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| Basilica San Diego Alejandria |
Sometime around 1975, I published a letter in the now defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner in response to an article written by reporter Tony Castro. Castro was an experienced, serious journalist, who in the 90's became an editor with the Eastside Publications Group, where he invited me to write a weekly opinion piece. An avid, prolific writer, Tony's articles appeared regularly in the Herald Examiner, and other major newspapers. He was right up there with the L.A. Times' Ruben Salazar (who had already died), Frank del Olmo, and Al Martinez.
Coming off his successful book, Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America, Tony had written something about the media always expecting Chicano writers to write about “Hispanic” topics, in other words, pigeon-holing Mexican American writers, the term bandied about in the media, back then, before “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or “Latin X” came into vogue. Most of those hard scrabble reporters had matured in smoke-filled, typewriter-clacking newsrooms, and, like all reporters, they wanted to cover the biggest, news breaking stories of the day.
At the time, I’d begun writing fiction. Many of my characters were Mexican and the stories’ “settings” were the areas I knew best, places I’d lived or visited. I never considered myself a Chicano writer. I didn't even know what that meant. I was just writing and trying to tell stories.
Chicano literature was still a burgeoning field, still developing. Scholars were debating if it began with English and works published by Chicanos in the United States, or should Chicanos claim works going back to the Aztecs in Mexico, and the Spanish in the Americas. I’m still not sure that argument has been settled.
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| Inspired by an ancestor's journey during the Revolution |
I began outlining what would become my first novel, Pepe Rios, a mostly fictionalized story inspired by my paternal grandfather’s flight from his family ranch in Jalisco when he was 17 years old. His father had died, suddenly, and his older brother, Pedro, had run off to join the revolution, so my grandfather, the eldest male in the house, expected to take the role, “man of the house.”
According to family lore, when his older sister married, nobody asked my grandfather’s permission for her hand. Instead, the couple asked my grandfather’s mother for permission to marry, going against tradition. My grandfather took the slight personally. He felt disrespected. Impulsive? Maybe. He ran away from home and never returned.
Just a teenager, alone, he crossed war-torn Mexico. We don’t know much about his journey, only that it couldn't have been easy, and he ended up in the north, working dairy farms in Kansas, traveling down through the southwest, until he ended up on L.A.’s westside, the small settlement of Sawtelle, what the Mexicans called Sotel, West Los Angeles, today.
They say his mother walked the long distance, each day, from their ranch, Las Amapolas, to the church in San Diego Alejandria, to pray for his safety, and a hope for his return. He never returned, and he never contacted his family to let them know he’d started a new life in California. It’s hard for me to believe because he was such a loving man but, I was told, his mother died never having heard from him again. I hope somebody got that part of the story wrong.
I remember thinking that if my novel takes place in Mexico is it considered Chicano literature, and how would publishers view it? This begged the question: how do our old-world roots influence us as Americans descended from Mexicans, even if we’ve never been to Mexico? As a third-generation Chicano, born and educated in the U.S., in an ethnically mixed neighborhood, a U.S. Army veteran, far from fluent in Spanish, as a kid, how much did my Mexican roots contribute to my American identity?
Where does our Chicano, Chicana identity begin, north or south of the border? For the protagonist of my novel, Pepe Rios, his Chicanismo started south of the border, but his Americanization began on the north side of the Rio Bravo, where one journey ends and another begins.
As the oldest in my family, I spent more time with my Mexican grandparents and relatives, both paternal and maternal, than my younger siblings. My grandparents spoke only Spanish and lived in Santa Monica, and other Los Angeles’s westside neighborhoods, among friends and relatives from their ranches and villages in Mexico. My uncles and aunts, most of them born in Mexico, arrived north at an early age, around 1920, and attended U.S. schools, spoke and wrote both Spanish and English fluently. Mexico, regardless of what I thought, pulsated through my psyche.
For these reasons, I decided to place my first novel in Central Mexico because it’s the region where three of my grandparents hailed, and I’d visited the area numerous times, so I’d become familiar with the land and the people.
I was reading Mexican writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela, and Agustin Yanez, trying to understand Mexico and the Mexican mind. I read as much as I could about the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the catalyst for my family’s migration north, but I wasn't Mexican, not by a long shot, even though I’d heard so many stories of grandparents’ lives in Mexico and trek from their ranch, Mitic, in Los Altos de Jalisco. I began to think, that, yes, Chicano literature starts south of the border, in those towns and villages where our grandparents, and their ancestors, lived, for generations.
Yet, with all this going on in my head, I didn’t see myself as a Chicano writer, but a writer who is Chicano, and that's how I answered the Herald Examiner’s writer. If one labels him or herself as an ethnic writer, journalist, or artist, does it limit oneself to writing only about ethnic issues? Do we stereotype ourselves? African American writer and critic Ismael Reed, in an introduction to Beginning Ethnic American Literatures, argued, it doesn't really matter what we call ourselves. American ethnic writers carry a burden Caucasian writers/artists don’t carry or don’t even consider, how to portray their ethnicity in their work.
In the wider world of creative art, Chicanos, for example, like other ethnicities, have seen their portrayals in movies, books, and art, historically, as mostly negative, or stereotypical. Recently, I watched Under the Volcano, a movie adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s novel, one of my favorite books. Director John Huston, he of the academy award-winning “African Queen,” followed Lowy's storyline closely. Set in 1930s Quanahuac, better known to most as Cuernavaca, Lowry told the story of an alcoholic, self-destructive English ambassador known as the “Counsul,” who brooded over his estranged beautiful spouse, and at the same time, suffered from PTSD due to his actions in WWI. Cuernavaca had become his home, yet he could barely speak Spanish, nor did he interact much with Mexicans, except for the town doctor.
Something of a “Kurtzian” dystopia, Cuernavaca is portrayed as a rough, dusty, uncut gem, while Mexicans are seen as either stoic silent, near-mute, Indians, much the movie's stage setting, or as brute savages, waiting for the Consul to slip-up, which he does, so they can become his executioners, riddling his drunken body with bullets. The Mexicans at El Farolito, a bar rivaling Star Wars' outer space bar scene, drunks, fascists, thieves, rebels, prostitutes, even a little person, appear, not unlike freaks escaped from a carnival. To be fair, and a little more accurate, the Consul is usually so drunk that, if seen through his eyes, this is how Mexicans and Mexico appear. Yet, one still must consider, how will American audiences view Mexicans and Mexico in Huston's rendition? I'm sure Huston never stopped to think about it.
Caucasian writers 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. To Ishmael Reed's point, ethnic writers feel a responsibility to not only “get it right,” but strive to “get it down, accurately,” allowing all characters their humanity.
Chinua Achebe, the African scholar-author of the classic, Things Fall Apart, in a critical essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness," took on Joseph Conrad’s beloved, dystopian classic, and called Conrad “thoroughly racist.” Achebe saw Heart of Darkness as inaccurate, racist, and dangerous as to how Europeans viewed Africa and Africans. It made no difference if Conrad's point was to show ignorant, selfish, greedy Europeans destroying Africa. Achebe argued, Conrad's Africans (like Huston’s Mexicans), act at a level just above animals, and Africa (like Mexico), something akin to Eliot's Wasteland.
Achebe quoted Conrad’s portrayal of Africans, “They 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 juxtaposed Conrad's white characters to Africans, as if Europeans are observing their primitive, cave-dwelling ancestors.
Like many European writers who use underdeveloped countries, ethnic and indigenous communities to set their stories, even if their white characters are evil or unsavory, they often follow Conrad, and they fail to show a country's complexity or history.
One of Conrad's literary sins, according to Achebe, is to use all of Africa as the mere setting for the disintegration of one puny European mind, which is a reminder that ethnic artists can never completely discard their ethnicity or their culture in their work. They have neither the luxury nor the privilege.
