo Spells/Hechizospells (1976), Milhuas Blues and gritos norteños (1980, Milwaukee Blues and Northern Shouts), Brown Bear Honey Madness: Alaskan Cruising Poems (1982), Amsterdam cantos y poemas pistos (1983, Amsterdam Cantos and Drinking Poems), Eagle Visioned/Feathered Adobes (1990), Amerikan Journeys: Jornadas americanas (1994). In 1985, Arte Público Press* published a selection of his English language poems in Selected Poems. Sánchez always envisioned himself participating—in fact, leading—a sociopolitical consciousness-raising movement. His many travels and itinerant lifestyle—always in search of a permanent job in academia—resulted in his functioning as a model troubadour for the developing Chicano literary movement. His poetry announced and exemplified the authenticity of a bilingual writing style that had roots in oral tradition and community concerns. In 1995, the year of his death from cancer (September 3), Washington State University issued a reprint edition of Canto y grito mi liberación and, in 1997, a posthumous collection of Sánchez’s love poems, many of which had never been published, were issued as The Loves of Ricardo Sánchez by Luis Rodríguez’s* tiny publishing house, Tía Chucha Press. Further Reading López, Miguel R., Chicano Timespace: The Poetry and Politics of Ricardo Sanchez (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Sánchez, Trinidad V. (1943–2006). Mexican American poet and activist Trinidad V. Sánchez was born the ninth of ten children in Pontiac, Michigan, and served for some twenty-seven years in the Jesuit Order, principally in the mission to prisons, before renouncing his vocation and dedicating himself more directly to societal progress and his writing. Although Sánchez had left the order, he continued to counsel and work with prison inmates, often using his poetry to reach them and encouraging them to write. Sánchez became a schoolteacher in Michigan and later in Texas, often teaching creative writing. In the late 1990s and the early years of the following decade, he worked in Denver with young fathers through Early Head Start and other programs. During this time, he and his wife also ran Café Taza, a coffee house that provided a forum for spoken-word performances; however, the venture proved economically difficult and had to cease operations. Sánchez’s varied writing palette included 1034

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themes of social struggle, which emerged during the Chicano Movement, as well as the celebration of Mexican American food and culture. A perennial writer-inthe-schools, he influenced generations of children and inspired them to be proud of their Latino heritage. He died in penury in San Antonio on July 30, 2006, after a long illness. Sánchez’s son, himself a poet, continues to write and recite, especially in and around San Antonio. In 1997, Sánchez published a collection of his father’s and his own poems: Poems by Father and Son. Sánchez’s other books include Poems (1984) and his very popular Why Am I So Brown (1991). His last published collection was Jalapeño Blues (2006). Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Sánchez-Boudy, José (1928–). Born on October 17, 1928, in Havana, Cuba, Sánchez-Boudy was the son of a wealthy Spanish immigrant and the daughter of a Frenchman. Educated in Catholic schools, Sánchez-Boudy studied for two years in New Hampshire and the University of Detroit but returned to Cuba for a law degree, which he obtained from the University of Havana in 1953. Sánchez-Boudy became a noted criminal attorney, but in 1961 he abandoned Cuba for Miami and then Puerto Rico after Castro’s takeover. In Puerto Rico, he worked as a journalist and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1965, he took his wife and children to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he spent the rest of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Sánchez-Boudy has become one of the most distinguished authors and critics of Cuban exile literature, devoting almost all of his creative work to reliving the Cuban past and the effects of the Cuban Revolution. His poetry, in particular, is nostalgic for the sights and sounds of Havana street culture and, in particular, Afro-Cuban dialect and customs. His collections of poems is heavily inspired in Afro-Cuban poetry: Aché, Babalú, Ayé (1975), Ejué, Abankué Ehué (1977), and Ritos Náñigos (1977, Afro-Cuban Rites). Included among his most famous works are Cuentos grises (1966, Gray Stories), Cuentos del hombre (1969, Stories about Man), Tiempo congelado (Poemario de una isla ausente) (1979, Frozen Weather [Poetry about an Absent Island]), Cuentos de la niñez (1983, Stories from Childhood), and La patria no ha muerto, no, está en el viento (1986, The Fatherland Has Not Died, No, It’s in the Wind). His novels Liliyando (1971) and Liliyando pal tu (1978), titles in Sánchez-Boudy’s invented language, principally have language as their protagonist, made up of conversations among nameless characters before the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution. His novels Los cruzados de la José Sánchez-Boudy. 1035

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aurora (1973, Those Who Crossed at Daybreak) and La soledad de la Playa Larga (1971, The Loneliness of Long Beach) are both anti-Castro narratives, the latter dealing with the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961. Further Reading García, Ofelia, “José Sánchez-Boudy” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989: 272–283). Moore, Woodrow W., Cuba and Her Poets: The Poems of José Sánchez-Boudy (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1974).

Nicolás Kanellos Sánchez-Scott, Milcha (1955–). Born in Bali to a Colombian father who was raised in Mexico and a mother of mixed Asian and European ancestry, playwright Milcha Sánchez-Scott was raised in South America and England—she attended a Catholic girl’s school in London—before her family settled in the San Diego area of Southern California. While studying literature and philosophy at the University of San Diego, a Catholic college, Sánchez-Scott worked at an employment agency for maids; the stories she collected there became part of her first written and produced play, “Latina” (1980), a serious drama with humorous elements and surrealistic episodes that indicts racism among and against Latinos on top of gender discrimination in the employment of maids by rich Anglo Americans. After college, Sánchez-Scott honed her playwriting skills through workshops with such pioneers as María Irene Fornés* at INTAR* (1984–1985) and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (1987) and the Mark Taper Forum (1995–1996). Her plays were workshopped in various laboratories, such as the South Coast Repertory (1993), and have received such awards as the Dramalog Award (1980), Vesta Award (1983), and Le Compte du Nouy Prize (1985). Her most renowned play is Roosters (1987), an energetic and often surrealist drama set on a farm with dance that deals with a father–son confrontation over masculine values. The play was released as a film on video in 1995. Among her other plays are the one-acts “Dog Lady” and “The Cuban Swimmer” (1984), which deal with Latin athletes in training, and “Evening Star” (1988), a barrio love story, as well as “Stone Wedding” (1989), “El Dorado” (1990), and “The Old Matador” (1993). Various plays by Sánchez-Scott have been published by play services as well as anthologized. Sánchez-Scott lives in Los Angeles, where she works with the group Artists in Prisons and Other Places. Further Reading Peterson, Jane T., and Suzanne Bennett, Women Playwrights of Diversity: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos Sandoval, Víctor (1945–). Roll Over, Big Toben (2003), Victor M. Sandoval’s first book of fiction for young adults, captures an authentic comingof-age story of a young man from the barrio who seems to have all the avenues 1036

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of possibility closed to him. Struggling under the burdens of loyalty to family and friends, David becomes a protagonist for every generation, a character who must carve his own place in the world—a story that draws heavily on Sandoval’s own experiences. The fifth child of eleven brothers and sisters, Sandoval spent his elementary years in East Los Angeles playing in an open lot behind his house, nestled between the freeway and the County General Hospital, “where the wild grass grew taller than any of us.” Sandoval used his imagination to escape his surroundings and turn the empty lot into a wonderland peopled with soldiers, cowboys, Indians, and invaders from Mars. As an educator with the Alhambra School District for over thirty years, Sandoval saw his fair share of turbulent youth. He thus incorporated the importance of a support network of family, friends, and educators into his book having been on the receiving end of this support before. Born on October 16, 1945, and raised in Southern California, it was an Arroyo High School English teacher who was the first to help Sandoval discover his talent for storytelling by urging him to submit poetry for the high school literary magazine. Being published in his high school literary magazine encouraged Sandoval to enroll at East Los Angeles College, which he attended until his father died and he was forced to drop out and work as a bank management trainee. Sandoval later returned to college and enrolled at the California State University, Los Angeles, where he eventually earned a B.A. in English in 1972 and a master’s in educational administration in 1988. Sandoval is an assistant principal at Alhambra High School. He started as an English teacher at Alhambra High School in 1972, went through the district’s management internship and became assistant principal of Brightwood Elementary School in 1988. He continued at Brightwood until 1991, when he returned to the secondary level as an assistant principal at San Gabriel High School. He remained at San Gabriel for seven years, until 1998, when he moved to Alhambra High School and his current position, assistant principal of business and activities. Sandoval lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife. Further Reading York, Sherry, Children’s and Young Adult Literature by Latino Writers: A Guide for Librarians, Teachers, Parents, and Students (Columbus, OH: Linworth Publishing, 2002).

Carmen Peña Abrego Sansores, Rosario (1889–1972). Poet, writer, and journalist Rosario Sansores was born on August 25, 1889, in Mérida, Yucatán. The daughter of Juan Ignacio Sansores Escalante and Laura Pren Cámara, she married Antonio Sanjenís, a Cuban businessman, when she was fourteen years old, after which she had two daughters. She lived for twenty-one years in Havana, Cuba, and for two years in the United States. Rosario Sansores wrote sixteen books, and some of her poems were set to music, including her most well-known: “Cuando tú te hayas ido” (When You Have Gone). Her writings were widely published in Mexico, the United States, 1037

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and Cuba. Sansores contributed articles to El Heraldo de México* (The Mexican Herald), Novedades (News), and Hoy (Today) in Mexico and El Diaro de la Marina (the Harbor Daily), El Mundo (The World), El País (The Country), Revista Carteles (Poster Review), and Bohemia in Cuba, also publishing in La Prensa (The Press) of San Antonio, Texas, where she was a member of the editorial department. She also worked for La Prensa’s sister newspaper, Los Angeles’s La Opinión (The Opinion), and frequently also used the pseudonyms Crysantheme and Solange. Sansores’s publications included short stories, chronicles, articles, and poetry. She is considered a pioneer of the society page in Mexico. Sansores’s romantic poetry was widely published in newspapers in the United States, and her articles appeared in the section “El buzón femenino” (The Women’s Mailbox) of the El Paso, Texas, newspaper El Continental. Sansores’s essays often deal with women’s conditions in society as well as with exile from Mexico. In 1968, Sansores was honored by the Ecuadorian government with the Lira Poética (Poetry Lire) Award. Included among her books are País del ensueño (1911, Country of Dreams), Mientras se va la vida (1925, As Life Transpires), Cantaba el mar azul (1927, The Blue Sea Sang), El brevario de Eros (1930, Eros’s Breviary), La novia del sol (1933, Betrothed to the Sun), Rutas de emoción (1942, Routes of Emotion), Las horas pasan (1942, Time Passes), Mi corazón y yo (1943, My Life and I), Fruta madura (1945, Mature Fruit), Brevario de amor (1945, Breviary of Love), Libro azul de la sociedad mexicana (1946, Mexican Society Blue Book), Diez años de juventud (1946, Ten Years of Youth), Polvo y olvido (1951, Dust and Forgetfulness), Sombra en el agua (1951, Shadow in the Water), and Dulzura del recuerdo (1951, The Sweetness of Remembering). Sansores died on January 7, 1972. Further Reading D’Acosta, Helia, Veinte Mujeres (Mexico City: Editores Asociados, 1971). Diccionario Histórico de la Revolución Mexicana, Vol. VII (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1992).

Carolina Villarroel Santacilia, Pedro (1829–1910). Cuban poet and revolutionist Pedro Santacilia was born on June 14, 1829, in Santiago, Cuba, but was educated in Spain. He did not return to his homeland until 1845, when he began writing for such periodicals as El Orden (The Order), Semanario Cubano (Cuban Weekly), and El Redactor (The Redactor). After a brief imprisonment, he was exiled to Spain in 1851 for his involvement in the independence movement. He successfully escaped the vigilance of the authorities and fled to New York City in 1853, where he became the director of the Cuban Revolutionary Club. In his haste, however, he lost a number of important unpublished political and poetry manuscripts. He remained in the United States until 1863, when he ended up in Mexico, fighting against the French–Austrian occupation, and 1038

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married one of the daughters of President Benito Juárez. Among the works published mostly in Cuba and New York were Instruccion sobre el cultivo del cacao (1847, Instructions for the Cultivation of Cacao), Ensayos literarios (1848, Literary Essays), El arpa del proscripto (1856, The Banished Man’s Lyre), and Lecciones sobre la historia de Cuba (1859, Lessons on the History of Cuba). He was also one of the poets featured in the historically important first anthology of exile poetry, El laúd del desterrado (1858, The Lute of the Exiled). El arpa del proscrito is Santacilia’s foundational collection of poetry on the exilic condition. Santacilia’s eloquent speeches in New York promoting the struggle for independence against Spain were collected and issued as Lecciones Orales sobre la Historia de Cuba, Pronunciadas en el Ateneo Democrático Cubano de Nueva York (1859, Oral Lessons on the History of Cuba, Presented at the Cuban Democratic Atheneum of New York), which was actually published in New Orleans. He died in Mexico City in 1910. Further Reading Calcagno, Francisco, Diccionario biográfico cubano (Miami: Editorial Cuba, 1996). Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Santayana, George (1863–1952). Philosopher, poet and novelist George Santayana was born in Madrid, Spain, and moved to Boston with his mother and siblings when he was nine years old. After learning to speak English, he went on to become an outstanding student and student poet, enrolling in Harvard, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1886. Santayana went on to study in Germany and England but finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1889, after which he embarked on a teaching career at Harvard. Santayana became a prolific poet and later a novelist, also winning respect as an academic philosopher. In 1890, he published his first book of poems, Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy. He published his first book on esthetics, The Sense of Beauty, in 1896. From 1912 until his death in 1952, Santayana resided in Europe, principally in England, France, Spain, and Italy. In 1927, Santayana was awarded the Gold Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in London. In 1929, he was offered the prestigious Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, which he refused, having given up teaching. In 1935, he was the author of the first novel written by a U.S. Hispanic to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize: The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of George Santayana. 1039

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a Novel. Included among his many books are Poems (1922), Dialogs in Limbo (1941), and his autobiography, Persons and Places (1944). Further Reading Singer, Irving, George Santayana: Literary Philosopher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Santiago, Esmeralda (1948–). Born on May 17, 1948, in Puerto Rico, the eldest of eleven children, Santiago moved with her family to Brooklyn, New York, when she was thirteen. Despite her poverty-stricken background, Santiago was able to receive a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and an M.A. from Sarah Lawrence. First dedicated to documentary filmmaking, Santiago shifted her artistic career to writing when in 1993 she published her acclaimed memoir of growing up in Puerto Rico and moving to New York: When I Was Puerto Rican. In 1998, she published the sequel, covering her maturation in the big city and exploring the immigrant’s typical struggle to adapt and establish an identity, as well as the adolescent’s fight for independence from a strong-willed mother who still retains the old customs. In these and her novel of immigration, America’s Dream (1997), Santiago revived the 1960s and 1970s themes of culture clash, racial identity, and the culture of poverty, although from a feminist perspective. In addition to these themes, Santiago explores the relationship between mothers and daughters and the cycles of womanhood. In her 1988 continuation of her memoir, Almost a Woman, Santiago charts her adaptation to American society. The book was such a success that it was adapted into a screenplay for the Public Broadcasting System and aired on Masterpiece Theater in 2001; the drama was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. Santiago has explored the relationship of mothers and daughters in an anthology of essays by diverse authors: Las Mamis (2000). An earlier anthology she compiled, Christmas: Favorite Latino Authors Share Their Holiday Memories (1999), also explored family relationships. Her most recent novel is My Turkish Lover (2004), a memoir of an abusive relationship with a film maker. In 2005, Santiago issued a children’s book, A Doll for Navidades. Further Reading Rivera, Carmen S., Kissing the Mango Tree: Puerto Rican Women Rewriting American Literature (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Santos, John Philip (1957–). A 1979 graduate of Notre Dame, John Philip Santos joined the Ford Foundation in 1997 as a program officer in the Media, Arts and Culture Program. He has direct programming responsibility for the Foundation’s Media Projects Fund and international initiatives involving new media technologies. Originally from San Antonio, Santos is a filmmaker, producer, journalist, and writer whose work examines the intersecting 1040

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issues of media, culture, and identity. He is the recent producer of From the Airwaves to the Internet, a short history of broadcast news, was an executive producer and director of new program development for Thirteen/WNET and was also a producer of over forty documentaries on culture, religion, politics, and spirituality for CBS News, two of which were nominated for Emmys. Santos is a Rhodes Scholar and holds degrees in English literature and language from Oxford University and philosophy and literature from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to his work at the Foundation, he served as an appointed member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Excellence in Education for Hispanic Americans. Santos’s reputation as writer depends largely on his family memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award. Places projects the story of Santos’s family onto the epic of the Mexican people and their immigration to the United States. The family saga is rich in adventure and tragedy, dealing with Indian kidnappings, a family member who suffers from epilepsy, and a grandfather’s suicide in San Antonio. Santos participates as a character in his memoir as he travels and attempts to uncover his family history. Further Reading Morales, Ed, “John Philip Santos Crosses the Border” (http://www.villagevoice.com/ books/9939,morales,8592,10.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso (1874– 1938). Bibliographer, orator, curator, writer, and Mason Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 24, 1874, to a German father and a mother of African heritage from St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He began his education in San Juan, where a fifth-grade teacher told him that “Black people have no history, no heroes, no great moments.” Being of African descent, such disregard provoked in Schomburg a thirst for knowledge about his people, and he spent the rest of his life studying the history and collecting the books and artifacts that resulted in one of the most extensive collections on African history in the Americas. In 1891, Schomburg moved to New York in 1891 and became involved in the independence movements of Cubans and Puerto Ricans. He attended night school at Manhattan Central High School and worked at odd jobs to support himself. In 1892, he became a

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.

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Mason and by 1911 became the master of his lodge, El Sol de Cuba No. 38. In 1918, he became grand secretary of the Grand Lodge, a position he held until 1926. Schomburg met the journalist John Edward Bruce, who introduced him to the New York African American intelligentsia and supported his interest in African and world history. As a writer and scholar, Schomburg published Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools, Colleges, etc., as well as magazine articles and brochures on Masonry, including some that defended Negro masons. Among his other publications are Is Hayté Decadent? (1904), Plácido, A Cuban Martyr (1910), A Bibliograhic Checklist of Negro Poetry (1916), and Military Services Rendered by the Haitians in the North and South American Wars of Independence; Savannah, Georgia, 1779; Columbia, South Carolina, 1815 (1921). In 1927, he received the William E. Harmon Award for his outstanding work. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s quest for historical and literary materials by and about African people in their diaspora resulted in a collection of letters, manuscripts, prints, playbills, and paintings from all over the world, although the majority of his materials concerned the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and the lives of heroic people in that region. The New York Public Library’s Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints owes much of its collection to materials sold or bequeathed by Schomburg. As a consequence of such treasures, the New York Public Library became a center of intellectual and cultural activity in Harlem. As a curator in the library, beginning in 1932, Schomburg became a core participant in the social and literary movement known as the “Harlem Renaissance.” Schomburg died on June 10, 1938. Further Reading Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse, “The Migrations of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York 1891–1938” Journal of American Ethnic History Vol. 21, No. 1 (Nov. 1, 2001) (http://www.ebsco.com/online/direct.asp?IssueID= Q3DRGXHYN74G).

F. Arturo Rosales Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno (1806–1890). Juan N. Seguín, a politician and one of the founders of the Texas Republic, was born into a prominent family of French extraction in San Antonio, Texas, while it was still part of New Spain. At the age of eighteen, he was elected mayor of San Antonio, which was at that time under the Mexican Republic. One of the developers of a nationalist spirit in Texas, Seguín led Texans in opposition to the central government of Antonio López de Santa Anna in the 1830s. In the struggle for the independence from Mexico, Seguín served as a captain in the Texas cavalry, eventually rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the war of independence, Seguín served once again at the head of the San Antonio government, but this time as commander. In 1838, he was elected to the Texas senate and in 1840 once again to the mayoralty of San Antonio. Seguín defended Tejanos against profiteering Anglos who were rushing into the 1042

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republic to make their fortune at all costs. Unjustly accusing him of favoring invading Mexican forces and betraying the Santa Fe Expedition to foment revolt in New Mexico, Anglos forced Seguín to resign as mayor in 1842. Fearing reprisals, he moved with his family across the Rio Grande into Mexico. In Mexico, he was jailed and forced to serve in the Mexican army, including in battle against the United States during its war with Mexico. In 1848, he once again moved to Texas, only to return again to Mexico and live out his days just across the border in Nuevo Laredo, from 1867 until his death in 1890. Seguín documented much of these travails in his melancholy memoir, Personal Memoirs of John Seguín, from the Year 1834 to the Retreat of General Woll from the City of San Antonio 1840 (1858), considered one of the first Mexican American autobiographies. In its pages, he was one of the first to use the phrase “strangers in their own land” to characterize the plight of Mexican Americans. As a figure caught between two cultures, Seguín is considered a forerunner of later authors of bilingual–bicultural literature, as well as one of the first Mexican Americans to express the disillusionment that many Mexican American writers felt after the Anglo American takeover of the Southwest. Further Reading Teja, Jesús F. de la, ed., A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín (Austin: Statehouse Press, 1991).

Nicolás Kanellos Sellén, Antonio (1840–1889). One of the most respected poets and translators of the exiled Cuban intellectual community in the United States during the late nineteenth century was Antonio Sellén, who was born in Santiago, Cuba in 1840. He and his brother, Francisco Sellén,* the equally respected poet and playwright, attended school at the Colegio del Angel in Havana. By 1862, he and Francisco were publishing the Spanish–English bilingual newspaper, Heraldo Cubano (Cuban Herald), and in 1863 they coauthored Estudios poéticos (Poetry Studies). Besides publishing numerous poems in such magazines as Revista de la Habana (The Havana Review), Antonio Sellén also published a collection of his own verse, Poesías originales (Original Poems), in 1864. Shortly after the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War, Sellén emigrated to the United States in 1869 as a political refugee and by 1873 began publishing a magazine, El Museo de las Familias (The Museum of Families); in 1875, he began publishing other specialized magazines, the children’s El Amigo de los Niños (The Children’s Friend) and El Educador Popular (The Popular Teacher), which was published by Nestor Ponce de León.* From his base in New York, he also sent poems and essays for magazine publication in Spain and in Spanish America. In 1877, he returned to Cuba to work as a teacher; he also resumed publishing poems, stories, and essays in Cuban magazines. From his days in Cuba on, and continuing in the United States, Sellén made part of his living translating from French, German, English, and other languages such things as the works of distinguished poets, including Lord Byron. After so much intimate 1043

Sellén, Francisco

contact with contemporary European poetry, Sellén’s own work developed in their shadow as pre-Modernist literature. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo, “Cuban Literature of the United States, 1824–1959” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, eds. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61). Lazo, Raimundo, La literatura cubana (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1965).

Nicolás Kanellos Sellén, Francisco (1838–1907). Poet and playwright of Cuban independence from Spain Francisco Sellén was born in Santiago, Cuba, in 1838. He and his brother Antonio attended the Colegio del Angel in Havana and became poets. In 1862, Francisco and Antonio founded and directed the Spanish–English newspaper, Heraldo Cubano (Cuban Herald) and began publishing their poems in island magazines and newspapers. In 1863, Francisco and his brother coauthored their first book of poetry, Estudios poéticos (Poetry Studies). Like his brother Antonio, Francisco also had a distinguished career translating literature from English, German, and French. In 1868, with the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War, Francisco Sellén went into exile in New York; from this base he joined with others to further the independence movement and took part in a failed military expedition by sea that was forced to return to New York Harbor. While in New York, he dedicated himself to journalism, translating and writing poetry and drama. He also directed a number of pedagogical periodicals, such as El museo de las familias (1873, The Museum for Families), El amigo de los niños (1875, The Children’s Friend), and El Educador Popular (1873–1877, the People’s Educator), the latter with Nestor Ponce de León.* Sellén was probably one of the busiest and most respected literary translators, specializing in the works of northern Europe—especially those of Byron. In 1878, he published his monumental anthology, Joyas del norte de Europa (Gems from Northern Europe. Sellén was one of the editors of the newspaper El Nuevo Mundo (The New World) and of the magazine América Ilustrada (Illustrated America). He published his poems in two collections: Poesías de Francisco Sellén (1890, Poems by Francisco Sellén) and Cantos a la patria (1900, Songs to the Fatherland), which were mostly of a patriotic and anti-Spanish nature. His major historical play, Hatuey: poema dramático en cinco actos (1891, Hatuey: Dramatic Poem in Five Acts), was composed by Sellén as a means of creating a national mythology for Cuba while using the Spanish Black Legend as a basis for the independence movement from Spain. Hatuey was the legendary last Amerindian leader to fall to the Spaniards; the play contrasts the virtues and bravery of the noble savage with the cowardice and cruelty of the iniquitous Spanish conquistadors, all while poetically alluding to Cuba’s struggles for independence. In 1901, Sellén published another play, Las apuestas de Zuleika; pieza en un acto y en prosa (Zuleika’s Gambles: A One-Act Play in 1044

Selva, Salomón de la

Prose). The only other major publication by Sellén in New York was his magnum opus of translation, Ecos del Rin: colección de poesías alemanas (1881, Echoes of the Rhine: a Collection of German Poetry). Further Reading Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Salas, Marcela, “El exilio cubano del siglo XIX: La leyenda negra y la figura del indio” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 3, eds. María Herrera-Sobek and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000: 203–217).

Nicolás Kanellos Selva, Salomón de la (1893–1959). Poet Salomón de la Selva was born in León, Nicaragua, on March 20, 1893, the son of a medical doctor. When he was eleven, he moved to the United States with a scholarship to pursue his education. He became completely fluent in English and became associated with such American poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1914 and 1915, De la Selva served as interpreter for one of the greatest Latin American poets of all time, Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, on his visit to New York. Soon after, de la Selva joined American poet Thomas Walsh in translating Darío’s poetry in Eleven Poems of Rubén Darío (1915). In 1916, de la Selva became a professor of Spanish and French at Williams College. Salomón de la Selva became a defender of Latin American interests and in his lectures criticized U.S. imperialism, a note that would be repeated in his only book written completely in English and published in the United States: Tropical Town and Other Poems (1918). A number of the poems included in Tropical Town had previously been published in such mainstream magazines as Century, Harper’s Monthly, Poetry, and Contemporary Verse—quite an accomplishment for someone whose native language was not English. Despite the notes of his personal alienation and loneliness in the United States as well as his anti-imperialist stance in the book, de la Selva tried to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1917 but was refused because he was not a U.S. citizen; he eventually enlisted in the British army and fought in Europe during World War I. After the war, de la Selva remained in England for a year and spent some time the next year in New York, continuing to write poems in his adopted language; it is believed that an unpublished manuscript The Unknown Soldier later became the basis for a collection entitled El soldado desconocido (1922, The Unknown Soldier). Distraught with the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, de la Selva moved to Mexico, where he worked in education and resumed writing in Spanish. In 1925, de la Selva resided in Nicaragua and became associated with the nationalist liberation led by Augusto Sandino; he later served briefly in the United States as a representative of the Nicaraguan Labor Federation. In 1935, he moved back to Mexico and continued his writing career. In 1952, de la Selva was named to the Mexican Academy of Language on the condition that he become a Mexican citizen; he refused. In 1954, the Academy made him an 1045

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honorary member. While serving as Nicaraguan ambassador at large in Europe, de la Selva died on February 5, 1959, in Paris. Further Reading Sirias, Silvio, “The Recovery of Salomón de la Selva’s Tropical Town: Challenges and Outcomes” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 3, eds. María HerreraSobek and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000: 268–314).

Nicolás Kanellos Senarens, Luis (1863–1939). An immensely successful author of dime novels, Luis Senarens was the son of a Cuban father and an American mother. His father had immigrated to the United States and opened a tobacco store in Brooklyn, where his son was born on April 24, 1863. The death of his father during his early teenage years forced him to begin working, and he started writing dime novels for Frank Tousey, a New York publisher who had a deal to publish the biographies of the Reades, a family of wealth residing in Pennsylvania who would invest money from time to time into new machines and technologies. Although grossly exaggerated, the adventures that Senarens began to write at the age of sixteen about the Reade family have their foundations in logbooks and journals that the family kept. Senarens spent the rest of his life writing, the majority of his work being dime novels about the Frank Reades accounts and a series featuring the youthful protagonist Jack Wright. His work inspired Jules Verne, and this famous author of fantastic fiction wrote Senarens letters of praise and even stole some of his ideas found in The Steam House. The partnership between the Reades and Senarens lasted more than twenty years and was a successful enterprise for both parties. He obtained his college diploma later in life, graduating from St. John’s College of Art and Science. He became an editor in the Tousey publishing house after years of writing and then tried writing screenplays. He did not experience the success that he had with the dime novel, and his writing slowly came to a stop. He lost money in his older age through bad investments, and the Tousey publishing house eventually went out of business. He retired in 1939 and began to suffer from a heart condition from which he died that same year. His work is presently seen as a pseudo-precursor of science fiction, classified as “Edisonade” (coined after Thomas Edison), or work centered on young heroes and their ingenuity and inventions. Although he is little studied outside the world of science fiction and fantasy literature, his work has been rediscovered by academics and those interested in those two genres. Further Reading Bleiler, E. F., “Luis Philip Senarens” in Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982: 53–58).

Craig Denison 1046

Sender, Ramón

Sender, Ramón (1901–1982). A prolific Spanish novelist, essayist, and journalist reported to have written 102 books, Ramón J. Sender was born on February 3, 1901, in Chalamera de Cinca, Aragón, Spain. When he was seventeen, his articles and stories started appearing in such newspapers as El Imparcial (The Impartial), El País (the Country), España Nueva (New Spain), and La Tribuna (The Tribune). Later, he enrolled in the University of Madrid, but, disappointed with the academic system, he largely taught himself. At the age of twenty-one, Sender enlisted into the army and participated in a war on Morocco. Upon returning to Spain, he began writing articles for El Sol (The Sun), the most prestigious Spanish newspaper at that time. Sender worked for El Sol from 1924 to 1930 while simultaneously launching his literary career and participating in many political activities, some of which involved the anarchist movement. In 1930, Sender published his first novel, Imán (Magnet), and left his work at El Sol. Sender spent a short period of his career in Russia, sympathizing with communism there; once back in Spain, he denounced the bloody repression in Casas Viejas (1933). In 1935, Sender received the National Award of Literature for Mr. Witt en el canton (Mr. Witt at the Canton). Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Sender joined the Republican lines and sent his wife and two children to Zamora to live with her family; his wife was murdered by the nationalists shortly after the move. After sending his children to France, Sender was able to spend short periods of time with them during his travels from Barcelona to France. During this time, the Republican movement sent him to the United States to speak on behalf of the Republican cause at various universities. After the situation in Spain deteriorated in 1938, Sender fled to France, afterward moving to Mexico with his children in 1939. (See Spanish Republican Exiles.) At the peak of his literary career in 1942, Sender received a Guggenheim Fellowship to attend the New Mexico Highlands University. He later became resident within the United States and was involved academically with the universities of Denver, Harvard, and Amherst. During his long life, he opposed fascism and dictatorship in Spain. Most of his very prolific career took place in the United States with the production of a vast body of novels, stories, essays, poetry, and theater. He even published more than 600 articles in periodicals throughout the Western Hemisphere. Sender became an American citizen in 1946 and in the following year was given a position as professor of Spanish literature at the University of New Mexico, where he worked until his retirement in 1963. During his retirement he lived in California, teaching at the University of Southern California. After the death of dictator Francisco Franco, Sender returned to Spain in 1976 and made public his intention of reestablishing himself within his native country. However, he was never able to accomplish his goal; he died on January 16, 1982, in Los Angeles, California. Sender remarried in the United States and continued writing and publishing prolifically until his death. His voluminous life’s work has been divided into several categories: socialist realism, allegorist narrative, historic narrative, 1047

Sephardic Literature

autobiographic narrative, tales, and so on, as well as essays, theater, and poetry. Sender published more than fifty works after moving to the United States. Although these exile* works represent his most significant production, they remain still overlooked by critics. Sender’s most famous work, a part of the Spanish canon that is taught in universities throughout the world, is his civil war novel, Requiem para un campesino español (first published in 1953 under the main character’s name, Mosén Millán, and in 1960 changed to Requiem for a Spanish Peasant). Further Reading King, Charles L., Ramon J. Sender (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1974).

María Arnedo Sephardic Literature. Sephardic literature refers to literature written by Jews or Crypto-Jews (hidden Jews) who either lived in the Iberian Peninsula or purposefully trace their origins to it. “Sepharad” is the Biblical, rabbinical, and Modern Hebrew term for the Iberian Peninsula, specifically Spain, and can be found in the biblical book Obadiah. Evidence suggests that there were Jews in Sepharad even in pre-Roman times. Significant Jewish immigration to the Peninsula (called Hispania by the Romans) and beyond began during the Roman occupation of 218–202 BC, long before the Roman destruction of the second Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD. Life for Jews in Spain was tolerable until the Visigoths adopted Christianity, in 587 AD, after which they implemented highly aggressive, anti-Semitic policies. With the Muslim invasion of the Peninsula in 711, Spanish Jews once again flourished, although not without some restrictions on them as dhimmis (non-Muslim monotheists). During the first few centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, known as the Golden Age of Sephardic Jewry, Jews became multilingual administrators, traders, scholars, poets, artists, scientists, and physicians, as well as translators and linguists, and were among the intellectual precursors to the Renaissance. Among the most prominent Sephardic figures of this period, who wrote in Arabic and Hebrew, a combination thereof called Judeo-Arabic, or even Latin, are the Andalusian rabbi, physician, and philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204), whose best known work is the Moreh Nevuchim (Guide for the Perplexed), philosopher, astronomer, physician, poet, and linguist Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) from Tudela, in present-day Navarra, author of many biblical and grammatical commentaries, among which are the Sefer ha-Yashar (Book of the Straight), the Moznayim (Scales) and Zahot (Correctness), and, physician, philosopher, astronomer, and biblical commentator Bachya ibn Pakuda (11th century), from Saragossa, author of Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub (Guide to the Duties of the Heart). Some of the writers of the Golden Age of Sephardic literature are the Toledano poet Judah ha-Levi (1075–1141), author of works such as the philosophical treatise The Kuzari (In Defense of the Despised Faith) and the poems “My Heart Is in the East” and “Zion, Thou Art Anxious” and the

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La Luz newspaper ad for the Sephardic Publishing Company, New York.

poet and philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021–1058), from Málaga, best known for his philosophical dialogue Meqor Hayyim (Fons Vitae) and the ethical treatise The Improvement of the Moral Qualities. The arrival of the more fundamentalist Islamic Almoravids and Almohads, beginning in 1090 AD, which coincided with the ongoing Christian Reconquest of Spain, signaled the inevitable decline of this golden age of

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Muslim–Jewish–Christian convivencia (coexistence), which ended in the Christian victory and reunification of 1492. Although it is widely held that the Sephardim (Judeo Spanish people) left the Peninsula from 1492 on, after the Edict of Expulsion of the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel, there were a number of earlier periods of repression in early Christian Spain during the centuries leading up to 1492 that also caused Jewish emigrations. A large number of Sephardim ended up in the Ottoman Empire (which included much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa), where Sultan Beyazid II welcomed them. There they joined other Jews who had been living in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) for nearly 2,400 years, living relatively undisturbed in millets (autonomous communities), where they culturally and economically prospered. As a result of twice having coexisted in tolerant Muslim societies, Arabic culture has had enormous influence on the Sephardim, first during Muslim rule of the Peninsula from 711 to 1492 and then when a large number of them went to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey, Balkans, and Palestine) after the 1492 Expulsion. Those who did not go to the Ottoman Empire went to other places in Europe (Amsterdam, Italy, Portugal) or ended up in North Africa, back in the Middle East, or somewhere in the Americas. Thus there are three major subgroups of Sephardim: the Levantine or Ottoman Jews, whose primary language is Ladino (with some Greek), those who settled in North Africa and speak a dialect of Judeo-Spanish known as Haketia (and Arabic or French), and the Ladino-speaking Spanish–Portuguese Jews, who remained on the Iberian Peninsula and converted to Christianity but later reverted to Judaism in the Diaspora. Because Ladino was never an “official” or “state” language anywhere, the Judeo-Spanish language the Sephardim took with them when they left Spain was a mixture of Old Castillian with Hebrew and Arabic, which with their customs distinguished them as Spanish (and Portuguese) Jews. It remained their lingua franca but slowly changed by incorporating elements of the languages spoken in societies where they settled, such as Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Italian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Turkish. The enormous French influence on the language and culture of select Sephardim is also greatly attributable to the presence of the French–Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle schools (founded in Paris in 1860) that were established in major Ottoman Sephardic centers. The recent use of the terms “Sephardic” and “Sephardim” can be confusing because for some they are all-inclusive categories that now take in not only Jews originating in Spain but also Iran, Iraq (Mizrahi Jews), and North Africa and Egypt (Maghrebi Jews). This is further complicated by the fact that there were and still are some far-flung communities of Sephardic Jews that established themselves in Eastern Europe, India, the Caribbean, South Africa, and North, Central, and South America. In the Americas, as elsewhere, Sephardim have often coexisted with Ashkenazim (a term referring to Jews who migrated to Germany and its surroundings between 800–1000 AD, Ashkenaz being the Medieval Hebrew word for “Germany”). The disproportionate destruction 1050


the Holocaust wrought on Sephardic communities in the Balkans and Mediterranean, when combined with the effects of the Diaspora and the assimilatory pressures from Ashkenazi majorities in other locations and by host societies in general have caused a huge decline in Sephardic populations worldwide and contributed to the rapid decline of the Judeo-Spanish language (known variously as Ladino, Djudio, Sephardi, Djudezmo, Judezmo, Spanyolit, Haketia, Tetuani) and culture. The current world population of Sephardim, using the broadest and most inclusive definition, is nearly two million. There are currently under 400,000 Sephardim in the Americas, most of them living in the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. Perhaps the best known examples of post-Expulsion/pre-twentieth century Sephardic literature are the posthumously published 1677 philosophical treatise Ethica (Ethics), by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a Dutch Jew of Portuguese origin, and the Me’am Loez, an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century rabbinical commentary in Ladino on the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible), by a series of scholars—Rabbis Yaakov Huli, Yitzak Magriso, Yitzak Machor Agruiti, and Shmeul Yerushalmi (between 1730 and the 1770s). There have been Sephardim in the Americas since the arrival of Christopher Columbus, whose own ethno-religious background is still being debated. With him came an undetermined number of Crypto-Jews (Jews who were hiding their Jewishness) and Marranos (false or true converts to Catholicism), Rodrigo de Triana, Maestre Bernal, and Luis de Torres among them. Sephardic Jews first came to what is now the United States in the 1620s, via Brazil, with the Dutch who settled in New Amsterdam (New York City). Their presence grew, although mostly assimilated. However, there are colonial-era synagogues in places such as Charleston, South Carolina, Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City, where Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue founded in 1654, stands as a reminder of the early Sephardic Jewish presence there. It was not till the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a significant influx of Ottoman Jews, who left Turkey and the Balkans after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, replenished but transmogrified the Sephardic presence in the United States. In addition to the city of New York, where the largest number of them settled between 1915 and 1925, other cities that became home to significant Sephardic communities in the twentieth century in the United States were Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Some of these produced Sephardic newspapers, published primarily in Ladino (and then English), that survived between forty and fifty years. Up until the 1940s and 1950s, these newspapers were printed in Ladino, using Rashi script (a medieval from of Hebrew print) to transliterate it (just as Yiddish is also represented in transliterated Hebrew print). Some prominent earlier literary writers of U.S. American Sephardic descent include Penina Moishe (1797–1880), Mordechai Manuel Noah (1785–1851), Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), Annie Nathan Meyer (1867–1951), Robert G. Nathan (1894–1985), Lawrence Pereira Spingarn (1918–2001), and Curaçaoan 1051


American Daniel de León* (1852–1914), a socialist, trade unionist and cofounder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known for many addresses and pamphlets, among them “What Means this Strike” (1898), “The Burning Question of Trades Unionism” (1904), and “Woman’s Suffrage” (1911). Although traditional categories of Sephardic literature include liturgical, rabbinic, and oral traditions, according to Diane Matza, a scholar of modern Sephardic literature, the modern U.S. Sephardic literary tradition is characterized by its cosmopolitanism, its confidant women writers, and its examination by both men and women of the patriarchal nature of Sephardic culture. Some of its scholarly writers are the American scholar of the Sephardic oral tradition Samuel G. Armistead (1927–), author of Judeo-Spanish Ballads from New York (1981), Rabbi Martin A. Cohen, who edited a special issue of American Jewish Archives (1992) dedicated to the Sephardim in the Americas, Romaniote (Greek) Jew Rae Dalven (1905–1992), a prolific translator and the author of The Jews of Ioannina (1990), Stanley Sultan (1928–), who in 2001 published Joyce’s Metamorphosis, poet and founder of the River Styx poetry organization Michael Castro (1945–), and scholar, translator, and poet Ammiel Alcalay (1958–), author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993) and the crucially important anthology Keys to the Garden (1999). Other Sephardic writers from the Americas include Moroccan American Ruth Knafo Setton (1951–), author of The Road to Fez (1991), Salonican American Leon Sciaky (1894–1958), whose 1946 book Farewell to Salonica was reprinted in 2003, Holocaust survivor Rebecca Camhi Fromer, author of The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece (1998), Cuban American anthropologist and author Ruth Behar* (1956–), creator of the documentary film “Adio Kerida,” Guatemalan American Victor Perera* (1934–2003), author of The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey (1995), Franco-Mexican Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (1936–), one of whose most recent novels is titled El sefardí romántico (2005, The Romantic Sephardic), and Mexican novelist Rosa Nissan (1939–), whose novel Novia que te vea (1992, So That Your Sweetheart Sees You) was turned into a successful full-length film, “Like a Bride,” U.S. Crypto-Jew Sally Benforado, whose book Bring Me More Stories: Tales of the Sephardim (2005) is just one example of renewed interest in recovering the Jewish past of the American Southwest, and U.S. Latino Kathleen Alcalá* (1954–), author of Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist (1992) and Spirits of the Ordinary, a Tale of Casas Grandes (1998). Further Reading Artigas, María del Carmen, Segunda antología sefardí: Continuidad cultural (1600–1730) (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2005). Artigas, María del Carmen, Antología sefardí: 1492–1700 (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 1997). Ayoun, Richard y Haïm Vidal Séphiha, Los sefardíes de ayer y hoy. 71 retratos, trans. Tomás Onaindía (Madrid: Editorial EDAF, 2002).

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Cohen, Martin A., ed., American Jewish Archives Vol. 44, No. 1 (1992) [special issue titled Sephardim in the Americas]. Cohen, Martin A., and Abraham J. Peck, eds., Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). Matza, Diane, ed., Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1997).


Sepúlveda, Luis G. (c. 1898–1933). Although much is unknown about Luis G. Sepúlveda’s life, it is known that he was a Colombian journalist living in New York when he published one of the most incisive collection of poems about the metropolis, Instantáneas neoyorkinas (1930, New York Snapshots), which was reissued posthumously in Bogotá in 1939 by his brother. Born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, Sepúlveda arrived in by ship in New York City on November 7, 1917. Sepúlveda died in Italy and was buried in Rome in 1933. This one book that he is known to have authored, written at times incorporating English-language terms and some slang, is a time capsule that gives an immigrant’s view of the various cultures and several of the neighborhoods in New York City. Over all, the vision that Sepúlveda presents is admiring of the modernity and technology of the mammoth city, in such poems as “Times Square,” Luis G. Sepúlveda. “Bowery,” “Wall Street,” “Greenwich Village,” “Little Italia,” “Bronx Park,” “Coney Island,” and “Broadway.” Sepúlveda also focused on certain character types of the times, such as the flapper, a favorite subject of immigrant writers during a time when women were gaining greater liberty and rights in the United States. Nevertheless, when it came to Spanish Harlem, Sepúlveda criticized the social ills resident there and the underclass Latinos who were being exploited in factories or drugged with marijuana and alcohol. Sepúlveda’s “snapshots” attempted to capture everyday street scenes in the city, showing the good, the bad, and the ugly; nevertheless, each poem revealed his particular perspective and judgment on life in the United States at this juncture in history. Thus Instantáneas neoyokinas is an important contribution to the literature of immigration,* although it may also be considered an example of Latino travel literature.* Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–455.


Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti, Emma

Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti, Emma (1950–). Born in Argentina on August 15, 1950, but raised in Chile, Sepúlveda came to the United States after Chilean refugee Salvador Allende was overthrown and assassinated by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Sepúlveda has made a life for herself through political, feminist, and literary struggles in the United States. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1978. After receiving her M.A. and Ph.D in Spanish literature from the University of California, Davis (1976) and the University of Nevada (1978), respectively, Sepúlveda began her career as a university professor. Today, she is a full professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Sepúlveda is a distinguished poet who has published her works in Spanish and English in numerous magazines and anthologies. In 1993, she received Emma Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti. the Carolyn Kizer Award for Poetry. Her books include Tiempo cómplice del tiempo (1989, Time the Accomplice of Time), A la muerte y otras dudas (1996, To Death and Other Doubts), and Death to Silence/ Muerte al silencio (1997). Although Sepúlveda’s poems run the gamut of themes from that of the loss of voice and identity to women’s liberation, her work continues to exhibit the feelings of a political exile in its attack on fascism and its feelings of alienation within a new society. In 1998, Sepúlveda published a memoir of her travails in Chile under the dictatorship, her immigration to the United States, and, most interestingly, her political campaigning in Nevada for a seat on the state legislature. Further Reading Whitlock, James, The Literature of Emigration and Exile (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos Serros, Michele (1966–). Young-adult poet, short fiction writer, and novelist Michele Serros has produced literature that represents an often forgotten segment of Mexican American teen life: the middle class. A fourth-generation 1054

Sierra, Rubén

Californian, Serros was born in Oxnard, California, on February 10, 1966. As a student at Santa Monica City College in California, Serros published her first book of poetry and short stories, Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard, with Lalo Press. After the press went out of business, she began selling the book herself from her garage. Chicana Falsa was later picked up and reissued by a New York publisher in 1998. Chicana Falsa is a collection of poems and stories that deal with the identity crises and other problems faced by Mexican American teens as they come of age. Her second book, How to Be a Chicana Role Model, was published in 2000 and immediately made the Los Angeles Times best seller list; the book is made up of vignettes in which Serros uses her own life as a successful author to give tips to teens. Her young adult novel, Honey Blond Chica (2007), follows upper-class Evie Gomez and her friends in an environment of privilege, alcohol, and drugs, where confusion about one’s identity and culture are rampant. And her ¡Scandalosa! A Honey Blond Chica Novel begins with Evie Gomez experiencing the best of all worlds, including love, before her worlds begin to collide and fall apart. Serros has made a place for herself in popular culture and the media: she is a commentator for National Public Radio, has written scripts for “The George Lopez Show,” has published a spoken-word CD through a commercial record company, has performed on the road with rock bands, and has had poems selected for display on Los Angeles city buses. Further Reading Cai, Mingshui, Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Sierra, Rubén (1946–1998). Actor, playwright, and theater professor Rubén Sierra was born in San Antonio, Texas, on December 6, 1946, into a family whose members had participated in Mexican American traditional theater and even written plays. Thus, while growing up, Sierra developed an early interest in the theater and, when he went to college, became acutely aware of the lack of dramatic literature by Latinos that was available. In 1970, Sierra graduated with a bachelor’s degree in speech and drama and, shortly thereafter, served in the Army for two years—this later experience informed the plays he wrote. Sierra went on to further study and in 1974 received his M.A. in directing at the University of Washington in Seattle. He taught theater there until 1978, the year that he founded the Group Theater, which was committed to producing plays representing the various ethnic

Rubén Sierra in Celso.

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theater arts in the United States; he also continued to serve as the director of the Ethnic Cultural Center and Theater at the University of Washington. Sierra’s first play to be produced was La Raza Pura, Rachel, Rachel, produced at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio in 1968 and later published; it satirized interracial relations and conflict. “The Conquering Father” (1972) was one of his most philosophical: an allegory dealing with the Divinity, death, and organized religion. Sierra’s “La Capirotada de los Espejos” (1973, The Potpourri of Mirrors), constructed in Chicano theater style, presented the pageant of Chicano history, beginning with the Aztecs in Aztlán.* Sierra’s Manolo (1975, published in 1979), on the other hand, was a realistic drama drawing on his Army experience in Vietnam; the three-act work deals with the drug addiction of a Vietnam veteran and his responsibility to family and community. “The Millionaire and the Pobrecito” (1979) was Sierra’s adaptation of Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper for children’s theater. Sierra also adopted Leo Romero’s* poetry collection, Celso, into a one-man play, “I Am Celso” (1985), in which he toured the country as the actor. “Say Can You See” is Sierra’s satirical answer to the American Dream and the melting pot. In his final play, “When the Blues Chase up a Rabbit” (1998) has a young Chicano fighting prejudice in Texas in the 1960s. Sierra died on October 29, 1998.

Scene from Manolo by Rubén Sierra.

Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ramírez, Arthur, “Rubén Sierra” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers: Second Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1992: 259–263).

Nicolás Kanellos

Silén, Iván (1944–). Ivan Silén was born in 1944 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He was fascinated by poetry since childhood, a period of his life also marked by a strong religious education (which remains visible in many of his works) and by the untimely death of his mother in 1955. Although other biographical data on Silén are scarce, he has found in writing an ideal medium with which to reinvent himself and to weave an inner—perhaps more 1056

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significant—autobiography. Silén’s books often revisit similar topics and key figures (sexual identity, the mother, Orpheus, Oedipus) to offer his readers a glimpse of a personal universe in constant evolution. In his works, neosurrealistic images predominate, and ontological questioning is the norm. The poet is always presented as entering other worlds (e.g., the underground, alterity) in which liberation is felt as the overcoming of dichotomies. At the same time, however, Silén has maintained an interest in social poetry and in the intricacies of the Puerto Rican political status. Silén published his first book, Después del suicidio (After the Suicide), in 1970. Its leitmotif is schizophrenia, which the poet explores in connection to language (Spanish/English), cultural geography (New York/the Island), and politics (citizenship/discrimination), among others. Suicide, in that sense, is seen as the door to another reality and as a nihilist response to the establishment’s order. Silén’s social interests were expanded in 1972 with the publication of El pájaro loco (Woody Woodpecker). In it, Silén dwells on the world of marginality in New York City. Madness and nonconformity are the positions from which the poet both exposes the societal ills of the metropolis and espouses a neo-surrealist lyricism that transcends them. These early works were also marked by numerous implicit and explicit references to some of Silén’s most influential predecessors, including the Beat Poets, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Julio Cortázar, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and the classics, to whom Silén returns repeatedly. Madness continued to be the driving force in Silén’s third book, Edipo Rey o La Caperucita (1974, King Oedipus, or Little Red Riding Hood), where the poet constructed a personal and political allegory against imperialism and the state apparatus. His next book, Los poemas de Filí-Melé (1976, The Poems of Fili-Mele) is Silén’s most well-known book. The various poems in the book read as cantos of a longer work whose main topic is the desire for unity through schizoid duality. This desire is also felt in the way in which Silén attempts to blur the boundaries between prose and poetry in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (who lived in exile in Puerto Rico). Like Jiménez, Silén also plays with his own name in Los poemas, subverting whatever fixed identity it might have meant for him: in the poems he becomes Navi, the absolute (mirror like) inversion of himself, and therefore an alter ego, not entirely unlike Fernando Pessoa’s heteronimos. In 1981, Silén published El miedo del pantócrata (The Pantocrator’s Fear), a book marked by introspection and egotism, in which poems became even longer than they were in his earlier books. In 1992, Silén’s long and distinguished poetic career was recognized by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (the most prestigious cultural organism in the island) with the release of the anthology La poesía como libertá (Poetry as Freedom), which also won him the 1993 PEN Club de Poesía award. More recently, Silén has also published Casandra & Yocasta (O: el libro de Tití) (2001, Cassandra and Yocasta [or: Titi’s Book]), in which the poet returns to the classics for a new exploration of the topics of orphanhood, death, and the shortcomings of language to speak about feelings and reality. 1057

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In addition to these poetic accomplishments, Silén’s publications in the last two decades have reflected his growing interest in creative prose and in the essay genre. His works in prose are as complex and challenging as his poetry, contributing to bringing further insights into the poet’s obsessions, interests, and tastes. In his several books of essays, Silén engages in a critique of such philosophers as Nietzsche, Derrida, and Deleuze while proposing a radical reflection on Puerto Rican politics. In addition, El llanto de las ninfómanas/The Wail of the Nymphomaniacs (1981) contains a rich discussion of intertextuality as creation, an element that explains much of his creative work, understood as a dialogue with earlier writers. Through that dialogue, Silén carefully carves his own space into the international literary map. Published in 1986, Nietzsche o la dama de las ratas (Nietzsche, or the Lady of the Rats) typified his engagement with ontology and the work of the German philosopher. Silén introduced in that book the figure of the pariah (the man of the non-being) to account for the marginality of the poet and the thinker in their struggle against the state. In the 1990s, Silén published two new volumes of essays, La rebelión (1995, Rebellion) and Los ciudadanos de la morgue (1997, The Citizens of the Morgue). The former defined rebellion as the political acquisition of memory and advocated transcending the ontic/political dichotomy inherited from Heidegger through the language of imagination (literature). The latter is Silén’s most political work to-date, and it includes a reconsideration of the legacy of the Puerto Rican pro-independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos. The third major component of Iván Silén’s writing is composed of creative fiction. Silén’s prose works are largely a product of the last twenty years. In 1984, he published an experimental novel, La biografía (The Biography) that centers on the problems of narration and voice. With echoes of Miguel de Unamuno and Jorge Luis Borges, La biografía explores the ways in which the writer is the product of the work he or she produces. Within the decade, Silén published two other novels in the style he termed “schizoid realism,” La casa de Ulimar (1988, Ulimar’s House) and Las muñecas de la Calle del Cristo (The Dolls from Calle del Cristo)—the former infused with a difficult symbolism of Biblical inspiration and the latter characterized by a grotesque plot that includes a political satire of both the United States and the Puerto Rican governments. His latest fiction books include Los narcisos negros (1997, The Black Daffodils), a collection of short stories published by the press of the Universidad de Puerto Rico, and La muerte de mamá (2004, Mom’s Death), a novel that combines autobiography and metaliterature with Silén’s talent for creating provocative intertextual dialogues (in this case, with the work of Albert Camus). Iván Silén is also a painter, signing his works with the name of Nelis (reversing the letters of his last name) and has edited two anthologies of Latino writers in the United States. Overall, despite his somewhat marginal status, Silén has produced a rich and complex body of literature that is central for Puerto Rican and Latino and Latina letters in the United States and for Hispanic literature elsewhere.

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Further Reading Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., “Iván Silén: Una poética de la alteridad” in Hispania Vol. 75, No. 2 (May 1992): 301–309.

Manuel Martín-Rodríguez Silva, Beverly (1930–). Beverly Silva’s life has been paradigmatic of the overall feminist struggle and the specific Chicana quest for recognition and self-determination. Born on May 12, 1930, she lived and evoked a historical moment marked by accelerated social change and the emergence of novel articulations of the Chicana’s place in Chicano society, culture, and the literary canon. Silva’s work “constitutes a chronicle of personal shared struggle” (Lagos-Pope 30) of the period. Fascinated by the oral storytelling of her grandfather, she wanted to be a writer and to go to college, but her parents put her in a vocational–secretarial track in high school. She married early and often and had four children from her three marriages. Her first husband died in an accident after five weeks of marriage, and her second marriage lasted six years, ruptured by her spouse’s mental breakdown and confinement in a state hospital. Her third marriage, to an older man, lasted thirteen years and exposed her for the first time in her life to educated people who enjoyed the books that she had always read in her own solitude. When her youngest child entered school, she registered at San José City College and experienced the frothy turmoil of the late 1960s and the 1970s, afterward stating, “I was so emotionally changed by these events that I was never able to go back to the old ways of living.” She left her husband and the security that he represented and lived in downtown San José with her three children, graduating with an M.A. in English from San José State University in 1976. Now retired, Silva has had a successful career as a faculty member. She taught first at Mesa Community College (Arizona) and then at her original alma mater, San José City College. Known both as a poet and a writer of short stories, including the collection The Cat and Other Stories (1986), her well-received The Second St. Poems (1983) is a poignant example of the emergence of a new group of Chicana (and Chicano) poets who benefited from the activism and quest for social justice of the earlier cohort but who pursued poetry that was deeply personal, introspective, and confessional. Silva’s poetry is rooted in the shared place and traditions that are characteristic of Chicana and Chicano culture and its barrios; these, in turn are a source of strength. At the same time, her most poignant poems evoke the crucial years that she lived in downtown San José and had to fend for herself as an independent and sensual woman who had already raised her children and who was now starting a new life and entering new relationships with Latino men. The Chicana portrayed in her work is a man’s equal, an independent and selfsupporting person who belongs to an ethnic and cultural tradition while at the same time moving toward integration into the American mainstream. She

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needs personal relationships with men, family, and community to be content and fulfilled, but these relationships, as a natural consequence of her community’s growth, contain dignity, rights, and a genuine assertive voice. Further Reading Ginsberg, Judith, “Beverly Silva” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers: Second Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1992: 264–269). Lagos-Pope, María Inés, “A Space of Her Own” in Beverly Silva, The Second St. Poems (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 1983).

Gary D. Keller Silva de Cintrón, Josefina (1885–1986). The importance of the social, intellectual and feminist work done by Josefina Silva de Cintrón for the Puerto Rican and Hispanic community in New York City since the 1930s has still not been adequately acknowledged. Josefina Silva was a feminist, teacher, and journalist who sought to defend, promote, and enhance the work and achievements of Puerto Rican and Hispanic women, intellectuals, writers, and artists. She founded, owned, and directed the monthly cultural magazine Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters), indisputably her most important contribution to the colonia’s cultural life, and also was in charge of the editorial office of the magazine Americana, published on Broadway in 1947. Josefina Silva was born in 1885 in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she began her career as an elementary school teacher. After enjoying the privilege of being one of the few women attending the University of Puerto Rico’s Normal School, her trajectory as a community leader started in Río Piedras, where she founded the first post office in Hato Rey and contributed social and cultural work as member of the Red Cross and the Corte de Lourdes (Lourdes’s Court). According to Puerto Rican writer Pedro Caballero,* Josefina Silva, affectionately known as Pepiña, took her first steps in journalism and feminism in her native island, where she collaborated with Mercedes Solá, along with other educated middle- and upper-class women, campaigning at the head of the important feminist journal La mujer del siglo XX (The Twentieth-Century Woman) and endorsing the suffragist movement by her active membership in the Asociación de Puertorriqueña de Mujeres Sufragistas (Association of Puerto Rican Women Suffragists). She also used the pseudonym of Lidia to publish social chronicles and essays—not only in Puerto Rico but also in New York City, where she arrived in 1927 to stay, becoming a cultural promoter for the growing Puerto Rican and Hispanic community. Along with her husband, Reverend Felipe Cintrón, the head of the Hispanic Episcopal Mission, whom she married in New York, she was well known in her time for her commitments to the social life and cultural development of the Hispanics in the city. Her political, social-service, and intellectual career were

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in part thanks to her involvement in local and international, social, political, and cultural organizations and associations: Damas Auxiliares de la Misión Episcopal (Women’s Auxiliary of the Episcopal Mission [as director]), the Unión de Mujeres Americanas (American Women’s Association), the Pan American Women’s Association, and the League of Spanish-Speaking Democrats. Her cultural, affective, and social bonds with the Hispanic and American cultural elite in New York City helped her to promote relations and cultural exchanges between the Hispanic community and institutions such as the Roerich Museum and the International Sunshine Society. Her commitment to protect and contribute to the prestige of the Hispanics in New York City led her to constitute the Círculo Cultural Cervantes (Cervantes Cultural Circle), an association that united professors, writers, artists, and elite members of the colonia, who aimed to share their knowledge with the community and contribute to its gradual cultural improvement. The Círculo Cultural Cervantes was born to be an annex to the amateur theater group Grupo Artístico Cervantes (Cervantes Artistic Group) and grew from a recreational, charitable, and cultural association to be a center for intellectual meetings, social gatherings, and cultural activities, such as literature readings and conferences, poetry recitals, and celebrations of Latin American national commemorations. Cultural and civic associations such as the Círculo Cultural Cervantes and the Unión de Mujeres Americanas gained local as well as international renown because of their close affiliation with Silva de Cintrón’s cultural magazine Artes y Letras, which functioned from 1933 until 1945 to became one of the most important and noteworthy cultural magazines for the New York Hispanic immigrant intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s. Artes y Letras showed another remarkable face of the Puerto Rican immigration, different from the one referred to in contemporary newspapers such as Gráfíco* (Graphic), Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples), or Alma Boricua (Puerto Rican Soul). This magazine denounced the discrimination the Puerto Ricans were victims of in society and school, helping to promote many Hispanic cultural projects taking place in the city. It also functioned as a network for writers, artists, editors, local enterprises, and middle- to upper-class readers, circulating their emerging discourse, which later would be refined in ethnic, nationalist, or pan-Hispanic terms. Some of the first representatives of Puerto Rican literature in New York City were to be found in Artes y Letras: Clotilde Betances Jaeger,* María Mas Pozo,* Pedro Caballero* (who served as its editor), and Pedro Juan Labarthe,* among many others. Artes y Letras enjoyed international distribution and exchanged its issues with several Latin American and Spanish magazines and newspapers. A few years after its founding, it had representatives in Argentina, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Spain, Uruguay, and Hispanic enclaves in the United States, such as California and Texas. It also published some of the most important Puerto Rican writers of these years, including Isabel Cuchí

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Coll,* Luis Palés Matos, Carmen Alicia Cadilla Ruibal,* Martha Lomar, Concha Meléndez, Carmelina Vizcarrondo, José Enamorado Cuesta,* Ana María O’Neill, Trinidad Padilla de Sanz (La Hija del Caribe), Clemente Pereda, Samuel R. Quiñones, Enrique Laguerre, Ferdinand Cesteros, and Amelia Ceide. It also published such Spanish and Latin American writers as Gabriela Mistral,* Jorge Mañach, José Santos Chocano, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, Carlos Brandt, Max Jiménez, Estrella Genta, Serafina Núñez, Margarita Robles de Mendoza, Alberto Rembao,* Ramón del ValleInclán, Gastón Figueiras, and Wenceslao Pareja, to name a few. Josefina Silva de Cintron’s magazine has to be acknowledged for its contribution to the positioning of a cultural field that would distinguish the interests and activities of the Hispanic and Puerto Rican intellectual community in New York City. Many of the editorials in the magazine, written by Pedro Caballero, were dedicated to the community’s social and cultural problems; education was always seen as playing an important role in the community’s progress and self-respect. In addition, Artes y Letras articles and essays were in open communication, dialogue, and correspondence with Latin American cultural discourses, such as Hispanic racial identity and pan-Americanist and pan-Hispanist integrations. Politics were also the concern of Artes y Letras’s editorial staff, its pages an open room for national as well as international political opinions, critical debates, and updating, such as opposition to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and criticism of fascism during the Spanish Civil War, news that prefigured the issues of World War II. Although such authors as Puerto Rican writer Pedro Juan Labarthe were active promoters of pan-Americanism, many articles and editorials focused on Latin America, Puerto Rico, and the implications of U.S. imperialist policies for the Latin American countries and the Hispanic colony in the United States. As a feminist, Josefina Silva de Cintrón’s interests were channeled in the promotion of Hispanic women’s work and achievements, something evident in her many articles and interviews dedicated to women artists, writers, university students, and professionals. Her conservative position regarding women’s emancipation and equality to men allowed for women to achieve socially, professionally, and personally but saw women still fulfilling their duties at home. However, Artes y Letras was also an open forum for feminist discussions supporting more progressive positions. Artes y Letras and Josefina Silva de Cintrón became cultural referents for the Hispanic colonia. Her magazine’s essays, articles, and editorials registered Hispanic intellectual thought during its years of publication, recording the diversity of the Puerto Rican community in New York, as well as its social and political problems, including delinquency, interracial conflicts, discrimination, and economic depression. Further Reading Acosta-Belén, Edna, “Silva de Cintrón, Josefina. ‘Pepiña’” in Latinas in the United States: a Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).

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Acosta-Belén, Edna, et al., “Adiós, Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History, and Contributions (Albany, NY: University at Albany, SUNY, 2000). Sánchez Korrol, Virginia E., “The Forgotten Migrant: Educated Puerto Rican Women in New York City, 1920–1940” in The Puerto Rican Women: Perspective on Culture, History, and Society, 2nd ed., ed. Edna Acosta-Belen (New York: Praeger, 1986).


Sleepy Lagoon (1942–1944). In Los Angeles, during the 1940s, gang activity of Mexican American pachucos* (zoot-suited street youth) provoked police crackdowns and negative media coverage, which in turn created a widespread public backlash against Mexicans. The issue came to a head with the famous Sleepy Lagoon trial. A young teenager, José Díaz, was killed at a party in Sleepy Lagoon, a favorite watering hole for Mexican American teenagers. Twenty-four members of the “38th Street gang” were arrested and charged, despite flimsy evidence against them. Throughout the trial, the judge, the prosecutors, and some of the witnesses for the state engaged in an orgy of antiMexican bashing. As if the judge wanted them to appear sinister and unkempt, the defendants were not allowed to bathe throughout most of the proceedings. All but two were found guilty of various degrees of murder. A committee to provide legal support for the defendants included journalist-crusader Carey McWilliams, labor organizer Bert Corona, Josefina Fierro de Bright from the Congress of Spanish-Speaking People, Anthony Quinn, and an array of other Hollywood actors and movie-makers. Because of their efforts, the verdicts were overturned. Curiously, because the activist group contained well-known socialists—McWilliams, Fierro de Bright, and Corona—the effort tried not to be seen as un-American. Nonetheless, committee members were harassed by the Tenney Committee for Un-American Activities, which had been set up by the California legislature. Pachucos and the Sleepy Lagoon case became a cause celebre in Chicano literature* of the 1960s and 1970s, in large part as examples of the marginal status of Mexican Americans as well as of institutionalized racism. The most famous literary work based on the Sleepy Lagoon case has been Luis Valdez’s* Zoot Suit, a docudrama that systematically indicts the yellow journalism and racist judicial system that persecuted the defendants in the trial. Further Reading Escobar, Edward J., Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

F. Arturo Rosales

Solano, Gustavo (1886–?). Gustavo Solano, whose pen name was El Conde Gris (The Grey Count), was a prolific Salvadoran poet, playwright, and prose writer. Born on April 4, 1886, to parents who were writers, as a child 1063

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Solano was known for his great facility in improvising verses, and in his first collection of poems, Trinidad de arte (c. 1912, Trinity of Art), he revealed himself as a modernist, following in the steps of the great Central American author Rubén Darío. In addition to his extensive record as a creative writer, Solano led a very fruitful career as a journalist, beginning in his native El Salvador and later in Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, and the United States, where he was first the managing editor of the New Orleans–based Pan American Review and the founder and editor of the bilingual weekly La Opinión (The Opinion) from 1911 to 1912. In 1912, he moved to Laredo, Texas, to become the editor of El Progreso (The Progress), and then to Saltillo, Mexico, to become founder and editor of La Reforma (The Reform). He was a soldier in the Mexican Revolution and in 1916 also served time in the penitentiary in Mexico City for his political activities. Upon his release, he was declared persona non grata, upon which he returned to the United States. In 1920, he began a long relationship with Los Angeles’s El Heraldo de México* (The Mexican Herald) as an editorial writer. While in Los Angeles, he was under contract as a playwright to at least two of the theater houses. He remained in Los Angeles until 1929, during which time he also maintained relationships with various publications in Mexico. Of all the Los Angeles playwrights, Solano had the greatest number of works published. In his book of poems, Composiciones escogidas (1923, Selected Works), Solano lists the following published works: Verso, Fulguraciones, Trinidad de Arte (poesía) (Verses, Ponderings, Trinity of Art [Poetry]), Nadie Es Profeta en su Tierra (No One Is a Prophet in Their Own Land), Apóstoles y Judas (1915, Apostles and Judases [an allegorical play of the Mexican Revolution]), and Sangre, Crímenes de Estrada Cabrera (1920, Blood, the Crimes of Estrada Cabrera [a play attacking the eponymous Guatemalan dictator]). This four-act tragedy depicting the bloody career of the dictator and his eventual demise is a fine example of the theater of exile; the attitudes expressed in the play also help to explain why Solano was persona non grata in Central America for many years. In Uno más—prosa y verso (1929, One More—Prose and Verse), he added the following to the list: México glorioso y trágico (Revolución Mexicana en escena—prosa y verso (1928, Glorious and Tragic Mexico: The Mexican Revolution Onstage—Prose and Verse) and Con las alas abiertas (Prosa) (With Wings Spread Open [Prose]). He also mentioned various other works of drama, poetry, and prose about to be published. In his Volumen de la vida (1932, Volume of a Life) are included four of the plays that were staged in Los Angeles: Homenaje lírico a la raza (1932, Lyric Homage to Our People), La casa de Birján (Birján’s House), Las falsas apariencias (Mistaken Impressions), and Tras cornudo, apaleado (Beaten on Top of Being Cuckolded). In 1930, he also published a book of poems in his native land, En marcha (On the March), and a book about Guatemala, Guatemala a través de mi lente (Guatemala through My Lens), which was printed in Guatemala City. Despite all of these publications and stage productions, the Gray Count remains relatively unknown, the subject of almost no scholarship or criticism. 1064

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Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Solís, Roberto Ignacio (1945–). Under the pen name of Pancho Aguila, Roberto Ignacio Solís became a celebrated poet in the San Francisco area during the 1960s, both as a performer of his poems and as a published writer. But “Pancho Aguila” was just one of some twenty or more aliases used by the convicted felon, who had killed a guard while robbing an armored car in 1969 (after which he spent some twenty years in Folsom Prison). Rather than go on the straight and narrow, re-immersing himself in the world of art and literature, Solís recruited a twenty-year-old Native American, Heather Tallchief, to rob another armored car, in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1993. This time, he and his accomplice escaped with $3 million. Tallchief turned herself in to authorities in 2006, but Solís is still at large and wanted by the FBI. Like many other “pintos,” or prison writers (see Prison Literature), Solís discovered poetry while incarcerated and used it as a means of societal denunciation as well as self-exploration. Ultimately, it became part of his rehabilitation from criminality and made him a celebrity in the Chicano Movement* in the Bay Area. Numerous other Latino writers, such as Ricardo Sánchez,* Raúl Salinas,* Piri Thomas,* and Miguel Piñero* had similar awakenings to politics and art while in prison and went on to fame, if not fortune, after being paroled. Solís published the following books and chapbooks, issued by Bay Area small presses: Hijacked (1976), 11 Poems (1977), Anti-gravity (1977), and Dark Smoke: Poems. (1977). Further Reading Crane, Gregg David, “Reasonable Doubts: Crime and Punishment” American Literary History Vol. 18, No. 4 (2006): 797–813. Ramírez, Arthur, “The Next World: Poems by Third World Americans, by Joseph Bruchac” MELUS Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn 1978): 100–102.

Nicolás Kanellos

Soto, Gary (1952–). Gary Soto is the Chicano poet who is most acclaimed in academic circles in the United States. After winning some of the most prestigious creative writing awards and earning tenure at the University of California, Soto transformed himself into a highly commercial writer of children’s and young adult literature. Born on April 12, 1952, to Mexican American parents in Fresno, California, Soto was raised in the San Joaquin Valley. At California State University he came under the guidance of the renowned poet Philip Levine, who helped Soto launch his career as a poet. In 1976, Soto earned his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine and thereafter began teaching at the University of California–Berkeley. While at Berkeley, Soto’s fame became well established when he won numerous 1065

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Gary Soto.

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awards and fellowships, publishing his poetry books with such prestigious presses as that of the University of Pittsburgh. All of Soto’s works, including the fiction that he later cultivated, are very autobiographical and characterized by a highly polished craft. His poetry and prose also pay great attention to narration and characterization—in prose, as in verse, Soto is always conscious of telling a story. Soto is one of the Hispanic writers who concentrate on themes’ and literature’s universality rather than on plumbing the special or the particular in a community’s experience. Despite his renown, Soto’s department turned him down for a full professorship at Berkeley, after which Soto broke with academia to dedicate himself to the pursuit of more commercial literature, especially as a writer for children. For his poetry, Soto won the Academy of American Poets Prize (1975), the Bess Hopkins Prize (1977), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), and the Levinson Award (1984), among other honors. His short story collections and children’s books have also won awards, including the American Book Award (1984) and the Tomás Rivera Award (1998). Soto’s poetry books include The Elements of San Joaquín (1977), Where Sparrows Work Hard (1981), Black Hair (1985), Who Will Know Us? (1990), and A Natural Man (1999), among others. In 1995, he published Gary Soto: New and Selected Poems as a major compilation of his poetic career, a volume that was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Soto returned to his constant themes of childhood, family, and sense of place in two new poetry collections, One Kind of Faith (2003) and A Simple Plan (2007). His most famous young-adult novel is Baseball in April (1990), and his latest young-adult offering is Mercy on These Teenage Chimps (2007), a humorous tale about a young man who wakes up transformed into a chimpanzee. Among his children’s picture books are Boys at Work (1995), Chato’s Kitchen (1997), and Big Bushy Mustache (1998), as well as a score of other titles for beginning readers up to young adults.

Soto, Pedro Juan

In the new millennium, Soto began writing a series of novels around his recurrent protagonist, Silver Mendez, a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed poet: Nickel and Dime (2000), Poetry Lover (2001), and Amnesia in a Republican County (2003). In 2002 and 2005, respectively, Soto turned to biography in an effort to call attention to the lives of farm worker union leaders: Jesse de la Cruz: Profile of a United Farm Worker Leader and César Chávez:* A Hero for Everyone. Further Reading Paredes, Raymund, “Gary Soto” (http://www.georgetown.edu/ faculty/bassr/heath/ syllabuild/iguide/soto.html). Torres, Hector Avalos, “Gary Soto” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, First Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl. R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale research Inc., 1989: 246–252).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Soto, Pedro Juan (1928–2002). Born on July 11, 1928, in Cataño, Puerto Rico, to a barber father and a spiritualist mother who held séances at home, Pedro Juan Soto became a distinguished Puerto Rican short-story writer, novelist, and dramatist. He moved to New York to study pre-medicine at Long Island University but eventually graduated as an English major. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English in 1950, was drafted, and was sent to fight in

Pedro Juan Soto.

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Soto Vásquez, Carmen

Korea. After returning to the United States, Soto earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in 1953. In 1976, Soto earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Toulouse in France. All along, he had been writing short stories, many of them based on the discrimination against Puerto Ricans that he witnessed in New York and in the Army. Finally, after completing his master’s, he began writing as a professional for Visión (Vision) magazine, Temas (Themes), and Ecos de Nueva York (New York Echoes) in New York. Soto began winning prizes for his short stories, including for “Los Inocentes” (The Innocents), which depicted life in the Puerto Rican immigrant communities of New York and was recognized by the first-prize award of the Ateneo Puertorriquño in 1954. This is also the period when he wrote his most famous story, “Garabatos” (Scrawlings), about a struggling and misunderstood Puerto Rican artist living in poverty in New York. In 1954 or 1955, Soto returned to Puerto Rico to work in the Division of Publications of the Puerto Rican Department of Education. From then on, he wrote and published a steady stream of short stories and novels that made him one of the most famous and respected Puerto Rican literary figures. In 1956, Soto published his definitive collection of stories centering on Puerto Rican life in New York: Spiks. Ever attracted by marginality, his first published novel, Usmail (1958), portrayed a Puerto Rican mulatto living on the island of Vieques. Two other novels reflect his feelings of marginality, probably ingrained since his experience in New York: Ardiente suelo, fría estación (1961, Burning Soil, Cold Season), narrating the culture conflict a Puerto Rican faces when he returns to the Island after being gone for a long time, and El francotirador (1969, The Sniper), dealing this time with a Cuban exile living in Puerto Rico. Other novels include Temprada de duendes (1970, Ghost Season), Un oscuro pueblo sonriente (1982, A Dark Smiling People), and Memoria de mi amnesia (1991, Memory of My Amnesia). Un oscuro pueblo sonriente earned Soto Cuba’s international award, Premio Casa Las Américas (America’s House Prize). Pedro Juan Soto taught literature at the University of Puerto Rico until his death in 2002. Further Reading Simpson, Victor C., Colonialism and Narrative in Puerto Rico: A Study of Characterization in the Novels of Pedro Juan Soto (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos Soto Vásquez, Carmen (1861–1934). The first Hispanic woman to become a theater impresario in Arizona was actress Carmen Soto Vásquez, who constructed and operated the most important theater house in Tucson: Teatro Carmen. Teatro Carmen was Tucson’s largest theater house to that date, seating fourteen hundred spectators. During its heyday, from 1915 to 1921, the theater hosted some of the most important professional companies on tour, including Virginia Fábregas, María del Carmen Martínez, María Teresa Montoya, the Cuadro Novel, and numerous others. When a touring show was 1068

Soto Vélez, Clemente

not at the Carmen, its own stock company, made up in 1915 of defectors from the Compañía Nacional and the Compañía Turich, performed, and silent films were shown. True to custom, the Teatro Carmen became the pride, joy, and center of cultural life for the Mexican and Mexican American community and even served as a forum for political candidates wishing to win the Mexican vote. According to Thomas Sheridan, [T]o the Mexican elite of Tucson, Teatro Carmen was a powerful symbol of selfidentity, living proof of the depth, power, and beauty of their culture. They were the ones who supported the most vigorous cultural institution in town, a theater whose works were in Spanish, not English. Such an institution destroyed once and for all the image of Tucson as a crude little frontier town. In the face of increasing discrimination, Teatro Carmen also reassured the cultivated ranchers, merchants, and professional men and women that they belonged to a society equal or superior to that of their Anglo neighbors. The dramas of Spain’s Golden Age or the contemporary works of Mexico’s finest playwrights and composers gave lie to the derogatory stereotypes of Mexicans so prevalent in the Southwest. (201)

Unfortunately, by 1919, the Teatro Carmen began its decline, closing for a period, as the Spanish-language newspapers continuously exhorted the public to attend its functions. In 1921, in addition to serving as a theater, the theater also became a boxing ring and was closed by city authorities, supposedly because it lacked accommodations and emergency exits for large crowds, to which the newspaper El Tucsonense responded on March 26, 1921, decrying discrimination. After a poor showing for the María Teresa Montoya company in 1922, the Teatro Carmen became a dance hall and later a boxing ring again—and, in 1927, a garage. The building still stands today. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States, Origins to 1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990). Sheridan, Thomas E., Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854–1941 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).

Nicolás Kanellos Soto Vélez, Clemente (1905–1993). One of the most famous innovators of Puerto Rican poetic style and purpose, Soto Vélez was born in Lares, the seat of a famed rebellion against Spanish rule, and dedicated himself and his poetry to freeing Puerto Rico from U.S. colonial rule. He studied business and engineering at the Ramírez Commercial School in San Juan, but nevertheless became involved in writers’ groups and participated in events at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Atheneum). In 1928, he began working as a journalist and editor at the newspaper El Tiempo (Time) and began publishing poetry. In 1929 he was a leader of the iconoclastic “Atalaya de los Dioses” (Watchtower of the Gods), a poetry movement that, although mainly esthetic in its innovation 1069

Spanish–American War

and desire to break with all literary tradition, led to political activism. Many of the “atalayistas” became radicalized and joined the Puerto Rican nationalist movement, including Soto Vélez. In 1936, Soto Vélez was indicted with other nationalist leaders for inciting the overthrow of the U.S. government; he was found guilty and was imprisoned for seven years. While in prison, he met Earl Browder, secretary general of the American Communist Party, and joined the party himself. Upon release in 1942, he moved to New York, his return to Puerto Rico having been prohibited as a condition of his parole. He spent most of his remaining days in New York, where he continued his writing and his political activism. He organized Hispanic merchants into a society and was also the founder of Club Cultural del Bronx (Bronx Cultural Club) and and Casa Borinquen (Puerto Rico House); he also served as president of Círculo de Escritores y Poetas Iberomericanos (Ibero-American Writers and Poets Circle) and a member of various other cultural associations for which he organized literary events. During the 1940s, he also served as an editor for his fellow communist Juan Antonio Corretjer’s* newspaper, Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples). After years of publishing his poetry in periodicals on the island and in New York, in 1954 Soto Vélez published his first book of poetry, Abrazo interno (Internal Embrace). Other books followed, including Arboles (1955, Trees), Caballo de palo (1959, Wooden Horse) and La tierra prometida (1979, The Promised Land), book-length narrative poems that continued his experiments with esthetics and language. In 1976, his importance as a national writer was recognized by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which reprinted his Caballo de palo. Soto Vélez died in Puerto Rico on April 15, 1993. Further Reading Rodríguez, Carlos A., Simposio Clemente Soto Vélez—Simposio Klemente Soto Beles (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1990). Romano, James V., “Clemente Soto Vélez” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989: 305–309).

Nicolás Kanellos Spanish–American War (1898). The U.S. war waged against Spain grew directly out of the decades-long struggle of Cuban and Puerto Rican patriots to free themselves from Spain, a war that had lasted the better part of a century. When, in the 1890s, such leaders as José Martí* waged intensive campaigns to bring about independence, Spain’s retaliation was characteristically harsh: José Martí was killed four months after the final struggle began. One year after the insurrection started, Madrid sent General Valeriano Weyler, a hardened veteran who launched a brutal “war with war” campaign to wipe out the rebel movement. In a highly successful campaign, on the other hand, Cuban propagandists in the United States worked hand in hand with the English-language press to evoke sympathy for the Cuban cause against Spain. General Weyler was then pulled out of Cuba to quell the intensity of world public opinion, which had turned against Spain—especially among Americans. 1070

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But American support quickly turned into outright confiscation of the Cuban and Puerto Rican rebels’ cause. When the American battleship USS Maine blew up mysteriously in Havana Harbor in April 1898, the “yellow press” newspapers of the United States clamored for war against Spain. President William McKinley, reflecting an American longing for a maritime empire, seized the opportunity and declared war against Spain on April 28. Five months later, Spain capitulated and signed the Treaty of Paris, transferring Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States, handing President McKinley the overseas holdings that he wanted. One of the most important outcomes of the war, of course, was that Cuba and Puerto Rico became colonies of the United States, intensifying Cuban and Puerto Rican migration and even granting citizenship to Puerto Ricans, creating an important source of Latino culture and literature in the United States. Further Reading González, Juan, A History of Latinos in America: Harvest of Empire (New York: Viking, 2000). Hernández, José M., Cuba and the United States: Intervention and Militarism, 1868–1933 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

F. Arturo Rosales Spanish Black Legend. An early source of Anglo American antipathy towards Hispanics is found in the “Spanish Black Legend.” This anti-Hispanic “legend” has its roots in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century resistance of European nations to Spanish territorial and military expansion. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish administration itself invigorated the European attack through English propagandists’ translation of Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas’s written descriptions of the atrocities visited by the Spaniards on the Native Americans during the conquest and colonization of the Americas. The English and Dutch translators and elaborators sought to discredit the reputation of the rival Spanish Empire in the New World. As a consequence, Anglo Americans held negative views of Hispanics even before confronting Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans on New Spain’s frontiers, where the encounter itself deepened prejudices and provided a least one important rationale for “Manifest Destiny.”* The seeds of Hispanophobia took root in the European nations that vigorously attempted to check the growth of the Spanish Empire during its ascendancy during the Renaissance as the Italians, Germans, French, English, and Dutch challenged Spain’s hegemony in the New World and competed with the Catholic monarchs and their royal descendants to establish colonies in the Americas. From the fifteenth century on, the Spanish soldiers and lords who had conquered and ruled vast portions of Italy and the Lowlands were stereotypically depicted in oral and written lore as cruel, tyrannical, foppish, lazy, fanatical, and greedy, among other things. The negative image of Spaniards was disseminated precisely during the time that the use of the printing press spread throughout northern Europe into the 1071

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hands of some of Spain’s greatest adversaries. The institution of the Inquisition in Spain in 1480, as well as that country’s expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and their subsequent relocation to the Low Countries and Germany, also intensified the barrage of anti-Spanish sentiment as this more literate class of displaced Spaniards took to pen and press with vengeance. Amsterdam and Frankfurt am Main became centers of publication that issued anti-Spanish propaganda, furthering the battles of the European powers against the Spanish Empire. More important, the Protestant Reformation spread the attacks against Spain as the leading defender of Catholicism. The charge of Spanish fanaticism and obscurantism became reinforced in the minds of Protestants throughout Europe and in the English colonies in North America—stereotypes that are still applied to Hispanics in the United States. The process by which many of these anti-Spanish sentiments were developed and disseminated made use of a powerful tool in international relations: propaganda, made easier than ever before by the rise of printing as well as the spread of capitalism. The bigotry and racism applied to the Spaniards over the centuries also came to stigmatize Spanish Americans, as well as all Hispanics. Furthermore, generations of English, Germans, and French believed Spaniards to be racially inferior because of their miscegenation with Jews and Moslems, racism that was carried forward in the nascent American republic and that only intensified when Spanish Americans were understood to be the product of racial mixing with American Indians and Africans. It was not uncommon for members of Congress to refer to the Spanish Americans to the south and west as “the bastard races.” Thus, the Spanish Black Legend presented an already developed racism for elaboration in the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” For some two hundred years, one of the goals of native Hispanic writers in the United States has been overcoming stereotypes and fighting prejudice. Even immigrant writers have often felt the need to defend their communities and cultural identities against these types of prejudicial attitudes; numerous immigrant periodicals announced prominently in their mastheads that this defense was part of their mission, quite aside from the number of periodicals entitled La Defensa or a variety thereof. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Image in American Culture (Boulder, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1998). Weber, David J., The Spanish American Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

Nicolás Kanellos Spanish Civil War. See Spanish Republican Exiles Spanish Harlem. See Barrio Spanish-Language Book Market. Today, according to demographers, the United States may be considered the country with the fifth largest 1072

Spanish-Language Book Market

population of Spanish-speakers. It is projected that in ten years, only Mexico will have a larger population of Spanish speakers. Latinos in the United States make up the country’s largest minority group, more than forty million people; by 2050, Latinos will make up as much as one fourth of the total population of the United States. By then, the Mexican-origin population of the United States will be equal to eighty percent of the population in Mexico. By population, Los Angeles is the second largest Mexican city, New York the second largest Puerto Rican city, and Miami the second largest Cuban city. These statistics also imply significant marketing data relating to Hispanics, such as their educational level and their buying power in the billions of dollars, which in turn implies their potential consumption of information and cultural products. The following data represent tempting characteristics for industries that publish books in Spanish: there are some five hundred Hispanic newspapers published in the United States, circulating among some 11 million readers. There are some 550 radio stations broadcasting in Spanish, a number that is rapidly expanding. The for-profit commercial stations are not the only ones broadcasting; in fact, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce sponsors a radio program that reaches some seventy important markets. In publishing, a similar phenomenon exists: the largest Latino publishing house, Arte Público Press,* is a not-for-profit institution at the University of Houston. At any one time, more than one million students at universities study the Spanish language and literature in Spanish, pointing to an inevitable future. Spanish is the “foreign” language most taught at every level of the education system, so much so that many other foreign language programs, such as the traditional French, German, and Italian have had to cut back their operations or have ceased to exist altogether. The teaching and learning of Spanish fulfills many different needs from those other languages in that Spanish is a living language of commerce and community in the United States and can be considered as a national language—despite efforts by nativists* to call for deportation of immigrants and to declare English the “official language of the United States.” If the demographic and acquisitive power of Latinos is attractive to the publishing industry, there are a number of serious barriers to publishing and distributing Spanish books that must be considered. The majority of Latinos are younger than twenty-one and as yet do not have the buying power to acquire many books, nor the economic, social or political power to influence the buyers for libraries, bookstores, and schools—although they do read Spanish-language books in schools and libraries (not necessarily those of their choosing or preference). The habit and pleasure of looking for and buying a book in Spanish has not yet formed, simply because Hispanic books are not part of their environment: their homes and their neighborhoods. In fact, per capita, Hispanics are served by fewer libraries and bookstores than any other segment of the population, except perhaps for Native Americans. In addition, the institution with the greatest power in their environment, the school, only values information sources written in English and actively promotes these 1073


resources as the only ones to be trusted. For elementary and secondary schools, Spanish continues to be considered “the language of poverty.” Even bilingual education classes only exist to transition the students to speaking, reading, and writing English, definitely not to assist in the maintenance of their native tongue. Usually this transition is achieved within two or three years of the bilingual education system, whose primary goal is preparing the students to receive the rest of their education exclusively in English. The above, of course, is in reference to the bilingual school population that has access to books in Spanish. But some fifty percent of Latino students drop out of school before finishing high school. It should be assumed that these drop-outs will not become part of the market for books in Spanish. The great majority of Latinos are part of the working class with low incomes and low educational attainment. It is a given that the largest part of their salaries will go to paying for necessities of life and family, and whatever is left may be spent on music and sports, not to mention alcohol. (This assumption, which is common in the publishing industry as well as in others, will be discussed further below.) Despite the high drop-out level, and even though Latinos are predominantly working-class, the real extent of their literacy is not known. The lack of schooling does not necessarily mean illiteracy among Latinos. Because Spanish is written phonetically, it is easy to learn to read and write. There may be millions of Latinos in the United States who read Spanish, despite having had no formal education. And the value of a few years of education in the homeland before immigrating to the United States should not be underestimated, nor that of the power of the autodidact in a land of advanced literacy and technology. In addition, because many Hispanics are immigrants anxious to advance the economic future of their children, their priority after housing and food is the education of their children—and despite the drop-out rate, in fact Latino enrollment at universities has shown the most growth of any group in recent years. All of this is to say that there is a large market potential for Spanish books in the United States, especially when the following cultural and social class characteristics are considered: 1. The ethnic, social, and linguistic relevance of the material. The material should provide information and value according to the culture of immigrants, their nationalities and national dialects and needs in their adopted country. 2. The needs of children for progress in school and ascend the social ladder in the United States. 3. The ease and comfort of purchasing or borrowing material. The material should be available in oft-frequented stores, supermarkets, and community centers, not in the large chain bookstores that make no effort to attract Latinos. 4. The hottest media for promoting products to Latinos are, first, radio, and, second, television. Without an advertising program and a distribution system for books in place, Hispanic newspapers have to date not proved their value in creating a market for books. But as yet, none of these media have solved the problem of lack of bookstores and other points of distribution.

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If the foregoing is complicated, the fragmentation of the Hispanic market is even more so. Hispanics in the United States are the heterogeneous group that most reproduces the ethnic, linguistic, and racial origins of its homelands: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Distinct ethnic and dialect groups Varied socioeconomic levels (although the working class predominates) Dispersal in distinct regions and cities of the United States Variance in the language spoken—because of the loss of Spanish among the young or simply because of their preference for English

There are daunting problems in marketing books in Spanish to this audience: 1. The lack of a promotional infrastructure for books in Spanish: reviews and interviews in the print and electronic media, author tours, book fairs, and so on, as well as the lack of capital among small publishers to advertise books in Spanish. 2. The lack of distribution avenues: national distributors with a sales force, wholesalers, bookstores, and so on; the current industry has national and regional distributors and wholesalers who handle few books in Spanish, and those who do handle them do a full twenty-five percent of their trade in Puerto Rico. These businesses do not have buyers competent in Spanish, and what they mostly handle are imported books, not books by and for Latinos in the United States. They also are adverse to dealing with small publishers, who are in fact the largest producers of books in Spanish in the United States. 3. General bookstores and chain bookstores often do not, or only sparingly, offer books in Spanish, making no effort to reach out to Latinos. When they have a Spanish section, it is made up of an indiscriminate hodge-podge of dictionaries, New Age, Latin American Boom authors, and children’s books. The store personnel do not attend to these shelves as they do to others, and when a title sells, they do not reorder it. 4. What few Spanish bookstores there are, as well as distributors, prefer to order imported books rather than those produced by U.S. Hispanics, because they are able to buy greater quantities and to see higher margins. Latino books produced in the United States are costlier because of the high price of production here and the smaller margin that small publishers eke from the sale of their products. This represents a prejudicial barrier to the distribution and sales of Latino materials created in the United States and reflective of the culture here. This barrier becomes even greater, because many Spanish-language bookstores and distributors are also the selectors and suppliers of books for schools and libraries, thus making the population that would benefit most from material reflecting their national culture and language, ethnicity, and environment the most deprived.

Most of the above has the effect of dissuading publishers from entering the Spanish-language book market. Publishing houses are understandably reticent about publishing books for a poorly defined or organized market. Further Reading Críticas: An English-Speakers Guide to the Latest Spanish-Language Titles (http://www. criticasmagazine.com).


Spanish-Language Literature

Spanish-Language Literature. Throughout the long history of Hispanic writing in what became the United States, Spanish has been the dominant language in literary production. Spanish was the language of daily life and commerce in the lands obtained by the United States through conquest and the purchase of southern, western, and southwestern territories. In the West and Southwest, despite the imposition of Anglo American law and official culture, the language survived in the home and the workplace as hundreds of thousands of principally Mexican children were denied an equal education and pushed out of segregated schools as “drop-outs.” Likewise, in the large immigrant communities in the West, the Southwest, Florida, and the New York and Chicago areas, the lack of educational attainment and the propensity for industries to form large labor camps of Hispanic immigrants worked to further the isolation in ghettoes, preserving the Spanish language. These conditions prevail even today for many immigrants. The literature up to World War II that arose from such native* and immigrant* communities was predominantly written in Spanish, as were their newspapers, periodicals, and books. Even today, when English dominates and saturates public and commercial life and there is a large Latino middle class forming that includes educational attainment at the highest levels in history for Latinos, well over forty percent of the materials submitted to such publishers as Arte Público Press* are written in Spanish. That Arte Público and the majority of publishers in the United States produce books mostly written in or translated to English has led outside observers to conclude that Spanish is waning and that Latino literature today is written overwhelmingly in English. Simply stated, publishers cannot issue many works in Spanish because the review, distribution, and retail networks are practically nonexistent in the United States for literature written in Spanish. Because of this, publishing more than a poor sampling of books in Spanish is a financially unfeasible proposition. Spanish-language literary publishing does exist, however, in community newspapers, both commercial and nonprofit, as well as in a handful of Spanish-language magazines, such as Ventana abierta (Open Window), edited by Luis Leal,* and in a plethora of online magazines. All of this is not to say that Latinos have never published in English or in other languages. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Cuban exiles issued numerous works in English as part of their effort to involve the American people and their political representatives in their cause of independence. Early nineteenth-century newspapers in Louisiana were issued bilingually in French and Spanish, and then in a French–Spanish–English trilingual format. Until recently, one of Tampa’s oldest newspapers, La Gaceta (The Gazette), was issued trilingually in Spanish, Italian, and English; but the real growth of English-language writing and publishing was integral and grassroots based as more and more Latinos began to see themselves as Americans, exercising their rights as citizens of the United States. Whereas in the nineteenth century a few novels were published, beginning with María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s* romances, it was not until the post-World War II period that publishing in 1076

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English began to grow, principally as a reflection of Latinos across the country who claimed their American identity and rights—they had fought valiantly for the United States in the war and their veterans returned to their communities to found such patriotic Latino civil rights organizations as the American G.I. Forum. It was their children in the 1960s who erupted with the Chicano and Puerto Rican civil rights movements, accompanied by an aggressive and outspoken literature written quite often in English or in Spanish–English code-switching. (See Language Choice in Literature and Bilingualism in Literature) This code-switching, however, had begun in the late nineteenth century as Anglo and Latino communities interfaced, although they did not flourish as an esthetic form until the 1960s. Today, most of the Latino literature issued by the large commercial publishing houses in the United States is in English. As models of access to mainstream culture and mass marketing, these English-language texts further influence and inspire young writers to produce works in English and ignore the possibility of writing for a Spanish-speaking audience at home and abroad— quite the opposite of their literary history and heritage. The irony is that, after some of these authors achieve success in English, their publishing houses have their works translated to Spanish for Hispanic communities at home and abroad. Many of these writers, having been educated exclusively in Englishlanguage American schools and colleges, are incapable of producing credible works in the Spanish language. As one would surmise, the opposite is also true: many writers in the United States whose first language is Spanish cannot produce works in English and thus go unpublished. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “La literature hispana en los Estados Unidos y el mercado del libro” (http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/congresos/valladolid/ponencias/unidad_diversidad_ del_espanol/3_el_espanol_en_los_EEUU/kanellos_n.htm).

Nicolás Kanellos Spanish Republican Exiles. In the 1930s, Spanish political refugees reached U.S. shores from across the Atlantic, fleeing the Spanish fascism of the Flanges led by Francisco Franco. Hispanic communities across the United States embraced the refugees and sympathized with their cause; many Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican organizations held fund-raisers for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Expatriates were fast to establish their own exile press. Their efforts hit fertile soil in Depression-era communities that were already hotbeds for union and socialist organizing. Manhattan and Brooklyn were the centers of Hispanic anti-fascist fervor and contributed to numerous newspapers and publications that maintained socialist or anarchist tendencies. Such newspapers as España Libre (Free Spain, 1939–1977) lasted a considerable amount of time. In addition, many Hispanic labor and socialist organizations, made up of Spanish immigrant workers who were not necessarily exiles, also published newspapers that came to support the Republican 1077

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cause; the long-running anarchist paper Cultura Proletaria (Proletarian Culture, 1910–1959) was one. The Hispanic labor press in Tampa, Chicago, and the Southwest also expressed solidarity with the Spanish expatriates, supporting the Republican cause in their pages and raising funds for refugees and victims of the Spanish Civil War. In the 1930s, such playwrights as Leopoldo González* created plays to be performed at fund-raising events for the war effort at the Spanish mutual aid societies and even at such commercial theater houses as the Teatro Hispano, and writers such as José Enamorado Cuesta left New York to fight in the trenches of Spain against the fascists. Such writers and cultural workers as Prudencio de Pereda,* Marita Reid,* Ramón Sender,* and Erasmo Vando* maintained the cause with publications and performances for many years from the late 1930s into the 1960s as Franco survived as one of the longest-lived dictators in history. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodical in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Stavans, Ilán (1961–). Born in Mexico City in 1961 into a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, Stavans came to New York to pursue graduate degrees in Jewish Studies. After receiving his B.A. at Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, he earned a master’s degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary (1987) in New York. In 1990, Stavans received his Ph.D. in Spanish from Columbia University and has since written a series of articles and books espousing his impressions and opinions of Latino life and literature. Since 1993, he has been a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Although considered by some, especially in the mainstream media, the preeminent Latino literary critic, his work has found little acceptance from many Latino scholars, especially among the generation active since the 1960s in recovering some three centuries of lost authors and texts. Stavans has published and lectured widely on Latino literature and has even hosted his own PBS television program, “Conversations with Ilan Stavans.” He has also published an autobiography, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (2001), and a 352-page collection of his essays, criticism, and stories: The Essential Ilan Stavans (2001). His conservative and often controversial ideas about Latino culture are fully articulated in his The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (1995). His project to translate Don Quijote to Spanglish in a book titled Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2004), has drawn criticism from some linguists, who denote the often pejorative term “Spanglish” as bilingual* code-switching. Despite the popular acceptance of his work, Stavans has been perceived by many other Latino scholars as being far removed from the Latino life and culture that they believe he inaccurately por1078

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trays. Stavans has authored a number of books, editions, and anthologies in Jewish and Latin American literature; in fact, he is a recipient of the National Jewish Book Award. Stavans is also an acclaimed author of The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories (1998) and the novel The Disappearance (2006). Further Reading Iffland, James, “Mangled in La Mancha: Don Quijote Meets the Spanglish of Ilan Stavans” in Don Quijote: Across Four Centuries: 1605–2005, ed. Carroll B. Johnson (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006: 107–135). Suárez, Lucía, “The Dynamics of Memory: Geography and Language in John Phillip Santos’s and Ilan Stavan’s Memoirs” Michigan Quarterly Review Vol. 41, No. 3 (2002 Summer): 464–488. Tarnopolsky, Noga, “Only 40 with 17 Books? How Does Ilan Stavans Do It? His Is Less the Voice of a Displaced Hispanic Than of an American ‘Making His Mark’: On Borrowed Words; The Essential Ilan Stavans” Forward (July 27, 2001): 11.

Nicolás Kanellos Stereotypes. Originating from a printing term dating to the decades following Johan Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable type printing press, stereotype in this early period referred to cast molds of letters and symbols that could be repeated over and over again in identical patterns. From this mechanical origin evolved the use of the term to describe social and psychological imaging and patterns based on rigid, unchanging perceptions to define a person, groups of people, cultures, or classes of items according to a single type or to partial and distorted features. Stereotypes of Latinas and Latinos in the United States are thus defined as representations of Latina and Latino groups and individual Latinas and Latinos as unchanging ethnic types identified by selective qualities or traits based on external perceptions or imagined features. Examples include “illegal,” “Spic,” “beaner,” and “Latin Lover”—slurs that emphasize, respectively, the criminalization of undocumented workers; accented speech (e.g., the Spanish inflected pronunciation of “speak” as “spick”); common foods eaten (e.g., pinto beans, black beans, and other varieties of legumes), and the hypersexuality ascribed to Latinos (and other people of color) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Caucasian Protestant Christians as a contrast to their own perceived superior morality. Although some distinguish between positive and negative stereotypes (e.g., romantic Latin Lover v. criminal illegal), contemporary social science and cultural studies literature underscores the invalid and harmful nature of biased images that distort ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and culture. Such distortions lead to incomplete, biased, and rigid portrayals, whether idealized or demonized, forming the basis of racial profiling, a harsh form of official stereotyping that views Latinos and other minorities with suspicion solely because of their race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. This practice is sometimes called “DWB”—i.e., driving while black/brown—and occurs when police or witnesses identify or arrest individuals not because of bad conduct or in response to verifiable evidence but because of their racial profile. Early literary works, 1079

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including José Antonio Villareal’s* Pocho (1959) and Piri Thomas’s* Down These Mean Streets (1967), as well as more recent documentary journalism, such as Enrique Cirules’s Mafia in Havana, contain depictions of Latina and Latino stereotypes before the term “racial profiling” emerged. In the twenty-first century, cultural studies scholars explore the process of stereotyping within broader contexts and concepts like “the imaginary,” “image construction,” “thought collective projection,” and related ideas of postcolonialist discourse. These ideas share the assumption that social groups (thought collectives) generally perceive others through filters of their own experience (image construction) and imaginations, perceptions that are projected on that which is other, often in stereotyping ways (the imaginary) drawn from biased preconceptions devoid of experiential dimensionality. Important scholarly investigations since the 1970s have discovered many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English-language texts that describe Mexicans, for instance, as lazy, dirty, violent, and sexually promiscuous based on writers’ limited exposure to soldiers, traders, and other workers of the Southwest borderlands and Western frontier. Early examples of these usages, sometimes categorized as the defamatory “Mexican greaser” iconography, appear in the writings of Boston writer Richard Henry Dana (1787–1879), historian Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918), U.S. soldier and senator Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), and many other travelers and immigrants to New Spain, Mexico, and, after 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the U.S. Southwest. Many researchers trace a significant subsoil of this racist iconography to La Leyenda Negra (the Spanish Black Legend*), one of the Americas’ most widespread and deep-seated cultural stereotypes. The Black Legend was seeded in the foreign policy of Britain, her New England colonies, and her allies during the seventeenth-century age of exploration to demonize Spain, her allies, and the colonies of New Spain in their competition for “New World” hegemony. Strongly anti-Spanish and anti–Roman Catholic, the Black Legend accused Spain’s monarchs of behavior dominions—especially in their treatment of New World natives and non-Catholics in general—so extraordinarily brutal and tyrannous that it justified England’s (and later the United States’) designs on Spanish territories in North, Central, and South America. The Black Legend engendered generations of racist attitudes and prejudice against Spain, the Spanish, Catholicism, and, by extension, the descendants of colonial Mexico and Latin America, continuing to the present in the form of anti-immigrant hysteria. Other Latina and Latino stereotypes were generated by Spanish racial purists and their conservative criollo (i.e., American-born Caucasian) supporters among Mexicans and other Latin Americans. These race-based, ethnocentric views are at their core white-supremacist and anti-mestizaje and consist of many color-coded racial stereotypes, including such still-commonplace pigment identifications as trigueño (buckwheat dark-skinned), moreno (brownskinned or brunette), and güero (fair-skinned or blonde), by which individuals 1080

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are lumped and social stratified. Other largely negative stereotypes include pocho, used by Mexican natives to refer to U.S.-born Mexican Americans, “Tio Taco” applied by Chicanos against other Latinos as an equivalent of Uncle Tom–like subservience or vendidismo (i.e., selling out), and “macho,” employed to describe the hypermasculine narcissism of adolescent boys and men. Like the “Black is Beautiful” grassroots pride movement of the 1960s, however, many Latina and Latino artists, activists, and researchers have “talked back” to the colonialist past and redefined and reclaimed concepts such as mestizo, mestizaje, and the indigenous American Indian roots of all the Americas. For these Hispanics, the reclamation is proudly multi and hybrid, black and brown and red and white and yellow, in an affirmation of La Raza—literally “the Race,” but, more idiomatically, Hispanic people and their communities in general. The ubiquity of media images in print, radio, film, television, and their contemporary digital spin-offs has played an important role in stereotyping. In addition to reflecting and reproducing stereotypes prevalent in society, the media also reinforce distorted images both through repetition and dissemination, as well as invention. For example, the “greaser” iconography of the nineteenth century was carefully transferred onto silent film screens in the work of D. W. Griffith (e.g., 1915’s The Birth of a Nation), among many other early filmmakers. The successful silent movies presented overtly sexist, racist, and white-supremacist views of America to mass audiences, including such defamatory portrayals of Mexicans and Latinos as in Ah Sing and the Greaser (1910), The Greaser’s Gauntlet (c. 1914), and Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914). These and many others carried over to the talkies and radio entertainment media, serving as a basis for similar slurs broadcast directly into private homes. As many film scholars (e.g., Gary D. Keller, David Maciel, Clara Rodríguez, et al.) and anti-defamation advocates (e.g., the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of La Raza, and so on) have pointed out, the widespread circulation of stereotypes by mass media outlets is in part a result of the absence of minority representation in the industry itself. This lack of representation extends from the media boardrooms and technical crews to the writers and talent seen and heard by the mass consumers. Other media and communication specialists argue that although fair representation on the airwaves would help, the presence of barrio exploitation products (such as gang movies and sexist hip-hop) proves that numerical equity is inadequate to redress the prevalence of stereotypes within society itself. On national television there have been only a few Latina and Latino representations to match the popularity of the Ricky Ricardo character portrayed by Cuban-born musician Desi Arnaz on the comedy sitcom I Love Lucy, still in syndication worldwide. The success and longevity of Arnaz’s role, along with his behind-the-camera contributions as a director and producer, effectively balanced the deployment of ethnic stereotypes on I Love Lucy by countering them with humor, dimensional characterizations, and layered plots. More recent performers include Colombian John Leguizamo, Chicano George Lopez, Nuyorican Rosie Perez, Puerto Rican/Surinamese Jimmy Smits, and 1081

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Chicanas Eva Longoria and America Ferrera. Similar progress appears in television broadcasting through such figures as executive Roland Santos and reporters Soledad O’Brien, Juan Quiñonez, Cristina Saralegui, and others whose work consistently works as a counterforce to the superficiality of conventional Latina and Latino stereotyping. Contemporary culture studies specialists emphasize the critical importance of acknowledging collective imaginaries (i.e., shared symbols and fantasies) to the formation of stereotypic thinking among individuals and to the persistence of stereotypes within society at large. That is, the slurring and marginalization of people perceived to be culturally and racially different is an ancient practice that derived from the prehistorical need for tribal security and defense, a byproduct of which was the demonization of “enemies” and “strangers” as alien beings worthy of conquest and destruction by such terms as savage, bloodthirsty, half-breed, nigger, greaser, witch, hussy, and illegal. When the same tactics are used in contemporary society, they often reflect cultural ignorance or political agendas that seek exclusionary power for a privileged few. These empowered few often reject inclusive democracy for all and view diversity challenges to stereotyping as “mere political correctness,” or “PC,” an originally valid concept that has been disparaged by a systematic campaign to maintain an unequal, exclusionary socioeconomic status quo. Challenging such untenable stereotypes has often fueled the creativity and popularity of Hispanic writers and artists. In the same way, what has elevated many Latina and Latino popular-culture titles to the level of contemporary classics is their use of literary motifs and subtexts to critique such a narrow, undemocratic viewpoint. Examples of such works include the novel, film, and song, Ramona, the grassroots anthem “La Borinqueña,” the films Salt of the Earth and High Noon, the plays West Side Story, Zoot Suit, and Coser y Cantar (To Sew and to Sing), television programs such as Chico and the Man, and the documentaries The Lemon Grove Incident and Los Mineros (The Miners). These and countless other examples demonstrate the vital relevance of literature to all areas of Latina and Latino culture and personal experience. Further Reading Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, gen. ed., Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004). Gibson, Charles, ed., The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Knopf, 1971). Powell, Phillip W., Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudice Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Su Teatro. See García, Anthony J. Suárez, Mario (1923–1998). Mario Suárez, one of Chicano letters’ earliest short-story writers, was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. One of his best 1082

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characteristics as a short story writer was not his development of the craft itself, but rather his ability to connect with people from all walks of life. In his short stories, which he referred to as “sketches,” Suárez mastered the creation of detailed images of the many people he met, whom he then molded into characters in his stories. In several of his sketches, he describes the people in the Chicano neighborhood where he grew up, an inner city barrio called El Hoyo. Writing about the barrio and its inhabitants was important to Suárez, who believed that the stories of the oft-forgotten Chicano people were worthy of print. Suárez was the oldest of five siblings whose parents emigrated from Mexico shortly after the Mexican Revolution in the early 1920s. He came from a working-class family: his father worked as a tailor and his mother as a seamstress. They lived in a humble apartment in Tucson. After finishing high school, Suárez joined the Navy and served with a coast patrol stationed in Lakehurst, New Jersey. In 1943, he was sent to Brazil, where he served until 1945. After World War II, he enrolled at the University of Arizona, majoring in English, but eventually switched to Spanish, focusing on folklore, and graduated with a B.A. in 1952. As a child he was encouraged to read by his father, but it was during his studies at the university that he developed an interest in writing as well. Soon after beginning his university studies he began to write his first sketches, centering them around the theme for which he would become known: everyday people and the conflicts that surround their lives. Dr. Ruth Keenan, his freshman English professor, was an important influence on Suárez’s early writing career and mentored his progress. With her encouragement, he submitted his first sketches to Arizona Quarterly in the summer of 1947. To his surprise, the journal accepted his first five stories: “El Hoyo,” “Señor Garza,” “Cuco Goes to a Party,” “Loco-Chu,” and “Kid Zopilote.” The stories “Southside Run” (1948), “Maestría” (1948, Mastery/Teaching), and “Mexican Heaven” (1950) followed in subsequent issues. He later published “Las comadres” (1969, The Godmothers) and “Los coyotes” (1972, The Coyotes) in the Chicano literary magazine Con Safos, as well as “The Migrant” (1982) in Revista Chicana Riqueña. In 1949, he traveled to New York City in hopes of finding a publisher that might be interested in publishing his work. He used “Cuco Goes to a Party” as the basis for a full-length novel, but it was rejected by Macmillan. The editors’ encouragement to continue writing inspired him to remain in New York for several more months, but he eventually decided to return because of financial difficulty. Upon returning to Tucson, he met Cecilia Cota-Robles, whom he later married in 1954, and together they raised three children: Francisco Amado (1955), Mario Miguel, or “Mike” (1956), and Laura Harriet (1957). In 1957 he received a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship that gave him the financial support he needed to further develop his stories. At the University of Arizona, Suárez enrolled in a literary technique course with Richard Sommers, who, as an established writer, also mentored his progress. It was during this course that Suárez produced his second novel, Trouble in Petate, which portrays the unfortunate fate of a young Indian who 1083

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returns to his hometown and dies after an unsuccessful attempt to gain meaningful employment in a large and distant city. Although he was satisfied with the novel, he chose not to seek a publisher because he believed that the work would be rejected. Between 1952 and 1954, Suárez wrote his third novel, A Guy’s Worst Enemy, portraying a young man who attempts to become a mobster but is eventually killed in the process. In what would become a pattern of sorts, Suárez deferred seeking publication so that he could work on other stories that he had left in various stages of completion in the late 1940s. It was his intent to eventually combine the works from the Arizona Quarterly with his other unpublished texts into a single work that he planned to title “Chicano Sketches.” In 1975, Suárez completed a draft of a fourth novel, The Kiosk, which depicts the experiences of the marginalized people in southwestern border towns. The premise of the text is that few individuals are blessed with good fortune for more than a short period of time in their lives. Suárez did not seek publication for this novel either, believing that the draft needed more polishing. Although Suárez’s novels may have never come to fruition, his short stories, defined by their tightness of description, have become an established part of the Chicano literary cannon. “El Hoyo,” one of Suárez’s most anthologized pieces, epitomizes his style and command of detail. It provides an in-depth look at the barrio in which he grew up and describes its inhabitants as Chicanos— and, more important, as individuals. In this story he employs the Mexican dish capirotada (a bread pudding with many diverse ingredients) as a metaphor to describe the differences that can be found among Chicanos. As he explains, despite that all capirotadas may look similar and contain the base ingredient of bread, each one uses a variety of additional different ingredients and thus develops its own unique taste, nonetheless remaining capirotada. Although most Chicanos share some common traits, each Chicano must be distinguished as a person having a unique set of experiences. This same idea is expressed in another commonly anthologized short story, “Señor Garza,” in which people from all walks of life visit Garza’s Barber Shop, from lawbreakers and sheriff’s deputies to zoot-suiters, drunks, and even some friends. Garza, who is very versatile, communicates with each on an individual basis, appreciating the different qualities that each person possesses, thus able to connect with each one of them separately. The characters in Suárez’s works are developed both in physical and character description and treated with a complexity true to human character. “Kid Zopilote” provides an excellent example of this in which Suárez creates an in-depth portrayal of the pachuco,* or zoot-suiter. Although Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad (1950) describes the pachuco as an extreme form of a Mexican who has lost his culture, Suárez chose two years before that to humanize the pachuco as a young Mexican American caught between two cultures and in a society that continually labels and judges him based on his looks, language, and dress. The moral of the story unfolds at the end when Pepe, the young man who is branded “Kid Zopilote,” is told by his uncle that a zopilote (buzzard) can never be a peacock and does not want to, 1084

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alluding to a similar principle found in Rudolfo Anaya’s* Bless Me, Ultima (1972): the impossibility of defying one’s destiny. These stories and several others, both previously published and unpublished, have now been anthologized to fulfill Suárez’s dream of creating a collection of his work: Chicano Sketches: Short Stories by Mario Suárez (2004), edited by Francisco A. Lomelí, Cecilia Cota-Robles Suárez, and Juan José Casillas-Núñez. Together these sketches provide a literary space where Chicanos are not simply painted with broad strokes in the way that several outsiders, both Mexican and Anglo, have done. Instead, Suárez depicts a complex reality in which Chicanos personify positive and negative qualities, face hardships, reveal flaws and exude virtues, and, most important, express their humanity. Perhaps this is why Suárez is one of the most significant Chicano short-story writers to date; he writes not of one Chicano experience but of the many Chicano experiences that are seldom told. Aside from fiction writing, Suárez also wrote for area newspapers. Between February 14 and June 6, 1958, he served as contributing editor to a Hispanic newspaper in Tucson called P-M, short for Prensa Mexicana (Mexican Press). Assuming the pseudonym “El Gavilán” (The Hawk), he wrote provocative and investigative articles in English and Spanish that attest to his political activism as a defender of people’s rights. In his writing he denounced social wrongs and political corruption and for this was warned by then-governor of Arizona Howard Pyle to cease the attacks or face reprisals against his family. In 1958, Suárez moved his family to California, where he believed there would be better opportunities. In California, he continued to write editorials, polemical essays, and op-ed pieces for newspapers such as the Herald-Dispatch, a local African American newspaper, and La Raza, a Los Angeles based Chicano newspaper. By 1960, Suárez began to pursue his secondary teaching credential at California State University at Fullerton, which he completed in 1962. He also became involved in local grassroots political activities, spurred by the growing Chicano Movement,* and joined an East Los Angeles chapter of MAPA (Mexican American Political Association). He continued to use his involvement to serve the community by supporting crusades for local justice and civil rights and by assisting in political campaigns and other community-based activities. In 1966, he was hired by Claremont College to develop a tutorial reading and writing program in which his principal role was designing and implementing a new reading curriculum for the impoverished. Suárez’s keen sense of justice and involvement in local politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s prove that he did not distance himself from his subjects as a writer, which may be why he was so successful in capturing the images of his people. Like the more recognized and celebrated Chicano writer Tomás Rivera,* he wrote from within the community, not solely as a passive observer. By 1970, Suárez began teaching at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California, until he retired in 1990. As a full-time professor, he was a pioneer in creating interdisciplinary curricula for Chicano students that 1085

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focused on history, literature, education, and culture that was relevant to the Chicano community. He maintained an active political and cultural agenda until battling a long illness during the mid-1990s. He died on February 27, 1998, in San Dimas, California, but he lives on through his literary legacy, as do scores of other Chicanos; as his daughter wrote in the foreword to Chicano Sketches, “My father is no longer with us, but his stories remain as priceless portraits of everyday heroes leading fascinating everyday lives.” Further Reading Lomelí, Francisco A., Cecilia Cota-Robles Suárez, and Juan José Casillas-Núñez, eds., Chicano Sketches: Stories by Mario Suárez (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).

Spencer Herrera Suárez, Virgil (1962–). The only son of a pattern-cutter and a piecemeal seamstress working in the sweatshops, Suárez was born on January 29, 1962, in Havana, Cuba, and was raised in the United States since 1974. Suárez earned a B.A. in creative writing from California State University–Long Beach (1984) and an MFA in creative writing (1987) from Louisiana State University, where he studied with Vance Bourjaily. After graduating, he embarked on a long career as a professor of creative writing at various universities, ultimately earning tenure at Florida State University–Tallahassee. Although educated in the United States from age twelve, Suárez has been preoccupied with themes of immigration and acclimatization to life and culture in the United States, where he arrived as a refugee from Communist Cuba. Before settling in the United States, however, his family spent four years in Spain in a refugee community. Suárez is the author of five successful novels, as well as numerous stories, essays, and poems, which have been published in literary magazines. He is also an active book reviewer for newspapers around the country and an editor of anthologies of Latino literature. His first novel, Latin Jazz (1989), chronicles the experiences of a Cuban immigrant family in Los Angeles by adopting the narrative perspectives of each of the family members. His second novel, The Cutter (1991), deals with the desperate attempts of a young sugar-cane cutter to leave Cuba and join his family in the United States. Suárez’s collection of short fiction, Welcome to the Oasis (1992), portrays a new generation Book cover with photo of Virgil Suárez as a child. 1086

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of young Hispanics who struggle to integrate themselves into American culture while preserving pieces of their heritage. Havana Thursdays (1995) and Going Under (1996) are mature novels in which Suárez casts a critical eye at middle-class Cuban American life in Miami. Havana Thursdays brings together a family of exceptional women attending a funeral who are in the process of adjusting to their loss. The funeral becomes an occasion for a painful assessment of their lives. Virgil Suárez had this to say about the women: “I wanted to create a garland—a necklace of voices beautiful and lasting. After I finished the book, I spent almost a year being haunted by the voices of these great women.” Going Under: A Cuban-American Fable is the chronicle of a Cuban American yuppie who is sold on the American Dream, nervous and energetic and blind to the consequences of his feverish race up the ladder of Virgil Suárez. success as he loses sight of and control over things of value— family, friends, identity. Virgil Suárez has also compiled two collections of autobiographical essays, stories, and poems: Spared Angola: Memories of a Cuban-American Childhood and Infinite Refuge. In both books he uses his own life experiences as a refugee and immigrant to ponder universal questions of identity, homelessness, and being the outsider. Suárez’s autobiographical and testimonial voice continues in his published poems in such collections as You Come Singing (1998), Garabato Poems (1999), In the Republic of Loving: Poems (1999), Banyan: Poems (2001), Guide to the Blue Tongue: Poems (2001), and 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems (2005). Suárez has conducted readings, workshops, and lectures in many universities, colleges, schools, book fairs, libraries, prisons, and community groups both nationally and internationally. He has been an untiring promoter of Latino literature and has compiled various anthologies in this mission, including Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction (1992, with Delia Poey), Paper Dance: Fifty Latino Poets (1995, with 1087

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Victor Hernández Cruz* and Leroy V. Quintana*), and Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology (1996, with Delia Poey). He is a member of PEN National and International, The Academy of American Poets, Associated Writers’ Program, and Modern Languages Association. When Mr. Suárez is not out giving readings and lectures in the universities, colleges, and the community at large, he lives with his wife and daughters in Tallahassee, Florida, where he is a full professor of Latino literature and creative writing at Florida State University. Further Reading Cortina, Rodolfo J., “History and Development of Cuban American Literature: A Survey” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States, ed. Francisco Lomelí (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 40–61).

Nicolás Kanellos Svich, Caridad (1963–). Of mixed Cuban, Argentine, Spanish, and Croatian ancestry, Latina playwright Caridad Svich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 30, 1963. Svich’s career has been focused since her undergraduate days on playwriting and theatrical production: she received a B.F.A. in theatre–performing arts from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte (1985) and then went on for an M.F.A. in theater–playwriting at the University of California, San Diego (1988). After finishing her studies, Svich developed her playwriting abilities and practice through workshops and residencies at such venues as the LaJolla Playhouse (1987), the South Coast Repertory Theater (1990), New York’s INTAR, under Maria Irene Fornes’s mentorship (1988–1990), the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (1998), and the Women’s Project in New York (1991, 2004, and 2007). Likewise, her plays have been produced in commercial and academic venues on both coasts of the United States and as far abroad as Scotland, England, Italy, and Germany. Svich is a trained literary translator and has published numerous translations of plays written in Spanish, most notably those of Federico García Lorca. As one of the most intellectual and academically prepared of the Latino playwrights, Svich has also lectured and taught at universities around the country and published numerous studies and anthologies of Scene from Caridad Svich’s “Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on Latino playwrights. the Neon Shell that Was Once Her Heart.” 1088

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Svich’s awards include Cincinnati Playhouse’s Rosenthal New Play Prize (1994), an NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum for Prodigal Kiss (1996–1997), a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University/Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2002–2003), TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency at INTAR, NY, for The Tropic of X and The Monster in the Garden (2002–2003), a National Latino Playwrights Award (2003), and the Whitfield Cook Award for New Writing given by New Dramatists for her as-yet-unproduced “Lucinda Caval” (2007), among many others. Svich’s produced plays include Gleaning/Rebusca (1991), Any Place But Here (1992, and a revised draft, directed by María Irene Fornés, in 1995), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues (1994), Fugitive Pieces (2000), Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable) (2004), The Booth Variations (2004), Thrush (2006), The Tropic of X (2007), and The Labyrinth of Desire (2008). Some fifteen of her plays and translations have been published in anthologies and theater journals. As a theater critic and leader, Svich has edited several anthologies, including Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (2000, with María Teresa Marrero), Federico Garcia Lorca: Impossible Theater (2000), Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (2004), Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks (2005), and Out of Silence: Censorship and Self-Censorship in Theatre & Performance (2008). Svich is an alumna playwright of New Dramatists, the founder of NoPassport, the pan-American theater alliance and publishing venture, and a member of the editorial board of Contemporary Theatre Review; she is also contributing editor for Theatre Forum. Further Reading Arrizón, Alicia, and Lillian Manzor, eds., Latinas on Stage (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, University of California–Berkeley, 2000). “Caridad Svich” (www.caridadsvich.com). Danowski, Chris, ed., Performing the Here and Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Theater and Performance (Iowa City: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 2005).

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T Tafolla, Carmen (1951–). Chicana poet Carmen Tafolla, born on July 29, 1951, in San Antonio, began coming to prominence in the late Chicano Movement of the mid-1970s. The holder of B.A.s in Spanish and French (1972) and an M.A. in education (1973) from Austin College, she received a Ph.D. in bilingual education from the University of Texas (1982). After receiving her doctorate, Tafolla began teaching women’s studies at California State University–Fresno. Despite her educational accomplishments, Tafolla is an oral poet and performer who bases her work on the bilingualism and biculturalism of working-class Mexican American neighborhoods. A folklorist at heart, she has preserved many of the folkways and much of the worldview of common folk in her verse. To date, she has published the poetry chapbook Get Your Tortillas Together (in 1976 with Cecilio Gracía-Camarillo* and Reyes Cárdenas) and four other diverse works: Curandera (1983, Faith Healer), To Split a Human: Mitos, Machos y La Mujer Chicana (1985, Myths, Machos and the Chicana Woman), Patchwork Colcha: Poems, Stories and Songs in English and Spanish (1987), and Sonnets and Salsa (2004). What comes to the fore in Curandera is a constant in Tafolla’s esthetic, which derives directly from oral lore and wisdom passed on by women. In 1989, her Sonnet to Human Beings won the University of California–Irvine award for Chicano literature, and in 2001 she published a well-reviewed collection, Sonnets and Salsa. Tafolla has also written works for children, including Minnie the Mambo Mosquito (1990), The Dog Who Wanted to Be a Tiger (1996), Take a Bite (1997), Baby Coyote and the Old Woman/El coyotito y la viejita (2000), and My House Is Your House: Mi casa es su casa (2000). Tafolla is also a performance artist whose dramatic readings and performances promote women’s culture. 1091

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Her most recognized performance piece, which has been presented more than 600 times, is “My Heart Speaks a Different Language,” which is dramatized in the voices of nine characters from a repertoire of some thirty. Further Reading Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Tafolla, Santiago (1837–1911). Born in Santa Fe on July 23, 1837, Santiago Tafolla, Sr. (also known as James, or simply Reverend Tafolla) lived a life of adventure, much like the fictional one of Huckleberry Finn. In his memoirs, “Nearing the End of the Trail,” he documents these adventures. His father, a Mexican military officer, was murdered when he was three, presumably by Native Americans but perhaps by corrupt Mexican officials. When his mother died four years later, he was taken in by an older brother who was an abusive alcoholic. Unable to endure life with his brother, young Santiago ran away, meeting his future benefactor, Robert A. Mathews, and traveling with him by wagon to St. Louis and then by steamboat to Washington, D.C., where he learned English, attended school, and worked at the United States Hotel, first as an errand boy and later as a night clerk. With Mathews, he moved to South Carolina and then Georgia. Calling him “the Mexican boy,” the southerners proclaimed Tafolla “white enough.” In fact, Tafolla even worked as superintendent of Mathews’s plantation. After working odd jobs and returning to Washington, he enlisted in the Army, which, at the time, was sending men to Texas, New Mexico, and California. Although he was an exceptional soldier, becoming chief bugler of his regiment and serving admirably on several expeditions, Anglo officers mistreated him on numerous occasions. He was threatened with court martial twice—first for a fight with a corporal and second for desertion. In March 1860, however, he was honorably discharged. He moved to San Antonio, married the cousin of José Policarpo Rodríguez, and began ranching in Bandera County. When the Civil War broke out, Tafolla joined the Confederate Army; on one occasion, he was part of a company that invaded Mexico to retrieve deserters and Northern sympathizers. Tensions between Anglo and Mexican American soldiers came to a head in 1864, and Tafolla and five others deserted to Mexico. After the Civil War, he returned to his ranch in Texas with his family. Little is known of Tafolla’s later years; his memoirs break off in mid-sentence in the year 1875. One year later, Tafolla converted to Methodism and became a preacher in Laredo, Texas. He died in 1911. His descendants include Santiago Tafolla, Jr., a San Antonio judge and early LULAC leader, and Carmen Tafolla, a contemporary Chicana poet. Further Reading Tafolla, Santiago, “Nearing the End of the Trail: The Autobiography of Reverend James Tafolla, Sr., A Texas Pioneer, 1837–1911,” ed. Fidel L. Tafolla (Ts. Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, n.d.).

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Tapia, Consuelo Lee (1904–1989). Poet, essayist, and political activist Consuelo Lee Tapia was born into a distinguished literary family on March 29, 1904, in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Her grandfather was famous Puerto Rican literary figure and patriot Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, and her father was American writer Albert Lee. After receiving her early education in Puerto Rico, Lee went on to Dwight College in the United States; along the way, she became sensitive to social injustice. She became affiliated with the Communist Party of America, where she met her future husband, the poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer.* In 1943, Lee became the editor for Corretjer’s anti-imperialist weekly newspaper, Pueblos Hispanos, in which she published a series of essays on feminist thought and the history of Puerto Rican women. Lee returned to Puerto Rico with her husband in 1946 and became a teacher in Guaynabo, where she established the Unión del Pueblo (People’s Union) center for adult literacy. Nevertheless, during the 1960s, she was harassed for her political stances and was even indicted and arrested for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, charges that were later dismissed. In 1985, Lee Consuelo Lee Tapia. founded and directed the Museo-Bilblioteca Juan Antonio Corretjer (Library and Museum) dedicated to the archives and studies of her by-then-deceased husband. In 1977, Lee published a selection of poems from over the years, Con un hombro menos (With One Less Shoulder), comprising both her militant and her more intimate poetic expressions. Further Reading Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos El Teatro Campesino. See Valdez, Luis Teatro Repertorio Español. In 1968, the only Hispanic repertory company specializing in production of the classics of the Spanish Golden Age as well as contemporary drama, the Teatro Repertorio Español, was founded in New York City. It continues today as the most active Hispanic theatrical company in the United States. It is also one of the few companies in the United States to stage nineteenth-century zarzuelas. Operating today out of the Gramercy Arts Theater, 1093

Tejera, Diego Vicente

which has a tradition of Spanish-language theater that goes back to the 1920s, the Teatro Repertorio Español caters both to educational and community-based audiences with productions in both Spanish and English. Founded by producer Gilberto Zaldivar and Artistic Director René Buch, the theater’s mission has been consistent over the years: to introduce the best of Latin American, Spanish, and Hispanic theater in high-quality productions in New York City, and across the country by touring. Robert Weber Federico joined the company in 1970 as resident designer and associate artistic producer; today he serves as executive director. In 1984, the company began to present and commission new plays by Hispanic playwrights, and in 1991 it inaugurated an infrared simultaneous translation system providing an opportunity for non–Spanish speaking audiences to enjoy the Poster for a Teatro Repertorio Español production. company’s plays in English. Repertorio Español has received a 1996 Honorary Drama Desk Award for presenting high-quality theater, a 1996 OBIE Award for the play series “Voces Nuevas” (New Voices), and the New York State Governor’s Award, as well as many citations by ACE, the Asociación de Cronistas de Espectáculos (Association of Theater Critics). Further Reading “A History of Repertorio Español” (http://www.repertorio.org/ about/). Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States, Origins to 1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Tejera, Diego Vicente (1848–1903). Cuban poet, playwright, journalist, and patriot Diego Vicente Tejera was born on December 20, 1848, in Santiago into a well-to-do family favored by the Spanish authorities. His father, a lawyer, was appointed to various judicial positions, including stints in Ponce, Puerto Rico, but his son nevertheless associated with revolutionaries, even participating in the Lares, Puereto Rico, revolt. His father consequently sent his son abroad to New York and to various European countries, partly to keep him out of trouble. In fact, not only did Tejera associate with one of the founders of the Puerto Rican independence movement, Ramón Emeterio Betances, but also became a close colleague of José Martí,* the leader of the Cuban movement. Subsequent to various militant activities, Tejera was exiled in New York, where he directed the important newspaper La Verdad (The Truth), the principal organ of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. At the same time, and during later exiles, he published not only journalistic articles but many poems, stories, and essays in the Spanish-language press of New York and Key West that were con1094

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sumed principally by the expatriate Cuban community. When the Spanish–American War ended and U.S. forces occupied Cuba, Tejera returned to his homeland and directed the newspapers La Victoria (Victory) and Patria (Homeland). In 1899, he founded the very first Cuban Socialist Party and, in 1901, founded the Partido Popular (People’s Party), neither of which was successful. Nevertheless, Tejera, in addition to being a long-standing fighter for Cuban independence and the author of foundational, nationalist literary works, is also celebrated today as Cuba’s first socialist. Among his books are his collection of poems, Consonancias (1874, Consonancies), his poetry volume Un ramo de violetas (1877, A Bouquet of Violets), his complete poems, Poesías completas 1869–1879 (1879), another poetry collection, Poesías 1871–1892 (1893), a mixed bag of Diego Vicente Tejera. prose writings, Un poco de prosa (1895), an important speech given in Key West, La capacidad cubana (1899); a collection of political and socialist speeches he delivered in Key West, Conferencias sociales y políticas dadas en Cayo Hueso (1899, Social and Political Speeches Delivered in Key West), and the posthumously published Enseñanzas y profecías (1916, Teachings and Prophecies). In the latter as well as in much of his later journalistic work, Tejera warned about the ulterior motives of the American occupation of Cuba. A particularly interesting work is his short play written and performed in New York, La Muerte de Plácido (1875, The Death of Plácido), in which he makes a case for founding the Cuban nation as a a mulatto society, taking his lead from the famous martyred mulatto poet Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, known as “Plácido.” Tejera died on November 6, 1903. Further Reading Poyo, Gerald, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Dirham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Tenayuca, Emma (1916–1999). In the 1930s, Texas produced one of the most well-known labor crusaders in the form of Emma Tenayuca. Born on December 12, 1916, in San Antonio, Texas, she was an activist in unionism since her days in high school. After joining the American Communist Party in 1937, she brought to her work a fervor born out of her dedication to the class struggle. That same year, she was named general secretary for ten chapters of the Workers’ Alliance. Tenayuca helped organize the well-known San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike when El Nogal (The Pecan Tree), a syndicate affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a packing house union, struck against the Southern Pecan Shelling Company in 1938. In San Antonio, the pecan processors were influential, and the police quickly embarked on a harassment campaign to break the strike. At this point, Tenayuca became a strike leader but had to resign because of her affiliation 1095

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with the Communist Party. Nonetheless, she continued to support the effort and remained dedicated to the cause. Tenayuca gave such fiery speeches to animate the striking workers that she earned the nickname of La Pasionaria (The Passionate One), a name previously given to labor and feminist leaders in Spain. The strike, which lasted one month, succeeded in obtaining higher wages for the pecan shellers, although soon after that, the industry mechanized and laid off workers. When the dispute began in 1938, 10,000 shellers toiled in the Southern Pecan-Shelling Company; by 1941, the company employed only 600 workers. After the strike, Tenayuca was blacklisted and had to leave San Antonio. She moved to San Francisco and became a schoolteacher in 1952. She later moved back to San Antonio and earned a master’s degree in education from Our Lady of the Lake University in 1974. While working as a teacher, Tenayuca continued writing, but her manuscripts have not as yet been released by her surviving family. Tenayuca died on July 23, 1999. In her most famous essay, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” which she coauthored with her husband, Homer Brooks, at the height of the Pecan Strike, Tenayuca provided one of the earliest arguments in English for the rights of Mexican Americans in the United States. In the essay, Tenayuca explored Marxists theories of nationalism, emancipation, and citizenship. Further Reading Telgen, Diane, and Jim Kamp, eds., Notable Hispanic American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993). Vargas, Zaragosa, “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement during the Great Depression” Pacific Historical Review (Nov. 1997): 553–580.

F. Arturo Rosales TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán). The most remarkable story of the stage in the Southwest is the spontaneous appearance in 1965 of a labor theater in the agricultural fields and of the full-blown theatrical movement that conquered the hearts and minds of artists and activists throughout the country. The movement, largely student- and worker-based, eventually led to professionalization, Hollywood and Broadway productions, and the creation of the discipline of Chicano theater at universities. El Teatro Nacional de Aztlán (TENAZ, the National Theater of Aztlán), the training and service arm of that movement, was largely responsible for developing the professionalism that brought many actors, playwrights, and directors to the mainstream during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1965, the modern Chicano theater movement was born when an aspiring playwright named Luis Valdez* left the San Francisco Mime Troupe to join César Chávez* in unionizing farm workers in Delano, California. Valdez organized farm workers into El Teatro Campesino in an effort to publicize the plight of the farm workers and to raise funds for agricultural product boycotts and the farm worker strike. From these humble and limited origins, the movement grew to include small agitation and propaganda companies around the country. By 1968, El Teatro Campesino had left the vineyards and lettuce fields in a conscious effort to create a theater for the Chicano nation, a people that 1096

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Valdez and other Chicano organizers of the 1960s envisioned as working-class, Spanishspeaking or bilingual, rurally oriented, and having a very strong heritage of preColumbian culture. In 1968, Valdez engendered the idea that the best elements from the various theater groups could be brought together into one national and international touring company that would embody the pinnacle of Chicano national identity and art. He called this new company-to-be the National Theater of Aztlán, whose acronym, TENAZ, means “tenacious” in Spanish. Valdez’s version of cultural nationalism, like that of many other artistic leaders, relied heavily on the claim of an illustrious indigenous past and the identification of a homeland, the mythological Aztec homeland of Aztlán, within today’s five southwestern U.S. states. But El Teatro Campesino itself TENAZ poster for its annual festival. became the national company, and TENAZ, officially founded in 1971, became a membership and service organization. TENAZ organized yearly festivals and workshops and published a newsletter, TENAZ Talks Teatro, which was launched in 1978 and edited by Jorge Huerta. TENAZ also served as a meeting ground where theaters could compare notes and facilitate their tours. From 1973 to 1974, TENAZ published three volumes of a magazine, Chicano Theatre, that provided news, acting exercises, plays, and other service information for the field. Although Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino remained the principal models and theorists of Chicano theater, TENAZ became the organization that would provide formal coordination for the movement. Reaching a zenith of well over one hundred companies in the early 1970s, membership in TENAZ included not just Chicano companies but also Puerto Rican and other Latina and Latino companies from New York and New Jersey. San Francisco’s radical Anglo American Bread and Puppet Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Mexico’s El Teatro de los Mascarones, and many others participated as well. While helping members to develop their playwriting and performance, TENAZ also promoted an ideology similar to that espoused by Valdez: Chicano theaters were to develop revolutionary arts to liberate their communities from oppression. As theaters of the people, they were to raise the level of political consciousness of their community-based audiences while also drawing their creative materials directly from the community in the form of real-life political and social issues, folk culture, and the language spoken by the common folk. 1097

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Jam session at 1976 TENAZ Festival in Mexico City.

These tenets were repeated in all communications and in the 1973 TENAZ Manifesto: “TENAZ will work with all oppressed people; it must develop a human and revolutionary alternative to commercial theater and mass media. . . . The creation of theaters as community organizations will serve as a tool in the life-struggle of LA RAZA.” TENAZ came of age in the summer of 1974 when it partnered with Mexico’s CLETA theater organization to host a hemispheric theater festival in Mexico City. More than sixty people’s theaters performed, and representatives of numerous others attended from as far south as Argentina and as far north as Seattle, Washington. Workshops in everything from Mayan philosophy to techniques for mime and children’s theater were held, and performances were staged in theaters throughout the city and at the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacán. During the festival, TENAZ broke with Valdez and El Teatro Campesino by siding with highly radicalized participants who severely criticized Valdez and Campesino for their promotion of religious solutions to material and political problems, as represented in the apotheosis of the Virgin of Guadalupe in their play “La Carpa de los Rasquachis” (The Tent of the Underdogs). So strong was the censure that, subsequent to the festival, Valdez and Campesino withdrew from TENAZ. Valdez went on to pursue more commercially viable stage, television, and film projects, and TENAZ continued with business as usual sans Valdez. TENAZ’s influence and convening power reached its peak in the summer of 1976 when four teatro festivals were held to counter the U.S. bicentennial celebration. It was the first large-scale attempt by a grassroots theater movement 1098

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to offer a broad counter-narrative to a nationally saturated media blitz trumpeting the supposed liberties and opportunities provided by the American Dream. The summer’s festivals, hosted in Los Angeles, Denver, Albuquerque, and Seattle, also culminated a period of growth that saw TENAZ members achieve aesthetic and political independence from Valdez and his formulas. Los Angeles’s Teatro Urbano, in its mordant satire of American heroes, intensified the teatro movement’s radicalism in the face of the Campesino’s increasing religious mysticism. Santa Barbara’s El Teatro de la Esperanza was achieving perfection as no other Chicano theater had by working as a collective and by assimilating the teachings of Bertolt Brecht in its plays. San Jose’s El Teatro de la Gente had taken the corrido-type acto, a structure pioneered by El Teatro Campesino that set a mimic ballet to traditional Mexican ballads, perfecting it as Campesino never had. El Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo, from Gary, Indiana, succeeded in reviving the techniques of radical American theaters of the 1930s in their Silent Partners, an exposé of corruption in a local city’s construction projects. After the heights of 1976, TENAZ and the Chicano theater movement embarked upon a downward trend that would eventually lead to dissolution by the mid-1980s. After the withdrawal of El Teatro Campesino, Chicano theaters developed on their own, managing to exist as agitation and propaganda groups until the end of the 1970s. By then the Chicano civil rights movement that had given the theater movement so much impetus had also waned. The more successful theaters, such as El Teatro de la Esperanza, administered their own theater houses and toured nationally. Others, such as Albuquerque’s La Compañía, set down roots and became repertory companies. The 1980s saw numbers of Chicano theater groups disbanding as some of their members became involved in local community theaters, their performance spaces and budgets supplied by state and local arts agencies. For the first time in history, they could afford to make Chicano and Latina and Latino theater literature available on a wide scale. Some Chicano theater artists successfully made the transition to television and film, following a path that Valdez had already blazed, but others, such as Jorge Huerta, became university professors of theater and directors of such mainstream regional organizations as San Diego’s Old Globe Theater. Thus, although the 1980s saw the disappearance of the grassroots movement and of TENAZ itself, during these years greater opportunities opened up for Chicanos and Latinas and Latinos to enter more mainstream theatrical, educational, and entertainment venues. It may be argued that TENAZ played an important role in preparing actors, directors, and playwrights for these new opportunities. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Hispanic Theater in the United States: Post-War to the Present” Latin American Theatre Review (Spring 1992): 209. Valdez, Luis, Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).


Testimonial Literature

Testimonial Literature. There are many types of testimonial literature, but the one most pertinent to the study and development of Latino literature in the United States concerns a series of dictations that were commissioned by Hubert Howe Bancroft in California. In the 1870s, eighty people of Mexican ancestry who had lived in California before the Gold Rush were interviewed by the staff of Hubert Howe Bancroft, a wealthy bookseller and publisher. The written transcripts of the interviews amount to over 5,000 handwritten pages and are now housed at the Bancroft Library at the University of California–Berkeley. They constitute an extremely important set of historical and literary documents. As historical sources, these first-hand accounts of life on the far northern frontier of Mexico offer an unparalleled view of Hispanic life in California before the U.S. conquest. As literary texts, these documents can be termed testimonios, which are, in the words of one scholar, “mediated narratives by a subaltern person interviewed by an outsider.” They offer vivid examples of a subjugated people attempting to reclaim its historical voice in a time and place increasingly inhospitable to its culture, heritage, and experiences. At times, their command of language (in most cases, Spanish) and their rhetorical style, figurative language, inventiveness, and use of folk references and motifs serve to increase even further their literary value. Two decades after California became one of the United States, Hubert Howe Bancroft decided to compose a large multivolume history of California. To his credit, Bancroft realized that the experience of California before the American conquest had to be an integral part of this total history. As a way of including this perspective in his work, Bancroft decided to try to collect as many surviving textual documents and first-hand reminiscences from the residents of pre–United States California as he could. Although a considerable number of official documents from Spanish (1769–1821) and Mexican (1821–1848) Alta California had been brought together in the office of the Surveyor General in San Francisco, a number of other documents were still in the possession of individuals and families. Bancroft realized that Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo* would be a pivotal Depiction of Eulalia Pérez, narrator of a historic testimonial figure in this endeavor. Vallejo had been collected by Bancroft’s agents. 1100


one of the most significant political and military figures in Mexican California, and his extensive rancho in Petaluma had been a major center of economic activity in the 1840s. After the conquest, Vallejo had collected a large quantity of documents and had begun to write a history of Alta California. However, Vallejo’s unfinished manuscript and notes were destroyed by a large fire that consumed his house in Sonoma in 1867. In 1874, Bancroft dispatched one of his staff members, Enrique Cerruti, to try to enlist Vallejo’s aid in the proposed history project. Cerruti eventually persuaded Vallejo to cooperate. He served as Bancroft’s intermediary with a number of Californios (as many native-born Hispanic residents of Alta and Baja California had begun to call themselves in the 1820s). In addition, Vallejo donated a considerable number of documents to Bancroft and also gave Cerruti an extensive interview. Largely on the strength of Vallejo’s reputation, Cerruti was able to conduct interviews with seventeen additional Californios. Four other Bancroft staff members, Emilio Piña, Rosendo V. Corona, Vicente Perfecto Gómez, and Thomas Savage participated in this textual recovery and interview project. Piña conducted six interviews, Corona conducted two, and Gómez conducted ten. Savage, who became the principal agent in this project, conducted or supervised a total of fifty. Many interviews were unplanned. As he traveled on board the steamer that was taking him to meet Vallejo for the first time, Cerruti encountered a group of Californios. He convinced two of them, Guillermo Fitch and Blas Piña, to give him their reminiscences of life before the Gold Rush. While he was in Sonoma, he decided, for reasons that remain unclear, to interview Isidora Filomena, the widow of Suisun chieftain Sem-Yeto, an important indigenous ally of Vallejo’s. Two other California Indians were interviewed as part of this project. One, Julio César, was interviewed by Savage as part of his formal schedule. The other, Lorenzo Asisara, was interviewed by Savage during his scheduled interview of Pedro Amador, who insisted that Savage speak to Asisara. Similarly, when Savage arrived in Santa Barbara to interview Angustias de la Guerra, she told him that because of her brother’s illness she was unable to speak to him at that time. She suggested that he interview Apolinaria Lorenzana, which he did, despite having no prior plans to do so. Many other interviews were elaborately prepared—some even stretched out over a number of days. However they were arranged, the interviews generally proceeded in a formulaic fashion. The interviewer would ask the subject a series of specific questions. When the subject answered any question to the satisfaction of the interviewer, the interviewer would pose another question. When the interviewer had gone through his list of questions, he would terminate the interview. However, we know the actual questions in only two of the interviews— those given by Rosalía Vallejo and Dorotea Valdez. In the other cases we have to reconstruct the interview questions through the manner in which the subjects talked. For instance, at times the subjects might say that they “remembered well” a certain person or event. At those points they were most likely 1101


responding to a specific question: Do you remember so-and-so, or when such-andsuch happened? At other points, an abrupt change in subject probably indicates that the interviewer posed a new question. Thus, the interviewers directed the process. However, within this context the subjects of the interviews were often able to manage the conversation much more fully than the interviewer anticipated. Vallejo, because of his rather privileged position in the process, was able to do this explicitly. “I will not be hurried or dictated to. It is my history, not yours, I propose to tell,” he once stated to Cerruti as he laid the groundwork for their collaboration. But other interviewees did the same thing in other ways. During a conversation with Savage, Angustias de la Guerra forced the conversation back to a topic or person on which Savage thought he had enough information but about which or whom she wished to say something further. Josefa Carrillo took a simple question about place names and used it to construct an elaborate denunciation against those who had seized her rancho. Isidora managed to include a host of information about her people’s social customs in an interview in which Cerruti was mostly interested in her husband’s military tactics. After the interviews were concluded, the interviewer attempted to put his notes into what he considered to be a more coherent order. The transcripts were put into their final form only when Cerruti, Gómez, or Savage actually returned to the Bancroft headquarters in San Francisco after the particular journey during which they conducted the interview. The two major interviewers, Cerruti and Savage, presented the final versions of their interviews in different literary styles. In Cerutti’s transcripts, the narrator’s voice is that of the interviewer himself. He generally inserted the interviewee’s comments into an essay that he composed and in which he was a major actor. Thus the subjects’ voices were often rendered in the third person: “He told me” or “She said.” Savage, on the other hand, generally spent a page or two introducing the interview. He described something about the person, revealed whether other people were present, and offered any other details he deemed relevant. Then, in a distinct part of the document, he offered his subjects’ words in the first person. Thus, the transcript of the interview with Justo Larios that Savage conducted on June 1, 1878, begins, “I was born in the pueblo of San José on May 12, 1808.” Accordingly, in the Savage transcriptions we are probably closer to the subjects’ original words than in the Cerruti transcripts. But “closer” is a relative term; none of the interviewers—Savage, Cerruti, Gómez, Piña, or Corona— gave their subjects free rein. Although we can hear the subjects’ words in all of the testimonios, we must remember that these words were constantly filtered by the agenda and activity of the interviewers and by the multiple editorial revisions the interviews underwent before they were finally deposited in Bancroft’s library. Because the explicit aim of the interviews was to provide material for Bancroft’s history, the interviewers normally attempted to steer the conversations in directions that would generate information about war and politics, two subjects that dominated Bancroft’s account. Thus, Juan Bautista Alvarado spoke at 1102


great length on the complex political struggles of the 1830s that resulted in his ascendancy to the governorship of Alta California. Likewise, Vallejo spent a considerable amount of time on the conflicts that he waged against the Indian peoples of Northern California. Many of the Californios offered accounts of various military episodes, such as the 1818 sack of Monterey by Hipólito Bouchard, the 1824 Chumash revolt, the 1829 revolt of Estanislao, and the various military encounters among competing Californio factions in the 1830s and 1840s. The interviewers also asked a large number of questions about the mission system. The Californios generally took a liberal political position. They stated that the missions had been a failure even though a number of the friars had personally been very holy men. José de Jesús Vallejo reflected a common opinion of the California land owning class when he stated that most Indian conversions to Catholicism were insincere and motivated more by a desire for food or for advancement within the developing Hispanic hierarchy in California than by anything else. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo insisted that Californio hostility to the missions did not stem from a desire to appropriate the mission lands. Rather, he stated that his generation was imbued with republican thought, which made the subordination of the Indians at the missions philosophically intolerable. The interviews sometimes contained information about the missions that was not readily available from other sources. For instance, Lorenzo Asisara told Savage a story that he had heard from his own father about the way in which the Indians at Mission Santa Cruz had killed the resident priest. Eusebio Galindo recounted another version of the same story. Apolinaria Lorenzana and Eulalia Pérez offered intimate glimpses into the daily life of both the indigenous and the Hispanic population of missions and gave many details that never made it into the official ecclesiastical reports. The interviews also contain a considerable amount of information about domestic life at the ranchos that dominated the California economy from the 1830s until the American conquest. José del Carmen Lugo described the daily schedule of rancho life in great detail. Antonio Coronel gave a full account of social and gender roles on the ranchos and in the pueblos. The interviews also sketched out many aspects of popular culture. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo recounted a series of décimas* that were current as he was growing up. Eulalia Pérez recited the songs and music to which she had danced in her younger days. Inocente García recalled some popular songs that had been composed in the wake of the Bouchard invasion. Guillermo Zúñiga remembered some verses that had been composed about the Chumash revolt. Juana Machado described how the Pastorela was celebrated in San Diego. Many of the Californios offered shrewd judgments about life in Mexican California. José Fernández traced to generational tensions a number of the conflicts that marked the 1830s. The younger people, he said, preferred a republican system, but the older people and the missionaries retained their allegiance to the older Spanish system and the public order they believed it had provided. 1103


Julio Carrillo offered the opinion that struggles over the land and cattle of the missions was the root cause of the political instability that had too often plagued the territory. But the interviews were not only about the past. The testimonios reveal quite clearly that many members of the Californio community were acutely aware that their own culture and experiences were routinely denigrated by the Americans who had taken over their country in 1848. Teresa de la Guerra vigorously insisted that Alta California was “civilized” well before the Anglo Americans arrived. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo at times tempered his criticism of the Americans with humor. He said that the newcomers had very little knowledge of Spanish and little inclination to learn it. In their ignorance they would simply take a Spanish place name and put the word “San” in front of it. He quipped that he expected soon to hear some American refer to a well-known mountain in the East Bay region of San Francisco as “San Diablo!” Some of the interviewees revealed that they were very aware of the negative things that were being said about them by the Anglos. Teresa de la Guerra stated that many of her relatives were upset about the portrayal of themselves in an 1846 book written by Alfred Robinson. In his interview, Julio Carrillo attacked a book written in English that he said misrepresented the first delegate Alta California sent to the Mexican Congress in the 1820s. For others, the criticism was more personal. Rosalía Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe’s sister, poured out her bitterness at the treatment her brothers and her husband had received at the hands of the Bear Flag insurgents, who had imprisoned them for two months at Sutter’s Fort in 1846. Josefa Carrillo, like many land owners, found herself faced with a new and unfamiliar legal system, an 1851 federal law that imposed heavy burdens on those who sought to prove the validity of their land titles, and a host of squatters staking out their own claims on her property. She was forced to mortgage some of her land to pay legal fees to try to retain the rest of it. In her interview, she was extremely resentful that she lived in a town (Healdsburg) that was named for a man whose relatives had been able to buy a part of her rancho very cheaply at an auction. Some Californios contrasted life in Mexican California with life after the U.S. takeover. Dorotea Valdez noted that natural population increase was less among American families than it had been among Mexican families. She attributed this to various “medicines” taken by American women and darkly commented, “This is a sin that God does not forgive.” In a similar vein, Juan Bautista Alvarado stated that women in Mexican California “never sold their caresses for a vile coin, as is happening now.” The interviews reflected the ambivalent evaluation that many Californios had of independent Mexico. Reflecting a common criticism that was leveled by the California land owners from 1821 onward, Juan Bautista Alvarado called the enlisted Mexican soldiers who were posted to California “scum.” A number of Californios accused Mexico of having neglected Alta California and of having retarded its economic and political development. The political instability in Mexico during the 1830s and 1840s, according to a common Californio 1104

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complaint, prevented the potential of Alta California, especially in the realm of international trade, from being realized. These remarkable testimonios are important for the alternative perspective, which they offer on the social development of California and the entire U.S. Southwest. It is still unfortunately true that the study of the Mexican period in California and borderlands history is relatively neglected, especially in contrast to the Spanish period. The Bancroft interviews offer a revealing window into this important period. They offer us the opportunity to recover the first-hand experience of one of the oldest Latino communities in the United States. More than that, they offer us an alternative perspective to the pervasive triumphalist narratives of the U.S. war against Mexico in 1846–1848. In these interviews we genuinely encounter history “from the bottom up.” In addition, the Indian voice represented in some of these testimonios is much more direct than the voice that too often has to be teased out of political or ecclesiastical documents. The women’s testimonios are also highly significant because they offer a view of public life different from that encountered in many historical narratives. The California that emerges from all these testimonios was a complicated place in which the familial normally intersected with the political and in which the public sphere creatively interacted with the private sphere to create a different and more humane society than the one the Americans brought. Finally, these testimonios represent one of the bases on which Latino literature has since been constructed. (See also Bildungsroman.) Further Reading Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz, Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006). Padilla, Genaro, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Sánchez, Rosaura, Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonies (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz

Testimonios. See Testimonial Literature Theater

Origins to 1940 The Southwest The roots of Hispanic theater in the United States reach back to the dance-drama of the American Indians and to the religious theater and pageants of medieval and Renaissance Spain. During the Spanish colonization of Mexico, theater was placed at the service of the Catholic missionaries, who employed it in their evangelizing of the Indians and their continued instruction of them and their mestizo descendants in the mysteries and dogma of the Church. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Mexico a hybrid religious theater was developing that often 1105

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employed the music, colors, flowers, masks, and even languages of the Indians of Mexico while dramatizing the stories from the Old and New Testaments. In Mexico and what eventually became the southwestern United States there developed a cycle of religious plays that, although dramatizing these stories from the Bible, nevertheless became so secular and entertaining in their performances that Church authorities finally banned them from church grounds and from inclusion Itinerant theater company, Arizona, 1890s. in the official festivities during feast days. They thus became folk plays, enacted by the faithful on their own and without official sanction or sponsorship from the Church. At the center of this cycle of folk plays that dealt with Adam and Eve, Jesus lost in the desert, and other favorite passages of the Holy Scriptures, was the story of the Star of Bethlehem that announced the birth of Jesus Christ to humble shepherds, who then commenced a pilgrimage in search of the newborn Christ. On the way to Bethlehem, Satan and the legions of hell attempt to waylay and distract the shepherds, and a battle between Good (represented by the Archangel Michael) and Evil takes place. Among the other various dramatic elements in this shepherds play, or pastorela, as it is called in Spanish, are the appearance of a virginal shepherdess, a lecherous hermit, and a comic, bumbling shepherd named Bato. Pastorelas, plays presented by the common folk from central Mexico to northern California are still performed today, especially in rural areas during the Christmas season, and even such professional companies as Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino perform a pastorela in alternative years with Las Apariciones de la Virgen de Guadalupe (The Apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe) at the San Juan Bautista Mission in California. In 1598 Juan de Oñate led his colonizing mission into what is today New Mexico. As stated above, the missionaries introduced religious theater, and Juan de Oñate’s soldiers and colonists brought along the roots of secular drama. Oñate’s soldiers entertained themselves by improvising plays based on the experiences of their journey. They also enacted the folk play that has been spread wherever Spaniards have colonized, Moros y cristianos (Moors and Christians), the heroic tale of how the Christians defeated the Moors in northern Spain during the Crusade, eventually driving them from the Iberian Peninsula. For many scholars, these represent the roots of an authentic secular folk theater that developed in what became the southwestern United States and that gave rise to such New Mexican plays in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as Los Comanches (The Comanches) and Los Tejanos 1106

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California Theater. (photo by Francisco Blasco)

(The Texans), both of which deal with military conflict in an epic manner. Even as late as the early twentieth century, re-enactments of Moros y Cristianos, even performed on horseback, have been documented in New Mexico, which appears to be the state, because of its rural culture, that has most preserved its Hispanic folk traditions. But the most important part of the story of Hispanic theater in the United States is not one of a folk theater but of the development and flourishing of a full-blown professional theater in the areas most populated by Hispanics: the Southwest, New York, Florida, and even the Midwest. The origins of Spanishlanguage professional theater in the United States are to be found in midnineteenth-century California, where troupes of itinerant players began touring from Mexico to perform melodramas accompanied by other musical and dramatic entertainments for the residents of the coastal cities that had developed from earlier Franciscan missions—San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. (As early as the 1830s, professional troupes from Cuba also toured to theaters in New Orleans.) These three California cities were more accessible from Mexico than San Antonio, Texas (for instance), because of the regularity of steamship travel up and down the Pacific Coast. There is evidence that plays were being performed as early as 1789; the manuscript copy of a three-act cloak and dagger play, Astucias por heredar un sobrino a su tío (The Clever Acts of a Nephew in Order to Inherit His Uncle’s Wealth), 1107

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Centro Español de Tampa.

bears that date and shows evidence of having been toured through the California settlements. Records of professional theatrical performances become more numerous some decades later. In the 1840s various troupes of itinerant players visited the ranches and inns around the San Francisco and Monterey areas of northern California, performing in Spanish for both Spanish- and Englishlanguage audiences. During this time at least one semi-professional theater house existed in Los Angeles. In 1848 Antonio F. Coronel,* who later became mayor of Los Angeles, opened a theater, Teatro Merced, that seated three hundred people. In the following decades various other theaters opened to accommodate both Spanish- and English-language productions: Vicente Guerrero’s Union Theater existed from 1852 to 1854, Abel Stearn’s Hall from 1859 to 1875, and Juan Temple’s Theater from 1859 to 1892. In the 1860s and 1870s the Hispanic community also frequented the Teatro Merced, Teatro Alarcón, and Turn Verein Hall. In the 1880s Spanish-language productions were even held in the Grand Opera House in Los Angeles. By the 1860s the professional stage had become so established and important to the Spanish-speaking community that companies that once toured the Mexican Republic and abroad began to settle down as resident companies in California. Such was the case of the Compañía Española de la Familia Estrella, directed by the renowned Mexican actor Gerardo López del Castillo, which chose San Francisco for its home. The company was typical of those that toured interior Mexico, being composed of Mexican and Spanish players and organized around a family unit into which López del Castillo had married, 1108

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New York’s El Teatro Hispano.

mostly staged Spanish melodrama and holding its performances on Sunday evenings. Each program was a complete evening’s entertainment that included a three- or four-act drama; songs, dances and recitations; and a one-act farce or comic dialog to close the performance. The full-length plays that were the heart of the program were mostly melodramas written by Peninsular Spanish authors such as José Zorrilla, Mariano José de Larra, and Manuel Bretón de los Herreros. Productions by this and other companies that settled in or toured California were seen as wholesome entertainment appropriate for the whole family, and a broad segment of the Hispanic community—not only the elite— subscribed and attended. Among the twelve or fourteen companies resident or actively touring California during the 1870s and 1880s, the Compañía Dramática Española, directed by Pedro C. de Pellón, and the Compañía Española de Angel Mollá were two resident companies in Los Angeles that extended their tours to Baja California and up to Tucson, Arizona; from there they returned to Los Angeles via stagecoach. During this time Tucson boasted two Spanish-language theater houses: Teatro Cervantes and Teatro Americano. In 1878 Pellón established himself permanently in Tucson, where he organized the town’s first group of amateur actors, Teatro Recreo. Thus, the 1870s mark Arizona’s participation in Hispanic professional theater. It is in this decade as well that troupes began to tour the Laredo and San Antonio axis of Texas, first performing in Laredo and 1109

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Vaudeville number at the Teatro Hispano, New York, with “La Chata” Noloesca (center).

then San Antonio in open-air markets, taverns, and, later, in such German American settings as Meunch Hall, Krish Hall, and Wolfram’s Garden in San Antonio. At the turn of the century and afterward, companies touring from Mexico began basing out of San Antonio and Laredo. The last decade of the nineteenth century experienced a tremendous increase in Mexican theatrical activity in the border states. More and more companies that had previously only toured the interior of Mexico were now establishing regular circuits extending from Laredo to San Antonio and El Paso, through New Mexico and Arizona to Los Angeles, and up to San Francisco or down to San Diego. It was the advent of rail transportation and the automobile that was bringing the touring companies even to smaller population centers after the turn of the century. Between 1900 and 1930, numerous Mexican theaters and halls were established to house Spanishlanguage performances all along this circuit to entertain the masses of immigrants leaving Mexico, especially during the Revolution. By 1910, even some smaller cities had their own Mexican theaters with resident stock companies. The more mobile tent theaters, circus theaters and smaller makeshift companies performed in rural areas and throughout the small towns on both sides of the Rio Grande Valley. Theatrical activities expanded rapidly when thousands of refugees took flight from the Mexican Revolution and settled in the United States from the border 1110

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El Teatro Los Mascarones being videotaped by author and cinematographer Jesús Salvador Treviño.

all the way up to the Midwest. During the decades of revolutionary upheaval, many of Mexico’s greatest artists and their theatrical companies came to tour or to take up temporary residence; some never returned to the homeland. Mexican and Spanish companies and an occasional Cuban, Argentine, or other Hispanic troupe toured the Southwest but found their most lucrative engagements in Los Angeles and San Antonio. They even crisscrossed the nation at times, venturing to perform for the Hispanic communities in New York, Tampa, and the Midwest. By the 1920s, Hispanic theater was becoming big business, and important companies, such as Spain’s Compañía María Guerrero y Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, had their coast-to-coast tours into major Anglo American theaters booked by New York agents such as Walter O. Lindsay. The company of the famed Mexican leading lady Virginia Fábregas was of particular importance in its frequent tours, not only because it performed the latest serious works from Mexico City and Europe but also because some of the troupe members occasionally defected to form their own resident and touring companies in the Southwest. Virginia Fábregas was also important because she encouraged the development of local playwrights in Los Angeles by buying the rights to their works and integrating the plays into her repertoire. The two cities having the largest Mexican populations, Los Angeles and San Antonio, became theatrical centers, the former also feeding off the important film industry in Hollywood. In fact, Los Angeles became a manpower pool for Hispanic theater. Actors, directors, technicians, and musicians from throughout 1111

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A scene from El Teatro de la Esperanza’s “Brujerías.”

the Southwest, New York, and the whole Hispanic world were drawn there looking for employment. Both Los Angeles and San Antonio went through a period of intense expansion and the building of new theatrical facilities during the late teens and early twenties. Los Angeles was able to support five major Hispanic theater houses with programs that changed daily. The theaters and their peak years were Teatro Hidalgo (1911–1934), Teatro México (1927–1933), Teatro Capitol (1924–1926), Teatro Zendejas (later Novel; 1919–1924), and Teatro Principal (1921–1929). There were as many as twenty other theaters operating at one time or another during the same time period. San Antonio’s most important house was the Teatro Nacional, built in 1917, which housed live productions up through the Great Depression. Its splendor and elite status were not shared by any of the other fifteen or so theaters that housed Spanish-language productions in San Antonio during this period. Although it is true that in the Southwest, as in Mexico, Spanish drama and zarzuela (the Spanish national version of operetta) dominated the stage up until the early 1920s, the clamor for plays written by Mexican playwrights had increased so much that by 1923 Los Angeles had developed into a center for Mexican play-writing unparalleled in the history of Hispanic communities in the United States. While continuing to consume plays by Spanish Peninsular authors such as Jacinto Benavente, José Echegaray, Gregorio Martínez-Sierra, Manuel Linares Rivas, and the Alvarez Quintero brothers, the Los Angeles Mexican community and its theaters encouraged local writing by offering cash prizes in contests as well as lucrative contracts and lavish productions. Various 1112

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impresarios of the Spanish-language theaters maintained this tradition throughout the 1920s, offering at times as much as two hundred dollars in prize money to the winners of the play-writing contests. It was often reported in the newspapers of the time that the Hispanic theaters drew their largest crowds every time they featured plays by local writers. The period from 1922 to 1933 saw the emergence and box-office success of a cadre of playwrights in Los Angeles composed mainly of Mexican theatrical expatriates and newspapermen. At the center of the group were four playwrights whose works not only filled the theaters on Los Angeles’s Main Street but were also contracted throughout the Southwest and in Mexico: Eduardo Carrillo,* an actor; Adalberto Elías González,* a novelist; Esteban V. Escalante, a newspaperman and theatrical director; and Gabriel Navarro,* a poet, novelist, Poster for INTAR production. composer, orchestra director, columnist for the newspaper La Opinión (The Opinion), and the editor of the magazine La Revista de Los Angeles (The Los Angeles Revue). There were at least twenty other locally residing writers who saw their works produced on the professional stage, not to mention the scores of authors of vaudeville revues and lighter pieces. The serious full-length plays created by these authors addressed the situation of Mexicans in California on a broad, epic scale, often in plays based on the history of the Mexican–Anglo struggle in California. Eduardo Carrillo’s El Proceso de Aurelio Pompa (The Trial of Aurelio Pompa), which dealt with the unjust trial and sentencing of a Mexican immigrant, was performed repeatedly on the commercial stage and in community-based fundraising events. Gabriel Navarro’s Los Emigrados (The Émigrées) and El Sacrificio (The Sacrifice) dealt, respectively, with Mexican expatriate life in Los Angeles during the Revolution and with the history of California around 1846, the date of the outbreak of the Mexican–American War. By far the most prolific and respected of the Los Angeles playwrights was Adalberto Elías González, some of whose works were performed not only locally but also throughout the Southwest and Mexico, as well as being made into movies and translated into English. Those of his works that saw the light on the stages of Los Angeles ran the gamut from historical drama to dimenovel sensationalism. The most famous of his plays, Los Amores de Ramona (The Loves of Ramona), was a stage adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel 1113

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about early California, Ramona: A Story; it broke all box-office records when it was seen by more than fifteen thousand people after only eight performances and soon it became a regular item in many repertoires in the Southwest. Two of González’s other plays dealt with the life and culture of Mexicans in California: Los Misioneros (The Missionaries) and Los expatriados (The Expatriates). Probably his second most successful work was the sensationalist La Asesino del Martillo o la Mujer Tigresa (The Assassin with the Hammer, or Tiger Woman), based on a real life crime story reported in the newspapers in 1922 and 1923. A dozen other plays dealt with love triangles and themes from the Mexican Revolution, including La Muerte de Fancisco Villa (The Death of Francisco Villa) and El Fantasma de la Revolución (The Ghost of the Revolution). Adalberto Elías González and these Poster for Miguel Piñero’s “The Sun Always Shines for other authors addressed the needs of their the Cool.” audiences to relive their history on both sides of the border and to revive the glories of their own language and cultural tradition with the decorum and professionalism befitting the type of family entertainment that the community leaders believed would reinforce Hispanic culture and morality while resisting assimilation to Anglo American culture. But with the rise of vaudeville and the greater access of working-class people to theatrical entertainment, vaudevilletype revues and variety shows became more and more popular, gradually displacing more serious theater. But Mexican vaudeville and musical comedy did not avoid the themes that were so solemnly treated in three-act dramas. Rather, the Mexican stage developed its own type of revue: the revista. Revistas were musical revues that had developed in Mexico under the influence of the Spanish zarzuela and the French revue and vaudeville before taking on their own character in Mexico as a format for piquant political commentary and social satire. Also, like the zarzuela, which celebrated Spanish regional customs, music, and folklore, the Mexican revista also created and highlighted the character, music, dialects, and folklore of the various Mexican regions. Under the democratizing influence of the Mexican Revolution, the revista highlighted the life and culture of the working classes. During the Revolution, the revista política in particular rose to prominence on Mexico City stages, but later all revista forms degenerated into a loose vehicle for musical and comedic performance in which typical regional and underdog characters such as the 1114

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pelado (literally, “skinned” or “penniless”), often improvised a substantial part of the action. The Los Angeles stages hosted many of the writers and stars of revistas that had been active during the time of formation of the genre in Mexico, including Leopoldo Beristáin and Guz Aguila (Antonio Guzmán Aguilera*). In the theaters of Los Angeles and the Southwest were staged most of the revistas that were popular in Mexico and that were of historical importance for the development of the genre. Such works as El Tenorio Maderista (The Maderist [Don Juan] Tenorio), El País de los Cartones (The Country Made of Boxes), La Ciudad de los Volcanes (The City of Volcanoes), and numerous others were continuously repeated from Los Angeles to Laredo. Such innovators of the genre as Guz Aguila were for a time a perennial attraction at the Los Angeles theaters. Even important composers of scores for the revistas, such as Lauro D. Uranga, graced Los Angeles’s Hispanic stages. With their low humor and popular music scores, the revistas in Los Angeles articulated grievances and poked fun at both the U.S. and Mexican governments. The Mexican Revolution was satirically reconsidered over and over again in Los Angeles from the perspective of the expatriates, and Mexican American culture was contrasted with the “purer” Mexican version. This social and political commentary was carried out despite the fact that both audiences and performers were mostly immigrants and thus liable to deportation or repatriation. The Los Angeles writers and composers were serving a public that was hungry to see itself reflected on stage, an audience whose interest was piqued by revistas relating to current events, politics and the conflict of cultures that were produced while living in the Anglo-dominated environment. The revistas kept the social and political criticism leveled at the authorities, be they Mexican or American, within the light context of music and humor in such pieces as Guz Aguila’s México para los Mexicanos (Mexico for the Mexicans) and Los Angeles Vacilador (Swinging Los Angeles), Gabriel Navarro’s La Ciudad de Irás y No Volverás (The City of You Go There Never to Return), and Don Catarino’s Los Efectos de la Crisis (The Effects of the Depression), Regreso a Mi Tierra (The Return to My Country), Los Theater poster on the cover of Zoot Suit. 1115

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repatriados (The Repatriated), Whiskey, Morfina y Marihuana (Morphine and Marijuana), and El Desterrado (The Exiled One). It is in the revista that we find a great deal of humor based on culture shock, typically derived from the misadventures of naïve, recent immigrants from Mexico who have difficulty becoming accustomed to life in the big Anglo American metropolis. Later on in the 1920s, and when the Great Depression and Repatriation take hold, the theme of culture shock becomes one of outright cultural conflict. At that point, Mexican nationalism becomes more intensified as anti-Mexican sentiments are more openly expressed in the Anglo American press as a basis for taking Mexicans off the welfare rolls and deporting them. In the revista, the Americanized, or agringado and renegado, become even more satirized and the barbs aimed at American culture become even Latins Anonymous. sharper. It is also in the revista that the raggedly dressed underdog, the pelado,* comes to the fore with his low-class dialect and acerbic satire. A forerunner of characters such as famed movie comic character Cantinflas, the pelado really originates in the humble tent theaters that evolved in Mexico and existed in the Southwest of the United States until the 1950s. With roots in the circus clown tradition, and a costume and dialect that embody poverty and marginality, the pelado was free to improvise and exchange witticisms with his audiences that often embodied working-class distrust of societal institutions and the upper classes. Although the pelado, or peladito, as he was affectionately called, was often criticized for his low humor and scandalous language, theater critics today consider the character to be a genuine and original Mexican contribution to the history of theater. The most important author of revistas was Antonio Guzmán Aguilera, who went by the stage name of Guz Aguila. Guz Aguila settled in Los Angeles expressly for the purpose of becoming a theater impresario and movie producer. Instead, he became a journalist for El Heraldo de México (The Mexico Herald) but still managed to tour his theatrical company as far south as Mexico City and as far west as San Antonio. Guz Aguila had risen to fame in Mexico City as a newspaperman and prolific revista author, but as a result of a falling-out with President Alvaro Obregón (and his subsequent imprisonment), went into exile in Los Angeles in 1924. Guz Aguila’s production has been estimated as high as five hundred theatrical works—none of which were ever published—but it is certain that many of his revistas were reworked, renamed, and recycled to 1116

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accommodate different current events, locations, and audiences. In Los Angeles in 1924, Guz Aguila was given a contract that paid $1,000 per month to write for the Teatro Hidalgo. In a June 7, 1924, interview for El Heraldo de México, Aguila stated that the Hidalgo had also formed a company of thirty performers for him and commissioned special scenery and costumes. In the same interview, he revealed that his personal motto was “corrigat riendo A scene from Caridad Svich’s “Licorice.” mores”—that is, customs are corrected through laughter. And an abundance of laughter, color, patriotic symbolism and naturalism is what Guz Aguila gave his audiences, by pulling out and producing his most famous and time-proven revistas: Alma Tricolor (Three-Colored Soul), La Huerta de Don Adolfo (Don Adolfo’s Garden; a reference to President Adolfo de la Huerta), and Exploración Presidencial (A Presidential Exploration). After presenting many of his wellknown works, Aguila began to produce new revistas based on culture and events in Los Angeles: Los Angeles Vacilador (Swinging Los Angeles), Evite Peligro (Avoid Danger), and El Eco de México (The Echo from Mexico). Guz Aguila returned to the stages of Mexico City in 1927, but he never regained the level of success that he had previously experienced there. He continued to tour the republic and the southwestern United States in the years that followed. Unlike those of Los Angeles, the stages of San Antonio did not attract or support the development of local playwrights, and although they hosted many of the same theatrical companies and performers as did the California stages, theater in the Alamo City did not support as many resident companies. To be sure, as stated above, there were many Mexican theater houses and various stock and resident companies, many of which used San Antonio as a base from which to launch tours of Texas and both sides of the Rio Grande Valley. Whereas the story of Los Angeles’s Hispanic theater is one of the proliferation of Spanish-language houses, companies, and playwrights, the story of San Antonio illustrates the persistence of resident companies, actors, and directors in keeping Hispanic drama alive in community and church halls after being dislodged from professional theater houses by vaudeville and the movies during the Depression. San Antonio’s is also the story of the rise of a number of vaudevillians to national and international prominence. San Antonio also became a center for another type of theater, one that served an exclusively working-class audience: tent theater.* In San Antonio and Los Angeles, and throughout the Southwest, the Great Depression and the forced and voluntary repatriation of Mexicans depopulated not only communities but theaters. Theater owners and impresarios could no 1117

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longer afford to present full companies accompanied by orchestras and technicians; the economic advantage of showing movies was devastating to live theater. After receiving the triple blow of the Depression, Repatriation, and cinema, the Hispanic theater industry continued to writhe and agonize from 1930 until the middle of the decade, when only a few hardy troupes acquiesced to entertaining briefly between films, donated their art to charity, toured rural areas in tent theaters, struck out to perform for New Teatro Alma Latina, Camden, New Jersey, 1974. York’s growing Hispanic population, or they simply returned to Mexico. Many artists from Los Angeles to the Midwest stubbornly continued to perform, but their art was now staged in church and community halls for little or no pay in the service of community and church charities, which were especially numerous during the Depression. There was no more heroic battle waged anywhere than that of the San Antonio resident directors and their companies to keep their art alive and in service of the communities. Directors Manuel Cotera, Bernardo Fougá, and Carlos Villalongín, along with such stars as Lalo Astol and María Villalongín, continued to present the same theatrical fare in the same professional manner in church and neighborhood halls throughout San Antonio and on tours to Austin, Dallas, Houston, Laredo, and smaller cities and towns during the 1930s. At the same time, to fill the vacuum that had been created by the return of many performers to Mexico, and by the cessation of tours from there, amateur theatrical groups began to spring up and proliferate, often instructed and directed by theater professionals. Quite often these groups also used the church halls and auditoriums for their rehearsals and performances. It is worth reemphasizing that most of the professional and community groups did not exist to present religious drama, but church facilities and church sponsorship were often offered because the theater and most of the serious plays presented were seen as wholesome entertainment and instruction in language and culture for the youths of the community, who were even more cut off from the culture of interior Mexico during the Depression. In addition to providing the environment for this important community theater movement, San Antonio was also the center for the Hispanic circus and tent theater industry in the United States. Circus and theater had been associated together since colonial days in Mexico, but during the nineteenth century there developed a humble, poor man’s circus that traveled the poor neighborhoods of Mexico City and the provinces. It would set up a small tent, or carpa (see Theater in a Tent, Circus, Tent Shows), to house its performances; later these theaters were called carpas by extension of the term. It was in the carpa during the Revolution that the Mexican national clown, the pelado,* 1118

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developed. As well as offering all types of serious and light theatrical fare, the carpa generally came to be known for satirical revistas that often featured the antics and working-class philosophy and humor of the pelado. The carpas functioned quite often as popular tribunals, repositories of folk wisdom, humor, and music, and as incubators of Mexican comic types and stereotypes. They continued to function in this way in the Southwest, and in particular in San Antonio, which had become, especially after the outbreak of the Revolution, a home base and wintering ground for many of the carpas. Probably because of their small size, barebones style, and organization around a family unit, the carpas could manage themselves better than large circuses or theatrical companies could. Furthermore, they were able to cultivate smaller audiences in even the most remote areas. The carpas became in the Southwest an important Mexican American popular Teatro Causa de los Pobres, Denver, Colorado. culture institution. Their comic routines became a sounding board for the culture conflict that Mexican Americans felt in language usage, assimilation to American tastes and lifestyles, discrimination in the United States, and pocho,* or Americanized status, in Mexico. Out of these types of conflicts in popular entertainment arose the stereotype of the pachuco,* a typically Mexican American figure. Finally, the carpas were a refuge for theatrical and circus people of all types during the Depression, Repatriation, and World War II. More importantly, their cultural arts were preserved by the carpas for the post-war generation that was to forge a new relationship with the larger American culture. From the turn of the century through World War II, San Antonio was home to many a carpa. Two of the most well-known resident tent shows of San Antonio were the Carpa García and the Carpa Cubana, whose descendants still reside in the Alamo City. The Carpa García was founded by Manuel V. García, a native of Saltillo, Mexico. He relocated his family to San Antonio in 1914, after having performed with the Carpa Progresista in Mexico. Featured in his Carpa García was the famed charro (Mexican-style cowboy) on the tightrope act. One of the comic actors of the Carpa, Pedro González González (“Ramirín”), later had a successful career in Hollywood westerns. Other members of the family performed magic, ventriloquism, song and 1119

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dance, and comedy. The highlight of the show was the peladito Don Fito. As played by Manuel’s son Rodolfo, Don Fito became a typical wise guy from the streets of West Side San Antonio, speaking an urban Mexican American dialect, or caló. He also satirized the language of Mexicans and pachucos and often engaged audiences in repartee. The Carpa García at times also hosted Don Lalo (Lao Astol) and the famous singer Lydia Mendoza and her family of performers. Daughter Esther García, an acrobat, went on to the center ring of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. By 1947, the Carpa García decided to retire after a final run-in with the Fire Department about making its tents fireproof. In Latin American and U.S. circus history, the Abreu name appears frequently during the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. The Abreu company, directed by Virgilio Abreu, owned and operated the Carpa Cubana—also known as the El Teatro Campesino’s “El fin del mundo,” 1974. Cuban Show and the Circo Cubano— that made San Antonio its home base in the 1920s and 1930s. But before that, various members of the family had appeared as acrobats, tumblers, and wire-walkers with such famous shows as Orrin, Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers, John Robinson, and Sells–Floto. In San Antonio, the Cuban circus included trapeze artists, rope walkers, jugglers, clowns, dancers, and its own ten-piece band. Although based in San Antonio, the company toured as far as California and central Mexico by truck and train but mostly limited its tours to the Rio Grande Valley in the south and Austin to the north during the 1930s. Virgilio Abreu and his wife Federica owned a home on the west side of San Antonio but lived in tents with the rest of the company when on the road. The company would tour for four or five months in the spring until the summer heat set in and then not leave San Antonio again until the fall, returning home for the Christmas season. The members of the company would also do variety acts in the local San Antonio cinemas.

New York City It was during the 1890s in New York that regular amateur and semi-professional shows began as the Hispanic immigrant community, made up mostly of Spaniards and Cubans, grew in size, reflecting once again the patterns of economic disruption and internal conflict in the homeland and 1120

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immigration to the U.S. that would be repeated time and again during the development of Hispanic communities and culture in the United States. Of course, the diaspora brought on by the Mexican Revolution (1910), more than any other factor, characterized the theater in the Southwest during the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, New York became an organizing and staging center for Cuban and Puerto Rican expatriates seeking the independence of their homelands from Spain. Later in the century heavy migration of Puerto Ricans (now U.S. citizens) and the Puerto Rican nationalist movement in pursuit of independence from the U.S. would also manifest itself on the city’s Hispanic stages, as would the efforts by exiled Spanish Republicans fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the mid-thirties. Documentary evidence of the Hispanic stage in New York begins in 1892 with the La Patria newspaper reporting on the draA scene from El Teatro de la Esperanza’s “Guadalupe.” matic activities of actor Luis Baralt and his company. Until 1898, the year of the Spanish American War, this newspaper, published by José Martí* to support the Cuban revolutionary movement, occasionally covered performances by Baralt and his troupe, which included both amateurs and actors with professional experience. The company had an irregular performance schedule in such auditoriums and halls as the Berkeley Lyceum and the Carnegie Lyceum, where it presented standard Spanish melodramas as well as Cuban plays, such as De lo Vivo a lo Pintado (From Life to the Painted Version), by Tomás Mendoza, a deceased hero of the revolutionary war, and La Fuga de Evangelina (The Escape of Evangelina), an unknown author’s dramatization of the escape from prison by a heroine of the independence movement. The last performance reported took place at the Central Opera House on January 16, 1899; funds were raised for the sepulcher of the great Cuban philosopher-poet and revolutionary José Martí. After this last performance there is no further mention in surviving newspapers of theatrical performances in Spanish until the advent of a truly professional stage some seventeen years later in 1916. (It bears mention that the Spanishlanguage presses of New York had been publishing plays—both locally written and imported—since the 1830s, but there is as yet insufficient information about their staging.) 1121

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Unlike the theatrical experience of Los Angeles, San Antonio and Tampa, in the mid-teens of the new century, the New York Hispanic community could not claim any theaters of its own. Rather, a number of impresarios would rent available theaters around town, but mainly those located in the Broadway area, from midtown Manhattan up to the 1880s: Bryant Hall, Park Theater, Amsterdam Opera House, Leslie Theater, Carnegie Hall, and so on. The first impresario to lead companies on this odyssey through New York theater houses was a Spanish actor-singer of zarzuelas who had made his debut in Mexico City in 1904: Manuel Noriega. Noriega was a tireless and enthusiastic motivator of Hispanic theater and, for a number of years. His was practically the sole responsibility for maintaining Spanish-language theatrical seasons. Noriega’s genius as a comic actor could always be relied upon to bring in audiences during difficult financial straits. Noriega found his way to New York in 1916 from the Havana stage to perform Teatro Intimo’s “Dos y Dos Son Cinco.” at the Amsterdam Theater. That very same year he founded the first of his many theatrical companies, Compañía Dramática Española, which performed at the Leslie Theater from June to September and then went on to other theaters in the city. In Noriega’s repertoire was the typical fare of Spanish comedies, zarzuelas, and comic afterpieces. During the first two years, Noriega had so much difficulty in getting the Hispanic community out to the theater that a community organization, the Unión Benéfica Española, had to have a fundraiser for his poverty-stricken actors. It was in 1918 at the Amsterdam Opera House that Noriega’s company began finding some stability, performing each Sunday with an occasional special performance on Thursdays. By November of that year, the company was so successful that it added matinee showings on Sundays; by December it began advertising in the newspaper for theatrical artists. As Noriega hired on more actors—mostly Cubans, Spanish, and Mexicans—the nature of the company began to change, at times highlighting Galician or Catalonian works, and at others Cuban blackface comedy. In 1919 Noriega formed a partnership with Hispanic, Greek, and Anglo American businessmen to lease the Park Theater and make it the premier Hispanic house, 1122

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rebaptizing it El Teatro Español (The Spanish Theater). After a short performance run, all the parties concerned bailed out of the bad business deal; the Noriega company went on to other theaters to perform in its usual manner until 1921, when Noriega slipped from sight. The 1920s saw a rapid expansion of the Hispanic stage in New York, which was now regularly drawing touring companies from Cuba, Spain, Mexico, and the Southwest and which had also developed many of its own resident companies. Most of the companies followed the pattern of renting theaters for their runs and relocating afterward to different neighborhoods or to Brooklyn, Bayonne, Jersey City, or even Philadelphia. Beginning in 1922, the Hispanic community was able to lay claim to a number of houses on long-term bases, at times even renaming the theaters in honor of the Hispanic community. The first two theaters that began to stabilize Hispanic theater culture in New York were the Dalys and Nicolás Kanellos as “Teacher” in the youth program of El Apollo theaters. After 1930, the Apollo Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo. no longer offered Hispanic fare; the leadership then passed in 1931 to the San José/Variedades, in 1934 to the Campoamor, and finally in 1937 to the most important and longest-lived house in the history of Hispanic theater in New York: El Teatro Hispano. As in the Southwest, these houses also experienced the same evolution of Hispanic theater in which melodrama and zarzuela reigned at the beginning of the 1920s only to be gradually displaced by musical revues and vaudeville as during the 1930s artists of serious drama took refuge in clubs and mutualist societies—although rarely in church auditoriums, unlike in the Southwest. However, the kind of musical revue that was to rein supreme in New York was not the Mexican revista but the obra bufa cubana, or Cuban blackface farce, which featured the stock character types of the negrito (blackface), mulata, and gallego (Galician), relying heavily on Afro-Cuban song and dance and improvised slapstick comedy. (See African Roots.) Like the revistas, the obras bufas cubanas often found inspiration in current events, neighborhood gossip, and even politics. The most famous of all the bufos, Arquímides Pous, who played in New York in 1921, was the creator of more than two hundred of these short works, many of which were kept alive by his followers after his death in Puerto Rico in 1926. Pous, who always played the negrito, was famous for his social 1123

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satire, and especially for his attacks on racism. The bufo genre itself had been influenced in its development during the second half of the nineteenth century by the buffes parisiennes and the Cuban circus. Under the Spanish in Cuba, the bufos were particularly repressed for being native Cubans, causing many of them to go into exile in Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Mexico, and the United States. Beginning in 1932, the Mt. Morris Theater (inaugurated in 1913) began serving the Hispanic community under a series of various impresarios and names: first as the Teatro Campoamor, then as the Teatro Cervantes and, on August 19, 1937, finally metamorphosing into El Teatro Hispano, which lived on into the 1950s. Señor del Pozo, a somewhat mysterious Mexican impresario who never used his first names, surfaced at the head of a group of backers made up of Hispanic and Jewish businessmen. Del Pozo administered the theater and directed the house orchestra. Under Los Angeles’s Teatro Primavera, 1976. Del Pozo, besides movies, the Teatro Hispano offered three daily shows at 2:00, 5:30, and 9:00 p.m., except on Sundays, when four shows were given. To maintain the interest of his working-class audiences, Del Pozo instituted a weekly schedule that included bonuses and surprises: on Tuesdays and Fridays. Banco was played at the theater and prizes were awarded; Wednesday audiences participated in talent shows that were broadcast over radio WHOM; on Thursdays gifts and favors were distributed to audiences; Saturday mornings featured a special children’s show. There were also occasional beauty contests, turkey raffles, and the like. Weekly programs changed on Friday evenings and were billed as debuts. Del Pozo used the radio, weekly playbills, and personal appearances to promote the theater as a family institution and himself as a great paternal, kindly protector of the community. Upon its opening in August 1937, Del Pozo immediately began to elaborate upon the formula of alternating shows relating to the diverse Hispanic nationalities represented in the community. For one week he played to the Puerto Ricans with the revue En las Playas de Borinquen (On the Shores of Puerto Rico), which he followed in September with an Afro-Caribbean revue Fantasía en Blanco y Negro (Fantasy in Black and White) and De México Vengo (I Come from Mexico); this was followed by the Compañía de Comedias Argentinas and a week celebrating Puerto Rico’s historic proclamation of independence, El 1124

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Grito de Lares. By the end of September, Del Pozo was again announcing Cuban week, featuring a Cuba Bella (Beautiful Cuba) revue. Each week a movie was shown to coincide with the country featured in the revue or plays. In the months and years that followed, numerous revues and an occasional zarzuela were staged, always balancing out the ethnic nationality represented. The Puerto Rican negrito Antonio Rodríguez and the Cuban negrito Edelmiro Borras became very popular and were ever present (See African Roots). The cast at the Teatro Hispano was constantly being reinforced by refugees from the Spanish Civil War, such as Rosita Rodrigo of the Teatro Cómico de Barcelona, and artists from the failing stages of the Southwest, such as La Chata Noloesca. By 1940 the Teatro Hispano had fixed its relationship to the predominantly working-class community, which by now was becoming mostly Puerto Rican. The Teatro Hispano and the other theaters did not sponsor play-writing contests and did not support the development of a local dramatic literature as did the theaters in Los Angeles. Although the dramatic activity was intense in New York City, the Big Apple did not support a downtown center where five or six major Hispanic houses located side by side competed Puerto Rican Traveling Theater’s production of “La Era with each other on a daily basis, as did Latina.” the theaters in Los Angeles. The community of Hispanic immigrants in New York was not cognizant of a resident Hispanic tradition, as were the communities in the Southwest. And although the relationship between journalism and play-writing had been well established in Mexico and the Southwest, this does not seem to have been the case in Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Spain. Then, too, many playwrights had been drawn to Los Angeles to work in the Hispanic film industry. Futhermore, the New York Hispanic public was not 1125

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El Teatro Repertorio Español’s ad for “Gardel.”

as large as Los Angeles’s during the 1920s and could not support so large a business as the theater represented in the City of Angels. By far the most productive playwrights and librettists in New York were the Cubans, especially those riding the crest of popularity of the irreverent, bawdy, satirical obras bufas cubanas. Of these, the most prolific and popular were Alberto O’Farrill* and Juan C. Rivera. The former was a successful blackface comic and literary personality who edited the weekly Gráfico newspaper and produced a number of zarzuelas and obras bufas cubanas based on Afro-Cuban themes. All of them debuted at the Apollo Theater. Juan C. Rivera was a comic actor who often played the role of the gallego and is known to have written both melodramas and revistas. Only a few of the works by these authors are known by name; it is assumed that they produced a considerable body of works to be staged by the companies in which they acted. Although it is true that Cubans and Spaniards made up the majority of theater artists in New York City—and that their works dominated the stages of the times—it is also true that Puerto Rican drama emerged at this time and seems to have accounted for a more serious and substantial body of literature. Two of the first Puerto Rican playwrights appear to have been socialists whose dramas supported the Spanish Republican cause and working-class movements: José Enamorado Cuesta* (1892–1976) and Franca de Armiño* (a pseudonym). Of the former little is known: he was an activist for Puerto Rican independence, wrote revisionist histories of Puerto Rico, and fought in the Spanish Civil War—La Prensa on May 22, 1937, called him a revolutionary writer when it covered his play El Pueblo en Marcha (The People on the March). Of Franca de 1126

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Armiño, all we have is her published drama Los Hipócritas (The Hypocrites), whose notes and introduction reveal that she was the author of various other plays, essays, and poems, and that Los Hipócritas was first staged in 1933 at the Park Palace Theater. The play itself, which begins with the stock market crash, sets a Romeo-and-Juliet story to the background of the Spanish Civil War and the foreground of conflict between the workers and management at a shoe factory. While full of propaganda, Marxist theory, and stereotyped characters, Los Hipócritas is a gripping and entertaining play that reflects the tenor of the times. While Franca de Armiño and José Enamorado Cuesta were calling for a workers’ revolution, Gonzalo O’Neill* was also championing Puerto Rican nationalism and independence from the United States. Immediately upon his graduation from Puerto Rico’s Instituto Civil, O’Neill moved to New York, where he became a very successful businessman and somewhat of a protector and godfather to newly arrived Puerto Rican migrants. A published poet and literary group organizer as a youth in Puerto Rico, he continued his literary vocation in New York by writing poetry and plays, some of which he published. From his very first published dramatic work, La indiana borinqueña (1922, The Indians of Puerto Rico), O’Neill revealed himself to be intensely patriotic and interested in Puerto Rican independence. His second published play, Moncho Reyes (1923), was a three-act biting satire of the current colonial government in Puerto Rico. Although both of these works enjoyed stage productions, it was his third play, Bajo una sola bandera (1928, Under Just One Flag)—which debuted at the Park Palace Theater in New York in 1928 and at the Teatro Municipal in San Juan in 1929—that deserves the greatest attention for its artistry and thought. These also made it a popular vehicle for the Puerto Rican nationalist cause. In Bajo una sola bandera, the political options facing Puerto Rico are personified in down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood characters. The plot deals with the daughter of a middle-class Puerto Rican family residing in New York who must choose between a young American second lieutenant—the personification of the United States and military rule—and a young native Puerto Rican, whom she really loves. Both parents oppose each other in their preferences. Of course, the Puerto Rican youth wins the day, and the play ends with sonorous, patriotic verses underlining the theme of independence for Puerto Rico. Although O’Neill is sure to have written other plays, the only other title known is Amoríos Borincanos (Puerto Rican Episodes of Love), which appeared at the Teatro Hispano in 1938 (O’Neill was one of the investors in the Hispano). Most of the other Puerto Rican and Hispanic playwrights of New York were minor in comparison to these and to the highly productive writers in Los Angeles. The true legacy of the New York Hispanic stage was its cosmopolitan nature and its ability to represent and solidify an ethnically diverse Hispanic community.

Tampa In the late nineteenth century the Tampa area witnessed the transplant of an entire industry from abroad and the development of a Hispanic 1127

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enclave that chose the theater as its favorite form of art and culture. Various cigar manufacturers from Cuba, in order to remove themselves from the hostilities attendant on the Cuban war for independence from Spain, to come closer to their primary markets and avoid import duties, and to try to escape the labor unrest endemic to their industry, began relocating to Tampa. In the swampy, mosquito-infested lands just east of Tampa, Ybor City was founded in 1886. By the 1890s the Spanish and Cuban tobacco workers had begun establishing mutual aid societies and including theaters as centerpieces for the buildings they constructed to house these societies. Many of these theaters eventually hosted professional companies on tour from Cuba and Spain; more important, they became the forums where both amateurs and resident professionals entertained the Hispanic community for more than forty uninterrupted years. These theaters were also the training grounds where El Teatro Campesino. numerous tobacco workers and other community people developed into professional and semiprofessional artists, some of whom were able to make their way to the Hispanic stages of New York, Havana, and Madrid. Tampa also played a key role in one of the most exciting chapters of American theater history, being the site of the Federal Theater Project’s only Hispanic company under the Works Progress Administration. Unlike Los Angeles, San Antonio, and New York, there was very little truly commercial theatrical activity in the Tampa–Ybor City communities. The six most important mutual aid societies—Centro Español, Centro Español de West Tampa, Centro Asturiano, Círculo Cubano, Centro Obrero, and Unión Martí-Maceo—each maintained a comisión de espectáculos, or show committee, to govern the use of their theaters, a task that included renting the theater to touring companies and others, scheduling events, hiring professional directors, scenery painters, and technicians, and even purchasing performance rights to theatrical works. Along with this comisión, which obviously took on the theater management role, most of the societies also supported a sección de declamación, or amateur theatrical company, made up mostly of the society’s members. For a good part of each year the company would rehearse on week nights and perform on Sundays. For the most part, the audiences were made up 1128

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of tobacco workers and their families. The tobacco workers prided themselves on their literary and artistic tastes and were considered an intellectual or elite labor class that had gained an informal education from the professional lectores, or readers, that they hired to read aloud to them from literary masterpieces, newspapers, and other matter while they rolled cigars. Neither the demanding audiences nor the managing committees would be satisfied by strictly amateurish renditions, especially because they could compare such performances with those of the professional companies that often visited their theaters. It therefore became the custom to recruit and hire professional actors and directors from Havana to train and direct the resident sección de declamación, which was paid for its performances. Over the years numerous professional artists either settled in Tampa or were recruited to become part of the companies. But Tampa’s Hispanic societies also prepared such important actors as Manuel Aparicio, Cristino R. Inclán, and Velia Martínez, who later abandoned the Thalia’s production of “Los Buenos Días Perdidos.” cigar factories to dedicate themselves completely to the world of footlights and marquees. By the 1920s a good number of local artists considered themselves professionals and demanded reasonable salaries for their performances. Of the six societies, the Centro Asturiano was the most important and the longest-lived; in fact, it is still functioning today as a theater, hosting theater and even opera companies. Although the Centro Español of Ybor City was the oldest and for a time most prestigious society, having been founded in 1891, the Asturiano, founded in 1902, held the distinction of hosting in its 1200-seat, first-class auditorium some of the greatest names in Hispanic theater in the world—and even opera companies from New York and Italy during the period before World War II. It was to the Centro Asturiano that Spain’s first lady of the stage, María Guerrero, took her company in 1926. That was a stellar year during which, in addition to producing the works of its own stock company directed by Manuel Aparicio, the Asturiano also hosted the Manhattan Grand Opera Association. But the socially progressive—even liberal—Centro Asturiano, which extended its membership to all Latins, even Cubans and Italians, held the further distinction of housing the only Spanish-language Federal Theater Project. 1129

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It was during the tenure of the Federal Theater Project* (FTP) for eighteen months in 1936 and 1937 that the Centro Asturiano made American theater history by housing the only Hispanic unit of the WPA’s national project. It is a chapter in which the two theatrical traditions, the Hispanic and the Anglo American, which had existed side by side for so long, finally intersected to produce at times exciting theater but also instances of cultural misunderstanding. Teatro Trucha, Chicago, 1975. From the start the FTP administration’s attitude seems to have been a model of condescension; ultimately, the Hispanic unit had to disband because of xenophobia in the U.S. Congress. A unique theatrical experience was that of the Unión Martí-Maceo, Tampa’s Afro-Cuban mutual aid society, whose very existence resulted from the doubly segregationist forces of the Jim Crow South and Cuba’s own racism. Although the Unión hosted many of the same theater companies touring to Tampa and also sponsored performances by its own and the other society’s secciones de declamación, the Unión’s theatrical and cultural activities were rarely covered in the press, rarely attracted audiences from the Hispanic “white” population and, on the whole, were hardly integrated into the social life of the Hispanic, Anglo American, or black communities. In the archives of the Unión, however, are plays and fragments of plays that provide some interesting glimpses into the nature of the theatrical performances of this society. Two of these works, a one-act play, Hambre (Hunger), and an obra bufa cubana, Los Novios (The Betrothed), are notable for their relevance to the social and economic ambience of the Martí-Maceo. Hambre is a gripping and angry social drama that protests the poverty and hunger suffered by the working class while the rich enjoy lives of luxury. Los Novios, a much lighter and more entertaining play featuring mistaken identities and ridiculously complex love triangles, also deals with the supposed trespassing of race and class barriers and miscegenation. A buffoon of a Galician servant and a negrito spread mistaken information about the landowner having illicitly fathered a mulata and the landowner’s daughter being caught embracing a black. The play also includes a number of asides that elaborate on race relations while throughout the negrito and the mulata maintain the greatest dignity in the play, the upper-class whites being shown as the most bungling and prejudiced. In the end, order is restored when everyone finds his rightful place and his rightful marriage partner. But the social satire, from a black perspective, is unmistakable. Another society that offered a unique theatrical experience was the Centro Obrero, the headquarters for the Union of Tampa Cigarmakers, which served 1130

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as a gathering place for workers and workers’ culture. (See Working-class Literature.) Through its various classes, workshops, publications, and activities, the Centro Obrero promoted unionism and—quite often—socialism. Although the Centro Obrero also hosted touring and local companies and even frivolous shows of obras bufas cubanas, it is within its halls and auspices that plays were developed and shown that promoted workers’ interests using their dialect and ideology. In the Centro’s weekly newspapers, El Internacional and La Federación, various of these plays were published, including Julia y Carlota (Julia and Carlota), in which Julia exhorts Carlota to break the bonds of family and religion that are meant to keep women, oppressed and divorced from politics, in their place, unable to help reform evil laws. Probably written by the most renowned feminist in Puerto Rican history, Luisa Capetillo,* who worked in and organized workers in the Tampa factories, the play is much like her other work, which appropriates an abbreviated melodramatic format to illustrate through dialog the solutions presented by anarchism and women’s liberation. She self-published many of her plays in her book La influencia de las ideas modernas (The Influence of Modern Ideas). Other works were clearly agitational and propagandistic, attempting to inspire workers to action. Finally, the Centro Obrero went all out to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. It sponsored numerous fundraising performances of such plays as Milicianos al Frente (Militia to the Front), Abajo Franco (Down with Franco), and Las Luchas de Hoy (1916, The Struggles of Today), all of unknown authorship. Many parallels can be drawn between the Tampa Hispanic stage and Hispanic theater as it flourished in the Southwest and New York: the relationship of the theater to politics and to patterns of immigration; the dominance of the Spanish zarzuela and melodrama, eventually ceding to more popular forms (such as the revista and the obra bufa cubana); the effects of the Depression; the role theater played in protecting Hispanic cultural values and the Spanish language, as well as in the education of the youth; the isolation of Hispanic culture and theater from the larger society; and so on. But Tampa’s Hispanic theatrical experience was unique in that it provided a successful example of lasting community support for theater arts so deep and so strong that private enterprise could not compete with the efforts of the mutual aid societies. Because the Hispanic stage had become such a symbol of achievement, that legacy lives on today in the memory of the Tampeños and in the Hispanic theatrical groups that still exist there.

Post-War to the Present The Southwest The postwar period in the Southwest has seen the gradual restoration of the amateur, semiprofessional, and professional stages in the Hispanic communities of the Southwest. From the 1950s on, repertory theaters have appeared throughout the Southwest to produce Latin American, Spanish, and American plays in Spanish translations. In San Antonio, the extraordinary 1131

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efforts of such actors as Lalo Astol, La Chata Noloesca, and her daughter Velia Camargo were responsible for keeping plays and vaudeville routines alive in the communities, even if they had to be presented for free or at fundraisers. Actors such as Lalo Astol made the transition to radio and television—usually as announcers, but at times as writers and producers. Astol even wrote, directed, and acted in locally produced television drama during the 1950s and 1960s. In Los Angeles, veteran actor-director Rafael Trujillo-Herrera* maintained a theater group almost continuously during the war and through the 1960s, its ranks filled by his drama students and professionals both, who quite often performed at a small theater house that he bought, El Teatro Intimo (The Intimate Theater). Although there are a few stories of valiant theater artists managing to keep Hispanic theater alive during the war and the post-war years, in most cases the tale is of theater houses that once housed live performances eventually becoming cinemas instead, or at least phasing out live performances during the war and through the 1950s by occasionally hosting small troupes of vaudevillians or subscribing to the extravagant caravanas de estrellas, or parades of recording stars, that were syndicated and promoted by the recording companies. Through these shows promenaded singers and matinee idols as peladitos and other vaudevillians served as masters of ceremonies and as comic relief. Vestiges of this business strategy still survive today in the shows of Mexican recording and movie stars of the moment which are not now produced at movie houses but at convention centers and large-capacity sports and entertainment arenas. The most remarkable story of the stage in the Southwest, however, is the spontaneous appearance in 1965 of a labor theater in the agricultural fields under the directorship of Luis Valdez, and of its creation of a full-blown theatrical movement that conquered the hearts and minds of artists and activists throughout the country. Under the leadership of Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, for almost two decades Chicano theaters dramatized the political and cultural concerns of their communities while crisscrossing the states on tour. The movement, largely student- and worker-based, eventually led to professionalism, Hollywood and Broadway productions, and the creation of the discipline of Chicano theater at universities. In 1965 the modern Chicano theater movement was born when aspiring playwright Luis Valdez* left the San Francisco Mime Troupe to join César Chávez in organizing farm workers in Delano, California. Valdez organized farm workers into El Teatro Campesino in an effort to popularize and fund the grape boycott and farm worker strike. From the humble beginning of dramatizing the plight of farm workers, the movement grew to include small agitation and propaganda theater groups in communities and on campuses around the country, eventually developing into a total theatrical expression that would find resonance on the commercial stage and screen. By 1968, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino had left the vineyards and lettuce fields in a conscious effort to create a theater for the Chicano nation, a people that Valdez and other Chicano organizers of the 1960s envisioned as working-class, Spanish-speaking or bilingual, rurally oriented, and having a 1132

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very strong heritage of pre-Colombian culture. By 1970, El Teatro Campesino had pioneered and developed what would come to be known as teatro chicano, a style of agit-prop theater that incorporated the spiritual and presentational style of the Italian Renaissance’s commedia dell’ arte with the humor, character types, folklore, and popular culture of the Mexican, especially as articulated earlier in the century by the vaudeville companies and tent theaters that had toured the Southwest. Almost overnight, groups sprang up throughout the United States to continue along Valdez’s path. In streets, parks, churches, and schools, Chicanos were spreading a newly found bilingual–bicultural identity through the actos, oneact pieces introduced by Valdez that explored all the issues confronting Mexican Americans: the farm worker struggle for unionization, the Vietnam War, the drive for bilingual education, community control of parks and schools, the war against drug addiction and crime, and so forth. El Teatro Campesino’s Los Vendidos (The Sell-Outs), a farcical attack on political manipulation of Chicano stereotypes, became the most popular and imitated of the actos; it could be seen performed by diverse groups from Seattle to Austin. The publication of Actos by Luis Valdez y El Teatro Campesino in 1971, which included Los Vendidos (See Vendido), placed a ready-made repertoire in the hands of community and student groups and also supplied them with several theatrical and political canons: 1. Chicanos must be seen as a nation having geographic, religious, cultural, and racial roots in Aztlán. Teatros must further the idea of nationalism and create a national theater based on identification with the Amerindian past. 2. The organizational support of the national theater would be from within, for “the corazón de la Raza (the heart of our people) cannot be revolutionized on a grant from Uncle Sam.” 3. Most important and valuable of all, “The teatros must never get away from La Raza. . . . If the Raza will not come to the theater, then the theater must go to the Raza. This, in the long run, will determine the shape, style, content, spirit, and form of el teatro chicano.”

El Teatro Campesino’s extensive touring, the publicity it gained from the farm worker struggle, and the publication of Actos all effectively contributed to the launching of a national teatro movement. It reached its peak in the summer of 1976 when five teatro festivals were held to commemorate the Anglo bicentennial celebration. The summer’s festivals also culminated a period of growth that saw some of Campesino’s followers reach sufficient esthetic and political maturity to break away from Valdez. Los Angeles’s Teatro Urbano, in its mordant satire of American heroes, insisted on intensifying the teatro movement’s radicalism in the face of the Campesino’s increasing religious mysticism. Santa Barbara’s El Teatro de la Esperanza was achieving perfection as no other Chicano theater had by working as a collective and assimilating the teachings of Bertolt Brecht in their plays Guadalupe and La víctima (The Victim). San Jose’s El Teatro de la Gente had taken the corrido-type acto, a structure that sets 1133

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a mimic ballet to traditional Mexican ballads sung by a singer/narrator, perfecting it as its innovator, El Teatro Campesino, had never done. El Teatro Desengaño del Pueblo, of Gary, Indiana, had succeeded in reviving the techniques of the radical theaters of the 1930s in their Silent Partners, an expose of corruption in a local city’s construction projects. The greatest contribution of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino was their inauguration of a true grassroots theater movement. Following Valdez’s direction, the university students and community people creating teatro held fast to the doctrine of never getting away from the raza, the grassroots Mexican. In so doing, they created the perfect vehicle for communing artistically within their culture and environment. At times they idealized and romanticized the language and the culture of the mexicano in the United States. But they had discovered a way to mine history, folklore, and religion for those elements that could best solidify the heterogeneous community and sensitize it to issues of class, cultural identity, and politics. This indeed was revolutionary. The creation of art from the folk materials of a people and its music, humor, social configurations, and environment represented the fulfillment of Luis Valdez’s vision of a Chicano national theater. Although Campesino, after leaving the farm worker struggle, was able to experiment and rediscover the old cultural forms—the carpas, the corridos, the pastorelas (or shepherd plays), the Virgin of Guadalupe plays, the peladito*—it never fully succeeded in combining all of the elements it recovered and invented into a completely refined piece of revolutionary art. La gran carpa de la familia Rascuachi (The Tent of the Underdogs) was a beautiful creation, incorporating the spirit, history, folklore, economy, and music of la raza. But its proposal for the resolution of material problems through spiritual means (a superimposed construct of Aztec mythology and Catholicism) was too close to the religious beliefs and superstitions that hampered la raza’s progress, according to many of the more radical artists and theorists of people’s theater. The reaction of critics and many Chicano theaters playing at the fifth Chicano theater festival, held in Mexico, was so politically and emotionally charged that a rift developed between them and El Teatro Campesino that has never been healed. El Teatro Campesino virtually withdrew from the theater movement, and from that point on the Chicano theaters developed on their own, managing to exist as agitation and propaganda groups and rag-tag troupes until the end of the decade. The more successful theaters, such as El Teatro de la Esperanza, administered their own theater house, created playwriting workshops, and took up leadership of TENAZ,* the Chicano theater organization, while taking over El Teatro Campesino’s former role as a national touring company. Other groups, such as Albuquerque’s La Compañía, set down roots and became more of a repertory company. The 1980s saw numbers of Chicano theater groups disbanding as some of their members became involved in local community theaters, their own performance spaces and budgets supplied by state and local arts agencies. Thus, such companies as Houston’s Teatro Bilingüe, San Antonio’s Guadalupe Theater, and Denver’s 1134

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Su Teatro began serving their respective communities as stable repertory companies. Other former Chicano theater artists successfully made the jump to television and movies, including Luis Valdez himself. In fact, Valdez’s play Zoot Suit enjoyed a successful two-year run in mainstream theaters in Los Angeles and had made its way to a Broadway and into film. He followed up with stage and television productions of his play Corridos* (Ballads) and then the overwhelming box-office success of his movie La Bamba. In 1994, Valdez also made a successful incursion into commercial television with his made-fortelevision movie, The Cisco Kid. Since then, Valdez has had numerous showing of his plays at mainstream regional theaters, such as Chicago’s Goodman and San Diego’s Globe, and El Teatro Campesino has continued to produce plays by up-and-coming playwrights in their playhouse in San Juan Bautista. Other former Chicano theater directors, such as Jorge Huerta, became university professors of theater and directors of productions in such mainstream organizations as San Diego’s Globe Theater. Thus, although the 1980s saw a disappearance of the grassroots, guerrilla, and street theater movement among Chicanos, these were the years of greater professionalism and greater opportunity, allowing Chicano theater people to make a living from their art in community theaters, at universities, and even in the commercial media—the latter facilitated, of course, by the great rise of the Hispanic population with its attendant spending power. But the 1980s also saw the emergence of a corps of Chicano and Latino playwrights in communities from coast to coast as the repertory theaters in the Southwest and in New York and Miami began clamoring for works dealing with Hispanic culture written in the language of Hispanics in the United States. Numerous playwriting labs, workshops, and contests, such as Joseph Papp’s Festival Latino in New York, sprang up from New York to Los Angeles. In the mid1980s a major funding organization, the Ford Foundation, took official interest in Hispanic theater and not only began substantially funding the theater companies, including El Teatro de la Esperanza, in an effort to stabilize them but also began supporting efforts by mainstream companies and theaters, such as the South Coast Repertory Theater and the San Diego Repertory Theater, to produce Hispanic material and employ Hispanic actors. Furthermore, the Ford Foundation even funded the nation’s leading Hispanic press, Arte Público Press,* when it published a line of Hispanic play anthologies and collections of works by the leading Hispanic playwrights. By 1991, Arte Público Press had produced a new anthology of plays by Luis Valdez, Milcha Sánchez Scott, Severo Pérez, and others (Necessary Theater: Six Plays of the Chicano Experience, edited by Jorge Huerta), as well as anthologies of Hispanic women’s plays, Cuban American plays, Puerto Rican plays, and collections by Luis Valdez, Dolores Prida,* Edward Gallardo, Iván Acosta,* and Carlos Morton.* It also reissued its historic 1979 anthology, out of print for a decade: Nuevos Pasos: Chicano and Puerto Rican Theater, edited by Nicolás Kanellos and Jorge Huerta. As the 1990s saw the stabilization of theater houses and companies in the Southwest, thanks to funding agencies such as the Ford Foundation and to 1135

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local and state arts councils that now recognized Hispanic arts, another outgrowth of Chicano theater became prominent: commercially viable improvisational theater companies. Two such Chicano companies, Culture Clash* and Latins Anonymous, appeared in California to resounding success; Culture Clash even sustained a television series by the same name for two seasons during the early 1990s. Both groups, populated by seasoned veterans of El Teatro Campesino and other Chicano theaters, based their improvised comic sketches on satirizing stereotypes of Hispanics, poking fun at politics and current events. Latins Anonymous, with lead playwright Rick Najera,* also satirized Hispanic media personalities—there were now enough Hispanic personalities in entertainment and national television for impressions of them to be recognized. Najera and a new breed of stand-up comedians were also increasingly appearing on television and even in their own HBO specials. Nevertheless, because very few playwrights have been able to achieve productions of their plays, a number of them, including Najera, Denise Chávez,* and Ruby Nelda Pérez, have taken to the road to present one-man or one-woman shows. Today only a vestige of teatro chicano survives among university groups. Most theater activity among Mexican Americans, much as among Puerto Rican, Cubans, and other Latinos, revolves around the production of plays from the entire Hispanic world in Spanish or English, as well as the production of original plays written by individual Latinos. Only Valdez has remained somewhat true to the acto form, although he has expanded and deepened it to hold an audience for two hours, as in his most recent play, Mummified Deer (2002). Even though most other playwrights also continue to confront social and political issues that are important to Latinos, most of them do it through the conventional forms canonized by commodity theater in conventional playhouses.

New York During the war years and following, serious theater in the Hispanic community waned, first as vaudeville drove it from such commercial stages as the Teatro Hispano and then as the movies and the caravans of music recording stars, just as in the Southwest, began to drive even vaudeville from the stages. Under the leadership of such directors as Marita Reid, Luis Mandret, and Alejandro Elliot, full-length melodramas and realistic plays were able to survive in mutual aid societies, church halls, and lodges during the 1940s and 1950s, but only for smaller audiences and for weekend performances. With such attractions as La Chata Noloesca’s Mexican company and Puerto Rican vaudevillians, including famed recording star Bobby Capó, vaudeville survived into the early 1960s, playing to the burgeoning working-class audiences of Puerto Ricans. One notable and valiant effort was represented by Dominican actor-director Rolando Barrera’s group Futurismo, which for a time during the 1940s was able to stage four productions yearly of European works in Spanish translation at the Master’s Auditorium. Beginning in 1950, Edwin Janer’s La Farándula Panamericana staged three and four productions yearly of 1136

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classical works, as well as contemporary Spanish, Puerto Rican, and European works at the Master’s Auditorium and the Belmont Theater. In 1953, a play was staged that would have the most direct and lasting impact of any theatrical production in New York’s Hispanic community. A young director, Roberto Rodríguez, introduced to a working-class audience at the Church of San Sebastian the play La carreta (The Oxcart) written by the as-yet-unknown Puerto Rican writer René Marqués.* The play, which deals with the dislocation of a family of mountain folk from their farm and their resettling in a San Juan slum and then in New York City, effectively dramatized the epic of Puerto Rican migration to the United States in working-class and mountain dialect. René Marqués went on to celebrity and many more plays and productions in Puerto Rico and the continental United States, but his La carreta became key for building a Puerto Rican and Hispanic theater in New York in that it presented serious dramatic material based on the history, language, and culture of the working-class communities. Roberto Rodríguez joined forces with stage and screen actress Miriam Colón* to form El Nuevo Círculo Dramático (New Dramatic Circle), which was able to administer a theater space in a loft, Teatro Arena, in Midtown Manhattan. Although there were other minor and short-lived companies, it was El Nuevo Círculo Dramático, along with La Farándula Panamericana, that dominated the New York Hispanic stage into the early 1960s, when two incursions were made into the mainstream: in 1964 Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival began producing Shakespearean works in Spanish, and in 1965 an off-Broadway production of La carreta starred Miriam Colón and Raúl Juliá. The 1960s also saw the introduction of improvisational street theater similar to Latin American people’s theater and Chicano theater, which attempted to raise the level of political consciousness of working-class Hispanics. Among the most well-known, although short-lived, groups were the following ensembles, which usually developed their material as a collective: El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de las Américas (The New Poor People’s Theater of the Americas), Teatro Orilla (Marginal Theater), Teatro Guazabara (Whatsamara Theater), and Teatro Jurutungo. But the most interesting of the improvisational troupes, and the only one to survive to the present day, has been the Teatro Cuatro, so named for its first location on Fourth Avenue in the Lower East Side, made up at first of a diverse group of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Latin Americans. Under the directorship of Argentine immigrant Oscar Ciccone and his Salvadorean wife Cecilia Vega, the Teatro Cuatro was one of the most serious troupes, committed to developing a true radical art and to bringing together the popular theater movement of Latin America with that of Hispanics in the United States. As such, Teatro Cuatro became involved with TENAZ and the Chicano theater movement and with teatro popular in Latin America, sponsoring festivals and workshops in New York with some of the leading guerrilla and politically alternate theatrical directors and companies in the hemisphere. During the late 1970s Teatro Cuatro became officially associated with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and began to 1137

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organize the biennial Festival Latino, a festival of Hispanic popular theater. Today, Ciccone and Vega manage the Papp organization’s Hispanic productions, including the festival and a play-writing contest, but the Teatro Cuatro has gone its own way, functioning as a repertory company in its own remodeled firehouse theater in East Harlem. The type of theater that has predominated in New York’s cosmopolitan Hispanic culture since the 1960s is that which more or less follows the patterns established by the Nuevo Círculo Dramático and the Farándula Panamericana mentioned above, in which a corps of actors and a director of like mind work as a repertory group to produce works of their choosing in their own style. Styles and groups have proliferated so that at any one time over the last twenty to twenty-five years at least ten groups have existed having different esthetics and audiences. Among these theaters (many of which have their own houses today) are INTAR, Miriam Colón’s Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Teatro Repertorio Español, Nuestro Teatro, Duo, Instituto Arte Teatral (IATE), Latin American Theater Ensemble (LATE), Thalia, Tremont Arte Group, and Pregones.* Aided in part by New York’s population of over one million Hispanics, many organizations are also able to survive—although few flourish—because of the state, local, and private institutions whose support for the arts has led them to be generous to the theaters. Compared to other cities and states, the financial support for the arts and theater in particular, in the capital of the U.S. theater world, has been excellent. The three most important theater companies have been the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Teatro Repertorio Español, and INTAR. The PRTT, founded in 1967 by Miriam Colón, takes its name from its original identity as a mobile theater that performed in the streets of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods. At first it performed works by some of the leading Puerto Rican writers, such as René Marqués, José Luis González,* and Pedro Juan Soto,* alternating Spanish-language performances with English-language ones. The company also produced Latin American and Spanish works and in the early 1970s pioneered productions of works by Nuyorican* and other U.S. Hispanic authors, such as those of Jesús Colón* and Piri Thomas.* In addition to its mobile unit, the theater maintained a laboratory theater and children’s theater classes. Its most important development came in 1974 when it took over and remodeled an old firehouse in the Broadway area on 47th Street, and opened its permanent theater house. To this day, the PRTT provides the stage, audience, and developmental work for New York-based Hispanic playwrights, such as Jaime Carrero,* Edward Gallardo, Manuel Ramos Otero,* Pedro Pietri,* and Dolores Prida.* Founded in 1969 as an offshoot of Las Artes, by exiled members of Cuba’s Sociedad Pro Arte (Pro Art Society), the Teatro Repertorio Español has grown into the only Hispanic theater in the nation specializing in the production of both classical Spanish works (such as Calderónde al Barca’s La Vida Es Sueño and Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio) and works by contemporary authors from Latin America. It is also one of the few companies in the nation to stage 1138

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nineteenth-century zarzuelas. Operating today out of the Gramercy Arts Theater, which has a tradition of Spanish-language performances that goes back to the 1920s, the Teatro Repertorio Español caters both to educational as well as community-based audiences with productions in both Spanish and English. The Teatro Repertorio Español is the only New York Hispanic Theater to tour regularly around the country. This is possible because, of the major Hispanic companies in New York, the Teatro Repertorio Español is the only one still working basically as an ensemble, whereas the others are production companies that hold open auditions for all of their parts. INTAR (International Arts Relations) was founded in 1967 as ADAL (Latin American Art Group) dedicated to producing works by Latin American authors. By 1977, under the name of INTAR, the company had achieved equity status as a professional theater. After converting a variety of structures into theater spaces, they currently occupy a theater on West 42nd Street near the Broadway theater district. Under the direction of Max Ferra, the company has offered workshops for actors and directors, staged readings for playwrights, and a children’s theater. Today INTAR is known for its production of classical works in new settings and innovative directing, such as María Irene Fornés’s* La Vida Es Sueño (Life Is a Dream) and Dolores Prida’s Crisp, based on Jacinto Benavente’s Los Intereses Creados (Vested Interests). INTAR also presents works in English, including some standard nonHispanic fare. INTAR has been particularly instrumental in developing Hispanic playwriting through its playwrights laboratory and readings, quite often following up with full productions of plays by local writers. Today, both Fornés and Prida are the leading Hispanic playwrights of New York and for more than two decades have produced award-winning plays. Fornés has won more Obie awards than any other Hispanic playwright, cultivating an English style that is abstract and quite often devoid of Hispanic context, but Prida has continuously experimented with adapting the conventional forms of commodity theater to Hispanic culture in plays written in Spanish or English or bilingually. In fact, her most famous play splits the psyche of her protagonist into two characters, one speaking English and assimilating to U.S. culture and the other speaking Spanish and paralyzed with nostalgia for Prida’s birthplace, Cuba. Although the Hispanic theatrical environment in New York has been of necessity cosmopolitan, lending itself to the creation of companies with personnel from all of the Spanish-speaking countries, there have been groups that have set out to promote the work and culture of specific nationalities, such as the Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Spaniards. Most notable, of course, has been the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, but the Centro Cultural Cubano was also instrumental in the 1970s in developing Cuban theatrical expression, most significantly in producing the work of Omar Torres and Iván Acosta. Acosta’s play, El Super (The Superintendent), has been the biggest hit to ever come out of a Hispanic company and even led to a prize-winning film adaptation. In general, Cuban American theater 1139

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is well-represented in almost all the Hispanic companies of New York, including Dolores Prida, Iván Acosta, Manuel Martín, María Irene Fornés, and Omar Torres* among the most successful playwrights. Puerto Rican playwriting is also well represented at most of the Hispanic companies, but during the 1960s an important new focus developed among New York Puerto Ricans that had long-lasting implications for the creation of theater and art in Hispanic working-class communities. It was called Nuyorican (New York Rican), meaning that it emerged from artists born or raised among New York’s Puerto Rican working-classes. Nuyorican theater is not a specific form of theater per se. Nuyorican theater has included such diverse theatrical genres as collectively created street theater and works by individual playwrights produced in such diverse settings as the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater, Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival, and Broadway itself. Although the term was first applied to literature and theater by playwright-novelist Jaime Carrero in the late 1960s and finds some stylistic and thematic development in his plays Noo Jall (a play on the Spanish pronunciation of “New York and “jail”) and Pipo Subway No Sabe Reír (Pipo Subway Doesn’t Know How to Laugh), it was a group of playwright-poets associated with the Nuyorican Poets’ Café and Joseph Papp that first defined and came to exemplify Nuyorican theater. Included in the group were Miguel Algarín,* Lucky Cienfuegos, Tato Laviera,* and Miguel Piñero,* all of whom focused their bilingual works on the life and culture of working-class Puerto Ricans in New York. Two members of the group, Lucky Cienfuegos and Miguel Piñero, were ex-convicts who had begun their writing careers while incarcerated and chose to develop their dramatic material from prison, the street, and the underclass culture. Algarín, a university professor and proprietor of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, created a more avant-garde aura for the collective as the virtuoso bilingual poet Tato Laviera contributed lyricism and a folk and popular culture base. It was Piñero’s work and life, however, that became most celebrated, his prison drama Short Eyes having won an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Best American Play Award for the 1973–1974 season. His success, coupled with that of fellow Nuyorican writers ex-convict Piri Thomas and street urchin Pedro Pietri, often resulted in Nuyorican literature and theater’s becoming associated with a stark naturalism and with themes of crime, drugs, abnormal sexuality, and generally aberrant behavior. This led to a reaction against the term by many writers and theater companies who were in fact emphasizing Puerto Rican working-class culture in New York. Today there is a new generation of New York Puerto Rican playwrights who were nurtured on the theater of Piñero and the Nuyoricans and who have also experienced greater support and opportunities for developing their work. They quite often repeat and reevaluate many of the concerns and the style and language of the earlier group but with a sophistication and polish that has come from drama workshops, playwright residencies, and university education. Among these are Juan Shamsul Alam, Edward Gallardo, Federico Fraguada, Richard Irizarry, Yvette Ramírez and 1140

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Cándido Tirado,* most of whom have had their works included in the historic anthology, Recent Puerto Rican Theater: Five Plays from New York (1991), edited by John Antush.

Florida Today Hispanic theater still finds one of its centers in Florida, although most of the theatrical activity in Tampa has disappeared, only the Spanish Repertory Theater continuing to perform in the old playhouses (Centro Asturiano) with a fare that varies from the standard zarzuelas to Broadway musicals in Spanish. With the exodus of refugees from the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Hispanic theater in Florida found a new center in Miami, where the Cuban expatriates—many from middle- or upper-class backgrounds used to supporting live theater in Cuba—founded and supported theater companies and laid fertile ground for the support of playwrights. During the last thirty years, the type of theater that has predominated in Miami has produced standard works from throughout the Spanish-speaking world and from the theater of exile, which is burdened with attacking communism in Cuba and promoting a nostalgia for the pre-Castro past. Although the Cuban playwrights of New York, many of whom have been raised and educated in the United States, have forged an avant-garde, openly Cuban American theater, the Miami playwrights have been more traditional in form and content—and, of course, more politically conservative. Most frequent in the exile theater is the form and style inherited from the theater of the absurd, from theatrical realism, and, to some extent, from the comic devices and characters of the teatro bufo cubano; however, the predominant attitude among Cuban exile playwrights is the intellectual one—the creation of a theater of ideas. The exile playwrights whose works have been most produced in Miami are Julio Matas,* José Cid Pérez, Leopoldo Hernández, José Sánchez Boudy,* Celedonio González,* Raúl de Cárdenas, and Matías Montes Huidobro.* In an effort to bring together some of these with some of the newer voices, such as that of Miami’s Miguel González Pando, Rodolfo Cortina’s important anthology, Cuban American Theater (1991) considers the exile theater part of the total Cuban American experience and esthetic. Overall, however, the theatrical fare in Miami is eclectic. Audiences are able to choose from a variety of styles and genres, from vaudeville and French-style bedroom farce to serious drama, Broadway musicals in Spanish, and Spanish versions of classics, such as Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Othello. The theater companies offering the most “serious” fare have included the Teatro Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Theater), the Teatro La Danza (The Dance Theater), Grupo Ras (Grassroots Theater), and Pro Arte Gratelli (Gratelli’s Pro Art). Among the longest-lasting theaters in Miami are Salvador Ugarte’s and Ernesto Cremata’s two locations of Teatro Las Máscaras, which primarily produce light comedy and vaudeville for largely working-class audiences. Two of impresario Ernesto Capote’s three houses, the Martí Theater and the Essex Theater, have a steady line-up of comedies and vaudeville, but his third house, the Miami Theater, provides an eclectic bill, 1141

Theater in a Tent, Circus, Tent Shows

including such hard-hitting dramas as The Boys in the Band in Spanish. The Teatro Miami’s stage also serves for the taping of soap operas for television. The theaters that play more to the working classes in Miami, as exemplified by some of the theaters named above and by some that use movie houses after the showing of the last films, produce a type of reincarnation of the teatro bufo cubano that uses workingclass language and culture as well as the comic style and characters from the bufo tradition to satirize life in Miami and Cuba under Castro. Here, comic characterizations of Fidel and his brother Raúl (Raúl Resbaloso—Slippery Raúl) join some of the traditional character types, such as Trespatines (Three Skates) and Prematura (Premature). This theater is the most commercially successful Cuban theater, but the other, more artistically elite and intellectual theater often begs for audiences and depends on grants and university support for its survival. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Theater in a Tent, Circus, Tent Shows. Early circus history in the Southwest of the United States owes much to the tent shows that developed in Mexico. Even today Mexicans are represented substantially in circuses around the country. The Mexican American circus experience is one that has benefited from a diverse series of roots and influences. Hernán Cortés’s chronicler, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recognized circus-type diversions at the court of Moctezuma,

Circus parade for the Carpa García.

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emperor of the Aztecs. From then on the circus activities of the American Indians and those of the Spaniards were blended to give a distinct character to the circus as it developed in Mexico and later in the Southwest. On this early base of mestizo circus culture, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added layers of Italian, English, and Anglo American influence, until after World War II the Mexican American circus finally ceased to exist—the Mexicanos were assimilated into the large American circus companies or left circus life completely. The indigenous roots of the Mexican American circus can be identified in the entertainments by dwarfs, buffoons, and a type of clown that Bernal Díaz documented as existing in Pre-Columbian Mexico. There also existed an acrobatic religious ritual that involved flyers called “voladores” descending like birds from a high revolving platform while another acrobat danced atop the tiny platform and played a flute and small drum. As Eusebio Pirrín as Don Catarino.. the American Indian religions were supplanted by Christianity, this ritual became a secular circus act that persists to this day. The early mestizo circus was called “compañía de voladores,” “compañía de volantines,” or simply “la maroma,” this last term derived from the rope tied to the flyers. Thus the acrobats also came to be known as “maromeros.” In Chicano literature today there are references to maromeros in the works of Rolando Hinojosa* and Luis Valdez.* The European circus tradition begins in the New World with the Spaniards’ introduction of roving minstrels, saltimbanquis, juglars, and such like during the colonization period. By 1670, maromeros were noted as performing at bullfights in Mexico City, and by 1769, a clown known as “el loco de los toros” (the fool of the bulls) had already evolved. This figure is probably an early predecessor of the rodeo clown of today. By 1785, the first compañía de volantines was documented García sisters, chorus girls in the Carpa García. as having performed at a theater in Mexico City, followed by the performance of musical and dramatic pieces by the regular actors of the theater. Thus from this early date, both popular theater and playwriting seem to have had a home in Hispanic tradition 1143


as part of tent shows. This mixture of circus and theatrical spectacles was to characterize the Mexican circus from then on. In 1791, there appeared a circus made up of totally Mexican talent, the Compañía de Volantines del País. At this time and well into the nineteenth century, circuses staged their performances in theater houses and at bullrings. In 1833, Carlos E. Green’s circus, originating from northeastern United States, was the first to feature pantomimes, such as the one entitled “Don Quijote & Sancho Panza.” Also at this time, the payoso or gracioso of the Spanish theatrical tradition was featured singing popular songs in the circus. The most famous of these payasos, José Soledad Aycardo, appeared in the Mexican circus in 1852 and dominated it for the next five decades. El Chole Aycardo’s diverse talents Postcard promotion for one of the Mendoza family included horsemanship, acrobatics, gymnasvaudeville routines, often performed in a tent. tics, maroma, acting, and composing and reciting poetry on topical themes. In fact, his is the most important contribution to the evolution of the Mexican clown as a poet and satirist. Aycardo organized all of his circus’s acts and also directed and acted in operettas, pastorelas, and five-act melodramas. Aycardo combined European-type circus with maroma and theater. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Mexican circus received important influences from Italian, English and Anglo American circuses that performed in Mexico. Most noteworthy of all was the introduction of the English-type clown by the Chiarini Circus in 1867. The clown wore baggy pants, a face made up with flour, and a red wig with three lumps of curls on the forehead. Chiarini was also important for having integrated Mexican acts into the show. In 1869, he introduced the Bell Family from England. Fiveyear old Ricardo Bell was to become the most famous clown in Mexican history and the patriarch of a large and very famous circus family. Although Ricardo Bell was born in England, he grew up in Mexico, and he and his children intermarried with Mexicans. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, he and his family became Mexican. In 1873 Chiarini also introduced the Orrin Family, which originated in England and the northeastern United States. The Orrins also founded a circus dynasty in Mexico. The Orrins’ popularity virtually drove the more traditional Mexican circuses from the capital. Only when it was on tour did such companies as Ortiz (later to reappear in the United States Southwest), directed by Jesús Ortiz, perform in Mexico City. At this time the

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Rivas Brothers were also appearing with Chiarini and Bell; after the turn of the century they would tour their own circus in the United States Southwest. In the nineteenth century, there existed a more humble, poor man’s circus that traveled the poorer neighborhoods of Mexico City and the interior and set up a small tent or carpa to house its performances. The term carpa is ancient Quechua for an awning made of interwoven branches. In Spanish it signifies a canvas cover, a tent, and a type of folksy and down-to-earth circus. During the Mexican Revolution, actors and clowns from the more established theaters and circuses took refuge in the carpas, where the pantomimes originated by Ricardo Bell and the satire of Aycardo fermented to bring about the creation of the satirical, often political, review which starred the character that today is recognized as the Mexican national clown: the pelado* or naked one: the penniless underdog. Somewhat reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin and best exemplified by Cantinflas, the peladito improvises a dialogue displaying popular forms of picaresque humor and satire as well as extraordinary verbal ingenuity. The themes of these improvised comic routines were the high cost of living, political scandals, the treachery of political leaders, and other such themes. Historians have seen in the pelado and the satirical musical reviews in which he was featured a true voice of the people, a forum for the expression of grassroots sentiments and identity. Both the pelado and the revues enjoyed an extended life on the stages of the Southwest United States almost into the 1950s and were both resuscitated in such Luis Valdez* plays as La carpa de la familia Rascuachi, starring Jesús Pelado in the early 1970s and, most recently, Mummified Deer (2005). From the 1850s on, there is considerable documentation of touring compañías de volantines and maromas throughout the Southwest. The earliest note comes from Monterey, California, in 1846, concerning maromas. Gipson mentions a Mexican circus of acrobats, clowns, ropewalkers, and stock characters of devils and skeletons in Tucson from 1853 to 1854, attesting that by the 1870s the Mexican circus was the most popular and frequent type of entertainment in Tucson. In California during the 1850s, a Circo de Los Angeles appears with the Spanish clown Nicolás Martínez. The earliest reference to the Mexican circus in Texas is the following comment from the San Antonio Ledger, November 8, 1852: “The Mexican circus is with us. We knew in our hearts the season for fun and joy was about to commence.” The comment seems to indicate that the San Antonio public was familiar with the Mexican circus, and we can probably assume that these circuses had performed in San Antonio prior to this date. From this time until the 1950s, San Antonio seems to have been an important show town for Mexican circuses as well as a home base for some of them. During the period of the Mexican Revolution, many circuses began touring north of the border and chose places like San Antonio and Los Angeles for their home bases. After the hostilities ceased, some returned to Mexico, but others remained in the United States, where they had established lucrative circuits. A fruitful avenue for many Mexican circus performers was the Mexican

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vaudeville circuit in the United States. Some of the performers even made their way into the American and Canadian vaudeville circuits during the 1920s and 1930s. The Bell Family, after relocating in the Southwest, for instance, not only toured the vaudeville circuits but also bought a theater in Los Angeles to house its own performances and those of other touring companies. Even the great Escalante Circus at times booked some of its family members into vaudeville houses to raise some extra funds. Other circuses that moved north were the Ortiz Brothers and the Rivas Brothers. Of all of them, the Escalante Circus seems to have had the greatest popularity and longevity in the Southwest, performing from the 1900s well up into the 1950s. But the type of Mexican circus that survived the longest in the United States was the small, family-based carpa that performed along the Mexican American border. For the most part, the carpas survived the Depression, Repatriation, and the other economic and social forces that put Mexican and Hispanic entertainments out of business during the 1930s and 1940s. Some carpas continued to perform along the border into the 1960s and even followed the migrant labor stream north. Today an occasional carpa still visits the towns of the Rio Grande Valley. Probably because of their small size, barebones style, and organization around a family unit, the carpas could manage themselves better than the larger circuses. Furthermore, they were able to cultivate smaller audiences in the most remote areas. The carpas became in the Southwest an important Mexican American, popular culture (see Popular Culture) institution. Their comic routines became a sounding board for the culture conflict that Mexican Americans felt in language usage, assimilation to American tastes and life-styles, discrimination in the United States, and pocho*-status in Mexico. Out of these types of conflicts in the popular entertainments arose the stereotype of the Pachuco,* a typically Mexican American figure. The carpa also preserved the format of the Mexican vaudeville revue (revista) that in the late sixties found new life in Chicano theater. In fact, San Antonio’s 1979 Chicano theater festival was dedicated to La Carpa García, and some of the local circus’s comic routines were revived. Finally, the carpas were a refuge for theatrical and circus people of all types. These artists could ride out the Depression, Repatriation, and World War II with a steady, although meager, employment, doing something akin to their regular acts. More important, these cultural arts were preserved by the carpas for the post-War generation that was to forge a new relationship to the larger American culture. The Carpa Garcia retired its tents around 1948. The following is a brief inventory of Mexican circuses performing primarily around California and Texas prior to World War II: • Gran Circo Escalante Hermanos: Founded some time around 1917 and lasting well into the 1950s with Los Angeles as its base, the Escalante circus was probably the most widely known of the Mexican circuses, performing throughout the Southwest in its own tents. The Escalantes were originally acrobats, but their tents housed a great variety of acts, including dramatic pieces. Among the featured groups was El Troupe Piña in 1920, formerly with Orrin. The circus’s impresario was Mariano Escalante (1881–1961), and its clowns were Cara Sucia,

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Tony, and Chamaco. In 1934, probably affected by the Depression and Repatriation, the company announced that it was going to Mexico (La Opinión, Los Angeles, August 10, 1934). It later returned to the United States, and in 1950 Billboard brought down the final curtain for Yolanda Escalante (b. 1928); and, in 1961, for Mariano. Los Hermanos Bell: During the Mexican Revolution, the Bell family moved to the United States, where for many years it toured the vaudeville circuits, adapting its music, dance, pantomime, and dramatic talents, feats of strength, magic, and other spectacles to the stage. Among the sketches that were salvaged from the circus show were “El Espejo Roto” (The Broken Mirror), “La Princesa del Hawaii” (The Hawaiian Princess), “Gabinete Dental” (The Dentist’s Office), and “Barbería Filharmonica” (an original of the late Ricardo Bell, Sr.), among many others. A typical program, such as would be performed at Los Angeles’ Teatro Novel in 1920, was: Nelly Bell (dancer), Jorge Bell (ventriloquist), Ricardo Bell, Jr. (violinist), Oscar Bell (impressionist, especially of Charlie Chaplin). All nine Bells acted, sang, and played diverse musical instruments together. In 1925, when they played San Antonio’s Teatro Nacional, they also featured clown acts. In 1927, Ricardo Bell, Jr., bought the Teatro Capitol in Los Angeles, where the family performed and also hired such acts as their long-time associates the Areu Brothers (dancers) and Beatriz Noloesca (a native of San Antonio and an internationally renowned singer, dancer, and actress). In fact, the Bells had at one time formed a partnership with the Areus and toured as the Compañía de Novedades Modernas Bell-Areu, along with the famous magician Justiniani. The importance of the Bells was that they passed on many of their father’s routines to Mexican American popular culture. They continued to tour into the 1930s. Esqueda Brothers Show: Active in California and Arizona throughout the 1920s, the Esqueda Show was basically an acrobatic, equestrian, and vaudeville company that included the clowns Pipo, Paquito, and Toni. In 1929, under impresario Juan Esqueda, the Circo Esqueda suffered a terrible accident in Nogales in which their tent’s center pole fell and injured various spectators (La Prensa, San Antonio, August 24, 1929). Circo Rivas Brothers: Probably from interior Mexico and associated there with Chiarini, the Rivas Brothers are documented as having performed in the Southwest under impresario L. P. Rivas, at least from 1917 to 1921. Their acts included the clown El Segundo Robledillo (Manuel Macías), the clown Ferrín (Amador Fierro), María Rivas on the trapeze, and various pony, monkey, vaudeville, and pantomime routines. P. Pérez Show Circo y Variedades: Documented as having performed in Los Angeles in 1923, the circus included the Perez sisters’ song and dance and clowns Cristobalito, Rivanito, and Tamborini. Circo Azteca de los Hermanos Olvera: The only documentation that has been uncovered regarding this show is a note of its performances from 1918 to 1922 in Los Angeles, Agua Prieta, and Douglas. Circo Carnival “Iris Show”: Documented as having appeared in Los Angeles in 1923, the Iris Show included the following: María Refugio Fuentes, song and dance; Santos Fuentes (a young girl), flyer and contortionist; Abundio Fuentes, strong man; Daniel Rodríguez, magician; Eliseo Carrillo, mandiblist; and Juan Soto, actor, singer, director, impresario. Teatro Carpa Hermanos Rosete Aranda: Documented as having appeared in Los Angeles in 1925, it had as its impresario Carlos V. Espinel e Hijos. La Compañía Hermanos Ortiz: Active from the 1920s to the late 1930s in Texas and New Mexico, in its May 1936 performance in San Antonio it featured

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twelve acts, including magic and the clowns Tamborín and Rubiné. Its impresario was Emeliano Ortiz. Teatro Carpa Independencia, also known as Carpa Guzmán: The Guzmán is one of the companies that used San Antonio as its base. Its activity has been partially documented for the years 1917 and 1918. San Antonio’s La Prensa, April 29, 1918, identifies some of the troupe members who were longtime San Antonio residents: María del Carmen Guzmani, María P. de Sampers, Amelia Solsona, Manuel Sampers, Aurelio Díaz. The August 18, 1917, show featured A. Guzmani transforming himself into five different characters in an act called “Castillos en el Aire” (Castles in the Air), Sr. Flores on the high bar, the gymnast Mr. Salas, the comic duet Carmencita y Tiburcio, the Hermanos Olvera Guatemalan marimba quartet, singer Carmen G. de Guzmani, and a pantomime entitled “Un Baile de Carnaval” (A Carnival Dance). Compañía de Vaudeville Mantecón, also known as Circo Mantecón: Documented as performing in San Antonio, Floresville, Beeville, Corpus Christi, and Del Rio in 1921, their San Antonio vaudeville performance was at the Teatro Nacional on the same bill with the magician Justiniani. Also a family-based circus, the Mantecón company included twenty-eight members, many of whom belonged to the immediate family. In Del Rio, on July 1921, they donated 50% of their gross for the construction of a Mexican school. Cuban Show (also known as Carpa Cubana, Circo Cubano): Based in San Antonio but also traveling as far west as California, the Cuban show existed in the 1920s and 1930s under the directorship of Virgilio Abreu. The circus included trapeze artists, rope walkers, jugglers, clowns, dancers, and its own ten-piece band. According to San Antonio’s La Prensa, July 16, 1921, the circus was advertising pantomimes on Mexican national themes for its Kingsville and Lyford, Texas, performances. The various Abreu brothers—José, Virgilio, Cleo, and Domingo—had broad experience during the teens with such circuses as Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers, Robinson, and Sells-Floto. Carpa García: The best-known of the San Antonio–based Mexican circuses, the Carpa García was founded in 1914 by Manuel V. García, a native of Saltillo, Mexico. It was originally called the Carpa Progresista, and later the Argentina Show. Manuel, an orphan who joined the circus at age fifteen, became a trapeze artist, dancer, and everything else that it took to run a small circus. Featured in the show was the famed Charro on the tightrope. One of the comic actors of the Carpa, Pedro González González (“Ramirín”) later had a successful career in Hollywood westerns. The Carpa also featured the comic hobos Don Suave and Don Fito, as well as a Pachuco* called Don Slica (slick). Miscellaneous shows: Other tent shows that have been briefly documented in Texas newspapers were the Texas Show, serving the ranches around Los Ebanos, 1929; the Circo Hidalguense, noted as performing in Charlotte, Texas, in 1921; The Carpa Metropolitana in San Antonio, in 1919; the Maroma Pájaro Azul, from the 1920s to the 1930s, around Del Rio; and the Carpa Modelo, mentioned by Consuelo García of the Carpa García in an interview.

Further Reading Gipson, Rosemary Gipson, “The Mexican Performers: Pioneer Theatre Artists in Tucson” Journal of Arizona History Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter 1972): 235–252. Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).


Thomas, Piri

Third Woman Press. Founded as Third Woman magazine in 1979 at Indiana University by graduate student Norma Alarcón, the enterprise grew into the most influential literary journal in Latina feminism as well as an innovative and respected publisher of books by Latinas of all ethnicities. After having served for years as the book review editor for Revista Chicano-Riqueña* (Chicano-Rican Review) and having worked among the Latina writers in the Chicago area, such as Ana Castillo* and Sandra Cisneros,* Alarcón founded Third Woman as a vehicle to publish and promote the writings of third-world Latinas in the United States, with occasional contributions from other writers of color and writers in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Born in northern Mexico and reared in San Antonio and Chicago, Alarcón was a student of Latina American feminist literature and was part of the early 1980s movement to fill in the gap in the Chicano literary movement: the lack of access for Chicanas to publishing. However, from the start, her focus was broader than just Chicanas. By the time Alarcón had joined the Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and Spanish faculties at the University of California–Berkeley in 1987, Alarcón was publishing books in addition to the issues of the magazine and had some of the most enduring names in Latina literature and scholarship on her board and writing for her publications. In addition to Castillo and Cisneros, there were also such pioneers as Iris Zavala,* Cherrie Moraga,* Elena Poniatowska, and Gloria Anzaldúa.* Included among the most noteworthy of the titles edited by Alarcón were The Sexuality of Latinas (1998, edited with Castillo and Moraga) and Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (1999, edited with Karen Kaplan and Minoo Moallem). By the early twenty-first century, Third Woman Press and the magazine had run their course after having published some thirty books, and Alarcón had left the university and entered private life in San Antonio. Further Reading Horno-Delgado, Asunción, Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Thomas, Piri (1928–). Nuyorican writer Piri Thomas was the author of a foundational work for Nuyorican* literature, Down These Mean Streets (1967). His memoir was the first agonizing tale of the search for identity among conflicting cultural, racial, ethnic, and linguistic alternatives presented to Latinos in general and Afro-Hispanic peoples in the United States in particular. It was such a milestone that the Nuyorican and Latino literature that followed it either continued its themes or totally rejected its poetic melange of street language and psychodrama as a naïve and unsophisticated cry out of the culture of poverty. Thomas was born John Peter Thomas on September 30, 1928, in New York City’s Harlem Hospital to a white Puerto Rican mother and an Afro-Cuban working-class father. In his upbringing he experienced racism in the most intimate of settings, as his siblings’ lighter skin was preferred over his obviously dark African inheritance, which, of course, presented one of the principal causes for anguish in his life and in his books. 1149

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Piri Thomas.

When his family attempted to escape the ills of the city by moving to Babylon, Long Island, again he faced rejection at school and in the neighborhood because of his skin color; this is in part the subject of his second book, Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1972)—which also deals with the hypocrisy he faced while working with a Christian church when he was out of prison. Thomas grew up on the streets of Spanish Harlem, where he became involved in gang activity and criminality. Thomas’s saga was continued in his collection Stories from el Barrio (1980). In 1950, he participated in an armed robbery of a nightclub that left him and a policeman wounded; he was sentenced to, and served, seven years in jail, the subject of his Seven Long Times (1974). While in prison, Thomas became part of the black pride movement, converted to Islam, earned a G.E.D. and began writing. As an ex-convict in 1962, he was befriended by an editor from Knopf and supported by a grant for five years from the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, with which he was able to produce the modern classic autobiography that forever changed his life and the trajectory of Latino and ethnic literatures in the United States. Thomas’s life was memorialized in 1998 when the Public Broadcasting System aired Every Child Is Born a Poet: The Life and Works of Piri Thomas, which not only narrates his life but also shows him in performance. Such a consummate performer is Thomas that he has also released CDs of his poetry recitations, including his No Mo’ Barrio Blues (1996). Further Reading Gordils, Yanis, “Piri Thomas” in Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States, ed. Nicolás Kanellos (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989: 311–322). Mohr, Eugene V., The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982).

Nicolás Kanellos Tía Chucha Press. Memoirist, poet, and novelist Luis J. Rodríguez* founded Tía Chucha Press in Chicago in 1989 and affiliated it to the Guild Complex of cultural organizations in 1991. It has published more than forty books and chapbooks of poetry by authors from diverse backgrounds, such as Elizabeth Alexander, Terrance Hayes, Patricia Smith, David Hernández,* Diane Glancy, Michael Warr, Kyoko Mori, Anne-Marie Cusac, Tony Fitzpatrick, Carlos Cumpián,* and even more. From 2004 on, Tía Chucha began publishing full-color complete poetry books out of its Centro Cultural in 1150

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Sylmar, California, with its chapbook series remaining in the Chicago location. Tía Chucha Press books are distributed by Northwestern University Press. In 2000, Luis J. Rodríguez partnered with María Trinidad Rodríguez and Enríque Sánchez to found Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore in Sylmar. Although the bookstore sells the full gamut of Chicano* and indigenous literary and history books, it also becomes a setting for spoken-word performances, especially through its Open Mic night. Film showings, theatrical performances and other cultural events are also hosted there. In addition, the Centro Cultural also runs an Internet café as a nonprofit enterprise serving San Fernando Valley low-income residents. Most of the Centro Cultural’s events encourage community dialogue, learning, and performance, especially around the concepts of literature and reading. Rodríguez and his cohorts fully believe in the power of healing in words and art. Tia Chucha’s mission includes becoming “a positive and visionary force, to enhance what is decent, compassionate and just in our communities while reconnecting to our ancestral roots and teachings in the vortex of great social transitions and technological development.” Further Reading “Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore” (http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/template/ pub,oc,Detail.vm?plugin=bio&inst=9776174).

Nicolás Kanellos Tirado, Cándido (?–). The works of Nuyorican* playwright Cándido Tirado have been among the most successfully staged in New York since the mid-1980s. Many of his works have been produced in the leading Hispanic theaters in New York, including Pergones, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, and Teatro Repertorio Español. Tirado’s drama presents with gritty realism many of the social and familial problems afflicting poor Puerto Rican families in New York City: incest, prostitution, child abandonment, drugs, gang violence, and so forth. One play even features a baby refusing to be born into such a horrible and chaotic world. Two exceptions from this dire fare are his musical biography of salsa queen Celia Cruz, Celia (2007), coauthored with Carmen Rivera, and his joint interpretation, with multiple authors, of Calderón de la Barca’s classic La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream): The Dream Chain (2007). Tirado’s produced plays include First Class (1988), For Love (1994), Checking Out/Morir Soñando (1998), King with a Castle/Rey sin Castillo (2000), and Momma’s Boyz (2006). Tirado has also worked as a successful screen writer for such television series as Heroes, Lost, 24, Grey’s Anatomy, House, The Simpsons, Ugly Betty, and others. Further Reading “The Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre’s Productions to Date” (http://www.prtt.org/ productions.html).

Nicolás Kanellos Tirado, Romualdo (1879/80–1963). The most important figure in the history of the Hispanic stage in Los Angeles was the great impresario, actor, singer, and playwright Romualdo Tirado. Tirado was a Spaniard born in Toledo 1151

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on September 3, 1879 or 1880. He immigrated to Mexico and developed his career on the stages of the capital city. Since his arrival in Los Angeles in the second decade of the twentieth century, Tirado was a prime mover in the theatrical and cinematic industries, and, just as importantly, was a catalyst in bringing about the staging of local plays and revistas (musical-comedy reviews). Through the various companies that he directed, Tirado was able to stage his own revistas. Included among these were Clínica Moderna (1921, Modern Clinic), Una Noche en Los Angeles (1921, A Night in Los Angeles), Aventuras de Daniel después de una Noche en la Calle New High (1921, Daniel’s Adventures after a Night on New High Street), De Los Angeles a Alaska (1924, From Los Angeles to Alaska), Los Chorros de Oro (1927, The Golden Squirts), El Trust de los Tenorios (1927, The Trust of the Don Juans), El Viejo Rabo Verde en Romualdo Tirado. Long Beach (1928, The Dirty Old Man in Long Beach), Las Mariposas de Hollywood (1929, The Hollywood Butterflies), Los Pizcadores (1930, The Farm Workers), and a slew of revistas following the comic misadventures of Triado’s stage persona, such as Tirado Dentista (1921, Tirado the Dentists) and Tirado Bolshevique (1924, Tirado the Bolshevik). In most of his revistas, Tirado took on the persona of the pelado,* the typical Mexican underdog or down-and-outer. Tirado, himself a light-skinned, blue-eyed Spaniard, not only was convincing in this role to his largely Mexican audiences but often appealed to Mexican nationalist and patriotic spirit in his depictions. Of all of his revistas, De México a Los Angeles (1920, From Mexico to Los Angeles), which follows the misadventures and culture shock of a tailor who has just immigrated, seems to have been his biggest hit, with as many as one hundred performances in 1920 and 1921 alone. So successful was this revista that Tirado was able to transition it to film, serving as the producer, director, and cinematographer himself. On November 20, 1928, the Heraldo de México* (Mexican Herald) critic, reviewing this revista, praised Tirado’s acute sense of observation of the local scene, highlighting Tirado’s satire of agringados (Americanized Mexicans) and of the horrible treatment of Mexicans in the United States. He also congratulated Tirado on closing the revista in a patriotic apotheosis with the Mexican national anthem. Romualdo Tirado was also the author, with Antonieta Díaz Mercado, of a full-length play based on a Mexican national theme: the stage adaptation of Mariano Azuela’s* novel of the Revolution: Los de abajo (The Underdogs). Unfortunately, the play was a complete flop. When the theatrical life fell apart during the Depression, Tirado nevertheless stayed on in California, acting in some thirty-three Spanish-language films from 1930 to 1940. He would occasionally leave the city for the stages of New 1152

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York City and Puerto Rico during the 1940s. Tirado died on October 17, 1963, in Los Angeles. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Tolón, Miguel Teurbe (1820–1857). Born in Pensacola, Florida, on September 20, 1820, and raised in Matanzas, Cuba, Miguel Teurbe Tolón was one of the leading figures in the Cuban literary exile of the late 1840s and 1850s. With a deep education in the humanities and foreign languages (French, English, and Latin), Teurbe Tolón became a teacher and intellectual in Matanzas and Havana. He was the founding editor of Matanzas’s La Guirnalda (The Garland), a periodical in which he also launched his literary career as a poet. He published his first book of poems, Preludios (Preludes) in 1841 and published poems and essays widely as well as journalistic pieces in numerous Cuban newspapers before going into exile in New York in 1848 because of his political activities. He worked tirelessly to establish and edit several newspapers, including La Verdad (The Truth), El Cometa (The Comet), El Horizonte (The Horizon), El Cubano (The Cuban), and El Papagayo (The Parrot), all based in New York City. In addition, he worked as an editor for Latin American affairs for the New York Herald. Because of his editing of the revolutionary La Verdad, he was condemned to death in absentia by the Spanish authorities in Cuba. In the United States, Teube Tolón published widely in various forms, crossing easily from lyric to explanatory essay and sometimes writing in English. He translated into Spanish Paine’s Common Sense and Emma Willard’s History of the United States. Teurbe Tolón was one of the most important pioneers of Hispanic journalism in the United States. But it is not only as a journalist that Teurbe Tolón must be remembered. He is one of the founders of the literature of Hispanic exile, which is both a theme in many of his poems and the driving force behind his publications and community leadership. He helped establish New York’s Ateneo Democrático Cubano (Cuban Miguel Teurbe Tolón. 1153

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Democratic Atheneum), where exiles met regularly to discuss literature, philosophy, and politics. Teurbe Tolón’s poetic work figures most prominently in the first anthology of exile literature ever published in the United States, El laúd del desterrado (1858, The Lute of the Exiled), issued a year after his death. He also published a book of poetry, Leyendas Cubanas (1856, Cuban Legends), and a language-learning book, The Elementary Spanish Reader and Translator (New York, 1853). The latter went through several editions and remained in print until the early twentieth century. For many years impoverished and ill, he returned to the homeland under an amnesty on August 30, 1857, only to die in Matanzas on February 4, 1858. Teurbe Tolón’s writing career in the United States expresses the competing challenges of desire for the homeland and integration into a new society. On one hand, Teurbe Tolón saw himself as writing to Cuba from his New York base. On the other hand, he attempted to draw connections between exiles fighting for liberty and U.S. revolutionary figures. He saw the history of revolution (and the role of the revolutionary writer) as stretching from the late-eighteenth century United States to his contemporary Cuba. His work in translation and the production of the Spanish-language reader at the same time that he was writing actively for newspapers is a testament to his efforts to establish a dialogue between English- and Spanish-speaking peoples. Since the writings of Teurbe Tolón and his colleagues, exile literature has been a continuing current in Hispanic letters of the United States. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodical in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Montes Huidobro, Matías, ed., El Laúd del desterrado (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).

Rodrigo Lazo and Nicolás Kanellos Toro, Vincent (1975–). Dominican American playwright, poet, and fiction writer Vincent Toro was born in the Washington Heights section of New York City. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English and theater from Rutgers University, Toro began teaching in the Newark schools, but soon gave that up to become a full-time writer. In 1991, his plays B.H. and One Way were produced at Theater 22 in New York City. As a poet, Toro has been dedicated to the spoken word, and has distinguished himself in poetry slams, most notably becoming a semi-finalist at the Nuyorican* Poets Café Poetry Slam in 1995 and in 2001 winning the PopThink Internet poetry slam. In 1996, he became a resident writer/performer at Dixon Place for the “Y Qué! A Latino Poetry and Play Reading Series.” He has also been a resident at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. Further Reading Torres Saillant, Silvio, Diasporic disquisitions: Dominicanists, Transnationalism, and the Community (New York: City College of New York Dominican Studies Institute, 2000).

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Torres Saillant, Silvio, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Torres, Edwin (1931–). Born in 1931 in New York City’s Spanish Harlem to poverty-stricken Puerto Rican parents, Edwin Torres is one of the most prolific and commercially successful Latino writers. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School and City College, Torres obtained his law degree from the Brooklyn Law School in 1958. In 1959, he worked in the city attorney’s office, where he participated in the prosecution of Mafia figures. Shortly thereafter, he became a criminal defense attorney, an experience that would serve him well in portraying the criminal mind in his works of fiction. In 1977, the same year as the publication of his second crime novel, Torres was appointed to the New York State Criminal Court; in 1980, he was elected to the New York State Supreme Court in the Twelfth Judicial District to preside over numerous criminal cases. A master of crime fiction, Torres has seen his works transformed into acclaimed Hollywood productions starring some of the greatest film actors of the twentieth century. A judge in the New York City courts by day, Torres has produced an unending stream of stories for such magazines as Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Crimespree, Demolition, Shred of Evidence, and SHOTS. His novels include Carlito’s Way (1975), Q & A (1977), and After Hours (1979), the sequel to Carlito’s Way. Torres’ most acclaimed and renowned work is Carlito’s Way, a gritty and dark tale of a street criminal, drug dealer, and murderer who rises to power and, in his aging, sees a new breed of thugs taking over and bringing about his own decline. Throughout the narrative, Latino concepts of loyalty, machismo, and honor cut across, and conflict with, criminal needs and expectations. Q & A is a police procedural novel depicting the investigation of corruption in the police department. Torres lives in Connecticut with his wife. Further Reading Figueredo, Danilo H., “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: The Latino Detective Novel” The Multicultural Review Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sep. 1999): 22–29.

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Torres, Edwin (1965–). The child of Puerto Rican parents who settled in Bronx, New York, poet Edwin Torres was educated in city elementary and high schools. Known as a spoken-word artist, Torres has published the following books of his poetic compositions: SandHomméNomadNo (1997, a self-published chapbook), Fractured Humorous (1999), The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (2001), and Lung Poetry (2002), which are highly experimental in their use of graphic and sound juxtapositions in their attempt to represent Torres’s oral/aural performances in writing. His poetry is irreverent, humorous in its frequent use of bilingual puns, and surprising in its fluid incorporation of so many disparate references, sounds, and concepts. His poetic style, paradoxically, has been called “frenetic” as well as “elegant,” by a Publishers Weekly 1155

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(1999) book critic, who also has stated that amid the poems that “resemble exploded bilingual eye charts” there are “lovely quiet moments.” In 2002, Torres also produced a CD, Holy Kid (1998), with his oral performances. From 1993 to 1999, Torres toured nationally and internationally performing and offering workshops as a member of Real Live Poetry (formerly Nuyorican Poets Cafe Live), a collective of spoken-word artists. In 2003, he and Brazilian poet Flavia Rocha collaborated in editing a special issue of Rattappalax magazine, featuring spoken-word artists, signers and composers, with an accompanying CD: Rattapallax 9, described as “a visceral multimedia hit of poetry” by Time Out magazine. Based on the success of this experiment, three more issues of the magazine/CD followed, featuring Torres and some of the same Nuyorican and Brazilian poets and performers. A member of the Nuyorican* school of poetry, Torres is a perennial performer at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Torres is a recipient of a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Torres, Omar (1945–). Omar Torres is an actor, playwright, poet, and novelist. Born on September 13, 1945, in Las Tunas, Cuba, he immigrated to Miami, Florida, with his family in 1959. There he attended both junior and senior high school. The family then moved to New York, where he attended Queens College for a while, only to drop out to study on his own. Torres has had an active career in radio, television, and movies. In 1972, he cofounded with Iván Acosta the Centro Cultural Cubano, and in 1974 he founded the literary arts journal Cubanacán (a nonsense word here meaning “Cuba”). From 1972 to 1982, Torres had many plays produced at the Centro and on other stages. After this decade, he seems to have made a transition to writing fiction. He is the author of three novels: Apenas un bolero (1981, Just a Bolero), Al partir (1986, Upon Leaving), and Fallen Angels Sing (1991). He has also authored five books of poetry: Conversación primera (1975, First Conversation), Ecos de un laberinto (1976, Echoes from a Labyrinth), Tiempo robado (1978, Stolen Time), De nunca a siempre (1981, From Never to Always), and Línea en diluvio (1981, Line in the Deluge). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–455. Omar Torres.

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Torres, Steven (1969–). Born in the Bronx, New York, Steven Torres is the author of a successful series of detective novels featuring his small-town sheriff Luis Gonzalo, whose beat is Angustias, a fictional mountain village similar to Moca, where Torres lived for a while. The series currently includes the following titles: Precinct Puerto Rico: Book One (2002), Death in Precinct Puerto Rico: Book Two (2003), Burning Precinct Puerto (2004), and Missing in Precinct Puerto Rico: Book Four (2006). Throughout this police procedural series, the initial mysteries to be unraveled by Gonzalo, set in the local color of rural Puerto Rico with idiosyncratic and folksy character types, lead to larger, international criminal activities and conspiracies. In 2007, Torres departed from the series to turn his attention to New York City as the site of his fiction in The Concrete Maze. Torres’ short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Crimespree, Demolition, Shred of Evidence, and SHOTS, among other periodicals. Torres graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York and received a B.A. in English from Hunter College in 1994. In 2002, he received his Ph.D. in English from CUNY Graduate Center. Torres has taught English at a number of institutions, including Bronx Community College, Yeshiva College, Utica College, and Manchester Community College. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Damaris. Further Reading Figueredo, Danilo H., “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: The Latino Detective Novel” The Multicultural Review Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sep. 1999): 22–29.

Nicolás Kanellos Torres, Teodoro Jr. (1884–1944). Famous journalist, novelist, and cronista* Teodoro Torres, Jr., was born in Villa de Guadalupe, San Luis Potosí, Mexico, on September 1, 1884. Torres began publishing stories and writing for newspapers in Mexico in 1906. When the Victoriano Huerta government collapsed, Torres went into exile in San Antonio, Texas, in 1914, where he became the editor of Ignacio Lozano’s* daily newspaper La Prensa (The Press), for which he also penned the newspaper’s editorials. In La Prensa and elsewhere, Torres employed the pseudonym of Caricato in writing satirical crónicas,* many of them criticizing the revolutionary factions in Mexico. He is reported to have returned to Mexico in 1921, but he either did not return or was exiled again— or his association with Lozano was so strong that the publisher issued Torres’s two novels of the Mexican revolution with the perspective of an exiled intellectual after that date: Como perros y gatos: o las aventuras de la sena democracia en México, historia cómica de la Revolición Mexicana (1924, Like Dogs and Cats: Or Adventures in the Dice Throw of Democracy in Mexico, Comic History of the Mexican Revolution) and Pancho Villa, una vida de romance y tragedia (1924, Pancho Villa, A Life of Romance and Tragedy). The former is a high satire of the hypocrisy of the revolutionary leaders in Mexico, and the latter is a mixture of fiction and history published in pulp to reach a broad popular audience. Torres was later to publish in Mexico a book on satire in Hispanic tradition: El humorismo y la sátira en México (1943, Humor and Satire in Mexico). 1157

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After his return to Mexico, Torres resumed his career in journalism, serving as editor for Excelsior and later México al Día (Mexico to Date). He also founded the first school of journalism in Mexico, a deed for which he has been remembered as “the father of Mexican journalism.” As an important figure in the profession, he also published a book on journalism: Periodismo (1937). Torres’ most important contribution to the fiction, however, is his novel of immigration, La patria perdida (1935, The Lost Homeland), which, although published in Mexico, ends with the protagonist rejecting the post-revolutionary culture and politics of the Mexican homeland, returning to the United States to attempt to create a sort of utopia on his extensive ranch outside Kansas City. It is ironic that its author, Torres, did in fact return to Mexico and was successful in re-inserting himself in his profession there even as many writers of immigration, such as Julio B. Arce* and Daniel Venegas,* who advocated a return to the homeland and the rejection of the United States, remained in the United States. La patria perdida is also the most highly literary and sophisticated of the novels of immigration, portraying in realistic terms life in the United States, the subcultures of exiles and immigrants (comparing Mexican and European immigrants to the United States), and the construction of innovative symbols and characters, such as the Anglo American adopted son of the protagonist and his wife, a son who comes to embody the hybrid culture that would develop among Mexican Americans. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the United States” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (2007): 438–455.

Nicolás Kanellos Torres Betances de Córdova, Carmen (1885–?). Carmen de Córdova was born November 26, 1885, in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. In the census of 1910 she is listed as residing in Bayamón with her husband Santiago Córdova Ríos (1874), her children Gloria M. (1904), Carmen Elvira (1906), and Santiago (1910), and her mother- and sister-in-law. In 1920 she lived in Barceloneta with her husband, the three children noted previously and three more: Consuelo (1911), Anne (1915), and Luis (1906). It is speculated that her first trip to New York City with her son, Luis, on July 9, 1926, occurred after the death of her husband. Three months later, her five other children reunited with their mother in Manhattan. In 1929, 1939, and 1948 her name is found in the registries for the passenger lists for the port of New York. It was after her second trip to New York that she began to participate in the intellectual circles of Puerto Ricans. In 1933, her story “Rizos de Oro” (Goldilocks) was published in Artes y Letras (Arts and Letters). This was followed with “Reflexiones: El día de las madres” (May 1934, Thoughts: Mothers Day), “Alfabeto de sabiduría” (June 1934, Alphabet of Knowledge), and other works that inculcated the proper way of life for the Puerto Ricans living in the metropolis. It was during this period that her career as a journalist, essayist, and 1158

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short story writer flourished, allowing Carmen de Córdova to become the director of the Feminine Page of Artes y Letras as well as an active participant and representative in the Unión de las Mujeres Americanas (Union of Women of the Americas). The date of her death is unknown. Further Reading Muñiz, Vicky, Resisting Gentrification and Displacement: Voices of Puerto Rican Women of the Barrio (New York: Routledge, 1998).

Ana-María Medina Tórrez, Everardo (1972–). Born in Michoacán, Mexico, in 1972, Everardo Tórrez grew up on a sugar beet farm in south central Idaho. After graduating from Mimico High School in 1990, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California (1996) and an M.A. in communication from Boise State University (2002). Tórrez has written numerous short stories that focus on the polarization of U.S. and Mexican culture and that have been published in such magazines as Permafrost, Fugue, and Colddril. His debut novel, Narco (2003), is a thriller with interesting character studies of people involved in the drug trade in Everardo Tórrez. northern Mexico and the U.S. side of the border; it features a picaresque ne’er-do-well anti-hero who is hired to drive an escaping drug family moll to El Paso. Tórrez is the grand prize winner in the University of Alaska Press fiction contest and earned an honorable mention in the Edward Moses Fiction Contest at the University of Southern California. He lives in Boise with his wife and two children. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Torriente-Brau, Pablo de la (1901–1936). Pablo de la Torriente-Brau was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 16, 1936, the grandson of the well-known intellectual and historian of the island, Don Salvador Brau Asencio. His mother was Graciela Brau de Zuzuarregui and his Spanish-born father, Félix de la Torriente Garrido, a Spanish teacher. The family moved to El Cristo, Santiago de Cuba, in 1909 and to Havana in 1919, the year of Pablo’s Cuban naturalization. By this time, he was already a journalist and writer. His first important literary work, however, was not published until 1930. It was a collection of short stories coauthored with a friend, Gonzalo Mazas Garbayo: Batey. Cuentos cubanos (The Peasant Yard: Cuban Stories). Soon after its publication, because of his participation with University of Havana students in revolts against president Gerardo Machado’s regime, he was imprisoned with the other protesters in the Isle of Pines Penitentiary. Some of them were freed in 1933, upon condition of exile. Forced into Spanish exile, 1159


Torriente-Brau sailed from Havana, on May 16, on board the Spanish vessel Cristóbal Colón. When the ship stopped at New York City, friends, relatives, and Puerto Rican workers who opposed the deportation of the grandson of the famous and respected Don Salvador Brau obtained permission for him to come ashore. He was transferred to Ellis Island and there was finally admitted into the United States days later, for a first short stay in this city. Pablo returned to Cuba soon after president Machado fled the country, on August 12, 1933. Exercising radical and critical journalism in Havana afterward, and being an active political insurgent, he became an important member of the Havana University Strike Committee and a convener of an unsuccessful strike on March 1935. This political failure forced him to leave the country, once again in the direction of the United States, where he arrived on March 16. In New York City, this second exile lasted seventeen months. Politically committed to the leftist Cuban exile movement, Torriente-Brau settled here and served as the Secretary General of the Organización Revolucionaria Cubana Antimperialista (Anti-imperialist Cuban Revolutionary Organization) from July 1935 to June 1936, during which time he published three issues of its newspaper, Frente Único (One Front), and organized the Cuban Club Martí in uptown Manhattan. Torriente-Brau became an outstanding promoter of the social and political interests of the Hispanic local clubs, which altogether accounted for most of his activity during this period. He presided over the Latin American Committee for Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of May 1st (1936) and was author of its manifesto, “¡Hispanoamericanos! Conmemoremos el 50 Aniversario del 1ro. de Mayo. ¡Denunciemos la tiranía!” (Spanish Americans! Let Us Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of May 1 and Denounce Tyranny!). At the time, to make a living he also wrote several articles on local events and subjects, as well as others related to Cuban residents in New York, all intended to be published in Havana. “Dyckman Oval, meta para los atletas cubanos” (1935, Dyckman Oval, Scores for the Cuban Athletes) and “Un polo ground cubano en New York” (1936, A Cuban Polo Ground for New York) give detailed information about the popular Negro League baseball team the “New York Cubans” in their two best seasons. Their director and agent, Alex Pompez, also a Cuban, was the man who first set up a lighting system in a baseball field in the Bronx, giving New York the option of night games. “Guajiros en New York” (1936, Cuban Campesinos in New York) is dedicated to what seems to have been the first Cuban art exhibition in this city, a collection of works by the Vanguard painter Antonio Gattorno, set up at the French Institute that year. Also in 1936, Torriente-Brau wrote his only (and unfinished) novel, Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano (Adventures of the Unknown Cuban Soldier). Its story starts on July 4, 1935, when the only two characters involved meet at the Cuban Club Julio Antonio Mella (116th Street and Fifth Avenue) after attending a meeting that had been called to raise funds for the political struggle in Cuba. Both men, Hiliodomiro del Sol, the Cuban Unknown Soldier, and his interlocutor, one of the speakers at this meeting, Pablo de la Torriente—at the same time serving as narrator within the main dialogic structure of the text— 1160


get acquainted in a usual and popular Cuban manner: trying both to recall when and where they had met before. They finally become aware that it went back to Santiago de Cuba, when Pablo was a young boy and Hiliodomiro a notorious, merrymaking mulatto. That first night, Hiliodomiro tells his story: how he ended up being an unknown soldier, and that his coming to New York that day was an intentional attempt to get away from the noisy celebrations in Arlington Cemetery, where he lived. After a long conversation, they arrive at 125th Street and what is said to be a monument to the Unknown Soldier; here, before dissolving into a marble wall, Hiliodomiro invites Pablo to visit him at Arlington on a free weekend. This he does, and during several of their following nocturnal encounters, Hiliodomiro gives account of how unknown soldiers of other countries had been chosen. The author took this manuscript with him when he traveled to Spain but never finished it. Pablo de la Torriente-Brau has no followers in his very personal and freestyle novel. His critics agree that here the author anticipates future narrative tendencies: literary legitimization of vernacular characters and bold speech, as well as a parodical treatment of historical facts, that only appear in Latin American literature decades after his Aventuras . . . was written, and first published in Havana in 1940. As an active member of the Spanish Antifascist Committee of New York since 1936, Torriente-Brau participated in and reported on the political demonstration in support of the Spanish people that took place in Union Square, in July of that year: “La revolución española se refleja en New York” (The Spanish Revolution Is Reflected in New York). Torriente-Brau left New York City on August 28, 1936, on board the Île de France, carrying press credentials for New Masses and determined to report the Spanish Civil War for this local magazine and for El Machete (The Machete) of Mexico. Two of his works, arriving directly from the battlefield, were published posthumously by Joseph Freeman and Walter Reed, editors of New Masses: “Polemic in the Trenches” (December 1936) and “Last Dispatch” (January 1937). Torriente-Brau died in combat in Majadahonda, Madrid, Spain, on December 19, 1936. Most of his journalistic and literary works were published only after his death. Besides his novel (1940), his books include Peleando con los milicianos (Fighting on the Side of the Militia, 1938), Pluma en ristre (The Pen as Lance, 1949), Presidio Modelo (Model Prison, 1969), Páginas escogidas (Selected Works, 1973), all of which have had new reprints and editions since their first publication. Escapé de Cuba (I Escaped from Cuba), a first-hand testimony due to appear soon, includes his literary (including letters) and journalistic works written during his last exile of 1935–1936 in the United States, including his Spanish Civil War chronicles. Pablo de la Torriente-Brau is an outstanding example of the most radical stand (anti-imperialist) within the Cuban leftist and progressive intellectual movement prior to World War II. His work is typical of writers exiled in the United States at that time; both the political and the aesthetic, and the combination of the two, is reflected in his activism as well as in his written works. 1161

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And both, because of his very personal commitment to a new and better world, always had Cuba as his compass in mind. Further Reading Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, ed., Para ver las cosas extraordinarias. Coloquio internacional Cien años de Pablo [2001] (Havana, Cuba: Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, 2006). García Ronda, Denia, “Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano. Novedad y trascendencia” in Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano (Havana, Cuba: Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, 2000). Torres, Melvin, Contar el tiempo. Aproximaciones a la narrativa de Pablo de la Torriente Brau (Havana, Cuba: Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau, 2006).

Ana Suárez Trambley, Estela Portillo (1936–1998). Born in El Paso, Texas, on January 16, 1936, Estela Portillo Trambley was a playwright and fiction writer distinguished by her pioneering role as a successful feminist writer in Chicana and Chicano literature. The first woman to be awarded the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol (Fifth Sun Prize) by the germinally influential periodical, El Grito (The Shout/Cry) in 1972 for her play The Day of the Swallows (1971), Trambley left a public legacy of writing, storytelling, and classroom teaching that influenced several generations of readers and students. Her body of work consists of a significant number of acclaimed short stories (including the celebrated tale of feminist coming of age, “Paris Gown” [1973]), several full-length dramas (including the lesbian-themed Day of the Swallows and the biographical homage Sor Juana (Sister Juana) [1983]), and the novel Trini (1986). She is also credited as the first Mexican American woman to have published a collection of short fiction and to write a musical comedy. Trambley attended schools in her hometown, including the University of Texas at El Paso, from which she received her B.A. and M.A. in English in 1956 and 1978, respectively. From 1979 to the late 1980s, Trambley held various teaching posts in the Department of Special Services in El Paso’s public school system. During this period she chaired the English Department at El Paso Technical Institute and taught for five years at El Paso Community College, where she served as drama instructor and produced and directed numerous plays. Her vibrant creative career also included hosting a television program, Cumbres (Summits), devoted to cultural topics for the Latino themed radio station KROD in El Paso. Although scholars agree that Trambley’s intellectual impact was partly sociological and historical as the first celebrated woman writer of the Chicano Renaissance,* her major contributions to Latina and Latino popular culture were primarily literary. She created memorable fictional representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity interlocked with the material issues of social class and economic power. Whether in the violence of her tragic drama, Day of the Swallows, or the stories in the first edition of Rain of Scorpions and Other 1162

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Writings (1975), Trambley presents the social practices associated with love, courtship, and sexuality as a contest of conflicting desires taking place in a frontera (border zone) of culture and psychology. Several of her stories are set on geographical borders to capture the liminal challenges of these conflicts (such as the Mexico/Paris zone of “The Paris Gown” and the U.S./Mexico industrial border in “Rain of Scorpions” and “La Jonfontayn”). These and other of her writings also expose the damages and social costs to individuals and families caused by machismo* (hyper masculinity). Similarly in the novel Trini and the completely revised second edition of Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (1993), Trambley continues her career-long interest in examining and raising consciousness of the personal human relations that lie at the core of authentic community. Typically, the action of Trambley’s fiction and drama generates a bilingual, bicultural zone of language and behaviors outside the codes of traditional conventions and beliefs. Clotilde in “Paris Gown” and Beatriz in “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle . . .” (both revised in 1993) personify the heroics of Trambley’s protagonists’ contesting of the constricting norms around them, for example. Her work also voices intense concern for representing the full texture of mestizo worlds to reflect the potential power of Chicana and Chicano and Mexican experience, as in Refugio’s tragicomic relationship with Chucho in “Pay the Criers” and the hilarious telenovela (soap opera) love story of “La Yonfantayn.” Capturing distinctly Latina and Latino forms of human connectedness, her fictions contain a keen awareness of Mexican–Texan biculturality, Spanish–English bilingualism, and a Chicana feminist resistance to the lasting effects of conquest and colonialism. Her representations thus offer another tejano perspective alongside that of Rolando Hinojosa Smith, anticipating the later borderlands* writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, Benjamin Saenz, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Further Reading Candelaria, Cordelia, “Engendering Re/Solutions: The (Feminist) Legacy of Estela Portillo Trambley” in Decolonial Voices: Chicana/o Cultural Studies in the 21st Century, eds. Arturo Aldama and Naomi Quiñonez (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002: 196–208). Candelaria, Cordelia, “Latina Women Writers: Chicana, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican Voices” in Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art, eds. Francisco Lomeli, et al. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 134–162). González, Laverne. “Portillo Trambley, Estela” in Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985: 316–322).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Transnationalism. Although a recently coined term, transnationalism offers a useful way to conceptualize many aspects of Latino writing, from the life experiences of authors to the ways their work circulates to readers. Transnationalism was adopted by social scientists in the 1990s to describe the new configuration of social relations in an increasingly globalized world, where an unprecedented number of people (“transmigrants”) move frequently from one place to another. According to the foundational definition of Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, 1163

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and Cristina Szanton Blanc, transnational subjects maintain strong connections to both their nation of origin and the one to which they have migrated. Whereas older models imagine migration as a one-way process in which the immigrant assimilates the cultural values and political allegiances of the new nation, the concept of transnationalism emphasizes two-way movements across relatively fluid national borders. Transnationalism, then, challenges rigid concepts of national identity, with important implications for the study of cultural and aesthetic forms. Not all Latino writing is concerned with transnational questions, but when a work explores the effects of such movements upon people’s experience and perception, the concept can be particularly useful. Beyond the thematic level, too, transnationalism can often account more precisely for the network of social relations that shapes individual writers. A transnational perspective may be often necessary to describe what we might call literature’s conditions of possibility: literacy rates and educational practices; cultural and religious mores about the value of reading; mechanisms of production, distribution, and reviewing; the conditions of the literary marketplace. Specific social contexts allow some persons access to authorship and inroads to the publishing world while discouraging others—ethnic, racial, and gender discrimination, for instance, can affect such access. So can ideologies of language: rather than losing their native language within a generation or two, as most U.S. immigrants did in the past, recent transmigrants (like nonimmigrant Latino groups in the past) tend to value bilingualism and creative creole tongues such as Spanglish, despite their denigration by the dominant national culture. Many Latino writers and readers learned to speak or read in Spanish under a different educational system before coming to the United States—the Mexican-born poet and mystery writer Lucha Corpi* is one example. Others, like Cristina García,* have reversed that process, striving to recapture a Spanish-language familiarity they fear their generation has lost, reaching out to reconnect with a homeland they barely recall. Even Latino writers who imagine their primary audience to be English-speaking have found themselves reconnecting to new—but somehow familiar—audiences in Spain and Latin America when their works are translated into Spanish. Finally, ideas about literary value travel across national boundaries as well: many Latino writers have defended their tendency to speak publicly about political matters in the U.S. by referencing to the tradition of Latin American artists doing so. A transnational perspective also has implications for the way literary traditions—manifested in anthologies and course syllabi—get shaped. Notions about national character tend to determine which literary works receive attention and to impose coherence on the way we read them: the idea that the “great American novel” should involve self-reliance, upward mobility, or assimilation, for instance, still wields considerable power. Many Latino works initially received attention because of their perceived parallels with established national traditions: critics compared Richard Rodriguez’s* first autobiography, Hunger of Memory, to that of Benjamin Franklin, and others insisted (in the other direction) that Ron Arias’s* The Road to Tamazunchale belonged in the 1164

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tradition of Latin American magical realism. (Although Latin America is not a “nation,” assumptions about its common regional aesthetic have shaped canons and readerly expectations in the same way that has occurred with “American” literature.) A transnational approach to literary criticism tries to resist such self-reproducing ideas about the national character. Although the field of comparative literature has always looked at the ways in which national cultures contribute to one another through translations, adaptations, and linguistic borrowings, such studies are often limited to influences that can be seen in the texts themselves, rather than the broader social and political contexts that shaped them. Just as some historians and social scientists prefer “transnational” over “international” because the first term challenges the idea of sharply demarcated and distinct nations, transnational literary criticism presumes that national cultures are generally flowing too closely in and out of each other to “compare” them. It encourages readers to ask what counts as a “nation” and why. José Martí’s* vision of Cuban nationhood was only retrospectively celebrated by the state whose independence he never lived to see. Puerto Rico has never been an independent country, but the dynamics of two-way transmigrancy are profoundly important to U.S.-based Puerto Rican writing. Perhaps more importantly, the way that U.S. influence has prevented full political and economic sovereignty on both islands requires that we think of nationhood in a relational context that pays attention to the uneven flows of power of all kinds, including the power of ideas. It is helpful, then, to de-link the common definition of the politically independent nation-state from the abstraction of nationhood as expressed in Ernst Renan’s 1882 essay, “What is a nation?” which argued that “A nation is a soul, or spiritual principle” consensually agreed on by its members. Stories— whether patriotic myths or popular novels—are crucial in nourishing a sense of national belonging, and (as Benedict Anderson has argued) a popular print culture that was quickly disseminated across the nation helped far-flung people feel as if they had something in common with others they would never meet, for they were all reading the same thing at the same time. In contrast, the specialized periodicals—often in Spanish—that have so frequently incubated Latino literary works were rarely concerned with promulgating a sense of U.S. national identity; rather, they sought to maintain relations with their readers’ nation of origin, or—in the tradition of Martí—to extend the imagined community transnationally to include other Latin Americans as well. Yet Renan’s spiritual concept of nationhood does resonate with another important current in Latino literary history: the ethnic-nationalist movements of the 1970s, when Boricua and Chicano activists embraced art and culture as a way to promote community. Consequently, these civil rights movements ushered in a heyday of new works published in small presses and inexpensive, widely distributed magazines and newsletters: a latter-day instance of the belief that words can transform strangers into fellow-citizens. Just as we need to understand what “nation” connotes to think about how its boundaries may be transcended, we also need to ask, When is a nation? 1165

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Historians point out that modern ideas of nationhood—whether in the spiritual or the strictly political sense—should not be projected onto earlier contexts in which people did not yet understand themselves as free individuals possessed of a secular vision of their human rights. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca* wrote his Relación (The Account), considered by many to be the first Latino text, as the testimony of a loyal subject of his divinely ordained King. Although Cabeza de Vaca uses the word “nation,” it describes distinct tribes, not political entities; he wanders through different terrains from the Gulf Coast to what are now New Mexico and Sinaloa entirely innocent of modern notions of “territories” and “borders.” Thus the concept of transnationalism does not do much to illuminate these early texts. Only when the anti-colonial revolutions began to stir in the late eighteenth century did nationhood become so essential to individual and community identities. From that point on, however, the fomenting of national feeling proves to be one of the major roles of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The anthologies and celebrations of national literature that proliferated in the nineteenth century functioned as a kind of secular creed (the term “canon” originally designated sacred texts) for those who believed in the power of the Word to convert those without a personal stake in the nation-state, such as children and recent immigrants, into patriots committed to its sovereignty and survival. Print culture was instrumental in the struggle against colonial rule in English America, with its Protestant emphasis on literacy and well-developed transportation systems that allowed publications to circulate widely and swiftly. Many Latin American creoles with similar views took advantage of that infrastructure to publish incendiary works that would have been censored under Spanish rule, and Philadelphia became the center of a hemispheric print culture in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Figures such as José Alvarez de Toledo* and Vicente Rocafuerte Bejarano* published tracts there to smuggle into the colonies. Numerous “anónimos” also participated in this transnational publication circuit, including the author of Jicotencal (1826), a historical novel of the Mexican conquest with a strong pro-republican message apparently directed at Cubans. The important role of print in fostering national feeling can also be seen in the memoirs of two principal players in the Texas revolution. The Yucatecan-born Lorenzo de Zavala* penned his Voyage to the United States of North America (Paris, 1834) to help his fellow Mexicans develop their own fledgling sense of nationhood, yet soon after its publication he defied Santa Anna’s authority to embroil himself in the Texan bid for independence from the distant Mexican center. Later, as the Texas Republic’s vice president, he tried to restore diplomatic relations but died before he could write more about these fascinating shifts of citizenship. Juan Nepumoceno Seguín,* by contrast, was born in Texas and not only supported the independence struggle but became the only Mexican Texan in the new Senate. Ironically, he eventually had to flee his native land for Mexico to avoid his political enemies and subsequently fought under the Mexican flag during the 1846–1848 war; he was ultimately pardoned by the U.S. and allowed to return to Texas. Seguín’s 1166

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Personal Memoirs (1858) chronicle the instability of personal and political identity during this volatile period of nation-building. Independence-minded elites in the rest of Mexico’s northern borderland had less time to realize new visions of nationhood before their territories were annexed by the U.S., as the surviving records of californios like Mariano Vallejo* and Antonio Maria Osio suggest. The astonishing and prolific writings of María Amparo Ruíz de Burton* are best understood within a broad transnational context that considers the political instabilities of both Alta (U.S.) and Baja (Mexican) California, as well as the civil wars that saw both countries under divided governance. Fully bilingual, and sharing the nineteenth-century conviction in the power of the word to change popular feelings, this novelist and dramatist also challenged the gender categories prevailing in the two national cultures. Among nineteenth-century Spanish speakers in the United States, however, the subgroup that most exalted the social role of literature was undoubtedly the Cubans. Most of the island’s politicized men and women of letters advanced their hopes for independence from elsewhere: Cirilo Villaverde* drafted his famous antislavery novel Cecilia Valdés in New York, where he had followed the model of other Cubans who founded exile* newspapers. They were particularly invested in adapting the most aesthetically valued literary form—poetry—to the revolutionary cause, writing neoclassical odes to the homeland (such as José Maria Heredia’s* “Himno del desterrado” (Hymn of the Exile), along with stirring elegies to fallen patriots and potential martyrs. When the poetry collection El laúd del desterrado (The Lute of The Exiled) appeared in New York in 1858, many of the works in it—by Heredia, Pedro Santacilia,* José Agustín Quintero,* Leopoldo Turla,* Pedro Angel Castellón, Miguel Teurbe Tolón,* and Juan Clemente Zenea*—had already been published in U.S.-based newspapers. Some of this group settled in the U.S. permanently, and even those who did not still found their sense of Cuban nationhood profoundly shaped by their experiences in the United States. Even as the Cuban independence movement shifted course over the century, its close ties with print cultures in other nations continued: José Martí, for instance, wrote from Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States for audiences all over Latin America. Other political exiles took advantage of the U.S. publishing infrastructure as well: the Juárez loyalists who flocked to California and Nevada in the 1860s founded their own papers tied to “Zaragoza Clubs,” where patriotic poems were declaimed. But exile publications inevitably found other Spanish-speaking audiences outside their immediate circle of countrymen—a San Francisco juarecista paper also advertised meetings of the local society of Chilean miners, for example. The common practice of newspaper exchange accelerated this process of broadening the paper’s imagined community. Unable to fill their pages with original material, editors cut and pasted essays, poems, and even serialized novels from other papers they received. Spanish papers from New York or New Orleans arrived in San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles more regularly than those from Mexico City, a circumstance dramatized in Aristeo Brito’s* The Devil in Texas (1990), where an isolated newspaperman 1167

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celebrates the arrival of such papers because they reassure him that he is not alone in his struggle. Even in cases where the print culture seems most attuned to local issues—like turn-of-the-century New Mexico, where the push for statehood and political representation spurred a strong movement to preserve regional culture— such exchanges took place, helping yoke readers together in fellowship with other Spanish speakers both in and out of the United States. The popularity of the near-mythic bandido Joaquín Murrieta* during this period is an exemplary case of the transnational travels of such writing. The real historical figure, a vengeful californio whose life inspired sensational serialpaper and dime-novel stories there, Murieta was reclaimed as Sonoran in the border journalist Ireneo Paz’s Vida y aventuras del más célebre bandido sonorense Joaquín Murrieta (1904, Life and Adventures of the Most Celebrated Sonoran Bandit Joaquín Murieta), even as Chilean versions by Carlos Morla Vicuña and later Pablo Neruda claimed him for their nationality. The Murieta legend appeared on the stage as well, for from the beginning nontextual cultural forms traveled along the same transnational circuit as did Spanish-language periodicals. Musical and theatrical performances of astonishing variety from opera to blackface and eventually films as well could be called into service for the same community-building functions as written stories and poems; the itineraries of folkloric forms and oral culture are even more complex and harder to trace with precision. The rise of illustrated magazines that, like Martí’s La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age), were distributed throughout the hemisphere, further pushed Spanish-language periodicals in the United States closer toward what we would now recognize as a pan-Latino conception of their audience. Gráfico,* an illustrated paper published in New York in the late 1920s, was one important example that emphasized the cosmopolitan “Hispanic American” identity of its readers. Like Martí and Francisco “Pachín” Marín* before him, the Puerto Rican writer Jesús Colón* found in New York a new set of alliances with people of diverse origin, particularly the Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and other Caribbean tobacco workers who traveled the circuit between New York and Florida. As international labor movements gained ground in the early twentieth century, writers began to agitate for political ends other than independence: Colón and his compatriot Luisa Capetillo,* for instance, wrote stirring manifestoes and commentaries on women’s and worker’s rights. The largest influx of potential new readers for Spanish-language writing, however, came when roughly one million Mexicans fled to the U.S. between the start of the Mexican Revolution and the Great Depression. Important papers founded during this period, such as La Crónica (The Chronicle) in Laredo, Texas, La Prensa (The Press) in San Antonio, and El Heraldo de México (The Mexican Herald) and La Opinión (The Opinion) in Los Angeles, encouraged their readership to see themselves as still-loyal Mexicans, no matter how long they intended to stay. Reprinting novels and essays from the leading Mexican writers, these newspapers attempted to preserve language and culture within the community dubbed México de afuera* (Mexico on the 1168

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outside); the Mexican government eventually joined in these efforts by sending teachers and filmmakers to the “colonies” within the United States. The literary genre most strongly associated with México de afuera is the crónica,* a short, satirical sketch of urban life contrasting the spiritual and moral climate of the United States unfavorably with that of the homeland. Writers such as Julio Arce* (“Jorge Ulica”) and Benjamín Padilla* (“Kaskabel”) archly lamented the vulnerability of less-educated Mexicans, especially women, to what they perceived as the diabolical attractions of yanquilandia. Daniel Venegas’s* serial novel Don Chipote, o cuando los periocos mamen (1928, Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, 2000), used these satirical characteristics of the crónica to make an argument against assimilation: its comic ending finds the hapless hero back in the rural hamlet where he began, apparently unaffected by his misadventures in the United States. Conrado Espinosa’s* El Sol de Texas (1926, The Texas Sun), also originally published in one of these papers, likewise warns against the exploitation of Mexicans in the U.S.—but with a tragic ending to reinforce its nationalistic sentiment. (Nor were these even the first novels on this fruitful topic: one called Los Dramas de Nueva York was published in Mexico City in 1869 by José Rivera y Río, a returned migrant.) But even as these papers sought to keep Mexicans from becoming too Americanized during the political turmoil of the teens and twenties, the Revolution also prompted transnational re-affiliations in the opposite direction, particularly among some Mexico-Texans who had lived on the U.S. side of the border for generations. The tejana Leonor Villegas de Magnón,* for instance, volunteered as a medical aide along with her friend Jovita Idar* (daughter of the founder of La Crónica, who later took over as its publisher), an amazing story recounted in her posthumously published memoir, The Rebel. Another memoir of revolutionary re-affiliations, Luis Pérez’s* El Coyote, the Rebel, was published in 1947. Later in the twentieth century, rural Texas (which has produced a disproportionate number of Latino writers) became a classic setting for stories of families moving naturally and fluidly across the border, something particularly evident in the work of Rolando Hinojosa,* Arturo Islas,* Norma Elia Cantú,* and John Philip Santos. However nationalistic and cautionary the México de afuera press tended to be, its distribution networks stretched, once again, throughout the United States and well outside it. Some cronistas such as Catalina Dulché Escalante (“Catalina D’Erzell”) became regular correspondents in the U.S. papers without ever leaving Mexico. And the U.S.-based press helped foster “Mexican” literature as well: Mariano Azuela’s* classic revolutionary novel Los de abajo (The Underdogs) was first published in a newspaper in El Paso in 1915, when a few newspaper publishers such as San Antonio’s Ignacio Lozano branched out into book publishing. Like all ideologies, the push toward cultural preservation among México de afuera had its weak points: alongside patriotic editorials, readers could find advertisements for books to learn English in a week or for local jazz clubs. A “pure” identity is always difficult to maintain, and complex cultural 1169

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forms are difficult to reduce to propaganda. Although early novels like Don Chipote had depicted border-crossing as the starting point of a contest of starkly polarized values, loyalties, and languages impossible to maintain simultaneously or hybridize without becoming a figure of ridicule, the classic narratives of selffashioning that appeared after World War II began to imagine other ways of managing these conflicts. This perhaps accounts for the popularity, among both Latino writers and readers, of literary genres focused on the development of individual subjectivity—autobiography, memoir, fictionalized autobiography, and coming-of-age stories. José Antonio Villarreal’s* Pocho (1959) and Piri Thomas’s* Down These Mean Streets (1967), to name only two canonical works, pivot upon the fundamental experience of feeling neither wholly “American” nor Mexican or Puerto Rican, respectively. In both cases, the narrator distances himself from both forms of national identity to articulate something new: a positive sense of a hybridized ethnic identity. During and after the civil rights movement, ethnic nationalism revived the spiritual sense of nationhood articulated in the nineteenth century as a crucial part of their demands for recognition and sovereignty. Tato Laviera’s* poetry collection La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), for instance, critiqued on-island Puerto Rican nationalism’s dismissive attitude toward Nuyoricans* and their linguistic and cultural “impurity.” The power of the word was once again mobilized to build community: a renewed concern with preserving and celebrating culture resulted in the establishment of new periodicals, small bilingual presses, and literary prizes to counteract the lack of representation of Latino writers in the mainstream publishing industry. These small-press books became the foundation of the Latino literary canon. Even during the heyday of ethnic nationalisms, however, transnational connections remained important, sometimes as a kind of a negative inspiration. Although a few writers of the Chicano Movement* in the 1970s praised Octavio Paz for making the pachuco* figure central to his exploration of Mexican culture in The Labyrinth of Solitude, others were moved by his negative portrait to celebrate what they saw as distinctly Chicano forms of expression (Chicana* feminists, in particular, rewrote Paz for their own purposes). In other cases, however, transnational recognition had a more positive effect, as when the awarding of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Prize to Rolando Hinojosa in 1976 got the world’s attention and ensured that Hinojosa’s subsequent works would get into print. Poet Tino Villanueva,* raised in a working-class Texas border household, immersed himself in the “foreign” tradition of Castilian Spanish to earn a Ph.D. in peninsular literature; his later poems playfully codeswitch between the many formal and informal registers of language that are only inadequately designated as “Spanish” and “English.” The prolific California novelist Alejandro Morales,* who also writes in both languages, published his first novel, La verdad sin voz (The Truth without a Voice), in Mexico in 1979; his most recent novels are set in a post-national future along what he calls the “LAMEX corridor” between Southern California and Central Mexico. Ironically, Latino literature has often been embraced more by the Anglophone U.S. mainstream than by the Spanish-speaking literary world, although 1170

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this is swiftly changing: institutions in Spain, Germany and France have shown increasing interest in the field, perhaps because of the way that transnational migration is transforming Europe. Groundbreaking conferences between mejicana and Chicana writers in San Diego and Tijuana during the 1980s, and finally in Mexico City itself in 1993, brought out lingering tensions around issues of language purity, ideologies of gender and sexuality, and assumptions about literary value, although they also nourished some cross-border collaborations. Similarly, recent conferences have brought together on-island Cuban writers and filmmakers with writers of the Cuban diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere: the anthology Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (1996), edited by Ruth Behar,* for instance, emphasized commonalities among second- and third-generation cubanos—regardless of their citizenship—who were not adult witnesses to the post-1959 splintering of the nation. Historically, a few Latino publications have promoted the idea that Latino and Latin American writers belong in the same category, but others have resisted it. Certainly the presence of people like Isabel Allende* and Rosario Ferré,* who initially earned fame for Spanish works published in their home countries but later immigrated to the United States and began publishing in English, complicates this question: both are now regularly classified as Latina writers. What does this make of a bilingual writer with a great deal of experience in the United States, such as Carlos Fuentes—Latin American or Latino? Furthermore, a number of Latino writers have, in later life, chosen to live at least part of the time outside the United States: Victor Hernández Cruz* in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico; Julia Alvarez* in Jarabacoa, the Dominican Republic; Francisco Goldman* in Mexico City. Because it allows for movement and change, the term “transnational” effectively describes such fluid affiliations better than essentialist identity terms. In the academy, however, traditional disciplinary divisions can discourage transnational approaches. Studying Latino literature in an English department, for instance, will shape the resources one turns to and the contexts in which one reads. Debra Castillo and María Socorro Tabuenca have criticized “border studies” scholarship that, despite its name, tends to be predominantly Anglophone, paying little attention to publications and archives outside the U.S. Some theorists have argued that it is precisely the cultivation of a transnational perspective or outlook that can transform someone raised to identify themselves with a compound national subgroup into a “Latino.” A Dominican American in Queens may have little in common with a Honduran American in New Orleans beyond the fact that they speak some variety of Spanish and get classified as “Hispanic” by the dominant national culture—but that might just be enough to give them a sense of common cause. In such novels as Graciela Limón’s* In Search of Bernabé, Demetria Martínez’s* Mother Tongue, and Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman—all influenced by the Central American solidarity movement of the 1980s—characters arrive at such a sense of shared Latinidad despite ethnic and class differences that would have kept them apart had they stayed in their homelands. As Richard Rodriguez* writes in a recent 1171

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essay, “Because I grew up Hispanic in California, I know more Guatemalans than I would if I had grown up in Mexico, more Brazilians than if I lived in Peru.” The rise of global networks of finance and mass media, as well as communications technologies that seem to erase space and time, means that transnational phenomena permeate nearly every aspect of our everyday lives—including culture. The globalization of the Spanish-language entertainment industry, increasingly centered in Miami and Los Angeles, has had some positive effects—bringing together diverse audiences—and some negative ones, as regional cultures, dialects and accents are now in danger of dissolving into homogeneity. The accelerated movement of people across national borders has become a more fruitful topic than ever for Latino writers: many chroniclers of contemporary immigration, such as Luis Alberto Urrea,* Rubén Martínez,* and Alicia Gaspar de Alba* have sharply critiqued the heightened militarization of the U.S.–Mexican border as a contradiction of the utopian rhetoric of “free trade” favored by proponents of globalization. Some critics fear that as the term gains popularity, “transnational” is becoming no more than a synonym for “global,” pointing out that the political form of the nation may yet prove to be the best hope for small, peripheral countries to maintain their sovereignty. The publishing industry has also undergone major shifts because of globalization, with results that have yet to be fully comprehended. For example, some publishers in Spain, such as the massive Planeta, are now translating U.S. Latino titles and distributing them successfully in Europe even as major New York houses launch their own Spanish imprints to serve both domestic and foreign markets. Despite many transnational collaborations in the industry, these parallel developments will eventually find themselves in competition— and if the trend toward the centralization of the industry continues, one will fall away. At the same time, however, the World Wide Web holds out at least the potential for an extension of the imagined community of Latino writers and readers across the globe in a way that the nineteenth-century idealists could not even have imagined. Because Latinos have been on the front lines of transnationalism for so long, their way of reading and writing—and of thinking about those acts—will profoundly shape the future of literature itself. Further Reading Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (New York: Routledge, 1993). Castillo, Debra, and María Socorro Tabuenca, Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Kanellos, Nicolás, “Recovering and Re-constructing Early Twentieth-Century Hispanic Immigrant Print Culture in the U.S.” American Literary History Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter 2007): 438–455. Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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Renan, Ernest, “What is a Nation?” in Becoming National: A Reader, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996: 41–55). Rodriguez, Richard, “Go North, Young Man” Mother Jones (July–Aug. 1995).

Kirsten Silva Gruesz Travel Writing. Travel writing straddles the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction—between faithful accounting and embellishment. Although one of the older forms of written narrative, it has only recently been considered more than a marginal literary genre. This lack of status has something to do with travel writing’s often dubious truth claims: from the time medieval Europeans brought back tales of monstrous beings from their trade ventures into Asia, such reports have been looked on as sources of vitally important, but potentially heretical and dangerous, information. Because travelers exposed themselves to contamination by strange customs and values, they seemed inherently suspect, even though it is clear from our distant historical perspective that they imposed their own cultural assumptions upon what they witnessed. Recording intercultural contact is one of travel writing’s main objectives, and for that reason it maintains a special resonance for Latino writers. Most critics make a distinction between travel writing with an obviously commercial or informational bent and more self-consciously literary works, although the line between these categories can be blurry. “Literariness” can be achieved through poetic descriptions of people and landscapes, or by deploying novelistic strategies in plot and character development—or both. A narrative that dramatizes scenes of departure and return as bookends can satisfy readers’ desire for plot, and travel stories often include other pivotal scenes that seem to epitomize the qualities of the place being visited. They may also highlight moments of sudden insight as the journey provokes some internal change in the narrator’s consciousness; the concept of travel as a life-changing experience is particularly visible in twentieth-century narratives. Novelty, too, is a recurring motif: the “true” traveler is always looking beyond the horizon to the next unvisited place. Travel narratives differ importantly from stories of migration in that the traveler is always conscious of his or her intent to return and possesses the ability to do so. Without that intent and ability, the story turns into something else: a captivity narrative, a story of exile, or (in the classic “immigrant literature” vein) a narrative of assimilation. Changing motives for traveling and different assumptions about the social function of writing distinguish modern travel narratives from those of earlier periods. Around the time that Columbus’s log-book and letters initiated the rich tradition of European writing about the New World encounter, many other varieties of travel writing began to flourish: narratives of traders, military men, redeemed captives, missionaries, explorers, religious pilgrims. There is a direct link between such writing and the emergence of the novel—a connection one can see readily in the picaresque genre, where a rogue anti-hero wanders from place to place; the itinerant figure of Don Quijote emerges from the picaresque and from more fantastical tales of adventure. Both fictional and 1173

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nonfictional travels dominate the literature of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, and because both kinds of texts were devoured by the same class of readers, they influenced each other so profoundly that the line between the real and the imaginary often seems impossible to distinguish. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s* report on his travels through North America (often suggestively referred to as the Naufragios, shipwrecks) illustrates travel writing’s tenuous relation to the real during this period. In addition to conveying important strategic and historical information, the text offers an invaluable ethnographic record of the tribes with whom Cabeza de Vaca lived: indeed, at some points he seems to speak from an indigenous perspective when he recounts apparently miraculous events consonant with their cosmography, a shift many readers see as a precursor of lo real maravilloso (magic realism). Because these colonial-era narratives of intercultural contact are so fundamental to understanding the complex racial past of Latin America, contemporary Latino writers have often turned to them to make sense of their own mestizo roots: Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s foundational story of the conquest of Mexico, for instance, has been referenced by many Chicana writers who share his fascination with Cortés’s translator and lover, Malintzín (“La Malinche”). Part of the appeal in returning to these early narratives is to probe their dual fascination and repulsion toward the indigenous “other” and to try to recuperate an echo of that subsumed voice. In the Americas as in Africa and Southeast Asia, narratives of travel, “adventure,” and exploration were central to the colonial project; despite their frequent distortion and incompleteness, they profoundly shaped the course of history. Mary Louise Pratt has argued that most European travel and exploration narratives, even those that strive to be sympathetic, portray the “natives” as temporally and morally backward, making colonialism appear to be the inevitable outcome of progress and helping to justify conquest. The same can be said of the numerous accounts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. travelers to Latin America. Mexico, Cuba, and Central America were popular destinations for adventurous-minded writers. These accounts were frequently used as guidebooks for later Anglo American filibusters and settlers. Under the spell of Manifest Destiny,* such narratives reaffirmed the central values of the dominant Protestant culture by characterizing different political and domestic practices—and especially Catholicism— as deviant. Likewise, Anglo American travel accounts of Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico are full of descriptions of “colorful,” “swarthy,” and “primitive” Mexicans and Indians, their “passionate” women and “lazy” men—setting in motion a cascade of verbal and visual stereotypes that persist to this day. Along with a few direct responses to this publicity machine by local Spanish speakers of the borderlands, the travel narratives of Latin Americans who visited the United States during the same period help counterbalance these negative images: the travelogues of Lorenzo de Zavala,* Benjamin Vicuña McKenna, Guillermo Prieto, and Justo Sierra Méndez (and, more recently, Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsiváis) seriocomically refract the 1174

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mistaken impressions that los yanquis have of them. A recent anthology of writings by Spanish and Latin America tourists titled Se habla español (Spanish Is Spoken), after the signs one sees in so many windows in the U.S., takes direct aim at those early narratives by emphasizing the ways that Latinos have transformed the United States. Beyond reproducing the dominant values of the traveler’s own culture, travel narratives took on a distinct function in the Romantic period: self-revelation and renewal. Just as the genre of the novel turned toward the interior revelation of psychological truths, the travel diary morphed in the nineteenth century from a simple logbook into more introspective forms. For the leisured classes of England and the United States, the “Grand Tour” of Europe to learn about the origins of Western civilization became obligatory, but many young writers transcended the cliché by using this encounter with cultural difference to question their own core values. At this point the travel narrative takes on a now-familiar theme: the testing of self that occurs when one is pushed to the very limits of what is familiar. Often the drama of such works revolves around a sudden insight into the tenuousness of one’s own privilege, resulting in a subtle but significant transformation of perspective. Sometimes the encounter with cultural difference results in a moment of unexpected connectedness when one is able to see through the eyes of the other: these become the “treasures” the narrator brings back from the journey, not the titillating exoticism or lucrative information of earlier exploration stories. The cliché that “travel expands one’s horizons” suggests how common this idea of self-transformation through travel has become, even as it draws on the same vocabulary of expansion as colonial travel writing. Given its ugly, racializing role in the colonization of the Americas, and because the majority of Latino migrants have come to the United States not as adventurers but as political exiles or workers, travel writing might not at first glance seem to be a genre with much appeal for Latino writers. Leisure travel is usually expensive (though the subgenre of “budget travel” still generates picaresque tales), and thus a pastime for the elite. Modern tourism has become a form of consumption where the commodity is experience itself—not to mention the prominent place that souvenir-gathering is usually accorded in travel writing. Whereas a leisure traveler goes for the experience and thus tends to prolong the journey, a migrant in search of work and food travels to survive, and thus tries to reach the destination as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the defining quality of the genre—narrating intercultural contact—touches the very marrow of experience of being Latino in the United States. One could argue that Latinos do not need an artificial situation of encountering the “other” to provoke their journey toward self-transformation, precisely because their immediate context can feel so linguistically and spiritually foreign. Traditional travel narratives can easily pinpoint who is the “native” and who the “foreigner,” whereas many Latinos resist making such distinctions. But “traveling” can also put a name on a sense of itinerant selfhood, of inbetweenness and permanent transitoriness between “here” and “there,” that 1175

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are, to many, the essence of the Latino condition. Julia Alvarez’s* meditation on the writer’s life, Something to Declare, uses the vocabulary of travel to structure its essays into two sections: “Customs” and “Declarations.” One specific kind of journey appears so frequently in both fictional and nonfictional Latino writings that it may stand as the equivalent of the nineteenthcentury “Grand Tour”: the felt imperative to return to their family’s place of origin. The lyrical autobiographical essays in Richard Rodriguez’s* Days of Obligation (1992) and John Philip Santos’s* Places Left Unfinished Since the Time of Creation (1999) are loosely connected by the narrator’s dramatic journey “back” to a Mexico they never knew—a journey prompted in both cases by the sense of a lingering ancestral mystery and a spiritual longing. (The fact that Rodriguez includes an epigraph from Cabeza de Vaca inscribes it within a long tradition of Latino travel writing.) Luis Alberto Urrea’s* “border trilogy” mingling reportage, essayistic reflection, and autobiography—Across the Wire (1993), By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996), and Nobody’s Son (1998)—is structured by Urrea’s multiple movements back and forth across the San Diego/Tijuana border on which he was born. There are recurring motifs within this body of work: the narrators’ idealized and perhaps unrealistic visions of a psychic wholeness and connection to the past that they hope to achieve on this journey; “mirror scenes” of relief that everyone in the crowd, for once, looks like them. Romantic expectations about travel leading to inner transformation often collide, however, with the lingering legacy of colonialism as the narrators confront the inadequacy of their Spanish or the enormous gap in social privilege that separates them from those in the ancestral home. The protagonists often travel to try to escape pigeonholing in the United States only to find, ironically, that the “natives” consider them outsiders and tourists. Sandra María Esteves* writes of journeying to Puerto Rico at age seventeen to find her roots, only to be labelled a “gringa” by her extended family there; Judith Ortiz Cofer* tells a similar story in Silent Dancing (1990). These basic structures of the autobiographical journey of return transfer readily from nonfiction to fiction, with results that sometimes seem, well, Quixotic. The characters of Theresa and Alicia in Ana Castillo’s* The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) hitchhike to Mexico during the height of the Chicano Movement* to discover that the deeper source of their alienation is not the Anglo establishment but the patriarchy common to both nations. The narrative of Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) begins when the youngest daughter, Yolanda, is overcome by a flood of childhood memories of her family’s fearful flight when she returns to the Dominican Republic years later. Journeying back to Cuba is more logistically and politically complicated for Cuban Americans, but the protagonists of Oscar Hijuelos’s* Our House in the Last World (1983) and Cristina García’s* Dreaming in Cuban (1993) make formative trips to the island in spite of those obstacles, hoping to resolve their conflicted identities. In each case the journey is crucial to the narrator’s coming of age—perhaps not coincidentally, these were “breakout” first novels for all four authors, who then went on to 1176

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mainstream prominence. (Of course, not every coming-of-age journey need center on ethnic identity; John Rechy’s* queer classic City of Night [1963] is similarly itinerant.) Poetry can also narrate—or simply allude to—the attractions and disappointments built into such journeys, as demonstrated by Lorna Dee Cervantes’s* much-anthologized poems “Oaxaca 1974,” “Refugee Ship,” and “Visions of Mexico from Port Townsend, Washington.” Juan Felipe Herrera’s* hallucinatory poetic sequences in Night Train to Tuxtla (1994) and Mayan Drifter (1997), an account of a trip through the Lacandón rainforest, respond to a deep-seated feeling of rootlessness through wandering. Herrera simultaneously borrows from and critiques the tradition of ethnographic and adventure writing, attempting to identify with contemporary Mayan culture without sentimentalizing it. Other poets have journeyed to Spain to reanimate their thinking about the roots and routes of mestizaje: Victor Hernández Cruz* flashes back to historical Gibraltar and southern Spain before the expulsion of Africans and Jews, overlaying that site with the present-day Americas. A variation on the individual pilgrimage to the ancestral country is that of the group road trip. Oscar Zeta Acosta* revised this archetype, popularized by Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), exposing the racial exclusions of those earlier road novels. The actual trip is subsumed to the narrator’s gradual political awakening in Brown Buffalo and its sequel, which have influenced numerous postwar Latino writers. Genaro González’s* The Quixote Cult (1998) presents a group of disenchanted Chicano activists hitting the road in a car named Rocinante, and a road trip also animates Urrea’s In Search of Snow (1994). The Chicago-to-Mexico-City itinerary undertaken ritually by the Reyes family in Sandra Cisneros’s* Caramelo (2002), and the cross-country journey of the Ramírez family in Stella Pope Duarte’s Let Their Spirits Dance (2002), twist the usually masculine emphasis of road-trip narratives. The motivating factor in Duarte’s novel, the loss of a son in the Vietnam War, reminds us that military movement, like migrating to find work, is another form of nonleisure travel; many Latino veterans of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, in particular, have written about their experiences with cultural difference in both fiction and nonfiction. Relatively few Latinos have as yet explored the genre of the reflective travel essay, with some exceptions among already-established writers such as Cisneros, Castillo, and Rodriguez, who have published pieces in large-circulation magazines. Rudolfo Anaya* adapted his A Chicano in China (1986) from a journal he kept during a month-long trip to China in 1984. Recording this moment of the initial “thaw” in U.S.–Chinese relations, Anaya records his ambivalence about being typed as “American” by the locals. Surprisingly, A Chicano in China turns into a modulation on the ancestral-journey story as Anaya begins to identify the faces he sees with what he imagines as the first indigenous Americans who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. China becomes for him a precursor homeland to Aztlán,* and this theory of ethnogenesis is strengthened by a family legend that his grandfather had once visited China, bringing back the mystical 1177

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symbol of the carp familiar to readers of Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya then sees affinities everywhere: Chinese iconography seems Aztec; tricked-out local bicycles remind him of lowriders. His identification with the Chinese leads him to downplay the nation’s internal heterogeneity; however, his reflection comparing the Great Wall of China—built to protect “natives” against “barbarians”—with the U.S.-Mexican border now reads as prescient. As electronic media offer near-instant communication between far-flung places and more regions than ever retooling toward a touristic economy, Latino writers will inevitably explore this genre further. It should be noted, however, that many are already very practiced at the travel writer’s game of defamiliarizing concepts of native and foreign, home and abroad. More politicized writers are already scrutinizing the conditions that have now made leisure travel so popular: Who is allowed to move readily across national borders, and who is not? Are the people who staff the service sectors in tourist zones “natives” or themselves “foreigners”? How does the tourist industry contribute to the global migration of workers? By bringing such questions to the forefront, travel writing can play an important role in the evolution of our thinking about what happens when different perspectives, traditions, and forms of expression meet. Further Reading Carballo, Emmanuel, ed., ¿Qué país es éste? Los Estados Unidos y los gringos vistos por escritores mexicanos de los siglos XIX y XX. (México D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1996). Paz Soldán, Edmundo, and Alberto Fuguet, eds., Se hable español: Voces latinas en USA. (Miami: Alfaguara/Santillana Publishing, 2000). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

Kirsten Silva Gruesz Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signified the end of the Mexican–American War in February 1848. The treaty was negotiated by Nicholas Trist, President James Polk’s emissary, and was signed in the small town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, outside Mexico City. Within a year of the treaty, Mexicans living in the ceded areas had to declare their intention to remain Mexican citizens or would become American citizens automatically. Either way, the treaty promised to protect their rights. Their property rights were guaranteed, including claims to land grants under Spanish and Mexican law. In New Mexico, especially, determining exact boundaries became difficult, because most of the Spanish grants had been awarded either to families or to villages as ejidos (communal land grants), a concept unfamiliar to Anglo American law, which emphasized individual rights and private property. Prominent landmarks, such as rivers, mesas, and geologic outcroppings, often defined property boundaries, and distances were measured in meters and bounds. In addition, before takeover by the United States, Hispanics had the custom of accepting verbal contracts when land exchanged hands or had lost written agreements. Unfortunately, after annexation, few Hispanic communi1178

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ties or individuals possessed the kind of documentation of their land rights that would stand up in an Anglo court of law. Although the treaty protected their legal rights, Mexicans had no assurance that their culture would be protected. Only two thousand Mexicans kept their citizenship and moved to a now shrunken Mexico. The rest of the Spanishspeaking population had to accommodate to living under a new, foreign government and to the imposition of Anglo American culture as Easterners flooded in to the newly acquired territories. Although the state constitutions being adopted in these territories were often bilingual English–Spanish and called for all laws to be published in both languages, over the years protection of the language and cultural rights of Mexican Americans disappeared. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Testimonio: A Documentary History of the Mexican-American Struggle for Civil Rights (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

F. Arturo Rosales Trejo, Ernesto (1950–1991). Bilingual poet Ernesto Trejo was born on March 4, 1950, in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico, but moved with his family when a child to Mexicali. He went on to study economics at California State University in Fresno and, while there, came under the influence of his teacher, Philip Levine, and his poetry associates, including now-famous fellow students Gary Soto* and Luis Omar Salinas.* Trejo received his B.A. and M.A. in economics and went on to earn an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa (1976). After publishing poems in various magazines, his first major publication was a four-poet anthology, Entrance: Four Chicano Poets (1975), probably the first anthology to publish Chicano creative writers who had studied writing formally. In 1976, he published his translations of poems from the Spanish of Panamanian Tristán Solarte as The Rule of Three. He later joined Levine in translating poems of Mexican poet Jaime Sabines. In 1976, Trejo relocated to Mexico City to work as an economist; while there he published chapbooks in Spanish, including Instrucciones y señales (1977, Instructions and Signs) and Los nombres propios (1978, Proper Names). In 1997 in Fresno, he also published his first solo collection of poetry in English: The Day of Vendors. In 1984, a year after returning to Fresno to teach part-time at California State, Trejo published a book-length collection in Spanish: El día entre las hojas (The Day among the Leaves). Trejo’s last work was his most incisive and influential, Entering a Life (1990), written and published shortly before his death. In all of his works his sparse language, surrealism and humane verse keep the reader grounded in the physical and in real human beings, including his own autobiographical memories. In 1985, Trejo joined the faculty at Fresno City College, where he taught English and creative writing until his death. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).


Treviño, Jesús Salvador

Treviño, Jesús Salvador (1946–). Born into a Mexican American family in Los Angeles on March 28, 1946, and a graduate in philosophy from Occidental College (1968), Jesús Salvador Treviño is an award-winning filmmaker renowned for his pioneering films of the Chicano experience. His early documentaries such as Yo Soy Chicano, Raza Unida, and América Tropical and the television series he produced, such as Ahora! and Acción Chicano, helped to shape Chicano identity during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. A founder of Chicano cinema, the Mexican feature film he wrote and directed, Raíces de sangre (Roots of Blood), was recognized in 1991 by the Valladolid, Spain, International Film Festival as one of the twenty-five most outstanding Latin American films of all time. He has won the Directors Guild of America award twice for best daytime drama, wrote and directed the American Playhouse drama Seguín, and has directed episodes of such television and drama series as NYPD Blue, ER, Crossing Jordan, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Dawson’s Creek, Nash Bridges, Star Trek: Voyager, Third Watch, E-Ring, and Prison Break. He served as one of the Executive Producers of Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, a four-hour documentary series for PBS, and is the coexecutive producer of the SHOWTIME drama series Resurrection Boulevard. Treviño’s development as an activist and filmmaker is detailed in his engrossing memoir, Eyewitness: A Filmmaker’s Memoir of the Chicano Movement (2001), which details his coming of age during the peak of the Mexican American civil rights movement and how this contributed to his development as a filmmaker. The Fabulous Sinkhole and Other Stories (1995) is his first collection of fiction writing, which garnered him a starred review in Booklist and the distinction of

Jesús Salvador Treviño on the set, directing.

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being named a finalist in the 1996 Benjamin Franklin Award given by the Publishers Marketing Association. His second collection of interrelated stories, The Skyscraper that Flew and Other Stories (published in 2005), like his first collection of related stories, follows a community of endearing characters whose surreal lives interface with modernity as well as with the magic in reality. Treviño lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Troncoso, Sergio (1961–). Prose fiction writer Sergio Troncoso was born in El Paso in 1961 to Mexican immigrant parents. Despite his humble origins, he was able to attend and graduate from Harvard University and conduct graduate work in international relations and philosophy at Yale University. Troncoso also won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Mexico. With such a background rich in academic exploration, it is no wonder that Troncoso is one of the most intellectual of the Mexican American writers. His first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, immediately garnered him attention, winning the Premio Aztlán and the Southwest Book Award. His novel, The Nature of Truth (2003), is a philosophical thriller that examines evil and examines the implications of the Holocaust. The stories in The Last Tortilla examine Mexican identity and masculinity on the border as well as more intimate themes, such as psychological conflict, morality, and love. Troncoso’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and even in such newspapers as Newsday and The El Paso Times. Further Reading Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., Life In Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Tropicana, Carmelita. See Troyano, Alina Troyano, Alina (1957–). Comedienne, playwright, and widely renowned performance artist Alina Troyano has created and assumed the persona of Carmelita Tropicana, an outlandish, brash, outspoken, and irreverent commentator of the cultural scene as well as satirist of Latina spitfires à la Carmen Miranda. Born in Cuba, but from age seven on raised in the United States, Troyano has been a perennial performer on stages and alternative spaces in and around New York City during the 1980s, and by the 1990s went on to national fame and acclaim. In 1999, Troyano was awarded an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance. In 2000, Troyano published a collection of her onewoman plays, essays and commentary under the title of I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures, in which her bilingual humor, her satire of stereotypes and her lesbian identity challenge heteronormative culture. Troyano has received a Cintas Fellowship and a Cuban Arts Foundation writing fellowship, 1181

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as well as fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts for Performance Art for screenwriting and playwriting. In addition, she has won fellowships to study at workshops at New York’s INTAR and Los Angeles’s The Mark Taper Forum. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Plumed Warrior writing award from the National Latin Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Organization. Further Reading Muñoz, José Esteban, “Flaming Latinas: Ela Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen” in The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, eds. Chon Noriega and Ana M. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Trujillo, Carla (?–). Psychologist, author, and lesbian theorist Carla Trujillo was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and raised in the San Francisco Bay area of California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in human development from the University of California, Davis and an M.S. and Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Trujillo produced both academic studies in her field of expertise and articles and anthologies on Chicana lesbian culture. Her anthology Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991) is one of the most important documents in Chicano gay, lesbian, and transgender literature. It was the winner of the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Anthology and the Out/Write Vanguard Award. Her Living Chicana Theory (1998) has similarly been influential in the study of minority gay culture. Trujillo is also a creative writer who has published short stories in magazines. Her first novel, What Night Brings, was awarded the Miguel Mármol Prize by Curbstone Press and was runner-up for the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund Award. The novel deals with a young girl, Mari Cruz, living in San Lorenzo, California; in the dysfunction of her family, Mari Cruz wishes she were born a boy and practically hates her father. In her academic career, Trujillo has become an expert in diversity and in fact serves as the director of diversity for the University of California–Berkeley. Further Reading Perpetusa-Seva, Inmaculada, and Lourdes Torres, Hispanic and U.S. Latina Expression (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Trujillo, Enrique (?–?). Enrique Trujillo was principally a newspaperman who was deported to New York in 1880 in retaliation for his revolutionary activities. After working on various revolutionary newspapers and having edited El Avisador Hispano-Americano (1889) in New York, in 1890 Trujillo founded what became an immensely influential newspaper, El Porvenir, which was printed in his own shop (Trujillo, Apuntes 42). Through the imprint of El Porvenir, he also published a variety of books similar in breadth to Ponce de León’s catalog. Although Trujillo was an accomplished publisher of the exiled intelligentsia, he was also an avid pamphleteer, penning numerous ideological tracts to sustain the Cuban independence movement—in reality, he was an adversary of José Martí’s revolutionary party and his pamphlets attacked the ideas issuing forth in 1182

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Martí’s periodical, Patria. As mentioned above, Trujillo also participated in laying the intellectual foundations for a Cuban national culture by publishing his biographical magazine, Album del Porvenir; in addition, he wrote and in 1896 published Apuntes históricos to document the effort of the expatriate community in the struggle for independence leading up to the Spanish–American War.* Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodical in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Trujillo, Enrique, Apuntes históricos (New York: Imprenta del “El Porvenir,” 1896).

Nicolás Kanellos Trujillo Herrera, Rafael (1895/97–?). Prolific playwright, drama teacher, and impresario Trujillo Herrera was born in Durango, Mexico, in 1895 or 1897. He was a captain in General Venustiano Carranza’s army during the Revolution and later immigrated to Los Angeles. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he began writing plays for the stage and for the radio; in 1933, he began directing his own radio program. In 1940, Trujillo Herrera became associated with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), for which he wrote a play, Bandido (Bandit); it was later published under the title of Revolución (Revolution). During the 1960s, Trujillo Herrera published numerous works in various genres in Los Angeles, Mexico and elsewhere, including some through his own publishing house, Editorial Autores Unidos (United Authors Publishing). In total, Trujillo Herrera claimed to have written some fifty one-act plays, two more in four acts, and twelve in three. During his life on the Los Angeles stage, he also directed at least five theatrical companies. In 1974, he opened the doors of his own theater, the Teatro Intimo (Intimate Theater), in Los Angeles. Trujillo Herrera’s most famous three-act plays are Revolución, Estos Son Mis Hijos (These Are My Children), La Hermana de Su Mujer (His Wife’s Sister), Cuando la Vida Florece (When Life Flourishes), and Ala Moda Vieja (Old Style). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Turla, Leopoldo (1818–1877). Havana-born poet Leopoldo Turla was the son of an American mother and an Italian father and grew up to be a leading activist for Cuban independence. Turla, a romantic poet, published a number of poetry collections, including Flores de mayo (1838, May Flowers), Jardín romántico (1838, Romantic Garden), and Ráfagas del trópico (1842, Tropical Breezes), before immigrating to the United States in 1846 as a political refugee. He settled in New Orleans (where he eked out a poor living as a teacher until his death in that city in 1877), subsequently publishing El artista (1849, The artist) and El colibrí (n.d., The Hummingbird). His most noteworthy poetry book, however, is Lágrimas (1860, Tears). Turla is one of the poets included in the famous Laúd del desterrado (1856, Lute of The Exile) anthology of Cuban expatriate poets. While 1183

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in the United States, Turla published poems in the revolutionary press, including El Tribuno Cubano (The Cuban Tribune), directed by his friend Cirilo Villaverde.* He often used the pseudonym “Un quidam” when doing so. Turla was among the very few Cuban poets whose works were translated to English, which accounts for his Whirlwind of the Tropics (n.d.). Some of his poems in English translation were published in The North American Review and other American periodicals. Turla was also the author of two plays: “El condestable de Castilla” (The Constable of Castile) and “El infante” (The Prince). Further Reading Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel (1931–). Frances Esquibel Tywoniak was born on April 2, 1931, in Atoka, New Mexico. Her life narrative, Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman, begins with references to her early life in southeastern New Mexico. The narrator situates herself as part of an extended family and as a fifth-generation New Mexican on her mother’s side of the family. She notes, for example, that the family history of her maternal grandfather is thought to have originated in Santa Fe, whereas her maternal grandmother’s family was from Las Cruces. Her father was born in Mexico in Santa Clara, Durango. She describes him as having worked in the silver mines of Durango, Mexico, later on the family ranch in New Mexico, and then as a farm laborer in California. Of particular importance in Esquibel Tywoniak’s narrative are those aspects that point to a rural New Mexican way of life. For example, she notes that her maternal grandfather owned land in New Mexico and raised sheep and cattle and grew cotton. However, because life was difficult in New Mexico during the Great Depression, she moved together with the rest of her family to California in 1937, where she worked in the fields of the Tagus Ranch with her sister and father. This was only one of many moves to various camps as the family followed the crops between the areas of the San Joaquin Valley and San Francisco. During this period of her life she became aware of her difference—of her “Spanish/Mexican background”—which placed her in contrast to others, such as African Americans and Anglos. Family moves later took her to various areas of California, such as to a farming community in Goshen near the barrio of Visalia, as well as to Tassajara. Although she suffered through “discriminatory placement” in vocational track courses in junior high school, she entered a college-track curriculum in high school, where she was a member of the student newspaper staff and the school chapter of Junior Statesmen of America. Upon graduating from high school, she was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of California at Berkeley, a turning point in her life. Although her years at Berkeley involved experiences in which her traditional Mexican American upbringing was challenged, this period is described by Esquibel Tywoniak as providing her with a sense of empowerment, of being 1184

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able to make a life of her own at the age of eighteen. Part of that process included working at a mountain resort at Shaver Lake and as live-in domestic help as a means of earning room and board. During her junior year at Berkeley, she discovered her desire to become a teacher and would later apply to the School of Education, eventually earn her teaching credentials. Her marriage to Ed Tywoniak, of Polish American descent, marked a crossing of ethnic barriers. Her life’s course clearly highlights a process of coming of age within Mexican American and Anglo cultural spaces. Further Reading Esquibel Tywoniak, Frances, and Mario T. García, Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Donna Kabalen de Bichara

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U Ulibarrí, Sabine R. (1919–2003). Short-story writer, poet, and essayist Sabine R. Ulibarrí has had one of the longest and most productive literary careers in Chicano literature. He is a well-known and highly respected chronicler of the way things once were in his beloved New Mexico. Born on September 21, 1919, in the small village of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, he was raised on a ranch by his parents, both of whom were college graduates. Besides learning the ways of rural life and the rugged countryside, Ulibarrí also experienced firsthand the folk culture of the area, which included not only the full repository of oral literature but also a strong connection to the language and oral literature of Spain and the Spanish-speaking Americas. His early love for the Spanish language and Hispanic literature took Ulibarrí to college and eventually to a Ph.D. degree in Spanish. Over the years he taught at every level, from elementary school to graduate school, with a pause for World War II, during which he flew thirty-five combat missions as an Army Air Force gunner. Today he is a professor emeritus of the University of New Mexico, where he spent most of his academic career as a student and professor. Ulibarrí’s awards include the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature (1988), Distinguished Alumni Award and Regents’ Medal of Merit, University of New Mexico (1989), and the white House Hispanic Heritage Award (1989). He has published two books of poems, Al cielo se sube a pie (1966, You Reach Heaven on Foot) and Amor y Ecuador (1966, Love and Ecuador), and the following collections of short stories in bilingual format: Tierra Amarillo: Stories of New Mexico/Tierra Amarilla: Cuentos de Nuevo México (1971), Mi abuela fumaba puros y otros cuentos de Tierra Amarilla/My Grandma Smoked Cigars and Other Stories of Tierra Amarilla (1977), Primeros encuentros/First Encounters 1187

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(1982), El gobernador Glu Glu (1988, Governor Glu Glu), El Condor and Other Stories (1989), and a selection of his stories in The Best of Sabine R. Ulibarrí: Selected Stories (1993). In 1997, he published a memoir of his World War II experiences in Mayhem Was Our Business: Memorias de un veterano (Mayhem Was Our Business: Memories of a Veteran). In all of his work, Ulibarrí preserves a style, narrative technique, and language that owe much to the oral folk tradition. Through his works he has been able to capture the ethos and the spirit of rural New Mexico before the coming of the Anglos. His works memorialize myths and legends and such distinctive characters of the past as cowboys, sheriffs, folk healers, Sabine R. Ulibarrí. penitents, and common, everyday folk. His works, in which he often writes two versions of the same story—in English and Spanish—are among the most direct and broadly accessible in modern Chicano literature. Further Reading Duke dos Santos, Maria I., and Patricia De La Fuente, eds., Sabine R. Ulibarrí: Critical Essays (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Ulica, Jorge. See Arce, Julio G. Umpierre-Herrera, Luz María (1947–). Feminist poet and literary critic Luz María Umpierre-Herrera was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, on October 15, 1947, attended private schools and graduated from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón with a B.A. in Spanish. She began law school in Puerto Rico but soon gave that up for graduate work in Spanish at Bryn Mawr College, where she received her Ph.D. in 1978, after which she taught Hispanic literature at the University of Kansas, Rutgers University, and various other educational institutions. Umpierre published her first book of poems, Una puertorriqueña en Penna (1979, A Puerto Rican Woman in Pain), to protest her marginalization while at Bryn Mawr, experimenting with the code-switching between Spanish and English that she copied from the Nuyorican* writers. Her following books of poems all criticize U.S. society as an outsider and lesbian while also revealing a desire for acceptance as a Latina. In her personal life, she has struggled against discrimination in the academic institutions where she has worked, a struggle that has marked her poetry as well, something that has not been well received by mainstream and minority critics. Her other books of poems include En el país de las maravillas (1982, In the Land of Marvels), Y otras 1188

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desgracias/And Other Misfortunes (1985), and The Margarita Poems (1987). Umpierre has also published her poetry widely in magazines and anthologies. In 1990, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Coalition of Lesbians and Gays of New Jersey. Further Reading Di Francsco, Maria, “Poetic Dissidence: An Interview with Luz María Umpierre” MELUS Vol. 27, No. 4 (Winter 2002): 135–156.

Nicolás Kanellos Unger, David (1950–). David Unger was born in Guatemala to a Hispanic Jewish family and lived there until 1955. He was raised in the United States, where his parents took refuge from the violence in their homeland. Unger received his early schooling in Hialeah, Florida, and received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. from Colombia University. Unger is a poet, novelist, and short story writer who writes in both English and Spanish. Among his works are the collection of poems Neither Caterpillar Nor Butterfly (1986) and the novel Life in the Damn Tropic: A Novel (2004), which narrates the life of a Jewish family in Guatemala during the turbulent 1980s and is filled with black political humor. In 1998, Unger was awarded the Ivri-Nasawi Poetry Prize. In 1991, he also won the Manhattan Borough President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. However, his fame as a creative writer is surpassed by his work as a translator of Nicanor Parra, Roque Dalton, Mario Benedetti, Isaac Goldemberg,* Sergio Ramírez, Luisa Valenzuela,* José Agustín, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and many others. Unger is currently the U.S. coordinator of the Guadalajara International Book Fair and the Director of City College’s Publishing Certificate Program. Further Reading Carr, Dorothy A., Central American and Caribbean Literature (New York: Authorhouse, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Uranga, Rodolfo (1901–?). A columnist for La Opinión in Los Angeles during the 1920s, Rodolfo Uranga used his journalistic position as a forum to defend Mexicans awaiting execution as well as those incarcerated. Uranga and his brother Lauro, who was a successful playwright in Los Angeles, were born in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico—although some say Hidalgo. A conservative who opposed the anti-clerical revolutionaries in Mexico, Rodolfo Uranga was nonetheless very concerned about the mistreatment and the lack of respect of Mexicans in the United States. In one of his columns, he first announced that Ignacio Castañeda, a Detroit automobile worker, had saved a woman from drowning in the Rio Grande as he crossed at El Paso from his native Jalisco. He then wrote, “We have heroes here in the United States. Anglo Americans have no right to criticize our crime and banditry in Mexico. They have crime galore here. Look at the situation in Chicago. It is not just to brand ‘inferior’ Mexicans as uniquely imbued with criminal tendencies.” 1189

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In 1931, Uranga also wrote columns for Tucson’s Tucsonense and El Paso’s El Continenal, a daily newspaper that served Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and became editor of La Voz (The Voice) in Ciudad Juárez. An ardent nationalist and conservative, Uranga joined a number of other like-minded ideologues in Chihuahua and in 1940 helped found the Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party), one of the most powerful political parties in Mexico today. While in the United States, Uranga promoted the idea that Mexicans in the United States were still Mexicans, regardless of their location outside of the patria. Further Reading Rosales, F. Arturo, Chicano! History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995).

F. Arturo Rosales Urista, Alberto Baltazar. See Alurista Urrea, Luis Alberto (1955–). Luis Alberto Urrea was born on August 20, 1955, in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, to Phyllis Dashiell of Staten Island, New York, and Alberto Urrea Murray of Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico. Although Urrea was born in Mexico, he was registered as an American citizen born abroad. When his parents decided to move to San Diego in 1958, Urrea frequently visited his paternal grandmother, who resided permanently on the Mexican side of the border. After their move from Tijuana, the Urreas first lived in Logan Heights, a mixed neighborhood of Mexicans and African Americans; but in 1965 the family moved to Clairemont, a predominantly white neighborhood. As a young child, Urrea contracted tuberculosis, but his parents were unable to find the appropriate cure for him. At the tuna cannery where the elder Urrea worked, he became friends with a man named Abelino García and his wife, Rosario. Rosario became a surrogate mother for the younger Urrea. Mamá Chayo, as he affectionately calls her, saved his life by curing his tuberculosis. Although Urrea’s memories of the Garcías are positive, most of his writings about his life are more tragic. In several of his books, Urrea mentions that a family member sexually abused him and is even more frank about the distant relationship between his parents. The family’s home was an uninhabitable place for Urrea as a boy, because his parents were always at odds. After their divorce, Urrea lived with his mother. Because of these family conflicts, Urrea compares himself to the border area where he grew up. His identity seems at odds in the same ways that his parents were with each other. Urrea struggles with his father’s demand for him to be macho, and after the divorce he grappled with his father’s absence. In 1977, Alberto Urrea Murray died in a car accident, but his death certificate said he died of a stroke. As he recalls in Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life, Urrea also had a conflictive relationship with his mother because of her racist attitudes and biases towards African Americans and Mexicans. His mother died in 1990. Urrea attended the University of California at San Diego from 1973 to 1977. During his college years, he wrote a collection of short stories and poetry entitled 1190

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Frozen Moments that was published by the university in 1977. Urrea started his first academic job in 1978 at San Diego Mesa College, where he worked as a teacher’s aide and tutor. From 1978 to 1982, Urrea worked as a relief worker with an American missionary group and E. G. Von Treutzcher III, known as Pastor Von. During this time, Urrea lived in San Diego and traveled daily to the Tijuana dumps, where the group focused its missionary efforts. Urrea later described the lives of the Tijuana natives in Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border and later in By the Lake of the Sleeping Children. Many of the depictions in these chronicles are raw, delving into topics such as poverty, sexual assault, and undocumented migration. In 1982, he left San Diego to teach expository writing at Harvard University. Urrea moved to Colorado in 1991 with his first wife and completed his M.A. in creative writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997. Urrea held faculty positions at Massachusetts Bay Community College (1987–1990) and the University of Southwestern Louisiana at Lafayette (1996–1999). Currently, Urrea lives in Naperville, Illinois, and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His second wife, Cindy, is a journalist. They have three children: Eric, Rosario, and Megan. Urrea was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, which tells of the journey of twenty-six undocumented immigrants across the desert in Arizona. Only twelve of these men survived. Urrea conducted a variety of interviews and researched the deaths of the migrants to stitch the story together. He writes compassionately about the hardships of these undocumented migrants but also describes coyotes (labor smugglers) and border patrol agents without trying to vilify either. The Devil’s Highway and The Hummingbird’s Daughter: A Novel share Urrea’s novelesque style of writing nonfiction. The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells about the life of his great aunt, Teresa Urrea, the Saint of Cabora, who is best known in her native state of Sinaloa for being a healer. She was the daughter of a Yaqui Indian woman and a white landowner, Tomás Urrea. After a violent assault against her, Teresita began to perform miracles. Urrea researched for more than twenty years to write the historical novel about his great aunt. Urrea has written twelve books that include poetry, collections of short stories, nonfiction, and memoirs: Frozen Moments (1977), Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1992), In Search of Snow (1994), The Fever of Being (1994), By the Lake of the Sleeping Children (1996), Ghost Sickness (1997), Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998), Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999), Vatos (with photographer José Galvez, 2000), Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction (2002), The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (2004), and The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005). He has edited several literary journals such as Fragmentos de Barro (Fragments of Clay) with César A. González-T. and Imagine with Tino Villanueva. Urrea also participated in the production of Un puño de tierra/A Handful of Dust, a play based on the opening chapter of Across the Wire. Since 2001, Urrea has kept a blog at http://lavistaluisurrea.blogspot.com. The blog serves as a journal 1191

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where Urrea posts quotes and discusses the day-to-day happenings in his household. Urrea’s blog entries represent his continued exploration of various literary genres and forms of expression and serve as meta-literary exercises in which Urrea tells about the process of writing and publishing his books. Further Reading González-T., César A., “Luis Alberto Urrea” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers: Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1999: 268–274).

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V Valdés, Gina (1943–). Poet, short story writer, and novelist Gina Valdés was born in Los Angeles in 1943, spent her childhood in Ensenada, Baja California, and returned to Los Angeles for her education. After graduating from Washington High School in 1961, Gina traveled to Japan, the homeland of her then-husband, before returning to California. In 1976, she attended Palomar College in San Diego County. She later transferred to the University of California in San Diego, where she received a B.A. degree in creative writing in 1981 and her M.A. in Spanish literature in 1982. Valdés, a long-time resident of San Diego, has taught courses in creative writing, Latin American literature, and Chicano and Chicana literature at several universities, including the University of California–Davis, Colorado College, San Diego State University, the University of Washington, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She has also taught poetry and writing to children within the San Diego school district and English as a second language courses for adults. Valdés’s varied life experiences influence her writing. Her contact with Japanese culture led to an interest in mysticism in Asian traditions, especially herbal medicine and meditation, which she blends with her grounding in Latino culture and spirituality, including her practice of healing and limpias (purification rituals). Her work is also very much marked by her experience crossing borders and her ties to Baja California. It is then no surprise to find that the political, the spiritual, and the border intersect all of her work. The author of two bilingual poetry collections, Comiendo lumbre (1986, Eating Fire) and Puentes y fronteras (1982, Borders and Bridges), Valdés is also the author of

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a novel, María Portillo, and numerous short stories, including “There Are No Madmen Here” and “Nobody Listens,” published as part of the There Are No Madmen Here collection (1981), and “Valley of the Sun” (in Requisa, 1981). Valdés continues to write poetry and short stories, publishing in a number of venues; her work has been widely anthologized and also appears in several literary journals in the United States and abroad. Gina Valdés is the consummate bilingual wordsmith; her language is a fluid, earthy material to be worked and polished. Whether she writes in English, Spanish, or in a mixture of the two, her words are instruments for critique as well as for healing. Fully bilingual,* Valdés thrives on the poetic and creative opportunities offered by code-switching. Performance is also very much a part of her creative talent, and her public readings are much sought-after throughout Southern California and Tijuana. Valdés’s readings are part of the video Rasgado en dos (1984, Ripped in Two). Her novel María Portillo focuses on the experience of a family that returns to Los Angeles after having previously moved to Ensenada in Baja California; it is a vivid chronicle of urban life lived on the edge. The title character, María Portillo, moves back to Los Angeles and finds herself a single mother with three daughters to support after being abandoned by her husband. Finding it hard to make ends meet as a seamstress in the Los Angeles garment industry, Portillo joins her brother in smuggling tequila across the border. The novel deals critically and poignantly with a series of problematic family relationships and issues, including exploitation, institutionalization, and poverty. This family appears in several of Valdés’s short stories. In “Nobody Listens,” also part of the There Are No Madmen Here collection, it is through Portillo’s father, don Severino—who resides in a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles and views the world from his bleak window, that we gain insights into the plight of the aged and destitute. Valdés combines a variety of techniques, including irony, ambiguity, humor, and satire to produce powerful vignettes of lives lived precariously and stories full of love, pain, and loss. In the collection Puentes y fronteras (Bridges and Borders) Valdés offers a collection of coplas (Spanish four-line stanzas, common in oral tradition) that provide a feminist rejoinder to the male-centered coplas of the popular song “La Llorona.” The title itself invokes the idea of border spaces as limiting and liminal, and Valdés works with both notions as she addresses issues of life on the U.S./Mexico border, finding ways of building bridges and transgressing obstacles, be they fences, languages, or literary and gender conventions. In Valdés’s nimble hands, the coplero, or poet, is not the traditional male singer but a coplera, a woman who uses words to seduce not only bodies but minds, a voice that draws in her lover but also comments on dreams and loss and the plight of immigrants, subjected to beatings, deportation, and even death at the hands of the Immigration and Naturalization Service authorities. Valdés’s coplas allow for a sensual/sexual female response to the traditional male singer, whose verses are echoed in her poetry, as she invites the male addressee to join her. Here the coplera’s cry or wail is not for her lost lover or drowned children, as in 1194

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traditional versions, but is a voice speaking out, naming her own desires, and calling out for justice for the oppressed. Valdés’s collection Comiendo lumbre (Eating Fire) includes some of her best known poems. Written in free verse for the most part, and in both English and Spanish with frequent code-switching, these poems also speak to a number of social issues: racism, economic exploitation, the oppression of women, and social and cultural contradictions. Among her best known poems from this collection are “Working Women” and “Las manos” (The Hands). “Working Women,” a poem written in Spanish with a good deal of switching to English, takes us down “El Cajón Boulevard” in San Diego, where low-riders, cops, and pimps look out on the “working women’s scene” as sex workers hustle and peddle their wares to make a living, not altogether unlike teachers and poets hustling their daily verbs in what, the poem argues, is a U.S. national house of prostitution. Insightful descriptions of nightlife on the streets and striking juxtapositions make this one of Valdés’s best poems. Also bilingually rendered, the poem “Las manos” focuses on the varying hues of hands and the multiple uses of hands generally, be it to play a variety of musical instruments, to handle tools, to write poetry, or to cook, hold, peel, add, or applaud. These are vibrant, productive, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial, but oppressed hands—hands forced to work in the fields and at home, cleaning, hammering, cutting, hoeing, and planting. They are hands necessary in speaking and therefore in telling the history of a people. These are hands crucified with U.S. nails, hands that can be raised as fists to demand what they provide and produce; but these hands also know how to smooth and caress and how to smile in triumph. Building on a chain of signifiers that manipulate the multiple nuances of “hands,” Valdés’s poem simultaneously provides a concise poetic narration of the labor history of men and women and a lyrical ode to the many hands that labor and struggle, that love and support, and that speak as well. Valdés has completed another collection of poems entitled Between Worlds. This collection will perhaps include one of her much-anthologized poems, “English Con Salsa” (first published in The Americas Review, 1993), a poem written again by straddling and marshalling both Spanish and English, as if refusing the borders between languages. The poem is premised as a humorous introduction to an ESL course, not an English as a second language course, but an “English Surely Latinized” course, in which Mexican culture (be it salt and lime, a clay jug, mescal, red cactus flower, duendes, saints, etc.) and Mexican geography/history or language (Náhuatl, Zapotec, Lake Patzcuaro, Jalisco, Xochicalco, Benito Juárez), are infused and blended with U.S. popular culture (Donald Duck and Batman) and U.S. history (George Washington) for the teaching of English to adult immigrants. On the one hand, the poem pokes fun at the limited learning taking place, as students are preparing for employment as service workers in the dollar economy, but on the other, it also comments on the complex phenomena of crossing borders and the Latinization of the United States. By turns both playful and provocative, “English Con Salsa” suggests a 1195

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circus master’s invitation to buy a ticket and sit in on the class and watch as history is being made. Always creatively engaged, Valdés has begun working on her memoirs and, among her other current projects, has begun a chapbook of Japanese poems and paintings. Gina Valdés is a truly gifted, outstanding poet and a master of the craft of writing. Already a benchmark in Chicano/Latino letters, this sometimes poignant, sometimes caustic, always perceptive and passionate poet and writer has a unique voice from which we can expect to hear much more in the coming years. Further Reading Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Beatrice Pita Valdés-Rodríguez, Alisa (1969–). Born on February 28, 1969, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a Cuban American father and an Anglo American mother descended from the founding fathers, Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez is one of a handful of Latinas popularizing a light, life-style literature created to appeal to Latina yuppies or aspirants thereof: Latina “chick lit.” Having a somewhat unconventional upbringing as the daughter of a university professor and as a talented musician who went on to receive a bachelor’s degree from the Berklee College of Music, Valdés-Rodríguez developed a love of writing and went on to earn a master’s from the Colombia School of Journalism in 1994. After her first job at the Boston Globe, Valdés moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1998 and then to the Albuquerque Journal in 1998. Her first book, The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003), is an irreverent and humorous look at the adventures, or misadventures, of six fictional women friends who meet six years after their graduation from college and decide to celebrate life and freedom. The book became a national best seller and projected Valdés-Rodríguez on to the pages of popular magazines and even resulted in the book being optioned for film. Valdés-Rodríguez was named one of the top twenty-five Hispanics by Hispanic Business and one of the top eleven women of the year by Latina magazine. With her newfound financial success and fame, Valdés-Rodríguez had the courage to establish the Dirty Girls Production film company to make an independent film of her book. In her second chic lit novel, Playing with Boys (2004), Valdés-Rodríguez follows three young women with distinct characters looking for love in Los Angeles. However, neither this nor her next novel, Make Him Look Good (2006), duplicated the success of her first novel. Valdés then turned to young adult literature with Haters (2006). Further Reading Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2005). Herrera Mulligan, Michelle, Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass, and Cultural Shifting (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).


Valdez, Luis

Valdez, Luis (1940–). Luis Valdez is considered to be the father of Chicano theater, the instigator of the contemporary Chicano theatrical movement, and its most outstanding playwright. Valdez has distinguished himself as an actor, director, playwright, and film maker; however, it was in his role as the founding director of El Teatro Campesino, a theater of farm workers in California, that his efforts inspired young Chicano activists across the country to use theater as a means of organizing students, communities, and labor unions. Luis Valdez was born on June 26, 1940, into a family of migrant farm workers in Delano, California. The second of ten children, he began to work the fields at the age of six and to follow the crops. Although Valdez’s education was constantly interrupted, he nevertheless finished high school and went on to San Jose State College, where he majored in English and pursued his interest in theater. While there, he won a playwriting contest Luis Valdez. with his one-act play “The Theft” (1961), and in 1963 the Drama Department produced his play “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.” After graduating from college in 1964, Valdez joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe and learned the techniques of agitprop (agitation and propaganda) theater and Italian commedia dell’arte (comedy of art), both of which influenced Valdez’s development of the basic format of Chicano theater: the one-act presentational acto or “act.” In 1965 Valdez enlisted in César Chávez’s mission to organize farm workers in Delano into a union. It was there that Valdez brought together farm workers and students into El Teatro Campesino to dramatize the plight of the farm workers. The publicity and success gained by the troupe led to the spontaneous appearance of a national Chicano theater movement. In 1967 Valdez and El Teatro Campesino left the unionizing effort to expand their theater beyond agitprop and farm worker concerns. From then on Valdez and the theater have explored most of the theatrical genres that have been important to Mexicans in the United States, including, religious pageants, vaudeville with the down-and-out pelado,* or underdog figure, and dramatized corridos,* or ballads. The new type of socially engaged theater that El Teatro Campesino pioneered led to the creation of a full-blown theatrical movement 1197

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in fields and barrios across the country. For more than three decades, El Teatro Campesino and Luis Valdez have dramatized the political and cultural concerns of Latinos, initially among workers and their supporters, but later among students in universities and among the general public through the legitimate stage, television, and film media. In establishing the canon of what teatro chicano should be, Valdez and El Teatro Campesino published their actos (short one-act agitprop pieces) in 1971 with a preface in which Valdez outlined their theatrical principals: (1) Chicanos must be seen as a nation with geographic, religious, cultural, and racial roots in the Southwest; (2) teatros must further the idea of nationalism and create a national theater based on identification with the Amerindian past; (3) the organizational support of the national theater must be from within and totally independent; and (4) “Teatros must never get away from La Raza. If the Raza will not come El Teatro Campesino. to the theater, then the theater must go to the Raza. This, in the long run, will determine the shape, style, content, spirit, and form of el teatro chicano.” Whether Valdez and El Teatro Campesino have strayed from the spirit of this declaration will be judged by posterity. The fact is that Valdez and his theater did expand their horizons by taking Chicano theater to Broadway and more commercial venues and by moving into commercial cinema and television. During the late 1960s and the 1970s El Teatro Campesino produced many of Valdez’s plays, including Los vendidos (1967, The Sell-Outs), The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1968), Bernabé (1970), Dark Root of a Scream (1971), La Gran Carpa de la Familia Rascuachi (1974), and El Fin del Mundo (1976). In 1978, Valdez broke into mainstream theater in Los Angeles with the Mark Taper Forum’s production of his Zoot Suit and in 1979 with the Broadway production of the same play. In 1986 he had a successful run of his play I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges at the Los Angeles Theater Center. In Bernabé, one of Valdez’s most poetic plays, a young village idiot is transformed into a natural man by his marriage to La Tierra (The Earth) and his subsequent death. Employing Aztec mythology and symbols in a tale about contemporary barrio characters, the play explores the pre-Colombian heritage of Chicano 1198

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society. The Mayan theme of death-is-life and life-is-death was developed here and continued to appear in Valdez’s later works. The writing of Bernabé marked the beginning of Valdez’s search for the meaning of Aztec and Mayan legends, history, and philosophy, but also revealed the influence of Spanish playwright Federico García Lorca, who also strove to elevate the country folk to heroic and mythic stature. Valdez’s most recent play, Mummified Deer, is perhaps his most psychologically intimate and revealing work, exploring the Yaqui heritage of his grandmother. In a mature blending of all that Valdez has accomplished in structure and style, Mummified Deer (2004) revisits dramatic space as interpreted by tent theater and the fluid transition from exterior political themes, such as enslavement and genocide against the Yaqui’s by the Porfirio Díaz government, to the more interior exploration of motherhood, family shame, and indigenous identity. Valdez’s screen writing career began with early film and television versions of Corky González’s poem, I Am Joaquín (1969), and with his own Los Vendidos, and later with a film version of Zoot Suit (1982). But his real incursion into major Hollywood productions and success came with his writing and directing of La Bamba (1987, the name of a dance from Veracruz), the screen biography of Chicano rock and roll star, Ritchie Valens. Other screen plays include Corridos (1987) and the successful television movies La Pastorela (1991) and The Cisco Kid (1993). Valdez’s plays, essays, and poems have been widely anthologized. He has published three collections of plays: Luis Valdez—The Early Works (1990), Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992), and Mummified Deer and Other Plays (2005). Valdez’s awards include an Obie (1968), three Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards (1969, 1972, and 1978), a special Emmy Award (1973), the San Francisco Bay Critics Circle for Best Musical (1983), and honorary doctorates from San Jose Sate University, Columbia College, and the California Institute of the Arts. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Valenzuela, Luisa (1938–). Luisa Valenzuela was born on November 26, 1938, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her parents were Pablo Francisco Valenzuela, a doctor, and Luisa Mercedes Levinson, a writer. Valenzuela was an avid reader since childhood, and today she is among Argentina’s most renowned contemporary writers. An author of both fiction and journalistic works, she is also one of the most widely translated women writers of South America. Valenzuela’s first journalist articles were published in magazines such us Quince Abriles (Fifteen Aprils), Atlántida (Atlantic) and El Hogar (The Home). Her first short story was “Ese Canto” (That Song), published in 1956. Valenzuela’s first novel was Hay que sonreír (1966, You Have to Smile), which she wrote when she was living in France. In 1967, she published her first short story collection, Los heréticos (The Heretics). In 1969, Valenzuela was 1199

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awarded a Fulbright grant to come to the United States and participate in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. After Iowa, she settled in New York City for almost two decades and became a frequent participant in literary events in the city and around the country and even received support of New York state grants for writers, as well as other funding. In 1983, she was awarded a fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. Among Valenzuela’s novels are La travesía (2001, The Crossing), Novela negra con argentinos (1990, Black Novel with Argentines), Realidad nacional desde la cama (1990, National Reality as Seen from My Bed), Cola de lagartija (1983, Lizard’s Tail), and Como en la guerra (1977, As in War). Some of her short story collections are Breves microrrelatos completos hasta hoy (2004, Brief, Complete Micro-tales to Date), Cuentos completos y uno más (1999, Complete Stories Plus One), Simetrías (1993 Symmetries), Cambio de armas (1982, A Change of Weapons), and Aquí pasan cosas raras (1976, Strange Things Happen Here). These are only a few examples of her extensive writings. In 1969, while Valenzuela was attending the University of Iowa, she realized her responsibility toward Latin American. In the United States, away from the nightmares of dictatorship, Valenzuela felt at liberty to write tales and novels concerning the harsh realities of Argentina during the late 1970s and 1980s. She positioned herself very strongly against the atrocities committed during the so-called “Dirty War,” a war of the Argentina military against “suspected citizens.” Tortures, disappearance of dissidents, censorship, and forced exile of hundreds of thousands of people typified this war. This commitment continues today. Further Reading “Luisa Valenzuela” in Encyclopedia of World Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 2005) (http://www.bookrags.com/biography/luisa-valenzuela/).

Alejandra Balestra Vallbona, Rima de (1931–). Rima de Vallbona was born on March 15, 1931, in San José, Costa Rica. In 1962, Vallbona earned a Bachelor of philosophy and letters from the Universidad de Costa Rica, and in 1981 she obtained a Ph.D. from Middlebury College in Vermont. She was a faculty member at the University of Saint Thomas, in Houston, Texas, from 1964 through 1995. When she retired in 1989, Vallbona was awarded an Emeritus Faculty title from Cullen Foundation. Vallbona is a writer of short stories, children’s poetry, novels, and essays. Her first collection of short stories, Noche en vela (Up All Night), was published in 1968. Other short story collections by Vallbona include Polvo del camino (1971, Road Dust), La Salamandra rosada (1979, The Pink Salamander), Mujeres y agonías (1982, Women and Agonies), Las sombras que perseguimos (1983, The Shadows We Pursue), Baraja de soledades (1983, Card Deck of Solitudes), Cosecha de pecadores (1988, Harvest of Sinners), El arcángel del perdón (1990, The Arcángel of Forgiveness), Mundo, demonio y mujer (1991, The World, the Devil and Woman), and Los infiernos de la mujer y algo más . . . (1992, Flowering Inferno: Tales of Sinking Hearts). Her short stories were published 1200

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in several literary magazines in Spain, Mexico, France, Germany, Venezuela, Uruguay, and the United States, where she is currently living. In addition to her writings in prose, she has published several academic essays, including Yolanda Oreamuno (1971), La obra en prosa de Eunice Odio (1981, The Prose Works of Eunice Odio), Vida, sucesos de la monja Alférez (1992, Life and Events of Sister Alférez), and La narrativa de Yolanda Oreamuno (1995, The Narrative Works of Yolanda Oreamuno). Included among her awards are the Aquileo Echeverría National Award for the Novel (1968), the Jorge Luis Borges Short Story Award (1977) from Argentina, the Agripina Montes del Valle Award for Novel (1978) from Colombia, and the Professor Lilia Ramos Children’s Poetry Award (1978) from Uruguay. In 1989 she was awarded Spain’s Civil Service Medal by King Juan Rima de Vallbona. Carlos for her efforts on behalf of Hispanic culture. In 1993, she also received the Willie Velásquez-TV Channel 48 Excellence Award for Hispanic Women, for her contributions to the Hispanic community in Houston, Texas. Further Reading “Rima de Vallbona” (http://www.inamu.go.cr/nuestras-huellas/GaleriaCultural/Novela/ RimaVallbona.htm).

Alejandra Balestra Valle, Adrián del (1872–1945). Adrián del Valle, who became famous using the romantic pen name of Palmiro de Lidia, was born in Barcelona, Spain, where his first publications appeared in a student newspaper. He first used the pen name when writing for an anarchist newspaper, El Productor (The Producer) in Barcelona in 1890. Shortly thereafter he moved to New York City and became the editor of another anarchist newspaper, El Despertar (The Awakening), which supported Cuban independence from Spain. In 1895, he founded and directed El Rebelde (The Rebel), another newspaper militating for Cuban independence. After the war with Spain, del Valle moved to Havana and founded the anarchist newspaper El Nuevo Ideal (The New Ideal) and militated for complete independence of Cuba from the United States. During the next two decades, he continued to write for numerous periodicals, promoting the cause of anarchism as well as that of living a healthy, natural life style for mental and physical health, a point of view which was espoused by the periodical he founded and directed: ProVida (Pro-Life). From the age of fifteen, del Valle was a prolific creative writer, producing a long list of novels, plays, and stories, always sustaining his ideological positions through art, an art that at times verged on the mystical and symbolist, as in the style of Spanish author Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. In New York, he had a number of his plays produced on the Hispanic stage and his first and best-known novel, Marta, 1201

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published in 1894. A protest novel printed as a pocket book, Marta’s objective was to raise the level of consciousness about the exploitation of women; his central character is driven into prostitution to survive economically, and eventually dies from a venereal disease. In various other novels and plays, del Valle also developed female protagonists as heroines engaged in class struggle, and he confronted racial injustice in La mulata Soledad (1929, Soledad, the Mulata). Further Reading Eledé, Adrián del Valle, hombre y señal (Havana: Estudios, 1950). Shaffer, Kirwin, “Prostitutes, Bad Seeds, and Revolutionary Mothers in Cuban Anarchism: Imagining Women in the Fiction of Adrian del Valle and Antonio Penichet, 1898–1930” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture Vol. 18 (1999): 1–17.

Nicolás Kanellos Valle, Carmen (1948–). Puerto Rican poet Carmen Valle was born in Arecibo in 1948 and raised in Camuy. After receiving her B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico and her master’s and Ph.D. from the City University of New York, she remained in New York as a professor of Spanish American literature at the New York City College of Technology and became very active in Latino literary circles. Valle is a perennial reader at literary events, has conducted workshops on poetry at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and has edited special issues of such magazines as Bilingual Review,* Ventana (Window), and the bulletin of the Asociación de Escritores Latinoamericanos de Nueva York (New York Association of Latin American Writers). A prolific poet, the following are among her books, in New York, Puerto Rico, and Colombia: Un poco de lo no dicho (1980, A Bit of What Wasn’t Said), Glenn Miller y varias vidas después (1983, Glen Miller and A Few Lives Later), De todo da la noche al que la tienta (1987, The Night Gives Everything to Whomever Tries), Preguntas (1989, Questions), Desde Marruecos te escribo in a bilingual edition (1993, I Write You from Marrocco), Entre la vigilia y el sueño de las fieras in a bilingual edition (1996, Between the Vigil and the Sleep of Beasts), Haiku de Nueva York (2001, New York Haiku), and Esta casa flotante y abierta in a bilingual edition (2004, This Floating and Open House). Valle’s poems have also been featured in the following magazines: Mairena, Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium), Scriptura (Scriptures), Poesía, Realidad Aparte (Poetry, A Separate Reality), Balcón (Balcony), Tinta Seca (Dry Ink), Galerna, Alhucema, Actual (Current), The World, The Portable Lower East Side, Third Woman, Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, and The Literary Review. Valle has also written and published several short stories, including her collection Diarios robados (1982, Stolen Diaries), which was published in Buenos Aires. Valle’s poetry is precise and beautiful in its craft as well as incisive in its themes, especially those that deal with feminism and women’s culture. Further Reading Marzán, Julio, Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).


Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe

Vallejo, Armando (1949–). Poet and activist Armando Vallejo was born on October 31, 1949, in Durango, Mexico, where he received his early schooling. After having immigrated to the United States, Vallejo received his high school and community college degrees in Santa Barbara, California. While at the University of California in Santa Barbara, he became involved in the Chicano Movement* and placed his early poetry at the service of its political and social messages. He was a member of the group of Chicano students who forced the university to become more involved in the Santa Barbara barrio and took on the task of directing the school and cultural center they founded, Casa de la Raza (The People’s Home). His social activism was coupled with his beginning to publish his poems in movement newspapers, such as Sí Se Puede (Yes, We Can). Along with his ideology based on working-class culture, Vallejo developed a poetry very much reflecting Mexican American popular and working-class* culture and language. In 1977, Vallejo joined with other students and writers and founded the literary magazine Xalman, loosely meaning alma chicana (Chicano soul). While at the university, Vallejo earned a B.A. and an M.A. while teaching courses in Chicano literature and film at UCSB and at the community college. In 1979, Vallejo collected his poems and published his first book, Luna llena (1979, Full Moon), in which he compared the stages of his personal growth and that of the Chicano Movement to the phases of the moon. Besides elaborating themes of identity and social protest, Vallejo also employed Aztec symbolism and Náhuatl references, in keeping with the cultural nationalist and indigenous ideology of the times. (See Aztlán.) This effort was followed in 1981 by the publication of two chapbooks, Pensamientos (Thoughts) and Reflexiones (Reflections), in which he began to develop the theme of love. In his next book, Para morir entre tus brazos (1989, To Die in Your Arms), Vallejo explored themes of love and death, but somehow wedded them to the social struggle. After briefly experimenting with prose fiction in the late 1980s, Vallejo published an extensive, highly autobiographical collection of poems under the title of Poemas de un emigrante (1990, Poems of an Immigrant), in which he reviews the history of Mexican and Latin American immigration and traces it back to the wanderings of the Nahuas. Further Reading Fuentes, Víctor, “Armando Vallejo” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Second Series, Vol. 122, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 296–302).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe (1808–1890). Mariano G. Vallejo, Californio politician and military leader, was born on July 7, 1808, into an upper class family in Monterey, the capital of Alta California under Mexican rule. At age fifteen, Vallejo became a cadet at the Monterey presidio; at age twenty-one he was already a commander and an elected member of the territorial legislature. In his mid-twenties, Vallejo was appointed military commander of all of northern California and administrator of the San Francisco Solano Mission at the time when 1203

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Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo.

missions were being secularized. During his tenure in these positions, Vallejo began to believe that the American takeover was inevitable and that it would be advantageous for Californios. During the Bear Flag Revolt, Vallejo was jailed for two months, but afterwards under American rule, was named to the legislative council. Later he also served as the northern Indian agent. In 1849 he was one of only eight Californios elected to the state constitutional convention, and was subsequently elected to the state’s first senate. Despite his prominence and influence in California politics, Vallejo lost important lands, including the large Soscol land grant, through court action by squatters and speculators. When he died on January 18, 1890, he owned only 280 acres. Much of Vallejo’s life was narrated in a series of memoirs dictated as well as written by him.

Further Reading Padilla, Genaro M., My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Vallejo, Platón (1841–1925). The only college-educated child of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo* and Francisca Carrillo de Vallejo, parents from distinguished old-line Californio families, Platón Vallejo became a medical doctor and served with honor as a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War. After receiving his medical degree from Colombia University in New York, he settled down with a medical practice in Vallejo, California, and devoted himself to intellectual pursuits, including writing sketches of pre-statehood Alta California. In his recollection of the golden years of California’s past, Vallejo credited the Hispanic past for the development of California’s resources; he also attempted to elevate the status of the Californios by emphasizing the accomplishments of their Spanish ancestors, countering the ethnocentrism of the easterners who had overwhelmed the native population. He did recognize and, somewhat paternalistically, defend the Indians, but often cast them as “noble savages.” Both his letters and his dictated “Memoirs of the Vallejos” reveal his efforts to counter official history of California and the West. Further Reading Sánchez, Rosaura, Telling Identities: The California Testimonios (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Vando, Erasmo (1896–1988). Poet, playwright, actor, cronista, and political activist, Erasmo Segundo Del Vando Rodríguez was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on June 2, 1896, while it was still a colony of Spain. A rebellious child under the new American government, he was expelled from high school in Santurce; there is no information showing whether he ever returned or graduated from school. What is certain is that Vando became an artist and an intellectual, 1204

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Erasmo Vando.

and migrated to New York in search of work in 1919, after having been recruited for farm work in the southern United States. In New York, he became a community leader, most notably as the president of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and a leader of the independence movement. He also served a term as president of the Puerto Rican Brotherhood of America. Vando was considered by Bernardo Vega* to be the best interpreter of the jíbaro, the Puerto Rican campesino, on the stages of New York, and Vando—like fellow autodidacts Vega and Jesús Colón*— always framed his intellectual and artistic pursuits within this perspective. One of the few dramatic pieces of Vando that have been preserved in manuscript is his Puerto Rican zarzuela, Amor en el batey: melodrama de costumbres puertorriqueñas (Love in the Front Yard: A Melodrama on Puerto Rican Customs), which was performed repeatedly on the stages of New York; after his return to Puerto Rico in 1945, it was also performed at the famous Perla Theater in Ponce in 1950. As an actor, Vando performed in and/or directed plays by some of the most notable Puerto Rican playwrights, including Gozlao O’Neill,* Luis Llorens Torres, and Manuel Méndez Ballester. His crónicas,* essays, and editorials were published in such Spanish-language newspapers of New York as Brújula (The Comass), Gráfico* (Graphic), La Defensa (Defense), Sangre Nueva (New Blood), and Social. In his published “Open Letter” to the Puerto Rican senate, Vando took up the cause of the uprooted and destitute Puerto Rican community in New York and elsewhere in the United States, challenging Puerto Rican politicians back on the island to tackle the problem of their emigrant brothers. In his poem “The United States,” Vando gave vent to all of the resentment that many immigrants felt at their disillusionment in the “Land of 1205

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the Free.” Vando’s first marriage was to poet-playwright-actress Anita VélezMitchell,* with whom he fathered poet Gloria Vando.* He died in Santurce on October 3, 1988. His family collected and published in a posthumous edition many of his poems: Amores: Poemas (1996, Loves: Poems). Further Reading Acosta-Belén, Edna, “The Building of a Community: Puerto Rican Writers and Activists in New York City (1890s–1960s)” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, eds. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993: 179–198). López Antonetty, Evelina, “The Erasmo Vando papers: Finding Aid” (www. centropr.org/lib-arc/archives/vando.html).

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Gloria Vando.

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Vando, Gloria (1934–). Gloria Vando is the daughter of two Puerto Rican writers: Anita Vélez-Mitchell* and Erasmo Vando.* Born and raised in New York and educated in the United States (at New York University) and Europe (Amsterdam and Paris), she ultimately received her B.A. from Texas A&I University in 1975. Vando dedicated herself to the literary life, becoming a respected poet of the English language who for many years dedicated herself to the service of the literary field and women’s culture, while only occasionally publishing her poems in magazines. Vando is a contributing editor of The North American Review, and the coeditor of Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems, benefiting Hunger Relief. In 1977, Vando founded a literary magazine and press, Helicon Nine, which published outstanding literary and artistic works by women until 1992. That year, she cofounded with her husband, William Hickok, The Writers Place in Kansas City, Kansas, as a venue for writers to come together and discuss their works. The Writers Place conducts workshops, book signings, art openings, readings, and theater productions. While more than fifty anthologies contain her poems, it was not until 1993, that Vando published her first collection of poems, Promesas: Geography of the Impossible, which became the first Hispanic book to win the Thorpe Menn Award for literary achievement. In 2002,

Varela y Morales, Félix Francisco

Vando published her second collection, Shadows and Supposes, winner of the 1998 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America; the book was also a finalist for the Walt Whitman Poetry Contest. Other awards for her work over the years include the Billee Murray Poetry Prize (1991), the Stanley Hanks Memorial Award (1986) and various fellowships and grants from the Kansas Arts Commission. Three of her poems were adapted for the stage under the title, Moving Targets: Three Interpretations of Murder, and were showcased at the Women’s Work Festival in New York City in 1999. Her work has also been included in presentations at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New Federal Theatre, and Latino Playwrights Theatre in New York City. Vando’s poetry is very finely crafted, tending toward the narrative and epic. Grounded in the canon as well as alternatively literary and folkloric sources, not only in the Spanish language but other European traditions, her poems address the history of Puerto Rico, colonialism and oppression in the world with a very acute sense of irony and subtle outrage. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Varela y Morales, Félix Francisco (1788–1853). Félix Varela, one of the first Cuban exile writers in the United States, was born on November 20, 1788, in Havana, Cuba. At age three, Varela was sent to live with his paternal grandfather, a military commander at St. Augustine in the Spanish colony of East Florida. At age fourteen, he entered the San Carlos Seminary in Havana to train for the priesthood. Upon becoming a priest and earning his baccalaureate in 1811, Varela began teaching philosophy at San Carlos. He became known as Cuba’s foremost philosopher, leading to his involvement in politics, even to his becoming elected to the Spanish Cortes in 1821. That same year he published one of his political tracts that set him at odds with the monarchy, Observaciones sobre la constitución política de la monarquía seguida de otros trabajos politicos (Observations on the Political Constitution of the Monarchy, Followed by Other Political Writings), which sustained the idea that justice and political rights are inborn in man and derived from God. At the Cortes he proposed political autonomy for Cuba, the abolition of slavery, and support for the independence of Spanish America. Because of his political ideas, Varela had to take refuge in exile in the United States in 1823. In Philadelphia, he founded and published one Félix Varela. of the first exile newspapers, El habanero: papel 1207

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politico, científico y literario (1823, The Havanan: Political, Scientific, and Literary Paper); in Philadelphia and New York he also published in the historically important El Mensagero Semanal (The Weekly Messenger). In 1826, he anonymously published the first historical novel ever written in the Spanish language, Jicoténcal, a novel in which the narrator takes the side of the Native Americans in Mexico during the Spanish conquest. Varela set the precedent for Cubans and Puerto Ricans of printing and publishing in exile and having their works circulating in their home islands. In fact, Varela’s books on philosophy and education (many of which were published abroad) were said to be the only “best sellers” in Cuba, and Varela himself the most popular author in Cuba in the first third of the nineteenth century—despite there being in effect a “conspiracy of silence,” in which his name could never even be brought up in public on the island. Throughout his career as a writer, theologian, and working priest who often tended to the immigrant populations in New York, Varela continued writing philosophical and theological tracts, such as his famous Cartas a Elpidio (1835, Letters to Elpidio) on piety, fanaticism, and superstition. From 1834 to 1843, Varela coedited the monthly Expositor Católico y Almacén Literario (Catholic Expositor and Literary Storehouse). He also edited the Children’s Catholic Magazine (1838), Young Catholic’s Magazine (1840) and The Catholic Expositor and Literary Magazine (1841). In 1850, Varela retired to the town of his childhood, St. Augustine, where he died on February 18, 1853. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Felix Francisco Varela y Morales” in Invisible Giants. Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002: 265–270). McCadden, Joseph, and Helen McCadden, Father Varela: Torch Bearer from Cuba (New York: n.d., 1969).

Nicolás Kanellos Vargas, Roberto (?–). One of the pioneers of Latino literary publishing and organizing, Roberto Vargas was born in Nicaragua, but during the ferment of the Chicano Movement,* he lived in the Mission District of San Francisco. A cofounder in 1969 of Editorial Pocho Che publishing house and of Third World Communications publishing house in 1973, he served as an editor for the multicultural Tin-Tan Magazine, Revista Cósmica (1975–1979) and the groundbreaking anthology Time to Greez/Incantations from the Third World (1975). Vargas studied business administration, marketing, and Latin American studies at San Francisco State University from 1968 to 1970. He also took various seminars and training sessions for diplomats and professionals working with the United States Agency for International Development: Vargas served as a cultural affairs minister in the United States for the revolutionary government of Nicaragua for a number of years and edited the Gaceta sandinista (Sandinista Gazette) in San Francisco from 1976 to 1979—actually, he and Alejanro Murguía* at one point went down and joined the fighting against the Contras. In fact, Vargas was very active in promoting the Nicaraguan cause among Latino literary and cultural workers during the civil war and even later, in 1987, 1208

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he planned and coordinated a poets’ delegation to Nicaragua, including Allen Ginsberg, Pedro Pietri,* Alurista, Bob Holman, Ann Waldman, Alejandro Murguia, Raúl Salinas,* and others. Vargas joined Alurista, Victor Hernández Cruz,* Abelardo Delgado,* Luis Valdez* and others in the first and second Chicano Liberation Conferences in Denver in 1968 and 1969, as well as the First Flor y Canto Festival in Los Angeles in 1973 (see Book Fairs and Festivals). He was the founder of the Third World Poetry Series at San Francisco State University. He was also the lead coordinator for an encounter at San Francisco State that brought together such writers as Miguel Algarín,* Alurista,* José Antonio Burciaga,* Victor Hernández Cruz,* Miguel Piñero,* Raúl Salinas, Pedro Pietri, and others. In 1976, he also organized poetry events to raise funds for Nicaragua in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. His literary organizing activity has continued to this date, with his serving as a member of the board of San Antonio’s Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s annual book fair. He has also worked as a coordinator and/or director of city and federal cultural arts programs, such as that of CETA in San Francisco. Vargas is a respected poet in his own right who has read his works at literary events and universities from coast to coast. Vargas has published two collections of poems, Promeros cantos (1971, First Songs) and Nicaragua, Yo te canto (1980, Nicaragua, I Sing to You). Vargas lives in San Antonio, Texas, where he works as Project Organizer for the Service Employees International Union. Further Reading Burciaga, Jose Antonio, “El Poeta Roberto Vargas” San Francisco Review of Books (Summer 1988): 19–20. Ramirez, Sergio, “La Azarosa Vida de Roberto Enrique Vargas” El Semanario (Mar. 1998): 9.

Nicolás Kanellos Varona, Enrique José (1849–1933). A foundational figure in Cuban nationalism was the philosopher, poet, and scholar Josí Enrique Varona, who fought to liberate Cuba from Spain in the nineteenth century, was exiled in New York, and returned during the early Cuban republic in the twentieth century and became vice president of his homeland. Born on April 13, 1849, in Santa María de Puerto Príncipe, in the province of Camagüey, Cuba, Varona received his early education in his hometown and later studied in the capital. In 1868, he took to the battlefield to expel the Spaniards from his homeland and declare independence only to experience defeat. He was later sent into exile in New York, where he associated with José Martí* and actually became the editor of Martí’s political newspaper, Patria (Homeland). On the liberation of Cuba from Spain in 1898, Varona returned and became a member of the new leadership on the island. As Secretary of Education, he worked to reform the educational system, and he also held the chair of

Enrique José Varona.

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Logic, Ethics, Psychology, and Sociology at the University of Havana until 1917. In addition, he served as his country’s Vice President from 1913 to 1917. Varona is reputed to have written hundreds of books. Some of his more literary titles include Odas anacreónticas (1868, Anacreontic Odes), Poesías de Enrique J. Varona (1878, Poems of Enrique J. Varona), Paisajes cubanos (1880, Cuban Landscapes) and Poemitas en prosa (1902, Brief Poems in Prose). His most famous, a meditative work, is Desde mi belvedere (1916, From My Belvedere). While exiled in the United States, he published a great deal of periodical literature of a political as well as literary nature; he was also known as a great orator in favor of the Cuban cause. Further Reading Calcagno, Francisco, Diccionario biográfico cubano (Miami: Editorial Cubana, 1969). Poyo, Gerald, With All, and for the Good of All: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

Nicolás Kanellos Vásquez, Enriqueta (1930–). Newspaper columnist, feminist, and Chicano Movement* activist, Enriqueta Vásquez was born on May 30, 1930, in Cherow, Colorado, into a family of migrant workers who had immigrated from Mexico. Raised in the migrant farm labor stream during the Depression, she had an intimate knowledge of poverty, racism, and discrimination during a time when Mexicans were forcefully deported as part of the grand Repatriation* programs created by local and state authorities. Married at an early age

The Queen of Spain greets Enriqueta Vásquez.

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and, subsequently, battered by her husband, the divorced mother of a young son and a daughter worked at a series of civil service jobs, mostly in Colorado. Nevertheless, her on-and-off work led her to the welfare rolls and public housing to sustain her family in Los Angeles. After having picked up some community college courses when she worked in Los Angeles, Vásquez and her children moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1963. The 1960s marked Vásquez’s political awakening and she became involved with Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales* and the Chicano Movement.* She joined the civil rights organization, the American G. I. Forum, and became an activist and organizer for Gonzales and his Crusade for Justice. Later, relocated to New Mexico with a group of activists, she became associated with Reies López Tijerina* and his alliance to recover land grants. With a coterie of activists, including editor Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, Vásquez participated in the founding of one of the most important grass-roots newspapers of the Chicano Movement: El Grito del Norte (The Shout from the North), which was published in Española from 1968 to 1972. El Grito del Norte became the most influential publication in the Chicano Movement, circulating from coast to coast muckraking and decrying racism and injustice in public life, while also keeping abreast of progressive movements throughout the United States and around the world. Vásquez’s column, “¡Despierten, Hermanos!” (Wake Up, Brothers!), became the most cogent and consistent voice for Chicano ideology not only attacking Gringo racism and oppression but also attempting to enlighten Chicano readers as to work needed to be done to correct their own racist and misogynistic practices. Vásquez’s responsibility as a columnist led to her exhaustive and broad readings, and her column thus became a source for historical information on Chicanos, their meztizo culture, and growing nationhood. She became a promoter of the concept of Aztlán* and cultural nationalism, rather than separatism or armed struggle against the imperialist oppression of Chicanos by the United States government and dominant Anglo society. Although a pacifist at heart, Vásquez refused to rule out violence as an alternative during the struggle for civil and human rights, as he had visited Cuba and sympathized with the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Vásquez and her associated were under constant surveillance by local, state, and national agencies, and the John Birch Society targeted her in its publications. After the demise of El Grito del Norte, Vásquez went on to further her causes, painting murals, teaching, and participating in writing projects. She coauthored with Betita Martínez a Chicano history entitled Viva la Raza! (1974). In 1981 Vásquez received her bachelor’s degree in university studies from the University of New Mexico. She has worked as a teacher in Taos since then and become further involved in indigenous culture. In 1992, Vásquez went to Spain as a member of an intertribal delegation to confront the quincentennial celebrations of the Encounter of Europeans and Native Americans. Further Reading Oropeza, Lorena, and Dionne Espinoza, eds., Enriqueta Vásquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito del Norte (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006).


Vásquez, Ignacio G.

Vásquez, Ignacio G. (?–?). Mexican poet and chronicler Ignacio G. Vásquez often wrote under the pseudonym of Quezigno Gazavic in the United States. Vásquez’s biographical data is very limited, but we know that his pseudonym is created with the letters of his “baptismal name,” according to an article published in El Heraldo Mexicano in San Antonio, Texas on May 5, 1928. This same article reveals that Vásquez also wrote under the following pen names: Xavier de León in the “Cabos Sueltos” (Loose Ends) column, in which he criticized political and religious matters, and Lic. Sin Título (Licentiate without a Title) in his column dedicated to political criticism, aptly titled, “Tiros al blanco” (Target Shooting). Vásquez’s rhymed chronicles provided snapshots of the Mexican immigrant society of the early part of the nineteenth century in Texas. He touched upon many of the issues that the community was experiencing in that time, such as living in a foreign land, harsh labor conditions, political concerns in both Mexico and the United States, and the Americanization of men and women, among others. One of his weekly columns entitled, “Tanasio y Ramona: Narración continuada y en verso de las pintorescas aventuras de dos sujetos ‘de allá de casa’” (Tanasio and Ramona: Serial Narration in verse of the quaint adventures of two persons from “back home”) in El Heraldo Mexicano delves into the despicable repercussions of a Mexican woman’s betrayal of her husband, who is left to suffer her abandonment while she enjoys her new life in the United States. Vásquez describes Ramona’s life with an Anglo husband who does not care if she is unfaithful to him while Tanasio, her first husband—whom she never divorces—follows her around the United States hoping that she will return to him. This topic was used widely by chroniclers and intellectuals who ascribed to the “México de afuera” (Mexico outside) ideology which, in general terms, advocated the creation of Mexico outside of the Mexican Republic that as a result of the Revolution of 1910 was merely a simulacrum of what it used to be. The Mexico in the United States, to remain intact, would uphold traditions and customs, maintain Spanish, and remain Catholic. In this manner, those citizens who did not respect the three requisites would be criticized by chroniclers like Vásquez. Most of his work was published in El Heraldo Mexicano and reissued in La Prensa in San Antonio and La Opinión of Los Angeles. Further Reading Gabriela Baeza Ventura, La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del México de Afuera (Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 2006).

Gabriela Baeza Ventura Vázquez, Lourdes (1950–). Puerto Rican poet and short story writer Lourdes Vázquez has read her work internationally from Amsterdam to Zimbabwe, although she has been most active in the Caribbean, New York City, and New Jersey, where she is a librarian at Rutgers University. Born on May 26, 1950, in Santurce, Vázquez received her B.A. and an M.A. in library science from the University of Puerto Rico in 1971 and 1981, respectively, and another master’s degree from New York University in Latin American and Caribbean 1212

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studies in 1985. Vázquez is a prolific poet and short story writer whose works have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies in both English and Spanish. She has also served as an editor for various poetry magazines, and she was the founding editor of La Calandria (The Lark) poetry series, which issued books and chapbooks from 1994 to 2004. Her work, which often is erotic and deals with the female body and desire, also is populated with many animals, as in her most celebrated book, Bestiary: Selected Poems 1986–1997 (2004). Vásquez is a surrealist in her mix of dreams and waling hours, of phantasmagoria and body parts and inanimate objects. Included among her other books are Las hembras (1987, The Females), La rosa mecánica (1988, The Mechanical Rose), Historias de Pulgarcito (1999, Histories of Tom Thumb), La estatuilla (2004, The Little Statue), Salmos del cuerpo ardiente (Psalms of the Burning Body), and Sin ti no soy yo (2005, Without You I am Not Me). Although Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States, and Puerto Ricans have made a home for themselves in New York and neighboring states for a century, and Vázquez has not been persecuted politically, she often presents herself in her poetry as a “Caribbean in exile.” In 2002, she was a winner of the prestigious Juan Rulfo prize for her short story “La estatuilla.” Further Reading Smith, Faith, “Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity” Callaloo Vol. 22, No. 4 (Fall 1999): 1091–1094.

Nicolás Kanellos Vásquez, Richard (1928–1990). Journalist and novelist Richard Vásquez was one of the first novelists to crack into mainstream publishing, with his generational saga Chicano in 1970. Born on June 11, 1928, in the Southgate section of Los Angeles, into a blue-collar community much like the one descended from his novel’s Sandoval patriarch, who migrated to the United States during the Mexican revolution. There is no public record of his having pursued higher education; however, his owning a construction company, beginning in 1945, is documented as well as his having worked as a cab driver until 1959. During the 1960s, Vásquez worked as a journalist for the Santa Monica Independent, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. From 1965 to 1970 he was an account executive for a public relations firm. While Chicano received generally good reviews from the Anglo American press, the book was consistently criticized by Latinos for its clichés and stereotypical characters, a reception that was disillusioning to Vásquez, which may explain the delay in his issuing another novel. His next foray, The Giant Killer, came in 1977; it deals with an investigative reporter who uncovers a plot to establish various ethnic homelands in the United States by separatist groups. The novel generally went unnoticed or was ignored by the critics. In 1982, Vásquez published his last novel, Another Land, which deals with the love of two immigrants pursued by criminals. Likewise, Another Land went unnoticed or was ignored. Vásquez’s books went out of print until his sister pursued their reprint after his death in 1990. The Rayo division of HarperCollins finally reprinted Chicano in 2005 for the academic market. 1213

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Further Reading Rodríguez, Joe D., “Richard Vásquez” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989: 275–280).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Véa, Alfredo, Jr. (1950–). Alfredo Véa, Jr. is a lawyer turned novelist who challenges western European thought and perception by constructing characters and situations that revive indigenous knowledge. Born in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, on June 28, 1950, Véa was raised by his maternal Yaqui-Spanish grandparents, as his mother spent most of her time on the roads of the migrant farm work. He joined his mother in seasonal farm work from the age of ten, and when he was in high school he became the breadwinner and parent to his younger siblings while his mother was still on the road. Véa had an interrupted and erratic higher education, being drafted and serving in Vietnam during the war; after retuning, he took a series of blue collar and labor jobs while getting his undergraduate and law degrees; in 1978, he obtained his J.D. from the University of California–Berkeley. After originally beginning as a public defender, Véa established his own practice in 1986 and has continued to support himself in this manner while writing novels. His first novel, La Maravilla (1993, The Miracle) is an experimental novel in style and language while following the development of a young Mexican American protagonist. Highly autobiographical, the novel centers on Beto, the protagonist, and his mystical and real-life education as a Yaqui descendant in a small town in the Arizona desert. As such, the reader is taken through Yaqui peyote rituals and perceives altered states in the process of cognition and achieving knowledge of the world. Véa’s second novel, The Silver Cloud Café (1996), is an intricate interweaving of the lives of farm workers of varying ethnicity whose drama results historically from the legacy of both Spanish and American imperialism; along with their struggles, Véa also delves into various types of love relationships and, in all, a real plot runs parallel to a metaphysical one. In Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa recalls his service in Vietnam again in a non-linear exploration of death and violence, except that the exploration of war extends backward to Chihuahua, Mexico, and forward to San Francisco, California. Further Reading Cantú, Roberto, “Alfredo Véa, Jr.” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 281–285).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Vega, Bernardo (1885–1965). Born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, Bernardo Vega became one of the most famous chroniclers of Puerto Rican life in New York City during the early twentieth century. A self-taught intellectual coming out of a background of cigar factories and union organizing, he was at the center of Puerto Rican community events from the time of his migration to New York in 1916 until his retirement in Puerto Rico during the 1940s. As a 1214

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result of his association with community leaders, writers, and activists, Vega became the owner and editor of the important Spanish-language newspaper, Gráfico* (Graphic) in 1927. As the editor of Gráfico, he worked with some of the leading Latino writers of the time, such as Clotilde Betances Yaeger,* Jesús Colón* and Alberto O’Farrill.* In his memoir Memorias de Bernardo Vega (Contribución a la historia de la comunidad puertorriqueña) (entitled in its Englishlanguage edition as Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York, 1979), Vega details the struggles of the Puerto Rican working class in the Metropolis, its organizations, and the social and environmental conditions in which it had to live. In addition, his Memoirs have preserved much information about literary and theatrical life in the Latino community. Vega was also a political organizer for Puerto Rican independence, as well as a labor leader, and his memBernardo Vega and Jesús Colón. oirs detail the issues and the participants in these movements. Another aspect to Vega’s personality, which seems to have been common among his cohort of organizers and laborers, was his interest in the arts. The Vega memoirs were edited and published posthumously in 1980 by a friend, César Andreu Iglesias, who eliminated some fictional parts of the narration; it seems that Vega thought it advantageous to publish the work as a novel; however, Andreu and contemporary scholars have verified and appreciated the work as documentary testimony and community history. Further Reading Flores, Juan, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Vega, Ed (1936–). Ed Vega is a Puerto Rican fiction writer who bases many of his works on life in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. Edgardo Vega Yunqué was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on May 20, 1936, where he lived with his family until they moved to the Bronx, New York, in 1949. He was raised in a devout Baptist home, his father having been a minister of that faith; today, Vega and his wife and children have adopted the Buddhist faith. As a child, books were very accessible at home, and he began both his education and writing at an early age in Spanish in Puerto Rico. After moving to New York and going through the public education system of the city, he served in the air force and studied at Santa Monica College in California under the G.I. Bill. In 1963, Vega almost graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa from New York University with a major in political science; he was short three hours of credit and did not actually graduate until 1969. He did not return to finish until that date because he had 1215

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Ed Vega.

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become disillusioned after personally experiencing racism at the university. From 1963 on, he worked in a variety of social service programs. In 1969, he returned to academic life as a lecturer for Hunter College and thereafter assumed various other lecturing and assistant professor positions at other colleges. From 1977 to 1982, he worked at such community-based education programs as ASPIRA of New Jersey. From 1982 to the present, he has been a full-time writer. Vega is one of the most prolific Hispanic prose writers, although much of his work remains unpublished. In 1977, his short stories began to be published by Hispanic magazines, such as Nuestro (Ours), Maize, and Revista ChicanoRiqueña (Chicano-Rican Revue). In 1985, his novel The Comeback, a rollicking satire of ethnic autobiography and the identity crisis, as personified by a halfPuerto Rican, half-Eskimo ice hockey player who becomes involved in an underground revolutionary movement for Puerto Rican independence, was published. In 1987, a collection of interconnected short stories, Mendoza’s Dreams, narrated by a warmhearted observer of the human comedy, Alberto Mendoza, was published. An additional common thread holding these barrio stories together is their charting of various Puerto Ricans on the road to success in the United States; thus, once again we have a Puerto Rican interpretation of the American Dream. Vega’s third book, Casualty Report (1991), is just the opposite; for the most part the collection of stories included here chronicle the death of dreams, as characters faced with racism, poverty, and crime succumb to despair in many forms: violence, alcohol and drug abuse, withdrawal, and resignation. Vega’s most ambitious project has been his multigenerational epic set in New York City, No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again; A Symphonic Novel (2003), which considers a broad spectrum of ethnic and class life in New York centered around a main character, Puerto Rican-Irish Vidamia Farrel, and, once again Vega challenges concepts of race and ethnicity. In Blood Fugues: A Novel (2005), Vega returns to his preoccupation with ethnicity in New York City and charts the hot and cold relationship of a Puerto Rican family with the Irish American family their son has married into. Vega’s most recent production, Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle: A

Velásquez, Gloria

Novel (2006), again centers on a mixed ethnic/racial relationship, that of thirty-five-year-old punk rocker Omaha Bigelow and the mystical fifteen-year-old Maruquita Salsipuedes who, in the course of treating him for an undersized penis, must battle a WASP-ish rival for his love. Further Reading Morales, Ed, Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Vega Yunqué, Edgardo. See Vega, Ed Velásquez, Gloria (1949–). Born on December 21, 1949, in Loveland, Colorado, to migrant worker parents, Velásquez grew up with her studies interrupted at times due to the exigencies of the migrant stream. While working part-time, she was able to graduate high school and the University of Northern Colorado (1978). As a university student, she began participating in Chicano literary circles and festivals as a poet and publishing her poems and a novella in progress, “Toy Soldiers and Dolls,” in periodicals. Her interest in literature led her to earn a Ph.D. in Spanish at Stanford University (1985) and to become a professor of Spanish at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. As a poet, Velásquez has published her poems of social and political commitment to women and minorities in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. She has published two books of poems, I Used to Be Superwoman (1997) and Xicana on the Run (2005). But Velásquez’s acclaim is principally due to her prose fiction works. In 1994, Velásquez began the Roosevelt High School Series, a series of young adult novels set among a multiracial group of teenagers at Roosevelt High, who must face such social and cultural issues as child and spousal abuse, racial prejudice, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, and others. To date, she has produced six highly acclaimed books in the series: Juanita Fights the School Board (1994), Maya’s Divided World (1995), Tommy Stands Alone (1995), Rina’s Family Secret (1998), Ankiza’s Rainbow (2000), Teen Angel (2003), and Tyrone’s Betrayal (2006). Each one of the installments deals with a separate and distinct teen problem, including racial discrimination, the divorce of parents, dealing with Gloria Velásquez. 1217

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homosexuality, physical abuse, and unwed pregnancy. In each of the books, teens, with the assistance of a psychologist, confront these problems and all of their possible solutions, ultimately resolving them in the best way possible. Her outstanding sensitivity in interpreting teenage angst and social conditions in the series has made Velásquez a popular speaker at high schools throughout the nation and has led some to call her the “Chicana Judy Blume.” Velásquez has received various types of recognition. In 2001, Velásquez was honored by The Texas House of Representatives for her outstanding contributions to literature. The 2004 anthology, Latina and Latino Voices in Literature for Teenagers and Children, devoted a chapter to Velasquez’s life and development as a writer. In 2004, Velásquez was featured in 100 History Making Ethnic Women, by Sherry York. In 1989, Velásquez became the first Chicana to be inducted into the University of Northern Colorado’s Hall of Fame. Velásquez is a tenured professor at the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Further Reading Cantú, Norma E., and Olga Nájera Ramírez, eds., Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). York, Sherri, Children’s and Young Adult Literature by Latino Writers: A Guide for Librarians, Teachers, Parents, and Students (Columbus: Linworth Publishing, 2002).

Nicolás Kanellos Velázquez, Loreta Janeta (1842–1897). Most of what is known about Loreta Janeta Velázquez comes from her memoir of participation in the American Civil War: The Woman in Battle (1876). Velázquez, born in Cuba of Spanish and French parents, came to the United States to study in New

Loreta Janeta Velázquez as a man.

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Loreta Janeta Velázquez as herself.

Vélez-Mitchell, Anita

Orleans, but ran away and married an American officer. According to her memoir, during the Civil War, she served as a spy and disguised herself as a man, Colonel Harry T. Buford, to engage in the fighting at such battles as Manassas, Ball’s Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. According to her narrative, Velázquez’s main motive was to gain fame, like other women in history, such as Joan of Arc. In her introduction, she confesses that the main reason for writing her autobiography was to earn money and not to create a literary work. Be that as it may, the book was so successful that it had four reprint editions in the first year of publication, and even today new editions have appeared with scholarly introductions. The question is still being debated as to whether her account is fictitious or not. Further Reading Alemán, Jesse, “Introduction,” The Woman in Battle: The Civil War Narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Cuban Woman and Confederate Soldier (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Hall, Richard, Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House Publishers, 1993).

Nicolás Kanellos Vélez-Mitchell, Anita (1922–). Poet, actress, and playwright Anita VélezMitchell was born on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, where she lived with her aunt and uncle until the age of ten, when her family moved to New York City. It was in her uncle’s library that she began her love of poetry, learning to recite many of the poems of the Spanish American canon by heart. From her teenage years on, Vélez worked as an actress in Spanish-language theatre in New York City and even performed as a chorus girl for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. It was through her Spanish-language stage work that she met her first husband, actor-poet-cronista Erasmo Vando,* the father of her daughter, poet Gloria Vando.* Her second daughter, Jane, has distinguished herself in journalism as a television reporter and anchor in Los Angeles and winner of four Golden Mike awards in California. As an actor-dancer, Vélez-Mitchell has performed in scores of plays, television programs, and Hollywood movies; she has also composed and translated many songs from English into Spanish. She has also been a notable theater director, winning Latin American theater Ensemble’s Directing Award. Among her produced plays are “Salsamerican Connection,” “The Perils of Chencha,” and “The Cave Named Ego,” which she also directed. She has had a working relationship with most of the Spanish-language/Latino playhouses in New York: Repertorio Espanol, Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Latino Playwrights, Latin American Theatre Ensemble, and Henry Street Settlement. As a poet, Vélez-Mitchell has read her works at most of the community venues in New York, and her book Primavida (Calendario de Amor) (1984, First Life [Love Calendar]) garnered the Julia de Burgos* Award for poetry. She has also won awards for writing short stories and essays, and was named “Poet of the Year” by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. Vález-Mitchell has also been a political activist and, in 2005, 1219

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Anita Vélez-Mitchell in rehearsal for West Side Story.

addressed the United Nations on the U.S. Navy’s bombing of Vieques Island. Vélez-Mitchell has also served as president of the Association of Puerto Rican Poets. Further Reading Ruiz, Vicki L., and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos

Vendido. The character-type whose name literally means “sell-out,” has been ubiquitous in Chicano* literature. To many theatrical spectators and readers of literature, the character is grounded in the reality of individuals who supposedly gain financially or in status or power by betraying their people. When anyone is asked if vendidos exist, they usually answer in the positive but are often pressed to name particular individuals they actually know as true vendidos. The accusatory nominalized adjective is most often applied to politicians elected to represent Mexican American districts or others placed in positions of power to monitor or safeguard Mexican American interests. However, the vendido lives more in the realm of folklore and literature than in real life; although he/she does represent an archetype of Mexican American culture in representing a mediator, an ambiguous and ambivalent figure caught between two cultures, the vendido at once serves as a warning for people to be loyal to their community 1220

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and culture while personifying the dangers of assimilation into mainstream American society. The vendido as a character on the stage and in the pages of Mexican American/Chicano literature has its roots in the agringado and renegado characters of the Mexican immigrant literature of the early twentieth century, which served in the Spanish language texts of such authors as Daniel Venegas* and Julio G. Arce* and the vaudeville sketches of comic troupes, such as Netty y Jesús Rodríguez* as targets for satire and censure for their admiring all things American—technological progress, materialism, women’s liberation, and so on—while displaying shame and derision for all things Mexican, such as poverty, backwardness when faced with American modernity, primitive customs, and culinary matters and so on. The agringado and renegado characters of the 1920s through 1950s personified the danger of losing one’s identity and values when assimilating to the supposedly superior American culture; in fact, the agringado was a device for debunking the American Dream and the “melting pot,” and for furthering Mexican nationalism. Likewise, during the Chicano Movement,* the close relationship of theatre and literature to the social and political struggle gave rise to characters both heroic and even tragic. In the parlance of the militant struggle, vendido was an appellative often applied to Mexican Americans who allowed themselves to be used in institutions, bureaucratic structures, and politics against the interests of the activists, be they farm workers, union organizers, educational reformers, or welfare mothers. From this arose the type and then the stereotype that served as a negative symbol for group solidarity and loyalty. The first to represent the character type was Luis Valdez in his very first play, “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa” (1964), which has a family member, Mingo, transformed by his life in American institutions, such as the Army, the university, and the welfare state. However, it was in his play, “Los Vendidos” (1967, The Sell-Outs), the most anthologized and staged Chicano play by students and communities to this date, that a fuller understanding of the character type was developed and promoted to audiences across the country. In this simple, but sophisticated one-act, Valdez creates a pageant of Mexican stereotypes that have been used by the media and power structures in American society to keep the Mexican American masses alienated from their history and in their place at the bottom of the social structure. Included are satirical depictions of the following media stereotypes: Mexican revolutionary from 1910, farm worker, Pachuco, Chicano militant, and “Mexican American.” But the greatest vendidos of them all are Ms. JIM-enez and Honest Sancho, both ambitiously engaged in buying and selling their people to the various governmental and educational power structures. In the end, the tables are turned and the audience sees that these stereotypes have only been roles played that can easily be manipulated by and in favor of the community. After Valdez, the stereotype has appeared repeatedly in Chicano literature, from Rolando Hinojosa’s* Ira Escobar in his Klail City Death Trip series to Sammy in El Teatro de la Esperanza’s play “Guadalupe” (1974), where Cortez addresses a school board meeting. But it is in another Esperanza play, “La Víctima” 1221

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(1976, The Victim), nevertheless, that the vendido gets his first, extensive treatment in Sammy. Here, the play provides Sammy’s biography, from a child born to immigrant parents, to his being lost and left behind during the historic Repatriation (mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s), to his serving in the Army and taught to kill Third-World peoples, to his joining and ascending in the ranks of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, where it becomes his duty to deport his own mother to receive the promotion he has sought and maintain his piece of the American Dream. As such, Sammy, the vendido, becomes a tragic hero and the ultimate victim in the eponymous play. Other, more sympathetic treatments of the vendido followed, such as Sarita in Milcha Sánchez-Scott’s* “Latina” (1980) and even in Cuban American playwright Dolores Prida’s* character Milagros in “Botánica” (1990, Herb Shop); in both, the vendidas are redeemed when they ultimately see the error of their ways and take steps to either defend the civil rights of their community, as in Latina, or to protect and preserve the cultural traditions of their family, as in Botánica. Further Reading Valdez, Luis, “Los Vendidos” in Luis Valdez—Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos Venegas, Daniel (1895–?). Very little is known about Daniel Venegas, author of one of the most important novels of immigration, Las aventuras de Don Chipote, O cuando los pericos mamen (The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed). According to World War I Draft Registration Cards, Venegas was born on December 8, 1895; this also seems to indicate that Venegas served in the U.S. Army. Linguistic and textual analysis of his novel tends to point to northern Mexico as the place of his birth; he arrived in California in 1919 after immigrating through the port of entry at El Paso, Texas. Venegas became a journalist, businessman, novelist, and president of Los Angeles’ La Confederación de Sociedades Mexicanas (The Federation of Mexican Societies). In the community, he emerged as an outspoken supporter of Mexicans who were treated unfairly. A man of letters, albeit a street-wise intellectual, Venegas was very knowledgeable about Mexican working-class life, especially in the Mexican communities in Los Angeles and El Paso. Venegas’ name appears in the Spanish-language press of Los Angeles, related to performance reviews of his plays and of the vaudeville ensemble, Compañía de Revistas Daniel Venegas, between 1924 and 1933. His theatrical group seemed to always perform in the more modest, working-class houses of the city. This was not always so for the production of his plays: ¿Quién es culpable? (Who Is to Blame?), which had its debut in 1924; Nuestro egoísmo (Our Selfishness), a three-act play which debuted in 1926 and was dedicated “in honor and defense of Mexican women,” according to El Heraldo de México, October 11, 1926; Esclavos (Slaves, 1930), about which we can only guess is its relationship to Mexican labor; and the vaudeville reviews El maldito jazz (That Darned Jazz), Revista astronómica (The Astronomic Review), El establo de Arizmendi 1222

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(Arizmendi’s Stable), which celebrated the famed Mexican boxer baby Arizmendi, and the supposedly very popular El con-su-la-do (a play on the word “consulate” in Spanish). While these later works were of the musical comedy variety so enjoyed by blue-collar audiences, it is almost certain that ¿Quién es culpable? and Nuestro egoísmo were works of serious drama, especially since the “first lady” of the Mexican theater, Virginia Fábregas, produced both works for the stage in Los Angeles. From 1924 to 1929, Daniel Venegas wrote, edited, and published a weekly satirical newspaper, El Malcriado (The Brat), which poked fun at the customs and politics in the Mexican community of Los Angeles. Venegas himself came to be known as “El Malcriado,” for his penchant for taking jabs at community figures through his newspaper. His talent for burlesque was also evident in the cartoons that he drew to illustrate the stories in his tabloid. Daniel Venegas. Before founding El Malcriado, Venegas had worked for the El pueblo newspaper in Los Angeles and, because El heraldo de México published his Don Chipote, he may have also been a staff writer for that paper as well. There is no information available as to whether Venegas had any formal education or worked on newspapers in Mexico before immigrating to the United States. However, the April 7, 1927, issue of El Malcriado identifies Venegas as president of the Mexican Journalists Association of California. Whatever else can be constructed of the life of this important author must be gleaned from the autobiographical passages in The Adventures of Don Chipote claiming that the author migrated to the United States as a bracero, worked on constructing and maintaining the rail lines in New Mexico and Arizona, and experienced many of the same sufferings as the protagonist of the novel. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction,” Daniel Venegas, The Adventures of Don Chipote, or When Parrots Breast-Feed, trans. Ethriam Cash Brammer (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Venegas, Miguel (1680–1764). Miguel Venegas was born in Puebla de Los Ángeles and studied in the Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo de México where he focused on the classics, rhetoric, and philosophy. In 1714 he was named professor of theology but soon after had to step down and move to the countryside where he died after sixty-four years as a religious man. As part of his commitment to helping the community he studied medicine and was able to negotiate with pharmacists from the capital of Mexico to provide 1223

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the needed medications to the poor of his country. Part of his literary production includes works on religious procedures and rituals, which reflect his ecclesiastical knowledge. Because of his admiration for the Jesuits, Venegas wrote the biography of Father Juan Bautista Zappa of Milán. His first book about the history of California and its missions entitled Empresas Apostólicas de los P. P. Misioneros de la Compañía De Jesús, de la Provincia de Nueva España obradas en la conquista de California debida y consagradas al patrocinio de María Santísima, Conquistadora de Nuevas Gentes en su Sagrada Imagen de Loreto (Apostolic Enterprises of the Jesuit Missionaries in the Province of New Spain Conducted during the Conquest of California . . .) was censured due to its negative comments about and critical view of the areas politics. His master work was also about California and was also censured for the same reasons as his previous work. This particular piece was translated into English, French, German, and Dutch, reflecting the international success of Noticia de la California y de su conquista temporal, y espiritual hasta el tiempo presente. Sacada de la historia manuscrita, formada en México año de 1730 (News of California and of Its Temporal and Spiritual Conquest to the Present . . .). Venega’s contribution to the study of the history of California is still of importance today, as his book is considered a classic and the first historical book about the region by the Royal Academy. Further Reading Navarro, Luis, “The ‘North’ under Spanish Administration: The Internal Provinces” in Handbook of Hispanic Culture in the United States: History, ed. Alfredo Jiménez (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994: 160–183).

Luziris Pineda Vigil, Evangelina (1949–). Evangelina Vigil was born in San Antonio, Texas, on November 19, 1949, the second of ten children of a very poor family that lived for years in public housing. In her later childhood years, Vigil lived with her maternal grandmother and uncle, from whom she learned much of the oral lore, which has become such an important basis for poetry; but Vigil’s mother was also an avid reader who gave her daughter a love of books. From her grandmother, she learned “to observe and listen for words of wisdom which come only with experience.” And, indeed, the predominant narrator in her first fulllength collection of poems, Thirty an’ Seen a Lot (1982), winner of the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, is that of the acute but anonymous observer, the observer of the life of working-class people in her beloved West Side barrio of San Antonio, the recorder of their language and diction, their proverbs and music, their joys and sorrows. Despite the apparently natural vernacular of her writing, Vigil’s poetry is the product of great craftsmanship, obtained through extensive reading and self-education was well as through formal study. She obtained a B.A. in English from the University of Houston in 1974 and took post-graduate courses at various institutions afterward. She also has served as an adjunct faculty member for the University of Houston since the mid-1980s. In 1977, 1224

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Evangelina Vigil, Tato Laviera, and Lorna Dee Cervantes at Arte Público Press in Houston.

Vigil-Piñón became the first Hispanic writer to win the National Literary Contest of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for work published in a small magazine. Vigil-Piñón is the Chicano poet who has most sensitively portrayed and celebrated working-class culture. She is also one of the leading exponents of bilingual code-switching in poetry—in Vigil there is as natural a transference from English to Spanish and back as in a conversation at the kitchen table. Working at the center of U.S. Hispanic literature as the poetry editor for the leading Hispanic literary magazine, The Americas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riqueña), Vigil-Piñón has also been a leader in the Hispanic women’s movement as an anthologizer (1983, Woman of Her Word; Hispanic Women Write), speaker, and host of writers on tour. Vigil’s second collection, The Computer Is Down (1987) explores how common folk must accommodate to or become displaced from the modern social and technological landscape. In 1987, Vigil translated Tomás Rivera’s* foundational work, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra into English as . . . And the Earth Did Not 1225

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Devour Him, the most credible translation to date of this novel that uses farm worker dialect and Spanish-English code-switching. In 2001, Vigil-Piñón published a lyrical first book for children, Marina’s Muumuu. Further Reading Rebolledo, Tey Diana, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

Nicolás Kanellos Villanueva, Alma Luz (1944–). Mexican American feminist novelist Alma Luz Villanueva was born on October 4, 1944, in Lompoc, California; she was left by her Mexican mother and her German father in the San Francisco Mission district to be raised by her Yaqui Indian grandmother. After her grandmother died when Villanueva was eleven, her mother took up the responsibility of continuing to raise her. Despite her mother’s guidance, Villanueva dropped out of high school and gave birth to a baby boy when she was just fifteen. Before she knew it, she was in a bad marriage to a Marine and raising three children of her own. She divorced and moved with her children to the California mountains and later married Chicano artist Wilfredo Castaño. Villanueva discovered the writing of poetry as a means of knowing herself and achieving peace with her life. Her first collection of poems, Bloodroot (1977), relies on women’s insight to explore diverse themes. In 1978, Villanueva published Mother, May I, a long autobiographical poem charting her trials and tribulations in a patriarchal society as well as her triumphs. In La Chingada (1985, The Fucked), Villanueva departed from the personal to explore feminine archetypes through history. In Lifespan (1985), she takes a completely celebratory tack on life and love and her destiny. Villanueva began publishing novels with Ultraviolet Sky (1988), whose protagonist struggles against odds to create a life of her own; it was awarded the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. In Naked Ladies (1994), Villanueva explores the myriad ills afflicting women’s lives, including sexual violence and oppression, alcoholism, illness, and infidelity. In Weeping Woman: La Llorona and Other Stories (1944), she has created a series of stories once again exploring the darkest corners of women’s sexuality: rape, prostitution, and incest. In 1998, Villanueva returned to poetry with Desire (1998), an exploration of passionate love; however, in her 2002 poetry collection, Vida, she paid homage to her Yaqui heritage. In 2002, she departed once again from her previous trajectory and wrote a book for young adults, Luna’s California Poppies, a novel depicting how the protagonist develops self-knowledge and strength through writing letters. Further Reading Wood, Jamie Martínez, Latino Writers and Journalists (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007).

Nicolás Kanellos Villanueva, Tino (1941–). Although outside of the Chicano Movement while living in Boston, Tino Villanueva became a celebrated Chicano bilingual poet during the early 1970s. Born in San Marcos, Texas, to migrant farm workers, 1226

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Villanueva grew up in poverty and discrimination. After serving in the Army, Villanueva studied at Southwest Texas State University, where he began to write poetry, graduated in 1968, and went on to graduate school at Stoney Brook and Boston. While studying for his Ph.D. at Boston University, he published his first book, Hay Otra Voz: Poems, in 1972, in which he experimented with bilingual writing and recalled the migrant farm worker and pachuco* culture. The book led to his widespread acceptance as a leading Chicano poet, and in this leadership role he was able to compile one of the earliest anthologies of Chicano literature and the first to be published in Mexico: Chicanos, antología histórica y Tino Villanueva. literaria (1980). In 1981, Villanueva obtained his Ph.D. and began teaching at Wellesley College but was never able to win tenure at that institution. In 1984, Villanueva founded Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal, which published authors from widespread cultures in various languages. Also in 1984, Villanueva published his second widely acclaimed book of poetry, Shaking Off the Dark. Villanueva’s other books include Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) and Chronicle of My Worst Years (1994), neither of which has had the impact of his earlier works. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

Nicolás Kanellos Villanueva Collado, Alfredo (1944–). A Puerto Rican poet, short story writer, and literary critic, Alfredo Villanueva Collado explores gay themes in his writings. He is also a member of a generation of authors who publish and disseminate their works not only in book format but also through the Internet. A native of Santurce, Villanueva Collado spent his childhood in Venezuela. Returning to Puerto Rico when he was in his teens, he attended the Universidad de Puerto Rico, where he was introduced to the poetry of the gay writer Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), with whom Villanueva Collado, aware of his own homosexuality, identified. Wanting to write and teach, Villanueva Collado traveled to New York City in 1970 to attend a Modern Language Association conference and look for employment. That same year, he matriculated at the State University of New York in Binghamton, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1227

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comparative literature in 1974. Following his graduate studies, he taught English at Hostos Community College and wrote over thirty articles and essays on Spanish American Modernisim and the treatment of masculinity in Latin American literature. In the 1980s, his volumes of poetry began to appear: Las transformaciones del vidrio (1985, The Transformations of Glass), Grimorio (1989, Distaste), En el imperio de la papa frita (1989, In the Empire of French Fries), La mujer que llevo dentro (1990, The Woman I Carry Inside), Entre la inocencia y la manzana (1996, Between Innocence and the Apple), among others. His poems, highly personal, are written with a clear voice that vividly depicts human anatomy and sexual encounters in an elegant and telegraphic style, sometime reminiscent of Ginsberg, sometimes of Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Villanueva Collado’s short stories are autobiographical, often dealing with sexuality. However, a dominant theme is the exploration of the legacy of colonialism and American influence in Puerto Rico. One of his best known stories and most often anthologized, “The Day We Went to See Snow,” tells of a true incident when a Puerto Rican politician had snow flown in from the Northeast so that children in San Juan could experience an American Christmas; the message was that children in Puerto Rico were not experiencing Christmas since there was no snow on the island and that they were therefore inferior to children in the United States. Villanueva Collado publishes many of his poems and short stories in electronic format, thus reaching a wider audience. He is also known for hosting tertulias, informal literary salons, in his apartment in New York City. Retired from teaching, he has become an expert in the art of glass-making and sculpture. Unlike many writers from the Hispanic Caribbean who live in the United States and write in English—the Dominican Julia Alvarez* and the CubanAmerican Oscar Hijuelos,* for example—Villanueva Collado prefers Spanish for his poetry and stories. Comments Nicolás Kanellos in Noche Buena (2000): Villanueva Collado “hopes that his writings offer an alternative history to that proffered by the American Dream” (182). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, ed., Noche Buena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories (New York: Oxford University, 2000: 182–186). Villanueva Collado, Alfredo, “Games at the San Cristobal” (www.enkidu. netfirms.com/art/2004/310804).

D. H. Figueredo Villareal, Edit (1944–). Edit Villareal is a playwright of sophisticated works that explore the relationship of media to life. Thoroughly grounded in academia, she has ascended in her career from professor of theater to university administrator. Born in Brownsville, Texas, on September 7, 1944, and raised in San Antonio and Los Angeles, Villareal received her B.A. in theater from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. In 1981, she participated in María Irene Fornés’* Hispanic Playwrights Lab in New York City and then went on to obtain her M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama in 1986. Shortly after 1228

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graduation, she began as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Villareal is the author of various plays and screenplays that have been produced. In 1991, her “The Language of Flowers,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set during the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, was produced at California State University, Los Angeles. Probably her best-known play is My Visits with MGM (My Grandmother Marta), produced in 1992 at the San Jose Repertory Theater; the play deals with a grandmother returned from death to guide her granddaughter through trials and tribulations. Villareal’s other plays include Crazy from the Heart (1989), produced by the Yale Repertory Theater; Marriage Is Forever (1999) and Ice (2001). As a screenwriter, her two produced scripts are La Carpa (1993, The Tent, written with Carlos Avila), for PBS’s “American Playhouse” and Broken Sky (2003), released in theaters. While continuing to write plays, Villareal has been serving as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at UCLA. La Carpa is particularly interesting because of Villareal’s research into the history of Mexican American theater: set in 1938, the play focuses on a tent theater* of vaudeville performers, typical of the ones that toured the Southwest during the Depression. Further Reading Huerta, Jorge, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Villareal, Ray (1952–). Ray Villareal had his first brush with the publishing world when he was in the fourth grade. He wrote a story that impressed his teacher so much that she thought it was worth trying to get it published. She shopped it around at different publishing houses. Unfortunately, the story didn’t sell. His teacher was terribly disappointed, and she was sure Ray felt the same way. He didn’t. At nine years old, Ray didn’t fully understand what it meant to receive a rejection letter—or to get published, for that matter. He recalls his teacher wrapping an arm around him, drawing him close to her, and telling him, “Don’t worry about it. One of these days you’re going to get published. I just know you are.” Over forty years later, her prediction finally came true. Villareal, born on August 26, 1952, in Dallas, Texas, and one of nine children, received his Bachelor of Arts degree in education from Southern Methodist University in 1981. Ten years later he completed his Master of Liberal Arts degree from the same university in 1991. He has taught in the Dallas Independent School District for twenty-six years and currently works as an instructional reading coach. It was while he was teaching sixth grade that Ray got the idea for his young adult novel, My Father, the Angel of Death. Ray was concerned that every time he took his class to the library, he would observe a number of his students, boys in particular, futilely scanning the library walls in search of something to read and not finding anything they connected with. In the classroom, however, the kids constantly talked about WWE wrestling on TV. So Ray decided to give them what they wanted—a fictional story about what it might be like to be the son of a wrestling superstar. He wrote it specifically to target the male reluctant reader. 1229

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Ray Villareal.

My Father, the Angel of Death tells the story of a boy whose father is the ominous, black-clad, skeleton face behemoth, the ACW wrestling heavyweight champion, the Angel of Death. Ray draws his inspiration for writing from his father, the late Fermin Villareal. Ray’s father was a construction worker with a third grade education, who, despite his limitations, had an almost insatiable desire to write, to put his words down on paper. He wrote countless poems and ballads, many of them telling about life in the Little Mexico community in Dallas where they lived. He had them printed up, then sent Ray and his brothers door to door to sell the writings for ten cents each. Ray has written and directed numerous children’s plays. His bilingual play, Una Familia Transformada (A Transformed Family), which was commissioned by the Women’s Missionary Union, was performed onstage at the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas when it was held in College Station. Ray lives in Dallas with his wife Sylvia and their children, Ana and Mateo. Further Reading Cai, Minqshui, Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002).

Carmen Peña Abrego Villarreal, José Antonio (1924–). José Antonio Villarreal published what is considered to be the first Chicano novel in contemporary times: Pocho (1959), a developmental novel in which the protagonist has a classic identity crisis. It was also the first Chicano novel to be published by a major commercial house: Doubleday. Villarreal was born on July 20, 1924, in Los Angeles to Mexican immigrant parents who were migrant farm workers. Villarreal became an excellent student and loved reading. After graduating high school and serving three years in the Navy during World War II, he returned to California and earned a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950. Villarreal took various and sundry jobs to support his wife and children and his writing. He finished Pocho in 1956 but was not able to find a publisher until 1959. The novel of immigration remained relatively unknown until the Chicano Movement created a market for such literature and it was reissued by Anchor Books in 1970. Since then, it has become required reading in Chicano and Latino literature classes at universities. Due to this rising demand, Villarreal published his second novel, a tale of the Mexican Revolution, The Fifth Horseman with Doubleday in 1974, but it never achieved the status of Pocho. Villarreal 1230

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became an outspoken critic of the Chicano Movement, its writers, and critics, attacking the very base that had made his first work so popular. Villarreal’s third novel, Clemente Chacón (1984), is an American Dream–tale of a poor Mexican who crosses the border to rise in riches and social success. This latest Villarreal offering was published not by a mainstream house but by Bilingual Press, a small university-based publisher, and is indicative of Villarreal’s struggle to please both mainstream publishers and students of Chicano literature. Further Reading Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M., Life In Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).

Nicolás Kanellos Villarreal González, Andrea (1881–1963). Born on January 20, 1881, in Lampazos, Nuevo León, María Andrea Villarreal González was born to merchant Prospero Villarreal Zuazua and Ygnacia Gonzalez Cantu. Villarreal was an educator, journalist, poet, and revolutionary activist who in the early 1900s, along with members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Mexican Liberal Party), openly denounced the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and called for an armed revolution. She contributed political essays to several periodicals, including Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s Vésper (Sunset) and Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón’s Regeneración (Regeneration). Persecution by the Díaz regime forced the PLM members and part of the Villarreal family to continue their work in exile in St. Louis, Missouri and San Antonio, Texas. While PLM members, including her brother Antonio I. Villarreal, were held as political prisoners, Villarreal and her sister, Teresa, continued the work with the presses and launched a national campaign to free the PLM junta members. A talented speaker, Villarreal was called the Mexican Joan of Arc. She was known to travel from San Antonio to border towns not only to supply men with arms and ammunition, but also to incite them to battle with her fiery speeches. In 1909, Villarreal spoke with Mother Jones in San Antonio on behalf of imprisoned PLM members at “freedom” meetings pleading the cause of the refugees. That same year, she founded the publication La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman) in San Antonio to advocate for women’s involvement in the revolutionary effort, while Teresa Villarreal founded the periodical El Obrero (The Worker) to maintain the U.S. Mexican community informed of developing events in Mexico. In these and other periodicals, Andrea Villarreal published her poetry on nationalist themes and essays on women’s role in society. She returned to Mexico after the triumph of the Revolution and got married, but soon became a widow. She continued her literary activities and even won a golden rose in a poetry competition in Monterrey. She died on January 19, 1963, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico. Further Reading Lau, Ana and Carmen Ramos, eds., Mujeres y revolución, 1900–1917 (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1993).

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Lomas, Clara, “Mexican Precursors of Chicana Feminist Writing” in Multiethnic Literature of the United States: Critical Introductions and Classroom Resources, ed. Cordelia Candelaria (Boulder: University of Colorado at Boulder, 1989).

Clara Lomas Villaseñor, Victor (1940–). A novelist and screenwriter who has brought the experience of Mexican immigration to the United States to wide audiences through his novel, Macho! (1973) and the non-fiction saga of his own family in Rain of Gold (1991), Victor Edmundo Villaseñor was born on May 11, 1940, in Carlsbad, California, the son of Mexican immigrants. Villaseñor was raised on a ranch in Oceanside and experienced great difficulty with the educational system, having started school as a Spanish-speaker and, unknown to his family and teachers, a dyslexic. He eventually dropped out of high school and worked on his family’s ranch, in other agricultural fields as a farm worker, and as a laborer in construction. Because of his learning disability and his failure at school, Villaseñor felt compelled to overcompensate precisely for what was most difficult for him: reading and writing. While supporting himself for ten years as a construction worker, he completed nine novels and sixty-five short stories, all of which were rejected for publication. Finally, Macho! was accepted and published by the world’s largest paperback publisher, Bantam, in 1973. In 1977, another major publisher issued Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona, a non-fiction narrative of the life and trial of a serial killer, immigrant Juan Corona. But Villaseñor’s most important work was to come much later, for it took years of research to produce his own family’s biography, Rain of Gold (1991). It became the very first Chicano best seller. Rain of Gold was so powerful and important a story that it occupied the next years of literary production for Villaseñor, who penned related works. His collection of stories, Walking Stars (1994), was a compilation of additional stories from his family’s saga, Wild Steps of Heaven (1995) was a “prequel,” and The Thirteen Sense: A Memoir (2001), Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004) and Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008) are sequels to Rain of Gold. There is unanimity among critics and teachers that Villaseñor’s works, while attesting to lived experience, are also very poetic and deeply spiritual. Macho! tells the tale of a young Mexican Indian’s illegal entry into the United States to find work; it is in many Victor Villaseñor. 1232

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ways a classic novel of immigration, though it departs from the model in that, upon return to his hometown in central Mexico, the protagonist has been forever changed. He is unable to accept the traditional social code, especially as it concerns machismo. Rain of Gold, its prequel and sequels, make up a nonfiction saga of various generations of Villaseñor’s own family, their experiences during the Mexican Revolution, and their eventual immigration to California. The saga is narrated in a style full of spiritualism and respect for myths and oral tradition, derived not only from Villaseñor’s own childhood and teenage years, but also from the years of interviews and research that he did in preparing the book. The popularity of Rain of Gold has brought to millions of Americans one family’s stories of the social, economic, and political struggles in Mexico that have resulted in widespread Mexican immigration to the United States, a place where new stories of racism, discrimination, and the triumph over these barriers continue to develop in the epic of Mexican American life. In the new millennium, Villaseñor has turned to writing children’s books, while still keeping his generational memoir updated. Elaborating tales that his parents and grandparents told him when he was young, Villaseñor has successfully re-packaged a number of Mexican folk tales and origin myths, as well as California recollections into the following bilingual books: Mother Fox and Father Coyote/Mamá Zorra y Don Coyote (2004), The Fox and His Friends Save Humanity/La rana y sus amigos salvan a la humanidad (2005), Little Crow to the Rescue/El cuervito al rescate (2005), and The Stranger and the Red Rooster/El forastero y el gallo rojo (2006). Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Victor Villaseñor” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Third Series, eds. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1999: 291–294). Tatum, Charles, Chicano and Chicana Literature: Otra Voz Del Pueblo (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Villaverde, Cirilo (1812–1894). Cirilo Villaverde, considered one of the major Cuban writers of the nineteenth century, spent more than half of his life in the United States. The geographic trajectory of his life is mirrored in the publication history of his best-known work, the novel Cecilia Valdés, o La Loma del Angel, which appeared originally as a two-part short story in Cuba in 1839 and was published in its final and most widely read version as a 590-page novel in New York in 1882. Like his novel, Villaverde started his writing career in his native island and went into exile in New York, where he labored many years as a journalist, editor, and political activist. As a figure of nineteenth-century letters, Villaverde helps us see the influence of transnational connections and the importance of newspapers in nineteenth-century hispanophone writings of the United States. Villaverde was born October 28, 1812, in the Pinar del Río province of Cuba and grew up witnessing the cruelty of slavery first-hand on a sugar mill where his father worked as a doctor. He studied philosophy at the Seminario de San Carlos, and received a law degree from the University of Havana in 1834. 1233

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After practicing law for a brief period, Villaverde dedicated himself to writing fiction and produced several notable titles, including La peña blanca (1837, The White Boulder), La cueva de Taganana (1837, Taganana’s Cave), and El espetón de oro (1838, The Golden Spit). One of his most interesting pieces from this period is a travel account called Excursión a Vueltabajo (1838–1842, Excursion to Vueltabajo), which Antonio Benítez Rojo has noted for its manipulation of nationalist discourse to create a sense of what it means to be Cuban. It was during this period of interesting literary production that Villaverde became increasingly dissatisfied with colonial rule and became part of the circle of intellectuals associated with Domingo Delmonte,* a literary impresario and critic who sought to publish antislavery writers. One of the events that influenced Villaverde’s life in profound ways was a concert in Havana, where Villaverde met the military man of action Narciso López. Villaverde joined with López in a conspiracy to overthrow Spanish rule. When the conspiracy was discovered, Villaverde was surprised at home in the middle of the night and incarcerated for six months. But Villaverde escaped with the help of a prison guard and made his way to the United States. After arriving in New York, Villaverde rejoined with López and became the general’s secretary, working actively to support López’s organizing of filibustering expeditions to Cuba. “Once outside of Cuba, I reformed my way of life,” Villaverde wrote later in life. “I exchanged my literary tastes for more noble thoughts; I passed from the world of illusions to the world of realities.” In other words, he gave up writing fiction. Instead, he became a contributor to and, for a brief period, editor of the newspaper La Verdad (The Truth), a bilingual publication that promoted the annexation of Cuba to the United States and featured the work of writers from the island and English-language articles. The rest of Villaverde’s life in the United States followed a similar course: journalistic work, political organizing, and (for the most part) an avoidance of writing fiction. He contributed to New York’s La Voz de América (1866, The Voice of America) and El Tribuno Cubano (1876, The Cuban Tribune), among other publications. During Cuba’s Ten Years’ War, Villaverde and his wife, Emilia Casanova,* organized groups for support of independence. In an obituary, José Martí* described Villaverde as a tireless supporter of Cuban liberation and noted the “gentleness of his gestures and the scourge and rebellion of his words.” For Villaverde, that type of organizing went hand-in-hand with newspaper work. He believed that publications could be deployed in Cuba to support military efforts. As a participant in a newspaper print culture that published materials in the United States to circulate them in Cuba, Villaverde contributed significantly to a tradition of Spanish-language publishing in the United States that stretched transnationally* to Cuba and other parts of the Americas. It was the failure of military efforts that drove him back to fiction. When the Ten Years’ War failed to dislodge Spanish rule from Cuba, Villaverde returned to the manuscript of his unforgettable novel, which appeared in New York as Cecilia

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Valdés, o La Loma del Angel (1882, Cecilia Valdés, or Angel’s Hill) bearing an imprint from El Espejo (The Mirror), a newspaper run by Villaverde’s son. Long considered a novel of Cuba and one of the major works of Latin American fiction, Cecilia Valdés was ultimately a product of printing presses tied to New York’s Cuban exile communities. A tale of doomed love set in the Havana of Villaverde’s youth, the novel intertwines memory with historical recuperation. It was advertised as a book that captured a period in Cuba’s history. As Doris Sommer has pointed out, readers have traditionally accepted the sociological reconstruction of Havana while overlooking the narrative obfuscations. Cecilia Valdés becomes a novel of Cuba rather than a desire for the island only if we overlook the print culture context and the way the narrative is affected by geographical and temporal distance. As a novel of the United States, Cecilia Valdés captures the transnational longing of exiles and migrants to return to a place that preceded life in the United States. It also adds an interesting hemispheric dimension to a growing corpus of novels about tragic mulata figures and slavery in the Americas. Given its importance in the literary canon, Cecilia Valdés is one of the most important Spanish-language publications in U.S. history. Further Reading Benítez Rojo, Antonio, “Cirilo Villaverde, Fundador” Revista Iberoamericana Vol. 56 (July 1990): 769–776. Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Sommer, Doris, “Who Can Tell? Filling in Blanks for Villaverde” American Literary History Vol. 6 (Summer 1994): 213–233.

Rodrigo Lazo Villegas de Magnón, Leonor (1876–1955). Born on June 12, 1876, in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Leonor Villegas was raised in the United States from the age of five, when her family moved to Laredo, Texas, the headquarters for her father’s ranching, mining, and import-export business. Villegas studied at boarding schools in San Antonio, Austin, and New York. In 1895 she graduated with honors and teaching credentials from Mount St. Ursula’s Convent in New York and returned to Laredo, where she opened one of the first bilingual schools in the area. On January 10, 1901, Villegas married Adolfo Magnón and moved to Mexico City, where their three children were born. During nine years of residence in Mexico City, Villegas de Magón witnessed first-hand the injustices of the Porfirio Díaz regime and became active in the Francisco Madero movement against the dictatorship. Upon her return to Laredo months before the revolution broke out, she began her transnational work. From the border area, she worked with juntas revolucionarias (revolutionary groups), founded the organization Unión, Progreso, y Caridad (Unity, Progress, and Charity), housed political exiles, and contributed articles reporting on the latest developments of the revolutionary movement to the Idar* family’s La Crónica (The Chronicle), as well as to El Progreso (Progress) and El Radical (The Radical).

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Villegas de Magnón (center) with General Murguía’s troops and band.

When the second and violent phase of the revolution reached the border area, following Victoriano Huerta’s betrayal of Madero, Villegas de Magnón founded the medical relief group, La Cruz Blanca Constitucionalista (The Constitutionalist White Cross), to care for the soldiers in Venustiano Carranza’s Constituionalist Army. The story of La Cruz Blanca became the focus of the two manuscripts of her memoirs, one original version in Spanish and another expanded version in English. Written to record the vital collaboration of nurses and doctors from both sides of the border region and published recently as The Rebel (1994) and La Rebelde (2004), these narratives stand as one of the few perspectives written by women in the early 1900s on the Mexican Revolution. They document the pivotal role of border activism that in effect erases geopolitical boundaries. Written in the third person, the narratives interweave autobiography covering the historical period from 1876 to the 1920s. During the four decades of Villegas de Magnón’s life after the revolution, her activism in both the United States and Mexico centered on promoting bilingual education, advocating democratic ideals, and struggling for women’s rights until her death on April 17, 1955. Further Reading Lomas, Clara, “Introduction,” The Rebel (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994). Tinnemeyer, Andrea, “Mediating the Desire of the Reader in Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 3, eds. María HerreraSobek and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000: 124–137).

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Vingut, Francisco Javier (1823–?). Francisco Javier Vingut was one of the first publishers of Spanish-language textbooks for use in colleges. Born in Trinidad, Cuba, in 1823, Vingut was a journalist who settled in New York in 1848, where he became a professor at the University of the City of New York after living in Washington, where he published the Aurora newspaper in English; he also published La Indiana (The Indian). As a professor, Vingut compiled, wrote, and edited various Spanish and English grammar books, including A key to the exercises in Vingut’s Ollendorff’s Spanish grammar; being a new method of learning to read, write, and speak the Spanish language (1854), Vingut’s Ollendorff’s new method of learning to read, write, and speak the Spanish language (1855), A Spanish reader and translator: Being a new method of learning to translate from Spanish into English and from English into Spanish (1856), Clave de los ejercicios del maestro de inglés (1869, Key to the Exercises of the English Teacher), The Spanish teacher; a practical method of learning the Spanish language on Ollendorff’s system (1871), Key to the Spanish teacher (1871), El maestro de inglés completo; método práctico para aprender la lengua inglesa según el sistema de Ollendorff (c. 1866, c. 1899, The Complete English Teacher; Practical Method for Learning the English Language According to the Ollendorff System). In addition, Vingut was one of the first professors to compile anthologies of Spanish literature for study at the college level, such as Gems of Spanish Poetry (1855) and Joyas de la poesía española (1856). Vingut married a distinguished American writer, Gertrude Fairfield, who assisted him in translating the poems from Spanish. Included in the volumes were numerous poems from exiled Cubans, such as Heredia,* Mendive,* and Tolón.* He also reissued works by José Antonio Saco in two volumes. Vingut died in Savannah. Further Reading Leavitt, Sturgis E., “The Teaching of Spanish in the United States” Hispania Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec. 1961): 591–625.

Nicolás Kanellos Viramontes, Helena María (1954–). Viramontes was born on February 26, 1954, in East Los Angeles, one of eight siblings in a working-class family. She graduated from East L.A.’s Garfield High School, and, in 1975, she graduated from Immaculate Heart College with a B.A. in English. Her love of literature led her to study English and creative writing over the next two decades. Her work as a writer was put on hiatus when she married and became the mother of two children, to whom she devoted most of her time. In 1994, almost a decade after the publication of her first book, she finished her M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of California–Irvine. By the time she had her degree in hand, Viramontes was already a force on the Hispanic literary scene, and her works had been canonized in some of the most important textbooks and anthologies, including those used by academia. Viramontes creates highly crafted tales of women struggling to make their lives in the barrios. However, her imagery, as in The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Untitled Helena María Viramontes Short Stories (2005), is often classically based, her command of language reveals years of hard study, and her works are the result of numerous drafts. 1237

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Viramontes’s powerful writing is based on politics and is grounded in the sociological reality of workingclass Latinas. In her conscious effort to give voice to women through her stories, she is personally battling and subverting patriarchal practices. Viramontes’s stories graphically depict the repression of women and the price they pay in challenging a misogynist society. Under the Feet of Jesus (1996), Viramontes’s first novel, is an apparently simple and direct narrative that follows the life of a thirteen-year-old migrant worker girl, but soon becomes an indictment of corporate agriculture in California and its practices of child labor and pesticide poisoning. The book is narrated from the point of view of the young girl, Estrella, who also questions the limitations placed on her as a female. Viramontes’ next novel was not published until almost ten years later, in 2007: Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel, which follows a Helena María Viramontes. group of young women struggling to survive in the gritty barrio of East Los Angeles during the 1960s. Reviewers see Viramontes as working in the social realist vein of John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair. But despite the brutal disregard for life by the agricultural companies, which she portrays in Under the Feet of Jesus, and the urban plight and hopelessness seen in Their Dogs Came with Them, her lush, vibrant language vividly depicts the bleak world faced by migrant workers. Viramontes’ awards include the first prize for fiction, Statement Magazine, California State University, Los Angeles, 1977; first prize for fiction, University of California, Irvine Chicano Literary Contest, 1979; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1989; Sundance Institute Storytelling Award, 1989; Robert McKee Story Structure Award, National Latino Communications Center, 1991; finalist, Women Script Writing Project, Paul Robeson Fund Exchange, 1991; finalist, Chesterfield Film Company, Universal Studios, 1991; National Association of Chicano Studies Certificate of Distinguished Recognition, 1993; a John Dos Passos Award for Literature, 1996; the Award for Literary Contribution from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, 2007; and the USA Artists Fellowship, 2007. Viramontes works as Professor of Creative Writing at Cornell University. 1238

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Further Reading Madsden, Deborah L., Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Nicolás Kanellos Virgin of Guadalupe. Although not a material historical personage, the Virgin of Guadalupe resides on a lofty pedestal of combined religious, political, and broad cultural meaning among Mexicans and Mexican Americans, regardless of professed sectarian religious beliefs. Known as the patron saint of México, the Virgin of Guadalupe refers to the brown-skinned Madonna representation who, according to the Roman Catholic tradition of miracles, appeared before the peasant Indian, Juan Diego, on December 12, 1531 (also reported as December 9, 1531, in some accounts). This account of her miraculous apparition on Mount Tepeyac, a hill that had formerly been associated with the indigenous worship of the goddess of motherhood and fertility, Tonántzin, inextricably linked the Spanish/European Virgin Mary with native beliefs in a transformational example of mestizaje (native Mesoamerican and Spanish hybridity). During the epoch of Spanish conquest and early colonialism, the Church’s strategic use of the Virgin of Guadalupe miracle helped convert thousands of the Indians who survived the invaders’ violence and diseases that made the conquest possible. The Church built an official structure, La Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe), in a northern neighborhood of México City called Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo and very near Tepeyac, where the two Virgin Mary apparitions reportedly occurred in 1531. Pope Benedict XIV issued a papal bull in 1754 officially canonizing la Virgen de Guadalupe as a saint and decreeing her to be the official patroness and protector of New Spain. Besides her brown-toned representation, other distinguishing features of the Virgin of Guadalupe associated with the image are believed to have been left as a sign of her appearance to Juan Diego on his tilma (cloak), a material relic that still hangs in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Her symbolic features include a spiked aura of light surrounding her image, at the base of which lay a large bouquet of roses representing the fresh flowers she presented to Juan Diego in her appearance. Scholars of the Aztec language, Náhuatl, believe that the native Indians called the Tonántzin inspired appearance “Tlecuauhtlacupeuh” (mispronounced as “Guadalupe” by the Spaniards) meaning “la que viene volando de la luz como el águila de fuego” (she who flies from the light like an eagle of fire). This merging of indigenous popular mysticism with the European Catholic tradition of mariolatry (i.e., the worship of the Virgin Mary) had a profound impact on unifying the disparate native populations and cultures into a governable mestizo society. The Guadalupe’s prominence as a cultural and historical icon intensified in 1810 when the emancipator priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, who was part of 1239

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Virgen de Guadalupe.

the initiators of the Mexican resistance against Spain’s hegemony, placed her image on his flag of freedom. She thus became a powerful symbol of the Mexican independence movement that has been raised repeatedly in other movements against tyranny. The de facto historical symbolism of the Virgen was further strengthened when the barrio of Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo itself served as the site where the treaty between the United States and México was signed to end the U.S.-Mexican War on February 2, 1848. The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is imprinted indelibly in the collective Mexican 1240

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and Chicana and Chicano memory as the end of one cultural identity and the birth of a hyphenated consciousness. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910 the government policy of Mexico became secular, and church and state were officially separated. Nevertheless, the popularity of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the iconography devoted to her in arts and crafts were unaffected by the legal change. Many contemporary historians, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars identify her as a singularly important iconic symbol of cultural unity that helped pacify resistance to colonialism and eased the transition to a hybrid mestizo society and eventual nation. Each year, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world come to the Our Lady of Guadalupe church, the holiest in Mexico and elevated to the status of a basilica by Pope Pius X in 1904. The present church, or Old Basilica, was constructed on the site of an earlier 16th-century church and was finished in 1709. When the structure of the old basilica became dangerous because of its sinking base foundations, a modern church called the New Basilica was built nearby, and it became the new home of the original tilma image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that attracts millions of pilgrims every year. In 2003 masses were still held every hour on the hour in the Basilica to accommodate the capacity crowd of pilgrims who visit the church to pay homage to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe). The Guadalupe symbol was adopted by farm worker organizer César Chávez* as a key banner icon during the United Farmworkers strikes and marches of the late 1960s and 1970s. Her image is prevalent in the artwork produced during and since the Chicano Movement,* on murals, picket signs, votive candles, lapel pins, t-shirts, lowriders, yard shrines, and countless other artifacts. She also is the center of the annual play, La Virgen de Tepeyac (The Virgin of Tepeyac) performed as a tribute to grassroots faith and popular traditions by El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista, California, and many other local communities. In this and millions of other forms, the Guadalupe symbol extends beyond the traditional jamaicas (folk fairs or church bazaars) where varieties of her image are staple articles sold to raise money for charity. In the late twentieth century many Chicana and Mexican feminists began to challenge the idea of the Guadalupe image as having only one unitary, Church-defined meaning. They sought to reclaim her representation for modern, twentieth-century advocates of women’s rights as an alternative to the patriarchal fundamentalism of the Roman Catholic Church that continues to deny women full participation in its activities. These modern views and reinterpretations have been respectful attempts to capture changed attitudes toward faith and gender, even though many traditionalists have been offended by their representations. Some of these reinterpretations include such popular culture portrayals of the Guadalupe by Chicana artists Yolanda López, Inèz Hernández,* and Alma López. Other contemporary renderings appear in the tattoos, paño (handkerchief) sketches, and leatherwork of incarcerated “pinto” artists. Whatever the approach and wherever the imaging 1241

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occurs, they collectively join the millions of forms that have been made for over 400 years in tribute to the feminine strength, wisdom, and compassion that constitutes the fundamental source of the Tlecuauhtlacupeuh-La Virgen de Guadalupe powers. Further Reading Castro, Rafaela G., Chicano Folklore: A Guide to the Folktales, Traditions, Rituals and Religious Practices of Mexican-Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). “Guadalupe, Basilica of” (http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=39058). McCracken, Ellen, New Latina Narrative: The Feminist Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999). Sorell, Víctor A., “Guadalupe’s Emblematic Presence Endures in New Mexico: Investing the Body with the Virgin’s Miraculous Image” in Nuevomexicano Cultural Legacy: Forms, Agencies, and Discourse, eds. Francisco Lomelí, V. A. Sorell, and Genaro M. Padilla (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). Wolf, Eric R., Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria

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W War. The study of Latino literature may also be seen as the study of the political history of the Hispanic world in that at many junctures in time, a motivation and driving force for literary creation has been the authors’ involvement in political and militant struggles, as well as their chronicling of and reporting on the larger-than-life experiences they have had as participants in bellicose action. Of course, this is true for the very inception of the Hispanic writing in the New World, which was tied to chronicling the discoveries and new experiences in strange lands among unknown peoples, discoveries that promptly deteriorated into armed conflict. Thus the chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Hernán Cortés himself can be seen as the precursors to Hispanic writing about and from the condition of war. There has never been a period in North American history when Hispanics were not engaged in literary depictions and explanations of armed conflict, whether of struggles against the native populations, wars of independence from Spain, the U.S. Civil War, the century-long struggle of Cubans and Puerto Ricans for independence, often planned and conducted from U.S. shores, and the world wars of the twentieth century, as well as the Korean conflict, Vietnam, and the more recent Middle Eastern invasions. As can be appreciated in the entries on publishers and publishing, as well as the literature section and the entries on such figures as José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois,* José Martí,* Leonor Villagas de Magnón,* Cirilo Villaverde,* Andrea and Antonia Villarreal,* and so many other nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury writers, war and revolution dominated the consciousness of writers and activists. What is not commonly known, however, is that Hispanics participated

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in all of the U.S. military actions from the Civil War on. Among the important memoirs of that particular struggle, three have come down to us. Luis Fenellosa Emilio’s History of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865 (1891) is a memoir of Emilio’s command of an all-black unit during the Civil War. (He had previously authored a vivid account of an “Assault on Fort Wagner” by the same regiment for The Springfield Republican in 1887, which was later issued as a pamphlet.) A much reprinted and celebrated memoir of life in a prisoner of war camp during the Civil War is Federico Fernández Cavada’s Libby Life: Experiences of a Prisoner of War in Richmond, Va., 1863–64 (1865). However, the most curious, and perhaps most controversial, literary product of Hispanic memoirs of the Civil War is Loreta Jeaneta Velasquez’s The Woman in Battle: a narrative of the exploits, adventures and travels of Madame L.J. Velazquez, otherwise known as Lieut. Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army (1876), which recalls her disguising herself as a Confederate colonel and participating in various battles as well as undercover spying missions. Of all the wars, the most heavily documented in literature, however, is the Mexican Revolution. In fact, a subgenre of the novel was born to fully explore the psychological, testimonial, and political dimensions of that war in what has been termed the novel of the Mexican Revolution. More of these novels were written and published in the United States by expatriates than were even in Mexico. The very first such narrative, seen as the initiator of the genre, was Mariano Azuela’s* Los de abajo (The Underdogs), published in El Paso in 1915. In the novel Azuela takes a critical stance from the common soldier’s point of view—one often repeated by others who followed him—condemning the uncontrollable whirlwind of violence that the Revolution had become. Some of the leading Mexican authors in U.S. exile continued the genre, including Miguel Arce,* Julián S. González,* and Teodoro Torres.* And although there was much oral lore, including songs and personal experience narratives, from the Civil War and the 1898 War against Spain, no other armed struggle was so fertile in production of legendry and song as the corrido* entered its golden age and enriched the music and lyrics of the world with its cucarachas, adelitas, and ranchos grandes, and with the figure of Pancho Villa. Although all of the wars of the twentieth century have similarly produced narrative, poetry, and song, it is the more contemporary conflicts that have merited the attention of some of the most distinguished names in Latino literature. Américo Paredes’s* autobiographical poetry was written while he was stationed in Japan after the Second World War but was not published until his later years of life in Between Two Worlds (1991). Among the most enigmatic and lyrical of Rolando Hinojosa’s works is his evocation of the battlefield in Korean Love Songs (1978); his highly autobiographical and melancholic The Useless Servants (1993) is probably the most outstanding Latino representative of the war genre of all time. Contributing to the literature on Vietnam are such works as Joe Rodríguez’s The Oddsplayer, which explores war on the battlefield as well as the war of racism among the American troops, and Charlie Trujillo’s Dogs from Illusion (1994), which depicts a harrowing nighttime trek of three Chicanos in Vietnam. 1244

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Further Reading Mariscal, George, Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Oropeza, Lorena, Raza Sí! Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

Nicolás Kanellos Wilbur-Cruce, Eva Antonia (1904–1998). Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce was born on February 22, 1904, at the family ranch in Arivaca, an area between the Arizona and Sonora border. Her father, Agustín Wilbur, was the son of Dr. Rubén Agustín Wilbur, who was educated at Harvard Medical School and arrived with Charles Poston in Arivaca, Arizona, in 1863. Grandfather Wilbur became an Indian agent and established his medical practice at the Cerro Colorado Mining Mill. Her paternal grandmother, Rafaela Salazar, from Altar, Sonora, was a descendent of Lieutenant Moraga, the very last conquistador to come to Arizona. Wilbur-Cruce’s mother, Ramona, was the daughter of Francisco Vilducea and Margarita López, who left Mexico during the porfiriato to settle near the Wilbur ranch. Wilbur-Cruce received no formal schooling in Arivaca until the age of six, when she was home schooled by an aunt. She initially learned to read in Spanish and was also introduced to works such as David Copperfield at a young age. She developed a love of literature early in life and began by writing poetry that focused on her experiences in nature. One of the first corridos* she wrote was entitled, “Palomita pitayera/Oh, Little White-Winged Dove.” Wilbur-Cruce’s autobiography, A Beautiful, Cruel Country, was written over a ten-year period. The original text, a fifty-page letter that was initially addressed to her nieces and nephews, who knew nothing of “country life” in the Sonora and Arizona Territory borderlands, was later published as a more extensive version of her life’s history by the University of Arizona Press in 1987, when Wilbur-Cruce was eighty-three years old. The dust jacket of the 1987 hardback edition of the narrative describes it as “a valuable primary source from a little-known region.” In terms of autobiographical elements, her text focuses primarily on what the author notes as “recollections of my early life in the border country along the creek.” Of further interest are references to traditional fiestas, such as the Feast of the Holy Cross, the spring and fall corridas, and narrative insertions regarding the diaspora and exodus of the Indians from this territory. In her autobiography, Wilbur-Cruce chooses to narrate her experience in the male realm of activities rather than in the world of domesticity. Uninterested in domestic activities, she looked up to a family friend, Doña Tomaza, who represented a different kind of woman, one who was able to speak at an equal level with men and who was capable of riding the range and taking part in ranching activities. Much of the narrative deals with the life of Wilbur-Cruce as a young child learning to partake in ranching activities normally reserved for men. This narrative, then, presents us with a child who is a prefiguration of the woman she would become, a woman capable of doing a man’s job and ultimately taking over the care of the family ranch. It is 1245

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through A Beautiful, Cruel Country that Wilbur-Cruce captures a world that involves the intersection of various cultural spaces, thereby situating her as an important Chicana voice. Further Reading Preciado Martin, Patricia, “Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce” in Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). Wilbur-Cruce, Eva Antonia, A Beautiful, Cruel Country (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987).

Donna Kabalen de Bichara Women Writers. To understand the range and value of the contribution of Hispanic women writers to the literatures of the Americas, what is needed is subject-identified reading: reading that seeks to comprehend, as historian Emma Pérez advises, from inside el sitio y la lengua (the site and discourse) of the subject—in other words, to try to see from inside the subject’s multiple intersubjectivities of gendered identity, ethnoracial experience, and material class situation. Part of this process requires appropriate labeling of the discourses being read. For example, the conflated term “Latino/a” is used increasingly to denote gender inclusive identification of the writers and artists who are the subject of this entry. Used interchangeably with “Hispanic” it expresses a concern for linguistic accuracy in conveying ideological pluralism even, as in most languages, when it is absent from a given language’s grammar. Similarly, the Latina writers surveyed here explore gender and ethnic multiplicity in their work, most often resisting unitary and static constructions of identity in favor of dynamic, evolving configurations of self and other. Latina texts tend to emphasize the metaphorical possibilities of cultural and historical mestizaje through a variety of styles, viewpoints, themes, and symbols. In a narrow sense, mestizaje refers to the racial and cultural fusion of Ibero-Hispano and American Indian peoples, but, more broadly, it has been explained as the natural syncretism that results from any long-term contract between socially different peoples. Such syncretism stands in multicultural opposition to the monocultural language and society of the dominant United States intellectual canons and discourses. Latina/Chicana letters challenge the prevailing monomyths both of U.S. culture Book cover for a collection of plays by Latinas. 1246

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and of phallocentric Latino/Chicano art and letters by emphasizing the gendered mestizaje of their material, social, and linguistic sources of identity. Another crucial source of Latino and Latina creativity and artistic tradition derives from what Doris Meyer describes as the “deeply embedded . . . desire” among Hispanic American writers “to define a Latin American identity, both on a universal and a regional (national) level” (2). She cites literary critic Roberto González Echeverría who describes this desire as “the main theme of Latin American thought,” one that produces its own “mythology of writing” (2). Accordingly, the bulk of Latina writings forefront the dynamic web of relationships between and among gender, genre, and geography, as well as the nexus between each of these spaces. The written record recuperated and reread by feminists in recent decades shows that, like other female intellectuals of earlier periods of history, Latinas were concerned with gendered biases against women at least as far back as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the preeminent colonial poet of New Spain. For example, she wrote vigorously against the hegemonic principle of her age, which stated that “mulieres en ecclesia taceant” (women should be silent in church). Her impassioned analysis argued that the effect of barring women from access to formal education resulted in the total disempowerment of women in society. As current feminist archival research is showing, the many generations of women writers of the Americas have, like Sor Juana, traced a similar link between gender and genre, between female experience and its expression in literature and other creative forms, throughout the European settlement of the hemisphere (Veyna; Lomas 1989; Rebolledo 1991). Well-known examples of these tracings include the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873), the Chilean Gabriela Mistral* (1889–1957), the Argentine Alfonsina Storni (1900–1938), and the Mexican Rosario Castellanos (1925–1974), as well as the vast majority of Chicana writers of contemporary times. The impulse to “define a Latin American identity,” as Meyer asserts, might be bound for Latinas, as it is for their male counterparts, to “regional” and “national” geography and politics, but, to a large extent, women produce their “mythology of writing” from deep within their conscious awareness of sex roles and other gendered social constructions. The awareness that material experience is inescapably gendered applies equally to ideology, language, and literary forms. Hence, the study of women’s writing and female identity in any combination, whether through focus on ethnicity, historical period, genre, theme, or similar conventional category, demands a multifaceted exploration of predominant sexual ideologies. For Hispanic women writers of the Americas, this approach requires examination of hierarchical religious and political customs and their appearance in everyday social forms of machismo, hembraísmo (ultrafemininity), heterosexism, and homophobia. No single approach or study can provide complete and comprehensive coverage of women in Hispanic American letters and art. This entry thus offers an introduction to a significant range of Latina writers and artists of the United States with primary emphasis on Chicana, Cuban, and Puerto Rican women. 1247

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The writers are presented within the tripartition of geography (nationality, culture, diaspora, exile, and other symbolic topographies), gender (sex role identity, sexuality, feminism, and other oppositional identities), and genre (women’s authorship and authority, intertextuality, imaginary codes of différance, and other sub/versions of form). Each partition presents a primary focus on selected writers and texts followed by a brief mention of other writers. The sectioning of the literature in these three categories, as well as the separation of literary from visual and filmic artwork, is intended solely for interpretive convenience and is not conceived in terms of exclusive or unchanging compartmentalizations, whether literary, critical, or political.

Geography All writers are shaped by their homelands in manifold ways, but not all writers choose to emphasize their geography of origin when crafting their works. This grouping focuses on the work of writers and artists whose aesthetic production offers compelling visions of their homelands in many ways. By foregrounding the country, region, or village that nourished their lives and imaginations, these works testify to the importance of place and landscape in the lives of the women who created them. Often the geography of origin appears from a distance, the writer removed from the immediate scene by forced exile or by other external agents of diaspora. Often, too, the geographic space appears as symbolic topography through a net of tropes, figures, and political motifs, rather than as a detailed representation of a literal physical place. Whatever the inspiration, the writers and artists in this section describe, define, praise, critique, denounce, and consistently reconstruct the birthplaces, homelands, and family homes that are etched within their interior beings— where mind, heart, soul and imagination intersect like charted lines on a map. For Mexican American women the question of homeland and nationality is amazingly complex. As mestizas whose historical, cultural origins point to Spain, a European country with its own complex racial and cultural mixtures, Chicanas are defined by the vast system of beliefs and behaviors of Europe’s shaping patriarchies without having had any direct political relationship to Spain for centuries. On the other hand, their Mexican roots, which include indigenous stock, imply a more immediate tie to the physical land and nature of the Americas, as well as to the Western Hemisphere’s history. An important part of that history is the unavoidable fact of conquest (politically by Spain and the United States and personally by the day-to-day realities of patriarchy) that has resulted both in the loss of a landbase and its traditions and in the absence, to a great extent, of autonomy and self-determination. Mexican American women experience the loss of landbase in several ways: as descendants of a people whose heritage in North America antedates that of the later arrivals from England and northern Europe, as members of the diaspora from Mexico after the Treaty of Guadalupe of 1848 and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and as women who were denied the rights of property and suffrage until 1248

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the twentieth century. This compounded loss and its other effects find poignant expression in poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s* “Refugee Ship,” in which she concludes for the poem’s speaker and other “orphaned” Chicanas that “I feel I am a captive/aboard the refugee ship./The ship that will never dock.” Although resulting in alienation and pain—this absence also intensifies creative interest by Chicanas in the nuanced texture of mestizaje and its literary possibilities. Ultimately, the blend of language, custom, religion, music, food, and fiesta that forms the quotidian experience of Chicanas binds them to their North American geography—even if some of its firmest spaces exist only in the metaphoric topography of Aztlán, the legendary site borrowed from Nahua mythology and reconstructed into a utopian Chicana and Chicano space by the rhetoric of empowerment during the 1960s Chicano Renaissance. Two early writers who treated the historical Mexican American concerns with land and dispossession are Fabiola Cabeza a de Baca* and Josephina Niggli,* whose books address the power of place in Mexican American culture in styles reminiscent of the local color writings of nineteenth-century U.S. American regionalists. In her fiction, Niggli situates her characters in settings heavily colored in such ways as to evoke distinct regionalist Mexican locales. Especially in Mexican Village (1945), a novel whose very title foregrounds place, the author describes the impact of land and locale on individuals and communities. In it she tells the story of Hidalgo, a fictional town on the Mexican side of the northern frontier between the United States’ border with Mexico. Built around a mining quarry that provides economic sustenance to the villagers, the novel chronicles the life and folk ways of a traditional community united by the culture and history that the people have evolved over many generations in their valley. Niggli bases her central plot on the arrival in Hidalgo of Bob Webster, an “outlander” whose outsider status allows the author to use him as a reader-like foil for her sometimes anthropologically detailed descriptions of the habits and customs of the Mexican natives. For the most part, Niggli’s narrative focuses on “the people of Hidalgo” (the Castillo, Canti, and O’Malley families, et al.) and “the rulers of the Valley” (Doctor Martínez, Don Nacho, Don Rosalio, and Father Zacaya). Adhering to traditional gendering in both art and life, Niggli assigns the village’s public power, much of which results in tragic consequences, to men, and assigns the transforming force of love and nature to key women characters (especially to Tía Magdalena, a wise anciana [old woman] who may be seen as a literary precursor to Rudolfo Anaya’s* Ultima, the ubiquitous Candelaria, the outcast María de las Garzas, and the evil Evita Cant). Whatever their role or outcome, however, the characters are carefully and explicitly inscribed with reference to place, as the examples of “Candelaria of the Quarry,” “Dionisio of the Salon of the Devil’s Laughter,” and “Maria of the River Road” suggest. A fine stylist and storyteller in the genre of romance, Niggli brought to Mexican Village (and her later A Miracle for Mexico, inspired by the paintings of Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo) a desire to tell another story of U.S. history: that of the Mexican experience in the United States after 1848. By zeroing in on the 1249

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quarry’s centrality on the people’s lives, she adroitly showed the link between economics, loss of landbase and cultural identity among Mexican Americans, even if her literary method lacked an articulated political framework. Less novelistic than Mexican Village, Cabeza de Baca’s We Fed Them Cactus (1954) is more a documentary family memoir than conventional narrative fiction. Cabeza de Baca set out to memorialize the folklore and traditions of Hispanic New Mexico as she remembered them first hand and as they were recalled in prior generations by family elders. Although both Niggli’s and Cabeza de Baca’s writings disclose certain outmoded anachronisms of pre–Chicano and Chicana Renaissance expression—particularly in their lack of an articulated political consciousness of ethnicity, gender, and class—their pioneering efforts are noteworthy, for they were among the first Mexican Americans published in the U.S. by establishment publishers in the twentieth century. Their work also documents well the inextricable weave of tierra (land) and lo cotidiano (everyday life) in North American and Border mestizo experience. Finally, their early integration of American letters with voices, names, and histories of their yet-marginalized subculture is a reminder of those who are today continuing the project of literary and political self-preservation of an unbroken path of words to the past. Another writer concerned with the effects of place on psyche and society is El Paso–born Estela Portillo Trambley,* whose body of fiction and drama occupies a significant shelf in the library of Chicano and Chicana literature. One of the first women to gain prominence within contemporary Mexican American letters (receiving the Quinto Sol Award in 1972), Portillo Trambley is the author of numerous plays, a published novel, and extensive short fiction. Although recognized for the depiction of feminist issues in her fiction and for the integration of literary and mythological allusion throughout her work, she also has approached the sketching of physical and geographical scene with exacting care. For example, her short story “The Paris Gown” (1973) highlights one of the world’s premier cosmopolitan cities in its title. More importantly, the plot’s feminist rite of passage depends for its thematic energy on the contrast of French and Mexican landscapes and the cultures that both places represent in the imagination of the young Theresa, the niece of the story’s protagonist, Clotilde, whose life is told in flashback. Paris and Europe represent free agency and self-determining choice to Clotilde as she tells her story decades later to her visiting niece, whereas Mexico and home mean suppression under the stifling authority of her father, of the future husband arranged for her, and of the machismo pervading the society of her birth. Less dichotomous in its emblematic use of place is Rain of Scorpions (1975), the novella included in the author’s first published collection of short fiction. Employing the techniques of naturalism, Portillo Trambley underscores the omnipotence of land, nature, and economics over the people of Smeltertown, a symbolically drawn industrial town situated between “two propitious mountains where long ago Cabeza de Baca had ciphered the name of El Paso del Norte” (136). The novella juxtaposes the socioeconomic struggles of the 1250

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town’s downtrodden workers with the personal struggle of Lupe, an Earth mother figure seeking to discover her selfhood and, in the process, to recover her feminine power, particularly over Fito, the veteran who returned from Vietnam with one leg missing but with his political conscience activated. Everpresent in the people’s lives is the grandeur of nature with its demanding but beautiful landscapes, unpredictable weather, and ubiquitous animals, elements that the author draws together in the narrative’s conclusion when the flooding rains arrive with the deluge of scorpions. Even though the town’s smelter (like Niggli’s quarry in Mexican Village), is a site of industrial pollution and capitalist greed, Portillo Trambley makes it clear that it is an outgrowth of the land that produced the ore that preceded it, and the land’s primacy invests it with spiritual power. Occasionally heavy-handed in her metaphorizing of nature and use of mythic symbols, Portillo Trambley’s work is nonetheless significant in contemporary letters. Two Chicanas whose prose fiction enriched the storehouse of Latino and Latina literature in the 1980s and whose writings underscore place—especially the remembered and imagined topography of home and childhood landscape as metaphor—are Denise Chávez* and Sandra Cisneros.* They share with Niggli and Portillo Trambley the portrayal of compelling female figures defined in large measure by their physical environments, and stylistically they resemble two American forebears, Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) and Tomás Rivera* (. . . y no se lo tragó la tierra [. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him]), in their use of narrative vignettes and short stories linked together by a central character. A native and still-current resident of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Denise Chávez is also an experienced actress and occasional playwright—all traits that surface in her fiction in her keen ear for speech and dialogue and her focus on New Mexican scenes. Her major published work to date is The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), a collection of short stories united by its New Mexico settings and female perspectives. She has published individual stories widely in little magazines, and her first novel, Face of an Angel, is scheduled for publication in 1993. All of the seven stories in Menu Girls present the girlhood experiences and imaginings of Roclo Esquibel, the “menu girl” of the collection’s title story. Although the stories’ plots collectively focus on Rocio’s personal development and emergent writer’s consciousness, Chávez etches her personality—and that of many of the other characters—through meticulous attention to the specifics of her surroundings. The closing lines of “Compadre,” the last story in the book, exemplify this concern with place. To the query, “What do you write?” Rocío responds offhandedly, “Oh, about people. New Mexico. You know, everything.” Her mother then intrudes, characteristically, into the conversation with a long monologue that captures much of the essence of the preceding stories: “. . . I say, Rocío, just write about this little street of ours, it’s only one block long, but there’s so many stories. Too many stories! . . . but why write about this street? Why not just write about 325? That’s our house! Write about 325 and that will take the rest of your life.” 1251

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The Last of the Menu Girls constitutes the author’s realization of this advice, for it chronicles the lives, images, events, speech, and human relations of that street and its houses, yards, secret hiding spots, and special landmarks of community remembered by the protagonist (Olivares 1990). In the title story, “The Last of the Menu Girls,” recipient of the 1985 Fiction Award from Puerto del Sol (Sun Port) magazine, Rocío’s character emerges through her exploration of Altavista Memorial Hospital, where she works as a menu taker for the patients. Her encounter with the hospital’s offices, patient rooms, corridors, smells, and sounds, along with her reaction to the other employees and patients give texture to her natural inquisitiveness and keen observation, just as her part-time job loosens sharp memories of her Great Aunt Eutilia’s dying in the Esquibel home a few summers before. Similarly, in “Willow Game” the unnamed narrator we know to be Rocío recalls a pivotal feature of her girlhood, the trees that punctuated her neighborhood and which serve in her adult mind as landmarks of her rite of passage to maturity. As in the other stories that capture the particulars of place, Chávez here painstakingly describes the trees in their physical spaces (“The Apricot tree was bound by the channelway that led to the Main Street ditch”; “the Willow stump remained underneath the window of my old room”) to emphasize the persistence of place in triggering memory: “Today I walked outside and the same experience repeated itself.” Like the other writers in this section, Chávez forefronts with concrete particularity places and spaces to show how they sprout and dynamically shape memory and idea in her characters’ lives and imaginations. In similar fashion, Sandra Cisneros unites The House on Mango Street (1985), a series of vignettes and short short stories, by attentive focus to the scenic details of their Chicago setting. The book received a 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Chicago-born and bred, Cisneros writes with an urban vitality that captures the density and rush of the city (outside and visible) as well as the interior city—felt and imagined. Whether recounting the people and occasions that are the subject of the chapters entitled “Boys and Girls,” “The Earl of Tennessee,” and “Minerva Writes Poems” or telling of the yearning and adolescent angst that gird the chapters “Linoleum Roses,” “Born Bad,” and “Bums in the Attic,” Esperanza, the protagonist of Mango Street, defines herself in relation to her memories of her childhood living on the move in the houses on Mango, Keeler, Paulina, and Loomis Streets. Importantly, her later recollection of the houses and the meaning of all the urban places of her girlhood elicits a politicized sense of community as well as a positive relation between her adolescent desire for a room of her own and her writerly need for solitude and introspection. Cisneros’s third book, My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987), a volume of poetry, contains similarly strong references to geography and physical space. Two of the volume’s four sections are titled with place names: “I: 1200 South/2100 West,” referring to Chicago’s street numbers, and “III: Other Countries,” relating to the poet’s European travels. In addition, she introduces two of the sections with epigraphs—one by poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Cisneros’s mentor, 1252

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and the other from The Three Marias—that explicitly allude to place. Especially graphic in communicating idea and feeling through tropes of physical place are the poems “Six Brothers,” “Twister Hits Houston,” “By Way of Explanation,” “Men Asleep,” and all the pieces in section III. “Six Brothers,” for example, contrasts the “earthbound” speaker’s search for ancestral roots in palpable places—“castles maybe” or “a Sahara city”—with her father’s ambitious hope for his family’s successful future as achievers of illustrious careers. In “Men Asleep” the speaker casts her sad yearning for intimacy deeper than the flesh in terms of place by describing past lovers “who go room into room into room,/who shut themselves like doors,/who would not let me in.” Wicked Ways, like Mango Street and the other texts in this section, gives voice to a selfexpression firmly bound to home and homeland, hearth and earth, transforming the literary page itself into a fresh discovered territory. Many other talented Chicana writers have indicated a pressing interest in the geography of Aztlán, the multiple Mexican American crossroads of the United States, and the rich cultural and political outgrowths of other known territories. Among them are poets Angela De Hoyos,* whose Chicano Poems for the Barrio (1975) examines the oppression of raza in urban barrios by showing how the land “belongs” to no one even though it must be respected as if it “belong(s) to all,” and Lucha Corpi,* whose “Veracruz” and “San Luis Potosí” (1980) exemplify her use of topography (like Portillo Trambley) to “establish the metaphors for the conflicting pressures between sexuality and prohibition” (156), as Marta Sánchez puts it. More recently, Gloria Anzaldúa argues in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) that Chicana identity cannot be separated from landbase and place. Other powerful treatments of the interrelated effects of country, region, village, and home on self, psyche, and empowered agency have been produced by poets Lorna Dee Cervantes,* Inéz Hernández, Marina Rivera,* Carmen Tafolla,* Gina Valdés,* Evangelina Vigil,* and Bernice Zamora,* novelist Isabella Ríos, and essayist Silvia Lizárraga. For Puerto Rican women, the issue of homeland and nationality is equally complex and just as problematic as it is for Chicanas. They share with Chicanas the importance of mestizaje, conquest, and loss of landbase, although differing somewhat on the last point. Puertorriqueñas from the Island possess a cultural identity that derives more directly from their status as citizens of a U.S. commonwealth and from their bicultural linkages with New York City, even though their socioeconomic subordination mirrors that of other U.S. minorities. Like millions of Chicanas who themselves or their parents are part of the post-1948 diaspora from Mexico, Puerto Ricans on the mainland also experience firsthand the negative and positive duality of split national and cultural identities. Unlike Chicanas, Puerto Ricans bear the weight of the statehood issue (whether or not to promote the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s absorption into the Union as a state), which has divided the Island’s inhabitants for decades. Ultimately, the essence and complexities of Puerto Rican culture and identity, Mainland and Island, have promoted an intense sense of place among the writers and artists discussed in this section. The daily life and history of 1253

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Puerto Rico and its various North American incarnations, particularly in New York, rivets its women writers to their native lands, even if some of its sharpest scenes emerge from an idealized Borinquen (the pre-Hispanic/pre-American indigenous name for the island). This Puerto Rican space and idea (like the Chicano and Chicana Aztlán) has evolved its own contemporary myths to accommodate a self-determining, nativist impulse among many intellectuals, artists, and political activists. One celebrated Puerto Rican writer of this century’s middle decades is poet Julia de Burgos,* whose considerable literary corpus—six poetry volumes and three books of prose—belies her brief life. An alcoholic, she died in abject misery at thirty-nine on what her compatriot Piri Thomas has memorialized as New York’s “mean streets.” She is esteemed in Latin American letters as one of the contributors to the flourishing decade of the 1930s, described by scholar Josefina Rivera de Alvarez as “[una] época de verdadero renacimiento en nuestras letras” (an age of genuine renaissance in our [Puerto Rican] letters [55]). Although renowned for her literary accomplishments by her peers and readers, that she wrote in Spanish has meant that her monolingual North American audience has been slow to discover her expressive art. But Burgos is appreciated by Islanders and New York Puertorriqueñas and Puertorriqueños for her striking use of nature and physical scene to illuminate human experience, as the poems in the posthumously published El mar y tú, y otros poemas (1954, The Sea and You and Other Poems) exquisitely demonstrate. Scholar Rivera de Alvarez points out that the themes in the poet’s final manuscript “ampliará en términos del mar el simbolismo erótico antes adscrito al río” (expand to terms of the sea the erotic symbolism she earlier ascribed to the river). For example, in her second volume, Poemas en veinte surcos (1938, Poems in Twenty Furrows), she devotes six verses to rivers, using their geographic literalness to inscribe personal and lyrical meaning. Like Rivera de Alvarez, Nicolás Kanellos* singles out “Río Grande de Loíza” as an example of the poet’s brilliant use of language, exploitation of form, and “meshing of idea and image” (1989). As already seen in the works of Denise Chávez and Sandra Cisneros, memories of girlhood and adolescence are well served in literature by the filter of place, and Burgos approaches the Rio Grande de Loiza in just this way, synthesizing her personal biography with that of this and the other rivers she lyricizes. By accomplishing that synthesis in evocative language and profound insight, she radiates ever-widening ripples of meaning (Rivera de Alvarez). An admirer of Burgos’ work—which she calls “matchless”—Nicholasa Mohr* is a writer whose life and work diverges in many ways from that of her literary forebear. Born in New York to first-generation immigrant parents from the Island, Mohr acknowledges her native New York roots straightforwardly, a directness that also leads her to write in English, “the language that gives life to my work, the characters I create and that stimulates me as a writer. It has also been a vital component in the struggle for my very survival” (1989, 114). She also differs from Burgos in her choice of genre (prose fiction and essay) as well as by being a graphic artist who has illustrated some of her books (Nilda and El Bronx Remembered). 1254

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But Burgos and Mohr share significant commonalities. Both pay markedly close attention to the concrete details of their physical surroundings in their writings. Although Mohr’s fiction dramatically keys to the Puerto Rican history and sociology of her “beloved Nueva York,” she, too, captures adolescence, family traditions, and cultural alienation by fastening her subject to spatial motifs. In Nilda (1974), her first novel, and In Nueva York (1979), her third, for example, she describes in vivid exactness the material ambience of her Nuyorican characters; the streets of the Big Apple, which Mohr calls “the Big Avocado,” rush and rash with the ceaseless urban noises of what one of her characters calls the “Nuorquirio” barrio, now preferred over the “slow pace” of the Island. Also resembling Burgos by communicating emotional states and psychological interiors via telling allusions to place, Mohr’s Felita, a 1979 children’s book, presents haunting images of public school buildings and yards to reveal the title character’s alienation from her unsettling new middle-class environs. The writer uses this technique again in her short story “An Awakening . . . Summer 1956” (1983), in which the young Puerto Rican protagonist is first introduced to the “barren, hot, dry Texas landscape” so unlike “the [green] color of [the] Island, soothing, cool, inviting.” The contrast in topography is real, but the emotional code it expresses is stylized narrative—the outgrowth of Mohr’s persona’s response to the unwelcome hostility. Another writer noteworthy for her lyrical treatments of place is Amelia Agostini de Del Río,* a prolific writer and accomplished scholar who, like Burgos, experienced the creative vitality of the 1930s in Puerto Rico but whose own active publishing career did not begin to thrive until the 1950s. Her writing encompasses several genres (literary criticism, prose narrative, drama, and poetry) and spans over five decades when her collaborations with noted playwright Emilio S. Belaval are included, for she is credited as coauthor of La romanticona, a comedy that appeared in 1926 at the start of Belaval’s career. Agostini’s treatment of place describes a considerable measure of her obra (works). Her Viñetas de Puerto Rico (1965, Vignettes of Puerto Rico), for example, set forth in prose her recollections of Yauco, the town in central Puerto Rico where she grew up (which appears again in many poems of the later volume, Canto a San Juan de Puerto Rico y otros poemas [1974, I Sing to San Juan of Puerto Rico and Other Poems]). Employing the techniques and conventions of traditional regionalism (or costumbrismo), she depicts in Viñetas her memories of the scenes, people, speech, and activities that filled her childhood, a style she carries over to a different locale in her narrative portrayals of Puertorriqueños en Nueva York (1970, Puerto Ricans in New York). Interested in chronicling slices of life of the diaspora, in this latter volume she turns her dramatist’s ear to the colloquial speech of her fellow émigrés to, as Josefina Rivera de Alvarez notes, “recoger con efectividad y exactitud los rasgos caracterizadores ciertos—internos y externos—de los personajes de su situación de trasplante y adaptación” (collect, effectively and painstakingly, the definitive characteristic features—internal and external—of transplanted characters in situations [requiring] adaptation [55]). Alvarez thinks, however, that Agostini’s 1255

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academic background interfered with her portrayal of authentic material experience, especially that of immigrants outside her professional class. It may also explain her tendency to romanticize Puerto Rican folk culture and to write in a formal, frequently anachronistic style. Nevertheless, the versatile writer’s limning of place and nature to express herself and her life perceptions persist throughout her career. It is permanently etched even among the elegies of grief she wrote during her widowhood, Con el duelo de mi corazón (Insomnios) (1964, With the Duel of My Heart [Insomnia]), and also appears in the photographic vignettes of her native island and adopted urbe neoyorquina (Nuyorican urban setting) that were among the last compositions of her life (6 voces y dos sainetes más, [1978, 6 Voices and Two More One-Acts]). Whether in poetry, fiction, graphic illustration, drama, or film, the Puertorriqueñas discussed in this section—and others like Luz María Umpierre,* Judith Ortiz Cofer,* and Cenen and Iris Zavala*—demonstrate the efficacy of physical landscape, geography, and images of known places to capture the psychological interiors and societal realities of being Puerto Rican. By placing regional and family home topographies in the foreground of so much of their work, they give voice and contour to an American experience largely overlooked within the received body of the hemisphere’s artistic expression. They also convey with concrete immediacy the impact of place, particularly the conjunction of Island/New York habitats, in the psyche and culture of Puerto Rican life. Like Puerto Rican women writers and artists, Cuban women also investigate the effects of Island/Mainland dualities in their work. This subject subsumes such issues of the diaspora as social acceptance, language, and personal identity, but unlike their Spanish-speaking Puertorriqueña counterparts, contemporary Cubanas must also address the changing impact of the Revolution of 1959 in their lives. This fact results in a forefronted consciousness of the geopolitics and ideology of the hemisphere that is inseparable from other social issues and literary themes, as writer Lourdes Casal* observed in 1957: Todos los pueblos de Hispanoamérica están de acuerdo en una actitud defensiva y hasta agresiva frente a la potencia del Norte; pero el influjo del triunfo aparente de ese estilo de vida, que nos es ajeno, ha determinado, sin embargo, la duda y la aceptación de costumbres importadas con etiquetas de “Made in U.S.A.” que se han ido infiltrando en nuestra America. (“Problemas hispanoamericanos” 14) (All Latin American communities share a defensive, even aggressive, posture towards the power of the North; but the influence of the victory apparent in that foreign lifestyle has determined, nevertheless, [both] the doubt and the acceptance of the imported styles stamped “Made in the U.S.A.” that have been infiltrating our America.)

And this pan-Latino and pan-Latina defensiveness, as Cuban-born playwright Dolores Prida* points out, is not new, except in one sense: today they are written about in English as well as the Spanish in which the “earliest examples” of such politicized Cuban literature were presented (1989). 1256

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One of this century’s earliest and much heralded examples of that production was Lydia Cabrera,* who through her work actively contributed to the retrieval of and appreciation for the Island’s African-origin people and their manifold cultures. She focused on the preslavery native elements brought from Africa, on their adaptations to Hispanic slavery in the New World, and on the hybrid of postslavery mestizaje still manifest in late-twentieth-century Caribbean Black identities. The daughter of a prominent Cuban attorney and Basque mother, Cabrera was exposed to Afro-Cuban creativity in childhood when she developed a voracious appetite for the tales and legends told her by the family’s servants, particularly her nanny. Later, while studying art in Paris, she was encouraged by Europe’s avant-garde interest in Négritude to compose a cycle of short stories (1936, Contes negres de Cuba [Black Stories of Cuba]) based on the tales she had heard as a girl. Contes negres was successful and led to the completion of two of her collections of folk-based stories recuperating the Black experience in Cuba from its prior neglect and ethnocentric treatment. Even though her work is generally considered to lack ideological critique, by recognizing the value of Afro-Cuban folklore and art and by working to preserve it, she merged aesthetic act with political engagement in her earliest literary project, which eventually expanded to occupy her entire career. José B. Fernández summarizes her impact on Latin American letters by noting that “Cabrera is still the great name of AfroCuban studies” and is regarded as “the pioneer of Afro-Cuban prose fiction.” Painstaking in folkloric detail and anthropological description, the three books of cuentos capture Cabrera’s sharp recollection of particular layers of the unique cultural ambience of her native land. Like writer Josephina Niggli, who gives similar attention to her folk culture in her work, Cabrera’s folkloric tales reflect her use of social milieu, folk custom, and borrowings from such dialects as Yoruba and Bantu to evoke place and region. For example, in Cuentos negros and its follow-up volume, Por qué . . . : cuentos negros de Cuba (1948, Why . . . : Cuban Black Stories), she recounts a multitude of animal fables and other orally transmitted negrista tales that inscribe aspects of marginalized Cuban life and social history that did not exist even as subliterary material in the Island’s hegemonic Spanish letters. Further, she takes care to evoke the region’s topography and to locate the tales in their specific rural or urban milieus—whether in the playa (beach) that accounts for the Island’s nickname, the pearl of the Antilles, the rugged peaks of the Sierra Maestra, the hidden piquancy of Havana—as she brings to light the vitality and complexity of the deterritorialized former slaves and their colonized cultures. Ultimately, Cabrera’s negrista-derived fiction and exhaustive ethnographies (El monte: Notas sobre las religiones, la magia, las supersticiones y el folklore de los negros criollos y del pueblo de Cuba [The Countryside: Notes on Religions, Magic, Superstitions and Folklore, by Black Creoles and the People of Cuba]) of the people’s daily lives, language, folkways, and humor, as well as the multifaceted effects of the African diaspora on Cuba, ensure that her name and work will remain valued in the broad plurality of the literary history of the Americas. Another factor in Cabrera’s imaginative output was her reluctant exile from her homeland in 1960. She left for Miami in 1960 (and later, briefly, to Spain) 1257

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because she feared eventual despotism in the new progressive Castro government that came to power in 1959 (although she had managed to live comfortably under the prior despotism of the Batista regime). Nevertheless, her years abroad first as an expatriated student in France and later as a political exile sharpened her perspective on the folk motifs and aesthetics of Négritude that riveted her as both a writer and researcher throughout her career. Finally, Cabrera’s work falls into the category of older-generation immigrant Cuban women writers identified by Cuban American literary scholar Eliana Rivero, distinguished from “minority writers in the U.S.” who “usually speak from an experience of marginality and discrimination due to race, class, and/or sex” (189). Rivero states that the older generation of Cuban writers in exile tend to “re-create inner and outer landscapes of their native land” (190) as they situate themselves and “identify with the establishment and reject the Third World stance of many native Hispanic writers” (190) of younger generations. Titles published in the last two decades of Cabrera’s life include Ayapa: cuentos de Jicotea (1971, Ayapa: Humorous Tales), Trinidad de Cuba (1977, Cuban Trinity), and Cuentos para grandes, chicos y retrasados mentales (1983, Stories for the Old, the Young, and the Mentally Retarded) and confirm Rivero’s categorization of political stance. It is clear, thus, that her exile not only did not flag her productivity but strengthened the vividness of her portrayals of the society that produced her (Arenas 155). Writer Mireya Robles* is another daughter of the Cuban diaspora who resides in the United States, where she migrated in 1957. A professor of literature, Robles has published two chapbooks of poetry, Tiempo artesano (1973, Time the Artisan, 1973) and En esta aurora (1976, In This Dawn), as well as a novel, Hagiografia de Narcisa la Bella (1985, Hagiography of the Beautiful Narcisa). Within Eliana Rivero’s categorization of Cuban émigré writers, Robles’s work, like Cabrera’s, avoids explicit Third-World politics as it presents the “inner and outer landscapes” of her immigrant consciousness. Unlike Cabrera, however, Robles does not emphasize the unique particularities of her homeland in her writing, choosing instead to adopt a cosmopolitan voice of worldly experience and vision. Nevertheless, she frequently takes care to place her titles in geographically specific locations. In “Tu primer poema,” (Your First Poem) her opening invocation to the reader in Tiempo artesano, Robles sets the book’s controlling metaphor in the language of place, diaspora, and dislocation: “Llego a ti/desarraigada/ciudadana trashumante/de la piel del mundo” (I arrive to you uprooted, a nomadic citizen in the skin of the world). Because the poem’s speaker is “uprooted,” she knows she ought to follow other roads (“he de seguir otros caminos”) to find union with “tu,” even if it requires searching in the river’s rush (“la voz del río”) or in the subtle fragrance of the meadow (“el perfume sutil de la pradera”). Ultimately, the speaker concludes her search in an ambiguous landscape of inner spaces where “tu sombra distante/se une/a mi silencio” (your distant shadow unites with my silence). In “Tu cuarto poema” (Your Fourth Poem) the speaker places the ambiguous landscape in the fertile fields of the imagination “de un 1258

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mundo fantastico/el mágico prodigioso” (in a fantastic world [of] prodigious magic), but even this lyrical call to a conjured up space of desire and memory devolves into a disquieting “tierra” (land) of dislocation where “ni existía la esperanza” (even hope did not exist) and where “nada/duele/más/que/una/ ruta/sin regreso” (nothing hurts more than a route [cf. “root”] without return). Avoiding the identifiable specifics of her absent patria, these and other poems in the volume nonetheless limn the mood and pain of a lost home despite the speaker’s knowing voice of worldly experience. Robles concludes over half of the thirty-one poems in Tiempo artesano with a geographical place name, presumably the site of the poem’s conception or composition during her post-Cuban wanderings. Most bear Spanish locations such as Madrid and Barcelona, but others emerged from the author’s travels to Lisbon, Rome, and New York (where she attended graduate school). One untitled piece opens with a question in Latin—“Quo vadis?”—to introduce a mildly ironic, humorous questioning of the speaker’s peripatetic travels over “treinta y tres puentes,” (thirty-three bridges) through a “paseo meteórico en el Louvre,” (meteoric walk through the Louvre) to the repeated refrain “con parada facultativa ante” (with optional stops beforehand). Similar in theme, though not in tone, “Trilogía en punto final” (Last Place Trilogy) captures the uprooted sentiments of the entire volume as well as its pervasive tone of wistfulness and heartbreak in love: I Nos encontramos en la equis siempre equidistante . . . Nos encontramos en tus manos abiertas —último rincón de mi derrota. II Se parte de cero para llegar a cero . . . III Ven, vienes, vamos: voy Te vas, te fuiste, te has ido: me voy. (We encounter each other in the always equidistant X We encounter each other in your open hands —final corner of my ruin [cf. “de-routing”]. The zero splits to arrive at zero Come, you come, let’s go, I go, You’ll go, you went, you’ve gone, I’m leaving.)

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Through these poems and others like “Verona en USA, 1971” (Verona in the USA, 1971) and “Poemas de la muerte” (Poems of Death), Tiempo artesano ends as it begins—situating its subject, time and art, firmly in the shifting consciousness of the émigré poet’s subtle imagination. In her second chapbook of twenty untitled poems, En esta aurora (1978, At This Daybreak), Robles leaves the subject of displaced wanderings to take up more explicitly the tense problematics of human relations, both romantic and mundane. “Sólo he venido al mundo/para abrirte un camino” (I’ve come to the world solely to open a path for you), begins one piece that explores the centuries-old “vértigo [que] nos envuelve” (vertigo [that] engulfs us) in the struggle to forge “eslabones de celulas” (links of cells) between one another. Here, as elsewhere, the poet invokes a metaphor of solid space to suggest an abstraction: “hasta encontrar/en el fondo de la tierra/el milagro desnudo/de una palabra nuestra” (until we encounter in the depths of the earth the naked miracle of our word[s]). The same effect emerges from “Apuntes para una mañana” (Notes for a Tomorrow), the last poem in the collection, in which Robles examines “Cosas simples” (simple things) such as how “afeitarnos el sexo/una vez por año/y reírnos de esa estafa” (we preen our sex once a year and we laugh at that swindle). The poem concludes “entre el pan y el gesto simple del olvido” (between bread and the simple gesture of forgetting) where, appropriately enough for a displaced writer, the only constructive outcome is “que nos vimos crecer/en la palabra” (that we saw ourselves grow through the word). The work of Lydia Cabrera and Mireya Robles—along with that of such other Cuban writers as Hilda Perera, Belkis Cuza Malé,* and Hortensia Ruiz del Viso, and artist Ana Mendieta—demonstrate the utility of imaging one’s personal experience of diaspora with reference to the geographic specifics of costumbrismo, physical scene, landscape, and political realities. Such imaging both recalls and preserves their homeland, as well as expressing intimate psychological interiors that capture poetic places with broad significance. By encoding their subjects and themes in terms of place throughout much of their work—even though their genres, styles, and preoccupations contrast markedly from each other—these three writers contribute distinct Cuban voices to Latin American letters. They also capture with concrete precision the inexorable value of the topography of origin to those who perceive themselves dislocated from their geographic roots.

Gender Just as the previous section is not intended as an impermeable, exclusive classification of traits but is rather meant as a category of selected commonalties to facilitate this overview of the larger diversity that constitutes Latina literature, so, too, the present section emphasizes gender-inflected commonalities apparent through this literature. Some of the texts and writers examined here could fit in either the previous or succeeding categories but are included here because of their works’ inscriptions of sexuality, feminism, and sex-role 1260

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identity. Most of the texts and writers discussed within this rubric explicitly forefront feminist issues and the problematics of female identity given the defining power of androcentrism. Through plot situation, characterization, symbol, and narrative experimentation, these writings recognize women’s crucial struggle “to express and assert the validity of woman-space and the textured zone of women’s experience” (Candelaria 1992, 55). These expressions of creativity are part of the feminist project undertaken by bicultural women in the United States and Latin America who are otherized by socioeconomic status (class), color (race), language, and culture (ethnicity), and legal and cultural proscriptions against female agency (gender). In a longer, more specialized study, a case could be made for tracing the origins of Latina/Mexicana/Chicana feminism to reconsiderations of four pre-feminist icons of American history and female identity—La Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Sor Juana, and La Llorona (The Wailing Woman). Each embodies important images of la mujer that have helped define and circumscribe the roles of Latin American women for at least five centuries. As singular historical personages, moreover, La Malinche and Sor Juana contributed to the shape of discourse on gender politics in the hemisphere in ways that still affect the language and cultures of the Americas (the Conquest, malinchismo, the perils of educated women). Suffice it to point out here that many of the writers and artists surveyed in this section allude to these four icons of female meaning in a variety of ways throughout their creative projects, usually through the optics of revisionary feminism. Most often their perspectives of Chicana/Latina history and experience do not privilege gender over race or ethnicity but disclose sex–gender/race–ethnicity as intertwined constructions of socioeconomic class and material history. Importantly, however, a number of writers (Rosario Castellanos, Cherrie Moraga,* Dolores Prida) have indeed elected to give primary emphasis to themes of gender and sexuality, believing that, in patriarchies, fundamental questions of desire, identity, and power unavoidably derive from and reside in primary ideas about femaleness, maleness and their intersubjective social construction. Mexican American women writers have played a vital part in configuring the feminisms of the Americas and also in reconceptualizing chicanismo, the philosophy and ideology of Chicana and Chicano consciousness. Chicana activists, whether literary, political, or grassroots, have helped forefront the distinctive history, experience, and desired agency of all marginalized cultures, including the need to challenge the gendered in-group subordination of Chicanas by machismo and its myriad traditions. Asserting personal and collective authority for themselves as women through public expression in print and other creative mediums, Chicana writers define themselves from within Chicana and Chicano experience and not solely in relation to the dominating political and social hegemonies, whether of the empowered dominant group or the subordinated in-group. As Rosaura Sánchez puts it in her “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective” (1990), 1261

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authentic social history requires a “subjectidentified” analysis that valorizes the “multiple subjectivities” of the Chicana’s gendered identity, ethnoracial experience, and material class situation. One of the first Chicanas to publish explicit attempts at feminist fiction is Estela Portillo Trambley, whose short story, “The Paris Gown” (1973), discussed above, raised the feminist issues of a woman’s right and freedom to choose career over marriage and also to create her individual identity instead of acquiescing to a prescribed traditional sex role. This and related concerns appear in several other of her writings, most notably in the short story “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle” (1973) and in her plays The Day of the Swallows (1971) and Sor Juana (1989). The central theme of “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” which was published with “Paris Gown” and six other stories in Rain of Scorpions (1975), is the sexual double standard and its often violent consequences in machismo-identified societies. The story presents three physically battered and economically dependent women—Beatriz, Sofa and Lucretia—who are thrown together originally as girlmistresses of Robles, a savage macho who must prime his virility with alcohol, lechery, and violence. Beatriz, an Apollonian figure obsessed with order and the central actor in the narrative, finds ways to provide comfort and a measure of safety from their tormentor for the three women. However, when Robles threatens to violate Lucretia, his latest, fourteen-year-old acquisition, Beatriz can no longer suppress her silent fury: “Beatriz felt an anger. Woman . . . the victim . . . woman the victim. Why? It had no order.” Exercising the unique agency she has demonstrated in carving an affirmative identity for herself despite Robles’s dominance, she plans and executes his murder by poisoning him with amanitas mushrooms fatefully sprouted beneath her well-tended honeysuckles, symbolic of nature’s abundance and beauty. The Spanish word for the flowering vine, madreselva, aptly captures the gender inflections of the narrative by connoting both an originary feminine principle and the mystery connoted by a primal wilderness. Praised for its bold theme, cohesive imagery and symbolism, and gripping plot, “Honeysuckle” has also been criticized for its harsh depiction of Robles, himself a pathetic victim of a patriarchy’s material circumstances and socialized behaviors, as well as for the extreme violence (like the male abuse it opposes) of its “solution” to women’s victimization. Nevertheless, as a fictionalized treatment of one segment of the mass of downtrodden lives, the story inarguably shows the powerlessness many battered women feel in finding societally approved solutions to spousal abuse, and it represents a feminist viewpoint that holds that the pervasive power of patriarchy infects (as well as inflects) the very ideas and methods that seek to challenge its hegemony. In view of the greater attention in the last two decades to rape, the “battered wife syndrome,” and other crimes against women, the story’s portrayal of the double standard gains force and cogency over time as societal consciousness to these issues expands. Portillo Trambley’s plays tackle the same subject in markedly different thematic treatments. The Day of the Swallows (1971) exposes the impossibility for open lesbian expression in phallocentric societies, and, like “Honeysuckle,” 1262

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reveals the possible violent consequences of female agency when a repressed woman revolts against the misogyny that surrounds her. Set in a Mexican village where the Catholic Church and tradition define individual roles and community values, the darkly tragic drama reverses expectations by presenting the arrogant Josefa, another Apollonian figure, in the protagonist’s role. The playwright forces the audience to confront objectively the play’s iconoclastic assertion of the basic right to female autonomy and lesbian identity without the facility of partisan sentiment for the main character. Not until her final act of violence—suicide—does sympathetic understanding for Josefa emerge from the realization that even she, haughty model of strength and public recognition, is like other women who lack the power of a truly original, female-identified self-constitution, because women cannot escape the patriarchy that simultaneously rejects them as empowered agents but still defines them and shapes the sometimes violent terms of their resistance. Portillo Trambley’s play Sun Images (1979) and historical drama Sor Juana (1983), about one of the four major icons of Chicana identity, further evidence the strength of the author’s obra. She has also written a novel, Trini, published in 1986. Another writer whose project includes the recuperation of a Mexicana/Chicana icon is Lucha Corpi,* whose Marina four-poem cycle retrieved the history and legend of La Malinche for revisionary treatment of the Conquest and its profound impact on the gendering of the hemisphere’s cultures. Corpi has been publishing her poetry since the mid-1970s, adding narrative fiction to her work later (1989, Delia’s Song; 1992, Eulogy for a Brown Angel). Her narrativist bent is strong, however, in her Marina poems, where story and characterization are plotted with the same attention given to poetic imagery, diction, line, and meter. Originally written in Spanish, the Marina poems were first published in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets (1976) in English translation. Corpi does not so much rewrite the history of the Conquest or reinvent the biography of Doha Marina, the guide–interpreter–lover of Hernán Cortés, as she reinterprets it through the eyes of the woman, whom many, like Octavio Paz, see as “la chingada de Mexico” (the violated woman of Mexico), but who some Chicana feminists have recuperated as an important foremother of “herstory” (Del Castillo 1974; Tafolla 1978; Candelaria 1980). These recuperations go well beyond her individual victimization as a woman—both by the conquering Spaniards and later by Mexican politicians needing an indigenous scapegoat for the Conquest—to address the pervasive sexism at the root of human sociocultural systems, politics, and history. Also known by her indigenous name, Malinalli, and later by the honorific title Malintzin, given to her by the native peoples of Mesoamerica, she eventually became known as “La Malinche,”* significantly, the same name that the native peoples used for Cortés, whom even Moctezuma addressed as “Malinche.” Corpi’s first poem, “Marina madre,” represents her subject’s christening and pre-Hispanic origins to establish that her subalternity was both general, as a woman in Nahua society (“Húmeda de tradición” [Steeped in tradition]), and specific (“y muda fue vendida . . ./de mano en mano, noche a 1263

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noche,/negada y desecrada” [and silent, she was sold . . . passed from hand to hand, night after night, denied and violated] [74]). That Corpi elected to use “Marina,” the name assigned to her by the Spaniards when she was baptized, reflects the poet’s attempt to confer respect on her subject in light of the pejorative meaning of “traitor” attached to “Malinche” by later Mexican generations. Certainly the variety of names for the Aztec women considered the symbolic mother of mestizo Mexico reflects the patriarchal tradition of women’s names being dependent on father, husband, and male-defined values. As the poem states it, she was defined first by the tribal “viejos” (elders) who named her, then by the Spaniards who renamed her, and later even by “aquel . . . niño” (that child [her son by Cortés and, metonymically, later generations]) who called her “la chingada” (the raped one, the whore). It is “Marina virgen,” the second poem in the cycle, that presents the lyric and feminist codes central to reading the complete cycle. Lyrically, Corpi takes her images and tropes from the language of Christianity and Catholic faith, drawing upon the paradigmatic meaning of virginity as innocent purity to the Church and its followers. By making reference to altar, the crucified Christ, His sacred wounds, sin, holy water, and similar terms, the poet argues a seeming paradox: that Marina was still virginal and innocent even after her violation. But it is not paradoxical if Marina’s identity is decoded instead as an identification with the tortured Christ, whose myth required that his death redeem the sins of others, a decoding that helps explain why Corpi chose to open the cycle with “Marina madre” and not “Marina virgen,” the logical first stage. Like the Christian son of God, whose miraculous ascension was guaranteed even before the suffering and death of his incarnate form, the poet’s Malinche was destined to be the mother of mestizaje in childhood, long before her literal violation by Cortés and the desecration of her name into “la chingada de Mexico.” The feminist code in this second poem places its Christian lyrics in ideological tension by ascribing active agency and will to the subject. Through terms like “De su propio pie” (of her own will) and “arropaba su cuerpo” (she wrapped her body), Corpi suggests that Marina’s heroic stature emerged from her capacity to detach her self-identity from her victimization by transforming her very victimization into an act of agency on her part: No sabías que la había sembrado [su alma] en las entrañas de la tierra que sus manos cultivaban— la tierra negra y húmeda de tu vida. (77) (You didn’t know that she had planted [her soul] in the earth’s entrails which her hands had cultivated— the black moist earth of your life.)

The ideological tension between codes thus emphasizes the struggle and contradiction inherent within Malinche’s actual biography and evolved iconography. 1264

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The cycle’s concluding two poems, “La hija del diablo” (The Devil’s Daughter) and “Ella (Marina ausente)” (She [Absent Marina]), are each shorter by half than the first two, as if to capture the way her complex life was truncated into the unfairness of her shrunken legend as traitor. “La hija del diablo” describes her death in apocalyptic terms (“el trueno se reventó” [lightning struck]) and her afterlife as unfinished: “Sóloquedó una semilla/a medio germinar” (Only a half-germinated seed was left). The final poem uses images of nature to evoke the shifting nature of the legend of La Malinche as flower, water, night, clay, and daybreak, for example. Corpi also makes sure to include in this final piece oblique reference to La Llorona, the folk legend that many believe grew out of Malinche’s role in Mexican history: “es la sombra enlutada de un recuerdo/ ancestral” ([She] is the shadow of mourning of an ancestral memory, [78]). By closing the poem (and cycle) with Marina’s hands “llenas de sol y de tierra” (full of sun and earth, [79]), Corpi reconnects it to the first poem’s opening lines and its images describing Marina’s primal origins in “clay . . . dried” under the “tropical sun.” The value of Lucha Corpi’s four Marina poems is multifold. First, they offer a striking reconsideration of a central pre-feminist icon whose definition and recuperation has preoccupied Chicana intellectuals in their agenda of, in Norma Alarcón’s words, “replacing the flesh” on the legendary outlines of a historical person’s life (1983). The poems also recognize the importance of another such icon, La Llorona. Considered together, these two icons signify meanings of woman, femininity, sexuality, disempowerment, power, history, and culture that extend directly or indirectly to the identity and politics of all Mexicanas/ Chicanas. Further, “La Malinche” as ideological and cultural sign is a significant part of the hemisphere’s gendered sociopolitical stratification and its ingrained systems of hierarchy, misogyny, inequity, scapegoating, and marginalization. Presenting a unique literary signature in that ideological and cultural gendering is the pen of the Chicago-born writer Ana Castillo,* whose poetry and fiction have enriched Chicano and Chicana literature since the 1970s, when her first titles appeared. One of the earliest Chicana voices to articulate a sexual politics through textual poetics, Castillo’s work is marked by an explicit eroticism and a feminist rejection of stereotypes, whatever their cultural source or ethnoracial form. That is, she was one of the first voices to publicly express a genuinely woman-identified alternative to the machismo of the early Chicano Movement’s cultural nationalism, and her evolved work also questions the applicability of liberal bourgeois feminism to Chicanas and other women of color. From her chapbooks and books of poetry—Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975), I Close My Eyes (To See) (1976), Otro Canto (1977, Another Song), The Invitation (1979), Women Are Not Roses (1984, her first nationally distributed work), and My Father Was a Toltec (1988)—to her recent novels, the award-winning The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) and Sapogonia (1990), Castillo’s writings disclose the uncensored imagination, incisive language, and bold style of an artistry chronicling its creator’s universe(s) and the process of her creative exploration. 1265

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Castillo’s vision and writerly skill emerges from her apprenticeship and early poetry to first find its most mature expression in Women Are Not Roses, particularly in My Father Was a Toltec, and then in her novels. The opening stanza of My Father Was a Toltec’s “In My Country” declares “In my country, men/do not play at leaders/women do not play at men” (74), a utopian vision that immediately exposes the opposite ironic truth about “her country.” As the last poem in the volume, it encapsulates many of the themes expressed throughout the chapbook, themes that have centered the development of Castillo’s work. Thematically, the poem addresses the masculinized politics of power, the unceasing cycles of human violence derived from that power, the inefficacy of racism specific to minorities under capitalism, and the stubborn persistence of the poet “who can rejoice in the coming of/Halley’s comet, the wonders/of Machu Picchu, and a sudden kiss” (75). Moreover, keenly conscious of the frail fears and insecurities hidden behind the mask of individual sexism as distinct from its structural forms, Castillo’s inscriptions of gender in Toltec carefully avoid repeating the problem she is exposing, as when she states: In my country men do not sleep with guns beneath their pillows. They do not accept jobs building weapons. They don’t lose their mortgages, pensions, their faith or their dignity. (73)

Here and elsewhere, the narrator’s irony shows her sensitivity to the patriarchy’s enslavement of individual men and the institutional hold it has on the idealized versions of male freedom. But her sensitivity does not mute her directness in describing the pervasive nature of misogyny in society, regardless of the ostensibly progressive ideology behind it, as, for example, in the counter-movements of ethnic and political minorities. In “Someone Told Me,” her homage to Chilean revolutionary singer, Violeta Parra, she captures with the razor-sharp resonance of feminism the abject pathos of the singer’s suicide: “Liberals and politicos might be/disappointed in this account. That/she did not die beneath the blows/of rifle butts or by electric shock,/and instead, died the death/of a woman” (70)—a “mere” woman heartbroken because she was abandoned by her lover. This insight into the complex nature of romantic love, its sexual expression, and its relation to the prevailing ideologies of social power is perhaps the foundation of the writer’s vision. Accordingly, Castillo’s achievement in writing “Chicana” in its multiple personal, political, mythic, and sexual representations in Toltec anticipates her move toward expansive treatment of this concern in her fiction. Indeed, the poems “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain,” “I Am the Daughter/Mother Who Has Learned,” and “A Christmas Gift for the President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I’ve Known in My Time” weave together specific tropes, ideas, narrative voices and diction that reappear in her short stories and novels. The 1266

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three poems configure the mestiza in her intercultural identities: (1) as masculinized archetype of the feminine (“We are Ixtacihuatls,/sleeping, snowcapped volcanoes/buried alive in myths”); (2) as literal female both defined and liberated by her physiology (“the daughter/mother who/cuts the umbilical cord/of umbilical cords/to set us both free”), and (3) as writer who is casually dismissed because of her sex (“i grapple with non-existence, making scratches with stolen pen” [“A Christmas Gift . . .” 52–53]). By positioning her particular voice into the literature of the Americas, Castillo in these poems “resists/the insistence that i don’t exist” and thereby articulates a mestiza Chicana literary presence that gives birth to its own authority, separate, at least metaphorically, from the “classics” of men’s “relentless desire to be divine” (“A Christmas Gift . . .” 52), which she recognizes as the belletristic version of hierarchy’s Realpolitik. The Mixquiahuala Letters (Before Columbus American Book Award for Fiction, 1986) continues this insistent articulation of a distinct mestiza authority. Castillo experiments in the novel with narrative and point of view to call attention to the fact that the so-called “ideal” capacity of language and literature to liberate instead limits and distorts actual women, as well as abstractions about Woman, by reflecting the patriarchy’s deeply grounded terms of enthrallment. Taking the epistolary form that dates back to the earliest forms of modern novelistic writing in the eighteenth century, Mixquiahuala exploits the convention that requires that letters, traditionally a private form of communication, be read as if they were directed personally to the reader even though addressed to a fictive character. To emphasize this point, Castillo opens the novel with a letter to the reader from the author, a letter of instruction replete with a chart of personae (Conformist, Cynic, etc.) for the reader to assume while reading the succeeding “letters” from her protagonist, Teresa. Despite the formulaic, game-like stiltedness of the instructions, which reveals as much about the writer’s need for omniscient control as it does about what follows, it cleverly heightens the reader’s awareness that literal women and ideal Woman exist within the limiting, distorting conventions of romance, politics, language, and art—depending on the observer’s viewpoint at that moment. Mixquiahuala tells the story of Teresa (Tere) through letters she writes to her friend Alicia about events, mostly of romantic relationships (heterosexual and lesbian) experienced ten years and earlier; hence, it is an extended epistolary flashback, which means that Tere’s representation of experience, like all reminiscence, is both descriptive and revisionary. She tells her perception of what happened and also recasts it with varying degrees of insight into the meaning of the recorded experience. This plot structure offers an effective vehicle for Castillo to revisit the important themes treated in her poetry. For instance, her interest in the way androcentric archetypes of the feminine shape literal female experience emerges throughout Tere’s recapitulated account, especially in her representation of her affair with Alexis, which employs his third person voice to describe his idealization of her into muse (a technique and theme honed in Sapogonia). Similarly, the 1267

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paradox of the physical body’s oppressive and emancipating potentiality surfaces in Tere’s erotic pleasures and the varieties of sexual expression (Letters 2, 14–16), even if the enjoyments are short-lived or coded in terms she ultimately rejects (Letters 21, 31, 33). And the author’s concern with the textual or literary replication of sexual politics pervades the letters, as, for example, in Tere’s realization that romantic love “in the classic sense” is— like the Word and Art—just a “one syllable” version of the patriarchy “one is born to.” These examples are insufficient to convey the full complexity and thematic resonance of the novel, but they suggest the novel’s stylistic skill and conceptual heft. Mixquiahuala once again demonstrates Castillo’s assertion of powerful experiential, feminist mestizaje into American public discourse. Along with her short fiction (the tightly crafted “Ghost Talk”), this novel and the 1990 Sapogonia attest to her singular talent among current American writers. Another important participant in contemporary Chicana feminist discourse is writer Cherrie Moraga, who first gained a national audience for her role in producing This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (coedited with Gloria Anzaldúa* in 1981) and for her well-received autobiographical prose poem Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca paso por sus labios (1983, What Never Passed through Her Lips). Enjoying several printings and a revised second edition (1988), This Bridge Called My Back helped frame an alternative feminism for ethnoracial minority women whose material life experiences are compounded by the triple jeopardy of hegemonic patriarchy (with its built-in sexism, classism and racism), in-group sexism (including homophobia), and generalized racism. Loving in the War Years, on the other hand, offers a penetrating look at some of the issues raised in This Bridge through a personal account of Moraga’s life. Although Loving was not the first published writing, personal or otherwise, by a Chicana lesbian, it is today the best-known example (Gloria Anzaldúa and Sheila Ortiz Taylor published their stories in the 1979–1981 period, and Taylor’s novel, Faultline, appeared in 1982). A number of factors explain the particular success of Loving, among them the recognition Moraga received for This Bridge and her forefronting of gender, race, and economic class as inseparable markers of identity. For example, in the section of Loving headed “We Fight Back with our Families” she writes, [T]he strategy for the elimination of racism and sexism cannot occur through the exclusion of one problem or the other. . . . The only people who can afford not to recognize this are those who do not suffer this multiple oppression. I remain amazed at how often so-called “Tercer mundistas” [Third-World advocates] in the U.S. work to annihilate the concept and existence of white supremacy, but turn their faces away from male supremacy. Perhaps this is because when you start to talk about sexism, the world becomes increasingly complex. The power no longer breaks down into neat little hierarchical categories . . .

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A major part of the work’s power in “talk[ing] about sexism” is Moraga’s depiction of the existential fact of her lesbian identity in a heterosexist world—the agony, the confusion, the wonders, and the joy. Another factor accounting for the book’s success is her experimentation with autobiographical form in its quilting together of techniques and multiple genres (essay, poetry, personal narrative, and vignettes of experience) as if to reflect her celebration of mestizaje through bold disregard of literary conventions. And certainly the work’s quality and evocative power is perhaps the clearest explanation of its reception. Near the end of Loving, Moraga writes, “I am a river cracking open . . . thin tributaries . . . skimming the bone surface of the earth. . . . Now I can see the point of juncture. Communion. And I gather my forces to make the river run.” In its widespread impact on readers and consistent critical acclaim, Loving in the War Years has resonated widely like the prophetic flow of that “river.” Other important streams in the powerful current of contemporary Chicanaidentified feminist literature have been written and published in the last two decades by Angela de Hoyos, Carmen Tafolla, Sylvia Lizárraga, Marina Rivera, Sylvia Gonzales, and Dorinda Moreno. Notable writers whose creative work gained audiences in the 1980s include Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, Alicia Gaspar de Alba,* Demetria Martinez,* Alma Villanueva,* and Helena Maria Viramontes.* Clearly, as critics as diverse as Juan Bruce-Novoa, Ramón Saldivar, and Charles Tatum have all observed, an exciting, prolific, and rich area of Latina and Latino creative literary expression is that being produced by Chicana feminists throughout the United States. Another equally vigorous source of Latina feminist literature is that being written by Puerto Rican women. Their foregrounding of gender in all aspects of cultural experience and their positioning of women’s subjectivities into public discourse adds to the riquezas (richness) of American literary production, too long identified primarily in masculine terms (in a canon running from Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman to Neruda, Martí,* and García Márquez). In addition, like their Cubana literary counterparts, Puertorriqueñas frequently underscore the social and cultural meaning of Négritude as they explore race in its definitive intersections with ethnicity and class within their gender-inflected perspectives on interior and exterior spaces. Rosario Ferré* belongs to that handful of Latin American women writers (Mistral, Castellanos, Poniatowska) whose works have gained an international readership and global stature. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to a family influential in politics and business, she acquired the extensive formal learning common to her class and an equally extensive informal education through intimate exposure to the workers who surrounded her family and made possible its privilege. Zealously bookish from early childhood, she began writing poetry at an early age and in college began the active publishing that has marked her entire career. Her firsthand acquaintance with island politics as the daughter of Governor Luis A. Ferré, coupled with her sensitivity to the political inequalities of her classist society and her steeped literary sensibility, eventually led her to espouse the radical and controversial views of the Puerto Rican independence movement. 1269

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The complex and contradictory tensions of her intellectual affinities as a privileged daughter of neocolonialism culminated in 1971 in her first, and one of her most lasting, major public projects: the cofounding of Zona de carga y descarga (Loading and Unloading Zone), a literary journal whose vanguard ideology pushed out aesthetic boundaries by offering a forum for Puerto Rico’s oppositional discourse on the legacy of historical colonialism and its contemporary technocapitalist forms. On the pages of Zona emerged the early contours of Ferré’s feminist frameworks and her lifelong concern with gender as psychological and experiential condition and as sociopolitical construction. The magazine published “La muñeca menor” (1976, The Youngest Doll, 1991), one of her most effective and best-known fictional treatments of the pernicious effects of sexism, bringing her into intellectual circles that would help further shape her cosmopolitan vision. The branches of Ferré’s conscientized feminist project extend in several directions. Her fiction, particularly in Papeles de Pandora (1976, Pandora’s Papers) and Maldito Amor (1986, published in translation as Sweet Diamond Dust and Other Stories, 1988), depict in poignant detail the struggles of individual women resisting the flattening of their multidimensionality and agency by the confining conventions of love, romance, domesticity, and male-identified femininity. Likewise, her essays and literary criticism (Sitio a Eros: siete ensayos literarios [1986, Eros Besieged: Seven Literary Essays], “El Acomodador”: una lectura fantástica de Felisberto Hernández [1986, The Usher: A Fantastic Reading of Felisberto Hernández], and her pieces in Zona de carga y descarga) trace the bases of her feminism to the empowerment derived from the dynamic process of reading literature, the subversive act of writing and the problematization of her particular position as a radical Puerto Rican writer. Similarly, her poetry, notably Fábulas de la garza desangrada (1982, Fables of the Bleeding Heron), addresses the mythic, lyrical standard of idealized womanhood and rejects its imprisonment of the objectified “Woman” that is bled fleshless by the idealization. Even in her juvenile writings, which are acknowledged as coding a sophisticated adult subtext (1977, El medio pollito [The Half Pullet], as well as her revisionary fairytales), she offers a feminist critique of unexamined gender inflections in social, cultural, and political forms. Space permits closer discussion of only two Ferré titles, a story and an essay. “La muñeca menor,” the celebrated story of a woman’s abuse and her revenge, grew out of a factual account from the author’s family that she transformed into a tightly drawn representation of the empowered desire that results when a woman made into a “doll” allows herself to actually feel her agony instead of denying it. The story’s thematic resonance—and surely part of its consistent popular and critical acclaim over the years—derives in great measure both from its gripping plot of calculated victimization turned upside-down by the victim’s calculated retribution (cf., Estela Portillo Trambley’s “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle”) as well as from the subtly crafted, familiar tone and matterof-fact innocence of the narrative voice. 1270

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A similar transparency of voice marks “La cocina de la escritora” (The Writer’s Kitchen), an essay that describes Ferré’s psychological “room of one’s own” development as a writer. “I place more trust in the words I use than perhaps I ever did in my natural mother,” she avers. “When all else fails . . . words are there, ready to return my confidence to me. . . . I write so as to reinvent myself” (214). The essay’s homely title and internal subheadings (“How To Let Yourself Fall from the Frying Pan into the Fire” and “How To Simmer the Stew over the Fire”), along with its few but pointed references to Ferré’s personal life, situate its carefully argued and literarily documented intellectual statements within the feminist belief that “the personal is political.” Ultimately, however, she registers that belief in the anti-feminist conclusion that the “secret of writing, like the secret of good cooking, has nothing to do with gender . . . [but] with the skill with which we mix the ingredients” (227). Yet, in the context of the totality of her resolutely feminist work, it is more accurate to describe her conclusion as post-feminist in the manner developed by later (especially French) “feminists.” Born only six years after Ferré, poet Sandra María Esteves* differs significantly from her more established compatriot in a number of ways. Unlike the economically privileged family Ferré knew, Esteves was born in the Bronx, New York, to a Dominican mother and immigrant Puerto Rican father, but was orphaned and raised by an aunt before being sent to a Catholic boarding school in Manhattan, where she lived for seven years. Ethnically self-identified as Nuyorican, she struggled to position her interest in art—particularly painting, which, during her work with the Taller Boricua artists’ collective, was her first mode of creative expression—inside her subjective experience as a bicultural immigrant Latina. Her emergence as a writer began in earnest when she discovered the countermovement in literary aesthetics through exposure in the 1970s to New York’s National Black Theater and the radical work of the African American “Last Poets” group. Brought to a political awareness of the efficacy of art and literature as oppositional discourse, her early work received the support of such well-known writers as Miguel Algarín,* Tato Laviera,* and Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and she began her own trajectory as a poet. Yerba buena: dibujos y poemas (1980, Spearmint: Drawings and Poems) and Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour (1984) are Esteves’s best-known works. In “A Julia y a mí” (For Julia and for Me), one of her most striking pieces in Yerba buena, the poet pays homage to one of her Puerto Rican foremothers through a conversation that problematizes her relation to the celebrated writer, Julia de Burgos. She acknowledges her predecessor’s important role as a guide to their shared geography (“en tus versos caminé tu rio/andé los pisos de la tierra roja” [in your verses I travelled your river/walked the grounds of the red earth,]) and to the universe they share as Puertorriqueñas: “el mismo mundo que miraba mi madre” (the same world my mother saw). But she also interrogates the sensibility of despair that resulted in the alcoholic Burgos’s tragic death at thirtynine: “you let the dragon slay you/. . . you let the wine mellow your hatred/dissolving the fuel that nourished your fires of wisdom” (50). Skirting 1271

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near the edge of post-hoc psychological reductionism, Esteves recognizes what she calls the “heresy” of her interrogation of the Burgos legend and is careful to acknowledge the poet’s central place within her own socialist feminist ideology, as when she sees a “world that has not moved/but an inch from your suffrage” (emphasis added, 51). Stylistically, as several critics have noted, an effective technique in the poem is its code-switching from Spanish (to describe Eurocentric cultural traditions) to English (to voice the countering ideology of feminist empowerment). The very alterations of code in the poem thus represent both the macrocosmic historical biculturality and the microcosmic internationalized double consciousness that define Puertorriqueñas and other Latinas of the Americas. Other examples of Esteves’s poems of empowerment include “A Celebration of Home Birth” and “Transference” in Woman of Her Word (1983). Both poems memorialize the nitty-gritty daily life of women’s experience (childbirth and male–female relations) to chronicle a record, to assert women’s authority, and to affirm the “possibilities” of authentic gendered equality “in a dialogue of we/You and me reacting, responding/Being, something new/Discovering” (Woman of Her Word, 35). Because the explicit idealism and celebratory feeling of such lines (cf. “sacred as Sunday morning in winter,” 32) is located within the homely struggles of everyday existence and the underscored specifics of concrete material forms, the poet, for the most part, manages to avoid both facile politics and emotional pathos without loss of exuberance. Also part of the vibrant feminist writing project that began flourishing in the 1960s among Puerto Rican women are Luz Maria Umpierre, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and those writers appearing in the successful Kitchen Table Press anthology, Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983): Amina Susan Ali, Cenen, Myrtha Chabrán, and Milagros Pérez Huth. The singular work of all these women has continued the important positioning of Island/Nuyorican voices in the American literary discourse begun decades before by Agostini, Burgos, and Mohr. A third indispensable source of Latina feminist literature originates with Cuban American women and traces a noteworthy lineage from the work of Lydia Cabrera. Cabrera’s forefronting of gender in her work hinted at the myriad possibilities and multifold styles that the subject could take, and her titles helped expand the androcentric master canons that comprise Western literature. Moreover, like Puertorriqueña writers and artists, Cubanas also frequently address the cultural and sociopolitical meanings of material African American experience and the symbolism coded in Négritude. They, too, interrogate race in its defining intersections with ethnicity and class as they write their explicitly gendered perspectives on self and society as refracted through the optics of (historical, “neo-,” and “post-”) colonial versions of Cuba, Miami, the diaspora, and interior or private subjectivities. A Cubana whose literary projects especially evince effective perspectives on gender is playwright and poet Dolores Prida. Born in Caibarien in 1943, Prida is an émigré to the U.S. who situates her work in a decidedly North American ambience and therefore employs English as her primary code, 1272

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Spanish bilingualisms figuring usually as metaphors of ideology. Prida’s plays and poems reside to a large extent in the individualized personal-is-political diction of North American postmodernity. Prida is among the best-known contemporary Cuban American writers of her generation. The winner of several literary honors in the U.S. and abroad (such as the Cintas Literature Fellowship and CAPS Creative Service Award for playwriting), she has had more than eight plays performed, some—such as “Beautiful Señoritas” and “The Beggars Soap Opera”—having enjoyed multiple productions. She also has published three volumes of poetry and is an active, highly visible presence in the New York literary scene, where she has held a number of editorial positions in publishing. Despite this impressive record, Prida “considers” herself “a ‘theater worker’ rather than a ‘theatre literata’ . . . [because] Theatre is people [and] team work” (Breaking Boundaries 183). This sense of popular community inspires her work and explains her choice of comedy and music as vehicles for her personal and political expression. To one degree or another, all her work dramatizes the problematics of gender, even those whose primary subjects and plots are not explicitly genderinflected. By skillfully using music, comic and parodic language, and striking visual symbols, she seeks to “reflect” the “hotly debated” original motives and evolved response (from indifference to backlash) to “la liberación femenina” (Breaking Boundaries). Her most effective work on women combines these attributes with strong, dimensioned characters living inside funny, adroitly developed plots. Exemplifying these attributes with a subtle treatment of Cubana realities and Third World feminism is Coser y cantar (To Sew and to Sing), first produced in New York’s Duo Theatre in 1981. A one-act bilingual play set in a modest New York City apartment, Coser y cantar presents only two characters: the roommates Ella, an immigrant Cubana, and She, an unconscientized Anglo American. Their dialogue alternates between easy familiarity, intense hostility, hilarity, quiet reminiscence, and relentless introspection about “el gran misterio de nuestra cultura” (the great mystery of our culture)—a mock serious statement uttered by Ella in trying to figure out the meaning of a popular Cuban song. What becomes clear as the “two” characters reveal themselves, moving from Ella’s messy feminine clutter of cosmetics and Virgin icons to She’s neater side arranged with books and the paraphernalia of a health fanatic, is that they are actually one woman and that their conversational quick changes and rollercoaster emotions constitute one elaborate subtextual monologue. This ingenious framework allows the playwright to be glaringly candid about the painful nature of Ella/She’s biculturality and the psychosocial schizophrenia it both reflects and produces, while at the same time making possible the affirmation of the ending, which implies that bicultural coexistence is not only desirable but an essential precursor to the intercultural synthesis that could comprise Ella/She’s (and America’s) best future. Prida’s program notes describe the play’s action as “a verbal, emotional game of ping pong . . . except in the final confrontation, Ella and She never look at each other, acting independently, 1273

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pretending the other one does not really exist” (“Important notes from the Author,” n.p.). Only after forcing one another to not only acknowledge and resist the other but actually to see each other can they begin to respect and care for the one person, the whole that contains “Her.” In other words, the nominative subject forms, “ella” and “she,” must embrace one another’s objective form, “her,” before the “singing” and “sewing” highlighted in the title motif that runs throughout the play can produce a whole song or finished garment. Only then can the infinitive forms of the homely, practical “coser” and the diverting, artistic “cantar” be combined into “ser.” The play’s feminism lies in its valorization of one simple, anonymous woman’s life—the one-act structure offering an appropriate scale—to “deal with how to be a bilingual, bicultural woman in Manhattan and keep your sanity” (Breaking Boundaries 185). By surveying with caustic bluntness and satiric humor the multiple conflicts and contradictions warring inside one woman about cultural/sexual/identity politics, the play both models and argues a “sisterhood” that, for individual and collective survival, can neither be scapegoated nor deferred. This vision of identity as grounded in the very margins of one’s biculturality, the interstices of one’s mestizaje (cf. Bruce-Novoa’s* “hyphen,” Candelaria’s “wild zone,” Anzaldúa’s “borderlands,” Sandoval’s “oppositional space”), is one of the most original and important contributions made to the discourses of literature and ideology by oppositional ethnic theory and aesthetics. Other significant Cubanas who are contributing to that oppositional literature, with attention to—if not particular emphasis on—the problematics of its gendered context include Cuban-born writers Aleida Rodríguez, copublisher of Rara Avis Magazine and Books of a Feather, and Sara Rosel, whose Spanish-language short fiction first appeared in Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983). Much of the more widely distributed work of Lourdes Casal, Lydia Cabrera, Eliana Rivero, and Mireya Robles, as well as that of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Dora Alonso, and Maria Elena Llano, also treats the subject of women and “Woman” creatively.

Genre Keeping in mind the permeability of groupings within the tripartition “geography/gender/genre,” intended primarily as a convenient schema of arrangement, this section looks at writers and texts that offer striking examples of literary crafting and stylistic experimentation, as well as forefronted treatments of intertextuality and issues of canonicity. In one sense, this section addresses the literary aesthetics, the poetics, of Chicana/Latina discourse, de-emphasizing for the sake of rhetorical convenience the figurative content and referential context highlighted in the two previous sections. In another sense, however—and as previously argued—this section can only be a framing category, for it is impossible to separate the poetics of these works not only from their content especially but also from their originating material contexts. Nevertheless, primary attention is given here to formal crafting and experimentation and to intertextuality (which necessarily includes issues of canonicity). 1274

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An argument might be made for tracing the historical genesis of an ars poetica for American women to La Malinche in the sixteenth century. As the conqueror Cortés’s “lengua” (tongue), so labeled by both natives and Spaniards at the time, the historical record shows her to be the first post-Columbian American woman forced to confront issues of interlingual meaning, intercultural translation, and linguistic choice. Thus confronted, she had to find the words in Maya, Nahua, and Spanish to express the different, competing, and contradictory desires of the masters she served. She had been partially “prepared” for this pivotal, absolutely sui generis role through her childhood abandonment and exile from the valley of Anáhuac and Tenochtitlán to the Yucatan peninsula (Candelaria 1980), but there was little in Mesoamerica to prepare her to serve as interlocutor between the Spanish crown, Ibero-European cultures, and Christianity (all represented by Cortés) and the empire of the Aztecs, Moctezuma, and her indigenous cultures and religious beliefs. In light of the vast gulf between the two worldviews and, more mundanely, of her required service as companion to the invading Spaniards and sexual partner to the Conqueror, La Malinche’s material experience was immediately bicultural and the actual terms of her identity positioned from the very beginning in the margins of her biculturality. As “La Lengua,” then, one whom explorer Bernal Díaz and others celebrate for her intelligence and interpreting skills (Del Castillo 1974; Candelaria 1980), we can assume with good reason that to communicate well she constantly had to confront such rhetorical concerns as representation, semantics, diction, and allusion—obviously all discursive concerns—and in doing so was pragmatically, if not theoretically, made conscious of the intercultural, interlingual gender inflections of language and representation. That consciousness inevitably required a discursive agency on her part, one that explains attributing to her a germinal position in the hemisphere’s history and mestiza discourse. Chicana writers have provided a nuanced library of titles reflecting the poetics of discourse going back at least to the Chicano and Chicana Renaissance. Importantly, the contemporary retrieval work in literary and historical archives that flourished in the 1990s suggests that the sources of women’s writing in Aztlán* trace back even to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of European exploration and colonization (Lomas 1990; Rebolledo 1992). Space considerations require, however, that only contemporary Chicana literature be treated here. One unusual example of that literature, also exemplifying a distinctive Chicana literary aesthetics, is the case of Diana López, whose Victuum (1976, Victim) appeared under the pseudonym Isabella Ríos. Her example is unusual because of her small output as a writer (Victuum is her only available published novel) and because she elected to publish it under a pseudonym, a rare choice among Mexican Americans. Further, the narrative itself defies deconstruction, generic placement, or analysis of idea. López has stated that Victuum was originally designed as a “Chicana bildungsroman*” based on the life of an aunt of hers but evolved instead into a “nonfiction biographical” account of oral history-like interviews of her psychic aunt (Eysturoy 202). But the book is not entirely or exactly generic biography either, for the author allowed her clairvoyant aunt’s psychic 1275

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experiences to determine the narrative’s unique episodic nature and even its striking title. In a filmed interview she describes the style of her book as closer to “drama” and “script” than to “novel,” which more fittingly captures the stream-ofconscious flow of the narrative (Lomelí 1979). However it is classified, the book offers a striking example of one Chicana’s attempt to name and represent “la mujer” (women and “Woman”) within the discourse of chicanismo. In summary, Victuum presents the psychic, supernatural, and material life of Valentina Ballesteros from preborn fetus through childhood to adulthood and her evanescence into psychic and metaphysical abstraction. It is thus a story that strives to apprehend the interiorities of womb, mind, words, and spirituality. To write such a tale convincingly, whether as biography or dramatized fiction, requires a technical sophistication, particularly in stylizing its point of view and characterization, that severely challenges López’s skills in her firstnovel experimentation. Such a story must hook interest to Valentina as an appealing protagonist whose personality and circumstances will so engage the reader that disbelief about her otherworldly experiences will be willingly suspended in readerly pursuit of the outcome (cf. Isabel Allende’s* House of Spirits). Unfortunately, the reader’s bond with Valentina is slow to form and remains tenuous largely because, as Francisco Lomelí points out in his mostly favorable study of the novel, the work suffers greatly from overwrought “disguises” in viewpoint and “confusing narration” (Lomelí 1985, 42). Its flawed plot development and too-few, remotely drawn situational specifics also distance the reader from engaging the solipsisms of the characters, especially Valentina and Victuum, the outergalactic being that appears to guide her to cosmic consciousness. López is primarily concerned with respectfully portraying her aunt’s clairvoyance, spirituality, and religious mysticism. That the writer does not fully meet the challenges of such a daunting task does not destroy the narrative. It effectively exploits the inherent capacity of the novel to stretch form and be open to the wide reach of human experience and consciousness. Moreover, it marks several noteworthy achievements: as experimental New Age/science fiction, as a female-dominated Chicana story, and as spiritual documentary and oral history. Despite its emphasis on the supernatural, Victuum does include a range of scenes of dialogue and material experience among Chicanas that are effectively marked by verisimilitude. Perhaps the title’s embedded allusions of victor (as spiritual triumph), vicar (as human intermediary of the spirit), tumba (tomb), and tumbar (to knock down or stumble as in life’s continual struggle between material reality and intangible ideals) best capture both the engaging ingenuity and the unsatisfying convolutions of López/Ríos’s highly original project. Another significant writer whose published work is modest but whose intertextual framework has resonating power is Colorado-born poet and literary critic Bernice Zamora.* An active presence in Chicano and Chicana letters for over three decades, her poems and essays have appeared widely in alternative periodicals, even though her primary contribution has been through one volume of poetry, Restless Serpents (1976), which, expanded with new material, is 1276

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being republished. Restless Serpents is marked by “occasional brilliance” and a “multiplicity of subjects and themes that range from Aztlán motifs to frequent allusions to art, religion and politics” (1989, 147)—the latter strength accounts for inclusion of the poet in the genre section of this study. The tropology of the title poem coheres the thematics of all the pieces in Restless Serpents. Zamora introduces the serpent metaphor first in “Stone Serpents,” a verse portraying the social and psychological condition of the weary wealthy” (66). She builds her treatment of the decadences of privilege not by limiting her figuration to the subtle intelligence and evil normally associated with serpents, but instead by positioning them as “carved” symbols on the “balustrades” surrounding the “castle” of affluence (66). This positioning allows her to foreground the snakes’ inanimateness as “stone” and their impotence as “rusting treasures” cached inside the unused “temple[s]” of the dead aristocracies they represent. Countering this serpentine stasis, the trope in the poem “Restless Serpents” relies on the animate qualities of “coiling,/recoiling, pricking” restlessness embodied in the unfettered motion of the serpents metaphorically stirring “the master’s veins” (74). The coiling snakes here dominate—not decorate—their environment like the reptiles in “Stone Serpents,” and they force human notice (“the duty of a cobra’s master”) and alert, engaged conduct. As metaphors for two kinds of attitudes to life and living, the dichotomy between “stone” and “restless” serpents represent the difference between impotence and vitality, between decay and creativity, that in part also describes Zamora’s explicitly intertextual poems. The poet consciously places a host of the volume’s titles in conversation with, primarily, American poets Theodore Roethke and Robinson Jeffers and German novelist Hermann Hesse. For example, her “Orange-throats” and “And All Flows Past” imitate Roethke’s language and symbols for the purpose of inscribing another version of the emergent erotics of adolescence. Her dialogue with Jeffers is more complex; in “Pico Blanco” and “California” the intertextual relationship argues “against his [philosophy of] Inhumanism” even as it “evokes the creative dynamics that inspired his poem. . . . Zamora recasts Jeffers’s work in essential ways, forcing reconsideration of the original texts” (Candelaria 1989, 149). Her foregrounded allusions ascribe a “stone”/”restless” serpents analogy to art and literature, suggesting that the preserved works of the past are not preserved unchanged, nor are they even really past: like language itself, their basic capacity to mean is dialectical and dynamic. Also working the demanding genre of poetry intertextually with nuanced sophistication is Lorna Dee Cervantes,* a California native now teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder and described in 1983 by the distinguished poet Alurista as “probably the best Chicana poet active today” (Chicano Poetry, 156). Her first published volume, Emplumada (1981), is still one of the most critically acclaimed post-Chicano Renaissance titles (Rocard; M. Sánchez), and her Bird Ave. (1989) poems have won similar favorable notice. In addition, her consistent participation in alternative publishing (Flor y Canto anthologies, Mango, Quarry West, and currently 1277

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Red Dirt) has established her central place in Chicana and Chicano literature, one further enhanced by the 1991 appearance of From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. The title image of Emplumada yokes “the fragility and transitoriness of lived experience and suggests that art is one way to gain [in Cervantes’s words] ‘distanc[e] from history’” (Chicano Poetry 183). The word “emplumado” refers, as the book’s epigraph states, to “feathered; in plumage, as in after molting,” while “plumada” denotes “pen flourish,” thereby connoting the act of writing. The volume’s title poem thus captures the poet’s recognition that poetry marries life’s fleeting temporal aspect (i.e., the plumage that molts with the passing of seasons) with the prospect of its conquest through the pen’s permanently etched strokes of meaning. This recognition informs the strongest poems in the book (“Uncle’s First Rabbit,” “For Virginia Chávez,” “The Anthill,” “Visions of Mexico,” and her especially well-crafted, most widely distributed title, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”) and imbues her possession of the poetic genre with the full multifold dimensions of her identity as a Chicana writer, or what critic Marta Sanchez names as Cervantes’s “harmonizing [of] gender and culture” through her vocation as “scribe” (1985, 85–86). Bird Ave. continues the poet’s use of the bird motif seen in her first volume in deepened, more problematized configurations: flying, caged, fragile as feathers, powerful as flight, expressive as plumas writing the world’s multitudinous stories. Inspired by a San Jose street sign, the book’s title reveals the poet’s incisive creativity as she teases the allusion to the Latin “ave” (hail), which calls up sacred hosannas to the Virgin Mary out of the more mundane than profane abbreviation for “avenue” ubiquitous in America’s cities. She fills the title poem with multiplying tropes that play off one another to texture an image, contest an idea, and reverse rhythms in subtle syncopations of language and line—a complex technique visible throughout the volume. For instance, as the poem’s pachuca speaker Cat-eyes remembers her tough youthful encounters on the street, her thoughts of another pachuca, Mousie, and of “teased tough hair [and] teased tight skirts” glide casually into the memory of “my head [banging]/on the blacktop for effect,” an elision that maintains her barrio-tough exterior by leveling the fact of being violently beaten to the same plane as the other recollected images (5). The poem’s muscular technique and dense figuration, which mark the book’s other pieces, make Cat-eyes’s barrio world of bittersweet delights, street violence, teeming vitality, pachuca experience, and the paradoxes of urban life concretely vivid. Like Emplumada, Bird Ave. dialogizes (in the Bakhtinian sense) contemporary American literary idioms with the forefronted voice(s) of her complex Chicana sensibility and rich experience. Also representing chicanismo dialogically, the poems in From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger extend Cervantes’s inscription of her gendered, ethnic, vocational self as a Chicana writer. The poem, “The Levee: Letter to No One,” demonstrates with particular brilliance the volume’s strengths. Describing the speaker’s walk along a levee, the poem focuses on her observation of a woman who “looked like my mother” (5) and the musings that 1278

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that impression generates. Dramatic as the concretely evoked scenes in Emplumada’s “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” to name one example, the opening lines of “The Levee” immediately engage the reader/hearer by forcing interest in its affective subject (why is the woman in “red stretch pants” crying?), as well as suspense by eliciting interest in why the speaker/poet is interested in the stranger. Our response is heightened by the poet’s skillful, meticulous attention to scenic detail: the “sewer spew,” the “blue herons, collapsing and unfolding,” the “silt and salt [of] this reservoir” (5). We are told that the woman “was there a long, long time,/sitting on the levee, her legs swinging,” thus forcing awareness that the speaker, too, was preoccupied on the same spot for a long time, further stimulating interest. Having secured reader/hearer engagement, Cervantes offers an optic to the thematics of “The Levee” through its intricately developed rhyming of tropes. She matches, for example, the “water,” “tears,” and “piss” to the “salt” and “silt” of “sewer spew,” just as she rhymes the bird images of “nest egg hair,” “herons,” “egret’s tail,” and “swallows” (5-5). This matching of images reifies by analogy the thematic bridging, the connecting of ideas, that explain the speaker’s bond with the stranger who “look[s] like her mother.” The two solitary women are also matched by their sharing of the levee, presumably the two alone, first sitting as mute observers, then walking “back both sides” to the sounds of the “slic[ing] wind or waves.” The speaker’s bond to the woman thus etched through imagistic rhyme, Cervantes’s technique sets up intertextual linkages (parallel allusions operating off each other) to the mothers (and grandmothers) in her other poems, a reading process that pushes forward the theme of mother loss girding the poem. Along with the intertextuality and matched tropes, she embeds the theme in the word choice that underscores squalor, pain, and absence: “leftover piss,” “knife of their throats,” “hunger,” “wrenched,” “denial,” and others that in context paradoxically evoke a poignant longing for their mother found opposites. This quintessential longing lies at the core of the tragic La Llorona legend and its incredibly lasting iconic, surely affirming resonance among Mexican Americans (Candelaria 1977; Limón 1990). But if mother loss girds the poem’s thematics and form (with, possibly, another more oblique allusion to La Llorona), it also builds to the subtle and complex affirmation associated with tragedy (i.e., the Chicana feminist recuperation of the Llorona tale). As in her other poems memorializing her mother and grandmother—works of harsh realities that nonetheless end hopefully— Cervantes offers here an explicit phrase of hope (“The river is a good place/for . . . beauty’s flush”) to reinforce the implicit affirmation in the poem’s poetically crafted authenticity and the beauty of its achieved authority. An added intertextual nuance in this melancholy lyric configuring a solitary poet-singer’s relation to her family origins lies in its recalling of a similar ode in American literature, Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Out of the primal waters (ocean, tears, rain, etc.) that mark both poems, both speakers sing their reconciliations with their pasts through recognition of their futures. In each the poet/speaker discovers the eternal tension underlying the 1279

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universe’s “symmetry”—the fused, and wrenched apart—and each apprehends the “good” in the decidedly lowercase nouns of mundane experience (a walk on a waterbank) and creative construction (poetry, song, walking, noticing, and remembering). Cervantes’s care in “The Levee: Letter to No One” characterizes the poetry in From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, and rivets her work securely on the shelf of poets of the Americas. Other Chicana poets whose accomplishments deserve much greater attention than present space allows include Alma Villanueva, Cherríe Moraga, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas,* Gina Valdés,* Yolanda Luera, and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Each contributes to the genre of poetry original signatures of powerful work that solidify the foundation of the verse begun in the Chicano Renaissance. Villanueva’s poems in Bloodroot (1977), the award-winning Poems (also 1977), Mother, May I (1978), and Lifespan (1984), and Moraga’s poems in Loving in the War Years and the play Giving Up the Ghost (1986) exploit the exacting requirements of poetry to chronicle their autobiographies of political resistance and personal affirmation. Both writers have also experimented successfully in other genres (Villanueva’s feminist novel The Ultraviolet Sky (1988) and Moraga’s autobiographical prose in her coedited Loving and in This Bridge Called My Back [1981]). Poets Cota-Cárdenas, Valdés, and Luera, who write extensively in Spanish, capture in their distillations of experience and vision the sociocultural challenges and unique possibilities of a consciously gendered mestizaje. A younger writer whose first published collection, “Beggar on the Cordoba Bridge” (in Three Times a Woman, 1989), was preceded by extensive publication in little magazines, Gaspar de Alba has enlarged her poetic work casting the sensibilities of a Tejana lesbian “exiled” in a racist, heterosexist America with an exciting new work of prose fiction, Facing the Mariachis: Puros Cuentos (1992). These poets and others—such as Carmen Tafolla, Angela De Hoyos, Miriam Bornstein, Evangelina Vigil, Demetria Martinez, Xelina, and Maria Herrera-Sobek—contribute striking perspectives to the dynamic currents of the Chicana-identified genre of contemporary American poetry. In Chicana prose fiction a number of writers and texts present memorable examples of technical crafting, stylistic experimentation, and explicit intertextuality. Like the work of Estela Portillo Trambley, their stories and novels disclose a heightened concern with the demands of fictional narrative that disrupts received conventions—whether of language choice, discursive method, or unquestioned cultural and ideological (U.S. or Mexican American) identities. Three writers whose prose fiction has invigorated the field with accomplished narratives that make adroit use of the genre’s malleable capaciousness are Helena M. Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo. Viramontes, the most conventional storyteller of the three in her limning of plot and character, relates stories of Chicana experience along a variegated continuum of ages, places, and relationships. Widely published in literary journals, her fiction is particularly noteworthy for its skillful handling of narration. The title story in The Moths and Other Stories (1985) exemplifies this talent through its development of the narrator’s voice as she tells of her “Abuelita’s” dying and 1280

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the grief that fuels her creative energy to write the piece. One of the most striking, adept features in “The Moths” is how the author manages to suggest the tone of the granddaughter’s mature grief and, simultaneously, the multiple registers of tone from the narrator’s girlhood. The flashbacks present a voice intermittently (and sometimes even simultaneously) infantile, confused, generous, sassy, and loving—and yet the dynamic tonality manages a narrative transparency that does not eclipse, romanticize, or ironize the fourteen-year-old’s viewpoint. As a result, the transition from objective, seemingly detached descriptions of the old woman’s dying (“Up close you could see her gray eye beaming out the window, staring hard as if to remember everything. I never kissed her” [25]) evinces an authenticity and immediacy that explains how the closing lines of magical unreality can ring true (“Then the moths came. . . . from her soul and out through her mouth” [281). The story’s effectiveness depends on the assured handling of the complexities of first-person telling, for it invites, sustains, and contains its other discursive parts. The other titles in the volume exhibit the same fine technique in the service of compelling themes. Like Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros is best known for her short fiction—even the novelistic The House on Mango Street, which consists of a series of vignettes held together by the girl narrator, Esperanza. Indeed, it is her insistent use of vignette and short story to build larger narratives that makes her work of particular interest in this section. As in Mango Street, her latest book, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), one of the first Chicana titles to be released by a mainstream publisher, constructs a narrative whole from a series of smaller fictions. Although the technique lacks consistent efficacy, as when the vignettes remain fragmentary shards (“My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” and “Eleven”), the title story succeeds in achieving its form and through its enhancement by the tone and themes of the accompanying pieces. By fully developing the female protagonist in “Woman Hollering Creek” through a rounded plot of marital estrangement, melancholy introspection, scenic borderlands detail, and evocative dialogue, Cisneros creates a fleshed persona whose story can then be deepened by the volume’s other short stories and prose fragments. It thus suggests the possibilities inherent in the author’s signature handling of the genre that Julián Olivares calls “a poetics of space” concerned with the “dialectic of inside and outside . . . [of] integration and alienation, comfort and anxiety” (1987, 161). Also working the genre of narrative fiction with particular skill and grace is Ana Castillo whose writing encompasses poetry, short fiction, and the novel. Castillo’s well-crafted assertion of a powerful feminist mestizaje in her several volumes of poetry and epistolary first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, assures her a significant place in contemporary American letters, a fact greatly strengthened by her achievement in Sapogonia (1990), her most recent book. The novel tells the story of Máximo Madrigal, a gachupín anti-hero who is at once romantic quester and beset picaro, and his love/hate obsession with Pastora Velásquez, a Chicana singer who becomes for “Max” an incarnate icon of “Woman” (the idealization of beauty, muse, Madonna, Eve, love) and also the fleshed woman 1281

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object of his material desires. As with certain Edith Wharton characters (Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, Ellen Olenska, and Newland Archer), Max only begins to give meaning to life and to know himself as he painfully resists, then slowly discovers that his “love” for Pastora is enmeshed with his testicular need to conquer and completely possess her. If unquestioned, it is a need that, given her intact serenity and strength, can only be satisfied by destroying her. The novel unfolds this passionate drama in the fictive “Sapogonia . . . a distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside . . . [its people] besieged by a history of slavery, genocide, immigration, and civil uprisings” (5). Creating her own Yoknapatawpha (Faulkner), Macondo (Garcia Márquez), or Klail City (Hinojosa-Smith*) gives Castillo a malleable and capacious place unbounded by literal referentiality that would distract from her novelistic design. Intellectually stimulating, stylistically inventive, and riveting in story, Sapogonia is a big book that alone would secure its creator honor; that it follows a path of outstanding literary work cements Castillo’s achievement. In a different vein of prose, Gloria Anzaldúa writes essays in the style of New Journalism that provide political commentary, autobiography, and historical revision. And, like that style, which is as old as Columbus’s diaries and Cortés’s letters and as new as articles by Elena Poniatowska and Gore Vidal, Anzaldúa pushes it to serve whatever idea and purpose occupies her at the moment. The well-received Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) sets out to define, recuperate, and celebrate the “border woman . . . between two cultures,” and it articulates that aim with an interwoven mixture of essay, story, memoir, poetry, and sermon presented in English, Spanish, and Tex–Mex bilingualisms. Coeditor of the original edition of This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa has also published essays and stories in alternative presses; her second book, Haciendo Caras (Making Faces), appeared in 1991. Contemporary Puerto Rican women writers who have produced an especially conscientized poetics of literary discourse include Luz Maria Umpierre, Ana Lydia Vega, Rosario Ferré, and Dolores Prida. However, as the lenses of literary criticism and historiography have been broadened and the received canon problematized by feminist and ethnopoetic analysis, archival retrieval studies (Marting 1990; Perricone 1988; Asize Vargas 1987; Umpierre 1985) are finding earlier sources of Puerto Rican women’s writing than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where most literary study on the subject to date has taken place. For example, even as early as 1908, Maria Luisa de Angelis produced a book-length treatment of Mujeres puertorriqueñas que se han distinguido en el cultivo de las ciencias, las letras y las artes desde el siglo XVII hasta nuestros días (Puerto Rican Women Who Have Distinguished Themselves in Cultivating Sciences, Letters and Arts Since the 19th Century to the Present [Foster 20]) and, in 1932, M. Santana Maz completed a dissertation for the Universidad de Puerto Rico devoted solely to La mujer en la literatura puertorriqueña (Women in Puerto Rican Literature [ibid.]) Reluctantly, then, space permits only abbreviated discussion of a few examples of the rich and textured field of contemporary Puertorriqueña writing. 1282

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One of the most prolific and skillful of those examples is the work of Luz María Umpierre, an Island-born poet who attended graduate school in the U.S., where she now teaches. She is the author of Una puertorriqueña en Penna (1978, A Puerto Rican in Penna [Pennsylvania]), En el país de las maravillas (1982, The Land of Wonders), Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes (1985), and numerous poems and critical essays in a wide range of literary or scholarly journals. What makes her poetry well-suited to this section is its insistent experiments with form and language, as well as its striking, often controversial, gendered and ethnicized treatment of theme. A quick decoding of the titles of her books makes the point precisely. The “Penna” in the first one depends on its interlingual punning of a common Nuyorican abbreviation for “Pennsylvania” with the Spanish “pena,” meaning “pain and suffering,” to draw out the allusion to the English “pen,” the basic (if phallic) tool of the writer (cf. Cervantes’s Emplumada), and the Spanish “pene” (penis). Likewise, the “country/land of marvels/marigolds” in the second title impart their tensions of paradox regarding material worlds and the intangible universes of imagination, love, and identity to the poems in the volume. Equally nuanced, the third title is interesting for its bilinguality and the in medias res beginning suggested by its first word fly/and,” adroitly emphasizing textured personal and cultural memory through use of “otras desgracias”—the “other” calling immediately to mind a past history of experience and the “desgracias” homophonically stressing the word’s embedded meanings (misfortune/bad luck/shameful/disgraceful/graceless). Umpierre’s subtle talents as a bilingual writer intent on exploiting her subjective difference as a means of exploding literary (and social) conventions are apparent throughout her writing, and manifestly so in her concrete poetry. For example, although “Sol Boricua” (Puerto Rican Sun, in En el país de las maravillas, 5) employs only the one word “sol” (sun) in graphic repetition and the musical scale “doremifasol[a]” inscribed linearly four times, the poem’s architectonic sculpting not only evokes the Island’s sunny tropical isolation but also its density of people and natural landscape and its heritage of music, languages, and history. She selects a less economical but equally effective technique in “litulo sobreentendido” (Title Understood) of En el pais, which presents the word “G H E T T O” in page wide block letters constructed from other meticulously selected words. The first “T,” for instance, consists of the word “BONGO” repeated four times and the second “T” of “CONGA” identically repeated. Foreshadowed by the title and skyscraper imagery visually suggested by “G H E T T O” on the page, then buttressed graphically and rhetorically by the words themselves, the poem’s “understood title” is that the key (“la cave”) to “happiness” in the implied Nueva York is the rhythms (“one two three”) of its people. In her other poetry and in her critical essays, Umpierre brings a fresh, assured, occasionally mordant voice to her subjects. Those features characterize, for instance, the intertextuality of “in Response” where she argues with compatriot writer, Sandra Esteves, as well as the parody of unquestioned allegiance to patriarchal forms in “Sacrilegio,” where she asks the Virgin Mary “¿Por qué no arbitraste la porfía a Eva?” (why did you not mediate the 1283

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treachery committed on Eve? [37–38]). Similarly, her essays on literary canons and their disruption neither euphemize language nor sanitize the harsh material “desgracias” of disempowerment. Another Puerto Rican concerned with themes of power, and who writes of them in genre-reflexive ways, is Ana Lydia Vega, whose work, written in Spanish, is not as widely read in the U.S. as is Umpierre’s or Ferré’s. Nevertheless, her work is seen by some as ranking with the more established Ferré’s in its contributions to the cuento form as evolved in Puerto Rico (Fernandez Olmos and Vélez). Her books, Encancaranublado (1983, a locution that compresses incarnation, enfeebled, cloudy, stormy, etc., for multiple suggestion) and Pasión de historia (1987, History’s Passion), are described by critic Efraín Barradas as “innovative” in their use of the short story genre to represent a gendered Boricua reality, depict folk humor, and echo the authentic “Caribbean sounds” of dialects in vigorous expression (Barradas 550). Rosario Ferré’s work is widely recognized as unexcelled in its originality, intellectual complexity, and aesthetic grace. Whether in the multiform (story, poem, letter, essay, catechism, ad) style of Papeles de Pandora or in the straightforward feminist essays of Sitio a Eros, her discourse reflects the anomalous sociopolitical nature of Puerto Rico as “Estado Libre Asociado” (free state in association [with the U.S.]) and of the experience of women within that anomaly. One of the ways Ferré conveys such a state of teetering imbalance of identities of self and culture(s) in her fiction is through an extraordinary narrative style that is at once modernist (particularly its poetic diction), postmodern in narration and tone, and traditional in plot (as in fairytales). “The Poisoned Story” (Ferré/Vélez, transl. in The Youngest Doll, 1991) exemplifies this extraordinary choreography as it draws the reader into Rosaura’s “house of many balconies” and “storybook world” (7) only to find at the end that the poison of the title—that is, the guava-colored ink in which the tale within the tale is written—is an agent of both the story’s and the reader’s deconstruction. Even though the narrator engages interest in the story immediately through the odd couple—the young literary Rosaura and the old and weary bourgeois Don Lorenzo—before long the intense, humorous, perverse narrative voice becomes the plot’s central focus. At one point the narrator even admits “I mustn’t betray my surprise, my growing amazement—after everything that’s happened, to find ourselves at the mercy of a two-bit writer” (8). The reader realizes at the end that the “two-bit writer” comprises the 1-narrator and also Rosaura, Rosita, Rosa, and the reader written into the text alongside the 1-narrator, all of whom are now suddenly found in the “elegant” book Don Lorenzo gave Rosaura on her “last birthday” (17). In a brilliant deconstruction recalling the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ferré plots his death, her birth, and the reader’s representation within one fictive intersection. Joining Ferré, Umpierre, and Vega as Puertorriqueñas whose unique craftings of subjectivity through literary genre deserve greater attention are Sandra Esteves, Judith Ortiz Cofer (e.g., 1986, Peregrina; 1987, Terms of Survival); Carmen Valle* (1983, Glen Miller y varias vidas después/Glen Miller and 1284

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Various Lives Later), and Amelia Agostini de del Rio (Puertorriqueños en Nueva York/Puerto Ricans in New York, 1970). They, along with Salima Rivera, Luz María Rodríguez, Amina Muñoz, Rosario Morales, Alma Gómez, and Milagros Pérez Huth, sharpen both the writerly and readerly optics of American literature and in the process enrich its sprawling, multitudinous canvas. The contributions of Cuban women writers to a conscientized poetics of literary discourse must begin with the work of Getrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who not only has become the canonized female writer of the nineteenth century but was also a bold and confident creator who demanded her freedom as an artist to match that of her life, which she lived in defiant resistance of many socioreligious conventions of her age (e.g., not curbing her public career after giving birth to a child out of wedlock). As with Chicana and Puerto Rican feminist writing, contemporary archival and historiographical work flourished in the 1990s, indicating that the sources of Cuban women’s writing also grow from a deeply planted mother-root (Miller 1983; Marting 1990), part of which derives from Gomez de Avellaneda’s germinal work. However, space permits coverage here of only a small number of Cuban writers who, except for La Avellaneda, are all twentieth-century writers. Also nicknamed “La Tula” and, by an envious male contemporary, the ironyintended epithet “Gertrudis la Magna” (Gertrude the Great), the title La Avellaneda is how the writer is most commonly known. Born in central Cuba in 1814 into the colonial realities of her country’s plantation feudalism, she began writing poetry at eight when her father died and, despite great pressure from her family and society to abandon her interest in letters and the arts, continued to write until her death at fifty-nine, by which time she had secured her worldwide fame as an author whose collected works comprise over a dozen hefty volumes. Although her extraordinary life as a self-authorized artist and free-thinking expatriate (primarily in Spain) is extremely fascinating, she is important to this section because of her work’s vanguard innovations for their time, consistent quality, and enormous literary and intellectual range. Her first novel, Sab (1841), for example, presented a strong abolitionist indictment of slavery a decade before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beth Miller notes that its progressive politics toward slavery and the cruelties forced upon Cuba’s African slaves through the story of the mulatto, Sab, led to its exclusion from early editions of the writer’s collected works (Miller, ed., 1983). As with North American women abolitionists of the century, La Avellaneda extended her abolitionist views to feminism and the cause of women’s rights, producing a great number of titles in several genres that treat gender with an enlightenment far ahead of her time (Dos mujeres [1842, Two Women], Egilona [1845], and El cacique de Tumerque [1861, The Chief of Tumerque). Equally significant is that in 1845 she became possibly the first woman to edit a Spanish-language periodical, La Gaceta de las Mujeres (The Women’s Gazette), addressing gender and women’s issues. Her prolific productivity and extensive publication in a time unfriendly and even hostile to women (she was denied induction into the Royal Spanish Academy 1285

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solely because of her sex) provides ipso facto evidence of its merits, for it would not have been published otherwise. Moreover, that she tackled difficult subjects from iconoclastic positions further evidences its worth, for only the most extraordinary female talent voicing oppositional views could have been as well-received as she was. La Avellaneda wrote verse, fiction, political and religious essays, letters, memoirs, and—which brought her the most fame during her lifetime—drama. Author of sixteen plays that enjoyed extended stage runs, she succeeded in comedy, tragedy, and biblical theatre, even to the extent of staging five plays (four of them major successes) in a single year, 1852. As Hugh A. Harter writes, her comedies stand “in sharp contrast to the melodramatic quality of the historical plays and tragedies. Such plays as La hija de las flores todos están locos (The Flowers’ Daughter or Everyone’s Crazy) are delightfully light in tone, but have themes that are (nevertheless) serious” (218). In addition to the vast range of her pen, she, like several American counterparts (notably Henry James and Walt Whitman), obsessively revised and rewrote her work, often publishing several versions of a text. Miller sees this trait as “attest[ing] to her literary ambition and professionalism,” reflecting “her ideological development,” and showing “an abiding concern with poetic craft” (1983, 204, 206)— that is, a preoccupation with the aesthetics of literary form and artistic immortality that are central to the notion of ars poetica. One admittedly inadequate way to summarize the rich texture of La Avellaneda’s astonishing life and career is to note that, even on those occasions when she was rejected by the Royal Academy, her male obstructionist judges publicly lavished praise on her literary talents and accomplishments even as they maintained their exclusionary, misogynist men’s club policy. In light of the oppressive sociohistory typified by this canonized nonmeritocracy, her lifetime of oppositional literary inscriptions in every genre must be recognized as fundamentally radical. Lourdes Casal (1938–1981), an author who continued Gomez de Avallaneda’s literature of social commitment in the present century, also lived most of her short life as an exile (to the United States) and, like her predecessor, retained a strong interest in, and close ties with, her native patria. Nevertheless, Casal differs from La Avellaneda in significant ways, primarily in that the bulk of her writings were written as social science, literary criticism, and journalism. Thus, her literary corpus is small, consisting of Los fundadores: Alfonso y otros cuentos (1973, The Founders: Alfonso and Other Stories) and the posthumously published Palabras juntan revolución (1981, Words Join Revolution). Of particular interest to this study is Casal’s stylistic experimentation with functional form and narrative voice. Like, for example, Chicanas Cisneros and Moraga and Puerto Rican Ferré, her fiction in Los fundadores often embraces vignettes and fragments in its construction of an overarching narrative (“Salvador en cuatro tiempos”) and also makes frequent use of ironic selfeffacing narratives (“Los zapaticos me aprietan”) to express the bewildering psychosocial effects on individuals of diaspora, unjust governments, and 1286

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self-serving institutions. Casal’s explicit intertextuality further invites interrogation as she rereads and rewrites Kafka in “Rodrigo de Triana” to produce a story of “magical realism . . . in the style of Jorge Luis Borges” and “García Márquez” (de la Cuesta 55), as well as Eliot, Rostand, and numerous popculture icons in “Love Story según Cyrano Prufrock” to chronicle the diminution of desire in the Sixties’ parallel revolutions against the state and the conventions of love and sexuality. Her work also includes a parody of a nineteenthcentury classic Cuban novel, Cecilia Valdés o la loma del Angel (Cecilia Valdés, or Angel’s Hill), titled “María o la colina de la Universidad” (María, or University Hill), that mocks academic pomposity through the optics of the working class neighborhood surrounding the academy. The poems that were published after Casal’s death from illness at forty-three are marked by the same blend of progressive politics, ironic humor, intertextual frameworks, and conjoined fragments apparent in her fiction. This hybrid style is especially well-suited to inscribe her complex view and experience of her personal and cultural mestizaje as a daughter of the diaspora. . . . Nueva York es mi casa. Soy ferozmente leal a esta adquirida patria . . . Pero Neuva York no fue la ciudad de mi infancia, . . . Por eso siempre permaneceré al margen, una extraña entre estas piedras . . . (Palabras juntan revolución [Words Bring Together Revolution] 25) (. . . New York is my home. I’m fiercely loyal to this acquired country . . . But New York is not my childhood city . . . That’s why I’m always on the margin, a stranger between these rocks . . .)

These lines from “Para Ana Veltfort” (For Ana Veltfort) synoptically capture the bridge Casal builds throughout her creative writing between a perceived fragmentation of identity and a style that relies on the illusion of words, images, voices, contradictions, and ideas pieced together as if randomly (see also the series “Tanto más vulnerable que la piedra” [More Vulnerable than Stone] in Palabras [Words]). Ultimately, the strength and coherence of her personal and political vision reifies a consciousness that holds together with great literary force and grace, which explains the deepening respect shown her writings. Several other Cubanas whose titles deserve greater attention than permitted here include Dora Alonso and Maria Elena Liano, whose short stories are included in Short Stories by Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real (1990), edited by Celia Correas de Zapata, a collection united by effective stylizations of women and families defined by the supernatural yokings of magical realism, Latin America’s surrealistic postmodern contribution to contemporary literature. Alonso’s “Sophie and the Angel” tells of the virginal eighty-year-old title character’s fantasy romance before her death with an angelic lover who gifts her with guitar music, companionship, and the “experience” of sexual love 1287

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so that she can die “filled with joy” (22). Llano’s “In the Family” recalls the fantastic qualities of Chicana Isabella Ríos’s novel Victuum as it lays out the tale of the strange mirror in the narrator’s family that reveals, from the other side of death, incarnate visitors who interact so intimately with the living family that eventually they “ended up divided over the question of who was really whose guest” (131). Both these fictions and others written by non-Cuban Latinas (Isabel Allende, Rosario Castellanos, Rosario Ferré, Clarice Lispector, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Lydia Vega, et al.) in Short Stories by Latin American Women underscore the permeability between life and death, present and past, female and male, youth and age, and other apparent but not real dichotomies that are emphasized by the keenly drawn memory and emotion of their Latin American sensibilities. In addition to the Cuban writers just discussed, the noteworthy literary inscriptions of identity and ideology produced by Cabrera, Robles, and Prida warrant closer attention to their personalized aesthetics and generic handling. Along with the new generation of Cubanas who began publishing in the 1980s, they texture the literary voice(s) of the Americas with inflections of gender, ethnicity, and personal expression that add both to the range and the precision of the Hemisphere’s understanding of its continuously fresh and dynamic past(s). No study of this sort can fail to mention the crucial importance of a host of other singular writers from throughout the Latin America whose achievements have helped configure the entire landscape of American letters in the twentieth century. Mexicanas Rosario Castillanos (1925–1974) and Elena Poniatowska (1933–), for instance, were among the first radical feminist writers of the Americas to join Simone de Beauvoir in vocalizing on an international scale the irrepressible force of contemporary woman-identified perspectives. Their remarkable work has had particular impact on Chicana and other U.S. feminists intent upon re-envisioning American literature as an unfenced, interlingual discourse. With Chilenas Gabriela Mistral, the first Nobel Winner from Latin America, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Isabel Allende, as well as Nicaraguans Claribel Alegria and Giaconda Belli, authors whose revolutionary writings are exquisitely beautiful and cogent, all the other writers presented much too scantily in this study have molded impressive imaginary worlds and articulated incisive understandings of the multiple and often contradictory roots of their historical, cultural, and personal origins. They trace the roots of their resistant imagination not only to the Euroclassic Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman traditions, but also to their previously suppressed female, American, and mestiza and mestizo antecedents from “la lengua” Malinalli to Anacaona, the pre-American native poet/songwriter of Santo Domingo, to Sor Juana—and their families and cultures of origin—to all those whose names have not yet been uncovered or whose voices were not memorialized, but whose precedent lives could only be contributive. Sor Juana’s words offer appropriate conclusion, then, for, particularly in the specific context of her unavoidable confinement like that of women throughout history and still today, her words comprehend the relentless motivation to write and to preserve one’s being that is perhaps the first—the 1288

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primary—source from which literature springs: “From the moment I was first illuminated by the light of reason, my inclination toward letters has been so vehement that not even the admonitions of others . . . nor my own meditations . . . have been sufficient to cause me to forswear this natural impulse” (9). Further Reading Alarcón, Norma, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision through Malintzin/Malinche: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981). Arenas, Reinaldo, Necesidad de libertad (Mexico, D.F.: Kosmos, S.A., 1986). Barradas, Efraín, ed., Apalabramiento: diez cuentistas puertorriquenos de hoy (Hanover, NH: Norte, 1983). Bruce-Novoa, Juan, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Candelaria, Cordelia, “Letting La Llorona Go: History’s ‘Tender Mercies.’ ” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (Fall, 1993): 5–10. Candelaria, Cordelia, “The ‘Wild Zone’ in Chicana Literary Study” Journal of Chicana Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (1992). Candelaria, Cordelia, “The Multicultural ‘Wild Zone’ of Ethnic-Identified American Literatures” in Multiethnic Literatures of the United States: Critical Introductions and Classroom Resources (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1989: i–xiv). Candelaria, Cordelia, Chicano Poetry, A Critical Introduction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986). Candelaria, Cordelia, “La Malinche: Feminist Precursor” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Vol. 5, No. 2 (1980): 1–16. Candelaria, Cordelia, “On La Llorona” Agenda: A Journal of Hispanic Issues Vol. 7, No. 4 (1977): 40–47. Candelaria, Cordelia, and Kathi George, eds., “Chicanas in the National Landscape” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Vol. 5, No. 2 (1980). Candelaria, Cordelia, and Mary Romero, eds., “Las Chicanas” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Vol. 11, No. 1 (1990). Casal, Lourdes, “Problemas hispanoamericanos” in Itinerario ideologico, eds. Lourdes Casal, Maria Cristina Herrera, and Leonel de la Cuesta (Miami: Estudios Cubanos, 1982: 1319). Cordova, Teresa, et al., eds., Chicana Voices: Intersection of Class, Race and Gender (Austin: University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies, 1986). Del Castillo, Adelaida R., “Malintzin Tenepal: Preliminary Look into a New Perspective” in Essays on La Mujer, eds. Rosaura Sanchez and Rosa M. Cruz (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies, 1977: 124–149). Del Castillo, Adelaida R., ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History (Encino, CA: Floricanto, 1990). Eysturoy, Annie O., “Isabella Rios (Diana Lopez)” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Chicano Writers, Vol. 82, eds. Francisco Lomelí and Carl Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research Tower, 1989: 201–205). Fernández Olmos, Margarite, and Doris Meyer, eds., Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America: Introductory Essays (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn College Press, 1983).

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Harter, Hugh A., “Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda” in Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, ed. Diane E. Marting (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990: 210–225). Herrera-Sobek, María, ed., Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (Binghamton, New York: Bilingual, 1985). Horno-Delgado, Asunción, et al., eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989). Lomas, Clara, “Mexican Precursors of Chicana Feminist Writing” in Multiethnic Literature of the United States, ed. Cordelia Candelaria (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1989: 21–33). Marting, Diane E., ed., Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990). Miller, Beth, “Gertrude the Great: Avellaneda, Nineteenth-Century Feminist” in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983: 200–214). Miller, Beth, ed., Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Mohr, Nicholasa, “Puerto Rican Writers in the U.S. Puerto Rican Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 111–116). Olivares, Julián, “The Expression of Community in Chicano Literature [Denise Chavez, Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera]” Hispanorama Vol. 54 (1990): 16–21. Olivares, Julián, “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and the poetics of Space” in Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers, eds. María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1987: 160–170). Partnoy, Alicia, ed., You Can’t Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile (Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis, 1988). Pérez, Emma, “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor” in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo (Berkeley: Third Woman, 1991: 159–184). Rivera de Álvarez, Josefina, Literatura puertorriquena: su proceso en el tiempo (Madrid: Partenon, 1983). Rivero, Eliana, “From Immigrants to Ethnics: Cuban Women Writers in the U.S.” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción HornoDelgado, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 189–200). Sánchez, Marta E., Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Sánchez, Rosaura, “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida Del Castillo (Encino, CA: Floricanto, 1990: 1–29). Sternbach, Nancy Saporta, “A Deep Racial Memory of Love: The Chicana Feminism of Cherríe Moraga” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 48–61).

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Vargas, Yamila Azize, “A Commentary on the Works of Three Puerto Rican Women Poets in New York” in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989: 145–165).

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Working-Class Literature. Although the development of the United States as a cultural, economic, and political power has much to do with the Hispanic background, the social and political patterns that were established by U.S. government and business vis-à-vis the Hispanic world have greatly determined the evolution of Hispanic culture within U.S. borders. On the one hand, the ideology of Manifest Destiny did much to justify United States expansion westward and southward and its grabbing of former Hispanic lands, with attendant displacement of Hispanic occupants and their gradual proletarization in an effort to develop those lands and the resources they contained. On the other hand, U.S. industrialization from the late nineteenth century on and the United States’ ever-increasing need for manpower led to the incorporation of workers via immigration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to operate the industrial machine and to perform as service workers. U.S. political intervention in Latin America also pointed an unending stream of refugees to U.S. shores. The economic and political decisions made by Washington, D.C., bending to the will of leading industrial and agribusiness interests, determined the character of the Hispanic population drawn to and nurtured within U.S. borders from the late nineteenth century to the present. As a consequence, today more than seventy percent of Hispanics in the United States belong to the working class. This working-class background and identity accounts for many of the major contributions of Hispanics to U.S. society, whether as laborers in the factories and fields, professional athletes, members of the armed services, or entertainers, as well as artists and writers. From the late nineteenth century, Hispanic workers have struggled for a living wage, humane treatment, and health benefits, often organizing themselves in attempts to obtain the type of working conditions that we take for granted today. Many writers emerged from these struggles, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Both Lucy González Parsons,* a participant in the watershed Haymarket Square demonstrations, and Luisa Capetillo,* a tobacco factory lector, were labor leaders who became fiery speakers and eloquent essayists and even wrote and produced dramatic works. González edited a number of magazines and published articles in newspapers. Although Hispanic leadership in protecting the rights of miners in the Southwest and steelworkers in the Midwest can be charted as forging some of the essential rights and benefits for all workers in the United States, the longest and most protracted struggle for the human rights and working conditions of working people has been that of agricultural labor, which—since the days of Juan Gómez, who organized cowboys in the Texas Panhandle in the 1880s—has not ceased to be manned by Hispanics, both natives and immigrants, and has 1291


not as yet won the rights of representation, negotiation, and strike in most of the states of the Union. The labor struggles throughout the twentieth century were always furthered by poets, composers, and improvisational acting troupes made up of laborers themselves. It is no wonder that the Chicano Movement* as a cultural force was initiated with César Chávez’s* organization of farm workers in California in 1965. Chávez enlisted playwright Luis Valdez to lead the farm workers in forming a theater troupe, El Teatro Campesino.* From that point on, visual artists, musicians, poets, and other writers expanded the Chicano Movement beyond the farm labor struggle until eventually it even gained currency in academic circles. Indeed, the foundational novel of the Chicano Movement, Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971, . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 1987), creates an epic of the life of migrant farm workers. Chicano literature itself has never left behind its working-class orientation and perspectives, preserving the language and dialects of the common man, deriving inspiration from oral lore and culture, promoting humanistic values that clash with elite and capitalist culture, and enshrining such folk literary forms as the corrido* and tent theater. Today, it is Hispanics’ working-class culture that has most influenced the United States in superficial, obvious ways, as well as through a deep transformation of U.S. worldview and sensibility. Hispanic popular culture at times seems to be everywhere, from the background music of innumerable television commercials to Mexican food’s position as the most popular ethnic food (and salsa as the most popular condiment) to the transformation of pop music by Latin rhythms and the addition of Latin instruments (such as congas, maracas, and other percussion instruments). Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera have become famous fashion designers, Jennifer López the sexiest movie star, and Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias the heartthrobs of crooning. The sheer numbers of Hispanics residing and immigrating to the United States augurs an even greater transformation of the Protestant–Anglo–American identity of the country; Hispanics are forecast to make up one quarter of the population by mid-century, and in fact a majority in the most populous and powerful states: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Hispanic demographics, buying power, political affiliation, linguistic preferences, bicultural identity—all have potential for transforming the identity of the United States in the world of tomorrow. In the main, it has been Hispanic working-class tastes and traditions that have contributed tortillas, chili peppers, rice, beans, and fried plantains to the American palate, Afro-Caribbean music—arising first out of slavery and honed by the urban working class—to the American ear, and Hollywood stars, such as Jennifer López, Jimmy Smits, and Luis Valdez (all children of the barrios and fields) to the American imagination. In fact, as mentioned above, it was the labor struggle in the California fields that in 1965 launched the theatrical movement, led by Valdez, that eventually accounted for more than 150 grassroots theatrical groups from whom emerged two generations of playwrights, script writers, actors, and directors now integrated in the Hollywood 1292


film industry, regional theaters, and Broadway. Valdez-influenced ex-convict playwright Miguel Piñero was the first to go to Broadway in 1973 with his Short Eyes, followed in 1980 by Valdez himself, with Zoot Suit. The Hispanic roots of American civilization run deep and have accounted for much of what we call “American.” Today we are living in another period of great Hispanic cultural infusion into American society and identity. Today, it has been children of working-class immigrants who have best articulated this by merging the experience of their parents into the American novel, as have Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos,* MacArthur Fellow Sandra Cisneros,* and best-selling author Victor Villaseñor.* Hispanics and their cultural contributions add to and transform the American Dream, unwilling as they are to renounce their Hispanic culture and their ties to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. Further Reading Kanellos, Nicolás, “Introduction,” Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States, eds. Nicolás Kanellos, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Nicolás Kanellos

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Y Yglesias, José (1919–1995). Born on November 29, 1919, in the Ybor City section of Tampa, Florida, Jose Yglesias was the first writer to have a Cuban American consciousness. He grew up within the tradition of Cuban cigar rollers but upon graduation from high school moved to Greenwich Village, New York City, to become a writer. From his early twenties on, he was politically engaged; his politics propelled him into the groups of writers and artists who militated against fascism in Spain under Franco, who promoted Socialism in the United States, and who were the first supporters of Fidel Castro in Cuba. His early journalistic writing in the Daily Worker and elsewhere during the late 1940s and early 1950s eventually led him to write several journalistic books on Spain and Cuba, such as The Goodbye Land in 1967, In the Fist of the Revolution: Life in a Cuban Country Town in 1968, Down There in 1970, and The Franco Years in 1977. But it is Yglesias’s work as a novelist that is most enduring, not least because of his humane narrators, eloquent prose, and sly humor. For more than thirty years, he wrote novels and stories based on Hispanic life in the United States and saw them published by some of the largest and most respected publishing houses in the country. Moreover, Yglesias is one of the very first U.S. Hispanic writers to be published by mainstream presses in the United States. His first novel, A Wake in Ybor City (1963), based on the Cuban-Spanish community in Tampa, is considered to be a classic of U.S. Hispanic literature. His other novels include The Kill Price (1976) and Tristan and the Hispanics. Yglesias was a working writer until his death from cancer in 1995. Two important new and highly received novels were published posthumously: Break-in (1996), set in Tampa and exploring the theme of race relations, and The Old Gent (1996), set in New York and dealing with the final days of an 1295

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aging novelist. Two of his stories were included in Best American Stories and form a part of his posthumous collection The Guns in the Closet (1996). In all, he wrote ten books of fiction, three of which were published posthumously after he died of cancer in December 1995. During his life, Yglesias never achieved the fame due him, but he did receive such awards as Guggenheim Fellowships (1970 and 1976) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1974). Yglesias died of cancer on November 7, 1995, in New York City. Since his death, Arte Público Press* has reissued all of his novels.

José Yglesias.

Further Reading Montes, Rafael Miguel, Generational Traumas in Contemporary Cuban-American Literature: Making Places (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

Nicolás Kanellos Yglesias, Rafael (1954–). Rafael Yglesias was born on May 12, 1954, and was raised in New York City’s Washington Heights, the son of Cuban American novelist José Yglesias* and Jewish American mother Helen Yglesias. Immersed in the literary environment of his father and his circle, Yglesias published his first novel, Hide Fox, and After All (1972), while still in high school, whereupon he dropped out. He continued writing novels and later became a writer of screenplays in Hollywood. His novel Fearless (1993) was his first to become a hit film (of the same title). His credits as a screenwriter include landmark films such as Death and the Maiden (1992; see Ariel Dorfman*), Les Misérables (1996), Batman Begins (2005), and Dark Water (2005). His other novels are How She Died (1973), The Work Is Innocent (1976), The Game Player (1978), Hot Properties (1987), Only Children (1988), The Murderer Next Door (1992), Fearless (1993), and Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil (1998). One of his most well-known works, Fearless, follows the lives of two characters, Max and Carla, after they survive a plane crash and come to a new understanding of their lives. The Murderer Next Door is a psychological thriller about a transvestite who kills his wife and retains custody of their child. Yglesias’s magnum opus is the 704-page, highly autobiographical novel, Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil, a bildungroman that charts the psychological development of a child torn between his father’s Cuban–Spanish, literary, highly bohemian, but unstable influence and his mother’s wealthy Jewish influence, nevertheless tainted by her sexual abuse of her own son; the clash of cultures and personalities makes for confusing identity formation and spawns a psychiatrist in the making who in later life must attend to the mentally challenged while still undergoing therapy himself.

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Further Reading Lybarger, Dan, “The Never Ending Past: An Interview with Rafael Yglesias” Script (http:// www.scriptmag.com/earticles/earticle.php?440).

Nicolás Kanellos Young Lords Party (YLP). In 1969, Puerto Rican college students in New York City formed the Sociedad de Albizu Campos (SAC) in an effort to create an atmosphere that would make higher educational institutions accountable to the Puerto Ricans in the city. But the founders felt that the Puerto Ricans in the ghetto also needed to unite with university students. They therefore targeted street youth and the dispossessed, guided by the belief that the “most disenfranchised segment of our community” harbored a revolutionary potential. They identified poor nutrition, lack of city services, and police brutality as issues needing the most attention. Eventually, in Chicago, a Puerto Rican organization called the Young Lords Party espoused similar objectives. The two merged under the name of the Young Lords Party and employed tactics such as direct action and militancy in their dealings with labor issues and their demands of church groups. The YLP blended political theory with civic activism by delivering free breakfasts to the poor, running lead-detection programs, supporting welfare mothers, and helping to organize hospital and health-delivery system unions. The Young Lords Party was very effective in using the media to obtain publicity and even hosted its own radio programs and published the bilingual newspaper Pa’lante, which also became a forum for literary publication. In Philadelphia, the YLP met a great amount of repression from the police and city officials. Nonetheless, the impact of its militancy forced the more established and moderate Puerto Rican leaders to realign their tactics and aspirations: they moved farther to the left and became more forceful. Although the Young Lords Party was short-lived, it had a lasting impact on Puerto Rican politics and culture in major urban areas, especially Philadelphia. For the Young Lords, the homeland served as continuing source of identity and the desire for Puerto Rican independence provided a continuous rationale for radical politics. Although the heyday of the Young Lords Party (YLP) in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia was from 1969 to 1972, the YLP became the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO) in 1972 and shifted from a cultural–nationalist stance to a more ideological Marxist–Leninist one. That same year, the Puerto Rican Student Union allied with it to form what was considered a “mass organization.” Further Reading Torres, Andrés, and José E. Velázquez, eds., The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

F. Arturo Rosales

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Z Zamora, Bernice (1938–). Poet and scholar Bernice Zamora was born on January 20, 1938, in Aguilar, Colorado, a coal mining village in south central Colorado, and was raised in Pueblo, Colorado. Growing up in a racially diverse community, Zamora experienced the similar linguistic trauma that many Chicanos have suffered: that of being forced to privilege English over her family’s native Spanish tongue. Like other Chicana scholars of her day, Zamora did not immediately pursue academic interests until later in life. After graduating from high school, she married and started a family and eventually enrolled at Southern Colorado University at the age of twenty-eight. She graduated in three years with a B.A. in English and French, something that proved significant when the study of French texts provided her an opportunity to examine women writers more closely, inspiring her to continue her literary studies. In 1972, she obtained her master’s degree in English from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The following year she began her doctoral studies at Marquette University but transferred a year later to Stanford, where she received her Ph.D. in English in 1976. In 1976, while at Stanford, she coauthored Restless Serpents with José Antonio Burciaga.* The collection of poetry began with a first printing of only 2,000 copies but over the years has become a Chicano literary milestone. Restless Serpents explores an array of themes, such as Chicano cultural traditions, the Chicana experience within a machista culture, language issues, and the power of poetry. Much of the poetry is written in a bilingual voice, and the poems “El último baile” (The Last Dance), “Asunto de principio” (Matter of Principle), “Gata Poem” (Cat Poem), “A tropezones en Stanford” (Stumbling in Stanford), and “Andando” (Walking) are written in Spanish. In general, the body of critical reviews of 1299

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Restless Serpents praises the poetry for its lyrical beauty, evocative power, and complexity of thought and feeling. Her poetry is evidence that she is intent on questioning oppressive forces, particularly vis-à-vis societal treatment of Chicanos and women, which she expresses in the poem “Pueblo, 1950,” in which she recalls how her mother and teacher scolded her for kissing with a boy, but nothing was said to him. Another important theme is Zamora’s resistance to being pigeonholed into a single category. Instead, she portrays the Chicana as a complex being, evident in the poem “So Not To Be Mottled,” in which she writes the following: You insult me When you say I’m Schizophrenic. My divisions are Infinite.

This same idea is reinforced in the anthology of Chicana literature Infinite Divisions (1993), edited by Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, which borrows its title directly from Zamora’s poem to demonstrate that life for Chicanas in the United States has always been complex and that there does not exist a uniform idea of what a Chicana is or should be. Releasing Serpents (1994), her long-awaited second book of poetry, combines some of Zamora’s previously published work with thirty new poems. In this collection it is clear that Zamora continues to wrestle with political and gender-related issues. Her poetic voice is best described in her essay “Silence at Bay” (1997), published in Máscaras (1997, Masks), a collection of Latinaauthored essays edited by Lucha Corpi,* in which she states, “I chose to write to provide myself with a much-needed freedom to express, to give myself and my daughters a recorded, albeit personal history, and to give the women in my community a voice—a railing one, perhaps, but a voice against the social (dis)order that maims our Chicano children at every turn” (22). Other more recent work includes a series of monologues entitled “Tere,” the first of which was published in New Chicana/Chicano Writing I (1992), edited by Charles Tatum, and the poems “Contraries” and “Glint,” which appeared in Floricanto Sí: A Collection of Latina Poetry (1998). Zamora has also served as the guest editor of the Chicano literary journal El fuego de Aztlán (Fire from Aztlán), coedited De colores (Of Colors) with José Armas in 1979, and coedited Flor y Canto IV and V: An Anthology of Chicano Literature (Flower and Song) with José Armas and Michael Reed, 1977 and 1978, respectively. She has also taught in the English Department at the University of Santa Clara. Her work has also been published abroad in Mexico, Italy, France, and Germany. Further Reading Bruce-Novoa, Juan, “Bernice Zamora” in Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980: 201–218).

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Zavala, Adina de (1861–1955). The notable granddaughter of Texas’s first vice president, Lorenzo de Zavala,* Adina de Zavala was a grassroots historian and folklorist who rescued the Alamo, a monument of Texas history, and selfpublished History and Legends of the Alamo and other Missions in and around San Antonio (1917), a compilation of tales and historical events that help readers understand the layers of Texas history and culture from pre-Columbian times to the Spanish and Mexican periods to the Republic and statehood. Born on November 28, 1861, in Harris County, she was home-schooled until she attended the Ursuline Academy in San Antonio, a finishing school for proper young ladies, from 1871 to 1873. In 1881, she received a teaching degree from the Sam Houston Institute in Huntsville, Texas, after which she taught school from 1884 until 1907, finishing her teaching career in San Antonio. In 1893, Zavala’s study group of women interested in history became affiliated with the Daughters of the Republic of Texas as its De Zavala Chapter. It was this chapter that led the campaign for the preservation of the missions in San Antonio and the Alamo. Their success came in 1905 when the governor of Texas conveyed the deed of the Alamo to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. In 1912, the De Zavala Chapter formed the Texas Historical and Landmarks Association, which was successful in preserving the Spanish Governor’s Palace and identifying and marking numerous other historical sites. In addition to her book, de Zavala wrote and published pamphlets on Texas history and was an activist for Texas Hispanic culture. Further Reading Hutchison, Kay Bailey, American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country (New York: William Morrow, 2004).

Adina de Zavala.

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Zavala, Adina de, History and Legends of the Alamo and other Missions in and around San Antonio (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996).

Nicolás Kanellos Zavala, Iris Milagros (1936–). Born on December 17, 1936, in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Iris M. Zavala has become one of the most distinguished scholars of Spanish and Spanish American literature. Despite her academic leadership, Zavala is an outstanding poet as well as a pioneer in feminism. A graduate of the University of Puerto Rico (1957) and a Ph.D. alumna if the University of Salamanca, Zavala has taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Hunter College, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook; since 1983, she has resided in the Netherlands, where she directs the summer school at the University of Utrecht. Zavala left New York City to pursue greater freedom as an intellectual and lesbian in Holland. While living and teaching in New York City, Zavala identified highly with the Nuyorican* school of writers and even self-published a collection of poems on the theme of New York City, El gran mamut (c. 1980, The Great Mammoth). Other books of poems include Barro doliente (1965, Barrio in Pain), La isla de los ratones (1965, The Island of Mice), Poemas prescindibles (1972, Unnecessary Poems), and Escritura desatada (1974, Unleashed Writing). In 1982, Zavala published a book of mixed poetry and prose, Que nadie muera sin amar el mar (1982, Let No One Die without Loving the Sea). Zavala is also a novelist; her first effort, a historical novel about the city of Ponce, was a finalist for the Heralde Prize in Spain: Kiliagonía (1980; in English translation Chillagony, 1985). Her Nocturna mas no funesta (1987, Somber, but Not Funereal) and El libro de Apolonio o de las islas (1993, The Book of Apolonius or of the Islands) are novels about women and freedom, or the lack thereof (including the lack of freedom under colonialism). In 1998, she published an autobiographical novel narrated in multiple voices: Sueño de amor (Dream of Love). Zavala is the winner of numerous fellowships and awards. In 1988, King Juan Carlos of Spain awarded Zavala the Order of Civil Merit for her contributions to Spanish culture. Further Reading Marting, Diane E., Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).

Nicolás Kanellos and Cristelia Pérez Zavala, Lorenzo de (1789–1836). The first vice president of the Republic of Texas, Lorenzo de Zavala, was born in Tecoh, Yucatán, Mexico, on October 3, 1789. Before coming to Texas, he was an ardent liberal in Mexico, where he was incarcerated in 1814 for three years because of his political activities. Just before Mexico won its independence, he was elected to the Cortes in Madrid; upon his return, he became a framer of Mexico’s Constitution of 1824 and served in the senate until 1826, when he was elected governor of the State of Mexico. Zavala was a founder of the Masonic York Rite in Mexico City, a group that promoted democracy and free trade. As a member of the senate, he 1302

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had been important in passing the Colonization Law of 1824, which offered incentives to both foreigners and Mexicans to settle in northern Mexico. In fact, with Vicente Filisola, he became a leader of one of the colonies and provided land contracts to eleven hundred families—most of them foreigners—in Texas. When General Antonio López de Santa Anna centralized Mexico’s political organization, he attempted to close off the border of Texas to the United States. In 1830, Zavala joined the Texas rebellion against the central government and became the first vice president of the Republic of Texas in 1836, having once again participated in the framing of a constitution. As evidenced by his travel narrative, Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América (1834, Journey to the United States of America), Zavala hoped to work for the establishment of a republic free of slavery and the Lorenzo de Zavala. other contradictions of American democracy. The book, which can be compared with De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, also published in 1834, was the first to present a Mexican perspective on United States political culture. From the mid-1820s on, Zavala was a prolific writer, mostly as a government official but also as a political theorist; he even wrote a history of Mexico’s struggle for independence from 1808 to 1830. Zavala died soon after the establishment of the republic, on November 15, 1836. Further Reading Henson, Margaret Swett, Lorenzo de Zavala: The Pragmatic Idealist (Fort Worth: Texas Christina University Press, 1996). Rivera, John-Michael, “Introduction,” Lorenzo de Zavala, Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América/Journey to the United States of America (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005).

Edna Ochoa Zenea, Juan Clemente (1832–1871). Juan Clemente Zenea was a precocious literary artist who began publishing his poetry by the age of fourteen, the same year he began editing the newspaper La Prensa (The Press). At age twenty, his anti-Spanish verse caused him to go into exile in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he continued writing for Spanish-language newspapers, such as El correo de Louisiana (The Louisiana Mail), El Independiente (The Independent), and Faro de Cuba (The Cuban Light). He later moved to New York and 1303

Zenea, Juan Clemente

worked for El Filibustero (The Filibuster), La Verdad (The Truth), and El Cubano (The Cuban). His was an untiring campaign in writing against the Spanish government, and in 1853 he was condemned to death in absentia by a Spanish tribunal in Havana. In this period, his love of poetry as well as his militant verses were widely published in magazines and newspapers. He returned to Cuba during an amnesty in 1855, published his book Poesías (Poems), the novel Lejos de la patria: Memorias de un joven poeta (1859, Far from the Homeland: Memories of a Young Poet), and the book Cantos de la tarde (1860, Evening Cantos); in 1861, he founded the journal La Revista Habanera (The Havana Review) and was once again forced into exile. He also wrote a book of criticism of American literature: Sobre la literatura de los Estados Unidos (1861, On the Literature of the United States). Like many of his contemporaries who worked in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, Juan Clemente Zenea was distinguished as both a nationalist figure in Cuban letters and as a prominent activist among U.S. exiles. Widely considered a major Cuban poet, Zenea also became a tragic figure after he traveled to Cuba on a political mission only to be captured and executed by colonial authorities. The critic Cintio Vitier has argued that Zenea was an important creator of Cuban Romanticism, a movement that stretched from the 1820s to the 1850s as writers sought to develop a connection between Cuban nature and a commitment to independence and liberty. Zenea also contributed poetry and articles to various publications run by Cuban exiles in the United States. As Matías Montes-Huidobro has argued, it would be a disservice to Zenea to separate his poetry from the historical events that provided the context of publication. His poem “El Filibustero” (The Filibuster), published in the newspaper of that same name in 1853 and included in the anthology El laúd del desterrado (The Lute of the Exiled), captures an abstract sense of displacement while engaging with military events. The poem builds on the symbol of the filibuster, which had been popularized in the United States as a result of the failed military expeditions to take over Cuba, led by Narciso López. Zenea’s stanzas transform the pain of losing a homeland into the possibility of political change from a site outside the bounds of national territory. Driven by diction of anger toward the “tyrant” in Cuba, “El Filibustero” is a testament to the loss and hope that is a hallmark of Cuban exile poetry and nineteenth-century newspapers. Zenea contributed to El Filibustero (1853–1854), La Revolución (1868–1870, The Revolution), and the controversial abolitionist paper El Mulato (1854, The Mulatto), among other publications. Committed to liberty for all people on the island, Zenea bucked the position of other exiles who sought in the 1850s to table the question of slavery while trying to gather support for Cuba’s separation from Spain or annexation by the United States. Defending his abolitionist position, Zenea declared that he would write for whatever publication he wished. His contributions to La Revolución were substantial, although his articles were not always signed. A self-described republican and defender of reason in political debate, Zenea never compromised his principles to support a unitary position among 1304

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exiles. It was this commitment to influence events in accordance with his beliefs that led to his execution. In 1870, Zenea traveled to Cuba with safe-conduct papers from a Spanish diplomat based in the United States. His goal was to propose a plan to revolutionaries that would have given Cuba greater autonomy and its own constitution but not total independence from Spain. This gesture of reconciliation would have ended the conflict, which became known as the Ten Years’ War. The revolutionaries, however, turned down the offer and turned over Zenea to Spanish authorities, who did not recognize the safe-conduct papers and imprisoned him. At the same time, a group of exiles that opposed negotiations attacked him as a traitor to the revolutionary cause. Zenea ultimately paid with his life for taking a position between intransigent opposing sides. Imprisoned before his execution on August 25, 1871, he wrote a cycle of poems that were published in Poesías completas de Juan Clemente Zenea (1872, Complete Poems of Juan Clemente Zenea). Zenea’s diary, including the poems he wrote in it, was published in 1874 as Diario de un mártir (Diary of a Martyr). Further Reading Lazo, Rodrigo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Montes Huidobro, Matías, ed., El Laúd del desterrado (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1995). Valverde, Antonio L., Juan Clemente Zenea, Su proceso del 1871 (Havana: El Siglo XX, 1927). Vitier, Cintio, Lo cubano en la poesía (Santa Clara, Cuba: Universidad Central de Las Villas, 1958).

Rodrigo Lazo Zepeda, Gwendolyn (1971–). Gwendolyn Zepeda was born in 1971 in Houston, Texas, to a Chicano father and German, Welsh, and Scottish mother. When she was four, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized, leaving Zepeda to grow up with her father’s extended family in the barrio that was Houston’s Sixth Ward. Although she was often rejected by her peers because of her fair skin, Zepeda gained a deep appreciation of her Mexican heritage from her father’s family and from the other families in the community. While watching brothers and cousins fall prey to the traps of inner-city poverty, she managed to resist drugs and crime by funneling her pain into art. She sang in neighborhood groups and studied drawing for a short time at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. MECA, a Houston-based arts organization for at-risk youth, encouraged Zepeda to apply to the University of Texas, where she was awarded a full scholarship. Zepeda might have been the first person in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree had she not dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1993 to begin raising an impromptu family. Suddenly finding herself a housewife in an isolated corner of the Texas Hill Country, Zepeda desperately reached out to others through the Internet. She taught herself HTML and created her own Web 1305

Zoot Suit Riots

site, www.gwenworld.com, which won her recognition and freelance writing jobs for other sites, such as the acclaimed www.televisionwithoutpity.com. This success led Zepeda to believe that, despite her atypical start and everything she had been told to the contrary, she could succeed as a “real” writer. Ten years after leaving Houston, Zepeda took her three children and left her failed marriage to go back home. She spent her first year back struggling to gain a foothold in the workforce and create a stable life for her kids while dealing with a nasty, drawn-out divorce and custody battle. Once again, Zepeda coped with pain by turning to her art. She wrote late at night and in temp-agency waiting rooms, compiling the short-story collection that she would eventually be brave enough to submit to Arte Público Press, To the Last Man I Slept with and Gwendolyn Zepeda. All the Other Jerks Just like Him. The collection contains bawdy, irreverent voices of women strong enough to leave behind their tribulations and mistreatment at the hands of men and create their own identities; the volume also contains a mock bodice-ripper so formulaic that many of the pages are partially blank because the reader knows what happens in the plot. Zepeda’s interest in women’s voices has led her to experiment with chic lit in her latest novel, set among the salsa-dancing singles in Houston: Houston, We Have a Problema (2008). She has also experimented with children’s literature in her bilingual picture book and a children’s bilingual picture book, Growing Up with Tamales/Creciendo con tamales (2008). Zepeda was awarded the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County’s Individual Artist Grant for her literary pursuits in 2004. She won the Diarist.Net Legacy Award for her online journal/blog in 2003. A consummate performance artist, she is the creator of The Quinceañera You Were Too Poor to Have, a literary event for artists fueled by deprivation. Further Reading Baratz-Logsted, Lauren, This Is Chic-Lit (New York: Penbella Books, 2006).

Carmen Peña Abrego Zoot Suit Riots. In the spring of 1943, with the tacit support of the press and their superiors, servicemen stationed in the Los Angeles area comman1306

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deered taxi-cabs and spilled out into the streets of East Los Angeles, beating up every Mexican teenager that crossed their path. The immediate cause of the riot was conflict between young Mexican Americans and equally young American soldiers in East Los Angeles. Many Mexican youth dressed in zoot suits, a style of dress popular among young men in many urban areas, not just Mexicans. But in Los Angeles, the dress was almost exclusively but erroneously associated with pachucos.* Although no one was killed, the experience served to humiliate the Mexican community, especially those members who felt optimistic about the possibility of discrimination’s diminishing. The Los Angeles press, controlled by the magnate Randolph Hearst, provided the legitimacy for the attacks by publishing exaggerated stories about Mexican American youth crime before the riots. Under proper discipline, the servicemen would not have been allowed such behavior—in essence permission was given to carry out the persecution of Mexican American youths. The young soldiers were generally lauded for cleaning up Mexican areas of the so called “pachuco menace” by the press. After five days of violence, military authorities, pressured by the Congress of Industrial Organizations Central Council, began to rein in the rogue sailors and soldiers. In addition, community organizations, not just Mexican American ones, pressed for an investigation, which eventually placed responsibility on the police, local officials, and the media.

Zoot suiter disrobed by American soldiers in Los Angeles.

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The memory of the “riots” has been preserved in Chicano literature as a key moment in the development of Mexican American conscience and identity. The pachuco has been a recurrent figure in the literature and was elevated even on to the Broadway stage by Luis Valdez* in his play Zoot Suit, which specifically recalls the “riots.” Further Reading Mazón, Mauricio, Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).

F. Arturo Rosales Zumeta, César (1850–1955). Venezuelan political figure, journalist, and writer César Zumeta was born in San Felipe, in the state of Yaracuy, in 1860 and was abandoned by his parents as a child. He was raised by Tomasa Zumeta, was able to get an education, and studied law at the Central University of Venezuela. However, he was unable to get his law degree because he was expelled from the country in 1883 for activities opposing the regime of President Antonio Guzmán Blanco in the newspaper he had cofounded, El Anunciador (The Announcer). He returned a year later under the regime of Guzmán’s successor but was promptly exiled again, whereupon he took up residence in New York City. In the Metropolis, he wrote for the Spanish-language magazine La América and associated with other exiled writers, including Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde and José Martí.* In 1890, he returned home and became the editor of El Pueblo (The People) newspaper and also cofounded the Revista Universal Ilustrada (Universal Illustrated Magazine), but as soon as the regime changed again, he was once again jailed and afterward opted once more for exile in the United States. In New York he directed the publishing house Casa Editorial Hispanoamericana and maintained literary relations with periodicals in Madrid, Paris, and cities elsewhere in the Americas. This was his most productive period as a writer, a time when he produced such famous works as El continente enfermo (1889, The Sick Continent), Escrituras y lecturas (1889, Writings and Readings), Las potencias y la entervenciún en Hispanoamérica (1889–1908, The Powers and Intervention in Spanish América), and La ley del cabestro (1902, The Dumb Ox Law). He returned briefly to Venezuela in 1901 and subsequently was named consul to Venezuela; once again he became disaffected with the regime and returned to exile in New York. He later went home and participated in government politics and even served as the president of the National Congress in 1932. As a political figure, he is remembered as a defender of the Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship in Venezuela; as a writer, he is considered the initiator of Modernism in Venezuelan letters. Zumeta was also a Mason, in fact rising to serve as Grand Master of Venezuela’s national lodge between 1913 and 1915. Zumeta died in Paris on August 28, 1955. Further Reading Gonzalez Echevarría, Roberto, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).


BIBLIOGRAPHY Acosta-Belén, Edna, et al. “Adiós, Borinquen querida”: The Puerto Rican Diaspora, Its History, and Contributions. Albany, NY: University at Albany, SUNY, 2000. Acosta-Belén, Edna, ed. The Puerto Rican Women. Perspective on Culture, History, and Society, 2nd ed. New York: Praeger, 1986. Alarcón, Norma, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. The Sexuality of Latinas. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1989. Aldama, Arturo J., and Naomi Helena Quiñónez. Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Brown on Brown: Chicano Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Alegría, Fernando, and Jorge Ruffinelli, eds. Paradise Lost or Gained? The Literature of Hispanic Exile. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. Algarín, Miguel, and Piñero, Miguel, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Alvarez Borland, Isabel. Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Anaya, Rudolfo A., and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Albuquerque: El Norte, 1989. Antush, John V. Recent Puerto Rican Theater from New York. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Arrizón, Alicia. Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

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Baeza Ventura, Gabriela. La imagen de la mujer en la crónica del “México de Afuera.” Juárez, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 2006. Babín, María Teresa. Panorama de la cultura puertorriqueña. New York: Las Américas Publishing, 1958. Bardeleben, Renate von, Dietrich Briesemeister, and Juan Bruce-Novoa, eds. Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.-Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture. Tübingen: Narr, 1986. Barradas, Efraín, ed. Herejes y mitificadores. Rio Piedras, PR: Huracán, 1980. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized NationStates. New York: Routledge, 1993. Beebe, Rose Marie, and Robert M. Senkewicz. Testimonios: Early California through the Eyes of Women, 1815–1848. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006. Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature Theory and History. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Buell, Lawrence, Rhonda Cobham Sander, Juan Flores, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. Columbia: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. Cai, Mingshui. Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Calderón, Hector, and José David Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Campa, Arthur León. Hispanic Culture in the Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Candelaria, Cordelia. Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Candelaria, Cordelia, ed. Multiethnic Literature of the United States. Critical Introductions and Classroom Resources. Boulder: University of Colorado at Boulder, 1989. Cantú, Norma E., and Olga Nájera Ramírez, eds. Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Carr, Dorothy A. Central American and Caribbean Literature. New York: Authorhouse, 2005. Castillo, Debra, and María Socorro Tabuenca. Border Women: Writing from La Frontera. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Chabran-Derne, Angie, ed. The Chicana/o Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cordova, Teresa, et al., eds. Chicana Voices: Intersection of Class, Race and Gender. Austin: University of Texas Center for Mexican American Studies, 1986.

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Cortina. Rodolfo. Cuban American Theater. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992. Costa, María Dolores. Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists. Binghamton, New York: Hayworth Press, 2004. Cuadra, Angel. La literatura cubana del exilio. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2001. Cutter, Martha J. Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Espinosa, J. Manuel. The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Fabre, Genevieve, ed. European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature of the United States. Houston: Arte Público, 1988. Figueredo, Danilo, ed. Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature, 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Flores, Juan. Divided Arrivals: Narratives of the Puerto Rican Migration 1920–1950. New York: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2003. Flores, Juan. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993. Foster, David William. El ambiente nuestro: Chicano/Latino Homoerotic Writing. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2006. Foster, David William, and Emmanuel Sampath Nelson. Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. García, Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gonzales, Deena, and Susana Oboler. Latinas in the United States: An Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gonzales-Berry, Erlinda, ed. Pasó Por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. González, Juan. A History of Latinos in America: Harvest of Empire. New York: Viking, 2000. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Gutiérrez, Ramón, et al., eds. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 7 vols. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2008. Herdeck, Donald E., ed. Caribbean Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1979. Hernández, Carmen Dolores. Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Hernández-Miyares, Julio E. “The Cuban Short Story in Exile: A Selected Bibliography.” Hispania Vol. 54, No. 2 (May, 1971): 384. Herrera-Sobek, María. The Bracero Experience: Elitelore Versus Folklore. Los Angeles: UCLA, Latin American Center Publications, 1979 Herrera-Sobek, María, ed. Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual, 1985. Hill, Mernesba D., and Harold B. Schleifer, eds. Puerto Rican Authors. A BioBibliographic Handbook. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974.

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1316

INDEX Page numbers in bold indicate a main topic in the encyclopedia. Aboy Benítez, Juan, 1–2 Abuela’s Weave, 204 Academia de Aztlán. See Academia de la Nueva Raza Academia de la Nueva Raza, 2–3 Acosta, Iván Mariano, 3, 41, 306; and Cuban theater, 318; and immigrant literature, 580; and immigration narratives, 582 Acosta, Mercedes de, 4 Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 4–5; and Aztlán, 102; and the Chicano Renaissance, 239; and travel writing, 1177 Across the Great River, 118, 152 acto, 8–9; and popular culture, 896–897 adivinanzas. See riddles Adventures of Don Chipote: When Parrots Breast-Feed, 292, 583–584, 585, 817, 1222, 1223 aesthetic concepts of Latino literature, 5–46; Chicano, 6–29; Cuban American, 38–46; negrism, 47–48; Puerto Rican, 29–38

African roots, 46–50; in Cuba, 48; in Cuban literature, 173; in Cuban music, 474; development process, 46; and Dominican literature, 668; oral tradition, 47; and Puerto Rican literature, 35–36; rise of Afro-Hispanic intellectuals, 48–49; in salsa music, 49–50 Afro-Caribbean salsa, 350 Agosín, Marjorie, 50–51 Agostini de Del Río, Amelia, 51–52 Agüeros, Jack, 52 Aguila, Guz. See Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio Aguila, Pancho. See Solís, Roberto Ignacio Aguilar Melantzón, Ricardo, 52–54 Aguirre y Fierro, Guillermo, 54–55 ¡AHA!. See Association of Hispanic Arts AIDS: and gay and lesbian literature, 512; in literature, 181–182 El Alamo, 900–901

1317

Index

Alarcón, Alicia, 55–56 Alarcón, Francisco X., 57 Alarcón, Justo, 57–58 Alarcón, Norma. See Third Woman Press Albizu Campos, Pedro, 58–59 Alcalá, Kathleen, 59–61 Alegría, Fernando, 61 Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo, 62; and immigrant literature, 580; and immigration narratives, 582 Alfaro, Luis, 63 Algarín, Miguel, 63–65, 695–696; and the barrio, 115; and Loisaida, 718; and Nuyorican literature, 820; and Nuyorican poetry, 884; and orality, 836; and theater, 1140 Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, 65–66 Alianza Hipano-Americana, 66–68 Allende, Isabel, 68–69, 816 Allo, Lorenzo, 69 Almost a Woman, 1040 Al partir, 325 Alurista, 12–14, 70; and Aztlán, 12, 102, 136, 150; and the barrio, 115; and code-switching, 136–137, 638–639; and land, 623; La Llorona, 449; and the pachuco, 848; and race, 963 Alvarez, Julia, 70–71, 359, 360–361, 367; and the novel, 818; and travel writing, 1176 Alvarez Bravo, Armando—1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 333 Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois, José, 72–76 Ambert, Alba, 76–77 American Book Awards of the Before Columbus Foundation, 100 American Dream: in Chicano theater, 898–899; in Cuban literature, 307–308 Américas Award, 100–101 The Americas Review. See Arte Público Press; Revista Chicano-Riqueña ¡A mí qué!, 774 Among the Valiant, 784 Among the Volcanoes, 204

1318

Los Amores de Ramona, 375 Amy, Francisco Javier, 77–78 Anábasis. See Reyes, José Ascención Anaya, Rudolfo A., 78–79; and the Chicano renaissance, 239; La Llorona, 449; and native literature, 802; and the novel, 817; and the Premio Aztlán, 101; and race, 963; and religion, 983; and travel writing, 1177 Anda, Diane de, 80 Anders, Gigi, 80–81 Anna in the Tropics, 302 The Anti-Bicentennial Special, 901–902 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 82–83, and gay and lesbian literature, 508–509 Apenas un bolero, 43 The Apprenticeship Novel, and bildungsroman, 130 Apuntes históricos interesantes de San Antonio de Béxar, 808–809 Apuntes Biográficos de Emilia Casanova de Villaverde, 199–200 de Aragón, Uva. See Clavijo, Uva Arawak mythology, 462–464 Arce, Julio G., 83; and crónicas, 288–292; and immigrant literature, 578 Arce, Miguel (Manuel), 83–84, 816 Areíto, 84 Arellano, Juan Esteban, 2, 85 Arenas, Reinaldo, 85–86; and the Cuban novel, 323–324; and exile literature, 406; and the novel, 816 Argentinean authors: Borinsky, Alicia, 155–156; Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 746; Valenzuela, Luisa, 1199–1200 Argüelles, Iván, 86–87 Argueta, Jorge, 88 Arias, Arturo, 88–89, 213, 406 Arias, Ron, 89–90 Arizona, civil rights of Mexican Americans, 67 Arizonian authors: Björkquist, Elena Díaz, 138–139; Martin, Patricia Preciado, 738–739; Méndez, Miguel,

Index

761–762; Preciado Martin, Patricia, 906–907 Armadillo Charm, 347 Armand, Octavio Rafael, 90, 337 Armiño, Franca de, 91 Arroyo, Angel M., 91–92 Arroyo, Rane, 92 Arte Público Press, 64, 92–95, 926, 937, 1073, 1076; Kanellos, Nicolás, 601, 603; Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Heritage, 975; Revista ChicanoRiqueña, 990; and theater, 1135 Arteaga, Alfred, 95 Artes y Letras. See Silva de Cintrón, Josefina Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works, 510 Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores, 91, 95–96 ASPIRA, Inc., 96 Association of Hispanic Arts (¡AHA!), 97 Astol, Lalo, 1132 Atencio, Tomás, 2, 98 Ateneo Puertorriqueño de Nueva York, 98 Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 5, 239, 1177 El automóvil gris. Novela de los tiempos de la revolución constitucionalista, 991 Autos de Entrada, 427 Autos Sacramentales, 427 Aventuras del soldado desconocido cubano, 1160–1161 Aventuras de un Niño de la Calle, 207 awards, 98–102; American Book Awards of the Before Columbus Foundation, 100; Américas Award, 100–101; Latino Literary Hall of Fame, 101; Premio Aztlán, 101; Premio Quinto Sol, 99, 374; Pura Belpré Award, 101; Tomás Rivera Award for Mexican American Children’s Literature, 101–102 Aztlán, 70, 79, 102–104, 1211; Alurista, 12, 102, 136, 150; award, 101; and border literature, 150–151; in Chicano literature, 13–14, 444; and Chicano

Movement, 234; and code-switching, 136, 639; Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 528; and land, 623; symbolism, 103–104; and women writers, 1253 Azúcar’s Sweet Hope, 180 Azúcar! The Story of Sugar, 179, 365 Azuela, Mariano, 104–105, 816 En babia, 356 Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 107–108, 909 Badikian-Gartler, Beatriz, 108–109 Báez, Annecy, 109–110 Báez, Josefina, 110–111, 365–366 Bajo una sola bandera, 829, 1127 The Ballad of Gato Guerrero, 971 Ballad of Greater Mexico, 433–443 The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz, 971 Bancroft, Hubert Howe. See testimonial literature Bancroft testimonios or dictations. See testimonial literature Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents, 111–112 Barela, Casimiro, 112 Barquet, Jesús J., 112–114 barrio, 114–116, 624–626; in Chicano literature, 11–12, 115, 118–119; versus “colonia,” 114–115; in native literature, 683; in Nuyorican literature, 683 El Barrio, 30, 31, 946 Barrio, Raymund, 116, 240 Beauty of the Father, 302 Behar, Ruth, 116–117 Bell, Ricardo, 1144 Belpré, Pura, 101, 117–118 Beltrán Hernández, Irene, 118–119 Bencastro, Mario, 119–120; and Central American literature, 212; and immigration narratives, 582; and the novel, 817 Benítez, Sandra, 120–121, 212 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 121–122 Bernal, Vicente J., 122

1319

Index

Bernardo, Anilú, 122–124 Bertrand, Diane Gonzales, 124–126 Betances Jaeger, Clotilde, 126–129 Between Worlds, 1195–1196 The Big Banana, 946 The Big Bear, 1015 bildungsroman, 129–133, 807, 948; approches, 129–130; Bless Me, Última, 131–132; El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories, 131; Canícula: Snapshots of Girlhood en la Frontera, 132; definition, 129; differences between Chicano and Chicana literature, 132; Dr. Neruda’s Cure of Evil, 1296; House of Houses, 132; The House on Mango Street, 130, 131, 133; influence of, 132–133; Paca Antillana, 170 The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, 133–134 The Bilingual Review. See The Bilingual Review/Press Bilingual Review/Press, 134, 233; and Keller, Gary D, 134, 604–605 bilingualism, 14, 24–25, 42, 70. See also code-switching; language; anaphoras, 662; and the barrio, 115; and biculturalism, 650–655; bisensibilismo, 641; congeries, 661; and coridos, 644; in education, 241; to express alienation, 656–658; and folk songs, 643–648; and identity markers, 655–656; jokes, 452; laws, 112; levels of, 632–633; in literature (see bilingualism in literature); in music, 15, 547; reason for retention of Spanish, 134–135; and transnationalism, 1164 bilingualism in literature, 134–138; and border literature, 152; exile literature, 135–136; juxtaposition of Spanish and English, 137; and multiculturalism, 137; native literature, 802; in Nuyorican literature, 822; in poetry, 136–137; in theater, 136 bisensibilismo, 641 Björkquist, Elena Díaz, 138–139

1320

Black Mesa Poems, 108 Black Widow’s Wardrobe, 268 Blanco, Beatriz, 139 Blanco, Richard, 139 Bless Me, Última, 16, 78, 79, 239, 449, 683, 802, 817; and bildungsroman, 131–132 The Blue Horse of Madness, 205 Blues for the Buffalo, 971 Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo, 401 Bodega Dreams, 625, 946–947 La Bodega Sold Dreams, 33–34 Bolaños Cacho, Miguel, 140 Bolaños, Gustavo Alemán. See Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo Bolet Peraza, Nicanor, 141, 578 Bolio, Dolores, 141–142 book fairs and festivals, 142–146; Border Book Festival, 145; Canto al Pueblo, 144–145; Edward James Olmos Book and Family Festival, 146; First Festival of Literatura Fronteriza, 148; Flor y Canto festivals, 144; Inter-American Book Fair, 145; and the mainstream publishing industry, 142–143; Miami Book Fair International, 145–146; National Latino Book Fair and Writers Festival, 143–144; Texas Small Press Book Fair, 145 Bordao, Rafael, 146–147 Border Book Festival, 145 borderlands: and literature (see border literature); and land, 624 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 152, 508 borderlands literature. See border literature border literature, 82, 147–154; and Aztlán, 150–151; and bilingualism, 152; and Chicana writers, 151–152; concepts of, 147–148; Garza, Beatriz de la, 501–502; González, Ray, 537–539; and immigration, 149–150; and mestizaje, 151; and the Mexican Revolution, 187; Mexican side versus American side, 149; modification of the border, 151

Index

Borderlands Theater, 154–155 Border Women: Writing from la Frontera, 148 Borge, Jorge. See López, José Heriberto Borinsky, Alicia, 155–156 Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina, 156 Bornstein-Somoza, Miriam. See Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina Brammer, Ethriam Cash, 156–158 Brandon, Jorge: and the barrio, 115; and Loisaida, 718; and orality, 833–834 Braschi, Giannina, 158 Braschi, Wilfredo, 159 Breathing Light, 811 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 354, 362–363 This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 508, 509, 780 Brinson Curiel, Barbara, 159–160 Brito, Aristeo, 160–161, 240 Broche, José Francisco, 313 El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories, 770, 823; and bildungsroman, 133 Brown Berets, 161–162 Brown-on-Brown, 971 Brown: The Last Discovery of America, 510–511 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 162–164 The Buddha Book: A Novel, 1003 Burciaga, José Antonio, 164–165, 240 Burgos, Julia de, 165–166, 1254 Burk, Ronnie, 166–167 Burton, María Amparo Ruiz de. See Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo Byrne, Bonifacio, 167–168 Caballero: A Historical Novel, 534, 617, 817 Caballero, Pedro, 169–172 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. See Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, Ezequiel, 172 Cabeza a de Vaca, Fabiola, 172–173, 1249–1250; and Fantasy Heritage, 689; and land, 618

Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger, From The, 216, 217 Cabrera, Lydia, 173–174 Cactus Blood, 268 Cadilla Ruibal, Carmen Alicia, 174–175 Calaca Press, 175–176 California: Californios, 197, 1100–1105; colonial literature, 262, 263–264; first printing press, 679; and immigrant press, 919–920; and land grants, 615; newspapers, 685–686; publishing in, 932–934 California League of Mexican American Women, 229 Californian authors: Coronel, Antonio Franco, 266–267; Ponce, Mary Helen, 890–891 Californio, 197; testimonial literature, 1100–1105 Calleros, Cleofas, 176 Camacho, Simón, 176–177 Camarillo y Roa de Pereyra, María Enriqueta, 177–178 Cambeira, Alan, 178–180, 365–366 Camino de Victoria, 286 Campa, Arthur León, 180–181 Campfire Dreams, 608 El Campo, 353 Campo, Rafael, 181–182; and gay and lesbian literature, 512–513, 888 Campos, Tito, 182–183 Canales, José T., 183–184 Canales, Viola, 184–185 Canción en inglés, 642–643 Candelaria, Nash, 185–186, 240 Candelaria’s Sorrow, 783 Canícula: Snapshots of Girlhood en la Frontera, 152–153, 188, 132 Cano, Daniel, 186–187 Canto al Pueblo, 144–145 Cantú, Norma Elia, 187–188 Capetillo, Luisa, 188–189 Caraballo Cruz, Samuel, 189–190

1321

Index

Caracol, 233 Caramelo, 1177 Caras viejas y vino nuevo, 11, 18, 24, 25 Cárdenas, Isidra T., 190 Cárdenas, Reyes, 190–191 Carlito’s Way, 1155 Carmen by Moonlight, 940–941 Caro, Brígido, 191–192 Carpa Cubana, 1148 Carpa García, 1148 carpas. See theater in a tent, circus, tent shows Carrasquillo, Pedro, 192–193, 350 Carrero, Jaime, 194–195, 580 La Carreta, 736, 737, 1137; and the barrio, 116; and La Carreta Made a UTurn, 670, 822; and the jíbaro, 595–596; and Nuyorican literature, 698, 737; and working class, 702 La Carreta Made a U-Turn, 116, 670; and the barrio, 116; and La Carreta, 670, 822; and transnationalism, 1170 Carrillo, Adolfo, 195–196 Carrillo, Eduardo A., 196–197 Carrillo, Leo, 197 Carrillo O’Farril, Isaac, and Cuban poetry, 327 Carry Me Like Water, 1021 Cartas Gredalenses, 141 La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc., 198 Casal, Lourdes, 198–199, 1286–1287 Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia, 199–200 El Caso Padilla, literatura y revolución en Cuba: documentos, 198 Castañeda, Carlos, 200–202 Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo, 203 Castañeda, Omar S., 203–204, 213 Castellano, Olivia, 205 Castellanos, Henry C., 205–206 Castellón, Pedro Angel, 206 Castellot, José, 206–207 Castilla, Julia Mercedes, 207–208

1322

Castillo, Ana, 208–209, 1265–1268; and Chicano Renaissance, 240; and travel writing, 1176 Castillo, Gary, 209–210 Castro v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, 4–5 Casualty Report, 1216 Catacalos, Rosemary, 210–211 Catalá, Rafael, 211–212 La Causa. See Chicano Movement Cecilia Valdés, o La Loma de Angel, 815, 1235 Ceja, Manuel, 212; and the Mexican American Movement (MAM), 763–764 Celestino, 323 Central America in My Heart, 527 Central American Literature, 212–213 Central American refugees, 213–214 Centro Asturiano, 315 Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York, 214–215 Centro Español de West Tampa, 315 Centro Español de Ybor City, 215, 315 Centro Obrero, 315 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 216–217, 888, 1277–1280 Chacón, Daniel, 217–219 Chacón, Eusebio, 219 Chacón, Felipe Maximiliano, 220 Chacón Gonzales, Herminia, 220–221 Chango’s Fire, 625, 948 Chapa, Francisco, 221–222 “La Chata” Nolesca. See Escalona, Beatriz Chavarría-Cháirez, Becky, 222–223 Chávez, Angélico, 223–224, 983 Chávez, César, 224–226, 572 Chávez, Denise, 226–227, 145 Chávez Padilla, Ernesto, 227–228 Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, 511 Chicana Liberation, 228–230 Chicano/a authors: Acosta, Oscar Zeta, 4–5, 102, 239; Alfaro, Luis, 63;

Index

Alurista, 12–14, 136, 70, 102, 115, 136–137, 150, 449, 623, 638–639, 848, 963; Anda, Diane de, 80; Arias, Ron, 89–90; Arteaga, Alfred, 95; Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 107–108, 909; Barrio, Raymund, 116, 240; Bornstein, Miriam Mijalina, 156; Brammer, Ethriam Cash, 156–158; Brinson Curiel, Barbara, 159–160; Brito, Aristeo, 160; Burciaga, José Antonio, 164–165, 240; Burk, Ronnie, 166–167; Cano, Daniel, 186–187; Cárdenas, Reyes, 190–191; Castellano, Olivia, 205; Castillo, Ana, 208–209, 240, 1176, 1265–1265; Ceja, Manuel, 212, 763–764; Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 216–217, 888, 1277–1280; Chacón, Daniel, 217–219; Chávez, César, 224–226; Chávez, Denise, 145, 226–227; Chávez Padilla, Ernesto, 227–228; Cisneros, Sandra, 246–247, 817, 818, 1177, 1252–1253; Cortez, Carlos, 278–280; Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita, 284–286; Cumpián, Carlos, 346–347; Delgado, Abelardo, 115, 239, 352–353, 883; Delgado, Juan, 353; Elizondo, Sergio, 377–382; Flores, Carlos Nicolás, 421–422; Gamboa, Harry, Jr., 490–491; García, Anthony J., 491–492; García-Camarillo, Cecilio, 496–498; García, Richard, 240, 495; Gilb, Dagoberto, 516–517; Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 10, 237, 296–298, 528–529, 549, 623, 800, 882; González, Genaro, 530–531, 1177; González, Rafael Jesús, 537; Gutiérrez, José Angel, 548–550; Hernández, Inés, 240, 558–559; Herrera, Juan Felipe, 562–563; Leal, Luis, 670–674; López, Josefina, 720–721; Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita,” 741–742; Méndez, Miguel, 240, 761–762, 963; Montalvo, José Luis, 773–775; Montoya, José, 776–777; Morales, Alejandro, 240, 781–783, 449;

Morton, Carlos, 784–785; Niño, Raúl, 810–811; Paredes, Américo, 274–275, 622, 817, 853–855; Peña, Terri de la, 863–864; Pérez, Emma, 867; Pérez, Raymundo “Tigre,” 870–871; Rechy, John, 16–17, 510, 972–973; Rivera, Marina, 240, 997; Rivera, Tomás, 101–102, 115, 239, 619, 802, 817, 998–999; Romano-Vizcarra, Octavio I., 1008–1009; Salinas, Luis Omar, 239, 1027–1028; Sánchez, Ricardo, 115, 136–137, 239, 909, 1033–1034; Silva, Beverly, 1059–1060; Suárez, Mario, 1082–1086; Tafolla, Carmen, 1091–1092; Trambley, Estela Portillo, 239, 1162–1163; Valdés, Gina, 1193–1196; Valdez, Luis, 14–15, 20, 104, 136, 236–237, 802, 847–848, 862, 963, 1063, 1096–1099, 1132, 1197–1199, 1221; Vázquez, Richard, 239, 963, 1213–1214; Vigil, Evangelina, 1224–1226; Villanueva, Tino, 115, 240, 1226–1227; Villarreal, José Antonio, 1230–1231; Villaseñor, Victor, 240, 1232; Zamora, Bernice, 240, 1276, 1299–1300 Chicano identity, 230–231; and the barrio, 115; and border literature, 148–149; and Chicano Renaissance, 238; term etymology, 230, 231 Chicano/a literature, 231–234; aesthetic concepts, 6–29; anthologies, 18; authors (see Chicano/a authors); awards, 99–100, 100–101; Aztlán, 13–4, 102; and the barrio, 11–12, 115, 118–119; and bildungsroman, 130–133; bilingualism, 14, 24–25, 136; and the border, 149–151; Chicana Liberation, 228–230; and the Chicano Movement, 7, 66, 231–232, 235, 692–694; and children’s literature, 125; Con Safos literary group, 4, 264–265, 934; critics’ contribution, 26–28; and cultural identity, 98 (see also Chicano identity); cultural nationalist canon, 232–233;

1323

Index

Chicano/a literature (continued) Editorial Quinto Sol, 373–374, 694; and ethnic relationships, 645–647; female voice, 20–23,; and feminism, 1261–1262; feminist criticism, 27; feminist detective novels, 268–269; and folk beliefs, 461; and folklore-based literature, 480; foundation novels of, 232; and gay and lesbian literature, 508–511; gender in, 1261–1269; genre, 1275–1282; and geography, 1248–1253; historical novels, 23–24; humor, 164; hybrid books, 22; influences, 8; and land grants, 610–611, 617; and land loss, 613; linguistic evolution, 24–26; and literary magazines, 233; La Llorona, 448–450, 718, 1261; La Malinche, 729, 1261; Mexican experience, 54; myths, 17; novels, 5, 116; and oral traditions, 12; poetry (see Chicano poetry); prefeminist icons, 1261; prison literature, 909–910; prose (see Chicano prose narrative) ; and religion, 984; shift from Spanish to English, 25–26; and social customs, 17–18; in Spanish, 26, 287–288; theater (see Chicano theater); themes, 28; and transnationalism, 1170; urban renewal, 614; vendido, 1220–1222; and the Vietnam war, 186–187; women’s role in, 132; and women writers, 233 Chicano art; cinema, 1180–1181; and religion, 984; removal of cultural references, 19; themes, 11; women’s role, 23 Chicano in China, 1177–1178 Chicano Movement, 8, 224–225, 234–235, 558, 1025, 1033; Aztlán, 102, 234; and Brown Berets, 161–162; chauvinism within, 228; and Chicana Liberation, 228; and Chicano literature, 7, 66, 231–232, 235, 692–694; and corridos, 439–443; Crusade for Justice (CFJ), 296; Delgado, Abelardo, 352–353; and the essay, 398; El Grito del Norte, 1211; González, Genaro,

1324

530–531; Gutiérrez, José Angel, 548–550; I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín, 528–529; Kanellos, Nicolás, 602; and La Malinche, 727; Montalvo, José Luis, 773–775; Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 786–787; Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), 787–788; and mythical past, 234; and native literature, 692–694; in New Mexico, 732; and newspapers, 933–934; novel, 817; and the pachuco, 847–848; Plan de Santa Barbara, 879–881; plastic arts, 11; and poetry, 10, 882; and prision poetry, 909–910; and religion, 983; and transnationalism, 1170; and workingclass literature, 1292 Chicano oral tradition, 432; children’s songs and games, 456–457; the corrido, 272–278, 433–443; folk belief and folk medicine, 459–461; folk speech, 452–453; folk theater, 455–456; prose narrative (see Chicano prose narrative); proverbs and proverbial expressions, 453–455; riddles, 457–459 Chicano poetry, 87, 107, 164, 191, 216–217, 885–886; albur, 378; and the Chicano Movement, 70; décimas, 349; engagée, 10–11; female voice, 20; feminism, 156, 208; floricantos, 18; indigenismo, 12–13; the narrative voice, 19; removal of cultural references, 19; Wobbly aesthetic, 279–280; women writers, 1277–1280 Chicano Press Association, 235–236 Chicano prose narrative, 1280–1282; caso, 451; categories, 443; chiste or jest, 451–452; and folk beliefs, 460–461; folktales, 444; legends, 444, 450; La Llorona (see La Llorona); myths, 444 “Chicano Renaissance,” 236–240; and Chicano identity, 238; important authors and scholars, 239–240; and Latin American literary boom, 238; Trambley, Estela Portillo, 1162–1163;

Index

transitional link between pre- and post-Renaissance eras, 238 Chicano theater, 8–10, 63, 1132–1135; acto, 8–9, 896–897; and the Alamo, 900–901; and the American Dream, 898–899; author-created, 20; and the corrido, 903–904; estrangement from its origins, 19; folk theater, 455–456; indigenismo, 14–15; and novels, 1135; and the pelado, 862; and popular culture, 894–905; and television, 1135; TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), 1096–1099, 1134; theaters companies, 133–134, 154–155; Valdez, Luis, 1197–1199 Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind, 352 children’s and young adult literature, 117–118, 120, 123, 125, 157, 183, 204, 218, 213, 223, 240–243; Alarcón, Francisco X., 57, 242; Alvarez, Julia, 242; awards, 101–102; Barahona Center, 112; Belpré, Pura, 241; bilingual education, 241; Chavarría-Cháirez, Becky, 222–223; Cisneros, Sandra, 242; Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 250–251; Engle, Margarita, 383; Galindo, Mary Sue, 488–489; Garza, Xavier, 504–505; indigenous culture, 88; Jiménez, Francisco, 596–597; Lachtman, Ofelia Dumas, 608–609; leading authors, 242–243; Mohr, Nicholasa, 242, 770; Mora, Pat, 242, 779; Puerto Rican culture, 175; Sandoval, Víctor, 1036–1037; Serros, Michele, 1054–1055; Soto, Gary, 242, 1065–1067; Varela y Morales, Félix Francisco, 240; Velásquez, Gloria, 1217–1218; Villaseñor, Victor, 242, 1233; Villaverde, Cirilo, 1233 children’s songs and games, 456–457 Chilean authors: Alegría, Fernando, 61; Alfaro, Luis, 62–63; Allende, Isabel, 68–69; Mistral, Gabriela, 768–769; Reyes, Guillermo A., 990–991 choteo, 325, 520

Chusma House, 243 Cienfuegos, Lucky: and Loisaida, 718; and Nuyorican literature, 820; and theater, 1140 Circo Azteca de los Hermanos Olvera, 1147 Circo Carnival “Iris Show,” 1147 Circo Rivas Brothers, 1147 Círculo Cubano, 315 Círculo Cultural Cervantes, 1061 Círculo de Cultura Panamericano, 243–244 Círculo de Tabaqueros, 245 circus. See theater in a tent, circus, tent shows Cisneros, Evangelina, 245–246 Cisneros, Sandra, 246–247; and geography, 1252–1253; and the novel, 817, 818; and travel writing, 1177 City of the Night, 973 civil rights: Hispanic, 690–691; of Mexican American, 67, 203 (see also Chicano Movement); in native literature, 802; and racial segregation, 964–965 Civil War, 1244 El Clamor Público, 685–686, 932–933, 966–967 Clavijo, Uva, 248, 652–653 Clemente Chacón, 1231 Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, 248–249, 357–358, 359–360 code-switching, 158, 1077, 1225; Alurista, 136–137, 638–639; for characterization, 658; and Chicano folk speech, 453; and ethnic relationships, 648–655; Floricanto en Aztlán, 136; as a function of style, 658–659; Mi querida Rafa, 137; mission of, 635–636; and multiculturalism, 630, 633–638; Nationchild Plumaroja, 136; in the nineteenth century, 135–136; PérezFirmat, Gustavo, 873; Spik in glyph?, 136–137; in theater, 136; Vigil, Evangelina, 1225–1226

1325

Index

Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 250–251; and children’s and young adult literature, 251; and Nuyorican literature, 823; and poetry, 888 Cofradías. See mutual aid societies Coll y Vidal, Antonio, 251–252 Colombian authors: Castilla, Julia Mercedes, 207–208; Falquez-Certain, Miguel, 409–411; Lleras, Lorenzo María, 716–717; Manrique, Jaime, 731–732; Ortiz-Vargas, Alfredo, 842–843; Sepúlveda, Luis G., 1053 Colón, Jesús, 49, 252–254, 692; crónicas and cronistas, 294–295; and immigrant literature, 581; and Nuyorican literature, 819 Colón López, Joaquín, 254–255 Colón, Miriam, 255–256 Colonial literature, 256–264, 678, 681; Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 298–299; in the early period, 257–258; in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, 257; significant works, 258–264; Escobedo, Alonso Gregorio, 387–388; Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, 262, 678 Los Comanches, 393 The Comeback, 1216 Comiendo lumbre, 1195 Community Service Organization (CSO), 225, 572–573 Como perros y gatos: o las aventuras de la sena democracia en México, historia cómica de la Revolución Mexicana, 816 Compañía de Vaudeville Mantecón, 1148 La Compañía Hermanos Ortíz, 1147–1148 El Conde Gris. See Solano, Gustavo La Conquista de la Nueva México, 388 Con Safos, 4, 264–265, 934 cooking literature, 173 La corbata roja, 519–521 Córdova, Rafael J. De, 265 Coronel, Antonio Franco, 266–267 Corpi, Lucha, 267–269, 240

1326

Corrales, José, 269–270 Corretjer, Juan Antonio, 270–272, 938 El Corrido de Dante, 541 El Corrido de Joaquín Murieta, 277 El Corrido de Juan Endrogado, 898–899 Corrido de Schenley, 441–443 corridos, 272–278; bilingualism, 644; border, 276–277, 435; and border literature, 148–149; corridor, 275–276; of Cortez, Gregorio, 435–439; Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno, 277; definition, 274; during the Chicano Movement, 439–443; and folklore-based literature, 479; formulas, 274, 435; and immigrant literature, 580; immigration, 277–278; and land loss, 615, 620–621; and the Mexican Revolution, 275; origin theories, 274–275; Paredes, Américo, 274–275; and popular culture, 903–904; and pre-Colombian romances, 272–273; and the Spanish romance, 433–435; subgenres of, 276–278; “Valentín de la Sierra,” 439–440 Cortez, Carlos, 278–280 Cortez, Gregorio, 280–281, 435–439 Cortez, Sarah, 281–282 Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno, 282–284; and corridos, 277; and land, 622 Cosas de Estados Unidos, 176 Costa Rican authors. See Quesada, Aníbal costumbrismo, 30, 39; in the Cuban novel, 319 Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita, 284–286 Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo, 286–287, 582 Coyote Sun, 346 El Coyote: The Rebel, 868 El Crepúsculo de la Libertad, 739 Crimson Moon, 268 crónicas and cronistas, 287–296; Colón, Jesús, 294–295; Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina, 376; and the flapper, 292–295; and folklore-based liter-

Index

ature, 479–480; Garza, María Luisa, 288; home-country moral attitudes, 295–296; and immigrant literature, 289, 701–702; and immigrant Mexican women, 289–291; Junco de la Vega, Celedonio, 598–599; and Mexican identity, 287; México de afuera ideology, 288–289; Padilla, Benjamín, 288, 848–849; panHispanism, 293; in the Southwest, 287–288; Torres, Teodoro Jr., 1157–1158; Venegas, Daniel, 288, 292–293 The Cross and the Pear Tree, 866 Crusade for Justice (CFJ), 296–298 Cruz, Angie, 298, 363, 367 La Cruz Blanca Constitucionalista, 1236 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 298–299 Cruz, Migdalia, 299–300 Cruz, Nicky, 300–301; and Nuyorican literature, 821 Cruz, Nilo, 301–302 Cruz, Victor Hernández, 32–33, 302–304; and the barrio, 116; and Nuyorican literature, 820, 822; and Nuyorican poetry, 884; and race, 963 Cuadra, Angel, 304. See also 1953 generation of Cuban poetry Cuba: Cuban Revolution, 305, 319–320, 321–322; exile, 215, 529–530; exile press, 913–916; Mariel boatlift, 733–734; Operation Peter Pan, 831–832; Spanish-American war, 1070–1071 Cuban American art, 43 Cuban American folklore: oral tradition, 470–473; popular music, 473–474; santería, 468–470 Cuban American literature, 86, 121–122, 305–308; aesthetic concepts of, 38–46; African roots, 173; American Dream, 307–308; and the barrio, 115; choteo, 325, 520; classifications of, 310; costumbrismo, 39, 319; Cuban American condition,

306–307; Cuban community as inspiration, 40–41; Cuban exile, 529–530 (see also literatura cubana en el exilio); Cuban Revolution, 305, 319–320, 321–322; Ediciones Universal, 372–373; and ethnic relationships, 648; exile literature, 39–40, 123, 305; and gender, 1272–1274; generational oppositions, 41; and geography, 1256–1260; homosexuality, 114; Linden Lane, 307; main themes of, 44; the Mariel generation, 733–735; and mestizaje, 1257; novel (see Cuban novel); PEN Club de los Cubanos en el Exilio, 862–863; poetry (see Cuban poetry); pro-revolution, 84; Puerto Rican and Chicano literature, differences with, 44; satire, 41–42; short story, 339–341; theater (see Cuban theater); and transnationalism, 1167, 1171; younger and older writers, differences between, 305 Cuban authors: Acosta, Iván Mariano, 3, 41, 306, 318, 580, 582; Allo, Lorenzo, 69; Anders, Gigi, 80–81; Arenas, Reinaldo, 85–86, 323–324, 406, 816; Armand, Octavio Rafael, 90, 337; Barquet, Jesús J., 112–114; Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 121–122; Bernardo, Anilu, 122–124; Blanco, Richard, 139; Byrne, Bonifacio, 167–168; Cabrera, Lydia, 173–174; Casal, Lourdes, 198–199, 1286–1287; Casanova de Villaverde, Emilia, 199–200; Catalá, Rafael, 211–212; Corrales, José, 269–270; Cruz, Nilo, 301–302; Cuadra, Angel, 304, 330–332; Cuza Malé, Belkis, 337–338, 347–348; Eire, Carlos, 374–375; Engle, Margarita, 383–384; Fernández, Roberto, 324–325, 415–416; Florit, Eugenio, 329, 425–426; Fornés, María Irene, 305, 316, 481–482, 587; Galiano, Alina, 488; Gálvez, Wenceslao, 490; García-Aguilera, Carolina, 495, 580;

1327

Index

Cuban authors (continued) García, Cristina, 492–493, 818, 1176; Girona, Julio, 518–522; González, Celedonio, 305–306, 529–530; González-Cruz, Luis F., 540; González, Genero, 530–531, 1117; Grillo, Evelio, 544–545; Guitart, Jorge, 547–548; Heberto, Padilla, 198; Heredia y Heredia, José María, 326, 554–555; Hijuelos, Oscar, 43, 307, 325–326, 563, 818, 1176; Hospital, Carolina, 568–569; Kozer, José, 605–606; Martí, José, 115–116, 241, 328–329, 396, 406, 578, 737–738, 841, 962; Matas, Julio, 750; Mayor Marsán, Maricel, 753; Medina, Pablo, 755–756; Mestre, Ernesto, 762; Mestre, José Manuel, 762–763; Monge-Rafuls, Pedro, 772–773; Montes Huidobro, Matías, 335, 406, 775–776; Muñoz, Elías Miguel, 790; Nattes, Enrique, 805; Obejas, Achy, 514, 825–826; O’Farrill, Alberto, 293–294, 315–316, 543, 826, 1126; Padilla, Heberto, 332, 406, 850–851; Pau-Llosa, Ricardo, 857; Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, 872–874; Piñeyro, Enrique, 878–879; Ponce de León, Nestor, 891–892, 915; Prida, Dolores, 42, 317 907–909, 1139; Quintero, José A., 950–952; Ramos, José Antonio, 968–971; Rivera, Beatriz, 994–995; Rivero, Andrés, 1000–1001; Rivero Muñiz, José, 1001; La Rosa, Pablo, 1011–1012; Saco, José Antonio, 1019–1020; Sánchez-Boudy, José, 39–40, 1035–1036; Santacilia, Pedro, 1038–1039; Sellén, Antonio, 323, 1043–1044; Sellén, Francisco, 323, 1044–1045; Suárez, Virgil, 326, 1086–1089; Tejera, Diego Vicente, 1094–1095; Tolón, Miguel Teurbe, 1153–1154; Torres, Omar, 43, 325, 1156; Torriente-Brau, Pablo de la, 1159–1160; Varela y Morales, Félix

1328

Francisco, 240, 318, 982, 1207–1208; Varona, Enrique José, 213, 1209–1210; Villaverde, Cirilo, 318–319, 815–816, 1233–1235; Yglesias, José, 1295–1296 Cuban exile, 215, 1001 Cuban literature in the United States, 308–342. See also Cuban American literature Cuban novel: classification of, 321; costumbrismo, 319; and the Cuban Revolution, 319–320, 321–322; evocativas group, 322; figurativas group, 322–323; first in the United States, 318; and the Mariel boatlift, 319–320, 321, 323–324; in the Romantic period, 319–320; and slavery, 318; themes of, 321 Los cubanos en Tampa, 1001 Cuban poetry, 113, 117, 139, 206; the atrevidos group, 335–338; and the Avant-Garde generation, 329; generation of 1970, 335–337; government persecution of poets, 330–333; Impressionist aesthetic, 328; the Mariel group, 337–338; 1953 generation, 330; Orígenes group, 329–330; in the Romantic period, 326–328; women writers, 1285–1288 Cuban Revolution, 305, 319–320, 321–322 Cuban theater, 3, 42–43, 1139–1140; classifications, 311; Cuban blackface farce, 1123–1124; in the early twentieth century, 314–316; exile theater, 1141; International Arts Relations (INTAR), 317; major themes, 311; in Miami, 317–318; nationalist themes, 313; new playwrights, 318; in New York, 315–316; (Operation) Peter Pan Generation, 301–302; in the Realist generation, 313–314; in the Revolutionary period, 316–317; Spanish Black Legend, 1044; subgenres of comedy, 311–312; in Tampa, 314–315, 536; theater groups, 315

Index

Cuba: su joven poesía, 330 Cubí y Soler, Mariano, 342–343 Cuchi Coll, Isabel, 343–344 Los cuentos de mi abuela, 177 Cuentos Orientales, 339 Culture Clash, 165, 344–346, 1136 Cumpián, Carlos, 346–347 curanderismo, 459 El cutis patrio, 392 Cuza Malé, Belkis, 337–338, 347–348 Darkness under the Trees: Walking behind the Spanish, 1028 A Daughter’s a Daughter, 185–186 Death at Solstice, 268–269 décimas, 349–350; and Cuban American folklore, 473; and folklore-based literature, 479; and immigrant literature, 580; and the jíbaro, 595; literary structure of, 350; and Puerto Rican folklore, 465 declamadores, 833, 883–884 The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, 867 En defensa de mi raza, 864 De León, Nephtalí; and Chicano Renaissance, 240 Del Monte, Domingo, 350–351 Delgado, Abelardo, 352–353; and the barrio, 115; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; and poetry, 883 Delgado, Juan, 353 Delia’s Song, 267–268 De México a Los Angeles, 1152 Derechos del hombre, 140 Descubrimientos de las siete ciudades, 812 Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, 507, 514 The Desert Remembers My Name: on Family and Writing, 60 Despertando, 556, 557 Dew on the Thorn, 533–534, 619 El diablo en Texas, 151, 160, 617 Día de Reyes, 797–798 dialectology, 392 Diario de Nueva York, 923–924

Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant, 869 Díaz, Junot, 354–355, 362–363, 367 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 433–444; and La Malinche, 727–728; and war, 1243 Díaz Guerra, Alirio, 355; and immigrant literature, 579; and immigration narratives, 582, 585 Diego Padró, José I. de, 356 The Dirty Girls Social Club, 1196 Dr. Neruda’s Cure of Evil, 1296 Dominican American literature, 109–110, 356–366; before the diaspora, 358–359; drama, 110–111; female voices, 364; feminism, 359; in New York, 358; poetry, 111; and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, 71, 357–358, 868 Dominican authors: Alvarez, Julia, 70–71, 359, 360–361, 367, 818, 1176; Báez, Annecy, 109–110; Báez, Josefina, 110–111, 365–366; Cambeira, Alan, 178–180, 366; Cocco de Filippis, Daisy, 248–249, 357–358, 359–360; Cruz, Angie, 298, 363, 367; Díaz, Junot, 354–355, 362–363, 367; Espaillat, Rhina Polonia, 361–362, 391; Lara, Ana-Maurine, 363, 667–668; Landestoy, Carmita, 627; Pérez, Loida Maritza, 363, 868; Rosario, Nelly, 363, 1012–1013; Toro, Vincent, 1154–1155 Dominican immigration, 366–367 Dominicanish, 111, 365 Dominican literature, 179–180 Dominican poetry, 359, 360 Doña Cisa y Su Anafre, 116 Don Catarino. See Pirrín, Eusebio Donde empieza la historia, 156 Dorfman, Ariel, 367–368; and exile literature, 406; and the novel, 816 Las Dos Repúblicas, 387 Down Garrapata Road, 402 Down These Mean Streets, 30, 683, 802, 1149. See also transnationalism drama. See Theater Dreaming in Cuban, 308, 492–493 Drown, 354, 363; and bildungsroman, 133

1329

Index

Duclós Salinas, Adolfo, 368–369 Dumas Lachtman, Ofelia, and children’s and young adult literature, 242 El Eco del Pacífico, 371–372 Ediciones Universal, 372–373, 926 Editorial Quinto Sol, 15–16, 373–374, 694; Premio Quinto Sol, 99, 374; Romano-Vizcarra, Octavio I., 1009 Educational programs for Latinos: ASPIRA, Inc., 96; Barahona Center for the Study of the Book in Spanish for Children and Adolescents, 111–112 Edward James Olmos Book and Family Festival, 146 Eire, Carlos, 374–375 Elías González, Adalberto, 375, 1113–1114 Elizondo, Hortensia, 375–376 Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina, 376–377 Elizondo, Sergio, 377–382 Emilio, 207 Emilio, Luis Fenellosa, 382 Eminent Maricones, 513, 731 Emplumada, 217 Enamorado Cuesta, José, 382–383 The Enemy, 182 Enfermeras de Amor. Una Novela de las Antillas, 169, 170 Engle, Margarita, 383–384 El enigma de los Esterlines, 121 Enterrado vivo, 1001 Erzulie’s Skirt, 363, 668 Escalona, Beatriz, 384–385 Escandón, María Amparo, 385 Escobar, Elizam, 385–386 Escobar, José, 386–387 Escobedo, Alonso Gregorio, 387–388 Escuelitas Mexicanas, 388–389 Espada, Martín, 389–391; and language, 652, 653 Espaillat, Rhina Polonia, 361–362, 391 Esperanza’s Box of Saints, 385 Espina, Eduardo, 391–392

1330

Espinel, Vicente, 349 Espinosa, Aurelio M., 392–393 Espinosa, Conrado, 393–394; and immigrant literature, 578; and immigration narratives, 582 Espinosa, María, 394 Esqueda Brothers Show, 1147 Esquenazi Mayo, Roberto, 395 Essay, 395–399; and activist periodicals, 397–398; and the Chicano Movement, 398; and the crónica, 397; of México de afuera ideology, 397; and political thought, 396–397; Rembao, Alberto, 396, 986; religious, 396 Essex, Olga Berrocal, 399–400 Estampas del Valle y otras obras, 564 Esteves, Sandra María, 400–401, 1271–1272; and language, 651; and Nuyorican literature, 820, 822; and race, 963 Estevis, Anne Hailey, 401–402 ethnic relationships. See also race; in Cuban literature, 648; in Leroy Quintana’s poetry, 645–647 Eulogy for a Brown Angel, 268 exile literature, 104–105, 123, 207, 402–407, 857; and bilingualism, 135–136; Central America in My Heart, 527; and Central American refugees, 213–214; Cuban, 676–677; in Cuban poetry, 198; Cuban theater, 311; homeland as central theme, 405–406; independence movements, 404–405, 706; literary clubs, 708; nostalgia for the patria, 707; novel, 320–321, 815, 816; periodicals, 706–707; and political refugees, 406; printing and publishing (see exile press); protest writing, 712–713; reason for, 404; Spanish Black Legend, 707; and Spanish Republican exiles, 712, 918, 1076–1077; transnationalism, 705 exile press, 704; during the Cold War, 918–919; and the Cristero War, 917–918; independence movements in

Index

Cuba and Puerto Rico, 914–916; and the novel of Mexican Revolution, 917; and Spanish Republican exiles, 918, 1076–1077 Face of an Angel, 226–227 La factoría; novela de un Américo-hispano en Nueva York, 62 Falquez-Certain, Miguel, 409–411 La familia de Justo Malgenio, 343–344 Fantasy Heritage, 411, 689–690; and Manifest Destiny, 197, 731; and race, 962 Farfán de los Godos, Marcos, 412, 260 Sin fecha de extinción, 113–114 Federal Theater Project (FTP), 412–414, 1130 feminism, 20–22, 36–37, 42, 82, 91, 156, 359; and the Chicana Liberation, 228; in Chicano literature, 1261–1262; and gay and lesbian literature, 508 feminist literature, 126–128, 208; detective novels, 268–269; and malinchismo, 654–655; Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer, 189 Fernández, Amando, 336–337 Fernández, Mauricio. See 1953 generation of Cuban poetry Fernández, Roberta, 414–415 Fernández, Roberto, 415–416, 324–325 Fernández Fragoso, Víctor, 416–417 Ferré, Rosario, 417–418, 1269–1271 festivals. See book fairs and festivals Fiesta de abril, 324 Figueroa, José-Angel, 418–419 Figueroa, Sotero, 419–420; and exile press, 914–915 filibustering: and independence of Spanish American colonies, 73; and the Mexican Revolution, 73–74; and Texas independence, 74–75 Firefly Summer, 117 First Festival of Literatura Fronteriza, 148 Fishlight, 876 Fitting In, 123 flapper, 292–295

Flores, Ángel, 420–421 Flores, Carlos Nicolás, 421–422 Flores, Francisca, 422 Flores Magón, Enrique, 422–424 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 424–425; and essay, 396–397; and exile literature, 406, 710; and exile press, 916–917; and land, 622 Flores silvestres: poesías dedicadas a las mujeres de América Latina, 805 Floricanto en Aztlán, 12, 136, 151 Florida: colonial literature, 260, 261, 263; and the Cuban novel, 320; and Cuban theater, 314–315, 317–318; exile novelists, 320–321; theater, 1127–1131, 1141–1142 Florit, Eugenio, 425–426, 329 Flor y Canto festivals, 18, 144 The Flower in the Skull, 60 folk drama and performance (Mexican American), 426–427 folklore and oral tradition, 428–477; Chicano (see Chicano oral tradition); Cuban (see Cuban American folklore); genres of, 430; and immigrant literature, 698–699; origins of, 431; Puerto Rican (see Puerto Rican folklore); speech, 452–453; theater, 455–456; transformations within U.S. context, 431–432 folklore-based literature, 477–481; Los Comanches, 393; Espinosa, Aurelio M., 392–393; Paredes, Américo, 853–855. See also orality; workingclass literature Folk Narratives from the Los Angeles Area, 450 Fontes, Monserrat, 480–481 Forbidden Fruit and Other Stories, 1011–1012 Fornés, María Irene, 481–482; and Cuban American literature, 305; and Cuban theater, 316; and International Arts Relation (INTAR), 587 Foronda, Valentín de, 482–483

1331

Index

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems of Love and Hunger, 216, 217 Franco, Jesús, 483–484 Fruta verde, 121 Fusco, Coco, 484–485 Galarza, Ernesto, 487; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; children’s and young adult literature, 241; and language, 649 Galiano, Alina, 488 Galindo, Mary Sue, 488–490 Gálvez, Wenceslao, 490, 580 Gamboa, Harry, Jr., 490–491 García, Anthony J., 491–492 García, Cristina, 492–493; and the novel, 818; and travel writing, 1176 García, Lionel G., 493–494 García, Richard, 495, 240 García-Aguilera, Carolina, 495 García-Camarillo, Cecilio, 496–498 García Naranjo, Angelina Elizondo de. See Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina García Naranjo, Nemesio, 498–500, 840 Gares, Tomás, 500–501 Garza, Beatriz de la, 501–502 Garza, Catarino, 502–503, 686–687, 935 Garza, María Luisa, 503–504, 288 Garza, Xavier, 504–505 Gasavic, Quezigno. See Vásquez, Ignacio G. Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 505–507; and gay and lesbian literature, 514; and the novel, 817 gay and lesbian literature, 82, 113, 507–516, 731; AIDS, 512; Anzaldúa, Gloria, 508–509; anthologies, 511; Campo, Rafael, 512–513, 888; Fernández Fragoso, Víctor, 416–417; Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 505–507, 514; gay male writing, 509–511; González, Rigoberto, 539–540; Islas, Arturo, 510, 589–590; lesbian female writers, 508–509, 513; Levins Morales, Aurora, 673; Manrique, Jaime, 513; Moraga,

1332

Cherrie, 509, 780–781; Nava, Michael, 806; Obejas, Achy, 514, 825–826; Ortiz Taylor, Sheila, 509, 842; Palacios, Mónica A., 851–852; Peña, Terri de la, 863–864; in Puerto Rican literature, 417, 512; Ramos Otero, Manuel, 512, 972; Rechy, John, 510, 972–973; recurrent themes, 511; Reyes, Guillermo A., 991; Rodriguez, Richard, 510–511; Umpierre-Herrera, Luz María, 513–514, 1188–1189; Villanueva Collado, Alfredo, 512, 1227–1228 Geada, Rita. See 1953 generation of Cuban poetry Geographies of Home, 363, 868 George Washington Gómez, 622 The Giant Killer, 1213 Gil, Lydia M., 516 Gilb, Dagoberto, 516–517 Gillow y Zavalza, Eulogio, 517–518, 982 The Girl from Playa Blanca, 609 Girona, Julio, 518–522 Glickman, Nora, 522–523 Gods Go Begging, 1214 Goldemberg, Isaac, 523–524 Goldman, Francisco, 213, 524–525 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 1285–1286 Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 153, 525–526 Gonzales, Ambrose Elliot, 526–527 Gonzales Bertrand, Diane, and children’s and young adult literature, 242 Gonzales, Oscar, 527 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 10, 528–529; and the “Chicano Renaissance,” 237; Crusade for Justice (CFJ), 296–298, 528; and land, 623; and National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 800; and La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 549; and poetry, 882 González, Adalberto Elías. See Elías González, Adalberto González, Celedonio, 40, 529–530, 305–306 González, Genaro, 530–531, 1177

Index

González, José Luis, 531–532 González, Jovita, 532–535, 817 González, Julián, 535–536 González, Leopoldo, 536 González, Rafael Jesús, 537 González, Ray, 537–539 González, Rigoberto, 539–540 González-Cruz, Luis F., 540 González-Viaña, Eduardo, 540–542, 817 González Parsons, Lucía. See Parsons, Lucía (Lucy) González Gou Bourgell, José, 542 Gracia De Fontanar. See Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina Gráfico, 127, 543–544, 937, 1215; and crónicas and cronistas, 293–294; and native Hispanics, 691; Vega, Bernardo, 1215, 543 La Gran Carpa de la Familia Rascuachi, 15, 903 Gran Circo Escalante Hermanos, 1146–1147 Green Web, 353 Grillo, Evelio, 544–545 El Grito del Norte, 398, 1211 Guadalupe, 9 La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1032 The Guardians, 208 Guatemalan authors: Arias, Arturo, 88–89; Castañeda, Omar S., 203–204 Guatemalan literature, 89 Guerra, Pablo de la, 546 Guerrero, Eduardo “Lalo,” 546–547 Guiseppe Rocco, 1015 Guitart, Jorge, 547–548 Gutiérrez, Franklin, 357 Gutiérrez, José Angel, 548–550 Gutiérrez de Lara, Lázaro, 550–551 Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio, 551–552, 1116–1117 El Habanero, 312 Hambre, 1130 Happy Birthday Jesús, 1014–1015 Hard Language: Short Stories, 851

Harlem Renaissance: Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso, 1042 Hatuey: poema drámatico en cinco actos, 1044 Havana Thursdays, 1087 Heberto, Padilla, 198 Helú, Antonio, 553 El Heraldo de México, 553–554, 920 Heredia y Heredia, José María, 554–555, 326 Hermandades. See mutual aid societies Los Hermanos Bell, 1147 Hernández, David, 556–558 Hernández, Inés, 240, 558–559 Hernández, Jo Ann Yolanda, 559–560 Hernández, Rafael, 561–562 Heroica, 121 Herrera, Juan Felipe, 562–563 Hijuelos, Oscar, 43, 307, 563; and the novel, 325–326, 818; and travel writing, 1176 Hinojosa, Federico Allen, 564 Hinojosa, Rolando, 564–566; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; and land, 618; and orality, 836–838 Hispanic peoples, 566–567 Hispanic Playwrights Project (HPP), 567–568 La historia de un caminante, o Gervacio y Aurora, 685 History and Legends of the Alamo and other Missions in and around San Antonio, 1301 Holy Radishes, 416 Honduran authors: Quesada, Roberto, 212–213, 945–946 Hospital, Carolina, 568–569 Hostos, Eugenio María de, 569–570 House of Houses; and bildungsroman, 132 The House on Mango Street, 22, 132, 246–247; and bildungsroman, 130, 131, 133 A House on the Lagoon, 418 How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 360, 1176

1333

Index

Hoyos, Angela de, 570–571 Huehuetitlan, 570 Huerta, Dolores, 571–573 Huerta, Javier O., 573–574 I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín, 10, 232, 623, 693, 882; and Aztlán, 103; and the Chicano Movement, 528–529 Ibáñez, Armando P., 575–576 Icy Watermelon/Sandía fría, 489 Idar, Jovita, 576–577, 935, 936 Imagining Isabel, 204 immigrant literature, 563, 577–581; Adventures of Don Chipote: When Parrots Breast-Feed, 292, 583–584, 585, 817, 1222, 1223; characteristics of, 577; crónicas and cronistas, 289, 701–702; of Cubans, 703; culture conflict, 699; difference with European immigrant literature, 697; double-gaze perspective, 577–578; and editorials, 700; La familia de Justo Malgenio, 343–344; El lavaplatos, 579–580, 584–585; and folklore, 698–699; Lucas Guevara, 355, 582, 583, 584, 585, 816–817; and mainstream English publishing, 703; México de afuera, 701; versus native literature, 683; and the novel, 816–817; En Nueva York y otras desgracias, 532; and the patria, 698; poetry, 889; of Puerto Ricans, 702; themes, 578–579, 698; women’s role, 699–700 immigrant press; in California, 919–920; Diario de Nueva York, 923–924; and México de afuera ideology, 920–921; and the novel of Mexican Revolution, 922–923; periodicals, 924–925; publishers, 925–926; in San Antonio, 922 Immigrants in Our Own Land, 107 immigration narratives, 582–585 Imprenta América, 914 indigenismo: in Chicano poetry, 12–14; in Chicano theater, 14–15 indigenous ethnopoetic, 202 indigenous roots. See Aztlán

1334

inditas, 586–587 I Never Was a Chicano Militant, 191 Inocencio: Ni siembra, ni escarda y siempre se come el major elote, 85 Insularismo; Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña, 859 Inter-American Book Fair, 145 interlingualims. See bilingualism International Arts Relation (INTAR), 317, 1138, 587–588, 1139 Irisarri, Antonio José de, 588–589 An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, 250, 251 Islas, Arturo, 589–590. See also gay and lesbian literature Islas, Maya, 590–591 Ismaelillo, 328 Jaramillo, Cleofas M., 593–594; and Fantasy Heritage, 689 Jewish Cuban America literature, 81, 117, 522, 524 Jewish-latino authors: Agosín, Marjorie, 50–51; Alcalá, Kathleen, 59–61; Anders, Gigi, 80–81; Behar, Ruth, 116–117; Glickman, Nora, 522–523; Goldemberg, Isaac, 523–524; Goldman, Francisco, 524–525; Levins Morales, Aurora, 673; Perera, Victor, 866; Sephardic, 1051–1052 jíbaro, 594–596, 1205; music, 350; in Puerto Rican poetry, 193 Jicoténcal, 318, 706, 815, 1208 Jiménez, Francisco, 596–597 Joaquín Murrieta, 192 Jones Act, 597, 937–938 journalism, 62, 127–128 Juárez, Tina, 597–598 JUBANA!, 81 Jumping Off to Freedom, 123 Junco de la Vega, Celedonio, 598–599 Junta Patriótica Mexicana, 371 Kanellos, Nicolás, 601–604; Arte Público Press, 601; Recovering the

Index

U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 974, 989–990 Kaskabel. See Padilla, Benjamín Keller, Gary D., 604–605; and Bilingual Review/Press, 134 Klail City Death Trips series, 23–24, 239, 565, 618, 619 Kozer, José, 605–606 Labarthe, Pedro Juan, 607–608 labor and literature. See working-class literature Lachtman, Ofelia Dumas, 608–609 Ladino, 609–610, 1050 Lalo Press, 228. See also Chávez Padilla, Ernesto Lama, Pedro de la, 610 Land Act of 1851, 615–616 land grants, 610–612; in California, 615; in New Mexico, 65–66, 611, 617–618, 621–622 land in literature, 612–627; Aztlán, 623; and borderlands, 624; in California, 615, 616; in colonial times, 614; and migration, 619; in New Mexico, 615; as a place of production, 619–620; as a place of struggle, 620–624; in Texas, 617; urban sites, 624–626 Landestoy, Carmita, 627 language; bilingualism, 14, 24–25, 42, 70, 631–633, 650–655 (see also bilingualism); Chicano folk speech, 452–453; Cuban folk speech, 471–473; Ladino, 609–610; in literature (see language choice in literature); Nuyorican, 31–32; Puerto Rican folk speech, 466–467 language choice in literature, 627–665; imagery, 660–661; in immigrant literature, 697; and multiculturalism, 628–631; rhetorical devices, 661–664; semantic transfers, 649; tone, 659–660 Lantigua, John, 665–667 Lara, Ana-Maurine, 363, 667–668 The Last Client of Luis Montez, 971

To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Other Jerks like Him, 1306 The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, 1181 Latin American boom: Alegría, Fernando, 61; and the Chicano Reanissance, 238; Novás Calvo, Lino, 814; Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 823; and Spanish-languague book market, 1075 Latin American Writers Institute (LAWI), 669 Latin Moon in Manhattan, 513 Latino Literary Hall of Fame, 101 Latino organizations: Asociación Puertorriqueña de Escritores, 91, 95–96; ASPIRA, Inc., 96; Association of Hispanic Arts (AHA), 97; California League of Mexican American Women, 229; La Casa de la Herencia Cultural Puertorriqueña, Inc., 198; Centro Cultural Cubano de Nueva York, 214–215; Círculo Cultural Cervantes, 1061; Círculo de Cultura Panamericano, 243–244; Latin American Writers Institute (LAWI), 109, 669; League of United American Citizens (LULAC), 864–865, 936–937, 965, 1030 ; Liga Femenil Mexicanista, 576; La Liga Protectora Latina, 610; Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana, 501, 674, 938; Mexican American Movement (MAM), 212, 763–764, 933; Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA), 229; Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH), 279, 280; Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 786–787, 880; Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), 229, 787–788; National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS), 799; National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), 800; Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), 853;

1335

Index

Latino organizations (continued) REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking, 977. See also mutual aid societies latinos. See Hispanic peoples Latins Anonymous: Najera, Rick, 798–799; theater companies, 1136 El laúd del desterrado, 206, 326–327, 951, 1039 El lavaplatos, 579–580, 584–585, 698 Laviera, Jesús Abraham “Tato,” 137, 669–670; and the barrio, 115; and language, 650; and Loisaida, 718; and Nuyorican literature, 822; and orality, 834–835; and race, 963; and theater, 1140; and transnationalism, 1170 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC): Perales, Alonso, 864–865; and publishing, 936–937; and racial segregation, 965; Sánchez, George I., 1030 Leal, Luis, 670–671 Leaving Home, 493–494 legend: Aztlán (see Aztlán); Chicano, 444, 450; La Llorona (see La Llorona); Spanish Black Legend (see Spanish Black Legend) León, Daniel de, 671–672 Letamendi, Augustín de, 672–673 Let It Rain Coffee, 298, 363 Letters to Louise, 353 Let Their Spirits Dance, 1177 Levins Morales, Aurora, 673 Lidia, Palmiro de. See Valle, Adrián del Liga Femenil Mexicanista, 576 La Liga Protectora Latina, 610 Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana, 501, 674, 938 Limón, Graciela, 674–676; and the novel, 817; and race, 963 Linden Lane Magazine, 307, 676 literary magazines: Bilingual Review, 233; Caracol, 233; Linden Lane, 307; La Palabra: Revista de Literatura Chicana,

1336

58; Revista Chicano-Riqueña, 233, 989–990; Tan-Tan: Revista Cósmica, 791; Third Woman, 233 literatura cubana en el exilio, 676–677 literatura fronteriza. See border literature literature: Chicano (see Chicano literature); Cuban (see Cuban American literature); Nuyorican (see Nuyorican literature); Puerto Rican (see Puerto Rican literature); and race, 962–963; in Spanish (see Spanish-language literature); working-class (see workingclass literature) literature clubs; and exile literature, 708; PEN Club de los Cubanos en el Exilio, 862–863; Sociedad Literaria HispanoAmericana de Nueva York, 892 literature, development of latino literature, 677–716; and colonial literature, 678, 681; exile literature (see exile literature); Fantasy Heritage, 689–690; first Spanish language novel, 685; historical background, 678–682; immigrant literature (see immigrant literature); impact outside of the United States, 714; native literature (see native literature); newspapers, 679–681 The Little Death, 806 Little Havana, 716 Lleras, Lorenzo María, 716–717 La Llorona, 717–718, 1261; Alurista, 449; Anaya, Rudolfo A., 449; anecdotal versions, 447–448; literary versions of, 446–447; and La Malinche, 729; Morales, Alejandro, 449; Moreno-Hinojosa, Hernán, 783; origins of, 444–446; structural patterns, 447 Loisaida, 718–719, 820; and the barrio, 115 Longing, 394 The Long Night of White Chickens, 525 López, Diana, 1275–1276 López, José Heriberto, 719–720

Index

López, Josefina, 720–721 Los de abajo, 104–105, 816 El Louie, 634–635 Lousiana Purchase, 721 Loves Me, Loves Me Not, 123 Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, 509 Loving Pedro Infante, 227 Lozano, Ignacio E., 721–723; and immigrant press, 921; México de afuera ideology, 766 Lucas Guevarra, 355, 582, 583, 584, 585, 698, 816–817 L’Unione Italiana, 315 Machado, Eduardo, 725–726; and International Arts Relation (INTAR), 587 machismo, 1163 Macho!, 1232–1233 Magda’s Piñata Magic/Magda y la piñata mágica, 223 Magda’s Tortilla’s/Las tortillas de Magda, 223 magical realism, 202, 204; Alcalá, Kathleen, 59–61; Alegría, Fernando, 61; Erzulie’s Skirt, 668; Flores, Ángel, 420; The Road to Tamazunchale, 1164–1165 magonismo, 423–425. See also Flores Magón, Ricardo El Malcriado, 1223 La Malinche, 654–655, 726–730, 1261; and La Llorona, 717, 729; in Lucha Corpi’s work, 1263–1265; and travel writing, 1174 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 43, 307–308, 325, 563 Maneras de contra, 340 Manifest Destiny, 99, 613, 730–731; and early newspapers, 685; versus Fantasy Heritage, 411; and race, 958, 959–960, 962; and Spanish Black Legend, 1071; and travel writing, 1174; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 613, 731, 197, 731 Manrique, Jaime, 731–732. See also gay and lesbian literature La Maravilla, 1214

El mar de las lentejas, 121 Mares, Ernesto Antonio, 732–733 Margins: A Novel, 863 María Portillo, 1194 Mariel boatlift, 733–734; Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 121–122; and the Cuban novel, 319–320, 321, 323–324; exile literature, 321, 323; santería, 469 Mariel generation, 733–735 Marín, Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín,” 735–736; and the barrio, 115–116; and exile literature, 406; and exile press, 914–915; and immigrant literature, 578 maromeros, 1143 Marqués, René, 736–737, 1137; and immigrant literature, 579, 580, 581; and immigration narratives, 582; and the jíbaro, 595–596 Marta, 1201–1202 Martí, José, 737–738; and the barrio, 115–116; and children’s and young adult literature, 241; and Cuban poetry, 328–329; and essay, 396; and exile literature, 406; and immigrant literature, 578; and race, 962; and oratory, 841 Martin, Patricia Preciado, 738–739 Martínez, Antonio José, 739–741, 982 Martínez, Demetria, 741 Martínez, Elizabeth “Betita,” 741–742 Martínez, Max, 742–744 Martínez, Michele, 744–745 Martínez, Rubén, 745, 153 Martínez, Rueben, 745–746 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 746, 816 Marzán, Julio, 747 Mas Pozo, María, 748–750 matachines dance, 426–427 Matas, Julio, 750 Mayer, Oliver, 751 Mayo, Wendell, 751–753 Mayor Marsán, Maricel, 753 McPeek Villatoro, Marcos, 213, 753–755

1337

Index

The Meaning of Consuelo, 251 MEChA. See Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) Medina, Pablo, 755–756 Medina, Rubén, 756–757 Megía, Félix, 757–758 Memorias de Bernardo Vega: Contribución a la historia de la comunidad puertorriqueña, 1215 Memorias del Marqués de San Basilisco, 195–196 Memorias inéditas del Lic. Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, 195 Memories, 185 Mena, María Cristina, 758–761 Méndez, Miguel, 761–762; and Chicano Renaissance, 240; and race, 963 mestizaje, 1246–1247; in border literature, 151; in Cuban literature, 1257; in Puerto Rican literature, 1253 mestizo, 957–958 Mestre, Ernesto, 762 Mestre, José Manuel, 762–763 Mexía, Félix. See Megía, Félix Mexican American authors: ChavarríaCháirez, Becky, 222–223; Mena, María Cristina, 758–761; Padilla, Mike, 851; Palacios, Mónica A., 851–852; Ramos, Manuel, 971–972; Rodriguez, Luis J., 1004–1006; SálazMárquez, Rubén, 1024; Sánchez, George I., 1029–1030; Sánchez, Trinidad V., 1034–1035; Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno, 1042–1043, 1166–1167; Serros, Michele, 1054–1055; Soto, Gary, 239, 1065–1067; Villanueva, Alma Luz, 239, 1226. See also Chicano authors; Mexican authors Mexican American Movement (MAM), 212, 763–764; and newspapers, 933 Mexican American Women’s National Association (MANA), 229 Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), 548–549

1338

Mexican authors: Mexican American authors; Azuela, Mariano, 104–105, 816; Bolaños Cacho, Miguel, 140; Camarillo y Roa de Pereyra, María Enriqueta, 177–178; Caro, Brígido, 191–192; Carrillo, Adolfo, 195–196; Carrillo, Eduardo A., 196–197; Castellot, José, 206–207; Elías González, Adalberto, 375, 1113–1114; Elizondo de García Naranjo, Angelina, 376–377; Elizondo, Hortensia, 375–376; Escandón, María Amparo, 385; Espinosa, Conrado, 393–394, 578, 582; Franco, Jesús, 483–484; García Naranjo, Nemesio, 498–500, 840; Garza, Beatriz de la, 501–502; Garza, Catarino E., 502–503, 686–687, 935; Garza, María Luisa, 288, 503–504; Gillow y Zavalza, Eulogio, 517–518, 982; Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 153, 525–526; González, Julián, 535–536; Gutiérrez de Lara, Lázaro, 550–551; Guzmán Aguilera, Antonio, 551–552, 1116–1117; Helú, Antonio, 553; Junco de la Vega, Celedonio, 598–599; Moheno, Querido, 769; Múzquiz Blanco, Manuel, 795; Navarro, Gabriel, 807–808; Niggli, Josephina, 809–810; Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis,” 869–870; Ramírez, Sara Estela, 967–968; Rembao, Alberto,396, 816, 985–986; Reyes, José Ascención, 991; Rivera y Río, José, 1000; Ruiz, Ronald L., 1014–1015; Sálaz-Márquez, Rubén, 1024; Torres, Teodoro Jr., 816, 1157–1158; Trujillo Herrera, Rafael, 1183; Vásquez, Ignacio G., 1212; Venegas, Daniel, 288, 292–293, 578, 579–580, 581, 582, 817, 1222–1223; Zavala, Lorenzo de, 962, 1302–1303. See also Chicano/a authors Mexican corridor, 350 Mexican farm workers, 487–488 Mexican Folk Plays, 809

Index

Mexican Revolution, 74, 75, 517, 1244; and border literature, 187; and the corrido, 275; filibustering, 73–74; literature, 83, 84, 104–105, 119; magonismo, 423–425; and México de afuera ideology, 765; novels, 535, 917, 922–923; and theater, 1110–1111, 1115, 1145–1146 Mexican theater, 192; El proceso de Aurelio Pompa, 196; Mexican national and expatriate themes, 196 Mexican Village, 810 The Mexican Voice. See Mexican American Movement México de afuera 764–767; crónicas and cronistas, 288–289; Garza, María Luisa, 503–504; ideology, 83, 178, 499, 564, 722–723, 1212; and immigrant literature, 701; and the immigrant press, 920–921; and Revista Mexicana, 499; transnationalism, 1168–1170 Miami Book Fair International, 145–146 La migra me hizo los mandados, 56 Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Women, 1184 Mi gusto, 636–637 Mi querida Rafa, 565; and codeswitching, 137–138 Mireles, Oscar, 767–768 Mistral, Gabriela, 768–769 The Mixquiahuala Letters, 22, 1176 Moheno, Querido, 769 Mohr, Nicholasa, 30–31, 683, 769–771, 1254–1255; and native literature, 802; and the novel, 818; and Nuyorican literature, 823 Moncaleano, Blanca de, 771–772 Monge-Rafuls, Pedro, 772–773 Montalvo, José Luis, 773–775 Montes Huidobro, Matías, 775–776; and exile literature, 406; and the 1953 generation, 335 Montoya, José, 776–777 Mooney’s Road to Hell, 971–972

Mora, Joseph Jacinto, 777–778 Mora, Pat, 778–780; and poetry, 888 Moraga, Cherríe, 82, 509, 780–781 Morales, Alejandro, 781–783; and Chicano Renaissance, 240; La Llorona, 449 Moreno-Hinojosa, Hernán, 783–784 Morín, Raúl R., 784 Los moros y cristianos, 412, 830, 1106 Morton, Carlos, 784–785 Motta, Jacob de la, 786 Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH), 279, 280 Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), 786–787; Plan de Santa Barbara, 880 Muerte de una estrella, 380–382 The Muffler Man/El hombre mofle, 183 Mujer en traje de batalla, 121–122 Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), 229, 787–788 Mujica, Barbara, 788 El Mulato, 788–790 multiculturalism: bicultural element, 628–629; categories of, 628; and codeswitching, 630, 633–638; crosscultural element, 629, 636; transcultural element, 629–630, 636–639 Mummified Deer, 1199 Muñoz, Elías Miguel, 790 Murgía, Alejandro, 790–791 Murrieta, Joaquín, 791–792, 1168 El Museo del Barrio, 792–793 music: Chicano, 546–547; Cuban, 473–474; Puerto Rican, 350 mutual aid societies, 793–795; Centro Asturiano, 1129–1130; Centro Obrero, 1130–1131; and Cuban theater, 315; in New York, 1136; and theater, 1128–1131, 1136–1141; Unión Martí-Maceo, 1130 Múzquiz Blanco, Manuel, 795 My Daughter’s Eyes and Other Stories, 363–364

1339

Index

My Father, the Angel of Death, 1229–1230 Nadal de Santa Coloma, Juan, 797–798 Najera, Rick, 798–799 Naranjo the Muse: A Collection of Stories, 204 National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS), 799 National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS). See National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS) National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), 800 National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 800–801 National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), 225 National Latino Book Fair and Writers Festival, 143–144 Nationchild Plumaroja, 136 native Hispanic press, 926–929; and books, 928; in New Mexico, 929–930; newspapers, 927–928 native literature, 801–803; and the barrio, 683; bilingualism and biculturalism, 802; and Chicano Movement, 692–694; and civil rights movements, 802; early publishing, 684; Fantasy Heritage, 689–690; feminism, 696; and Hispanic civil rights, 690–691; versus immigrant literature, 683, 801; mainstream Englishlanguage publishing, 690; newspapers, 685–689; in New York, 691; novel, 817; Nuyorican literature, 694–695; and publishing houses, 694; reasons for, 682–683 nativism, 803–805, 986–989 Nattes, Enrique, 805 Naufragios: transacciones de fin de siglo, 113 Nava, Michael, 805–807

1340

Navarro, Gabriel, 807–808 Navarro, José Antonio, 808–809 neorriqueño. See Nuyorican New Mexican authors: Anaya, Rudolfo A., 78–79, 101, 239, 449, 802, 817, 963, 983, 1177; Arellano, Juan Esteban, 2, 85; Atencio, Tomás, 2, 98; Bernal, Vicente J., 122; Bolio, Dolores, 141–142; Cabeza de Vaca, Fabiola, 172–173, 618, 689, 1249–1250; Candelaria, Nash, 185–186, 240; Chacón, Eusebio, 219; Chacón, Felipe Maximiliano, 220; Chacón Gonzales, Herminia, 220–221; Chávez, Angélico, 223–224; Escobar, José, 387–388; Jaramillo, Cleofas M., 593–594, 689; Mares, Ernesto Antonio, 732–733; Martínez, Antonio José, 739–741, 982; Martínez, Demetria, 741; Otero, Miguel A. Jr., 843–844; Otero Warren, Nina, 689, 844–845; Padilla, Camilo, 849–850; Quintana, Leroy, 639, 645–647, 650, 949–950; Romero, Leo, 1009–1010; Romero, Levi, 1010–1011; Salazar, Manuel M., 1024–1025; Sánchez, George I., 1029–1030; Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel, 1184–1185; Ulibarrí, Sabine R., 239, 1187–1188 New Mexico; and bilingualism, 639–640, 641–642, 644–645; and Chicano cultural identity, 98; and Chicano literature, 17; Chicano Movement in, 732; colonial literature, 259, 261, 262, 263; first press, 679, 910; inditas, 586–587; and land grants, 65–66, 611, 615, 617–618, 621–622; literature, 85; newspapers, 387, 688–689, 739, 930–931; publishing in, 929–930; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1178–1179; and women writers, 1251–1252 newspapers: Blanco, Beatriz, 139; in California, 685–686, 932–934; El Clamor Público, 685–686, 932–933, 966–967; cultural nationalism, 930–932; Diario

Index

de Nueva York, 923–924; El Eco del Pacífico, 371–372; and essays, 395–396; exile press, 913–919; Fantasy Heritage, 689–690; first Spanishlanguage, 911; function of, 680; Gráfico, 127, 293–294, 543–549, 691, 937, 1215; El Grito del Norte, 398, 1211; El Habanero, 312; El Heraldo de México, 553–554, 920; immigrant press, 919–926; Lozano, Ignacio E., 721–723; El Malcriado, 1223; Manifest Destiny, 685; El Mulato, 788–789; and native Hispanic press, 927–928; in New Mexico, 387, 688–689, 739, 930–932; in the nineteenth century, 679–681; Patria, 737; La Prensa, 721–723, 921; El Ranchero, 951; in Texas, 686–687; and transnationalism, 1167–1170; in the United States, 1073 New York: and the barrio, 115–116; and Cuban theater, 315–316; publishing in, 937–939; and Puerto Ricans, 691–692 (see also Nuyorican); theater, 1120–1127 Nicaraguan authors: Alemán Bolaños, Gustavo, 62, 580, 582; Selva, Sallomón de la, 1045–1046; Vargas, Roberto, 213, 1208–1209 Niggli, Josephina, 809–810 Nilda, 683, 770 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 330–332 Niño, Raúl, 810–811 Niza, Fray Marcos de, 812–813 La Noche Buena de Samuel, 221 Noloesca, Beatriz “La Chata.” See Escalona, Beatriz Nombela y Tabarés, Julio, 813–814 Noriega, Manuel, 1122–1123 Novás Calvo, Lino, 814–815, 406 Novel, 815–818; Adventures of Don Chipote: When Parrots Breast-Feed, 292, 583–584, 585, 817, 1222, 1223; of exile, 816; Lucas Guevarra, 355, 582, 583, 584, 585, 698, 816–817; of

the Mexican Revolution, 922–923; pedagogical, 170; and travel writing, 1173–1174 Los Novios, 1130 En Nueva York y otras desgracias, 532 Nuñez, Ana Rosa; 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 330–332 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, 818–819; and colonial literature, 262, 678; and travel writing, 1174 Nuyorican: art, 37; and the barrio, 115; definition, 29; and the jíbaro, 595–596; language, 31–32; literature (see Nuyorican literature) Nuyorican authors: Agüeros, Jack, 52; Algarín, Miguel, 63–65, 115, 695–696, 718, 820, 836, 884, 1140; Cienfuegos, Lucky, 718, 820; Cruz, Migdalia, 299–300; Cruz, Victor Hernández, 116, 302–304, 820, 822, 884, 963; Espada, Martín, 389–391, 652, 653; Esteves, Sandra María, 400–401, 651, 820, 822, 963, 1271–1272; Figueroa, José-Angel, 418–419; Laviera, Jesús Abraham “Tato,” 115, 137, 650, 669–670, 718, 822, 834–835, 1140, 1170; Mohr, Nicholasa, 30–31, 683, 769–771, 802, 818, 823, 1254–1255; Pietri, Pedro, 651, 820, 874–875, 1140; Piñero, Miguel, 115, 718–719, 820, 821, 822, 836, 877–878, 884, 893–894, 909, 1140; Povod, Reinaldo, 905–906; Reyes Rivera, Louis, 992; Rivera, Carmen, 995–996; Rodríguez, Abraham, Jr., 1002–1003; Thomas, Piri, 802, 818, 820, 821, 884, 909, 963, 983, 1140, 1149–1150, 1170; Tirado, Cándido, 1151; Torres, Edwin (1965–), 1155–1156; Xavier, Emanuel, 514–515. See also Puerto Rican authors Nuyorican literature, 29, 819–823; aesthetic, 695–696; and African Roots, 49; anthology, 64; and the barrio, 115, 683; and bilingualism, 136, 822;

1341

Index

Nuyorican literature (continued) costumbrismo, 30; disillusionment with island, 32; and gay and lesbian literature, 514–515; identification with other communities, 35–36; inspiration, 31; and Insularismo; Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña, 860; Loisaida, 718–719; maladjustment on the island, 194; orality, 693–695; poetry (see Nuyorican poetry); and popular culture, 893–894; and religion, 984; theater, 1140; thematic focus, 30; women’s role in, 36, 822–823 Nuyorican poetry, 31, 884–885; orality and ritual, 33–34; style, 884 Nuyorican Poets’ Café. See Algarín, Miguel; Nuyorican literature; Nuyorican poetry Obejas, Achy, 825–826. See also gay and lesbian literature Obras de Felipe Maximiliano Chacón, El cantor neomexicano: poesía y prosa, 220 Odisea del Norte, 119 O’Farrill, Alberto, 826, 1126; and crónicas and cronistas, 293–294; and Cuban theater, 315–316; Gráfico, 543 Olivas, Daniel, 827 Ollantay Center for the Arts, 827–828 O’Neill, Ana María, 828 O’Neill, Gonzalo, 829–830, 1127 Oñate, Juan de, 830 Operation Bootstrap, 830–831 Operation Peter Pan, 831–832 “Operation Wetback,” 832 orality, 833–839; Algarín, Miguel, 836; Brandon, Jorge, 833–834; Hinojosa, Rolando, 836–838; Laviera, Tato, 834–835; and Nuyorican literature, 694–695; and performance, 838; Sánchez, Ricardo, 1033–1034 oratory, 839–842; García Naranjo, Nemesio, 840; Martí, José, 841; during the nineteenth century, 840

1342

Orígenes group, 329–330 Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila, 842; and gay and lesbian literature, 509 Ortiz-Vargas, Alfredo, 842–843 Otero, Miguel A. Jr., 843–844 Otero Warren, Nina, 844–845; and Fantasy Heritage, 689 The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, 181–182 Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 203 Our House in the Last World, 1176 Paca Antillana: Novela Pedagógica Puertorriqueña, 170 pachucos, 20, 847–848, 1063, 1307, 1308; and the pelado, 862; Con Safos, 264 Padilla, Benjamín, 848–849; and crónicas, 288 Padilla, Camilo, 849–850 Padilla, Heberto, 850–851; and exile literature, 406; 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 332 Padilla, Mike, 851 El pájaro loco, 34 La Palabra: Revista de Literatura Chicana, 58 Palabras de la Vista/Retratos de la pluma, 85 Palacios, Mónica A., 851–852 Panamanian authors; Essex, Olga Berrocal, 399–400 Pancho Villa, una vida de romance y tragedia, 816 Panorama de la literatura norteamericana, 970 Pantoja, Antonia, 852–853 Paredes, Américo, 853–855; and corridos, 274–275; and land, 622; and the novel, 817 Parsons, Lucía (Lucy) González, 855–857 Al partir, 43 pastorela, 1106 Patria, 737 La patria perdida, 1158

Index

Pau-Llosa, Ricardo, 857 payaso, 1144 Pazos Kanki, Vicente, 857–859 pedagogical novels. See Paca Antillana: Novela Pedagógica Puertorriqueña Pedreira, Antonio Salvador, 859–860 pelados, peladitos, 861–862, 1145; Escalona, Beatriz, 384; theater, 1116 PEN Club de Cubanos en el Exilio, 862–863 Peña, Terri de la, 863–864 Pensamiento serpentino, 15 Pepe Ríos, 187 Peregrinos de Aztlán, 103–104, 817 Perales, Alonso, 864–865, 936–937, 962 Pereda, Prudencio de, 865–866 Perera, Victor, 213, 866 Pérez, Emma, 867 Pérez, Loida Maritza, 363, 868 Pérez, Luis, 868 Pérez, Ramón “Tianguis,” 869–870 Pérez, Raymundo “Tigre,” 870–871 Pérez Bonalde, Juan Antonio, 871–872 Pérez de Villagrá, Gaspar, 262, 872 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, 872–874 periodicals: Artes y Letras, 1060, 1061–1062; Caracol, 497; Con Safos, 264–265; and essays, 397–398; and exile literature, 706–707; Huehuetitlan, 570; and immigrant publishing, 924–925; Linden Lane magazine, 676; Literatura Cubana en el Exilio, 676–677; literary (see literary magazines); Magazín, 497; Pluma Roja, 771; Revista Chicano-Riqueña, 989–990; La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, 925; Revista Mexicana, 498–500 Perros y antiperros, 378 Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguín, 684 Peruvian authors. See González-Viaña, Eduardo Picassesque Surrealism, 37 Pietri, Pedro, 874–875; and language, 651; and Nuyorican literature, 820; and theater, 1140

Pineda, Cecile, 875–876 Pinkola Estés, Clarissa, 876–877 Piñero, Miguel, 877–878; and the barrio, 115; and Loisaida, 718–719; and Nuyorican literature, 820, 822; and Nuyorican poetry, 884; and popular culture, 893–894; and prison literature, 909; and theater, 1140 Piñeyro, Enrique, 878–879 Pioneros puertorriqueños en Nueva York, 255 Pirrín, Eusebio, 879 A Place Where the Sea Remembers, 120 Plan de Santa Barbara, 879–881 playwriting, 881–882, 1112–1113 Plum Plum Pickers, 116 P. Pérez Show Circo y Variedades, 1147 Pocho, 131, 1230; and border literature, 150; and Chicano Renaissance, 238; and transnationalism, 1170 El poema del Niágara, 871 Poemas del exilio y otras inquietudes, 358 Poetic Negrism, 47 poetry, 882–889; Chicano (see Chicano poetry); “cross over” to English, 887; Cuban (see Cuban poetry); declamadores, 883–884; immigrant, 889; Nuyorican (see Nuyorican poetry); publishing, 885; Puerto Rican (see Puerto Rican poetry); religious, 223; science, 211; women’s, 886–887 Pompa, Aurelio, 889–890 Pompa, Elías Calixto, 890 Ponce, Mary Helen, 890–891 Ponce de León, Nestor, 891–892, 915 popular culture, 892–905; and Chicano theater, 894–905; and corridos, 903–904; in Nuyorican literature, 893–894 Porque hay silencio, 77 El portero, 324 Porto Rican Brotherhood. See mutual aid societies Pous, Arquímides, 316 Povod, Reinaldo, 905–906

1343

Index

El Primer Congreso Mexicanista, 576 Preciado Martin, Patricia, 906–907 Pregones Theater, 907 Premio Aztlán, 101 Premio Quinto Sol. See Editorial Quinto Sol La Prensa, 721–723, 921 Prida, Dolores, 42, 317 907–909, 1139 prison literature, 909–910; Salinas, Raúl, 1029; Sánchez, Ricardo, 1034; Solís, Roberto Ignacio, 1065 proverbs: Chicano, 453–455; Cuban, 473; definition, 453 publishers and publishing, 910–939; Arte Público Press, 92–95, 143, 603; and awards, 99; and bilingualism, 136; Bilingual Review/Press, 134; book fairs and festivals, 142–143; book market, 1073; Calaca Press, 174–175; in California, 679, 919–920, 932–934; Castillo, Ana, 143; Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 143; of Chicano literature, 15–17, 26; Chicano Press Association, 235–236; Chusma House, 243; Cisneros, Sandra, 143; Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 143; cultural nationalism, 930–932; Delgado, Abelardo, 143; Ediciones Universal, 372–373, 926; Editorial Quinto Sol, 15–16, 373–374, 694; exile press, 913–919; Gilb, Dagoberto, 143; Hinojosa, Rolando, 143; of immigrant literature, 703; immigrant press, 919–926; Kanellos, Nicolás, 603; Keller, Gary D., 604–605; native Hispanic press, 926–929; of native literature, 690, 694; in New Mexico, 929–932; and newspapers, 911–912; in New York, 937–939; in the nineteenth century, 684; Nuyorican literature, 64; Lalo Press, 228; Laviera, Tato, 143; periodicals, 924–925; poetry, 885; in Texas, 934–937; Third Woman press, 1149; Tía Chucha press, 1150–1151; transnationalism, 1166 Puentes y fronteras, 1194–1195

1344

Puerto Rican Association for Community Affairs (PRACA), 853 Puerto Rican authors: Aboy Benítez, Juan, 1–2; Agostini de Del Río, Amelia, 51–52; Albizu Campos, Pedro, 58–59; Ambert, Alba, 76–77; Amy, Francisco Javier, 77–78; Armiño, Franca de, 91; Arroyo, Angel M., 91–92; Arroyo, Rane, 92; Belpré, Pura, 117–118; Betances Jaeger, Clotilde, 126–129; Braschi, Giannina, 158; Burgos, Julia de, 165–166; Cadilla Ruibal, Carmen Alicia, 174–175; Capetillo, Luisa, 188–189; Carrasquillo, Pedro, 192–193, 350; Cofer, Judith Ortiz, 250–251, 823, 888; Coll y Vidal, Antonio, 251–252; Colón, Jesús, 49, 252–253, 294–295, 581, 692, 819; Colón López, Joaquín, 254–255; Colón, Miriam, 255–256; Corretjer, Juan Antonio, 270–272, 938; Cotto-Thorner, Guillermo, 286–287, 582; Cruz, Nicky, 300–301, 821; Cuchi Coll, Isabel, 343–344; de Diego Padró, José I., 356; Enamorado Cuesta, José, 382–383; Escobar, Elizam, 385–386; Fernández Fragoso, Víctor, 416–417; Ferré, Rosario, 417–418, 1269–1271; Figueroa, Sotero, 419–420, 914–915; Flores, Ángel, 420–421; Gares, Tomás, 500–501; González, José Luis, 531–532; Hernández, David, 556–558; Hernández, Rafael, 561–562; Hostos, Eugenio María de, 569–570; Labarthe, Pedro Juan, 607–608; Marín, Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín,” 115–116, 406, 578, 735–736, 914–915; Marqués, René, 579, 580, 581, 582, 595–596, 736–737, 1137; Marzán, Julio, 747; Mas Pozo, María, 748–750; Nadal de Santa Coloma, Juan, 797–798; O’Neill, Ana María, 828; O’Neill, Gonzalo, 829–830, 1127; Pedreira, Antonio Salvador, 859–860; Pursifull, Carmen, 940–942; Ramírez de Arellano, Diana, 968; Ramos Otero, Manuel, 512, 972;

Index

Rivera, José, 996–997, 1126; RiveraMyrick, Luz Haydée, 999–1000; Rodríguez de Tió, Lola, 1007–1008; Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 1030–1032; Santiago, Esmeralda, 818, 819, 823, 1040; Silén, Iván, 1056–1059; Silva de Cintrón, Josefina, 1060–1063; Soto, Pedro Juan, 1067–1068; Soto Vélez, Clemente, 1069–1070; Tapia, Consuelo Lee, 1093; Torres Betances de Córdova, Carmen, 1158–1159; Torres, Edwin (1931–), 1155; Umpierre-Herrera, Luz María, 513–514, 653, 1188–1189, 1283–1284; Valle, Carmen, 1202; Vando, Erasmo, 1204–1206; Vázquez, Lourdes, 1212–1213; Vega, Bernando, 1214–1215; Vega, Ed, 821, 1215–1217; Vélez-Mitchell, Anita, 1219–1220; Villanueva Collado, Alfredo, 512, 1227–1228; Zavala, Iris Milagros, 1302 Puerto Rican folklore: Arawak mythology, 462–464; décimas, 465; folk medicine, 466; folk speech, 466–467; roots of, 461; and Spanish presence, 464–467. See also Nuyorican authors A Puerto Rican in New York & Other Sketches, 49, 819 Puerto Rican literature, 91; aesthetic concepts of, 29–38; and African roots, 35–36; and ethnic relationships, 647–648; and folklore-based literature, 480; gay and lesbian themes, 417, 512; and gender, 1269–1272; and geography, 1253–1256; as immigrant literature, 702; immigration to New York, 255; impact of cultural exchange, 170; mestizaje, 1253; militant, 34; novels, 1; and Nuyorican writers, 29; and Puerto Rican independence, 270–272; and race, 128–129, 170–171; social consciousness, 171; socialist themes, 253; theater, 91, 194–195, 1126–1127; writer’s associations, 95–96. See also Nuyorican literature

Puerto Rican music: décimas, 350; jíbaro, 350; Hernández, Rafael, 561–562; plena lyric, 835 Puerto Rican poetry, 92, 165–166, 556–558; décimas, 193; jíbaro, 193; women’s aesthetic, 174; women writers, 1282–1284 Puerto Rican traveling theater. See Colón, Miriam Puerto Rico: exile press, 913–916; jíbaro, 594–596; Jones Act, 597, 937–938; literature (see Puerto Rican literature); Operation Bootstrap, 830–831; Spanish-American war, 1070–1071 Puppet, 285 Pursifull, Carmen, 940–942 Quesada, Aníbal, 943–945; and the novel, 817 Quesada, Roberto, 212–213, 945–946, 582 Quiñónez, Ernesto, 946–949 Quiñónez, Naomi, 949 Quintana, Leroy V., 949–950; and ethnic relationships, 645–647; and language, 650; and multilinguism, 639 Quintana, Miguel Matías de, 950 Quintero, José A., 950–952 Quisqueya La Bella: The Dominican Republic in Cultural and Historical Perspective, 365 The Quixote Cult, 1177 race, 953–963; in colonial times, 955–956; color identification, 961–962; in the early America Republic, 958; and Fantasy Heritage, 962; in literature, 962–963; and Manifest Destiny, 958, 959–960; and mestizos, 957–958; racism, 128–129; segregation, 964–966; and Spain, 954–955; and Spanish Black Legend, 959, 960, 1072; and stereotypes, 1080–1081 racial segregation, 964–966

1345

Index

Rainbow’s End, 530 The Rain God: A Desert Tale, 589 Raining Backwards, 325 Rain of Gold, 1233 Ramírez, Francisco P., 685–686, 966–967; and native literature, 801; and nativism, 804–805; and race, 962 Ramírez, Sara Estela, 967–968 Ramírez de Arellano, Diana, 968 Ramos, José Antonio, 968–971 Ramos, Manuel, 971–972 Ramos Otero, Manuel, 972. See also gay and lesbian literature El Ranchero, 951 La Raza Unida Party (LRUP), 548, 549 Rechy, John, 16–17, 972–973. See also gay and lesbian literature Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 94, 118, 973–976; Kanellos, Nicolás, 603, 974; and Ladino language, 610 Redondo, Antonio, 976–977 REFORMA: The National Association to Promote Library Services to the Spanish-Speaking, 977 Reid, Marita, 978–979 La relación y comentarios, 819 religion, 979–985; and Chicano art, 984; and Chicano Movement, 983; and Chicano theater, 984; and Hispanic identity, 982–983; and Nuyorican literature, 984; and poetry, 223; Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, 984; and U.S. expansion, 981–982 Rembao, Alberto, 985–986; and the essay, 396; and the novel, 816 Remembering to Say “Mouth” or “Face,” 204 Reminiscencias del Ilmo. y Rmo. Sr. Dr. D. Eulogio Gillow y Zalvaza, Arzobispo de Antequera, 517 repatriation, 986–989 The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, 122 The Republic of Poetry, 390

1346

Restless Serpents, 164, 1299–1300 Reto en el Paraíso, 616 revista, 1114–1117, 1152 Revista Chicano-Riqueña, 93, 989–990; Arte Público Press, 990; Kanellos, Nicolás, 601, 602 Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, 141 Revista Mexicana, 397, 498–500 The Revolt of the Cockroach People, 5, 239 Reyes, Guillermo A., 990–991 Reyes, José Ascención, 991 Reyes Rivera, Louis, 992 riddles, 457–459 Ríos, Alberto Alvarado, 992–993 Risco, Eliazar, 993–994 Rivas, Bimbo; and Loisaida, 718 Rivera, Beatriz, 994–995 Rivera, Carmen, 995–996 Rivera, José, 996–997, 1126 Rivera, Juan C., 316 Rivera, Marina, 997, 240 Rivera, Tomás, 998–999; award, 101–102; and the barrio, 115; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; and land, 619; and native literature, 802; and the novel, 817 Rivera-Myrick, Luz Haydée, 999–1000 Rivera y Río, José, 1000 Rivero, Andrés, 1000–1001 Rivero Muñiz, José, 1001 The Road to Tamazunchale, 1164–1165 Robinett, Emma Jane, 359 Robles, Mireya, 1250–1260. See also 1953 generation of Cuban poetry Rocafuerte Bejarano, Vicente, 1001–1002 Rodríguez, Abraham, Jr., 1002–1003 Rodríguez, Jesús. See Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús Rodríguez, José Policarpo, 1003–1004 Rodriguez, Luis J., 1004–1006 Rodríguez, Netty and Jesús, 1006 Rodriguez, Richard, 1007. See also gay and lesbian literature Rodríguez de Tió, Lola, 1007–1008 romances, 273

Index

Romano-Vizcarra, Octavio I., 1008–1009 Romero, Leo, 1009–1010 Romero, Levi, 1010–1011 Rosa, la flauta, 378–379 La Rosa, Pablo, 1011–1012 Rosa Pita, Juana and 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 334 Rosario, Nelly, 363, 1012–1013 Roscio, Juan Germán, 1013–1014 Ruiz, Ronald L., 1014–1015 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 1015–1016; and native literature, 801; and the novel, 817; and race, 962; and transnationalism, 1167 Ruiz-Flores, Lupe, 1016–1017 Run, Nicky, Run, 300, 301 Rush of Hands, 353 Saco, José Antonio, 1019–1020 Saenz, Benjamin Alire, 1020–1021 Sagra, Ramón de la, 1021–1023 Salas, Floyd, 1022–1024. See also Chicano Renaissance Sálaz-Márquez, Rubén, 1024 Salazar, Manuel M., 1024–1025 Salazar, Rubén, 1025–1026. See also Chicano Renaissance Sales, Francis, 1026–1027 Salinas, Luis Omar, 1027–1028. See also Chicano Renaissance Salinas, Raúl, 1029; and Chicano Renaissance, 240; and prison literature, 909 Salvadorian authors: Argueta, Jorge, 88; Bencastro, Mario, 119–120; Solano, Gustavo, 1063–1064 Salvadorian literature, 119–120 Sánchez, George I., 1029–1030 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 1030–1033 Sánchez, Ricardo, 1033–1034; and the barrio, 115; bilingualism, 136–137; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; and prison literature, 909 Sánchez, Trinidad V., 1034–1035

Sánchez-Boudy, José, 39–40, 1035–1036 Sánchez-Scott, Milcha, 1036 Sanctuaries of the Heart/Santuarios del Corazón, 285 Sandoval, Víctor, 1036–1037 Sansores, Rosario, 1037–1038 Santacilia, Pedro, 1038–1039 Santayana, George, 1039–1040 santería, 468–470 Santiago, Esmeralda, 1040; and the novel, 818, 819; and Nuyorican literature, 823 Santos, John Philip, 1040–1041 satire, 83 Savariego, Berta, 324 Schomburg, Arturo Alfonso, 1041–1042 Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno, 1042–1043. See also transnationalism In Search of Bernabé, 674–675 In Search of Snow, 1177 Selected Poetry, 495 Sellén, Antonio, 323, 1043–1044 Sellén, Francisco, 323, 1044–1045 Selva, Salomón de la, 1045–1046 Senarens, Luis, 1046 Sender, Ramón, 1047–1048 Sephardic Judaism: in America, 1051; literature (see Sephardic literature); major subgroups of, 1050; origins, 1048–1050 Sephardic literature, 1048–1053; categories of, 1052; prominent authors, 1051–1052 Sepúlveda, Luis G., 1053 Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti, Emma, 1054. See also exile literature Serros, Michele, 1054–1055 The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, 973 And the Shadows Took Him, 218 Shifting Royalties, 187 Short Eyes, 34–35, 877 Sierra, Rubén, 1055–1056 Silén, Iván, 34, 1056–1059 Silva, Beverly, 1059–1060 Silva de Cintrón, Josefina, 1060–1063 The Silver Cloud Café, 1214 Sin fecha de extinción, 113–114

1347

Index

Sleepy Lagoon, 1063 Solano, Gustavo, 1063–1065 El Sol de Texas, 393 Soledad, 298, 363 Soledad Aycardo, José, 1144 Solís, Roberto Ignacio, 1065 The Song of the Hummingbird, 675 Song of the Water Saints, 363 Soto, Gary, 1065–1067. See also Chicano Renaissance Soto, Pedro Juan, 1067–1068 Soto Vásquez, Carmen, 1068–1069; and Teatro Carmen, 1068–1069 Soto Vélez, Clemente, 1069–1070 Spaces that Time Missed, 205 Spanish–American war, 1070–1071 Spanish authors: Megía, Félix, 757–758; Sender, Ramón, 1047–1048; Tirado, Romualdo, 1151–1153; Valle, Adrián del, 1201–1202 Spanish Black Legend, 170, 1071–1072, 1080; in Cuban theater, 1044; and exile literature, 707; and race, 959, 960; and stereotypes, 1080 Spanish Civil war. See Spanish Republican exiles Spanish Harlem. See barrio Spanish-language book market, 1072–1075; problems in marketing, 1075 Spanish-language literature, 1076–1077 Spanish Republican exiles, 1077–1078 Spik in glyph?, 136–137 Spirits of the Ordinary, 60 The Squatter and the Don, 616, 685 Stavans, Ilán, 1078–1079 Step Down Elder Brother, 810 stereotypes, 1079–1082 The Story of Evangelina Cisneros, 246 Strangers in Our Fields, 487–488 Suárez, Mario, 1082–1086 Suárez, Virgil, 326, 1086–1088 Los sueños de América, 541 El Súper, 41, 318 Su primer amor: novela de costumbres, 1–2

1348

surrealism; in Cuban American art, 43; in Nuyorican art, 37 Suruma, 379–380 Survivors of the Chicano Titanic, 191 Su Teatro. See García, Anthony J. Svich, Caridad, 1088–1089 syncretism, 468 Tafolla, Carmen, 1091–1092 Tafolla, Santiago, 1092 Tampa; theater, 314–315, 1127–1131 Tapia, Consuelo Lee, 1093 Tattered Paradise, 180 Tattoo the Wicked Cross, 1023 The Teachings of Don Juan; a Yanqui Way of Knowledge, 200, 201–202 El Teatro Campesino, 8, 9, 11, 19, 232, 693, 1132–1135, 1241; and codeswitching, 136; and the “Chicano Renaissance,” 236–237; and popular culture, 894–896; raza, 1134; and TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), 1096–1099, 1134; Los Vendidos, 1133. See also Valdez, Luis Teatro Carmen, 1068–1069 Teatro Carpa Hermanos Rosete Aranda, 1147 Teatro Carpa Independencia, 1148 Teatro Cuatro, 1137 El Teatro Hispano, 1123, 1124–1125 teatropoesía, 19–20 Teatro Repertorio Español, 1093–1094 Tejera, Diego Vicente, 1094–1095 Tenayuca, Emma, 1095–1096 TENAZ (Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), 1096–1099, 1134 The Tequila Worm, 184–185 Tertulia de Escritoras Dominicanas en los Estados Unidos, 360 testimonial literature, 1100–1105; and land loss, 615, 620–621 testimonios. See testimonial literature Texan authors: Beltrán Hernández, Irene, 118–119; Bertrand, Diane Gonzales, 124–126; Calleros, Cleofas, 176;

Index

Canales, Viola, 184–185; Cantú, Norma Elia, 187–188; Cárdenas, Isidra T., 190; Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo, 203; Catacalos, Rosemary, 210–211; Chapa, Francisco, 221–222; Cortez, Sarah, 281–282; Fernández, Roberta, 414–415; Galindo, Mary Sue, 488–490; García, Lionel G., 493–494; Garza, Xavier, 504–505; González, Jovita, 532–535, 817; Gutiérrez, José Angel, 548–550; Hinojosa, Rolando, 239, 564–566, 618, 836–838; Juárez, Tina, 597–598; Martínez, Max, 742–744; Mora, Pat, 778–780, 888; MorenoHinojosa, Hernán, 783–784; Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno, 1042–1043, 1166–1167; Vigil, Evangelina, 1224–1226; Villareal, Ray, 1229–1230; Zavala, Andina de, 1301–1302 Texas: colonial literature, 261, 263; first printing press, 679; and land loss, 617; newspapers, 686–687; publishing in, 934–937 Texas Small Press Book Fair, 145 The Teachings of Don Juan; A Yanqui Way of Knowledge, 200, 201–202 theater, 1105–1142; Arte Público Press, 1135; caravana de estrellas, 1132; La carreta, 1137; Chicano (see Chicano theater); and the circus. (see theater in a tent, circus, tent shows); companies (see theater companies); Cuban (see Cuban theater); exile theater, 1141; festivals, 1133; in Florida, 1141–1142; funding, 1135; improvisational street theater, 1137; in Los Angeles, 1111–1113; during the Mexican Revolution, 1110–1111, 1115; Los moros y cristianos, 1106; and mutual aid societies, 1128–1131; in New York City, 1120–1127, 1136–1141; pastorela, 1106; pelado, 1116; playwrights, 1126–1127, 1135; playwriting, 881–882, 1112–1113; revista, 1114–1117; in San Antonio, 1117–1120; in the Southwest,

1105–1120, 1131–1136; in Tampa, 314–315, 1127–1131; El Teatro Campesino, 1132–1135; in a tent (see theater in a tent, circus, tent shows) theater companies: The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, 133–134; Borderlands Theater, 154–155; Centro Cultural Cubano, 1139; Compañía Drámatica Española, 1109; Compañía Española de Angel Mollá, 1109; Compañía Española de la Familia Estrella, 1108–1109; and Cuban theater, 315, 317; Culture Clash, 344–346; La Fárandula Panamericana, 1137, 1138; Federal Theater Project (FTP), 412–414; International Arts Relations (INTAR), 317, 587–588, 1138, 1139; in the nineteenth century, 1107–1110; El Nuevo Círculo Drámatico, 1137, 1138; Pregones Theater, 907; Pro Arte Gratelli, 1141; Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, 1138; Teatro Bellas Artes, 1141; El Teatro Campesino, 136; Teatro Cuatro, 1137; Teatro La Danza, 1141; Teatro Las Máscaras, 1141; Teatro Repertorio Español, 1093–1094, 1138–1139 theater in a tent, circus, tent shows, 1118–1120, 1142–1149; Carpa Cubana, 1120, 1148; Carpa García, 1119–1120, 1148; Circo Azteca de los Hermanos Olvera, 1147; Circo Carnival “Iris Show,” 1147; Circo Rivas Brothers, 1147; Compañía de Vaudeville Mantecón, 1148; La Compañía Hermanos Ortiz, 1147–1148; Esqueda Brothers Show, 1147; Gran Circo Escalante Hermanos, 1146–1147; Los Hermanos Bell, 1147; maromeros, 861, 1143; during the Mexican Revolution, 1145–1146; and the pelado, 1145; P. Pérez Show Circo y Variedades, 1147; Teatro Carpa Hermanos Rosete Aranda, 1147; Teatro Carpa Independiente, 1148 Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel, 624–625, 1238

1349

Index

Third Woman Press, 1149 Thomas, Piri, 1149–1150; and race, 963; and native literature, 802; and the novel, 818; and Nuyorican literature, 820, 821; and Nuyorican poetry, 884; and prison literature, 909; and religion, 983; and theater, 1140; and transnationalism, 1170 The Throw-Away Piece, 560 Tía Chucha Press, 1150–1151 Tirado, Cándido, 1151 Tirado, Romualdo, 1151–1153 Tolón, Miguel Teurbe, 1153–1154 Tomás Rivera Award for Mexican American Children’s Literature, 101–102 Toro, Vincent, 1154–1155 Torres, Edwin (1931–), 1155 Torres, Edwin (1965–), 1155–1156 Torres, Omar, 43, 325, 1156 Torres, Steven, 1157 Torres, Teodoro, Jr., 816, 1157–1158 Torres Betances de Córdova, Carmen, 1158–1159 Tórrez, Everardo, 1159 Torriente-Brau, Pablo de la, 1159–1162 tourism, 1175 Trambley, Estela Portillo, 1162–1163. See also Chicano Renaissance Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, 117 translation of books, 118 transnationalism, 1163–1173; and bilingualism, 1164; concept of nation, 1165–1166; and Cuban literature, 1167; and exile literature, 705; and Latino identity, 1171–1172; and literary critics, 1164–1165; and newspapers, 1167–1170; and publishing, 1166 travel writing, 1173–1178; and the novel, 1173–1174; and tourism, 1175 Treasures in Heaven, 60 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 613, 616, 1178–1179; and land grants, 611; and Manifest Destiny, 731 Trejo, Ernesto, 1179

1350

Las Tres Américas, 141 Treviño, Jesús Salvador, 1180–1181 Trino’s Choice, 125 Trino’s Time, 125 Troncoso, Sergio, 1181 Tropicana, Carmelita. See Troyano, Alina Trópico, 425, 426 Trópico en Manhattan, 286 trovadores, 350 Troyano, Alina, 1181–1182; International Arts Relation (INTAR), 587 Trujillo, Carla, 1182 Trujillo, Enrique, 1182–1183; and exile press, 914–915 Trujillo Herrera, Rafael, 1183 Turla, Leopoldo, 1183–1184 Tute de reyes, 121 Tywoniak, Frances Esquibel, 1184–1185 Ulibarrí, Sabine R., 1187–1188. See also Chicano Renaissance Ulica, Jorge. See Arce, Julio G. Umpierre-Herrera, Luz María, 1188–1189, 1283–1284; and gay and lesbian literature, 513–514; and language, 653 Under the Feet of Jesus, 1238 Unger, David, 213, 1189 Unión Martí-Maceo, 315 Los unos con los otros . . . y el seibo, 340 Uranga, Rodolfo, 1189–1190 Urista, Alberto Baltazar. See Alurista Urrea, Luis Alberto, 1190–1192 Uruguayan authors; Espina, Eduardo, 391–392 Valdés, Gina, 1193–1196 Valdés-Rodríguez, Alisa, 1196 Valdez, Luis, 14–15, 20, 136, 1063, 1132, 1197–1199; and Aztlán, 104; and the Chicano Renaissance, 236–237; and native literature, 802; and the pachuco, 847–848; and the pelado, 862; and race, 963; and TENAZ

Index

(Teatro Nacional de Aztlán), 1096–1099; theatrical principles, 1198; vendido, 1221 Valenzuela, Luisa, 406, 1199–1200 Vallbona, Rima de, 1200–1201 Valle, Adrián del, 1201–1202 Valle, Carmen, 1202 Vallejo, Armando, 1203 Vallejo, Mariano Guadalupe, 1100–1101, 1203–1204. See also transnationalism Vallejo, Platón, 1204 Valls, Jorge; 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 332–333 Vando, Erasmo, 1204–1206 Vando, Gloria, 1206–1207 Varela y Morales, Félix Francisco, 240, 1207–1208; and children’s and young literature, 240; and Cuban novel, 318; and religion, 982 Vargas, Roberto, 213, 1208–1209 Varona, Enrique José, 1209–1210 Vásquez, Enriqueta, 1210–1211 Vásquez, Ignacio G., 1212 Vázquez, Lourdes, 1212–1213 Vázquez, Richard, 1213–1214; and Chicano Renaissance, 239; and race, 963 Véa, Alfredo, Jr., 1214 Vega, Bernando, 1214–1215. See also Gráfico Vega, Ed, 821, 1215–1217 Vega Yunqué, Edgardo. See Vega, Ed Velásquez, Gloria, 1217–1218 Velázquez, Loreta Janeta, 1218–1219 Vélez-Mitchell, Anita, 1219–1220 vendido, 1220–1222; and El Teatro Campesino, 1133 Los Vendidos, 802, 1133 Venegas, Daniel, 1222–1223; and crónicas and cronistas, 288, 292–293; and immigrant literature, 578, 579–580, 581; and immigration narratives, 582; and the novel, 817 Venegas, Miguel, 1223–1224 Venezuelan authors: Bolet Peraza, Nicanor, 141; Camacho, Simón,

176–177; López, José Heriberto, 719–720; Roscio, Juan Germán, 1013–1014; Zumeta, César, 1308 La vida es un special, 42 La vida inútil de Pito Pérez, 1010 Vigil, Evangelina, 1224–1226 Villanueva, Alma Luz, 1226. See also Chicano Renaissance Villanueva, Tino, 1226–1227; and the barrio, 115; and Chicano Renaissance, 240 Villanueva Collado, Alfredo, 1227–1228. See also gay and lesbian literature Villareal, Edit, 1228–1229 Villareal, Ray, 1229–1230 Villarreal, José Antonio, 1230–1231. See also transnationalism Villarreal González, Andrea, 1231 Villaseñor, Victor, 1232–1233. See also Chicano Renaissance Villaverde, Cirilo, 318–319, 1233–1235; and the novel, 815–816 Villegas de Magnón, Leonor, 1235–1236 Vingut, Francisco Javier, 1237 Viramontes, Helena María, 1237–1239; and the novel, 817 Virgin of Guadalupe, 1239–1242 Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, 374 war, 1243–1245; Among the Valiant, 784; Cold War, 918–919; Cortina Wars, 622; Cristero War, 917–918; Mexican Revolution, 1244; US Civil War, 1244; Vietnam War, 186–187 We Fed Them Cactus, 618, 621 White Bread Competition and Other Stories, 560 Who Would Have Thought It?, 817, 962, 1015–1016 Wilbur-Cruce, Eva Antonia, 1245–1246 With His Pistol in His Hand, 854 Woman, Woman, 571 Women Soldier/La Soldadera, 119

1351

Index

women writers, 1246–1291; gender, 1260–1273; genre, 1274–1289; and geography, 1248–1260 working-class literature, 1291–1293; and Chicano Movement, 1292; and the pelado, 861 Xavier, Emanuel, 514–515 The Year of Our Revolution, 251 Yerba Buena, 401, 822 Yglesias, José, 320, 1295–1296 Yglesias, Rafael, 1296–1297 . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra, 16, 22, 239, 619, 683, 802, 817, 998; and bildungsroman, 130, 131

1352

Young Lords Party (YLP), 1297 Yo-Yo-Boing, 158 Zaldívar, Gladys, 1953 generation of Cuban poetry, 333 Zamora, Bernice, 1276, 1299–1300. See also Chicano Renaissance Zavala, Andina de, 1301–1302 Zavala, Iris Milagros, 1302 Zavala, Lorenzo de, 962, 1302–1303 Zenea, Juan Clemente, 1303–1305 Zepeda, Gwendolyn, 1305–1306 Zoot Suit, 20; and the pachuco, 848 zoot suit riots, 1306–1308 Zumeta, César, 1308

ABOUT THE EDITOR Nicolás Kanellos has been professor at the University of Houston since 1980. He is founding publisher of the noted Hispanic literary journal The Americas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riqueña) and the nation’s oldest and most esteemed Hispanic publishing house, Arte Público Press, also the largest nonprofit publisher of literature in the United States. Recognized for his scholarly achievement, Dr. Kanellos is the recipient of the 1996 Denali Press Award of the American Library Association, the 1989 American Book Award—Publisher/Editor Category, the 1989 award from the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education, the 1988 Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature presented by the White House, and various fellowships and other recognitions. His monograph, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (1990), received three book awards, including that of the Southwest Council on Latin American Studies. Among his other books are Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Heritage in American Culture (1997), Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature of the United States (1989), Mexican American Theater: Legacy and Reality (1987), and Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (2005). His Hispanic-American Almanac (1993) and Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States (4 vols., 1994) won numerous prestigious awards from the American Library Association and other reference competitions. His Hispanic Literature of the United States: A Comprehensive Reference (2005) was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. Dr. Kanellos is the director of a major national research program, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States, intended to identify, preserve, study, and make accessible tens of thousands of literary 1353

About the Editor

documents from the colonial period to 1960 in regions that are now part of the United States. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed Dr. Kanellos to the National Council on the Humanities. In 1996, he became the first Brown Foundation Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston.

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ADVISORY BOARD: RECOVERING THE U.S. HISPANIC LITERARY HERITAGE José F. Aranda, Jr. Department of English Rice University

Antonia Castañeda Department of History St. Mary’s University

Gabriela Baeza Ventura Department of Hispanic Studies University of Houston

Rodolfo J. Cortina Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Studies University of Houston

Alejandra Balestra Department of Spanish and Portuguese University of New Mexico Rosemary Beebe Department of Modern Languages and Literatures Santa Clara University Aviva Ben-Ur Department of Judaic & Near Eastern Studies University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Kenya Dworkin y Méndez Department of Modern Languages Carnegie Mellon José B. Fernández History Department University of Central Florida Juan Flores Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies Hunter College

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Advisory Board: Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage

Erlinda Gonzales-Berry Department of Ethnic Studies Oregon State University

Raymund Paredes Commissioner of Higher Education State of Texas

José A. Gurpegui Director, Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Norteamericanos Universidad de Alcalá Spain

Nélida Pérez Puerto Rican Studies Library Hunter College of CUNY

Laura Gutiérrez-Witt Retired Director Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Library University of Texas José M. Irizarry Department of English University of Puerto Rico Donna M. Kabalen de Bichara Division de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales Tecnológico de Monterrey Luis Leal Chicano Studies University of California at Santa Barbara Clara Lomas Department of Romance Languages The Colorado College Francisco A. Lomelí Chicano Studies/Spanish & Portuguese University of California at Santa Barbara Blanca López de Mariscal Director of the Ph.D. Program in Humanities Tecnológico de Monterrey Agnes Lugo-Ortiz Department of Spanish & Portuguese University of Chicago Gabriel Meléndez American Studies Department University of New Mexico Genaro Padilla Office of Undergraduate Affairs University of California at Berkeley

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Gerald Poyo Department of History St. Mary’s University Bárbara O. Reyes Department of History University of New Mexico Antonio Saborit Dirección de Estudios Históricos Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia Mexico Rosaura Sánchez Department of Literature University of California at San Diego Virginia Sánchez Korrol Department of Puerto Rican Studies Brooklyn College of CUNY Charles Tatum College of Humanities University of Arizona Silvio Torres-Saillant English Department Syracuse University Theresa Salazar Bancroft Library University of California Roberto G. Trujillo University Libraries Stanford University Tomás Ybarra-Frausto Independent Scholar New York

CONTRIBUTORS Virginia Adán-Lifante University of California, Merced

Rodolfo J. Cortina University of Houston

María Arnedo University of Houston

Craig Denison University of Houston

Gabriela Baeza Ventura University of Houston

Lina DeVito University of Houston

Alejandra Balestra University of New Mexico

Amy Doherty University of Illinois

Carmen Bárcena Montgomery College

Kenya Dworkin y Méndez Carnegie Mellon University

William Barillas University of Wisconsin–La Crosse

José B. Fernández University of Central Florida

Rose Marie Beebe Santa Clara University

D. H. Figueredo Bloomfield College Library

Flavia Belpoliti University of Houston

Maura L. Fuchs The Kinkaid School, Houston

Encarna Bermejo University of Houston

Anel Garza University of Houston

Catalina Castillón Lamar University

Kirsten Silva Gruesz University of California, Santa Cruz

Cordelia Chávez Candelaria Arizona State University

Patricia Gubitosi University of Massachusetts

1357

Contributors

Spencer Herrera New Mexico State University

Edna Ochoa University of Texas–Pan American

María Herrera-Sobek University of California, Santa Barbara

Rhonda Osmun Hayworth Houston, Texas

Donna Kabalen de Bichara Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey

Edwin K. Padilla University of Houston, Downtown

Nicolás Kanellos University of Houston

Carmen Peña Abrego University of Houston

Gary D. Keller Arizona State University

Cristelia Pérez Independent Scholar Houston, TX

Randall G. Keller Arizona State University Bridget Kevane Montana State University Thomas J. Kinney University of Arizona Enrique Lamadrid University of New Mexico Rodrigo Lazo University of California, Irvine Clara Lomas Colorado College Francisco A. Lomelí University of California, Santa Barbara Helvetia Martell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Manuel Martín-Rodríguez University of California, Merced John H. McDowell Indiana University Ana-María Medina University of Houston Gabriel Meléndez University of New Mexico Norma Mouton University of Houston Patricia Napiorski Appalachian State University

1358

Sonja Z. Pérez University of Arizona Luziris Pineda University of Houston Beatrice Pita University of California, San Diego Amira Plascencia-Vela University of Houston John Pluecher Sam Houston State University Mary Helen Ponce Writer and Independent Scholar Jaime Retamales University of Houston Guillermo de los Reyes Heredia University of Houston Sergio Reyna University of Houston–Downtown F. Arturo Rosales Arizona State University Rosaura Sánchez University of California, San Diego Virginia Sánchez Korrol Brooklyn College Robert M. Senkewicz Santa Clara University

Contributors

Christina L. Sisk University of Houston

Alberto Varón The University of Texas at Austin

Ana Suárez Centro Juan Marinello Havana, Cuba

María Teresa Vera-Rojas University of Houston

Silvio Torres-Saillant Syracuse University Marina P. Tristán University of Houston

Carolina Villarroel University of Houston Marc Zimmerman University of Houston

1359

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