"A Net Made of Holes": Toward a Cultural History of Chicano Literature

In recent (and not so recent) debates, critics and theoreticians have contested the methodology and even the usefulness of literary history. Following the classic challenge of Hans Robert Jauss, reception theorists, among others, have questioned the conventional approach to the subject (i.e., the chronological listing of authors, movements, and works) for over three decades. ¹ Almost concurrently, ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups have called for rewriting traditional literary histories by including previously ignored or silenced voices in the canon. Chicano literary historians, for instance, have pushed in two complementary directions by demanding that works by Chicanos and Chicanas be considered part of the literary history of the United States and by reconstructing Chicano literary history with newly recovered and reprinted texts. ² Paradoxically, however, even these progressive efforts have been undertaken through traditional means. In fact, all histories of Chicano literature have emphasized chronology and successions of works and writers. Here I attempt to suggest parameters beyond chronology that are needed to reconstruct the history of Chicano letters as a borderlands, (trans)national, multilingual field. ³ My own use of chronological references, then, should be interpreted not as a sequential ordering of the past but as a way to connect past and present by invoking significant sociosymbolic moments in Chicano cultural history.

I have chosen 1998 as a point of reference because past tensions were carefully rearticulated during several important anniversaries in that year. First, 1998 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Oñate expedition, which brought to present-day New Mexico such things as the Spanish language and European theater, first performed in the Southwest at a place southeast of what is today El Paso and, immediately afterward, at villages and settlements throughout New Mexico. ⁴ But Oñate and his army also took violent measures against the indigenous populations, notably the Acomas, whose descendants led the protest against New Mexico's celebration of the 1598 campaign. ⁵

The year 1998 also signaled the sesquicentennial of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost almost half of its territory and the United States gained about a third of its present area. The treaty recognized the right of Mexicans who stayed in the "ceded" regions to retain their land, religion, and language. Legal maneuvers, however, dispossessed and marginalized most of them. ⁶

Finally, 1998 was the first centenary of the Spanish-American War, which resulted in the final dissolution of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Cuba and Puerto Rico, lost to Spain in the war, eventually produced the two other main groups of Latinos in the United States. More important for Chicano studies, the confrontation between the United States and Spain sparked a debate over cultural and political identity that manifested itself in Mexican American literature of the time.

The coincidence of events commemorated in 1998 presents an ideal opportunity to reconsider the questions of history and historiography. Indeed, if anniversaries are useful at all, it is because they generate momentum for rethinking the past. They invite us to reread history from the social and cultural present. ⁷ It is not uncommon for such rereadings to change the prevalent understanding of history at a particular time. The mere possibility of thus "changing" the past also provides us with an engaging metacommentary on history as a linguistic and rhetorical construct. ⁸ History is not independent of language or the subjects who write it. It is of the utmost importance, then, to ask what kind of history we want to write for our past as we revise and construct it.

To answer this question, I will use the temporal references outlined above, 1598, 1848, 1898, and 1998, as sociosymbolic moments in the cultural history of Chicano literature. I will attempt, not to construct a comprehensive history based on an...