SOURCE: Martínez, Eliud. “Personal Vision in the Short Stories of Estela Portillo Trambley.” In Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature, edited by María Herrera-Sobek, pp. 71-90. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Martínez asserts that Portillo Trambley's personal vision challenges traditional assumptions regarding the nature and function of Chicano literature.]

This book is designed to bring the sexes closer together, not to set them apart by placing one above the other. If in these pages the natural superiority of women is emphasized, it is because the fact has thus far received far too little attention. …

—Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women

In recent years, some Chicano writers have dealt increasingly in their works with larger realms of human experience, history, and knowledge. This expansion of artistic vision is reflected in the complex narrative styles, language, forms, and techniques which Chicano writers employ and which are to be found in world literature of the past and the present.¹ Consequently, contemporary Chicano literature may be said to have broken its artistic limits; challenging new directions for our present and future writers are everywhere. Chicano writers, men and women, seem to realize now that they are, as Octavio Paz would say, contemporaries of people from all over the world.

Estela Portillo Trambley is a Chicana writer who believes that Chicano literary expression should have no limits. Concerning the reading she has done that has shaped her art and personal vision, she has said:

I read philosophy, history, psychology: Bergson, Jung, Jaspers, Nietzsche, Huxley, the Bible, Toynbee, Aisley. I read Buddha, Lao-tzu, Kahlil Gibran, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.²

And as an English major she read other writers, she tells us: T. S. Eliot, Pound, Sartre, Genet, Balzac, the Russian writers. “One summer—she adds—I picked up Octavio Paz, and he opened the door to Vasconcelos, López Velarde, Alfonso Reyes, Pellicer, Novo, Pablo Neruda, and Asturias.”³

Regarding Chicano literature, she has also made comments that shed light on her own esthetic ideas and beliefs:

The future of Chicano literature lies not in the de-emphasis of the distinctive characteristics. It will be the incorporation of still untapped, humanistic resources outside our barrio existentialism, mythical font, or the romantic hold on “remembrances of things past.” It lies in a convergence of truths … that focus the whole world.⁴

Even today, there is still a critical lag among some critics of Chicano literature in dealing with writers like Estela Portillo Trambley, whose views and literary art challenge the more traditional, popular barrio attitudes and assumptions regarding what should be the nature and function of Chicano literature.⁵ Consequently, despite the interest in literature by and about Chicanas that has existed for many years, the critical bibliography on this Chicana writer is short indeed.⁶ Happily, however, one notes a greater willingness among Chicanos to broaden their perspectives and to understand the diversity of artistic sensibility among Chicano writers whose experiences within the group are different in some respects and who do not lend themselves to easy classification.

It is in this spirit, I suggest, that one must approach the short stories of Estela Portillo Trambley in Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories.⁷ In style, characterization, themes, and, above all, in the personal vision of the writer, her stories tap large realms of human experience, intellectual history, and knowledge. Nevertheless, Estela Portillo Trambley does deal with barrio experiences, although she does not make them the focus of her writings.

The writer herself guides the reader toward the dominant aspect of her personal vision. “I have a hang-up about language. I like to say, whee, look at me, look at the beautiful words.” And regarding the art of writing, which she says does not place Chicanos or anyone at a disadvantage, she states:

It is an instinctual and artistic pull. It is a love, an actualization. There are really no obstacles for one who loves life, people, ideas, words, and the glorious orgy of creation itself. … The writer who senses, intuits, and knows he is a writer achieves an autonomy inconceivable of boundaries.⁸

Personal vision emerges from a combination of elements in a work of art. Portillo Trambley mentions several whenever she speaks of her writing and of the art of writing in general. These elements include the choice and quality of language, style, vocabulary, images, tone, and symbols. A love of life, people, ideas, words, and creation itself will express that love in themes. Each element of a work of art, singly and collectively, tells the reader where the sympathies of the writer fall, toward which values he or she is inclined, and which characters best reflect the writer's way of thinking and feeling.⁹

Marcel Proust, for example, pointed out in a short essay on Goethe the importance of place, themes, and characters.¹⁰ Underlining what he felt to be a general truth about writers, Proust stated that the topics or themes to which writers habitually recur in their books show what has fired their inspiration and what has made a strong impression on their minds. After giving a few examples from Goethe's works, the French writer states:

One feels that these things were not merely put in to please, but that they had an extremely serious bearing on his intellectual life; that the concern of his intellect was to analyze the pleasure he drew from them … and to ascertain their effect on the mind.

In parenthesis, Proust added that “it is by an essentially higher kind of pleasure that things important to the intellect first impose themselves on it and declare their importance.”

Characters, too, according to Proust, embody a special kind of mind, see the world in a certain light, and therefore characters show the habitual preoccupations of the writer's mind. In sum, Proust asserts, “Goethe's novels cannot give us a complete statement about Goethe, but they show his preference of mind … plainly. … For it is … in our books that we record ourselves, our true selves.”

What then, one may ask regarding Estela Portillo Trambley, do her language and style tell us about her personal outlook? What are the themes to which she habitually recurs? And what do her female and male characters tell us about this Chicana writer's mind? What are the things that fascinate her? And, finally, what do the elements that combine in the short stories tell us about the way that she thinks and feels?

The beginning and the ending of some of her stories provide good examples of her language and prose style. “Pay The Criers,” for example, begins in the following way:

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth. It is tears, joy, hope, melted into cool torrents that fall on the longing and the hunger of the earth in rigorous tenderness to give her life. How well it speaks of senses in its cool excitement. The beginning of passion is a burst of flame. Its culmination speaks of an open door unto light, a lucidity of life, more life, forever life.

(p. 25)

The ending of the same story starts out in the following way:

In the atmosphere that diffuses light, there is a celestial song of currents and higher mathematics. There is the push and flux of life that finds its way to man. Man tastes it as a freedom, a way of depths, a way of new life. If the skill lies in the freedom, thought Chucho, then it belongs to death as well as life.

(p. 40)

“I like to say,” Portillo Trambley has told us, “whee, look at me, look at the beautiful words.” These two passages show that Portillo Trambley is a writer who venerates language both for its own sake and because of its powers to dramatize ordinary phenomena—in this case, rain and copulation. Her language is eloquent, sometimes exquisite, and always correct. Her style is philosophical, at times erudite, and in many cases conceptual. In almost all her stories she includes allusions to great books and authors, to the Bible, philosophy, intellectual history, and so on. One finds very few contractions in her writings and only a sprinkling of Spanish words, which she does not force. The rhythm of her prose is lyrical, her figures of speech are evocative, the images are forceful and symbolic.

When one considers the philosophical thoughts she attributes to her character Chucho in “Pay the Criers,” one is tempted to say that the characterization leaves something to be desired. One may take another view, however. For Portillo Trambley the beauty of language, the eloquence of style, the fascination with an optimistic philosophy of life—these, it seems safe to say, take precedence, in most cases, over the desire for verisimilitude of the characters or the stories. To judge her work by norms other than those that her works obey would be inappropriate.

In another story, “The Trees,” we find a combination of many of these and additional prose style elements. At the beginning of this story, with a generous paragraph, Portillo Trambley describes a setting and in so doing she establishes a mood and atmosphere that are Romantic in imagery and modern in their bleakness.¹¹ She describes what was once a “paradise” as a “wasteland,” in a way that may remind some readers of the beginning of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo or of T. S. Eliot's Wasteland.

The dead valley. Tombstones sprouted on a hill, scattered like old pennons along the valley, clustered in the shadows of a deserted house, and on the stamp of bank along a dead stream next to the hill. Dispirited, the wind moaned its own “Amen.” Clusters of dry weeds hugged against the moan while rootless tumbleweeds found a path free-styled following the wind. Unpredictable, these jumbled skeletons of brush found refuge against tree stumps, doorways, and tombstones.

(p. 11)

In the continuation of this first paragraph the intellectual side of the writer becomes noteworthy. The narrator of the story begins to ponder and to ask philosophical questions about death, nothingness, time, human error, the processes of human life. The tone of the writing is still Romantic, and the philosophical questions are expressed poetically, symbolically, and mystically:

Even dead valleys cling to traces of something. This something is new because it is now in the instance of process.

And:

All is part of the change in process, errant and eternal. The reality now is different from the reality then … a life emerged, then, a desolation in the duration we call time.

In these passages the Romantic sensibility and the intellectual side of the writer are blended. To these is added now that side of the writer which is the social commentator:

Put things and people of the earth are creation and self-created by complexities beyond comprehension. That is why blame and condemnation of people should not exist, for they are but creations of a process, self-created with ingredients from creations outside themselves. This valley thrived once; so did its people, following patterns known and unknown.

Despite the writer's statements regarding the undesirability of social commentary in artistic expression, it is to be found generously in her stories, and not only in the feminist quality of her work.¹² In the social commentary of the last part of this paragraph the narrator is telling us something significant by addressing what one may call eternal and timeless verities, generalities about time and change and about nameless people who follow patterns of life that are known and unknown. What is the narrator saying? The social commentary is not completely subordinated to the lyrical prose style, language, and imagery. The author is making—via the narrator—a conceptual statement. Perhaps it is up to the reader to discern it.

Is it too farfetched to speculate about the author's symbolic statement? Can this dead valley be a symbol of all the dead “valleys” where great and ancient civilizations once flourished and attained world renown? Is it farfetched to think of the rise and fall of great nations and empires, of conquerors and conquered? Can the valley of “The Apples” be a symbol of the Valley of Mexico at the time of the Conquest, a symbol of the great pre-Columbian empire razed by the Spaniards?

The principle that the author expresses through the narrator—that blame and condemnation of people should not exist—is really timeless and eternal. In a statement coming from a writer who knows the work of Octavio Paz, Vasconcelos, and Alfonso Reyes, a Chicana writer who has lamented an excess of complaint and condemnation in Chicano literature and the polarization between Chicano culture and American culture, it does not seem out of place to ponder whether she has not made a social statement about the Mexican heritage which is consistent with her views, whether she makes it consciously or unconsciously, or perhaps intuitively.¹³

“The Trees” shares many of the prose style qualities of the other stories. In addition, it reminds one of the Mexican corrido tradition.¹⁴ One aspect of the story is about two brothers, Rafael and Ismael, and the jealousy of the latter, who is deceived by his wife Nina into believing that she has been raped by Rafael. Nina, the female protagonist of the story, actually seduces her brother-in-law Rafael:

Afterwards, Rafael felt a remorse. The fabric of brothers' trust had been violated. He dared not think of what had happened. … Nina was amused by his total suffering. She felt him to be a hypocrite. Just like a man. … All of them were Pontius Pilates.

(p. 15)

To increase his torment and remorse, she informs him that she will tell.

Rafael was one of four drunken men, the reader learns, who had violated Nina many years before (p. 19). In order to avenge herself she makes her husband believe that she has been raped. Deceived by Nina, Ismael sets out to kill his brother. When Ismael is about to shoot Rafael, he accidentally kills his other brother Marcos, who in trying to prevent the killing gets in the line of fire (p. 21).

The suspense that had built up after Nina's seduction of Rafael and a chain of misfortunes that attend Nina's “rape” are described in a manner that reminds one of Greek tragedy:

The town now spoke of the growing curse. Trees were dying; workers were leaving the Ayala orchards. The assailant of Ismael's wife had not been found. Santos had died of a heart attack trying to save his wife who died in the fire. Nina was said to be going insane. Rafael was a broken drunk. Ismael was obsessed with the idea of revenge. Marcos was trying hopelessly to save the vestiges of family. Hubris, catastrophic pride … avenging furies on the heads of the town's nobility … fruit … all melting into a great velocity of madness.

(pp. 19-20)

The story also contains allusions to the Bible. Nina is described as “an Eve in a Garden of Eden” and “she was also the snake” (p. 13) and the apple:

Nina was like the Quinteca apple … soft, with that special sweetness … with that sensuality that spells life … she was so special … so exciting. Nina was the Quinteca apple in the moonlight.

(p. 15)

After Ismael has accidentally killed his brother Marcos, Nina looks down from the top of the hill to which she has fled from Rafael. Below her, from a height that emphasizes her woman's power over the Ayala brothers, she contemplates the scene of the grief-stricken Ismael placing his dead brother's body on the ground. “She looked down at Cain standing over the body of Abel” (p. 21).

In the valley to which Nina came after she married Ismael, “men and women had a separate given image until Nina came” (p. 13). She brought to this paradise a wrath that was shaped by a loveless childhood and by the four men who violated her (pp. 17-19). Nina plotted against men, her oppressors, and she won. Or did she? She used the special sweetness of her sensuality—that sensuality which spells life—as a strength to destroy. It was a dubious strength, in a sense, because it was nourished by fear and lovelessness and by the absence of freedom.

The depiction of Nina is eloquent and compassionate (p. 13). At the end of the story Eve and all women are exonerated from the easy blame cast upon them by men because of their sex. The feminist social commentary is inescapably obvious; its tone of compassion for women's plight appeals to the emotions.

Just before Nina plunges to her death, she remembers the sweetness after the dark, screaming battles of the spirit. She remembers when Ismael came into her life:

He had loved her with a gentle touch. But how could she love? She did not know how. … Sooner or later death comes. He had said many things which she did not understand because she had never known light and freedom. … All the beautiful things I am … the confidence, the power … one large, frightened sob? … Nina called out, “God, are you there?”

(p. 22)

In the depiction of Nina's death the Romantic sensibility of the author is most evident:

She leaned over simply to be caught by wind and the openness of things. A shower of rocks followed the path of her falling body in full symphony. It sang the praises of something new in erosive change. Not a nothingness, but a coming desolation. When her body hit the bottom of the hill, the praises followed like the lingering fullness of one note until her body was covered with debris. She was now part of all. …

(p. 22)

The preceding examples of Estela Portillo Trambley's literary art have demonstrated that she is a writer of Romantic sensibility, a philosophical thinker, and a social commentator. Many other passages from her stories, as we shall see, exemplify the first of these characteristics, and in them one can identify several general and related traits of the Romantic sensibility.¹⁵

First of all, writers of Romantic sensibility recognize the importance of imagination in works of art. Imaginative art is not bound by the rules and norms of literary verisimilitude.

Romantic writers love to describe landscape scenes of forests, woods, mountains, desolate and solitary places, graveyards; they are fascinated with the silence and stillness of night. They are drawn to wild, untamed, and melancholy aspects of nature and to scenes that strike the eye and arouse the emotions of whoever contemplates them, including the reader. They often stress a correspondence between nature and character and between nature and states of the soul.

Writers of Romantic sensibility often emphasize magical, mystical, legendary, and epic qualities of setting, atmosphere, and character, qualities which appeal to the spirit, emotions, and senses. Consequently, they describe objects, events, and characters subjectively in order to emphasize reactions to them and the effects that they produce in the writer, the observer, and the reader.

Romantic writers are fascinated with remembrances, history, and things of the past; with things that are remote, dead, unknown, old, mythical, or legendary; and with mystical, inexplicable, and “inexpressible” states of mind.

In terms of artistic expression, writers of Romantic sensibility favor poetic images, lyrical language, and suggestive figures of speech. They use a tone that expresses many kinds of responses to human experience: a sense of loss, regret, melancholy; a veneration for life and nature; a lament about all that diminishes our goodness and humanity; a sense of the ephemeral quality of life.

But Romantic writers also recognize “that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light.”¹⁶ In literature that is Romantic, consequently, every conceivable kind of human being may be depicted. The writer of Romantic sensibility, however, gravitates toward characters who are dreamers, solitaries, visionaries; they are frequently introspective, sensitive, passionate, moody, inquisitive, and imaginative.¹⁷ Other characters, such as those one finds in some stories of Portillo Trambley, are usually free spirits. They express the author's love of freedom of every sort.

Even though Portillo Trambley is a writer of Romantic sensibility, the intellectual side of the writer is most prominent. Her stories are characterized by a love of ideas and a fascination with intellectual order, conceptual systems, life patterns, and reason. One notes in the stories that she classifies and interprets ideas and patterns of order in human life. Her characters discuss issues and debate ideas. She is a writer who loves books, the life of the mind, and human knowledge. The topics to which she habitually recurs and the intellectual realms of knowledge on which she draws include art, philosophy, history, cultural differences and taboos, and men's oppression of women, among others.

Two stories, “If It Weren't For the Honeysuckle …” and “The Paris Gown,” illustrate more emphatically than the others how the Romantic, the intellectual, and the social commentator blend to express Portillo Trambley's feminist outlook. In “If It Weren't For the Honeysuckle …” the intellectual love of order is expressed in lyrical terms:

It had rained for three days and nights. The greenness now had a sweet heaviness. She looked up to watch the cloud movement with its secret of raindrops. The tapestry of the earth she knew well and loved because she saw an order. She loved order above all things.

(p. 98)

But the order which Beatriz contemplates about her and which she loves is robbed of its perfection and disfigured by the presence of a man. Robles, the man, oppresses Beatriz and the other two women who live with her, Lucretia and Sofa. Robles is depicted as a man of filthy ways who is violent and cruel. He gets drunk, kicks and breaks furniture, beats Sofa and breaks her hip, and kills the cat that Beatriz has bought for Sofa (p. 101). Finally, Beatriz can no longer tolerate his cruelty.

“Beatriz felt an anger. Woman … the victim. … Why? It had no order” (p. 105). She develops a plan to poison Robles; “fungus of the world, thought Beatriz. He was old and he was meanness, but Beatriz felt no fear. He was a swollen poison with an evil smell” (p. 106).

Beatriz is one of Portillo Trambley's strong-willed women who plot actively against cruel and violent men. Her thoughts emphasize the feminist theme of freedom from the oppression of men and their values. The author expresses these angry thoughts in language that is conceptual; here, the intellectual and the social commentator overshadow the writer of Romantic sensibility:

It had been decreed long ago by man-made laws that living things were not equal. It had been decreed that women should be possessions, slaves, pawns in the hands of men with ways of beasts. It had been decreed that women were to be walloped effigies to burn upon the altars of men. It had been decreed by the superiority of brute strength that women should be no more than durable spectacles to prove a fearful potency that was a shudder and a blow. It had been decreed … how long ago? … that women should approve of a manhood that simply wasn't there … the subservient female loneliness. … It had been decreed.

(p. 106)

The repetition of the phrase “it had been decreed” underlines the ageless, monotonous oppression of women and their voiceless helplessness in the world of men, against which Beatriz rebels. In this paragraph the reader is given a symbolic portrait of Robles—man the oppressor of woman—and all men like him.

The symbolic portrait of Robles and the intolerable pattern of women's lives as “decreed” by men justify Beatriz' anger and the three women's irrevocable decision to free themselves of Robles' violent and irrational disruption of the order they need and desire in their lives. Hatred is an important theme in this and other stories (pp. 42, 94).

Another strong-willed woman character is Clotilde Romero de Traske of “The Paris Gown.” Perhaps it will not be thought farfetched to suggest that her name may be symbolic of the aristocratic “blind tradition” into which she was born and which roused in her an “indignant feeling of injustice,” of being “like a victim from an early age” (p. 4). According to the Nuevo Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado (1951 ed.), Santa Clotilde, who died at Tours in 545 (the daughter of Gondebaldo, a king of Burgundy, and wife of Clodoveo I, a Merovingian king) brought about her husband's conversion to Christianity. Hence, the importance of the first name of the protagonist of “The Paris Gown,” who rebels against the “single fate for the gentlewoman … one variation of the cloister or another” (p. 4); like her namesake, she is a woman who is capable of exercising influence on men. Ironically, she rebels against the stereotyped image that her name suggests.

If Romero is the paternal maiden name of the Clotilde of this story, it is doubly ironic, for it means pilgrim, one who makes pilgrimages; in other words, one who travels, which she was forbidden to do by her father because she was a woman. The last name, de Traske, suggests aristocratic social class, but it also implies that woman is the possession of the husband. However, since the protagonist of “The Paris Gown” has had numerous marriages (p. 1), it too is ironic. Further speculation about he name is unnecessary.

Like Nina of “The Trees” and Beatriz of “Honeysuckle,” Clotilde Romero de Traske, as a young woman, must also plot against the barbarism of men, in this case that of her own father. Her father, she tells Theresa, had wanted to marry her off to a wealthy man who was old enough to be her father and who repulsed her. If she refused, her father threatened to send her to the cloister. The father was very unhappy with his daughter because she had “felt the gypsy spirit,” because she wanted to go to Paris, because she loved laughter and art and travel, and because she competed with her brother and surpassed him in riding horses and in other activities.

Clotilde develops a plan (pp. 6-8) to outwit her domineering father, whose interest is not in his daughter but in the marriage contract to the wealthiest man around (p. 6). Her plan succeeds (pp. 8-9), to the embarrassment of her father, and to protect his reputation he sends Clotilde to Paris, which was precisely what she wanted.

Again, the portrait of Clotilde in “The Paris Gown” is alternately Romantic and intellectual, and it too expresses the feminist ideas of the author. At the beginning of the story, the author depicts Clotilde as an aristocratic woman. She is described as sophisticated, chic, existentially fluent. She is graceful and youthful, confident, flexible of body, and of a quick and discerning mind.

Then her Romantic traits are given. In Paris she is an art dealer, but she is a legend back home. She is a totally free spirit and the stories about her many marriages, her travels, her artistic ventures, and her famous friends all make her stand out in stark contrast to the women of her time. “Her life abroad had become scandal in epic to the clan of women in aristocratic circles back home” (p. 1).

Another depiction, however, seems more than a little overworked in language and imagery. Consequently, it clashes with the previously Romantic depiction of Clotilde. It is less successful than the symbolic portrait of Robles:

Theresa was somewhat startled by the impression Clotilde made with the room as background. A convex reflection of mood, the older woman was a human focal point against the subjectivity of artistic experience in meaningful arrangement around the room. Emotionally coded, Clotilde stood, a liberated form from civilized order. All this was a sensing to Theresa who knew little about art.

(p. 2)

The passage speaks for itself without commentary. It illustrates how prominent the intellectual side of her writing is.

In the three stories, “The Trees,” “If It Weren't For the Honeysuckle …” and “The Paris Gown,” the women protagonists seek revenge, and they develop plans to rebel against male-dominated traditions and values that oppress women. Their revolt and their actions are justified on emotional and intellectual terms. The characters of Romantic sensibility appeal emotionally to the reader, and the narrator justifies their revolts intellectually.

In “The Paris Gown” the intellectual side of Estela Portillo Trambley and her feminist ideas are more prominent than in the other stories. This story contains sections that approximate brief intellectual treatises or essays. In the narrator's commentaries and in the dialogue between Clotilde and her granddaughter Theresa, a number of topics are discussed; among them are the older woman's fascination with travel and its importance in life, the relation of art and life, the conflict between barbarism and civilization in history, the blindness and barbarism of men and their violence toward women, the stifling effects of marriage on Clotilde (i.e., on women), man's use of marriage as a means to control women and keep them in “their place,” the unequal treatment of women and the unfair expectations of them as contrasted with the treatment and expectations of male siblings in childhood, and male oppression as the cause of women's desire for revenge (pp. 1-5).

The theme of freedom, as one can see from the preceding and other examples, is a dominant one in the stories of Portillo Trambley—freedom for women and men. In the author's view, as Clotilde expresses it, men are also victims when women are oppressed and denied equality with men:

“… I know that the instinct that respects all life, the instinct that understands equality, survives in all of us in spite of overwhelming, unfair tradition. Men know this instinct, too, although thousands of years of conditioning made them blind to the equality of all life. The violence of man against woman is a traditional blindness whose wall can be broken. Isn't that the object of love … to break walls?”

(p. 3)

Clotilde's defiance of her father, she says, “was a kind of insanity finding its own method to fight what I considered a slavery” (p. 8). And at the end of the story when her granddaughter asks her if her life in Paris causes her to miss Mexico, the other home, Clotilde responds:

“Yes, I left part of myself there and the people of my blood … of course there is a certain nostalgia … but no regrets. That's what I hope you will learn in your journeys … never to have regrets.”

“You have found … the freedom … the equality?”

“Yes, my child, I have known the depth of feeling in all its glorious aspects.” Both women looked out the window and caught the full colors of life.

(p. 9)

Other characters express the same veneration for the principles of freedom and equality.

Chucho, the male character of “Pay the Criers,” ponders the principle of freedom:

One time he had seen some ice-skaters in the city. He had watched their graceful, skillful skating with great wonderment. Such a difficult thing looked so easy, so effortless. That was beauty. Somehow he felt it had something to do with the freedom he loved so well, but he could not explain it.

(p. 29)

And Triano, the gypsy knife-sharpener of “Duende,” embodies freedom in the way that he earns his livelihood:

Triano loved his work. Its monetary reward was a pittance, but the days were rich with common sharing. The adventure of faces, the roar of dreams and fears, the many colors of sorrow and joy, all were a richness, a belief.

Everyone knew the gypsy. … He mended things and people. He was full of the duende spirit from the mountains of the old country where survival was a precipice giving the gift of sky and barren earth.

(p. 56)

Moreover, the romantic gypsy loves the night. Night represents the freedom that comes from dreams and hopes: “The night would play with dreams and hope would blossom magnificently” (p. 59). At night, Triano must be around people; “he had to drink with friends and listen to dreams. … The night is the total of the day; it is necessary for the full creation” (p. 67). And Fito, the Vietnam veteran of Rain of Scorpions, also exclaims, “I … I want to be free … I don't know how to be free” (p. 126).

Estela Portillo Trambley's characters tell the reader a great deal about her personal vision. Like the language of her prose style, the characters tell us that she is fascinated with life and people of different social classes, backgrounds, cultures, and nationalities. A poetic writer, she gravitates toward Romantic, intellectual, and international types.

Characters like Clotilde (a Mexican who lives in Paris) and Julius Otto Vass Schleifer (a German who lives in Mexico) of “The Secret Room” are of aristocratic background. Characters like Clotilde, the gypsies of “Duende,” the children of Rain of Scorpions, and Nan of “Pilgrimage” express the author's interest in travel. Some of her characters are cultured and elegant people who sip wine or brandy and engage in esthetic and philosophical discussions. Portillo Trambley is fascinated with characters, as has been noted, who express a love of freedom and equality, independence and broadmindedness of thought and purpose, and others who love song and the night, who have known sorrow and joy, tragedy and vision (pp. 27, 35, 36, 67). In addition to her strong-willed women, one also finds in her stories characters who love books, who are artists, actors and actresses, gypsies, people from Chicano barrios, Vietnam veterans, and adolescent girls, among others. It is not possible in this essay to do justice to all of them.

A few additional comments, however, can be made about characterization in Portillo Trambley's stories. Her art of character depiction is varied. Some of her portraits are brief and lyrical. Others are intellectually rendered, such as the one of Clotilde. Portillo Trambley develops her characters with dialogue, figurative descriptions, and literary allusions, or by presenting the reader with their unspoken thoughts. Some of her characters, such as the American Nan of “Pilgrimage” and the German Julius of “The Secret Room,” undergo a cultural metamorphosis. These two characters find in Mexico a new meaning in life, Nan when she accompanies her Mexican servant Cuca on a pilgrimage to the Basílica de Guadalupe, and Julio (as he modifies his German name) by living among the Mexican people who toil and love the earth.

Nan became very much aware of a strange metamorphosis of spirit that had begun when she had crossed the border and recognized the freedom. Freedom? Freedom from what? Nan could not yet tell. … But she was shedding old, sad, frightening things. It was a new perception with sun, wind, and desert yet unclear except in sense.

(p. 47)

The freedom, it turns out, is a freedom from hatred and rage, a freedom to love and to know joy (pp. 42-43, 49, 53).

In “The Secret Room” Julio sheds (along with his German name) the ideas and notions of the Germans as the master Aryan race. He goes over in his mind the Icelandic legends of Nordic grandeur, the memories of Germany during Hitler's rise, and his father's and his German girlfriend's impassioned nationalism. “Germany and the Germans are the superior race,” says Helga. She is unhappy with Julio because he does not share her views:

Helga pouted. “You're not a good German, Julius.” Julio silently agreed. He was not a good German. He didn't know what he was.

(p. 82)

Julio is a Mexican citizen of German birth. He lives among the people of Mexico. He falls in love with one of the inhabitants, Elsa, from whom he decides to take lessons on how to see (p. 88):

Julio took off his shirt and shoes. Then he lighted a cigarette. He wore the pantalones of the peon. His brown skin glistened. The moustache was the same as many of those worn by the farm people. He had become of the earth by choice.

(p. 81)

Julio refuses the slavery of power. He purges the dark secret room of his father's master race symbols. He opens the shutters, symbolically, and lets in the light.

There! The sun was something else. It sang about the earth, its constancy and neverending creations. Julio felt very, very Mexican. The earth people could more easily find a freedom. … It is the masters who wear the chains from within. …

(p. 87)

These two characters, Nan and Julio, find in Mexico a freedom from hatred, liberation from cultural biases, and spiritual happiness.

Conflicting cultural values and hatred (pp. 89-90) are also central themes of “The Burning.” In this story the extraordinary portrait of the aged Lela, a Tarahumara curandera, emerges from the perceptions of the women of the barrio and from her own memories of childhood as she is dying in her hut. This story exemplifies the author's storytelling gifts at their best. Many of the fine qualities of her writing that have already been noted are to be found in this story: a Romantic love of nature and spiritual mysticism, lyrical language, dreamlike atmosphere, and a fascination with the main character's miraculous powers of healing and her cultural belief in an afterlife (pp. 91-94).

In this story the author has made use of her knowledge of Eastern mystical philosophy, cultural anthropology, and religious superstition to write a fine Romantic story. The character portrait of Lela is epic and legendary (Ibid.).

The hate-filled women of the barrio think of Lela as a witch. They sit in council and decide to burn her hut (pp. 89-90). In the women's culture, death by fire is for sinners, heretics, and evil people. They do not know that in Tarahumara culture death by fire is the desired form of dying for those who love, who hold life and death in reverence, and who find communion in nature. While the women plot, the dying Lela prays that she may die by fire. Unaware that in Tarahumara culture fire allows the dead person to pass into Oneness with all things and to join the ancestors, the women set fire to Lela's hut. Lela's prayer is answered (pp. 95-96). The social commentary of the author is expressed by the irony.

In the depiction of Lela and other characters one is struck by their archetypal dimensions and by the lyrical language of the writer. This is true of female characters such as Refugio of “Pay the Criers,” Mama Tante and Marusha of “Duende,” and Lupe of Rain of Scorpions, among others. It is also true of male characters such as Manolo and El Soldado from the story “Recast.”

Estela Portillo Trambley links her characters with vital natural forces, human instinct, blood ties, myth and legend, ancestral memories, and secret, timeless psychological dramas. Two examples will suffice to illustrate further these qualities of the author's method of characterization. Here is a lyrical portrait of Refugio:

In life, Refugio had been a lusty warrior full of battle cry. … This was her kind of grandeur. … She was earth with its tenacity, its instinctual freedom, and its voracity. The roughness of Refugio gave way only to a simple faith, a childish belief in the ritual wonders of her church. Its pageantry made her one with God, the master in the center of the ring. She had wanted a warrior's funeral. … A fiery rocket must streak the heavens. … A feast in her honor where tears would be wept in ceremonious grace. This had been the wish of the dead woman on the cot.

(p. 27)

The author's portrait of Manolo in “Recast” is archetypal also. It is less lyrical and again the language illustrates the author's intellectual side. The story begins with a brief but panoramic anthropological survey of life since it came out of the sea. The survey then focuses on the growth of armor among some living things to protect their soft body parts. The author establishes a symbolic relationship between the armor of a dung beetle and the “armor” of human beings, in this case, her character Manolo. The following passage from the story is just a small part of the author's lengthy analogy between the dung beetle and the character:

Manolo found only fear in loneliness. He built a beetle's armor. The interplay of his life was similar to that of beetles found under rocks. When disturbed by the removal of the rock under which they live, they eject a drop of volatile fluid from the anus, an audible explosion in a jet of smoke, acidic, caustic, destructive. Manolo had built a shell that was the emblem of … a heroic, handsome image. …

(p. 70)

These kinds of connections between characters and historical pageantry (Refugio) on the one hand, and with biological evolution (Manolo) on the other, enhance the literary depictions of the characters. Ordinary human experiences such as the death of Refugio or the self-defensiveness of Manolo are dramatized. Other ordinary experiences such as sexual awakening or making love are endowed by the author with poetic sacredness.

In summary, one can say that the combination of elements in the short stories of Estela Portillo Trambley expresses a distinct personal vision in which the Romantic sensibility is dominant. This vision is inspired and erudite, poetic and intellectual, lyrical and conceptual. The variety of characters demonstrates that Portillo Trambley seeks a knowledge and understanding of peoples and cultures from all over the world, from many times in history. Even though she expresses a feminist outlook, her sympathies are toward characters, both female and male, who venerate life, joyfulness, gentleness, freedom, and equality. Some of her characters are international, but the barrio and lo mexicano are well represented. Some of the characters show the writer to be a social commentator.

Portillo Trambley venerates beautiful words and evocative language, the world of books. She uses language and symbols and knowledge to show the sacredness of life, its pageantry, and the timelessness of human experience. Her words, Anaïs Nin would say, expand our human dimensions, because Portillo Trambley sees the emotional and spiritual, the mythical and legendary meaning and dimensions of human acts. There is symbolism in everything we do, says Nin.¹⁸

Finally, it is gratifying to see in recent years that Chicano writers and scholars recognize the limitless dimensions of Chicano literary art. Chicano writers who deserve more critical attention than they have received so far include Estela Portillo Trambley, Orlando Romero, and Nash Candelaria, who are less well known than Ron Arias, Rodolfo Anaya, Alejandro Morales, and others. An author like Portillo Trambley rightly reminds us that for Chicano writers there are still untapped humanistic resources that focus the whole world. Her work stands as a commendable example of how writers have always used the past and made it present. It reminds us that writers have always known how to use intellectual history, literature and the arts, human knowledge, myth, legend, traditions of the past and the present, and many varieties of human experience—all of that, in order to artistically express the general and the particular. One of her characters in particular, Lupe from Rain of Scorpions, tells us much about this Chicana writer and allows the author to summarize her personal vision:

Fito admired the fact that she had read so many books and had educated herself beyond anyone he knew in the barrio. Not with schooling, although she graduated from high school. What Fito saw in her as a form of education … was a kind of madness. The reading of too many books had grown into a madness, and that madness had grown wings. These wings took her to … libraries, museums, and free concerts by herself. … She had the wings of a searcher. … She went to look, listen, and read about eternities and the wonder of human beings. Everybody thought she was strange. She knew she was strange and was glad of it. What came, what passed, what ended, her madness shoved aside. What she kept was an eternal pulse with the greatness of things.

(pp. 127-28)

Notes

1. Eliud Martínez, “Contemporary Chicano Literature, II: International Literary Relations and Influences,” unpublished ms. A short version of this essay was presented at the 1978 MLA Convention in San Francisco.

2. Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: UT Press, 1980), p. 180. Hereafter, this work will be cited as Chicano Authors.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., pp. 180-81.

5. The issue is not so heatedly debated as it used to be. The polemical conception of what should be the nature and function of contemporary Chicano literature is expressed very well in many parts of Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, eds., Aztlán: Anthology of Mexican American Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). See especially the essays in Chapter XI by Manuel J. Martínez, pp. 349-53, and Luis Valdez, pp. 354-61; the latter's “Introduction: La Plebe,” pp. xiv-xxxlv and pp. 405-06. See also Francisco Jiménez, ed., The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature (New York: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1979), and Eliud Martínez, “I Am Joaquín As Poem and Film,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. XIII, 3 (Winter 1979), pp. 505-15.

   Ernestina Eger's excellent A Bibliography of Criticism of Contemporary Chicano Literature (Berkeley: UC, Chicano Studies Library Publications, 1982) provides a broad, sensible definition of Chicano literature, pp. xiii-xxi. The bibliography is truly admirable in many respects and it will shape the future of Chicano literary scholarship and facilitate investigation immeasurably.

6. Ernestina Eger, pp. 50-51. See especially Judy Salinas, “The Role of Women In Chicano Literature,” in Francisco Jiménez, ed., op. cit., pp. 191-240.

7. All citations and page references to this work are to the first printing (Berkeley: Tonatiuh International, 1975), and they will be included in parenthesis in the body of the text.

8. Chicano Authors, p. 178.

9. Some of these statements are paraphrased from Ireneo Martin Duque and Marino Fernández Cuesta, Géneros literarios (Madrid: Colección Plaza Mayor, 1973), pp. 173-78.

10. Proust's essay is very short. The citations are from “Goethe,” in Sylvia Townsend Warner, trans., Marcel Proust: On Art and Literature, 1896-1919 (New York: Delta Books, 1958), pp. 363-66.

11. In all subsequent references to the Romantic sensibility of Portillo Trambley I am following the wise advice of Mario Praz, who cautions literary scholars against using literary terms too rigidly. Terms like “romantic” and “classic,” he says, are “approximate terms … and what they cannot give—exact and cogent definition of thought—is not demanded of them.” See his “Introduction: ‘Romantic’; An Approximate Term,” in The Romantic Agony (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. vii-xvi.

    I am also following Praz's example in leaving the reader to form his own judgment of the works from the exposition of this essay. Consequently, I have quoted generously from the short stories rather than make sweeping general interpretations that the reader would have to accept on faith. A statement regarding the sense in which I use the term “Romantic” is found in note 15, below.

12. See her statements in the interview in Chicano Authors, pp. 172-75, 179-81. The first five chapters of “Rain of Scorpions,” pp. 111-32, make an inventory of grievances against those who control the life and are responsible for the terrible living conditions in the “stinking hole of Smeltertown.” See also pp. 72-75 of the story “Recast” for a depiction of the Chicano movement and the barrio.

13. Ibid. Those interested in pursuing this polemical principle further as it concerns the Spanish-Mediterranean heritage of Mexicans may consult the following: Manuel Gamio, “España y los españoles,” in Forjando patria (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1960), pp. 153-57; Octavio Paz, “Los hijos de la Malinche,” in El laberinto de la soledad (México: FCE, 1959), pp. 59-80; Martín Luis Guzmán, “El verdadero concepto de la hispanidad,” in Segunda Antología (private printing, 1969), pp. 371-76, a scathing chastisement of José Vasconcelos; Alfonso Reyes, “México en una nuez,” in La Semana de Bellas Artes, INBA, No. 193, 12 de agosto de 1981, pp. 9-12; and Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

    Of additional benefit is a reading of Américo Castro's “Prólogo: Españolidad y europeización del Quijote,” Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (México: Ed. Porrúa, S.A., 1960), pp. vii-lix.

14. See Américo Paredes, “The Folk Base of Chicano Literature,” in Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds., Modern Chicano Writers (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979), pp. 4-17. This essay points out a “romantic point of view [that] deals not with living things but with idealization of them, in a world where there are no contemporary problems” (p. 16). From a modern perspective, “Romantic” literature seems “melodramatic” and “idealized.” Contemporary writers of Romantic sensibility run the risk of being perceived unfavorably.

15. The following traits are paraphrased from Mario Praz, op. cit., who follows the historical evolution of the word which, according to Praz, Logan Pearsall Smith lucidly traced. The best essay on the subject, in my opinion, is “Romanticism” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 717-22. This work indicates that there are 11,396 definitions of Romanticism. See also the essays on “Decadence,” pp. 185-86, “Symbolism,” pp. 836-39, and “Surrealism,” pp. 821-23.

    A very useful work that brings together many theoretical manifestos and esthetic statements regarding several European literary movements is Eugen Weber, ed., Paths to the Present (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc., 1970); see esp. the “Introduction,” pp. 3-11, and the editor's prefatory comments to Chapter I, “Romanticism,” pp. 13-17. The documents of Romanticism continue to p. 124.

    Three other works, out of many, may be cited; they establish continuity between the Romanticism of the 19th century (and its persistence) and the Modernism of the 20th century: Jacques Barzun, Romanticism and the Modern Ego (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1943), Henri Peyre, What Is Romanticism? (University, Ala.: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1977), and Ralph Freeman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963). The first two chapters of Freedman's work are excellent and pertinent to this essay: “Nature and Forms of the Lyrical Novel,” pp. 1-17, and “The Lyrical Tradition,” pp. 18-41.

16. Emile Zola, “Preface to Cromwell,” in Eugen Weber, op. cit., p. 42.

17. Ralph Freedman, op. cit.

18. Anaïs Nin. The Novel of the Future (New York: Collier Books, 1976). Regarding Nin's discussion of literary symbols and their relation to dreams, see pp. 12-16. Regarding symbols and the language of poetic prose, see pp. 40-43.

This essay and others on contemporary Chicano literature have been partly supported by intramural grants. I am grateful to the Academic Senate Committee on Research at UCR for these grants.