What La Bloga Wants for Its 19th Birthday: World Peace and a Chicana Chicano Literary Canon
Michael Sedano
It was nineteen years ago this month, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play around on the internet. We Blogueros were gainfully employed, commuter rat-racing daily to the jale. We--Rudy Ch Garcia, Manuel Ramos, Michael Sedano--were friends at CHICLE, a Listserv run by Teresa Marquez out of the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico. Some sort of pedo went down and CHICLE got shut down.
Rudy wrote one day he'd registered us for a new thing called a V-log, or a Blog.
And that was the start of La Bloga, gente. Thank you for joining us in the world's longest continuously operating literary blog dedicated to raza arte.
We agreed we'd avoid discussing one topic, "what is chicano literature?" While that's an impossible question, it's possible to look at United States literature and identify clearly a genre gente are calling Chicana Chicano Latina Latino raza writing.
I don't try to define our literature, I want to read all I can and thus let the thing itself define iself. Here are a pair of reprints of "seminar speculations" from La Bloga's past, where I delve into the "definition" by means of examples, seeking input from other readers and critics.
I know it when I read it. So, what should I read?
Reprint from January 2005
by mvs
Back in 1969 Herminio Rios and Octavio Romano from Berkeley's Quinto Sol Press published the world's first anthology of chicano literature, El Espejo. An outstanding collection that included such poets as Abelardo and Alurista. A few years later, Nicolas Kanellos in Texas, I think it was, started Revista Chicana-Riqueña, publishing work that mirrored Quinto Sol's writers, but Revista expanded its recruitment to include Boricua and other ascendencia hispanoparlante writers. An academic tipo jumped on the literary convergences he saw, and published a paper on Canonical and Non-Canonical Work. The critic found shortcomings in the puro chicano strategy Rios and Romano adopted.
My critical opinion of the brouhaha is "whatever." My preference has always been to let the writing stand on its own merits. No biography, no historical context, no appositional translation. Let the work stand on its own merit. Still, it was grist for the academic mill and I sometimes wonder if the pedo over what constitutes "canonical" hasn't slowed the acceptance of chicana chicano writing by a broader audience, and in particular, into the pages of high school anthologies. The anthology's the thing to capture the conscience of future readers.
Sadly, without some push from somewhere, chicana chicano literature keeps getting left out of the high school curriculum. Have a look at US Literature textbooks. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but I'd bet Sandra Cisneros and Gary Soto get anthologized a lot more than any other writer.
No, I'm not donning armor to joust with textbook companies or state deptos of education. But I would like to see kids--especially chicanesque kids-- read the best US literature, which must include chicana chicano lit. So here's my question. Considering whom you're targeting, if you could give a library of essential chicana chicano writing--prose, poetry, essay, criticism--would you have a long list, or a short one? What would you recommend to a high school kid; a high school English teacher; a working class reader?
Here on the jale I run a couple of reading programs. One, a general reading program for customer service reps--knowledge workers-- who need constantly to improve their oral communication and reading skills because they talk on the phone and read stuff out of a catalog. For them, I buy a bunch of paperbacks and populate a shelf in their lunchroom. I choose good stuff that a popular audience might enjoy; if there's a film or TV tie-in, all the better. Another group is gente in the warehouse who want to move into an office job, or people I notice who seem to have a lot on the ball. Most of the latter group are Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants, the majority Spanish-speakers who don't read a lot of English. Sadly, there's no hope to become a knowledge worker until they can listen, speak, and read English.
Here's the stuff I've been handing out. It's not a canon, perhaps more indicative of what my local indie bookseller shelves, and stuff I like that I want people to enjoy:
Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies.
Rodolfo Anaya. Shaman Winter.
Rudolfo Anaya, Zia Summer.
Rudolfo Anaya, Alburquerque.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Gods of Mars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes.
Orson Scott Card. Pastwatch. The Redemption of Christopher Columbus.
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street.
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek.
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
Dashiell Hammet, The Maltese Falcon.
Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway.
Walter Mosley. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.
Walter Mosley, Black Betty.
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress.
Robert Parker, God Save the Child.
Manuel Ramos. The Last Client of Luis Montez.
Manuel Ramos. Blues for the Buffalo.
Manuel Ramos. The Ballad of Gato Guerrero.
Manuel Ramos. The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz.
Michele Serros, Chicana Falsa and other stories.
Sara Paretsky, Blood Shot.
Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only.
Helena Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus.
How about your list? If you could offer a high school a library of chicana chicano literature, what's on the list? How about their teacher?
Reprint from September 2007
Propaedeutic to a Chicana Chicano Canon
Michael Sedano
I confess I’ve wanted to use “propaedeutic” in a title for a long time just never got around to it. I’m glad that’s out of my system. The word, not the question. I had lunch with a professor of C/S recently and forgot to quiz her on what literature goes into today’s majors and minors across the field. I’ve looked at syllabi on the internet and see as many “essentials” as there are profes angling for enrollment, so one’s choices for cultural literacy become luck of the draw rather than some compelling sense of a literature in common, or a clear recommendation to the high school 9-12 sequence.
The notion of a canonical literature for chicanas chicanos goes back to the beginnings of “Chicano” literature, and of La Bloga. Especially with the holidays around the corner, there’s value in asking again a pair of questions: what chicanarte titles should populate the shelves of readers of United States Literature, and readers of Chicana Chicano Literature?
In 1969, Quinto Sol publishers in Berkeley, California, published a beautiful anthology titled El Espejo: The Mirror. Selected Mexican-American Literature. Editor Octavio Romano had included exciting new chicano voices—there were few but men published-- but also pieces with strong allegiances for the anglo-european mainstream that justified the hyphenated subtitle. Then, 1972, in the fifth printing, with Herminio Rios on board, El Espejo: The Mirror became “ Selected CHICANO Literature”. The assimilationist, “just as good as” writers, had disappeared to the benefit of readers who now discovered Alurista, Abelardo, Tino Villanueva, rrsalinas. Poets.
Shortly after the emergence of the movimiento-infused literature of El Espejo and its supporting journal El Grito, a competing journal showed another set of voices. An east coast journal, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, arrived, with equal power to that out of Berkeley and the Southwest. The journal went through several transformations, existing for a quarter century, and was celebrated in 1988 with an award-winning anthology Floating Borderlands Twenty-five Years of U.S. Hispanic [sic] Literature”.
The 1980s saw an explosion of literary anthologies. The editors wrote about a “Chicano Renaissance” visible in the collections, which would replay variations of the tables of contents of El Espejo, El Grito, and la revista., even as scholars debated the “canonical” approach of El Espejo versus the “non-canonical” approach out of the east.
All that was the literature of my youth. The point being, it’s been 40 years, gente, since that first El Espejo collection. By now raza have amassed a corpus of work that suggests value in renewing a search for the ten foot shelf of essential titles that every family must own, that every kid can’t graduate high school or college without having read, that fills your gift list for the next ten years of a kid’s upbringing.
Any collection of essential work must include new work. The classics might be published tomorrow, but you’ll go broke buying every tempting title showcased at La Bloga or otherwise recommended by friends. Ojalá your public library has a new books budget and buys widely.
Owing to the hundreds, perhaps thousands of chicana and chicano writers, thankfully, anthologies continue to hit the market. It’s useful to come across a couple of newish anthologies, Cristina García’s 2006, Bordering fires: the vintage book of contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a literature (New York : Vintage Books, 2006) and the more recent Hecho en Tejas: an anthology of Texas-Mexican literature, edited by Dagoberto Gilb. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press published in cooperation with the Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, 2006).
http://labloga.blogspot.com/2006/05/nuevo-y-viejo.html
From here, it’s time to prioritize the novels I want to read again, and start from the top. Where would you begin?
Your expertise is a gift. Thank you for sharing it generously in your posts.
ReplyDeleteThank you for reprising these essays. Your questions are still vital and should never cease being asked and debated. Particularly important is the need for our literature to be mainstreamed in all literary curricula. Keep fighting this good fight.
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