[In the following essay, Alemán discusses the corrido tradition in Chicano novels and how Hunger of Memory fits into this tradition.]

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's.

(Bakhtin 293)

The dialogic nature of language Mikhail Bakhtin describes in “Discourse in the Novel” is nothing new to Chicano literary production, especially considering the “interlingualism” that distinguishes it from North American literature in English and Mexican literature in Spanish.¹ Numerous critics have already pointed out how Chicano literature straddles the borderlines of two national languages as it incorporates and combines each to create a hybrid discourse that registers the liminal cultural position Chicanos occupy between both linguistic world views. Examining Juan Felipe Herrera's poetry, for instance, Alfred Arteaga explains, “Two nations are imagined in English and in Spanish and differentiate themselves at a common border, yet Chicano border space is a heteroglot interzone, a hybrid overlapping of the two” (277–78), and most critics agree that the interlingual peculiarity of Chicano literature arises from this “heteroglot interzone.” So, as with Bakhtin's notion of language in general, Chicano literary discourse in particular is said to originate from a border space.

Nowhere is this argument for literary origins more apparent than in the corrido critical paradigm. This form of Chicano criticism views the corrido as the Ur-narrative of contemporary Chicano literary production. That is, following Américo Paredes's 1958 study, “With His Pistol in his Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, critics such as Raymund A. Paredes, José Limón, Ramón Saldívar, José David Saldívar, and María Herrera-Sobek each construct in their own way a Chicano literary history as well as a mode of critical analysis that evaluates and defines Chicano poetry and narrative through the lens of “the corrido of border conflict,” as Américo Paredes terms it (147). As a type of social and historical folk balladry, “[t]he corrido of border conflict assumes its most characteristic form when its subject deals with the conflict between Border Mexican and Anglo-Texan, with the Mexican-outnumbered and pistol in hand—defending his ‘right’ against the rinches” (147). For Paredes, El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez exemplifies the corrido of border conflict insofar as its form is distinguished from other types of balladry, such as romances, decimas, and coplas, each with their own specific socio-literary contexts, while its content portrays Cortez as a prototypical corrido hero fleeing in vain from certain injustice, and perhaps death, after killing in self-defense the Texas sheriff who falsely accused Cortez and his brother of stealing horses. Eventually, Cortez is captured, incarcerated, and later pardoned, but “[w]hatever his fate,” Paredes concludes, “he has stood up for his right” (150).²

Although Chicano critics undoubtedly point out the ways contemporary Chicano literature modifies the “original” border corrido, “[a] study of Chicano literature,” José David Saldívar contends, “must … begin with an attempt to define at least one of the cultural paradigms which emerge from the historical experience of the Chicano Border frontier life. … [T]he corrido is the central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm” (13).³ Because most critics build their paradigm from Paredes's study, they argue that the main concern of contemporary Chicano literature should be the description of social antagonism between Chicano and Anglo culture, making the underlying politics of the corrido critical paradigm a method of literary analysis that views social resistance as the defining characteristic of Chicano literary production. Not surprisingly, such analysis produces a prescribed master narrative that reinforces the social and literary construction of Chicano national and cultural identity: as with the corrido hero, the Chicano protagonist must stand up for his rights “with his pistol in his hand,” or the Chicano author must replace one phallocentric symbol with another and write with his pen in his hand, so to speak.⁴

But given the heteroglot nature of Chicano discourse, the corrido critical paradigm is somewhat problematic. On the one hand, the paradigm insists that the content of Chicano literature registers a unified narrative of social resistance; on the other hand, besides national languages, there are a variety of social discourses stratifying the ideological unity of Chicano literary production, making it “interlingual” in more than one sense. Monologic readings of political content are thus at odds with the dialogics of Chicano literature's “ideology of form,” as Frederic Jameson puts it (76). Juan Bruce-Novoa echoes this point in his “Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals: Chicano Literature”: “The tendency is to support the ideal of unity and stress the value of resistance. But, as the literature and its criticism matures, the plurality of voices makes it more difficult to ignore both the dialogical character of Chicana cultural production and the monological desires with their illusory claims” (239).

Dialogism and social resistance, however, are not necessarily separate events. In fact, narrativized dialogization, which Bakhtin explains as the ability to “regard one language … through the eyes of another” in a process of “critical interanimation” (298), can be viewed as a socio-literary subversive act that finds its most salient expression in novelistic discourse. What is characteristic of this discourse is not its heteroglossia; indeed, a variety of voices usually co-exist in a single language. Rather, novelistic discourse registers the interaction of multiple voices as they cross each other's social boundaries in a process of “interanimation” that highlights the ideological assumptions behind each discourse. In other words, novelistic discourse dialogizes heteroglossia, making social voices intersect to produce multiple ideological meanings, so as with Chicano interlingualism, the dialogic process in general creates a hybrid narrative form that, unlike poetic discourse, does not allow one ideological voice, including the author's, to control completely the narrative's social significance. “The internal social dialogism of novelistic discourse,” Bakhtin explains, “requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic structure, its ‘form’ and its ‘content,’ determining it not only from without, but from within” (300).

The complete dialogization of both form and content points to an important distinction between discourse and genre, particularly in the case of Chicano literature. For Bakhtin, novelistic discourse is not necessarily limited to the novel as a genre. Of course, it finds its fullest expression in the novel, but as Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson explain, Bakhtin “is interested in two distinct views of language and the world, two form-shaping ideologies that have found expression in a large number of novels and a large number of lyric poems. … His concern, in other words, is with novelness and lyricness” (319–20). In this sense, poetic discourse seeks to maintain a unified world view stylistically by silencing the other discourses always already informing the representation of its object; novelistic discourse, however, encourages the interaction of social heteroglossia, creating what Bakhtin terms in “Discourse in the Novel” “a sociological stylistics” (300). So along with Chicano literature's hybrid narratives, Chicano poetry, for instance, can also be considered novelistic, since it often collapses the traditional boundaries between social discourses, as Alfred Arteaga, Ada Savin, and Rafael Pérez-Torres have already pointed out in their analyses of Chicano poetry's interlingualism.

Registering a type of socio-discursive resistance to ideological closure, then, Chicano novelistic discourse offers a “layered discursive space constituted by discourses which intersect and allow for a deconstruction of either contradiction (at a class level), or difference (at the level of gender, ethnicity, family or generation),” as Rosaura Sánchez puts it (78). In the process of deconstructing the discourses of the dominant culture, however, the “sociological stylistics” of Chicano literature's novelistic discourse also resists the ideological unity of Chicano critical discourses such as the corrido paradigm, which constructs its own monologic narrative based on the socio-historical content of the corrido of border conflict. Useful as it might be for emphasizing social and literary oppositional strategies, the corrido critical paradigm limits how we understand the layers of discursive resistance informing Chicano narratives. So instead of silencing the dialogics of Chicano literature to construct, examine, and define its content according to a prescribed master narrative of Chicano/Anglo antagonism, Chicano critics must dialogize the corrido critical paradigm to emphasize the unfinalizable hybrid form of Chicano literary production. After all, as Pérez-Torres points out, Chicano literature “incorporates and includes” multiple discourses, “signal[ing] a movement toward mestizaje, toward a hybridization and crossbreeding on a cultural level that reflects the racial mestizaje which has produced the Chicano people” (8).

Granted, social antagonism seems to be the main theme of the border corrido, but the variety of discourses that structure the corrido likewise compete for authority over the corrido's content, creating a novelistic event that is less the progenitor of Chicano literary production and more an example of how Chicano literature always registers the socio-discursive conflicts that inform Chicano cultural identity. These conflicts are apparent in the short version of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez with which Paredes opens his study of the border ballad:⁵

In the county of El Carmen
A great misfortune befell;
The Major Sheriff is dead;
Who killed him no one can tell.
At two in the afternoon,
In half an hour or less,
They knew that the man who
                    killed him
Had been Gregorio Cortez.
They let loose the bloodhound
                    dogs;
They followed him from afar.
But trying to catch Cortez
Was like following a star.
All the rangers of the county
Were flying, they rode so hard;
What they wanted was to get
The thousand-dollar reward.
And in the county of Kiansis
They cornered him after all;
Though they were more than three
                    hundred
He leaped out of their corral.
Then the Major Sheriff said,
As if he was going to cry,
“Cortez, hand over your weapons;
We want to take you alive.”
Then said Gregorio Cortez,
And his voice was like a bell,
“You will never get my weapons
Till you put me in a cell.”
Then said Gregorio Cortez,
With his pistol in his hand,
“Ah, so many mounted Rangers
Just to take one Mexican!”

The social dichotomy of Mexican versus Anglo culture is almost immediately complicated discursively in this version with the phrase “great misfortune,” since it is unclear to what misfortune the corrido is referring: the death of the Major Sheriff, which the next line implies, the fact that Gregorio Cortez killed the sheriff, which the second stanza reveals, or the entire event narrated in the corrido. Each of these levels belongs to a different social group. The Anglo community would see the death of the Sheriff as a “great misfortune,” Cortez himself would see his position as a fugitive as a “great misfortune,” and the Mexican community would see the entire event, indicative of Mexican/Anglo relations, as a “great misfortune.” Registering three different discourses competing for narrative authority, the discursive conflict becomes more concrete with the double-voiced line, “Who killed him no one can tell.” As it highlights the Anglo community's ignorance of Gregorio Cortez's actions, the line also acts as an injunction to the Mexican community to remain silent about the killing and keep the Anglo community in ignorance; the second stanza continues to emphasize this discursive conflict through yet another socially double-voiced phrase: “They knew that the man who / killed him / Had been Gregorio Cortez” (emphasis added). Because “they” implies a distinction between what the Anglo community found out after “half an hour” and what the Mexican community perhaps already knew but would not tell, the word distinguishes the two social groups laying claim to Cortez's story. Ironically enough, in this version, Cortez himself loses the authority to admit to his own actions, even through reported speech.⁶ So instead of offering a unified narrative of Mexican/Anglo conflict, the corrido gives us multiple readings of the same event, turning the narration of the event itself into a site of verbal contestation.

The similes incorporated into the corrido further highlight the competing forms of social discourses in the narrative. “But trying to catch Cortez / Was like following a star,” not only emphasizes Cortez's elusiveness but also registers the Mexican community's idolization of Cortez; at the same time, though, “All the rangers of the county / Were flying, they rode so hard” (emphasis added). In effect, the two similes set up counter discourses: one implies that the Mexican community sees Cortez as untouchable, yet the other, as if from the perspective of the Rangers themselves, expresses their ability to reach Cortez eventually. And when the Rangers do reach Cortez, the corrido uses two additional similes to register another set of competing discourses: the sheriff speaks “as if he was going to cry,” while Cortez's “voice was like a bell.” Because the two similes signal a shift in cultural power, they invoke the normative discourses of gender, turning the racial conflict along the border into a conflict between Mexican masculinity and the Anglo feminized Other. In this sense, the corrido is not simply about the social conflict between Mexicans and Anglos—it is about the interaction of multiple social discourses competing for authority in the corrido's narrative.⁷

Ultimately, the corrido's “sociological stylistics” undermines any attempt by the narrative, the corridista, the Mexican community, the Anglo community, or Chicano critics to present a unified image of Gregorio Cortez. As Rosaura Sánchez explains in “Subjectivity in Chicano Literature,” “there are thus multiple ideological discourses which allow a large number of subjectivities to be acted out, to overlap, coexist, compete, clash and contaminate one another” (136). Consequently, the corrido resists becoming a monologic social allegory as its discourses slip through a variety of social functions. Its oral appropriation of historical discourse, for instance, dialogizes the forms of written history in Anglo and Mexican newspapers, but the corrido's folkloric discourse turns this emplotment of historical “facts” into a tool of socialization that teaches ordinary men “a pattern of behavior as well” (Paredes 118). Undercutting the fiction of history and folklore's intent to socialize, however, is the corrido's discourse of myth, which subverts historical chronology—mythic discourse after all recounts a prelapsarian time—while turning the communal folklore into a one-man mythic show. In effect, the image of the epic hero, whose actions alone distinguish him from the corridista and his audience, competes with the “everyday” man of folklore, whose actions other men must emulate, and both of these discourses clash with the image of the historical man written by Anglo and Mexican news accounts, which may themselves contradict each other. Finally, in the background still lingers Gregorio Cortez himself, who had very little to do with the dialogization of his own life.⁸

In the Bakhtinian sense, the corrido is much like the novel, an open-ended form of multiple voices interacting with each other in a dialogic process, so the appropriation and application of the corrido as a paradigmatic master narrative of contemporary Chicano literature strategically silences the corrido's multi-voicedness to emphasize the monologic script of social opposition between Anglo and Chicano culture. In Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems, José Limón clearly indicates this paradox: “We may say that even as the genre expands, it also contracts, with the best-known corridos fixed, as Paredes says, on ‘one theme … conflict; [on] one concept of the hero, the man fighting for his right with his pistol in his hand’” (19). Instead of focusing on how multiple discourses “expand” the corrido genre, though, Limón's analysis follows the “fixed” theme of social conflict, which allows him to construct a unified genealogy of Chicano literature in which the corrido functions as “a master poem that, as a key symbolic action, powerfully dominates and conditions the later written poetry” (2). Of course, by “fixing” the discourse of the corrido, Limón intends to politicize Harold Bloom's psychoanalytic theory of influence; in the process of applying it to Chicano aesthetics, however, Limón's analysis likewise “fixes” the novelistic discourse of Chicano literary production.

Thus, although he quite convincingly points out the ways the corrido's ideology of form “influences” Paredes's own study of the border ballad, proving that indeed, as with the corrido, Paredes's text is “a multiple-voiced performance … [of] polyphonic ethnography, a dialectical juxtaposition of identities, traditions, and cultures” (75), Limón's analysis nevertheless insists on a monologic image of Paredes himself, representing him as a mythic, pre-Chicano Movement academic hero, who, with his pen in his hand, single-handedly took on the Anglo academic community. “While [Gregorio] Cortez had aroused the consciousness of his community by riding and shooting his way toward them and soliciting their help,” Limón writes, “Paredes's ideological and cultural community began to come to him in the mid-sixties. … Together, then, this author and his book provided one model for the development of the Chicano movement, and that model was itself wholly indebted to the precursory master poem—the corrido” (89–90). Historicizing Paredes's study is one project, and in this sense, Limón's analysis would be in agreement with the work of José David Saldívar.⁹ But Limón's critical paradigm silences the corrido's multiple discourses and instead centralizes its mythic discourse, along with its concept of the hero, to construct a reified image of Américo Paredes “more fit for veneration,” as Renato Rosaldo puts it, “than dialogue and debate” (151).

In Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramón Saldívar similarly unifies the corrido's dialogic form to emphasize its dialectical content as “self-consciously created acts of social resistance” (42). As he makes clear, Saldívar is not “attempt[ing] to establish a single, originary source for all Chicano literature,” yet by focusing on the corrido's political content, he constructs a teleological paradigm to “show how the corrido has served as much to incite narratives differing from its ideological base as it has informed narratives conforming to its world view” (47–8). Following Lukács's distinction between the epic and the novel, then, Saldívar places a totalized image of the corrido hero in opposition to the more problematic protagonist of contemporary Chicano narrative. Given its multiple discourses, however, the corrido and its hero are always already problematic, suggesting that Saldívar's theory of dialectical opposition may in fact accurately describe the content of Chicano narrative, but it also displaces the dialogics of Chicano literature in general.¹⁰ The result is a corrido paradigm of dialectical difference that overlooks Chicano narrative's complex discursive strategies of resistance.

Saldívar's reading of Américo Paredes's short story “The Hammon and the Beans” is instructive in this sense. Situating it in the “post corrido period,” Saldívar argues that the story can be read as an “originary” point of contemporary Chicano literature because it, among other things, marks an “ironic revision” of the world of the corrido (49). In dialectical terms, the story describes the socio-historical conflict between Anglo soldiers and Chicanos living in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, but according to Saldívar, unlike the corrido of border conflict, there are no heroes in this story to stand up and resist the Anglo forces of domination at Fort Jones. In dialogic terms, however, the story's title itself registers the social resistance already inscribed in the narrative: “‘Give me the hammon and the beans!’” is Chonita's parody of the soldiers who, with “stuffed mouths,” call out for more food in stark contrast to the young girl's hunger (276). As Saldívar notes, “[Chonita's] mimicry and her daring are the instruments of her poetry” (53). But “mimicry” in the sense of parody is not an ideologically innocent act: Chonita appropriates and dialogizes the soldiers's voices in a socially symbolic act directly related to her literary production, and in a related footnote, Saldívar hints at the subversive nature of this act when he explains that “gringo jamonero,” according to Paredes, is a pejorative phrase describing Anglo-Americans (53). In effect, Chonita claims ownership over Anglo discourse as she creates a hybrid voice that turns Anglo discourse against itself to expose it as an ideology of conspicuous (over)consumption. Her dialogized word thus mirrors on a microlevel the corrido's own “sociological stylistics,” suggesting that despite Saldívar's corrido paradigm, there is no difference between the discourse of social resistance in the corrido and the socio-discursive strategies of resistance registered by contemporary Chicano literature's novelistic discourse.¹¹

By focusing on the theme of historical conflict, Saldívar can thus conclude that Chicano narrative indeed marks a teleological fall from corrido grace, but Chonita's voice in “The Hammon and the Beans” reminds us that Chicano novelistic discourse already registers the socio-discursive conflicts symptomatic of the various cultural positions Chicanos negotiate. Unfortunately, in the process of centralizing the content of Chicano literature under one banner of Chicano social politics, the corrido critical paradigm in general silences the complex discursive strategies that arise from the “hybrid interzone” of Chicano positionality. For instance, Limón does not offer an analysis of the work of Alurista and Ricardo Sánchez, both of whom are “engaged with a collage of influences, none really master precursors, from pre-Hispanic, indigenous poetics to the ‘beat’ poetry of the fifties, to African American culture” (91), because their novelistic discourse resists a monologic paradigm that places the “original” border corrido as a master narrative. Indeed, shaped by an interlingualism that includes national languages as well as multiple forms of social discourses, their novelistic poetry threatens to undermine Limón's construction of Chicano socio-literary identity as a unified development from the corrido of border conflict and its hero, since Alurista's and Sánchez's “mestizaje of linguistic form,” as Pérez-Torres puts it, “reveals some of the dichotomous conditions through and against which the Chicano poetic speaker voices the discontinuity of Chicano subjectivity and agency” (213).

In the context of Chicano literary history and the formation of a Chicano canon, the corrido critical paradigm continues this process of exclusion by examining and defining Chicano literature based on whether or not its content describes social conflict between Chicano and Anglo culture. In “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” for instance, which argues that “corridos have provided the Chicano writer not only with themes and stories but also with a narrative and cultural stance” (45), Raymund A. Paredes develops a definition of Chicano literature that emphasizes the unified portrayal of the “ethnic experience” at the expense of rejecting a variety of material written by U.S. citizens of Mexican descent (74). Moreover, because the corrido of border conflict is generally a performance of masculinity—its hero stands up for his rights “with his pistol in his hand”—Paredes expresses much of his evaluation of Chicano literature in normative gendered terms. He describes early Mexican-American writers whose “tone was not proud and defiant” as “tentative and subdued, even submissive” (45). Paredes likewise dismisses the mid-nineteenth-century poetry of José Elías González as “precious and effete” because it does not recount the social conditions of Mexican-Americans living in Los Angeles (46). Not surprisingly, then, it is the writing of women that cannot meet the male-centered standards of Paredes's corrido paradigm: he faults María Cristina Mena's work as “obsequious,” blaming the author herself for not being “a braver, more perceptive writer [who] would have confronted the life of her culture more forcefully” (50), and Nina Otera Warren's work is “pathetically unreal,” presumably because the author “suffered from a hacienda syndrome” (52).

Even if, as Bruce-Novoa puts it in “Canonical and Non-Canonical Texts,” the “incestual focus” on social conflict or ethnic content in Chicano literature ultimately excludes those writers who do not meet the ideologically prescribed conditions of a monologic critical paradigm (144), Tey Diana Rebolledo convincingly points out that the most seemingly “obsequious” narratives in Paredes's literary history nevertheless employ “narrative strategies of resistance” to “‘official’ text” (136). In other words, despite authorial intention as well as the intentions of Chicano critics, a level of socio-discursive resistance always already inscribes Chicano literary production. These “counter discourses” not only contest dominant constructions of class, gender, and ethnicity (Sánchez 87), but because Chicano discourse, as with Chicano culture, is dialogic through and through, it also challenges monologic constructions of Chicano identity and literature, inscribing instead on a stylistic level a socio-literary resistance to any unified world view, such as the one presented in corrido critical paradigms. This novelistic inscription of conflict informs all of Chicano literature, including those works usually excluded from the Chicano canon for political reasons.

For instance, according to the corrido paradigm, the political content of Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is nothing short of conciliatory, making it perhaps the most (in)famous example of a text excluded from the Chicano literary canon. As Ramón Saldívar writes, “Hunger of Memory is a perfect example of our tendency to disguise the force of ideology behind the mask of aesthetics” (170). However, if we dialogize the corrido critical paradigm in order to look for the ways multiple discourses compete with each other in Chicano narratives, then we might find that “aesthetics” itself is filled with a variety of disguises/discourses constantly registering resistance to one verbal-ideological “mask.” In this sense, the discourse of Rodriguez's text cannot be easily dismissed, since it resonates with unfinalized voices of social conflict.

Note the dialogics of the word “gringo” in the text. For his part, the narrator seeks to control this word to construct an ideologically innocent relationship between himself and his audience. Thus, he initially uses the term to register a general difference between his family and their neighbors: “They were the others, los gringos” (12). Then, the word begins to indicate a cultural, linguistic, and gendered difference between his parents and Anglos as the narrator equates “gringo” with English and both with public discourse: “I'd notice, moreover, that my parents' voices were softer than those of gringos we'd meet” (15). Finally, the narrator's subtle control of the word attempts to bridge the cultural and political gap between himself and his audience when he explains that “It is to those whom my mother refers to as the gringos that I write” (177). But the narrator's neutralized image of the gringo as “Someone with a face erased; someone of no particular race or sex or age or weather. A gray presence. Unknown, unfamiliar” is quite different from the image of the gringo the narrator's parents present (182).

As the voice of the narrator's father suggests, a history of social antagonism informs the word “gringo” and cannot be fully “stripped” from its use, making it a double-voiced word that reveals a counter discourse despite the narrator's rhetorical strategies.¹² “My father,” the narrator explains, “continued to use the word gringo. But it was no longer charged with the old bitterness or distrust. … Hearing him, sometimes, I wasn't sure if he was pronouncing the Spanish word gringo or saying gringo in English” (23). If the father's use of the word is ambiguous, however, the voice of the narrator's mother clearly (re)charges the word with its “old bitterness and distrust.” She congratulates the narrator after he wins a grammar school award, for instance, by telling him that “[he] had ‘shown’ the gringos” (53). Throughout the narrative, in fact, his mother's reported speech, which resonates with socio-political antagonism, continues to dialogize the narrator's use of the term “gringo,” (re)connecting it to its racial politics—“With los gringos looks are all that they judge on,” she says (113)—as well as class conflict—“The gringos kept him digging all day, doing the dirtiest jobs. And they would pay him next to nothing,” she recalls of her brother (118). The mother's dialogization of “gringo” thus challenges the narrator's rhetorical attempt to contain and neutralize the word in order to collapse his socio-political difference from his gringo audience; in the end, her private voice undercuts the rhetorical closure of the narrator's public discourse, since her use of “gringo” in the letter she writes to her son implies that the private is already public: “Why do you need to tell the gringos?” she asks (178).

And Chicano critics of Hunger of Memory often repeat the same question, suggesting that despite his own rhetorical strategies, the narrator cannot finalize completely the verbal-ideological representation of the narrative's content. The same holds true for critics who construct corrido critical paradigms. Inevitably, the search for literary origins has led Chicano critics to the monologic construction and application of the corrido as an Ur-narrative, but such a genealogical paradigm strategically silences the variety of social discourses from which Chicano literature emerges. By dialogizing the corrido paradigm, as well as any other critical project, we would instead be looking for the ways multiple discourses intersect in a socio-discursive process of resistance that makes the content of Chicano literature unfinalizable. After all, besides national languages, Chicano literature is interlingual insofar as it incorporates, among others, oral, mythic, academic, legal, literary, historical, and political discourses. “Rather than discard,” Pérez-Torres reminds us, Chicano literature “recasts. Rather than reject, it affirms the reality that things do not coalesce in neat packages of personal identity, national identity, cultural identity” (270). This type of hybridized narrative, then, perhaps best indicates the subtle relationship between the cultural positions Chicanos occupy and the novelistic discourse of Chicano literary production in general.

Notes

1. As Bruce-Novoa explains it in “Spanish-Language Loyalty and Literature,” interlingualism is not bilingualism. Instead, “Chicanos blend Spanish and English, at times in obvious ways, such as juxtaposing words from both languages, but more often in such subtle fusions of grammar, syntax or cross-cultural allusions that monolingual readers will hardly notice. … This practice rejects the supposed need to maintain English and Spanish separate in exclusive codes, but rather sees them as reservoirs of primary material to be molded together as needed” (50). Interlingualism is perhaps Chicano literature's most consistent and obvious process of dialogization in the Bakhtinian sense.

2. In The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis, María Herrera-Sobek quite clearly points out the variety of female archetypes inscribed in the corrido. Her text in many ways works as a corrective to Paredes's study, which silences the female and elevates the male to heroic status. Limón's study Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry seeks to problematize this issue by arguing Chicano poets reclaim the silenced maternal voice, but his study does not seem to take into account the way the corrido and Paredes's analysis of it construct masculinity vis-á-vis the feminized Other. See, for instance, his response to Herrera-Sobek's analysis (36).

3. Saldívar's point implies that there are multiple “cultural paradigms” from which we can read Chicano literature. Some critics, for instance, understand Chicano cultural production through what I would call a “mythic paradigm,” which emphasizes Chicano indigenous history and uses the myth of Aztlán as a unifying cultural metaphor for Chicano nationalism. So for Saldívar to say “the corrido is the central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm” is itself a critical gesture that places more importance on one set of historical experiences over another (13). While I understand the rhetorical need for such a gesture, I also think it is important to examine its implications in the context of Chicano literary production.

4. Along with Paredes himself, José Limón and Ramón Saldívar have noted the male-centeredness of the corrido of border conflict. In short, it is a performance of masculinity and an affirmation of the normative gender roles involved with constructing masculine social identity. As I see it, the corrido critical paradigm continues this androcentric production, which explains why I have not included the writing of Chicanas in my study. My goal is to deconstruct the corrido paradigm and suggest instead a critical project that foregrounds the multiple discourses of Chicano literature; perhaps because women were never included in the corrido critical paradigm in the first place, Chicana literary production freely foregrounds the socio-discursive resistance of novelistic discourse, as Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987), Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghamton: Bilingual/Bilingue, 1986), Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (New York: Vintage, 1989), and Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End, 1983) aptly prove. In this sense, the narrative strategies of Chicanas already make explicit what I am arguing is always implicit in Chicano narratives: social and literary resistance on a discursive level.

5. I cite the corrido exactly as it appears as the frontispiece of Paredes's study. In the body of his text, Paredes offers eleven variants of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez in Spanish, which he translates into English. Given that the corrido is an oral form of discourse, the variety of corridos Paredes cites is not surprising. In fact, this variety only highlights my point that the corrido is an unfinalized form of multiple voices. For Paredes, however, Variant X “gives a fairly accurate idea of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez before singers began to develop their own variants” (181). Unfortunately, Paredes does not clarify where the shorter corrido, which I cite, fits into his study of corrido variants, nor does he offer the Spanish version of it.

6. In four of the 16 variants, it is Cortez himself who informs the Rangers of his act, as in Variant C, for example: “It is not known who killed him. / He went out toward Laredo, Without showing any fear, / ‘Follow me, cowardly rangers, / I am Gregorio Cortez’” (Paredes 164).

7. On yet another level, the similes offer a literary discourse that collapses the distance between the socially symbolic oral tradition of “predominantly rural folk” (Paredes 182) and the written literary traditions of “high-brow” culture.

8. Arturo Ramírez echoes this point in “Views of the Corrido Hero: Paradigm and Development,” Américas Review 18.2 (1990): 71–79. Ramírez writes, “The corrido hero perpetuates as he adapts, old forms combined with a new context, traditional values meeting specific demands of a contemporary American context. Thus, with resilience and resourcefulness, the Chicano corrido and its hero continue to give voice to the Chicano people” (78). Ramírez cogently discusses the contemporary development of the corrido, but by placing “emphasis on the hero at the center of this folkloric vision,” Ramírez overlooks how the corrido's novelistic discourse constantly de-centers the hero by giving us multiple representations of him (71).

9. See Saldívar's “Chicano Border Narratives as Critique” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. Hector Calderon and José David Saldívar (Durham: Duke UP, 1991).

10. I am following Bakhtin's distinction between dialogic and dialectic, as Morson and Emerson explain it in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Dialectical opposition refers to two finalized monads, two monologic opposites, that produce a differential synthesis; dialogics implies that the “monad” itself is a synthesis of multiple discourses, which means that it can never be “finalized” into a binary structure of oppositions without first silencing its heteroglossia (49–50). “Dialogue and dialectics,” Bakhtin explains in “From Notes Made in 1970–71,” “Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that's how you get dialectics” (147).

11. In The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon explains that parody “contests our humanists assumptions about artistic originality and uniqueness and our capitalist notions of ownership and property. … In other words, parody works to foreground the politics of representation” (93–4). Following this definition, Chonita's parodic word aptly calls into question Anglo ownership of discourse as well as any teleological argument for the origins of Chicano literary production.

12. As Bakhtin explains it in “Discourse in the Novel,” double-voiced discourse “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions” (324).

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