A History of American Literature by Linda Wagner-Martin

Author:Linda Wagner-Martin [Wagner-Martin, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-08T21:00:00+00:00

Mexican American Writing (i.e., Latino/Latina)

As was the case with Native American writing, much of the writing in Spanish, or in English derived from or mixed with Spanish, during the early years of the twentieth century appeared in newspapers and slim local magazines, often in Spanish language publications. Writers from this group were less impressed with mainstream publishing than they were eager to get their work distributed to readers in a convenient and accessible format. (Much of this literature, particularly in such border states as Texas and New Mexico remained in oral forms.) Aside from Josephina Niggli's Mexican Village in 1945, a romantic rendering of ten short fictions that gave the United States-born Bob Webster his sense of place in Mexico, the first publications that identified the pride and power of Mexican allegiances were the stories of Mario Súarez, nearly all published in Arizona Quarterly. “Señor Garza,” the barber of the Tucson barrio, “El Hoyo” (The Hole), is representative of Súarez's accuracy.

In 1959 José Antonio Villareal published Pocho, a narrative about a mixed-blood Mexican who joins the navy rather than have his family divided because his father insists he remain exclusively Mexican (“pocho” refers somewhat negatively to an Americanized Mexican). On the heels of successful theater known as Teatro Campesino, guided by Luís Valdez, the publishing house Quinto Sol in Berkeley, California, brought out books by Rudolfo Anaya, Tómas Rivera, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, 1972, is set in central New Mexico at the end of the Second World War—a period marred by the testing of the atomic bomb in 1945 at White Sands. The reality of the lives of the Spanish, Indian, and Anglo characters who comprise the story marked Anaya as a leading writer for Mexican sensibilities. Though he wrote in English, Anaya used words from Spanish, in the pattern of code-switching that was to mark a great many works by Hispanic writers. His later works, Heart of Aztlan, 1976, Tortuga, 1979, and Alburquerque, 1992, as well as Jalamanta in 1996, continued his leadership of this group of writers. By the time of Alburquerque he had added to the themes of father–son conflict in portraying the necessary benefits of friendships between generations of men. One of his only fictions in third person, this novel narrates the conflicted racial history of young Abran Gonzalez, who has led his life as an adopted child.

Like the continuities among Louise Erdrich's various families in her fiction, Anaya's characters by the time of Alburquerque have stemmed from his cast of people in both Heart of Aztlan and Tortugo; readers therefore feel familiar with Ben Chavez and his family. The positive resolution to various mysteries, all race based and complicated by language difficulties, brings Anaya's novel to an optimistic resolution.

In some respects, the writing of Tómas Rivera resembled that of N. Scott Momaday, in that its very texture as well as its language reflected decades of traditional forms. Momaday's House Made of Dawn appeared in 1968; Rivera's “…y no se lo trago la tierra” (And the Earth Did Not Part) was published in 1971.

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