The Weight of Responsibility

                                                                                                                                                        

                                                                                      

Sometimes the burden is too heavy to bear.
 

     In the Army, if a Chicano looked weak or afraid, like the burden was too heavy to bear, another Chicano would call out to him, a threat masked as encouragement, "La Raza no se raje." That was it. You'd been warned. Get your ass in gear. Your behavior affected all the other Chicanos around you.

     It was around 1975, I published a letter in the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner in response to an article written by reporter Tony Castro. An experienced journalist, and a Harvard graduate, who later became an editor with the Eastside Publications Group, Castro’s articles appeared regularly in the Herald Examiner, right on the heels of L.A. Times reporters Ruben Salazar (who had already died), Frank del Olmo, and Al Martinez. 

     Castro had written an article about how the media and readers expected Chicano journalists to report on “Hispanic” (the term used at the time) issues, pigeon-holing Mexican American reporters. Most of those hardnosed reporters had matured in smoke-filled, typewriter-clacking newsrooms, and they wanted to cover major news stories, regardless of who did it or where it was done. Of course, they were experienced enough to know if news about Latinos broke, they’d be the first asked to cover the stories.

     At the time, I was interested in fiction, writing stories about what I knew best, the Mexican communities in Los Angeles. Castro’s article got me thinking. I didn’t consider myself a Chicano writer but a writer who was a Chicano. Like Chicanos and Chicanas in other professions, teachers, businesspeople, or skilled laborers, I’m sure didn’t think of themselves as raza, first, but as whatever their profession happened to be. In our careers, we want to be defined by our work not by our ethnicity, which isn't always the case since others want to define us by our ethnicity.

     As a university student, one of the few Chicanos in those years, as an English major, I studied English and American literature, with an eye towards Chicano literature, which was still in its infancy. Scholars (mostly Chicano Spanish professors), were debating whether Chicano literature was "writing" by Mexican Americans, in English, or could it include writing in Spanish? After all, in many regions of the Southwest, some Mexicans preferred to read and write in Spanish, especially along the border. I'd met Chicanos in the Army who could barely speak English, yet they'd been born in the U.S., in isolated Mexican enclaves, ranches and farms.

      Some scholars took it further, arguing whether there was a difference between Chicano, Mexican, Latin American, and Spanish literature, or was each be an appendage of the other? Many early Chicano writers, who were also activists, were influenced by Nahua, Mexican and Spanish poets, like Nezahualcoyotl, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez, as were Chicano poets, Alurista and Omar Salinas. 

     Budding Mexican American prose writers were looking to the works of “boom” writers, like Fuentes, Rulfo, Castellanos, Poniatowska, Borges, Garcia-Marquez and other Latin Americans. What about a book like Octavio Paz’s Labrinth of Solitude, and his analysis of “El Pachuco,” a mythic figure among Chicanos? Could Paz’s book be considered Chicano literature, or because Paz was Mexican is his book Mexican literature? 

     Even today, many popular American Latino(a) writers are immigrants, educated in the States but born in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Cuba. They live in blended neighborhoods, not only Latino but African American and Asian, and they write about their communities. Some write bestsellers, often about their journey in the U.S. as immigrants. Do they fall within the canon of Chicano-Latino literature, as taught in the academy? I wonder how they identify, as writers? 

    In the ‘70’s, when I thought about writing my first novel, Pepe Rios, a mostly fictionalized story inspired by my paternal grandfather’s flight from Mexico during the early days of the Mexican Revolution, I wondered if Chicano publishers might think it – too Mexican, even if it was written by a Chicano. What about Chicano scholars. Would they consider a novel by a Chicano, set in Mexico, Chicano literature? 

     I remember thinking I wanted my novel to explore how my ancestors’ experiences, and their old-world roots, might have influenced me, a third-generation American descended from Mexicans, in the same way Maxine Hong Kingston, Alex Haley, and Philip Roth’s books explored their deeper ethno-religious roots, and maybe, uncovered the flowers that ultimately bloomed on the surface. We can’t sever our past, even though many of us have chosen to try to ignore it, pretend it never existed. 

     Though, for us, Americans of Mexican descent, we are different from other American immigrants, even those who trace their roots back to the Mayflower. We aren’t immigrants, not really. Even if our European (Spanish) roots go back hundreds of years, our indigenous roots make us natives in this land, before there was even a border. This land was taken from our ancestors, by force. If anything, we are more a colonized people, not unlike the Palestinians, made to be foreigners on our own land? 

     As a the oldest in my family, I spent more time with my Mexican ancestors than my younger siblings did, so I know more about my family’s history. My grandparents settled in Santa Monica, in a neighborhood among friends and relatives who migrated from the same ranches and villages in Mexico, some as far back as the original founders in 1779, when California was still Mexico. 

     When I walked the streets in my grandmother’s Santa Monica barrio, I’d hear more Spanish than English. My grandparents, aunts, and uncles told me about their trek from the family ranch, Mitic, in Los Altos de Jalisco. Though the family migrated in 1920, my grandfather had already come north to work in Santa Monica, going back to the late 1800s, following the old trail used by Mexicans for generations. 

     So, when I began planning to write a novel, I thought, that, yes, Chicano literature doesn’t start north of the border but south of it, in those towns and villages where our grandparents, and their ancestors, lived, for generations, some even carrying indigenous blood until it mixed with the Spanish. 

     After the publication of my book, I didn’t see myself as a Chicano writer but as a writer. If one labels him or herself as an ethnic writer, journalist, or artist, does it limit one to writing only about ethnic issues? Do we stereotype ourselves? If every time ethnic writers, or artists, sit down to write, or paint, must they only write about their ethnic world, or can they explore other worlds, as well? 

     African American writer and critic Ismael Reed, in an introduction to a book on ethnic American Literature, wrote that ethnic American writers carry a burden Caucasian writers and artists don’t carry, don’t even consider, how to portray their communities responsibly. Mexicans and Chicanos, like other ethnicities, have seen themselves portrayed on the “big screen”, mostly negatively, or stereotypically, creating false images of us as a people. 

     Recently, I watched Under the Volcano, a movie adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s novel, one of my favorite books. John Huston, he of the academy award-winning “African Queen,” directed the movie. Set in 1930s Quanahuac, better known as Cuernavaca, the movie followed the self-destruction of the “Counsul,” an unforgiving alcoholic, brooding over the beautiful, Yvonne, his long-lost spouse, as he suffers from emotional trauma he experienced in WWI. 

     The movie portrays Mexicans as either stoic Indians or brute savages, waiting for the Consul to slip-up, which he does, and the Mexicans become his executioners, riddling his drunken body with bullets, in a scene rivaling Star War’s outer space bar, inhabited by creatures from different planets, aliens The Mexicans at El Farolito, drunks, thieves, rebels, dwarfs, and prostitutes appear more as escaped circus freaks than humans in a bar. 

     Caucasian writers or directors feel no compunction to “get it right,” not as far as ethnic representation goes. They just need to “get it down,” and in the “can,” as they say of movies. According to Ishmael Reed, ethnic writers carry the burden of not only “getting it right,” but being responsible as they strive to “get it down,” and to portray their ethnic characters more than one-dimensional caricatures but as thinking, feeling, humans, even the villains. 

    African novelist-scholar, Chinua Achebe, the author of the classic Things Fall Apart, in a critical essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” viewed Joseph Conrad’s popular novel as, “thoroughly racist.” Achebe described how Conrad’s European narrator said Africans, “… howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with the wild and passion, roar. Ugly, yes, it was ugly enough.”

     Achebe pointed to a juxtaposition of Africans and whites, but viewed through Anglo eyes, as if Europeans were observing, psychologically, in the Africans, their own primitiveness. Like many European writers, who use foreign countries, ethnicities, and indigenous communities to set their stories, even if their white characters are evil or unsavory, Achebe says of Conrad, he used all of Africa as the setting for the “disintegration of one puny European mind,” much like John Huston used Cuernavaca, and Mexico, as the executioner for one demented, drunken European. 

     So, one’s responsibility as an ethnic writer, artist, or any professional, as Ishmael Reed suggests, is a burden "White" writers don't carry. Like it or not, what we call ourselves is less important than the work we create.