SOURCE: Martín-Rodríguez, Manuel M. “Reading (in) the Past: Textual Recovery and the History of (Reading) Chicano/a Literature.” In Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature, pp. 139-70. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

[In the following essay, Martín-Rodríguez explores the trend, which began in the mid-1980s among Chicano/a scholars, of rediscovering earlier works of Chicano/a literature that had been disregarded for ideological reasons, but have nevertheless influenced contemporary Chicano/a literature.]

Upon dusty shelves, frayed and forgotten, the books of this history may still be hidden. By word of mouth, from time to time, there is word of a lost literature, in reminiscences and folk memories.

—Stan Steiner (1970)¹

It is our belief that an effort should be made to trace the historical development of Mexican American literature now that it has been recognized as a subject worthy of serious study.

—Luis Leal (1973)²

¿Y cómo es posible … que tan ricas prosas hayan permanecido ignoradas durante tantos años? … ¿cuántos más Ulicas no habrá por allí enterrados en los empolvados anaqueles de las bibliotecas o las amarillas páginas de los periódicos? Hasta que no sean descubiertos, como lo ha sido Ulica, no podremos hablar de una historia definitiva de la literatura chicana.

—Luis Leal (1982)³

In this final chapter, I intend to address one of the most recent yet dramatic shifts in the history of (reading) Chicano/a literature: the recovery and reprint of forgotten and formerly lost literary works by Chicanos/as, to which my three epigraphs refer. Since the mid-1980s, approximately, numerous scholars have devoted themselves to unearthing those texts, as well as to reclaiming their place in the history of Chicano/a literature, thus belatedly heeding don Luis Leal's recommendation quoted in my second epigraph. What were, at first, isolated efforts by individual critics such as Juan Rodríguez (who in 1982 edited Jorge Ulica's Crónicas diabólicas), Nicolás Kanellos (editor in 1984 of Daniel Venegas's Las aventuras de don Chipote), and Genaro M. Padilla (who compiled and edited Fray Angélico Chávez's Short Stories in 1987) later crystallized into a series of organized collective projects to (re)construct the early history of Chicano/a letters. Salient among these ventures are the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at its Arte Público Press/University of Houston base (henceforth referred to as the Recovery Project), as well as the Pasó por aquí series of the University of New Mexico Press, which concentrates on reprinting texts from the New Mexican past. Through these and similar efforts, a reader of Chicano/a literature today can access an exponentially greater number of works written prior to the 1950s than was possible thirty years ago. In a sense, it could be argued that in the past two decades Chicano/a literature has expanded as much toward its past as it has toward its future.

In addition to the three titles mentioned above, for instance, a partial listing of works recovered and reprinted in recent years includes Jovita González's Dew on the Thorn (edited by José Limón), Caballero: A Historical Novel (written with Eve Raleigh [pseudonym of Margaret Eimer] and edited by José Limón and María Cotera), and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and Other Stories (edited by Sergio Reyna); Adina de Zavala's History and Legends of the Alamo and Other Missions in and Around San Antonio (edited by Richard Flores); The Collected Stories of María Cristina Mena (edited by Amy Doherty); Miguel A. Otero's The Real Billy the Kid (introduction by John-Michael Rivera); Luis Pérez's El Coyote the Rebel (introduction by Lauro Flores); Women's Tales from the New Mexico WPA: La Diabla a Pie (edited by Tey D. Rebolledo and Teresa Márquez); María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It? (both edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita); Leonor Villegas de Magnón's The Rebel (edited by Clara Lomas); Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México (edited by Miguel Encinias et al.); Cleofas M. Jaramillo's Romance of a Little Village Girl (introduction by Tey D. Rebolledo); and Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez (with an introduction by Rolando Hinojosa), The Hammon and the Beans and Other Stories (introduction by Ramón Saldívar), The Shadow (with a prologue by the author), and Between Two Worlds (also with a prologue by the author). In addition, bibliographical enterprises outside the field of Chicano/a publishing, such as The Friends of the Bancroft Library (in consortium with the University of California, Berkeley), have contributed to the recovery trend with volumes such as Three Memoirs of Mexican California (a collection of testimonials from Carlos N. Híjar, Eulalia Pérez, and Agustín Escobar, as told to H. H. Bancroft's assistant Thomas Savage); The Diary of Captain Luis Antonio Argüello, October 17-November 17, 1821 (with an introduction by Arthur Quinn); and José Bandini's translated A Description of California in 1828. Finally, previously unpublished or unavailable works are now in print in such anthologies as The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (edited by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors), Nochebuena: Hispanic American Christmas Stories (edited by Nicolás Kanellos), and Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (also edited by N. Kanellos with a group of co-editors).⁴

Significant as these reprints or newly printed texts are, they seem to represent only the tip of the iceberg of what is now a massive database of original works recovered from the more than 1,700 extant periodicals published by Hispanics (many of them by Chicanos/as) in the United States, as well as from libraries and archives throughout the country and in Mexico. Arte Público Press's Recovery Project, for example, is currently working on indexing and cataloging a database of over 100,000 literary items.⁵

This felicitous circumstance does not come without its difficulties, however, as the task of rewriting the history of Chicano/a literature has become more complex—paradoxically—than it was when fewer works from the past were known to us. The complexity of this enterprise stems from the fact that, as I have suggested elsewhere and as I will explore in detail below,⁶ the task of reconstructing the history of Chicano/a letters cannot be understood as the simple process of filling in the gaps in the sequence of known works and then tracing alleged lines of evolution from the past to the present. Rather, historiographic reconstruction involves a delicate process of interpretation that in effect results in a discursive construction of the Chicano/a past. Thus, the next pages will be devoted to analyzing the main tenets that have built that critical edifice to date. Toward the end, I will propose an alternative model for rewriting Chicano/a literary history as the textual recovery progresses.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL URGE: SHORTCOMINGS, NEWER CRITICAL INSIGHTS, AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR CHICANO/A LITERATURE

Despite my and other similar cautionary calls for a more complex understanding of the Chicano/a past (which I will address in the penultimate section of this chapter), the predominant trend among Chicano/a literary historians so far has favored a chronological approach. This is not entirely surprising. Such a sequential ordering of known (or, at least, relevant) works has been the most common technique employed throughout the world by traditional literary historians, who would catalog books and authors by generations, groups, movements, or any other similar categories around the idea of literary evolution and sequential continuity.⁷ I contend that this model's long dominance in the field of literary history has resulted in a sort of methodological inertia that has outlived its usefulness and that, in turn, demands the experimentation with newer approaches. In particular, in the case of transnational (or postnational) literatures and in the context of diasporic and globalized movements of cultural capital and human labor characterizing our times, clinging to the notion of the diachronic evolution of national literatures seems of limited use.

In fact, the chronological listing model had some very early critics, as the following quote from Hans Robert Jauss conveys:

[A] description of literature that follows an already sanctioned canon and simply sets the life and work of the writers one after the other in a chronological series is, as Gervinus already remarked, “no history; it is scarcely the skeleton of a history.”

(Toward an Aesthetic, 4-5)

Other recent social and cultural changes in our understanding of history complement Jauss's (and Gervinus's!) reservations by opening up for questioning assumptions on which the chronological model rested. For one, Michael Foucault's thoughts on historical analysis in general, as expressed in The Archeology of Knowledge and other works, opened up a critical space for discussing the possibility of a historiographic discourse that would depart from the idea of history as a search for origins and as the permanent interconnection between eras. Foucault's warning, in this regard, was clear and straightforward, assuming the urgency of a mandate:

We must renounce all those themes whose function is to ensure the infinite continuity of discourse and its secret presence to itself in the interplay of a constantly recurring absence. We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten, transformed, utterly erased, and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books. Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs.

(25)

The Foucauldian understanding of the historiographic task enables the writer to emphasize precisely “the question of discontinuities, systems and transformations, series and thresholds” (13) that would likely result in a debunking of the hidden tenets supporting the edifice of traditional history. Rather than embarking on the search for a definite origin (a manifestation of which I explored in chapter 1), Foucault forcefully advocates suspending “all [the] syntheses that are accepted without question” (25), including methodological and disciplinary assumptions that serve to legitimize a false “synthetic purity” (26) based on the notion of uninterrupted evolution.

Likewise, the authority by which the historian could order the past from a position of seeming detachment and impartiality has been reexamined in such works as Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse and some of his other works, in which the tropological construction of history and the notion of metahistory are employed to account for the way a history (of any kind) always speaks of itself as much as it does of its subject. History is understood by White as a discursive construct rather than as an unquestionable collection of documented events. In thus shifting the emphasis from the chronicled past to the chronicling present, this newer conception of the historiographic undertaking also suggests that the history of a nation (or a literature) is always as much the chronicle of its present as it is that of its earlier periods, as the New Historicists have claimed repeatedly as well.

In the realm of literary history proper, a similar understanding of the tensions between past and present, the narrated and the narrator was also implicit in Jauss's concept of the shifting horizon of expectations, as was explored in earlier chapters. More importantly, at least for the present discussion, Jauss also called attention to those moments in which the past is consciously revisited (and rewritten) by a new generation of scholars or readers. In examining the reasons behind such instances of cultural revisionism, the German theoretician claimed that

a literary past can return only when a new reception draws it back into the present, whether an altered aesthetic attitude willfully reaches back to reappropriate the past, or an unexpected light falls back on forgotten literature from the new moment of literary evolution, allowing something to be found that one previously could not have sought in it.

(Toward an Aesthetic, 35)

To illustrate this Jaussian concept of the altered return of the past and its importance for Chicano/a literature, one need only look at the way the 1970s indigenismo sought to adopt and adapt a pre-Hispanic aesthetics for the benefit of a contemporary Chicano/a audience.⁸ From the Nahuatl-based identification of poetry as “floricanto” (flower and song) that later gave name to numerous literary festivals and publications, to the inclusion of other philosophical, ethic, aesthetic, and linguistic elements, Chicano/a literature in the 1970s was marked by its reinterpretation of its ancient past in Tenochtitlan (and, to a lesser extent, in the worlds of the Maya and other indigenous cultures). A poem such as Alurista's “las tripas y los condes,” for instance, from his 1971 collection Floricanto en Aztlán, translates into contemporary imagery Aztec rituals and practices so as to poetically dignify life in the Chicano/a neighborhoods:

“las tripas” y “los condes”
“los tequilas” y “los coloraos”
today in the barrio
los clanes de mi gente
incarnate gangs of caciques
con plumas y navajas
caballeros águilas y tigres.

—(Floricanto, poem 50)⁹

The anachronistic poetical appropriation of the Aztec military orders in the last line quoted serves to instill a sense of pride and defiance in the barrio gangs, a rhetorical move further reinforced by the peculiar use of the terms “clanes” and “gangs” in lines 4 and 5: in Alurista's historical reconstruction, the indigenous chiefs are said to form gangs while the barrio dwellers are related as clans. By thus altering the reader's expectations (of a more normal association between “caciques” and “clanes”), the poet manages to deprive the word “gang” of some of its negative connotations (as pervasive at the time as they are now in media and sociological analysis) while suggesting that they are in fact—by virtue of this newly recovered genealogy—military orders of sorts for cultural and physical self-defense. This last aspect is further reinforced by conjoining the images of “plumas” (“feathers,” but also “pens” in Spanish) and “navajas” (“knives”) in the sixth line of the poem: in that way, Alurista symbolizes how these present-day street fighters with their knives (a metaphoric allusion to the tiger's claws) and the poets that sing about them with their pens (an allusion through the polysemic meaning of “plumas” to the eagle's feathers) are working together toward the survival of La Raza.¹⁰

Similarly, there are many instances of revisionist readings of the past at times when a changed cultural context has allowed Chicano/a literature critics and readers to go back to certain texts and to read them differently, thus changing their relative importance for the history of Chicano/a letters. In chapter 2, I examined the case of the shifting reception of José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho, perhaps the ultimate example of how diachronic cultural transformations allow readers to find some things that one previously could not have sought in a particular text (to paraphrase Jauss). But many other examples could be taken into account here, including how a more receptive cultural context to sexual and gender differences since the mid-1980s permitted the reclamation and reinterpretation of formerly shunned or overlooked works, such as the novels published by John Rechy more than two decades earlier.¹¹

These and similar examples further confirm the ways (literary) history is necessarily dependent on the interplay between past and present and between the chronicled and the chronicler, rather than being predicated upon the existence of a more or less immutable past that the historian can record (or recover) without any further mediating intervention. Rather, as Jauss also suggested as typical of the history of reception, “the reappropriation of past works occurs simultaneously with the perpetual mediation of past and present art and of traditional evaluation and current literary attempts” (Toward an Aesthetic, 20). Because reception is always a subsequent phenomenon with respect to production and because of the “perpetual mediation” that Jauss identifies, it could be argued (as the parenthesis in this chapter's subtitle implies) that the history of a particular literature should also be the history of how that literature has been read in the different “presents” of enunciation of its diverse historians and readers.

In fact, within the Hispanic literary world, the idea of such a literary history of reception was already proposed in 1925 by the prolific José Martínez Ruiz (who published his works under the pseudonym “Azorín”). In a note on Lope de Vega, later collected in his Lope en silueta (Profile of Lope), Azorín first proposed his idea under the following terms as he devised a plan for such a history:

No se ha escrito en España—sobre intentos y trabajos parciales—una historia de la evolución de los grandes autores en el concepto del público y de la crítica. La Historia de las ideas estéticas de Menéndez y Pelayo es otra cosa. Lo que pedimos aquí es un estudio en que se fuera viendo, época por época, siglo por siglo, cómo la fama de un gran escritor ha ido formándose, modificándose, transformándose. … Y leyendo este libro—libro ejemplar—nos podríamos curar de muchos prejuicios y muchas vaguedades.

(86)¹²

While Azorín's project was still marked by its reliance on the notion of the “great author,” a notion that our own present has questioned, his ideas on methodology sound nonetheless fresh to this day. In fact, some fifty-five years after Azorín wrote his note on Lope de Vega, Annette Kolodny suggested employing a very similar analytical process to achieve almost diametrically opposed results. Kolodny demonstrated how documenting the diachronic changes in reception might serve not (just) to trace the changing estimation of the “great authors” but as a tool for canonical revisionism as well, with its attendant benefits for the (re)construction of historically marginalized literatures. Kolodny's essay reads not unlike a (much more modern) echo of Azorín's earlier claim, as it stresses the need for an acknowledgment of the presents from which literary history is constructed or revised:

[O]ur sense of a “literary history” and, by extension, our confidence in a historical canon, is rooted not so much in any definitive understanding of the past, as it is in our need to call up and utilize the past on behalf of a better understanding of the present. … To quote [David Couzens] Hoy fully, “this continual reinterpretation of the past goes hand in hand with the continual reinterpretation by the present of itself.”

(9)

Unlike Azorín, however, by thus invoking the notion of canon in a revisionist context, Kolodny was forced to question the very same process by which a certain standard emerges and is handed down through generations. In that sense, she was more interested in what literary histories have routinely qualified as “lesser authors” than in Azorín's “grandes autores.” Kolodny's recollection of how she reread with her students forgotten texts by women writers is eloquent in this respect and her questions are largely applicable to the Chicano/a situation as well:

In reading with our students these previously lost works [by early women writers], we inevitably raised perplexing questions as to the reasons for their disappearance from the canons of “major works,” and we worried over the aesthetic and critical criteria by which they had been accorded diminished status.

(2)

While I will come back to the notion of “disappearance” immediately below, what interests me right now from Kolodny's second quote is her emphasis on the act of reading (rather than on that of writing) as characteristic of and responsible for canonical evolution. An opposite valuation of these two parameters has constituted the most blatant—yet concealed—contradiction in traditional histories of literature by making the historian's voice and tastes almost invisible under the veil of an alleged objective documentation of the writings of the “great authors” (with an occasional minor author thrown in for the sake of documenting the “decadence” of certain movements and/or periods). Likewise, I would like to stress in Kolodny's last quote the explicit displacement from the idea of the “great author” or the “major work” as an undisputable tenet, still prevalent in Azorín's mind, to an understanding of literary relevance (Jauss's horizon of expectations) as a critical construct: relevant to whom is the question with which our current literary histories rather need to deal.

An equally important challenge to the traditional dominance of chronology as the basis for literary historiography results from a complication of the notion of “disappearance” to which Kolodny alluded in her second quote; that is, the fact that unknown texts from earlier periods may be “discovered” at a much later date than that of their production, as in the Chicano/a case, with little or no record of their original reception left. In such situations, traditional historians have resorted to placing those texts in their chronological sequence and then to rewriting their histories to accommodate the newly discovered works in a thus restructured order. A telling example is found in the history of Spanish literature, in which the “discovery” of the jarchas in 1948 resulted in a rewriting of its literary history with the addition of an entirely new beginning for its lyric poetry, a literary prehistory of sorts that was then integrated into the otherwise unchanged teleological model of literary evolution.¹³ But even if the dates of composition would reserve such a foundational role for the jarchas and other similarly unearthed works, literary historians cannot dismiss the temporality of their “discoveries” nor the present from which their new historiographical discourses emerge to thus rewrite the literary past. Jauss synthesized this idea eloquently when he signaled that “prehistories are always discovered ex eventu as prehistory of a post-history.”¹⁴ In that sense, it should be apparent that the particular posthistory from which the prehistory is written into the literary annals would be determinant in whatever role is accorded to the newly found texts.

To give but a simplified illustration of how significantly this process operates in the case of the Chicano/a literary past, consider how different the interpretation of currently recovered works would have been if that process had taken place in the cultural context of the 1960s and 1970s instead of starting during the 1980s and 1990s. While the partially recovered memoirs of Mariano Vallejo and texts by other early Californios/as have been celebrated in the 1990s as the legitimate antecedents of twentieth-century Chicano/a protest literature, critics in the 1960s and 1970s were clearly dismissive of those very same figures (even if most of their works were not known at the time) as representative of an assimilationist stance at odds with Chicano/a militancy. While our interpretive present can benefit from the use of such theoretical concepts as the notions of positionality and articulation, strategic essentialism, or differential consciousness¹⁵ critics in the 1970s were less inclined to consider in a positive light the notion of shifting or fluid identities, which then deserved the quick accusation of being un vendido, a sellout. A comparison between the following quotes, all of them centered around Vallejo in one way or another, would suffice to prove my point. The first quote is from Genaro M. Padilla's 1993 landmark study on Mexican American autobiography, My History, Not Yours (whose title is, in fact, a direct quote from Vallejo's memoirs):

Vallejo, moreover, may help us to understand the competing social forces that have made a virtue of contradictory responses; a virtue, I say, because such necessary contradictions between public and private sentiments, between intra- and intercultural experience, may be seen as establishing a negotiatory consciousness for Mexican Americans like Vallejo—with Juan Seguín before him and Cleofas Jaramillo after him—which has enabled their (our) survival in North America during the last century and a half.

(88)

Padilla's rhetorical strategy, including his careful choice of words (“virtue,” “survival”), casts Vallejo's figure in the heroic terms intended to (re)situate this pioneer memoirist (as well as the other individuals he mentions) as the foundation stone of later Chicano/a literature, as his parenthesis further emphasizes. In this, Padilla's narrative is not unlike those of other recent readers of the Chicano/a past, such as Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, who claimed (also in 1993) that Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (the latter character in the title being modeled after Vallejo)¹⁶ contains “an interpellation of today's readers, as citizens, or as descendants of Californios/as, to resist oppression” (51), while concluding that “such are the contestation and defiant discourse with which the literature of the population of Mexican origin in the United States emerges” (51).

The enthusiasm with which these highly respectable critics embraced the works of Vallejo and his contemporary Californios in the early 1990s sharply contrasts with the dismissive condemnation found two decades earlier, in 1972, in Raymond V. Padilla's critique of Leonard M. Pitt's The Decline of the Californios:

[F]ew conquests can be maintained without the continuous collaboration of some native faction. California and the Southwest were no exception. In California men like Mariano Vallejo and Pablo de la Guerra … played important roles in bringing California and the Southwest under Gabacho [Anglo] control. These political opportunists had much to gain by way of land speculation, increased commerce, and the hopes of political aggrandizement. They were men of influence and power who hoped to continue in privileged positions and even increase their power through a Gabacho hegemony.

(35)¹⁷

The radical disparity between these quotes is indicative of how different a history of Chicano/a literature written in the early 1970s would have been from that being written in the 1990s and early 2000s, even if the newly recovered texts (by Vallejo, Ruiz de Burton, and others) had been known at the time.¹⁸ Indeed, literary critics and historians in the 1970s had not paid much attention to similarly “heteredoxical” known figures from their recent past such as Fray Angélico Chávez (later “rediscovered” in part by Genaro M. Padilla), John Rechy, and Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca.¹⁹ Taking the case of José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho as our yardstick once more, it is very doubtful that a novel like The Squatter and the Don would have made many reading lists in Chicano/a literature courses back in the 1970s (if it had been known to critics then) unless accompanied by a significant commentary clarifying its “ambiguities and ideological confusions” (to quote—albeit slightly out of context—Ramón E. Ruiz's preface to the 1970 edition of Pocho).²⁰ By contrast, Ruiz de Burton's novel has generated a significant body of criticism since the 1990s (most of it overwhelmingly celebratory), and it has become required reading in many university courses, which has resulted in several reprints to date. All this in spite of the novel's marked elitism, which, as I signaled in 1996, contrasts with the more common working-class bent in twentieth-century Chicano/a literature, an aspect that has been often overlooked or avoided in the existing studies of this novel.²¹

As such, the reception of The Squatter and the Don provides us with a fine example of why a posthistory (in Jauss's sense) undertakes the task of (re)writing its own prehistory. In particular, the Nietzschean overtones of Jauss's ideas are of relevance here. For Nietzsche, especially in what he calls the critical historiographic model, history can become a fabrication of the past, “an attempt to give ourselves a posteriori, as it were, a new past from which we would prefer to be descended, as opposed to the past from which we actually descended” (107).²² Even though I am not suggesting that available Chicano/a literary histories are such a blatant fabrication of the Chicano/a past, it is nonetheless undeniable that—as is also the case with the recovery of many other marginalized literatures—the Chicano/a reconstruction of its literary past is not done without a combination of empirical restoration (involving physically locating and [re]printing texts from the past) and interpretive assumptions, which may very well be altered in future readings of the past but that allow the historian to construct a narrative of filiation between the recovered texts and the historian's present. This, in turn, determines which texts are selected as the main antecedents of present-day Chicano/a literature, as well as what parameters are selected as relevant for the historical narrative under construction. Because the main drive behind the different Chicano/a recovery efforts so far has been firmly directed toward restoring an uninterrupted chronological sequence, those features that would signal heterodoxy or even heterogeneity amid the Chicanos/as have been deemphasized so as to present a more cohesive picture of literary continuity.²³

Yet as I have suggested elsewhere (“Textual and Land Reclamations,” 54) and as I will explore in more detail below, the history of Chicano/a literature cannot be written without taking into account those differences;²⁴ stressing them, rather than attempting to overlook them for the sake of constructing a teleological picture of continuous cultural evolution, must be the historian's ambition if s/he is to succeed in chronicling a collective experience that reaches back several centuries and cuts, at one time or another, across the political borders of at least four countries.²⁵ Otherwise, the homogenizing effort would prove in the field of Chicano/a letters as limited in use as similar attempts in the case of other minority and marginalized literatures. The ambiguities and the silences with which many critics have treated certain aspects of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, in that sense, are not unlike those that Andrew Lakritz finds in the reception and rereading accorded to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. According to Lakritz,

Hurston's novel is an allegory of what happens when we try to return to origins and what we find there—not something upon which to build a stable, unifying sense of identity. We have taken this novel into the canon as a lost masterpiece. … Now that it is central to many American literature survey courses, American Studies courses, not to mention African American studies, women's studies, and others, it is harder to see that in fact the book was written from the point of view of an elite returning to find a home for herself and having to face the difficulty of seeing it.

(24)

Implicit in Lakritz's criticism is the idea that a certain critical consensus can be reached at particular times (such as in instances of canonical revisions) that would overlook specific aspects of a text or texts, thus resulting in an un/intentional manipulation or distortion of the past. While acknowledging that many readers may not see in Hurston's novel those aspects that Lakritz identifies (or those I signaled in relation to Ruiz de Burton's novel), it is clear nonetheless that the literary past cannot be perceived without the mediation of an interpreting present and that, consequently, the motivating force behind a particular reading of the past (e.g., finding one's origins, restoring a broken sequence, building a sense of identity, or creating a past from which one would like to be descended) would play a major role in defining the actual outcome of such reconstruction. It may be an exaggerated popular truism that one only finds what one is looking for, but after examining most contemporary rereadings of the past, one cannot deny that revisiting history is seldom (if ever) an ideological- and methodological-free enterprise. Rather, as discussed at some length by David Perkins,

[T]he classification is prior, in a sense, to the literature it classifies, for it organizes perceptions of literature. The validity of the classification confirms itself every time the texts are read, for the classification signals what to look for and therefore predetermines, to some degree, what will be observed.

(72-73)

The ensuing tension between a heterogeneous past and the attempt to homogenize it through historiographic discourses (the classifications to which Perkins alludes) is felt with particular force in postcolonial cultures or in the case of historically marginalized and suppressed literatures, suggesting that many Chicano/a literary historians are following in this sense a well-established, albeit questionable, path. Among the most articulate detractors of the reductionist classification as an intellectual enterprise is Mohammed Arkoun, a professor at the Institute d'Études Islamiques of the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, who focuses his criticism on the prevalent histories of postcolonial North Africa:

La historia del Magreb tiene lagunas y dispersiones, discontinuidad, rupturas culturales de las fuentes y de las fases romana, bizantina, árabe, turca, francesa y nacionalista. Lo que urge ahora es pensar en estas discontinuidades, sobre todo las que afectan al pensamiento árabe e islámico, en lugar de seguir construyendo una continuidad ilusoria, deseada por las élites nacionalistas.

(99)²⁶

The connection between elite, nationalism, and the homogenizing historiographic discourse is far from accidental, as Arkoun suggests, and in the Chicano/a—as in the North African case—it seems to be at the root of most current interpretations of its literary past.

Indeed, many of the documented efforts to reconstruct the Chicano/a literary history seem to have favored a search for links between the recovered texts and our own cultural present so as to construct a sense of unsuspended continuity despite the changes that time has brought to language, urbanization patterns, population trends, religious and folk practices, aesthetics, tastes, etc. This resulted in a series of “conceptual” historiographic accounts, in Perkins's sense,²⁷ that characterized the initial phase of the recovery enterprise, as critics attempted to present the newly recovered texts in a familiar light for the modern reader. Nicolás Kanellos, for example, made this the focus of his 1984 introduction to Daniel Venegas's Las aventuras de don Chipote, which he qualified as the first Chicano/a novel (an assertion repeated in the 1999 Spanish-language edition by Arte Público Press),²⁸ while pointing out how the novel “ofrece un nuevo indicio de la continuidad de producción cultural del mexicano al norte de la frontera” (4).²⁹

Kanellos's statement about the landmark status of Don Chipote, which in 1999 would otherwise sound even more inaccurate than it might have been in 1985, is not as much a chronological datation as an ideological interpretation, as the fact that he acknowledges the existence of earlier novels by conservative authors indicates (5).³⁰ In this, of course, we see yet another example of how the mediation of the literary historian works to mold and shape the reconstructed canon of Chicano/a literature. For the purpose of the literary history that Kanellos and others were starting to reconstruct in the mid-1980s, a proletarian novel was, no doubt, the ultimate text on which to found the edifice of Chicano/a letters. Literary history became, at that point, a genealogical enterprise, confounding into a discourse of filiation what was more than anything a case of heuristic affiliation for, as Perkins has signaled, “[a]ny conceptual scheme highlights only those texts that fit its concepts, sees in texts only what its concepts reflect, and inevitably falls short of the multiplicity, diversity, and ambiguity of the past” (51). The fact that Venegas's work was not known to Chicano/a Movement and post-Movement writers becomes irrelevant for Kanellos's historical reconstruction; in his analysis, Venegas becomes a sort of absent father who returns, almost six decades later, to reclaim his place at the head of the Chicano/a literary table.

The idea that Chicano/a literature has been marked since “the beginning” by one or several particular characteristics (e.g., its working-class status or its position as a site of direct or covert resistance) became—after Kanellos's edition—a major topos for the initial stages of the recovery of the Chicano/a literary past, and it dictated the shape that the reconstructed history would take. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this strategy works only when individual texts from the past (or some of their aspects) are compared with a select corpus of works from the present; by contrast, when the recovered texts are compared among themselves or when one expands the corpus of our own contemporary works, the differences are as telling as the similarities, and the critic would be at pains to ignore them (“Textual and Land Reclamations,” 53). This is not to say that there has been no continuity. On the contrary, a cultural continuity that encompasses folklore and the oral tradition, everyday practices, religion, and even to a certain extent printed literature is undeniable, and it has been documented extensively.³¹ However, as is the case with other peoples who have been historically subjected to a pattern of conquest, marginalization, and exclusion from power positions, there have also been in the Chicano/a past many factors that resulted in disruptions and ruptures in the continuity of cultural evolution, including alphabetization patterns, lack of free time for reading and writing, limited printing and distribution opportunities, class and gender differences, and regional versus (inter)national awareness. For the task of (re)constructing the Chicano/a literary history, therefore, continuity may not necessarily be the leading indicator to pursue. Rather, the historian may gain more in registering the interplay between the connections and the interruptions reflected in the literary activity throughout the years, as I will explore toward the end of this chapter.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIC TREND IN CHICANO/A LITERARY HISTORY

A second dominant impulse in the recent rewriting of Chicano/a literary history has resulted in an attempt to compensate for the general lack of knowledge of the literary past that characterized the Chicano/a Movement era by filling in as many “empty boxes” in the literary chronological sequence as possible. If we look at those chronologies accompanying modern reference works on Chicano/a literature, even as late as 1985,³² it is obvious that the gaps in the sequence of known works used to span in certain cases well over a century. The pedagogical utility of attempting to cover those “holes” by listing as many of the recovered texts as possible is therefore undeniable.³³ But aside from its didactic role as a visual aid, such an ex eventu reconstructed listing would be misleading, since it would include many of these works as if they had been always known to us, thus erasing precisely the history of displacement and marginalization that resulted in the temporary “disappearance” of those texts in the first place and that is, in itself, meaningful.

Therefore, I contend that instead of glossing it over with the help of the newly recovered texts, Chicano/a (literary) history needs to record the sense of loss and disjuncture that characterized its immediate past until recently and that Luis Valdez, one of the foremost cultural leaders of the 1960s and 1970s, conjured up in the following testimonial (as recorded in 1970 by Stan Steiner):

“We have to rediscover ourselves,” says Luis Valdez, the director of the Teatro Campesino. “There are years and years of discoveries we have to make of our people. People ask me: What is Mexican American history in the United States? There is no textbook of the history of La Raza. Yet the history of the Mexican in this country is four hundred years old. We know we pre-date the landing of the Pilgrims and the American Revolution. But beyond that? What really happened? No one can tell you. Our history has been lost. Lost!”

(218)

As Steiner astutely reflected immediately after Valdez's statement, “[u]pon dusty shelves, frayed and forgotten, the books of this history may still be hidden. By word of mouth, from time to time, there is word of a lost literature, in reminiscences and folk memories” (218).³⁴ What I am claiming in this chapter (and, in effect, throughout this book) is that dusting those shelves and bringing to the fore those lost and forgotten books can only account for half of Chicano/a literary history: that half which concerns literary production; the other half, literary reception and literary tradition, will always be marked by the tensions between permanence and disappearance. By “dusting off the shelves,” Chicano/a literary historians are uncovering a massive number of works whose existence was not recorded in previous annals, but Chicano/a literary history cannot be rewritten as if those texts had played then (i.e., in the periods when they were written) the significance that the historian can attribute to them now.

Rather, as I have advocated before, in rewriting Chicano/a literary history it is imperative to focus on both what I called the “gaps” and the “knots” in that “net full of holes” that the Chicano/a literary past has proven to be. Taking my title from a beautiful metaphor from the 1528 Manuscript of Tlatelolco,³⁵ I proposed that historians (and, in particular, those interested in the process of literary recovery) should approach the task of reconstructing the Chicano/a literary past not only with the sole intention of restoring a lost or forgotten sequence but also with the kind of cultural analysis that would account for a disrupted and marginal(ized) history; that is, with attention to what James Clifford has called “discrepant temporalities.”³⁶ I propose, therefore, that we analyze both the connectors that have kept Chicano/a literature alive through the years and the discontinuities that have marked its existence and that are likewise charged with significance, since, as I suggested before, they are the result of geographic, social, linguistic, cultural, technological, and educational history. They are the parameters which serve to discuss questions of hegemony and marginalization; of nationalism versus regionalism, transnationalism, and the borderlands; they help to analyze printing and distribution conditions; they also serve to look at alphabetization patterns among Chicanos/as. They lead to the analysis of school segregation, linguistic marginalization, social constraints for women writers, gender patterns of historical audiences, and so on and so forth (17).

Ignoring those fissures by adopting an encyclopedical literary history model could only result in a distorted construction of the Chicano/a literary past. At the same time, however, Chicano/a literary history can and needs to trace the lines of continuity in the transmission of cultural capital, whether that transmission occurred physically—through the inheritance of private libraries, for instance—or intellectually—in the way Chicano/a writers received and reacted to the works of earlier writers that may have been known to them even if their works never reached a larger audience.³⁷ The documented continuities reveal creative strategies for cultural survival and intervention, and they are indicative of the transformative resilience of Chicano/a printed culture, an element that was habitually overlooked by earlier scholars of the Chicano/a past, who preferred to privilege in their studies oral forms of resistance and cultural transmission.

If it is to continue to play a role in Chicano/a literary historiography, the encyclopedic effort cannot be supported upon an acritical or non-self-reflexive chronological listing model. The recovered works belong as much to the time of their recovery as they do to the era in which they were first published or conceived. Subsuming their multiple temporalities into the date of production or publication constitutes a double reductionism: first, it diminishes the social and aesthetic significance of literary works by stressing their status as documents or artifacts; second, it erases the history of their marginalization and/or disappearance, a literary category of particular relevance for nonhegemonic literatures, as discussed earlier in relation to Annette Kolodny's thoughts on canonical revisionism.

NATIONALISM AND CHICANO/A LITERARY HISTORY

Because of the intense nationalism that has dominated Chicano/a critical discourses since the late 1960s until very recently, a third element that has characterized the reading and reconstruction of the Chicano/a literary past has been the emphasis on the idea of Chicano/a literature as a national literature. During the Chicano/a Movement, the rallying cry “we are a nation” strove to instill a sense of national unity and distinctiveness among Chicanos/as.³⁸ Aztlán, the term preferred by most to symbolize that nationality, is found in the title and in the spirit of many of the publications dealing with the Chicano/a literary past.³⁹ Chicano/a literary history is not alone in this respect, as we saw in the beginning of this chapter, since the combination of chronology and nationality has been the base for literary historiography at least since the German romantics. Literary history, in that context, was conceived as the process by which to chronicle the continuous progress in the realm of letters from the nation's origin to the chronicling present. Such process entailed the notion of constant evolution toward an ever more refined and developed stage that would correspond with the consolidation of the national state. In the Chicano/a case, however, two objections need to be raised as a cautionary note against the nationalistic approach to literary history. First, the Chicano/a culture(s) and experiences transcend geographical borders. This is the result not only of shifting geopolitical boundaries but also of the cultural permeability of the historically rearranged limits between countries. Chicano/a literature, like the cultures from which it springs, is transnational, multicultural, and multilingual, and therefore the reliance on a nationalistic model to construct its history seems, at the very least, constrained.

In addition, and because of its transnational, borderlands nature, Chicano/a literary history presents a second challenge to the traditional reliance on the concept of nation. As the frequent debates on “who is Chicano/a?” have proven, biological and even experiential factors have never been entirely effective in writing the history of Chicano/a letters.⁴⁰ In fact, if we were to apply those criteria rigidly, one could even question Mexican-born Daniel Venegas's membership in the group as much as others question the status of figures such as Mexican-born Rubén Medina, despite the fact that he has resided in the United States for most of his life and that other Mexican-born writers (such as Alurista, Sergio D. Elizondo, and Abelardo Delgado) have been unquestionably accepted as Chicanos by critics.⁴¹ I do not intend to enter into nor resuscitate those debates here.⁴² Rather, my interest is in considering the actual existence of those debates so as to show their conceptual and historiographical limitations. Their existence, as far as literary history is concerned, is predicated on a rather fixed idea of cultural identity and nationality as well as on literary production or textuality as the sole parameters for the conceptualization of the body of works that has come to be known as Chicano/a letters. In successive (and, to a certain extent, overlapping) moments during these debates, the Chicano/a-ness, or what I would rather call Chicano/a-nicity, of a particular text has been determined by either its author's identity or by its contents.

The first preference (and its attendant problems) was well summarized by Luis Leal in his introduction to Trujillo and Rodríguez's Literatura Chicana when he noted that during the 1970s “[i]t was the consensus of opinion among critics that Chicano literature was that literature written by authors of Mexican background born or residing permanently in the United States” (1), but as Leal also acknowledged immediately, in many cases it was very difficult to determine the background of a particular writer, which resulted in the questionable inclusion or exclusion of certain writers. Thus, Leal's introduction discusses the well-known cases of Danny Santiago (pseudonym of Daniel James) and Amado Muro (Chester Seltzer in real life), but he forewarns that many other authors may be improperly classified in the existing bibliographies. As if to confirm Leal's suspicions, and to pinpoint the shortcomings of using the author's background as the main criteria for inclusion and exclusion, Trujillo and Rodríguez's bibliography lists Andrés Ramón Rodríguez (a Spaniard) as a Chicano poet while relegating Justo S. Alarcón (another Spaniard) to the category of “literatura chicanesca.” Likewise, Mexican-born Luis Arturo Ramos is included among Chicano/a short-story writers, a classification that may not be universally shared by other critics or even by the author himself.

The second position would be to look in the text itself for a Chicano/a content. This is, then a much more narrowly defined categorization, since it allows for the fact that “[j]ust as there are biological and cultural aspects to being a Mexican American, it must be understood that not all Mexican Americans call themselves Chicano” (Huerta, “Looking for the Magic,” 37). For proponents of this classification, such as Jorge Huerta,

[N]either the ancestry of its author, nor the fact that it is written in a particular language, determines whether or not a play is Chicano. If the theme explores the nature of being Chicano, I would call it Chicano and more particularly, ethno-specific theatre.

(“Looking for the Magic,” 39)

While biological and thematic issues cannot simply be dismissed, I suggest that the exclusive emphasis on the authorial and/or textual elements of the Chicano/a literary work results in a narrower literary history than is needed. On the one hand, these approaches would have to set more or less artificial borders where experience reveals a much more flexible reality. Because of that restrictive, normative stance, the resulting histories would always be plagued by questions that have proved irresoluble: why should a certain author born in Mexico be considered a Chicano/a while another should not? When can we say that a text has “enough” Chicano/a content, and how do we measure the degree of Chicanism in a particular book?

If, on the other hand, we were to seriously conceive Chicano/a identity and literature as transnational phenomena and if we were willing to analyze the entire literary experience rather than limiting ourselves to production and textuality, then it would be possible to circumvent these and similar dilemmas by acknowledging what are truly porous borders in the Chicano/a literary space. Furthermore, this transnational, multilingual aspect of Chicano/a literature would be better served by incorporating into its literary history parameters of reading patterns and empirical reception alongside textual and authorial considerations. Indeed, in order to (re)write Chicano/a literary history in its fuller dimension, one would need to look not only at what Chicanos/as wrote at different times but also at what they read. Traditional literary histories have all but ignored reading patterns and other reception-related aspects, but it is hard to deny that what authors and readers of a particular society consume becomes part of their cultural heritage as much as what they produce.

As I have proposed before, by way of example, late-nineteenth-century Mexican American poetry cannot be separated from the fact that its authors and their audience were knowledgeable and appreciative of romantic poetry from Mexico (“‘A Net Made of Holes,’” 18), not to mention the fact that many felt themselves to be part of the same cultural continuum. Even clearer evidence of how tenuous these national literary borders have been historically is found in Breve reseña de la literatura hispana de Nuevo México y Colorado, a rather peculiar book published in 1959 by José T. López, Edgardo Núñez, and Roberto Lara Vialpando (respectively a native of Colorado, a Peruvian, and a New Mexican). This short tome combines literary criticism with bibliographical listings and, more importantly for my purposes, an anthology of poetry. In this latter section, poems by two of the volume editors are printed alongside others by fellow New Mexicans and Coloradoans as well as several poems by Juan de Dios Peza, one of Mexico's most popular and revered romantic poets. No indication is made in the book of the fact that Peza is not from the New Mexico-Colorado area, which strongly suggests that despite the regional focus indicated in this book's title, literary boundaries were not particularly relevant or exclusive in the authors' minds. And the same is true of most literary genres, including drama and other performative genres, as suggested by the research of Elizabeth C. Ramírez, who has studied theatrical touring companies in the Southwest, and has concluded:

Above all, these [touring] dramatic companies were able to establish a reconnection between Mexican Americans and México. Rather than isolating themselves in the United States, the Spanish-speaking communities were able to continue cultural relations with México.

(15)⁴³

What this evidence confirms is that the nationalistic paradigm that brought much political strength to the Chicano/a Movement is inadequate for writing the literary history of Chicanos/as. Thus, when writing the history of this literature, it would be of limited use to differentiate categorically between north and south of the border and to ignore the transnational scope of literary trends, experiences, and tastes. Chicano/a literary history needs to keep itself open to such phenomena by engaging in a transnational analysis of the entire literary process rather than by restricting itself with self-imposed parameters of nation and literary production.⁴⁴ To a certain extent, some of the most recent publishing efforts seem to be leaning already in that direction, as reflected in Nicolás Kanellos's introduction to the anthology Herencia (2002):

[I]n its variety and multiple perspectives, what we will call “U.S. Hispanic” literature is far more complex than the mere sampling of the last forty years would lead us to believe. 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 sense of place in the United States while it also erases borders; it is transnational in the most postmodern sense possible.

(1)

Moreover, as the above quote indicates, newer bridges are being built between Chicano/a and present-day Latino/a literatures, which is resulting in yet newer parameters of expansion of and interaction across traditional literary borders. This trend, which started to be noticeable in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1980s and is only now gaining national attention, cannot simply be dismissed as a marketing fad or as political maneuvering (even if marketing forces are at play, as I explored in the previous chapter).⁴⁵ Rather, it works to confirm that insisting upon nationality as the central parameter around which to describe Chicano/a literature may not only be historically inaccurate (given the constant border crossings involved in the Chicano/a social and cultural experiences) but outdated as well (in the context of the diasporic movement of workers and other immigrants in the new globalized economy, in which newer alliances between immigrants and former immigrant groups are constantly refashioned).

TELLING THE STORY: CHICANO/A METALITERARY AND METAHISTORICAL DISCOURSES

In the preceding sections of this chapter, I have alluded to some of the best-known interpretations of the Chicano/a literary past. I have also discussed some of the assumptions underlying those analyses, as well as the critical parameters within which those interpreters have worked. In this section, I will concentrate on more recent metahistorical and metaliterary discourses that have emerged since the textual recovery projects started to take a more cohesive shape.

After the pioneering efforts noted at the beginning of this chapter, Chicano/a literary historiography received a major impulse through the biannual conferences of the Recovery Project at the University of Houston. In particular, the edited volumes with selected critical contributions from those conferences stand out as the most extensive and concerted body of thoughts on how to read the Chicano/a literary past. In them, one can detect the beginnings of a serious questioning of how Chicano/a literary history had been written to that point, as well as a series of proposals for nuancing future studies of the past. None of the critics and historians participating in those edited volumes has offered a comprehensive rethinking of the historiographical task, though, and therefore their influence is better felt in partial rereadings of specific works and periods than in a general or systematic approach.

Many of the contributions included in the first volume of Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Heritage (by far the richest of the three published volumes so far in metahistorical discourses and reflections) were authored by critics interested in discussing the overall implications of the recovery task ahead.⁴⁶ In the words of Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, the process of recovering and reinterpreting lost works needed to be seen as a delicate one with significant consequences for future interpretations of Chicano/a letters:

This long over-due project, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic literary heritage, by its very nature places us in the rather uncomfortable position of creating a literary canon, that is to say, in the position not only of codifying an ethnic literary identity, but also of assigning a standard of value to a corpus of texts.

(“Two Texts,” 129)

Very much aware of the possible consequences of canonizing formerly marginalized works, Gonzales-Berry strongly urged literary historians not to ignore parameters of difference when assessing the Chicano/a past (“Two Texts,” 129), a position also echoed by Charles Tatum, who, quoting an earlier essay by Rosaura Sánchez, suggests that

[a]ny consideration of nineteenth-century literary works must take into account the fact that while the writers may be of Mexican origin, “this population is as diverse as any other living group of people. There can be no simple labeling which can encompass the diversity represented by this population despite the fact that there are certain general social changes which have affected the entire population.”

(200-01)⁴⁷

But by far the most radical criticism of previous literary historiography (and, in that capacity, a warning as well for future similar endeavors) was launched by one of the volume editors, Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez compared recent historiographic discourses to those of 1920s Hispanophiles, and he found fascinating and, at the same time, disturbing similarities:

Like those histories of Hispanic literature written several decades earlier by the hispanidad advocates, Chicano, Puerto Rican and American Indian scholars created a past that relied heavily on identifying key writers and key texts. In many ways there was very little difference between these scholars who sought the first Chicano novelist, the first Chicano poet, the first Chicano short story, and hispanidad scholars who sought the purest and earliest Spanish literary forms in the United States. Both groups were intent in creating a canon of sacred texts. The histories of Chicano literature that were produced were premised on a monolithic concept of community and on the idea of political progress.

(“Nationalism,” 246)

To a certain extent, the similarities between the hispanidad trend and the recent Chicano/a literary historiography to which Gutiérrez alluded have grown even deeper since he wrote those words, inasmuch as colonial texts by Spanish explorers, friars, and soldiers have been incorporated into the new canon of Chicano/a literature through recovery and publication efforts. In that sense, the publication by Arte Público Press (in 1993) of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación and that of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México in the Pasó por aquí series of the University of New Mexico (in the emblematic year of 1992) is very much in line with Gutiérrez's findings, as well as with the hispanidad historiographic impulse itself, as a consideration of works such as Juan Francisco de Cárdenas's Hispanic Culture and Language in the United States would prove.⁴⁸ In that 1933 book, de Cárdenas postulated the notion that Spanish-American nations were a continuation of Spain—“each after its own fashion,” he conceded (19)—which he followed with a list of reasons why the United States should make Spanish its second language. In point of fact, de Cárdenas's reasons were not entirely unlike those adopted by Chicano/a literary historians some sixty years later, namely the presence in what is today the United States of Spanish writers since shortly after 1492 (Cabeza de Vaca, of course, among them) and their treatment of an autochthonous reality. While few would probably agree with de Cárdenas today in his restrictive view of the role of the indigenous American cultures, inevitably (and perhaps somewhat ironically) the attempts to (re)write a chronological, encyclopedical history of Chicano/a literature have led many Chicano/a literary historians to very similar positions.

Furthermore, as R. A. Gutiérrez's quote implies, the temptation to rely on the idea of “key writers and texts” (e.g., María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita González, Américo Paredes) would bring Chicano/a literary historiography back to utilizing the very same questionable methodology by which the recovered texts were marginalized in the first place, and it would of necessity result in the marginalization of other “less key” writers and texts, a danger against which Erlinda Gonzales-Berry cautioned future critics as well, as we saw. If—as Audre Lorde has suggested—the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, then Chicano/a literary history would do well in exploring alternative routes and mappings for its product, rather than relying on obsolete historiographic formulas.⁴⁹

An innovative approach to thinking about history, methodology, and identity is already visible in the works of Chela Sandoval and Emma Pérez. Benefiting from the insights of feminist and postcolonial cultural criticism (as well as from Foucauldian and Deleuzian thought), the works of Sandoval and Pérez have opened up alternative lines of approaching the study of the past that may be beneficial for literary historiography as well. First, by developing the idea of differential consciousness in a Chicano/a studies context, Sandoval has translated and adapted Homi Bhabha's notions on positionality to the culturally specific context in which it could benefit historians of this group's literature. The mobility of identities that the differential consciousness model presupposes serves as a potential corrective to the essentializing implicit in nationalistic ideology. Moreover, as studies like Genaro M. Padilla's My History, Not Yours and my own “‘A Net Made of Holes’” have made clear, at most historical junctures Chicano/a literary identities have proven to be extraordinarily fluid.⁵⁰ Consequently, newer Chicano/a literary histories could benefit from a concept such as Sandoval's differential consciousness to rethink parameters of identity and allegiance.

Likewise, in The Decolonial Imaginary, Emma Pérez has advocated for historians of the Chicano/a experiences to challenge the current status of the discipline, in which “traditionalist historiography produces a fictive past, and that fiction becomes the knowledge manipulated to negate the ‘other’ culture's differences” (Decolonial, xviii). Instead, Pérez proposes a Foucauldian archaeology based on the notion of the “decolonial imaginary” “as a rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written into history” (Decolonial, 6), in which the rupture rather than the causal becomes the organizing trope for her transnational, nonlinear historical account. In doing so, Pérez refuses to construct another master narrative in which localities and differences are subsumed into the main argument of community and progress.

Pérez's understanding of history finds a recent echo in Louis G. Mendoza's Historia, a monograph that attempts to read literature and history side by side. Mendoza's claim that literary works should be read as valid historical evidence (19) may recall earlier reductionist positions that relegated works of art to the status of documents, but his counterbalancing affirmation (following Hayden White) that history should be read as a literary genre produces enough of an equilibrium to bring the two disciplines into a much more complex dialectical relationship. This leads Mendoza to problematize the relationship between Chicano/a literature, on the one hand, and historical narratives on the other. For Mendoza, “Chicano/a literary production … exists independent of the formation of Chicano historical narratives and often contests the representation of a historical generation by shifting the focus of concern away from narrow definitions of power and identity” (61-62). While I disagree with Mendoza on the alleged discursive independence of literary production, his emphasis on addressing the assumptions that inform historical narratives remains essential. In this sense, analyzing Mendoza's own stated guiding principles is quite instructive, as his narrative reveals the mark of a certain intentionality that (like Pérez) favors the selective over the comprehensive approach but (unlike her) adopts a chronological model along a generational axis. The former, in a rather original interpretive move, allows him to renounce the kind of encyclopedic history I analyzed above and to denounce it as a masculinist project (36), but the latter threatens his narrative with the kind of selective comparative approach I criticized in “Textual and Land Reclamations” and again in this chapter. In acknowledging that he “selected authors and texts that lent themselves to a comparative analysis with the historical master narratives” he calls into question (36) and in clearly privileging Texas and California over the rest of the Hispanic United States, Mendoza fails to open his text up to the kind of counternarrative he attempts to construct, while walking an extremely tight rope over the problem of selective reductionism that Perkins exposed (see p. 153 above).

AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL: TOWARD A NEW CHICANO/A LITERARY HISTORY

Given the limitations of chronology, nationalism, and encyclopedism as the possible bases for organizing Chicano/a literary history, alternative models need to be explored in future readings of the Chicano/a past. While the task is yet to be performed, I have advocated elsewhere for a decentered, rhizomatic type of history to undertake this most pressing need (“‘A Net Made of Holes,’” 18), and I will briefly expand on my model here. I am taking the term “rhizomatic” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus without necessarily subscribing to other concepts put forth by these critics nor entering on the polemics of the scientific/botanical accuracy of their ideas. What interests me about their theory on the rhizome is the possibility it affords to conceive literary history as a decentered assemblage with multiple lines of entry, rather than as a monumental, unidirectional entity. Conceived in such a rhizomatic sense, Chicano/a literary history opens itself up to a more flexible approach that need not rest on a traditional notion of order (the chronological) and boundaries (the national) to aim for a sense of encyclopedic (the entire body of literature) or exemplary (the great authors and books) completeness. Rather, the literary historian can now enter this body of literature at any given point of significance, have certain texts (re)appear at different times (according to the respective literary appreciation accorded to them at those times), cross and transgress national or linguistic borders, and, most important of all, consciously acknowledge her/his role as interpreter/reader of this literature. Traditional literary history would have its narrative start at the “beginning” (e.g., the Spanish jarchas, Beowulf, Fray Marcos de Niza's Relación) and then follow through the centuries all the way up to the present. A rhizomatic literary history, by contrast, would allow the historian to start, if s/he so desired, with the Chicano/a Movement (or with any other point in time) and then move backward (to situate the newly recovered texts in their original time, for instance), forward (toward post-Movement literature), sideways (toward Mexican or other relevant literatures—like the Latino/a, the feminist, or the gay and lesbian in the United States), or even to proceed by a combination of these and other possibilities, as I have done in a minimal exemplary attempt in my “‘A Net Made of Holes.’” As suggested above, a rhizomatic literary history would also be flexible enough to allow its writer to account for the appearance and/or disappearance of texts beyond their date of production.

The advantages of such an approach for writing Chicano/a literary history are many, since the historian could insert the recovered texts (for example) in at least two different temporal junctures: that of their production and early reception and that of their reappearance in our present Chicano/a literary world. This would ensure that the texts are accorded a multiplicity of meanings and artistic status so that we may read them now as they relate to our own aesthetics and politics without doing violence to what they could have meant then for their contemporary readerships. In the case of unpublished texts or of those works that failed to reach their audience, we can certainly reconstruct the horizon of expectations of its intended readers then while studying the actual reception of the published book now.

A rhizomatic literary history, furthermore, would allow its creator to account for more recent “disappearances” of authors and books that were at some point vastly read and quoted but that have now all but faded away from critical and even popular discourses. Movimiento poets as diverse as Sergio D. Elizondo and Reymundo “Tigre” Pérez and narrators such as Saúl Sánchez and J. L. Navarro, among others, are seldom mentioned or read these days, but there is no reason to predict that their works could not be reclaimed or “recovered” at some point in the future (as Cecilio García-Camarillo's poetry has been).⁵¹

Last but not least, multiple lines of entry into the rhizomatic literary history of Chicano/a literature will guarantee that novels such as José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho are not read solely as what they signified at any one particular time in the history of their reception, but rather that they are allowed to be approached as evolving entities that transform and are transformed by its readers.

The model I am proposing would also problematize the very notion of readership. If, as I have proposed in this book, Chicano/a literature is “life in search of readers,” then it becomes imperative not to impose on the reader the same kind of restrictive definitions that have been used in the past to determine whether an author was Chicano/a or not. As should be clear from my analysis, Chicano/a literature's audiences have been diverse and multifarious. From the double audience of Ruiz de Burton and other Californias/os to the transcultural readerships of Rolando Hinojosa and even more recent writers, the role played by intended, potential, and actual readers has been determinant in ensuring not only the survival but also the shape Chicano/a literature has taken.

A Chicano/a literary history, therefore, would need to examine readerships with as much care as is used to investigate its authors, for these audiences are also transnational, multilingual, and multicultural. Furthermore, the audience's physical (as well as cultural) mobility would need to be taken into account to analyze certain periods in Chicano/a literary history. To give but a brief example, much has been written about how the Mexican Revolution displaced a cadre of intellectuals and writers to the United States, where they resumed their literary activity in community periodicals and in other media. It has also been noticed how these writers (Jorge Ulica, for example) observed Chicanos/as “from the outside” in their costumbrista chronicles and other satirical pieces, yet very little attention has been given to their audiences, among which we can presuppose a great number of equally displaced readers whose enjoyment of these pieces would be possible precisely because of their status as cultural “outsiders” as well. As we recover texts originally printed in periodicals across the United States, much would be gained from researching who subscribed to those periodicals, what their implied audiences were like, and how they were shaped and influenced by those they needed to reach in order to survive.

In closing, then, a new type of literary history needs to be devised to account for as complex a case as that of Chicano/a literature. This history must be prepared to address both historical continuities and ruptures. Because the history of Chicano/a literature has been marked by social and material conditions resulting from war, colonialism, and economic and political subordination, any account of this literature would need to address both the links that have kept literary activity alive among Chicanos/as and the gaps that have resulted from those experiences of marginalization and disenfranchisement. Chicano/a literary historians should resist the temptation to write master narratives that portray this literature's history as a heroic succession of congruent steps from “the beginning” to the present. Rather, internal contradictions and differences (resulting from gender, class, ethnic, sexual, and linguistic factors, among others) should be given as much weight as commonalities. Likewise, the recovered texts' former erasure from the history of Chicano/a letters should not be ignored when restoring them to new historical accounts: their previous disappearance needs to be accounted for inasmuch as it has value for understanding those forces that have shaped literary production and reception.

In consequence, Chicano/a literary historians must be careful not to do violence to a text's multiple temporalities and historical contexts by ascribing it solely to its period of composition or publication. Since the history of Chicano/a letters should address issues of reception as well as those related to literary production and textuality, it should be open to the changing significance of literary works for successive generations of readers as well. In that sense, any Chicano/a work of literature belongs to all of those periods in which it has had relevance for its readers. Furthermore, because many of the texts to be included in this history are now being recovered after a long period of oblivion, historians should not reduce them to historical documents by inserting them only in the time in which they were composed or published. At the very least, Chicano/a literary historians should aspire to analyze these works both in their original time of production and in the time in which they were recovered and made available to readers once again.

A third element of importance in the kind of literary history that I am proposing is the need to address both the regional-case scenarios and the transnational experience of Chicanos/as. The history of Chicanos/as has been marked by the long-standing presence in more or less self-contained areas (e.g., New Mexico, the Valley in South Texas) as much as by migration, immigration, and other forms of diasporic movements (including exile and deportation). Any account of the Chicano/a literary past should be flexible enough to account for those local particularities while keeping in sight transnational developments. Chicano/a literary history, therefore, should not be approached as a national enterprise but rather as a regional, national-driven, or transnational phenomenon depending on the areas, periods, readerships, authors, and movements studied.

Other internal differences need to be observed when chronicling Chicano/a literary developments. Salient among them is the fact that Chicano/a literature has been written in Spanish, in English, and in varied combinations of both languages. In addition, other linguistic forms (Caló, pre-Hispanic tongues, foreign words) have played a role in shaping Chicano/a texts and their target audiences. Chicano/a literary histories, on the other hand, tend to be written in English and published in largely monolingual outlets where the original linguistic richness of Chicano/a texts may not appear at all or be relegated to translations in the endnotes. If they are not to be accomplices to historical processes of marginalization, Chicano/a literary historians must strive for respecting the original language(s) in which the different works are written and consumed by linguistically proficient readerships. If translations into any other languages are needed, they should not take preference over the original; Chicano/a literary histories should not suppress Chicano/a multilingualism for the sake of an academic community of readers that is mostly monolingual.

Because of the peculiarities noted above, Chicano/a literary history can ill afford to depend on a master narrative constructed from any one particular vantage point. A rhizomatic approach, on the other hand, would minimize the risk of constructing a history that exerts rhetorical violence over its subject in order to mold it into a particular shape or to prove a particular theory. This innovative, flexible structure would also allow the historian to explore the connections between Chicano/a and other literatures as they become of relevance for particular works or audiences. Finally, it will ensure that literary works are studied as organic structures with a life beyond their dates and places of publication and, in so doing, that they are not treated as documents but acknowledged as artistic objects permanently open to new aesthetic consumptions (or, in other words, life in search of readers). Chicano literary history, in effect, should not restrict itself to the analysis of literary production only but should be open to exploring readers' response and reception as well.

As explored throughout this book, Chicano/a literature has been formed historically by the continuous interplay of authors and readerships, from the early colonial writers who wrote both for the metropolis powers and for the local communities to present-day transcultural writers who need to address Chicano/a and non-Chicano/a readers alike. Readers have had a determinant effect on the generic shape of literary works (by providing authors with admissible familiar genres from which to depart, for instance), on their thematics (by providing a social base of relevance), and on the linguistic choices available to Chicano/a authors. A history of Chicano/a literature would be ill served by neglecting to study one of the two poles on which literary activity hinges. Rather, the history of Chicano/a letters must account for the evolving significance of texts and genres as their interaction with successive generations of readers alters their aesthetic status. Only then can we aspire to truly chronicle the changing evolution of what has proven to be life in a constant search of readers.

Notes

1. La Raza: The Mexican Americans, 218.

2. “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective,” 32.

3. [And how is it possible … that such rich writings have been ignored for so many years? … How many Ulicas might there be buried on the dusty shelves of libraries or on the yellowish pages of newspapers? Until they are discovered, as Ulica has been, we would not be able to speak of a definitive history of Chicano literature] (my translation from the back cover of Jorge Ulica's Crónicas diabólicas).

4. All this is in addition and unrelated to earlier reprints of colonial and precolonial texts by publishing enterprises such as the Quivira Society in the United States, along with presses in Spain and Mexico that have printed from early on texts by Spanish soldiers and friars as well as from Mexican (American) politicians and writers such as Lorenzo de Zavala.

5. Source: www.arte.uh.edu.

6. “‘A Net Made of Holes.’” An even earlier, slightly more limited formulation of these ideas is found in my “Textual and Land Reclamations.”

7. Among the most recent manifestations of the chronological model, see Jesús Rosales, “A Sojourn of Desire” (2001), and the reprint in Dennis J. Bixler-Márquez et al., eds., Chicano Studies (second edition in 2001), of Francisco A. Lomelí's 1984 essay “An Overview of Chicano Letters: From Origins to Resurgence.” Chronological histories have a (largely pedagogical) role to play, and I myself have participated in the past in such reconstructions of the Chicano/a literary past (see Leal and Martín-Rodríguez, “Chicano Literature”). However, there are certain limitations to this approach that make it not as suitable beyond an immediate introductory or didactic role, as we will see.

8. On Chicano/a indigenismo, see Gary D. Keller's “Alurista, Poeta Antropólogo” and my “Aesthetic Concepts.”

9. [“the tripes” and “the counts” / “the tequilas” and “the reds” / today in the barrio / my people's clans / incarnate gangs of caciques / with feathers and knifes / eagle and tiger knights] (my translation). Floricanto en Aztlán is unpaginated, but the poems (at times two per page) are numbered.

10. The idealization of marginal figures in contemporary Chicano/a literature has generated debate among critics. A representative critique of this poetical license is found in Richard García's critique of Luis Valdez's reappropriation of the figure of the pachuco. See García's “Chicano Intellectual History.”

11. For an assessment of the parameters of inclusion and exclusion in early Chicano/a literary historiography, see Juan Bruce-Novoa's “Canonical and NonCanonical Texts.”

12. [Other than limited attempts and fractional essays, a history of the evolving estimation of the great authors in the popular and the critical mind is yet to be written in Spain. Menéndez y Pelayo's Historia de las ideas estéticas is something else altogether. What we ask for is a study in which we could follow—century after century, period after period—the formation and transformation of a particular author's reputation. … In reading that (exemplary) book, we could get rid of many prejudices and ambiguities] (my translation).

13. The jarchas were first brought to public attention by S. M. Stern in “Les vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwassahs hispano-hébraïques.”

14. My translation from the Spanish “las prehistorias siempre se descubren ex eventu como prehistoria de una post-historia” (H. R. Jauss, “El lector como instancia de una nueva historia de la literatura,” in José Antonio Mayoral, ed., Estética de la recepción, 61 (original emphasis). The Spanish text is, in turn, a translation by Adelino Alvarez from the German original: “Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichte der Literatur” (Poetica 7, 1975: 325-44).

15. On positionality, see Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture; on strategic essentialism, see Gayatri C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic; on differential consciousness, see Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed.

16. See Sánchez and Pita, 376, note 27.

17. Even such less confrontational critics as Lomelí and Urioste were hardly appreciative of the Chicano/a literary past in the 1970s. Although their Chicano Perspectives discussed Eusebio Chacón's work, their introduction dubbed Chicano/a literature “basically a contemporary phenomena” (10, sic) while decrying how prior to the Chicano/a Movement “literary expression remained an amorphous body written by a few” (10). Their concluding evaluation of the Chicano/a literary past is an eloquent testimony to the horizon of expectations of the 1970s: “These circumstances, then, tended to produce lyrical-escapist, unpublished protest, nostalgia-filled prose and poetry which too often disintegrated in old family chests. In accordance with the spirit of the times, literature was viewed as part of a social ritual and not as an instrument for understanding society” (10). Subsequently, Lomelí has made substantial contributions to the recovery effort, thus reflecting the general shift in the critical understanding of the Chicano/a literary past that I have illustrated with quotes from G. Padilla and from Sánchez and Pita.

18. In this sense, and back to the idea of how the mediation between present and past conditions our ability to read the past, it is impossible not to note that already in 1973 Luis Leal was calling for the reconstruction of the Chicano/a literary past in his seminal essay “Mexican-American Literature: A Historical Perspective,” a true landmark in Chicano/a erudition from which I take my second epigraph for this chapter. While individual efforts of historical recovery took place between Leal's article and the current movements, as noted, it is clear that historians during the 1970s, the context in which Leal wrote, were not ready to look for and reclaim figures such as Ruiz de Burton and others who are now unquestionably part of the Chicano/a literary past.

19. See Bruce-Novoa's “Canonical and NonCanonical Texts” for further discussion of these authors' reception.

20. For the complete quote, see p. 43.

21. I am giving 1996 as the date on which my analysis was published under the title “Textual and Land Reclamations.” In fact, I had presented variations of this analysis in several earlier forums, first within a paper titled “Reclaiming California: Land and Labor in Early Chicano Literature,” at the 1992 annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America, then in a lecture at the University of Washington (February 2, 1994), and finally during the plenary session of the third annual conference of the Recovery Project, at the University of Houston (December 2-3, 1994), under the title “Textual Reclamation and the Critical Reception of Early Chicano/a Literature.”

22. Incidentally, such a fabrication of the past may lie at the very mythical origins of Chicanos/as. As Daniel Cooper Alarcón has summarized, “Many Mesoamerican scholars, for example, believe that the Aztecs rewrote their ancestral records in order to erase their nomadic past and to legitimize their presence in the Valley of Mexico by claiming direct descent from the Toltecs” (58). Alarcón then goes on to analyze the fabricated aspects of the Aztecs' historical records (first purposefully burned and then rewritten) and of the myth of Aztlán (58-59).

23. As suggested by David Perkins, and as I will analyze in more detail below, this is also characteristic of most histories of literature by minorities (137).

24. Commenting on the reconstruction of the New Mexican literary past, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry has also cautioned against the problems in overlooking differences when creating a new literary canon from recovered texts (“Two Texts,” 129-30).

25. Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States of America, not to mention the pre-Hispanic and pre-British peoples.

26. [Mahgrebian history is characterized by breaks and lacunae, discontinuity, cultural ruptures of the sources and of the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, French, and nationalist phases. The most urgent task now is to consider these discontinuities, in particular those that affect Islamic and Arabic thought, rather than to continue constructing the illusory continuity that the nationalist elites desire] (my translation).

27. Perkins defines a “conceptual history as a discursive construction that “exhibits the interrelation of events as the logical relation of ideas” (49).

28. A first “recovered” edition was printed in 1984 by Mexico's Secretaría de Educación Pública with an introduction by Kanellos. The introduction to the 1984 edition was reprinted without significant changes in the 1999 Arte Público Press Spanish-language edition (as part of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series). Interestingly, the English-language translation of Don Chipote, also published by Arte Público in 2000 as The Adventures of Don Chipote, includes a new introduction by Kanellos. In it, Kanellos qualifies his assertion as follows, indicating a more nuanced approach to internal differences and (dis)continuities: “[Don Chipote] may be considered the first ‘Chicano’ novel—or, at least, a precursor to the Chicano novel of the 1960s and 1970s, which also identifies with the working class, albeit the Mexican American working class” (9, original emphasis). On the issue of the “first” Chicano/a novel, see chapter 2, pp. 42.

29. [offers a new indication of the continuity of cultural production by Mexicans north of the border] (my translation).

30. Kanellos mentions Ladrona (1925), by Miguel Arce, and El sol de Texas (1927), by Conrado Espino[s]a, in his introduction (5).

31. The tension between continuity and cultural transformation is also observable outside the field of literature. As suggested by Mario T. García, for instance, “[c]ultural continuity as well as cultural change, the two in time developing in a Mexican border culture, can be detected in the family, recreational activities, religion, and voluntary associations” (72).

32. See, for example, the multicolumned, genre-based chronological sequence accompanying Julio A. Martínez and Francisco Lomelí's Chicano Literature.

33. For further discussion of this type of encyclopedic history, see Perkins, 53-60. Perkins explores encyclopedism as a manifestation of the postmodern, at odds with narrative models of literary history; Chicano/a literary “encyclopedism,” though, does not read as incompatible with the conceptual type of history I analyzed at the end of the previous section. On the contrary, it has served as an argument for reinforcing a totalizing sense of continuity, based on the permanence of cultural traditions and societal practices.

34. Recall, in this respect, the ending of Miguel Méndez's Peregrinos de Aztlán, in which the narrator concludes: “Así la historia, de pronto, como en un mal sueño nos dejó varados en la isla del olvido, presos. No sólo eso, han quedado encadenados los genes que guardan la cultura, esencia de nuestra historia, vedando las arterias que como ríos traen el ímpetu de la sangre que anima la voz y el alma de nuestro pueblo. Ni dignidad ni letras para los esclavos, dijeron los dominadores, solamente la ignominia, la burla y la muerte; si acaso, la trágica baba de la demagogia, falsa moneda de los perversos” (183-84). For an English translation of this quote, see note 52 in chapter 2.

35. The metaphor, taken from a poem in the 1528 Manuscript of Tlatelolco, gives title to my essay “‘A Net Made of Holes,’” which I am referencing here. These are the relevant lines from the poem: “On the roads lie broken arrows, / our hair is in disarray. / Without roofs are the houses, / and red are their walls with blood. … / We have struggled against the walls of adobe, / but our heritage was a net made of holes” (Miguel León Portilla, PreColumbian Literatures of Mexico, 150-51).

36. Following Homi Bhabha, Clifford speaks of how “[e]xperiences of unsettlement, loss, and recurring terror produce discrepant temporalities—broken histories that trouble the linear, progressive narratives of nation-states and global modernization” (317).

37. See my essay “‘A Net Made of Holes,’” 17. These cultural continuities are also manifested in how contemporary authors engage in a figuration of the past in order to establish a cultural economy of linkages. The Manuscript of Tlatelolco, for instance, echoes in the mind of the informed reader when approaching Raúl R. Salinas's poem “About Invasion and Conquest,” in which the poetic voices of the embattled indigenous (a Taino and a Mexica, in separate stanzas) ask, “Who will be left / to tell of what happened to us … ?” (East, 90); the response in both cases is similar, and it points toward the role of the poets as connectors in the “net made of holes”: “Among those who survive, / there will be poets to recount / that which happened to us” (East, 90).

38. One of the earliest manifestos of the Chicano/a Movement, El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, repeatedly stated the idea that Chicanos/as are a nation as it stressed the political usefulness of nationalism: “Nationalism is the common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon” (2).

39. Cf. Luis Leal, “Cuatro siglos de prosa aztlanense.”

40. In an attempt to tackle this issue, Lomelí and Urioste first coined the term “literatura chicanesca” (“Chicanesque Literature”) in 1976 to account for that literature that “only appears to be Chicano” [Chicano Perspectives, 12] to differentiate it from “Chicano literature [which] is written by Chicanos” (12). While those authors Lomelí and Urioste listed under their Chicanesca label were clearly extraneous to the Chicano/a cultural experiences, other writers (e.g., Jim Sagel, Amado Muro) presented a different challenge when it came to their classification. By the time that Roberto C. Trujillo and Andrés Rodríguez adopted the term for their 1985 Literatura chicana, the label had become much more suspicious, to the point that Trujillo refers to it in the volume's introduction as those works written by “non-Chicanos” (original quotation marks, ii).

41. By the same token, others could question the status of Caballero, a novel written by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh (pseudonym of Margaret Eimer), particularly since the extent of their collaboration remains unclear. In fact, as discussed by L. G. Mendoza, such cross-cultural collaborations have been common in the history of Chicano/a political and literary activities (171). My contention is that Chicano/a literary history needs to open itself up to such instances of transnational and transcultural communication, not only by looking at authorial issues but by including matters of readership as well.

42. For more on these debates see J. Bruce-Novoa, “Canonical and NonCanonical,” and R. Gutiérrez, “Nationalism,” 247-48.

43. See also L. G. Mendoza, pp. 102 ff, for the blurring of national borders in turn-of-the-century newspapers in Texas.

44. This is not to be confused with José David Saldívar's effort to construct a pan-American literary history in The Dialectics of Our America. Rather than Saldívar's internationalism, which connects different cultures across borders, I am proposing a culturally specific (i.e., Chicano/a) literary history that, for historical reasons, has been produced in territories belonging to more than one present-day nation.

45. During the 1980s, Chicano/a-Latino/a presses such as San Francisco's El Pocho Che published books by authors residing in the Bay Area, including both Chicanos/as and Central Americans (and some South Americans as well). El Pocho Che's books often consisted of two different works bound together, as if to reinforce solidarity among Latino/a writers from different (or similar, depending on the volumes) backgrounds.

46. The volume was edited by R. A. Gutiérrez and G. M. Padilla.

47. Tatum is quoting from Rosaura Sánchez's “The History of Chicanas.”

48. Juan Francisco de Cárdenas was the Spanish ambassador to the United States when the book was published in 1933. The full title of Arte Público Press's reprint of Cabeza de Vaca's Relación is The Account: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación.

49. Lorde's idea is expressed verbatim in the title of one of her two contributions to C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa's anthology This Bridge Called My Back.

50. Padilla studies the period after the Mexican-American war, while I briefly study Chicano reactions to the Spanish-American War.

51. In 2000, Arte Público published the volume Selected Poetry by García-Camarillo, with an introduction by Enrique Lamadrid. Most of the author's poems were scattered in numerous chapbooks and journals prior to this edition.

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