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Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias

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In the following excerpt, Lee explores the complex matrix of historical, geographic, and cultural legacies that underlies Chicano identity, as well as the significance of memory and remembrance in Chicano literature, particularly in Bless Me, Ultima.
SOURCE: “Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias,” in Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, Northeastern University Press, 1996, pp. 320–39.

TO JOHN J. HALCóN AND MARíA DE LA LUZ REYES

For those of us who listen to the Earth, and to the old legends and myths of the people, the whispers of the blood draw us to our past.

—Rudolfo A. Anaya, A Chicano in China

Mexican, the voice in his deep dream kept whispering. Mejicano. Chicano.

—Nash Candelaria, Memories of the Alhambra

I'm a story that never ends. Pull one string and the whole cloth unravels.

—Sandra Cisneros, “Eyes of Zapata”

I might say that I studied Spanish and Hispanic literature … because I had to know more about my past, my historical past.

—Ron Arias in Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors

Four Chicano storytellers, four calls to legacy. No less than other American cultural formations, chicanismo invites a play of memory coevally personal and collective. If one begins with the historical sediment, the substrata that have made up Chicano culture, it is first to underscore the human passage involved, those transitions from past to present that its novelists, poets, and dramatists have so remembered when making imagined worlds out of actual ones.

The Olmecs and Mayans provide a founding repository, passed-down legends, belief systems, alphabets, and an architecture. Los aztecas and the European intrusion of Hernán Cortés in turn bequeath the very memory of mestizaje, a first joining to be endlessly repeated through time. Mexican Independence in 1821, the Texas-Mexican War of 1836, the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, and above all the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1917 again make for history as iconography, fact as also inward memory. Villa and Zapata, for their parts, supply the epic names, substance, and yet, as always, shadow. Seen from the 1960s and beyond, and to a population burgeoning by both birth rate and immigration, it comes as no surprise that Aztlán has found new currency, a term of rally and consciousness, yet always a remembrance, a reference back to chicanismo’s first homeland.1

Memory, thus, for virtually every Chicano/a, has meant a dramatic crossply, Nezahualicóyotl and Moctezuma invoked alongside Los Reyes Católicos, or La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe alongside Cortés, Coronado, and Cabeza de Vaca. It has meant overlapping cuentos of war and peace, from the aztecas to the conquistadores, or from the Alamo of the Mexican-American conflict to the Los Alamos of the atomic bomb. It looks to the transition whereby Alto México became the “American” Southwest of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Texas. Brujería and curanderismo, likewise, carry a folk pastness into a later Catholicism of First Communions and Mass. So rich a human “text” has increasingly found its literary equivalent, memory as the pathway into a renaissance of Chicano word and narrative.

In the same way as a Chicano legacy invokes the rural, a campesino life of crops and herding and festival, so does it invoke the urban. Barrios from East Los Angeles to Houston, Albuquerque to Denver, bear witness to the history of an estimated 60 percent of Chicanos who have now moved into the cities. If Harlem for African Americans carries the residues of both Dixie and Manhattan, then an East Los Angeles or Houston for Chicanos looks back to both el campo and the exhilarations and losses of inner-city life.

One refraction lies in popular culture, whether mariachi bands or Los Lobos, mural art or low-rider cars, work songs or “Latin” rap. Memory, at times nostalgia, it can be admitted, runs right through the cultural rebirth of the 1960s, from the music of Ritchie Valens to the actos of Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino, with, in train, the singing of Linda Ronstadt, the comedy of Cheech Marin, and the screenwork and directing of Edward James Olmos. In this latter respect, films like La Bamba, Zoot Suit, The Milagro Beanfield War, Stand and Deliver, American Me, Blood In, Blood Out (coscripted by Jimmy Santiago Baca), and even television's once mooted El Pueblo/L.A., for all their resemblance to the contemporary, could not have been more permeated by pastness, the appeal to shared recollection.

In like manner there has been the view of Chicano community, even in poverty, as in and of itself a kind of memorial art form, an inherited pageant of culture and custom. In this, Chicano foodways bear an especially ancestral insignia—a now familiar menu of chile, frijoles, enchiladas, mole, chimichangas, or tamales. If, however, a single token of legacy were needed, it would surely be found in the ristras hanging in almost every Chicano home.

In common with its nuyorriqueño and cubano-americano counterparts, chicanismo also involves a past held inside two seemingly parallel but actually deeply unparallel languages.2 For under American auspices English has long emerged as the language of power, leaving Spanish as the assumed lesser idiom, a signifier of illiteracy or migrant outsiderness. Even so, this is anything but to suggest that the two languages have not been historically symbiotic. Chicano Spanish, for its part, may resort to the street or vernacular caló of pachucos, vatos, and chulas, but it also abounds with borrowed anglicisms like watchar la tele or kikear (the drug habit). American English has in mirror fashion long made its own borrowings, like barrio and the all-serving gringo, as well as farm or ranch borrowings, like lasso, adobe, bronco, cinch, or sombrero. Endless repetition on television and other commercials of food terms like taco, tortilla, and nacho has made quite as marked an impact, one language's “history” remembered (or more aptly misremembered) inside another.

In the case of anglicization, Chicano memory has been stirred in another way as well. In categories like Hispanic or, depending on the user, even the more generally favored Hispano or Latino, many have heard the carryover of a note of condescension. “Ethnic” likewise arouses suspicion, a WASP hegemony's self-appointed rubric for patronage of minority culture. The English Only campaigns, now under way in more than twenty states, recapitulate the same discriminatory process. Here, in all its historic loading, is but the latest effort to make the language as well as the general sway of Anglo culture the presumed standard for America at large. Does not, then, an accusing politics of memory lie behind a reaction like “English Yes, But Only, No”?

A corrido, or folk song, like “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” adapted for the screen by PBS in 1982 from Américo Paredes's version with Edward James Olmos in the title role, nicely points up the discrepancy.3 The tale of a “Mexican” smallholder in the Texas of 1901 falsely accused of horse theft, it turns on how the word horse in English can translate into Spanish as both masculine and feminine, namely caballo and yegua. At issue, however, is infinitely more than a quirk of philology. The ballad speaks on the one hand to Gregorio Cortez's Mexican Chicano ancestry, and on the other, to the Anglo hegemony that lies behind the Texas Rangers who pursue him and the Yankee judge and court that try him for the murder of the sheriff. What is involved here is the remembrance of two value systems, two misreadings across the cultural divide. Much as English and Spanish might seem to have been saying the same thing, the gap has been symptomatic, and in this case, fatal.

Similar discrepancies in fact underlie a whole array of “popular” versions of American history. No better instance offers itself than the Siege of the Alamo (1836), and in its wake, the defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Told one way, the Siege has come to signify Anglo triumphalism. Where more so than in John Wayne's 1960 Hollywood version with its “Lone Star State” hurrahs and featuring James Bowie and William B. Travis as the truest of patriot martyrs? Told in another way, did not Santa Anna's attack on the Alamo represent a timely resistance, a counterforce to Yankee expansionism? Such a perspective, going against the grain, appears in Jesús Salvador Trevino's television film of 1982, Seguín.

These splits and divergences in memory extend more generally to the American Southwest and West, not least when they double as el norte. From a mainstream viewpoint, the link is to Manifest Destiny, an indigenista, tribal-Chicano world preordained to be won and settled. A Mexican or tribal viewpoint, however, speaks of colonized land, stolen tierra or patria. Counterversions of the Mexican Revolution similarly arise, on the one hand the Red plot, the Bolshevism so warningly reported (and then not reported) by, say, the Hearst press, and on the other hand the heroizing popular revolution of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI) and leftist recollection in general.

Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot-Suit riots of 1942–1943 also yield their twofold interpretations. Were the assaults of a largely white Southern navy in wartime Los Angeles “straight” racism or, more obliquely, the fascination of one uniformed group (Anglo, English-speaking, Bible-Protestant, military) with its also uniformed opposite (Latin, Spanish-speaking, sexually knowing, baroque)?4 How, subsequently, should one remember 1960s movements like César Chávez's United Farm Workers, especially the 1968 grape boycott, José Angel Gutiérrez's La Raza Unida in Texas, and “Corky” Gonzales's Crusade for Justice in Denver? Do they best refer back to mainstream labor politics (in Chávez's case, on account of the alliances with Filipino and other Asian workers) or, when linked back into the wartime bracero programs, to a wholly more discrete Chicano politics?

Nor, however collective the memory, does chicanismo yield some unconflicted view of itself. The class hierarchy, for instance, created by the conquistadores who devastated Moctezuma's Aztecs, has had its modern footfalls, still based on blood, skin color, landedness, and, as often, family name. Old chicanismo plays against new, especially between certain New Mexico dynasties and those of a supposedly inferior birthright. Does this also not call up the disdain of Spanish-born gachupines for colonial-born criollos or Creoles, and theirs, in turn, for los indios (especially genízaros—Indians forced to lose their tribal language and to speak only Spanish), for mestizos, and for negros (a distinct but Spanish-speaking black population)?5

Just as a missionary-begun Catholicism largely took over from Aztec and other cosmologies (though obliged to coexist with vernacular practices like curanderismo), so did evangelical Protestantism increasingly make inroads into that same Catholicism.6 This, and the impact of Latin American liberation theology, has led to increasing doubts about the church's attitude to family, women, birth control, divorce, and authority in general. How are Chicanas, especially, to “remember” Catholicism? As spiritual sanctuary or as yet another patriarchy able to oppress with its gendered rules of conduct?

Another major contradiction lies in the continuing pull of California. It has, undoubtedly, promised betterment, the dream of abundancia, whatever the risk of repeated deportations by la migra. Somewhere in this persists the remembered myth of el dorado, the continuing lure of Las Siete Ciudades de Cíbola. But California has notoriously also flattered to deceive. Chicano unemployment has soared, as have high school dropout rates, barrio poverty and crime, and the wars of attrition with the police and courts. Yet as the continuing surge of cross-border migration bears out, and despite each amnesty over residence papers, California remains history both made and still in the making.7

Imagining and reimagining the past may well be, in L. P. Hartley's apt and rightly celebrated phrase, to visit a “foreign country”—especially in an America notoriously obsessed with the future. Yet Chicanos, no doubt having known the flavors of defeat as well as those of triumph, have had good reason to dwell there. Whether it was the conquistador regime, a border as redolent of human flight as El Río Grande, the history by which Tejas was reconstituted as Texas, or the duality of California as promise and yet denial, the prompt to memory has been always ongoing. For it is the memory that serves as solvent for each generation's telling of la raza, and nowhere more so than in the ongoing body of fiction of what rightly has become known as chicanismo’s literary renaissance.8

Certainly that has been the case for Anaya, Candelaria, Cisneros, and Arias, however differently they have styled their uses of memory. Indeed, the Chicano tradition can virtually be said to have thrived on the shaping energies of remembrance, a present told and reinvented in the mirrors of the past. This is true especially for one of the seminal novels of chicanismo. José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959) not only offers the life of its writer-protagonist, Richard Rubio, as a portrait of the artist, it also locates that life within the history of migration from Mexico to southern California—thus memory as collective in scope yet specific, a single trajectory.9

In a story cycle as delicately imagistic as Tomás Rivera's “… Y no se lo tragó la tierra”/And the Earth Did Not Part (1971),10 another kind of memory holds sway, that of a single migrant-labor year of a Chicano dynasty headed for “Iuta” (Utah) in which all other similar years and journeys are to be discerned. Raymond Barrio's The Plum Plum Pickers (1971) makes for a linking memorialization,11 this time set in the Santa Clara Valley during the Reagan governorship. Its very accusations of labor exploitation and racism lie in remembrance. In Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974),12 Miguel Méndez takes a more vernacular direction—the memories of Loreto Maldona, car washer in Tijuana—as an anatomy of border life, of poverty and dreams, nationality and mestizaje. For his part, Alejandro Morales in Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975),13 translated as Old Faces and New Wine in 1981, transposes barrio Los Angeles into a kind of working archive, a city of inheritances and the present-day told in its own imaginative right as at once then and now.

In Klail City y sus alrededores (1976),14 as in the rest of the “Klail” series, Rolando Hinojosa subjects Belken County to Faulknerian rules, a south Texas Chicano and white “mythical kingdom” invoked as through a lattice of multicultural (and bilingual) recollection. Daniel Cano's Pepe Rios (1991) attempts historical fiction of an older kind,15 the Mexican Revolution as an epilogue to colonialism and yet a prologue to chicanismo. Arturo Islas looks to memory as myth in The Rain God (1984),16 the portrait of a Tex-Mex dynasty descended in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution from the escaping but always imperturbable matriarch Mama Chona. In all these different modes of using chicanismo as memory, fiction lays claim to a special kind of authority, a heritage of time and voice given its own dialogic measure.

Memory has equally shaped an increasingly emergent Chicana fiction, in whose ranks Sandra Cisneros has been little short of a luminary. Isabella Ríos's Victuum (1976),17 through the psychism of its narrator, Valentina Ballesternos, renders womanist history as a kind of ongoing dream script. Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) creates an epistolatory,18 and teasingly self-aware, feminist novel of women's friendship that also explores the pasts of America and Mexico, a historic mestizaje again taken up in her fantasia, Sapogonia (1990), and in her New Mexico almanac-memoir, So Far from God (1993).19 Cherrié Moraga's storytelling (and essay work), of which the anthology she co-edited with Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), and her Loving in the War Years (1983) and The Last Generation (1993) can be thought symptomatic, yields another remembrance, that of the “silence” that, by historic writ, has surrounded lesbian life in a culture so given to patriarchy.20

Literatura chicanesca, non-Chicano writing about Chicano life and culture, affords another styling of memory in John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War (1974).21 However specifically set in the 1970s or local the story, its drama of contested water rights again calls up an inlaid older history of Indian, Mexican, and Anglo conflict that, across four centuries, took New Mexico from a Spanish colony to a territory to America's forty-seventh state. Joe Mondragón finds himself fighting Ladd Devine and his Miracle Valley Recreation Area Development for the right to irrigate his land. In fact, what Nichols portrays tacitly is the fight for the Chicano heritage in which the bean field acts as a trope for the very soil, the nurturing medium, of a whole people's history. Nichols's novel and the Redford-Esparza movie of 1988 (with its appropriately multiethnic cast of Ruben Blades, Carlos Riquelme, Sonia Braga, and Christopher Walken) can so play “fact” against el mundo de los espíritus, the historicity of the past as open to a figural or any other kind of access.

Chicano autobiography as a related kind of “fiction” has been wholly as various in its uses of memory, whether Oscar Zeta Acosta's rambunctious, Beatnik-influenced narratives of the 1960s, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), or Richard Rodriguez's elegiac, if controversially assimilationist, Hunger of Memory (1981) and Days of Obligation (1992), or Linda Chavez's radically conservative manifesto, Out of the Barrio (1991), or Ray Gonzalez's El Paso “border” history, the lyric and pertinently titled Memory Fever (1993).22

For as these texts, too, “remember” (even those of an assimilationist bent) so, like the novels and stories they accompany, they inevitably contest and dissolve mainstream decreation of chicanismo. Perhaps, overall, Frances A. Yates's notion of “memory theatre” applies best—the forms of the past, however obliquely, always to be remembered and re-remembered in the forms of the present.23

“Some time in the future I would have to build my own dream of those things which were so much a part of my childhood.” So does the narrator of Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972) reflexively look back to the pending cuentista or authorial self who will write that childhood, that past, into being.24 The note, for Anaya, is typical, one of retrospect, pastness, and memory as a textualized weave of events actual and imaginary, which, if less persuasively, also runs through his subsequent novels, Heart of Aztlán (1976), Tortuga (1979), and Alburquerque (1992).25

The novel typically begins in remembrance. “The magical time of childhood stood still,” says Antonio Márez at the outset. He repositions himself as the seven-year-old raised in the 1940s Spanish-speaking New Mexico who finds himself pulled between the vaquero, herdsman, Márez clan on his father's side and the farmer-cultivator Luna clan on his mother's. But he also acknowledges the writer-in-waiting who will learn to appropriate as his own the shamanism, the brujería, of Ultima, the anciana and curandera invited by his parents to spend her last days with the family.

Anaya enravels each inside the other, a Chicano childhood as literal event, in Antonio's case often the most traumatic kind, and a drama of inner fantasy and imagining. “Experience” and “dream,” he rightly recollects, “strangely mixed in me.” This blend makes the imagined landscape of Bless Me, Ultima not a little Proustian, a New Mexico there on the map and yet personalized and sacralized by personal remembrance.

One contour, thus, has the adult Antonio recalling his ill-matched parents, his sisters, Deborah and Theresa, and the three absentee brothers with their eventual disruptive return from the wars in Europe and Japan. It looks back to the Spanish of the home, the English of school, the latter having anglicized him from Antonio to Tony. It summons back his parents’ competing hopes for him: his father's dream of a new beginning in California and his mother's hope that he will enter the priesthood. He sees, too, as he could not have done in childhood, the irony of a horseman father now asphalting the highways as if to seal in, to inhume, the very tierra his family once proudly herded.

Yet another contour remembers the dreamer child within, drawn to the indio myths of earth, mountain, and river and to the legend of the Golden Carp—a creation myth of a god-protector of the village—in which he comes to believe under the tutelage of his friends Samson and Cisco. The center of all these memories, however, has to be Ultima—ancient, as her name implies, midwife at his birth, explainer of his pesadillas, or nightmares, teacher of herbs and flora, and martyr who at the cost of her own death has brought down the murderer Tenorio Trementina. Her grave, whose secret celebrant he becomes, serves the novel in two ways: as a figuration of both his past and his future, his legacy and at the same time his destiny.

Antonio thus finds himself irresistibly drawn in memory to her bag of potions, her nostrums, her deific owl with its links to a Christly dove or an Aztec eagle, and her very aroma. But if she signifies for him as at once guardian angel, muse, and the very anima of chicanismo, he, for his part, plays the perfect apprentice, the word maker with his own eventual kind of brujería.

This double weave, the memory of the “facts” of his history and of his first prompts to imagination, determines the whole novel. He thinks back to the deaths he has witnessed: Lupito, who, unhinged by his Asian war experiences, shoots at the sheriff only to invite his own destruction; Narciso, the harmless drunk who, all too true to his name, is killed by Trementina; Florence, the drowned boyhood friend who first guided him to the Golden Carp; and Ultima herself. Each death “happens,” or “happened,” but each, equally, goes on “happening” in his own chambers of memory, to await transcription by the memoirist he will become.

The back-and-forth movement of memory also encloses Jason's Indian, the unspeaking sentinel to a pre-conquistador past; like the carp and the owl, he embodies the tribal and vernacular folk past as against the Holy Weeks, Communions, and Masses of Father Byrne's parish church. There is a sheen, a membrane, that also settles over the novel's place-names, notably Los Alamos, as indeed the Poplars, but also, the irony of which is anything but lost on Anaya, as the atomic test site. More domestically, for Antonio, “El Puerto” (“refuge,” “harbor”) as the home of the Lunas and “Las Pasturas” (“pasture”) as that of the Márez family resonate with equal effect—even as they pass into time past. Memory, in other words, in all its overlapping and coalescing kinds, also yields mixed emotional fare for the narrator-memoirist, pain and warmth, breakage as well as love.

But “build my own dream” Bless Me, Ultima does, a landmark portrait of childhood's dream itself told as a dream. The spirit of the dream derives, overwhelmingly, from Ultima, her creativity carried by the narrator from childhood to adulthood, from first associations to written word. For the memory of her, as of his family, of his land, and of all the voices and myths that have made up his legacy of chicanismo, cannot be thought other (such is Anaya's triumph) than Antonio Márez's memory—and memorialization—of himself.

Notes

  1. The following usefully address Chicano history and politics: George I. Sánchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque, N.M.: C. Horn, 1940); Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1948); Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera, The Chicanos: A History of Mexican-Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Towards Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972); Richard Griswold de Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1850–1890: A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Marcia T. García et al., eds., History, Culture and Society: Chicano Studies in the 1980s (Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1984); Alfredo Mirandé, The Chicano Experience: An Alternative Perspective (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Rodolfo O. de la Garza et al., eds., The Mexican American Experience (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1985); and Renate von Bardeleben, Dietrich Briesemeister, and Juan Bruce-Novoa, eds., Missions in Conflict: Essays on US-Mexican Relations and Chicano Culture (Tübingen: Gunter Verlag, 1986).

  2. See Andrew D. Cohen and Anthony F. Beltramo, eds., El Lenguaje de los Chicanos: Regional and Social Characteristics Used by Mexican-Americans (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1975); also Dogoberto Fuentes and José A. López, Barrio Language Dictionary: First Dictionary of Caló (Los Angeles, Calif.: Southland Press, 1974).

  3. Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1979).

  4. A persuasive interpretation of these events is found in Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1984).

  5. For the implications of this nomenclature, see Alfred Yankauer, “Hispanic/Latino—What's in a Name?” and David E. Hayes-Bautista and Jorge Chapa, “Latino Terminology: Conceptual Bases for Standardized Terminology,” both in American Journal of Public Health 77, no. 1 (1987): 61–68. I am grateful to Dr. Arthur Campa of the School of Education, University of Colorado at Boulder, for directing me to these references.

  6. A symptomatic publication would be Freddie and Ninfa García, Outcry in the Barrio (San Antonio, Tex.: Freddie García Ministries, 1988).

  7. Perhaps the most provocative history remains Acuña, Occupied America.

  8. For bearings on this achievement, see Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Clitts, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979); Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1980); Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: A Response to Chaos (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1982); Salvador Rodríguez del Pino, La Novela Chicana Escrita en Español: Cinco Autores Comprometidos (Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1982); Charles M. Tatum, Chicano Literature (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Robert G. Trujillo and Andrés Rodríguez, Literatura Chicana: Creative and Critical Writings through 1984 (Oakland, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1985); Luis Leal et al., eds., A Decade of Chicano Literature, 1970–1979: Critical Essays and Bibliography (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Editorial La Causa, 1982); Houston Baker, ed., Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literatures for Teachers of American Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982); Luis Leal, Aztlán y México: Perfiles Literarios e Históricos (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, National Association of Chicano Studies, 1985); Marta Ester Sánchez, Contemporary Chicana Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1985); Maria Herrera-Sobek, ed., Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1985); Julio A. Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí, eds., Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986); Cordelia Candelaria, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); Vernon E. Lattin, ed., Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1986); Carl R. Shirley and Paula W. Shirley, Understanding Chicano Literature (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988); Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley, eds., Chicano Writers First Series, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 82 (Detroit, Mich.: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989); Asunción Horno-Delgado et al., eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); and Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

  9. José Antonio Villarreal, Pocho (New York: Doubleday, 1959).

  10. Tomás Rivera: “… Y no se lo tragó la tierra”/And the Earth Did Not Part (Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971).

  11. Raymond Barrio, The Plum Plum Pickers (Sunnyvale, Calif.: Ventura Press, 1969; rpr., with introduction and bibliography, Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1984).

  12. Miguel Méndez, Peregrinos de Aztlán (Tucson, Ariz.: Editorial Peregrinos, 1974).

  13. Alejandro Morales, Caras viejas y vino nuevo (México: J. Mortiz, 1975).

  14. Rolando Hinojosa, Klail City y sus alrededores (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1976); Generaciones y semblazas, trans. Rosaura Sánchez (Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1978). Author's English version: Klail City (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1987).

  15. Daniel Cano, Pepe Rios (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1991).

  16. Arturo Islas, The Rain God (New York: Avon Books, 1984, 1991).

  17. Isabella Ríos, Victuum (Ventura, Calif.: Diana-Etna, 1976).

  18. Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1986).

  19. Ana Castillo, Sapogonia (Houston, Tex.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1990) and So Far from God (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).

  20. Cherrié Moraga et al., eds., Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983); Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); Cherrié Moraga, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por los labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Cherrié Moraga, The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993).

  21. John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1974). The rest of the trilogy comprises The Magic Journey (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1978) and The Nirvana Blues (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1981).

  22. Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973); Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory (Boston: Godine, 1981) and Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992); Linda Chavez: Out of the Barrio (New York: Basic Books, 1991); and Ray Gonzalez, Memory Fever (Seattle, Wash.: Broken Moon Press, 1993).

  23. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Some of these implications of “memory” I have explored elsewhere. See A. Robert Lee, “The Mill on the Floss: ‘Memory’ and the Reading Experience,” in Ian Gregor, ed., Reading the Victorian Novel: Detail into Form (London: Vision Press, 1980).

  24. Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima (Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972).

  25. Rudolfo Anaya, Heart of Aztlán (Berkeley, Calif.: Editorial Justa Publications, 1976); Tortuga (Berkeley, Calif.: Editorial Justa Publications, 1979); and Alburquerque (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

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