John S. Christie - Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination: Literature of the Borderlands

Emerging Voices Political, Social, Cultural, and Legal Issues

edited by
Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
University of New Mexico

First published 1998 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

Published 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire 0X14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Copyright 1998 John S. Christie All rights reserved

Christie, John S. 1954-

Latino fiction and the modernist imagination : literature of the borderlands / John S. Christie.

p. cm. (Latino communities)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8153-3246-6 (hbk)
ISBN 978-1-138-00180-0 (pbk)

1. American fictionHispanic American authorsHistory and criticism. 2. American fictionLatin American influences. 3. American fictionEuropean influences. 4. Hispanic AmericansIntellectual life. 5. Modernism (Literature)United States. 6. Mexican Americans in literature. 7. Cuban Americans in literature. 8. Puerto Ricans in literature. 9. Ethnicity in literature. 10. Narration (Rhetoric) 11. Literary form. I. Title. II. Series.
PS153.H56C49 1998
813.5409868dc21

98-31294

No part of this study would have ever been completed or even conceived of without the support of two people: my wife Lucia who gave me the time to work and all the Latino stuff thats in me, and my friend and teacher, Gina Barreca, who has somehow kept me laughing the whole way through.

I owe thanks as well to my colleagues for their comments, advice and encouragement: Evelyn Farbman, Charlie Darling, Ron Pepin, Nancy Caddigan, Barbara Douglass and Mary Ann Affleck.

From a general perspective, the growth of Latino literature is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sometime in the early 1980s, perhaps with the publication of Sandra Cisneross The House on Mango Street (1983) or Oscar Hijueloss Our House in the Last World (1983) or Richard Rodriguezs Hunger of Memory (1982), it dawned on the mainstream book industry and parts of the reading public that there existed a body of literature written in English by U.S. writers of Latin American descent. Over the last decade or so, encouraged at first by small, independent publishers, readers have begun to turn their attention to a collection of novels and stories which give voice to the lives of U.S. citizens living within the bicultural/bilingual borderlands of this country. Obviously, Latino fiction had been around long before this period of recognition (not to mention the Latino poetic tradition which lies outside the scope of this study), but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, works by writers like Arias, Pineda, Islas, Chvez, and Viramontes began to appear on the shelves of bookstores outside the Southwest. The few established Latino writers, nearly all of them Chcanos (Rechy, Anaya, Villarreal, Paredes, Hinojosa, Rivera)those whose popularity arose after the 1960s Chicano political movement - now gained credibility as elder statesmen for a younger generation of novelists and storytellers. In the eastern U.S., the autobiographical Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas (in the wake of Claude Browns Manchild in the Promised Land) resurfaced as one model for the urban autofiction of writers like Judith Ortiz Cofer, Abraham Rodriguez, Esmeralda Santiago, and Junot Diaz. Cuban-American writers like Hijuelos, Cristina Garcia and Roberto G. Fernandez (writing in English) established the beginnings of Cuban-American prose as a force distinct from the islands rich literary heritage. There appeared more frequent reviews of stories and novels in English by writers with Latin American cultural connections to the Dominican Republic (Alvarez, Diaz) or Central and South America (Goldman, Manrique). The result of this increasing public attention is an extensive body of Latino literature which, it is now fair to say, constitutes a particular subgenre of American literature. The list of fiction writers grows daily as publishers release new anthologies in their constant search for the next best-selling ethnic voice: Castillo, Va, Senz, Goldman, Benitez, Ageros, Abella, Alcal, and Gilb.

Scholars are not far behind this explosion of creativity: courses in Latino literature abound throughout the academic world, and there are numerous projects currently underway at universities throughout the U.S. to categorize and document the contributions made by Latinos to American letters. So far, the results are impressive in the particulars, but also fragmented. For those interested in Chicano/a writing, journals offer an extensive amount of criticism that is expanded upon daily as perspectives change and literary works are rediscovered. Chicana feminists are especially active in scholarship directed toward the lives of southwestern Latinas. At the same time, individual critics investigate the literary contributions of Latino writers with cultural roots in the islands of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, and thereby contribute to the larger field of post-colonial studies. Yet most Latino critics have primarily focused either upon individual, separate ethnic groups (mainland Puerto Ricans, Chicano/as, or Cuban- Americans) or analyzed a limited selection of texts, often by a single writer whose work might mesh with a specific critical approach. For example, influential works by the first of New Yorks Puerto Rican immigrant writers, Bernardo Vega and Jesus Colon have reappeared through the efforts of scholars like Juan Flores and Hunter Colleges Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueos whose mission is decidedly focussed upon a single group. The important scholarly works of feminists like Roberta Fernndez, Tey Rebolledo, Gloria Anzaldua, and Eliana Rivero concentrate solely on the woman writer, while the Jameson-influenced cultural studies of Chicano writing by Jos David Saldivar and Ramn Saldivar omit the urban Puerto Rican and Cuban-American authors. Scholars like Rosaura Snchez, Genaro Padilla or Nicols Kanellos have turned their attention to literary history, especially to Spanish texts from the Chicano past in order to showcase a Latino historical literary tradition. Emily Hicks has begun to establish a theoretical base for Border Writing, and Debra Castillo a case for Latin American feminist theory, but both studies emphasize Latin American literature and leave little space for close readings of Latino fiction.

The aim of this book is to approach Latino fiction from a wider perspective, and to cross the standard critical boundaries between Latino groups in order to focus upon the literary language of a collection of complicated novels and stories. My goal here is to provide a detailed and informative examination of a wide range of texts, believing that an emphasis upon the formal aspects of Latino fiction will neither detract from the writers depictions of sociological situations, nor deny the heterogeneity among distinct Latino ethnic groups. I assume from the start that readers will understand the problematic nature of the term Latino (or Hispanic which I have chosen for the most part to avoid), and that they naturally recognize the extensive cultural diversity of people who fall under such a nebulous label. In fact, I will argue that the close readings in this book help to foreground each individual authors political, ethnic, and racial uniqueness by recognizing and celebrating the narrative elegance with which cultural issues are presented. Since language and culture are inseparable, readers who overlook the vibrant literary creativity in these novels and stories often underestimate the Latino writers expertise, and may therefore misinterpret the strength of a writers social convictions. At present, many scholars and teachers from a variety of academic fields outside literature use these literary texts to illustrate social issues impacting on Latino life. While this may be a valid practice, Latino fiction, as a consequence, is somewhat ghettoized and distanced from a literary association, as the readers attention is steered toward sociopolitical issues arising mainly in the plot and character of the texts. As writers, Latinos are seen less as artists than as commentators. The point stressed in these pages is that sophisticated manipulation of language (i.e. subtleties of linguistic design, structural patterns, mixtures of Spanish and English) in no way hinders a writers capacity to convey his or her cultural critiques of the hybrid Latino world. The bulk of this study, therefore, explores in detail how Latino writers use narrative and linguistic innovation in order to celebrate and question the details and dilemmas of their own hybridity.