The Critica Nueva Award Lecture, 2005
The University of New Mexico, October 18, 2005
EL ESPEJO Y EL IMAGEN:
REFLECTIONS ON CHICANO LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Remarks on accepting the Critica Nueva Award from the University of New Mexico
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
Professor Emeritus of English, Texas State University System–Sul Ross
Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English, Texas A&M University–Kingsville
INTRODUCTION
To start, I want to thank those who selected me for the 2005 Critica Nueva Award. I was absolutely surprised when I received the notification. In all candor, however, I must say how gratifying it is as I approach 80 to receive recognition for so much of my life’s work. At the same time I am humbled by the honor, for there are many over the years who have contributed significantly to Chicano literature and its critical canon and are equally if not more deserving of this honor. I accept this award, then, on behalf of all of us in the field of Chicano literature and literary criticism. In these preliminary acknowledgments I dedicate this lecture to Dr. Gilda Baeza-Singh, my wife, who has been a constant source of support and inspiration for my work of these later years.
For me it all began here at the Univer-sity of New Mexico in 1966 when I was admitted to the doctoral program in English. I was 40 that year and had been a full-time member of the English Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces since 1964, so I only came to the UNM campus during the summers of 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1969. In the summer of 1969 I passed the comprehensive doctoral examination in English and settled into writing the dissertation. Fortunately, during the Academic year 1969-1970, I was offered a teaching fellowship in the Department of English during which, I surmised, I could complete the dissertation while satisfying the residency requirement for the Ph.D. I had settled on a Chaucer topic spurred in that direction by Haldeen Braddy, the Chaucerian at the University of Texas at El Paso where I had completed the M.A. in English with a Master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Stamp of One Defect: A Study of Hamlet, which has been identified as one of the most provocative in a century of Hamlet studies. At the University of New Mexico, Dr. Edith Buchanan was my program advisor.
In one of those unexpected intercessions of fate, in the summer of 1969 Louis Bransford, newly appointed head of the fledgling Chicano Studies program on campus, asked me to organize a Chicano literature course which I did with David Remley as faculty advisor. Though limited in extant material, the course was a resounding success. And it changed my life. The outcome of that experience challenged me as a Mexican American en route to becoming a full-fledged Chicano. The difficulties I had in finding texts for the course spurred me all the more to find the neglected trove of Mexican American literature which I intuitively surmised had to exist. It did. Why, I wondered, had no one previously considered the rich literary history of Mexican Americans and given it some taxonomic shape? It was that question que me puso necio. Here was a puzzle to piece together. And that’s what it has turned out to be: a challenging puzzle. Each day more pieces of the puzzle are added to the big picture by succeeding generations of Chicano scholars.
With that burr in my saddle, I went to Joe Zavadil, chair of the English Department, with a plan to write a dissertation on Mexican American Literature. And what of Chaucer, he asked? I had already completed three chapters (all published since then). He was persuaded by my enthusiasm, pointing out, however, that I would need a dissertation committee. He doubted that any member of the department knew much about the topic. He was right. But I was lucky to find David Remley, David Johnson, and Robert Fleming, three of the newer faculty in the department, interested enou-gh in the project to sign on as my dissertation committee with David Remley as Chair. They helped me more than they realized. The outcome was Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature, first study in the history of Mexican American literature. I did not know that at the time.
Since then, I’ve explained that Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature was not a comprehensive study, that it was among the first efforts in the field, that I felt more like a literary archaeologists, trying to ascertain the design of Mexican American literature in much the same way that archaeologists have pieced together the shapes of long since extinct creatures. In this case, however, the trove of texts were to be found in attic trunks, referenced in newspapers, and mentioned in the multitudinous correspondence of bygone days. I quickly realized there was much extant material, not enough however in print for a classroom of students. Thanks to Myra Ellen Jenkins, at the New Mexico state archives in Santa Fe, I had access to the New Mexico records from which I gleaned considerable information about nuevo-mejicano literary activities in New Mexico as part of the Spanish empire and the Republic of Mexico and then after 1848 as part of the United States. My research for Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature carried me to various California and Texas archives as well as to archives in Mexico City. I found enough material with which to build an initial scaffold for the structure of Mexican American literature and to proffer a working taxonomy. The ultimate shape of that literature is still emerging as Mexican American scholars explore the labyrinth of history, discovering its literary niches as evidenced by Recovering the Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States project at the University of Houston led by Nicolas Kanellos.
El Espejo y El Imagen
I have entitled this presentation “El Espejo y El Imagen” because both the mirror and the image in the mirror are key literary elements in Mexican and Mexican American literature. In his inquiry into the Mexican psyche, Carlos Fuentes made much of the buried mirror in unearthing the character of the Mexican. In renaissance European literature the mirror was regarded as holding up nature’s light to reality, as it were. One could feign much but there was little one could do to thwart the true reflections of the mirror. Could one really see “truth” in what the mirror captured? In Cinderella, for example, the mirror hedges when asked by the stepmother: who is the fairest of them all? The notion persisted– that the mirror reflected truth.
As a youngster, I went with my Uncle Jose, my mother’s brother, to one of those circus halls of mirrors in Chicago. Of all the shows, I was most impressed by the hall-of-mirrors. Unaware of the geometry of the illusion, I remember how awed I was by what seemed to me to be an infinity of mirrors. For as I looked into the mirrors, I could see my image, increasingly reduced, reflected in still more mirrors in seemingly unending reflections in the already reflected mirrors. In another part of the hall-of-mirrors were a number of “funny” mirrors which distorted one’s image even more, depending upon how far or near one stood to the reflecting surface. I was both amused by and suspicious of the comical and grotesque reflections of myself in those mirrors. And no matter how secure I may have been in the knowledge that the mirrors were just optical pranks meant to engender only good- humored laughter by others or oneself, I could not shake that uneasy feeling about the reality of the images reflected in those mirrors.
The mirrors distorted everything. I knew they were meant as a joke. I laughed at my reflections in those mirrors. Was it possible, I wondered, that I actually looked like the images in those mirrors, that some people actually saw me as I appeared in those ludicrous mirrors? The thought choked off my laughter a medio grito, in mid-stride, as it were. I was no longer amused. Instead I walked out angrily, confused and bewildered. Many years were to pass before I understood fully that moment in my life, before I came to fondle it as a great grain of truth revealing to me profundities I’m still grappling with. Time and again my thoughts have wandered back to that experience, and each time I’ve garnered additional truths–either about myself or the world about me–from that brief and singular moment in that hall of mirrors.
I wonder how many Anglos saw and continue to see Mexican Americans as the distortions produced by those mischievous mirrors? In fact, how many Mexican Americans have regarded and still regard themselves dysphorically as those distorted images? In “The Gorkase Mirror,” Eliu Carranza, the Chicano philosopher, has marveled at the hall-of-mirrors phenomenon as the mind seeks “to come to a realization of itself in terms of one distortion after another reflected in such mirrors.” This is the enigma wrapped in a riddle that Chicanos have been deciphering in their efforts to establish their place in the American mosaic.
In 1969, Mexican Americans (becoming Chicanos) were fighting a two-front literary war. The first was, overcoming the images Anglo America had of them, images institutionalized in hegemonic texts of instruction, and the images Mexican Americans cum Chicanos were giving light to in developing their own sense of self and which they sought to promulgate in their own replacement texts (countertexts). It was a life and death struggle between the forces of the distorting mirrors and the realities of self so well-understood by Mexican American Chicanos.
Interestingly, one of the first texts issued by Quinto Sol Publications in 1969 at the apex of the Chicano renaissance was titled El Espejo / The Mirror: Selected Mexican American Literature with the prefatory explanation: “[L]et this book speak for itself, and for the people that it represents . . . {t}o know themselves and who they are, there are those who need no reflection other than their own. Thus . . . EL ESPEJO–THE MIRROR.”
In the Fall of 1967, Quinto Sol Publications began publishing El Grito: A Journal of Mexican American Thought which carried in its first issue an editorial that was, in fact, a manifesto excoriating “intellectual mercenaries” of the age who spread “intellectually spurious and vicious” characterizations of Mexican Americans to further their own hegemonic ends. The editorial ends with a challenge to Mexican Americans:
Only Mexican-Americans themselves can accomplish the collapse of this and other such rhetorical structures by the exposure of their fallacious nature and the development of intellectual alternatives. El Grito has been founded for just this purpose–to provide a forum for Mexican-American self definition and expression on this and other issues of relevance to Mexican-Americans in American society today.
This was a clarion call for Chicano independence from the American literary mainstream which never paid us much attention anyway. This was the objective of “the Chicano Renaissance” and its well-spring–the Chicano Movement: to create a literature so essentially Chicano that is stood on its own, creating an esthetic unique to the Chicano experience. No longer would Chicano writers have to go hat in hand to mainstream literary outlets for literary largesse. Chicanos would establish their own literary outlets, their own publishing houses and presses. We can see, thus, that the term “the Chicano Renaissance” was an organic term of growth for those voices in the Mexican American community, growth over a benighted past. Chicanos were not to be just literary epigoni creating stamped works that reflected the vision Aurora Lucero White Lea had of the literary renaissance of the Hispanic Southwest festooned, unfortunately, with racial instability. In 1953 she wrote nostalgically for the waning origins of the Hispanic literature of New Mexico:
There now remains but one renaissance to be effected–the literary. With the happy accident that New Mexico possesses more traditional literary materials than any other Hispanic region it should be possible to bring about such a rebirth in the reenactment of the lovely old plays, in the keeping alive the lovely old folk dances and in the singing of the old traditional songs.
Ironically, the Chicano Renaissance came into being not in relation to the traditional Hispanic past but rather in the wake of growing awareness by Mexican Americans of their Indian, not Spanish, identity. The Chicano Renaissance was but a manifestation of a people’s long overdue coming of age. Like Milton’s unsightly root, in another country it bore a bright and golden flower. The Chicano Renaissance was an augury of transcendence, not repetition. Mexican American Chicanos opted to transcend the past instead of replicating it. In this regard, the Chicano Renaissance was a period of critical consciousness evidenced by the moiling throngs of Mexican American Chicanos who took to the streets in protest of the ascriptive caste structures and pieties of racial superiority which American hegemony had imposed on the Mexican American Southwest. In this respect, for Chicanos, literature was regarded as a teleological process, spatially and temporally a quest for purpose, ends, not a palimpsest for the traditional Templar literature for which Aurora Lucero pined.
Important to bear in mind is that the early period of the Chicano Movement was essentially one during which Mexican Americans, having grown weary of “searching for America,” cast aside the expectations that the United States would “do right” by them. Instead they proclaimed themselves agents in their own change. Chicano literature was percolating in the cauldron of Chicano nationalism, steaming out its agenda to identify the enemy, promote the revolution, and praise the people.
That in its incunabula many of the early works of Chicano writers were inspired by ideology did not lessen the expectations among many Chicanos that the responsibilities of Chicano writers were ultimately to fashion a literature so essentially Chicano that it stood on its own merits apart from other literatures. We see those expectations manifest in the works of Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, Rolando Hinojosa, Estela Portillo, Carlos Morton, Arturo Islas, Gloria Anzaldúa, Denise Chavez, Maria Helena Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, and a host of other Chicano and Chicana writers.
Significantly, a literature draws from the history and myths of its people’s past; and Chicanos turned to their Indian past for their most meaningful symbols and metaphors. Literature means many things to many people. A piece of literature is not just a speech act–it’s a social act as well; it has cultural connotations that reveal a writer’s relation to his or her group and to the entire fabric of society. As a cultural manifestation, a literary work inheres a sense of audience, its language (whether English, Spanish or a combination of both) is part of a weltanschauung shared by a community of readers. The significance of a literary work lies not only in the social reality in which the writer participated but grows out of the culture which nourishes him or her.
As it emerged from the cauldron of Chicano nationalism, some Chicanos saw the role of Chicano literature as one reflecting Chicano life and Chicano values–drawing from a distinctively Chicano imagination. Like the disciples of Senchan Torpeist, the fabled Irish poet of myth, who were sent out to recover the whole of the Tain–the great Irish saga–which none of them could remember entirely, Chicano writers were the “disciples” through whom the lost literary inheritance of Chicanos would be recovered and their emerging exploits recorded. They would be stewards of the Chicano legacy that had to be written down, explained
and defended as one would defend a beloved daughter.
There are many Chicanos who argue that Chicano literature is so much of a piece that is has a distinctive center of gravity as well as its own ground of being and, therefore, its own esthetic. There are norms and patterns in Chicano writing that are common to mainstream American literature and to world literature while at the same time different. Not because of innate Chicano characteristics but because Chicano writers, by and large, have emerged from a distinctive group experience in the United States.
This is not to say that that experience is uniquely different. Most writers, I daresay, have emerged from comparable group experiences: Jewish writers, Black writers, and others. While each group experience may be comparable (and thus not unique), the experiences of each group are different. For instance, Jews have not been slaves in the United States nor did their ancestors lose a war to the United States. Blacks have not suffered religious pogroms in the United States nor have they been prohibited from speaking their home language in the schools. Yet Jews, Blacks,. And Chicanos have suffered outrageous bigotry and discrimination in the United States. But that is not enough to say that their group experiences have been the same.
Discourse-specific, Chicano texts would generate their own dynamics from which a critical criteria would emerge. That was a radical departure. And yet, necessary. Prior to the Chicano Renaissance, the American literary mainstream perceived Mexican American literary production as little more than folklore (like the folktale of La Llorona) and ballads of banditry (like the Corrido of Gregorio Cortez).
In 1967, I was asked to submit a short story for an anthology of Texas fiction, only to have it returned with the explanation that it wasn’t the kind of story they were expecting from me. Along with the explanation they sent me a copy of J. Frank Dobie’s “The Straw Man” as an example of the kind of story they wanted. They wanted a quaint story about the stereotypical culture of Mexican Americans. I had sent them “Chicago Blues,” a story about a contemporary Mexican American jazz musician in Chicago. In 1957, the story had won an international story competition judged by Richard Wright.
What most characterized Chicano literature, early on, were its counter-texts–the textual background against which Chicano literature was superimposed, the texts of Chicano reality. Chicano writers were expositing not just Chicano views but counter-texts of Anglo views by which Chicanos were judged socially; countertexts which showed how Chicanos were contained within the value framework of mainstream culture and subjected cruelly and brutally to the apodictic values of American society.
Through countertexts, Chicano writers showed the insidious ways by which mainstream culture exercised hegemony over the Chicano community. Chicano countertexts pointed out how having been subjected to coercive Anglo texts and having internalized the values inherent in them, Chicano had inadvertently been instruments in their own oppression. It was this ploy of text and countertext that provided Chicano literature with its most enduring quality–process. Chicano literature was a process, not an outcome; it was a process of imagining and figuring out the world as Henry Louis Gates would have put it (Black Literature and Literary Theory, 1984: 71).
As products of process, Chicano texts were not finalities of truth but limns by which Chicano liberation could be achieved. Chicano literature was thus envisioned in the service of the cause, the people. It was not an end in itself. This meant Chicano texts were not self-sufficient but required the help of Chica-no readers to actualize their meanings.
In 1971 when Tomas Rivera, Jose Reyna, and I took part in the first national symposium on Chicano Literature and Literary Theory at Pan American University in Edinburg, Texas, our presentations were not as dicta in the development of Chicano literature. Chicano literature was a barely emerging field then. My essay on “The Chicano Renaissance,” had just appeared in the May 1971 issue of Social Casework. Our presentations sought to show how Chicano writers were looking for forms discrete to the Chicano experience by which to articulate that experience ; that Chicano writers wee searching for textual structures of meaning unique to the Chicano experience through which the meaning of the Chicano experience would be validated–by Chicanos, not Anglos. Or as Ramon Saldivar has put it:
the function of Chicano narrative is . . . to produce creative structures of knowledge to allow its readers to see, feel, and understand their social reality (Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, 1960: 6).
In this sense, the Chicano Renaissance functioned for Chicano writers much the way the Irish Renaissance functioned for Irish writers who cut their ties to British literature and turned to the roots and traditions of Irish literature for sustenance. Chicanos cast adrift th privileged norm of Anglo American literature. At that moment, Chicano literature embodied what Georg Simmel identifies as that process in life by which it generates forms demanding “a validity which transcends the moment” (On Individuality and Social Forms, 1971: 346).
In 1965, Joyce Carol Oates published an unusual and provocative short story entitled ”Where are you going? Where have you been?” The story suggests that to ascertain where one going one needs to know where one has been. How did Chicanos get to where they are today from where they began? The answer to that question lies in Chicano literature and its antecedents. The thousands of documents that have been recovered by Chicano scholars and the project at the University of Houston Recovering the Hispanic Literary Heritage of the United States have enabled us to see more clearly the Chicano literary mosaic of the past. The images of that past are helping to mitigate the distorted images of Chicanos in those mischievous halls of mirrors. We are able today to see the historical trajectory of Chicanos over the last 157 years and ascertain therefrom a better sense of where Chicanos are headed.
The question I am most asked today is about the demise of Chicano literature and its genesis partner the Chicano Movement. Many pundits say that as a social force the Chicano Movement seems to have all but disappeared from the public arena. But the Chicano Movement has not disappeared. It was not a fly-by-night phenomenon. It has morphed into more sophisticated manifestations with succeeding generations just as the American Revolution of 1776 has morphed into more sophisticated manifestations with succeeding generations of Americans. Chicano literature has likewise morphed into more sophisticated manifestations from its early forms of Movement texts.
What we can say about Chicano literature is that it’s a literature in process, drawing from different literary traditions (American, Mexican, global) sometimes from one of the other, and sometimes in a unique synthesis of Mexican American that is truly startling and innovative. The permutations are manifold.
Epilogue
Thirty five years ago my hope for Chicano literature was its integration into American literature. That’s still an important objective, though it’s no longer as pressing as it once was. Chicano literature has transcended the bounds of American literature. It’s studied in Paris, Munich, Moscow. It’s part of a new world order in which the Eurocentric view of literary canon is being scrutinized for its relevance to non-European-based literatures.
This is a critical juncture for Chicano literature. No longer necessary now is the need to juxtapose Chicano text and countertext, no need to identify the enemy, praise the people, and promote the revolution. Chicano texts must manifestly stand on their own–not for the benefit of Anglo mainstream readers but for the benefit of Chicano readers with whom Chicano literature has a pact of long-standing. For it is Chicano literature, after all, whose responsibility it is to proffer the verities of Chicano life to Chicano readers and, ultimately, to a universal audience.
Chicano readers have come to understand intellectually what they knew all along intuitively: that Chicano literature is not value-free; that language and culture–what Taine called moment, race, and milieu–are key factors in literary (cultural) production. The Anglo American mainstream lost sight of that, believing that its providential mission was to pass on to generation after generation of Americans of all colors the “truths” embedded in the literary works of the Wes-
tern Tradition: what is fitting for us is fitting for them. Thomas Macaulay’s words about the literature of India and Arabia reverberate in our consciousness as words about black and Chicano literature spoken by or subscribed to by white heirs of Macaulay’s literary imperialism:
I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic, but I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education . . . . It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used ap preparatory schools in England, In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same (Selected Writings, 1972, 241).
The distinguished men identified by Macaulay as proficient in the Eastern tongues were non-Easterners. The Orientalists were non-Oriental. They were all English, expounding on the Eastern and Oriental from the perspective of British imperialism.
The import of this perspective is that, with exception of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, information about the literary accomplishments of Mexican Americans in the United States has been nil in literary texts. Like Macaulay’s non-Easterners and non-Orientals, editors and writers of American literary texts have excluded and marginalized the literary achievements of Mexican Americans, first, and Chicanos, later, for reasons ranging from jingoism and racism to ignorance, disdain, and imperialism.
Copyright © 2005 by the author. All rights reserved.
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