Ethnic art is the American mainstream. …

—Ishmael Reed, Interview, ‘The Third Ear,’ B.B.C. Radio 3, April 1989¹

Growing up ethnic is surely the liveliest theme to appear in the American novel since the closing of the frontier. …

—John Skow, reviewing Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, Time, 27 March 1989²

1

A vogue it may currently appear. But can it be doubted that ethnicity has ever been other than a key ingredient in American culture? One thinks of founding racial encounters: Columbus sighting his ‘gentle’ Arawak Indians in the 1490s and they him, Cortés imposing Spanish imperial rule upon Aztec Mexico and the American southwest after arriving at Mexico City in 1519, or those first twenty enslaved Africans being deposited in Jamestown in 1619 from a reputed Dutch man-of-war.³ One thinks, subsequently, of the great ensuing waves of European immigration, each the bearer of a culture in its own right yet each to be made over into a new hyphenation with America—Anglos, Irish, Scots, Germans, Slavs, Italians, Scandinavians, Jews out of Russia and Poland. To these has to be added the Asian diaspora, from the early Chinese who spoke of San Francisco as ‘The Gold Mountain’ to the Japanese to the latter-day Korean and Vietnamese. The process in no way abates.

There would emerge, too, a now familiar body of ethnic debate. Was America melting-pot or mixing bowl, a W.A.S.P. hegemony or a genuine quilt of all peoples?⁴ Yet however long-standing or endemic the issue of ethnicity in America, it was in the 1960s as never before that it took on new prominence, new assertion. For during that turbulent decade and thereafter ethnic America, and above all non-European ethnic America, re-announced itself. The process was political, economic, a bid for long-overdue empowerment. It was also cultural, a major and continuing surge of imaginative self-expression.

To cite the 1960s from an ethnic or racial perspective of necessity first means a reference-back to the call for redress by black America. No clearer index of change offered itself than the use of Black for Negro, the latter discarded as belonging to a time about to pass and to a more traditional and quiescent racial equation. Other changes, however, were nothing if not dramatic—the Civil Rights marches, the push for voter registration in the Dixie South, the long hot summers, the city burnings from New Jersey to Watts and from Atlanta to Detroit, and the emergence of Black Power groups like the Panthers and Muslims. Tragically, too, there was the litany of assassinations, whether Jack and Bobby Kennedy, or Medgar Evers, or Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or George Jackson. Yet as the legislation got on the books, as a pantheon of new black leadership emerged, and as the American media increasingly took note of its black population, few doubted that an end to any supposed one-standard America lay in prospect.

Artists, film-makers, musicians, journalists, sports stars and comics all played their part, supplying fresh codes and images of American blackness. Literary figures, in especial, contributed. A fiction begun in names like those of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin has continued through into the generation of Ishmael Reed, James Alan McPherson and even beyond. A line of writing by Afro-American women has come to prominence, Ann Petry and Paule Marshall from an earlier time and Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Gayl Jones from among their successors. New departures in poetry, theatre and film have made their impact, as has a rich vein of autobiographical work stretching from Malcolm X to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and from Eldridge Cleaver to Maya Angelou. Then, too, there was the galvanizing effect of Alex Haley's Roots (1976), both the novel and the spectacularly widely viewed T.V. series. Whether ‘Black’ truly had become ‘Beautiful’ as the slogan ran, it had without a doubt called time on past assumptions. Not without cause has there been talk of a Second Renaissance of Afro-American art and ideas.⁵

But central as was this black efflorescence, it tended to eclipse others. Hispanic or Brown America lay in waiting, demographically the largest impending minority in America: Puerto Ricans in New York, emigré Cubans in Florida, Chileans, Salvadoreans, Argentinians and others in flight from dictatorship, and, above all, Mexican-Americans or Chicanos. These latter not only arose out of a profoundly non-Anglo tradition—Aztec-Spanish, Catholic, border Mexican—but out of their own variety of American Spanish and bilingualism. Theirs, too, was another geography, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and southern Utah, not to mention another set of cultural styles from foodways to low-rider cars. Equally, they could look back upon their own interpretation of history, be it the Mexican-American War (1846–48), Mexican Independence (1910), the Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots (1943), or the continuing influx across the Rio Grande. The 1960s meant César Chávez and the struggle of his U.F.W. (founded in 1962) to fight the grape-picking wars. They also meant Corky González and the Denver Crusade for Justice and José Angel Gutiérrez and La Raza Unida of Texas. They even came to mean the increasing recognition of a Chicano input into general American usage—Aztlán as the mythical homeland of the Chicano people and words like la raza (literally ‘the race’), mestizo (someone of mixed Indian and Spanish blood) and pachuco (young male Chicano). In literary-cultural terms they also meant nothing less than a Chicano Renaissance: Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino, or the fiction of Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, Ron Arias and others, or the poetry of Alurista and Bernice Zamora, or Richard Rodriguez's controversial autobiography Hunger of Memory (1982). Thus as The Milagro Beanfield War, East LA and Stand and Deliver win out in their depictions of Chicano life on American cinema screens, there can be little doubt that Chicanismo, too, has established new rights to attention.⁶

Blacks and Chicanos were to find their counterparts among the Indians of America. Reservation-based or urban, they in their turn felt moved to call time on their past demoralization. Typical was the replacement of the name ‘Indian’ itself with ‘Native-American,’ another break with white nomenclature. Typical, too, were events like the challenge of the National Indian Youth Council and the American Indian Movement (A.I.M., founded in 1969) to the traditional powers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; or the occupations and land claims in Alcatraz, Taos, Maine and Massachusetts; or the seizure in 1973 by Sioux activists of the historic village of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota; or the emergence of a militant new generation of leaders like Dennis Banks and Russell Means. To hand, also, were manifestos and re-interpretations like Vine Deloria's Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and Behind the Trail of Broken Treatises (1974). Non-Indian scholarship likewise took up the call, none more so than Leslie Fielder's The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), an analysis of the hidden ‘Red America’ within both high and popular American culture, and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), a history which examines the brutal cost to the Indian of the Winning of the West with its white triumphalist myth of frontier and settlement.⁷ Brown took as his departure-point the ‘graves of the dead’ as the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, once put it. All of this was to have its literary manifestation, nothing less than another genuine contemporary American renaissance. In quick order appeared fiction like: House Made of Dawn (1968) by the Kiowa, N. Scott Momaday; Seven Arrows (1972) by the Cheyenne, Heyemeyohsts Storm; Winter in the Blood (1974) by the Blackfoot, James Welch; Ceremony (1978) by the Laguna, Leslie Marmon Silko; and, to be sure, the Chippewa-inspired story-telling of Louise Erdrich. To these has to be added the poetry of talent like Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Gail Tremblay and Joy Harjo. Once again, a new ethnic and cultural contract was being sought with America.⁸

Asian-Americans were to have their day slightly later, in the 1980s. Theirs, too, like ‘Hispanic’ has been a composite name, in need of clear particularization into Chinese-American, Japanese-American and the like.⁹ America's Chinese have had to fight off a more than usually entrenched set of popular-culture stereotypes, those of coolie, cook and launderer. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan respectively bequeathed greatly influential images of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ Chinese, as likewise did Chop-Chop in the massively popular cartoon series Blackhawk (1941–84).¹⁰ Against these odds and the daemonology of ‘Red China,’ a new and largely West Coast flowering has been under way. So, at least, would be the evidence of the memoir work of Maxine Hong Kingston (her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey, is currently announced), the drama of Frank Chin—especially The Chickencoop Chinamen (1972) and The Year of The Dragon (1974)—and novels like Homebase (1979) by Shawn Wong, Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981) by Ruthanne Lum McCunne, and latterly, The Joy Luck Club (1989) by Amy Tan. Similarly Japanese-Americans have had to contend against the inherited stigmas of Pearl Harbour, the Pacific islands wars, and their removal to Californian and other ‘relocation’ camps during World War II. That story, and more, has been told by the likes of Monica Sone, Hisaye Yamamoto and Toshio Mori. Furthermore, the Asian-American literary roster grows, as can be witnessed in the ongoing fiction and essays of the Filipino-American, Carlos Bulosan (America is in the Heart (1946, 1973) as notably as any), or in a novel like Clay Walls (1986) by the Korean-American, Kim Ronyoung, or in Blue Dragon White Tiger (1978) by the Vietnamese-American, Tran Van Dinh.¹¹Time magazine, even if its focus was business and yuppiedom rather than culture, did no more than mirror another ethnic cycle of change when it gave over a whole issue in mid-1988 to Asian America.¹²

Anaya, Erdrich, Kingston: these three names, then, must do composite duty. They have every cause to be taken wholly on their own terms, powerful imaginations each. Yet as, respectively, Chicano, Native-American and Chinese-American, they also have drawn profoundly and quite inescapably from their different ethnic legacies. In each case, too, they have lived both within and yet at an angle from what passes as ‘mainstream’ America, a truly hyphenated or joint cultural citizenry as it were. In imagining ‘ethnically,’ thereby, they offer the paradox of having written into being an America the nation barely knew itself to be, another and yet the same America.

2

A historic first presence in the American southwest, a landscape as much of custom and language as of place, and the interplay of an ancestral Aztec legacy with a missionary-derived Catholicism—it hardly surprises that Chicano fiction has been so taken up with its communal past. Few Chicanos, writers or otherwise, have not pondered their pre-Columbian origins (for the most part it is carried in their facial appearance and skin colour), or the antiquity of their own legends and religion, or the push westwards and north into a supposed Yankee El Dorado. That consciousness, certainly, has pressed hard behind the landmarks of the achievement, novels like José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), generally acknowledged as the first Chicano novel and which portrays the Rubio family's bitter migration into California, or John Rechy's City of Night (1963), in line with his other fiction essentially a novel of homosexual transience but which also reflects his early Chicano and Texas origins, or Tomás Rivera's … y no se lo tragó la tierra (… and the earth did not part, 1970), a story-cycle set in Texas and unfolded through the persona of an unnamed child as a conflict of Chicano and Anglo cultures (rightly it has been compared with Joyce's Dubliners and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio), or, of late, Ron Arias's The Road to Tamazunchale (1987), a fantastical dream novel told as the last words of Don Fausto, a dying Chicano elder who looks back from the Los Angeles barrio upon his community's meaning and inheritance.¹³ To these has to be added a body of literatura chicanesca, writing about Chicano life by non-Chicanos, of which indisputably the foremost since the Robert Redford film version has been John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War (1976)—the first in a New Mexico trilogy.¹⁴

Within this frame, Rudolfo Anaya has equally laid down his own terms of reference and nowhere more so than in the novel which continues most to secure his reputation, Bless Me, Ultima (1972).¹⁵ Set in the rural New Mexico of World War II, it tells the rite of passage of 8–year-old Antonio Márez—Tony as he will become with anglicization—an evocation by turns tender and fierce of a unique Chicano childhood. For into its telling, Anaya brilliantly imports a whole stock of dynastic history, myth and belief, that of a people caught at the turning-point between a Mexican-hispanic past and an American-hispanic future. Presiding over the whole is the shamanistic figure of Ultima, known also as La Grande, a curandera or healer-sage under whose guiding kindliness Antonio falls. An inspired fusion of eventfulness and dream, the historic and the ceremonial, Bless Me, Ultima also yields its own Portrait of the Artist, the boy's emerging measure of his inheritance subtly rewoven into a first-person work of memory. Anaya's subsequent two novels, Heart of Aztlán (1976) and Tortuga (1979), the former which deals with the transition of a rural family into the urban barrio of Barelas in Albuquerque and the latter with the path into recovery and self-independence of a crippled boy (tortuga, tortoise, refers to his hospital plaster cast), may indeed represent a certain drop in power. But they share with Bless Me, Ultima, which deservedly won the prestigious Second Annual Premio Quinto Sol, a belief in the as yet still untold reaches of Chicano life.

‘Every morning I seem to awaken with a new experience and dreams strangely mixed in me.’ So Antonio looks back on his self-proclaimed ‘magical’ New Mexico upbringing, caught as he is between the Márez legacy of his father, one of vaquero or herdsman life on the llano (flatlands), and the Luna legacy of his mother, one of homestanding and cultivation of the land. Márez as against Luna might also be said to signify male and female principles, conquistador as against settler and homemaker. If, too, Gabriel hopes his son will reincarnate a nomadic past glory, his wife hopes the boy will become a priest and farmer like one of her own first ancestors. For Bless Me, Ultima portrays nothing if not worlds in transition. Gabriel Márez has moved in from the llano to the pueblo, works not with horses and cattle but in a highway repair crew, and if he looks backwards to the myth of his ancestors he also seeks to look forwards to his family's eventual (though unlikely) migration to California. A larger frame is also provided by the reference to the Second World War. Nearby lies Los Alamos (The Poplars), the testing site for the first atomic bomb and the instance of a technology at quite the other end of the time spectrum to that which has produced the Márez and Luna clans. Transition, too, is registered in the enlistment of Antonio's three brothers, eventual returnee GIs who come from battles in Japan and Germany not to stay but to become drifters seeking an easy pleasure in Las Vegas (The Lowlands). Aztec, Mexican or New Mexican as may be the sub-stratum of Antonio's land and history, yet, too, another transition pends—that brought on by his beginning studies of English, the pull of Yankee America for his cultural allegiance.

The novel's essential transitions, however, occur in terms of the boy himself, ‘experience’ and ‘dream’ indeed ‘strangely mixed’. In the former column, Anaya has Antonio witness the arrival in the family home of Ultima, his father's story-telling and drinking, intervals working the land with his mother's relatives at El Puerto, his first schooling, and the tugs and tensions of early boyhood friendship. He also witnesses four dramatically told deaths: that of Lupito, a war-veteran mentally damaged in Japan who shoots Chávez, the sheriff, and who typifies a madness imported from ‘the outside’; that of Narciso, the town's basically harmless drunk killed by Tenorio Trementina who believe Ultima a bruja or witch responsible for the death of one of his daughters but for whom Narciso has only gratitude and love; that of Florence, a boy who drowns and with whom Antonio has struck up a bond of private sympathy and ritual; and that of Ultima herself, who teaches him that death can be continuity and restoration as well as separation. He also undergoes a cycle of childhood fevers and acts of witness as when he sees the Lupito killing or is assailed by an avenging Tenorio astride his horse or sees Ultima cure with secret herbs a member of the Téllez family. Yet, wonderfully conceived and patterned as these events are, they in effect serve as supports to even deeper transitions taking place within Antonio Márez's inward being.

In these, dream and myth play key rôles, most of all in connection with Ultima. Antonio dreams of his own birth and ‘the old woman’ who delivered him (‘Only I will know his destiny,’ Ultima announces); he dreams several times of his three brothers, fugitive elder presences who strike out in directions he slowly realizes he cannot follow; he dreams of Tenorio's dead daughter (‘my dream-fate drew me to the coffin’), a vision with Macbethian overtones of witchery and magic; and, above all, he dreams of the legend of the Golden Carp, a huge fish which swims about the waters flowing beneath and about his pueblo and which is protected and half-worshipped by his friends Samuel and Cisco. The carp exists in fact and fantasy, a literal river fish but also a source of legend. Samuel explains how, in communal myth, the carp incarnates a protector-god, the deity of land and people:

… he went to the other gods and told them that he chose to be turned into a carp and swim in the river where he could take good care of his people. The gods agreed. But because he was a god they made him very big and colored him the color of gold. And they made him the lord of all the waters of the valley.

The carp, thus, mediates a world of fact and superstition, actuality and dream. And, for Antonio, it also supplies a counter to the Catholicism in which Father Byrne and the church have begun giving him instruction. A dilemma thus arises for the boy: which offers the better theology, an Indian animism or the Christianity of the Easter Week against which are set the later parts of the novel? Whichever Antonio's choice, both now co-exist as resources in the boy's nascent creative psyche.

So, too, and in overwhelming fashion, does Ultima. No obscure peyote or psychedelic cultist out of Carlos Castaneda, she is truly una última, one of the last of an ancient order. A Catholic believer, she nonetheless incarnates a oneness with prior and non-Christian stores of knowledge, the spirituality of the natural order. Not that Anaya turns her into mere formula or symbol; far from it. He depicts her as a credibly live presence, a bearer of the past but also for Antonio at least a major figure of his present. More still to the point, perhaps, she will be a crucial remembered presence in his future. From the start, too, he understands the meaning of the owl as her titular emblem (‘with Ultima came the owl’), a totem whose every successive cry heralds a major turn not only in her life but his own. It is the owl which attacks Tenorio in his first attempt to destroy Ultima and puts out his eye; the owl which accompanies her on her every mission; and the owl which when finally killed by Tenorio signals also her own inevitable death. Antonio acts both as her apprentice and her memorialist. She so in addition calls out his rising creative-imaginative sympathies, his artist's ability to see curandera and owl at once literally and figuratively yet without the slightest undue contradiction.

No account of Bless Me, Ultima, too, can pass over lightly Anaya's passionate sense of New Mexico not simply as region or place but as a storehouse of past Chicano identity. He himself has spoken of its hold for him in interview:

[The] landscape plays a major rôle in the literature that I write. In the beginning, it is an empty, desolate, bare stage; then, if one looks closely, one sees life—people gather to tell stories, to do their work, to love, to die. In the old days the sheep and cattle ranchers gathered in that small village, which had a train station, watering station for the old coal-burning trains. It was prosperous; they were good times. Then after the visit or the business at hand is done, the people disappear back into the landscape and you're left as if alone, with the memories, dreams, stories, and whatever joys and tragedies they have brought to you.¹⁶

Bless Me, Ultima clearly arose out of this store of ‘memories, dreams [and] stories,’ a triumph both for what they so palpably have given to him but which by the same token he has given back to them.

Notes

1. Broadcast 18 April 1989, and repeated 23 April 1989. The interviewer was the present writer.

2. Skow's review continues: ‘The Chinese-American culture is only beginning to throw off … literary sparks, and Amy Tan's bright, sharp-flavored first novel belongs on a short shelf dominated by Maxine Hong Kingston's remarkable works of a decade ago, The Woman Warrior and China Men’—Time, 27 March 1989.

3. See, respectively: Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Julian Samora and Patricia Vendel Simon, A History of the Mexican-American People (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), and Lerone Bennet, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America 1619–1964, rev. edn. (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1966).

4. For a provocative contemporary cultural discussion of these issues see Werner Sollers, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

5. The following offer accounts of this achievement: James M. McPherson, Laurence B. Holland, James M. Banner, Nancy J. Weiss and Michael D. Bell (eds.), Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1971); Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974); Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975); Michael S. Harper and R. E. Stepto (eds.), Chants of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship (Urbana, Illinois: Illinois University Press, 1979); Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana, Illinois: Illinois University Press, 1979); A. Robert Lee (ed.) Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel (London: Vision Press, 1980); C. W. E. Bigsby, The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980); A. Robert Lee, Black American Literature Since Richard Wright (British Association of American Studies Pamphlet No. 11, 1983); Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1985); and John F. Callaghan, In the Afro-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-century Black Fiction (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

6. On Chicano history and politics, see especially: Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Towards Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972); Marcia T. García et al (eds.), History, Culture and Society: Chicano Studies in the 1980s (Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1983); John A. García et al (eds.), The Chicano Struggle: Analyses of Past and Present Efforts (Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1984); Alfredo Mirandé, The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Rodolfo O. de la Garza, Frank D. Bean, Charles M. Bonjean, Ricardo Romo and Rodolfo Alvarez (eds.), The Mexican American Experience (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1985); and Renate von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister and Juan Bruce-Novoa (eds.), Missions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.: Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1986). For the Chicano literary renaissance, see: Ed Ludwig and James Santibañez (eds.), The Chicanos: Mexican American Voices (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1971); Francisco A. Lomelí and Donaldo W. Urioste, Chicano Perspectives in Literature: A Critical and Annotated Bibliography (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Pajarito Publications, 1976); Francisco Jiménez (ed.), The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature (Binghampton, New York: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1979); Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1980); Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982); Salvador Rodríguez del Pino, La Novela Chicana Escrita en Español: Cinco Autores Comprometidos (Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1982); Jorge A. Huerta, Chicano Theater: Theme and Forms (Ypsilanti, Michigan: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1982); Charles M. Tatum, Chicano Literature (Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1982); Robert G. Trujillo and Andrés Rodríguez, Literatura Chicana: Creative and Critical Writings Through 1984 (Oakland, California: Floricanto Press, 1985); Luis Leal, Aztlán y México: Perfiles Literarios e Históricos (Binghampton, New York: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1985); Cordelia Candelaria, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986); Julio A. Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí (eds.), Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Carl R. Shirley and Paula W. Shirley, Understanding Chicano Literature (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1988).

7. Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968); Dee Brown, Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: an Indian History of the American West (New York, Holt, 1970).

8. For general accounts of this renaissance, see Jack W. Marken (ed.), The American Indian Language and Literature (Illinois: A.M.H. Publishing Corporation, Goldentree Bibliography, 1978); Robert F. Berkhover, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978); Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1978); Paula Gunn Allen (ed.), Studies in American Indian Literature (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983); Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Brian Swann (ed.), Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); and Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (eds.), Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (Berkeley and Lost Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

9. For a relevant background, see H. Brett Melendy, Chinese and Japanese Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1972; reprinted New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984).

10. A most useful pamphlet which deals with these and other comic-strip ethnic stereotypes is: Charles Hardy and Gail F. Stern (eds.), Ethnic Images in the Comics (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1986). See, also, Eugene Franklin Wong, Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1978).

11. See, especially, Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, with Betty Wong (eds.), Roots: An Asian American Reader (Los Angeles: U.C.L.A. Asian American Studies Center, 1971); Kay-yu and Helen Palubinska (eds.), Asian American Authors (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1972); Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusso Inada and Shawn Hsu Wong (eds.), Aiiieeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Authors (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974); Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); and King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi (eds.), Asian American Literature, An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988).

12. Time, 31 August 1988.

13. To these I would add: Raymond Barrio, The Plum Pickers (1969), Richard Vásquez, Chicano (1970), Miguel Méndez, Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims of Aztlan, 1971), Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), Alexandro Morales, Caras Viejas y Vino Nuevo (Old Faces and New Wine, 1975), Rolando Hinojoso, Klail City y sus Alrededores (Klail City and its Environs, 1976), and Nash Candelaria, Memories of the Alhambra (1977).

14. The other two are The Magic Journey (1976) and The Nirvana Blues (1978).

15. Bless Me, Ultima (Berkeley, California: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972); Heart of Aztlán (Berkeley, California: Editorial Justa, 1976); and Tortuga (Berkeley, California: Editorial Justa, 1979). Among Anaya's other main publications should be included his several anthologies: Cuentos: Tales from the Hispanic Southwest (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1980) and (co-ed. Antonio Marquez), Cuentos Chicanos: A Short Story Anthology (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); his play The Season of la Llorona (produced by El Teatro de la Companía de Albuquerque, October 1979); his travel-narrative A Chicano in China (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); his collection The Silences of the Llano: Short Stories (1982); and his various essays and stories published in magazines like Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe, Escolios, Agenda, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Grito del Sol and South Dakota Review.

16. Juan Bruce-Novoa (ed.), Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (op. cit.), pp. 184–85.