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Community as Protagonist In John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War John E. Loftis University of Northern Colorado ThatJohn Nichols' major concerns as a novelist are overwhelmingly social is obvious to any reader; he even tells us, in the "Author's Note" prefixed to The Nirvana Blues, that his editor "has angrily denounced me as a 'Stalinoid'" (ii). His political and social beliefs as manifested in the novels will be embraced or rejected by his readers depending on their own political and social beliefs. The more interesting issue is how his primarily social intent affects the novels as novels. In The Milagro Beanfield War, the best, I think, ofthe three novels in his New Mexico Trilogy, Nichols draws upon possibilities inherent in the genre to write a social novel different from most other socially oriented American novels. The central conflict in this novel is between two cultures, two ways of life, two views of reality: the Anglo and the Chicano.1 Rather than focus on a single protagonist, a "hero," he develops a collective central figure: the real protagonist of The Milagro Beanfield War is the Chicano community of the town of Milagro. In creating this protagonist, Nichols not only examines particular social changes but also offers, implicitly, a theory about the nature and processes of such social change. The opening epigraph of Milagro — "What's that little half-pint son of a bitch want to cause so much trouble for" — engages immediately an important issue that Nichols needs to deal with in such an unusual novel: how do we account for and reconcile individually motivated actions on the one hand and collective movements on the other. As we ask what motivates Joe Mondragón to illegally irrigate his dead father's abandoned beanfield, we are also led to another, larger question: what enables the impoverished, weak, unorganized Chicano community of Milagro to confront and temporarily defeat the rich, powerful, organized Anglo establishment. In answering these two questions, we must examine the relationship between individual and social group as it is established in the novel; in that relationship we find both Nichols' theory ofsocial change and his artistic achievement. Early reviews ofMilagro praised it for its entertainment value, but only one, by Frederick Busch, took it seriously as a novel. In his review, Busch makes several astute observations, but because of the ways in which he applies these observations to the novel, he condemns it for what seem to me wrong reasons. First, he observes that "The novel is not Joe's story, or that of anyone else" (53). He is right, of 201 202Rocky Mountain Review course, but this only becomes a flaw in the novel if one assumes that every novel (as most in fact do) must have a single individual at its center. Second, he points out that many of the central characters are stereotypes, and about this he is partly right. He continues by complaining that "they don't exist in and of themselves, and they don't act because of inner necessity" (54). If by "inner necessity" Busch means that we should be able to analyze characters' motivations according to some system of individual psychology, he is probably right; but the novel provides us with a context that suggests another, collective psychological model that does accurately account for characters ' actions. Third, he objects to the long "set piece" on Amarante Cordova in the novel's first chapter, claiming that Cordova is "not essential to the design ofthe novel" (54). The novel contains many such "set pieces," and while some may not be crucial, the one on Amarante Cordova, and the earlier one on Cleofes Apodaca, are crucial to the design of the novel because of the relationships of these characters to the Chicano community, the collective protagonist of the novel. We generally expect a novel to have an individual protagonist, and Joe Mondragón seems at first to be that protagonist. As we begin to recognize the social intent of the novel, we anticipate his being like Yossarian in Catch 22 or Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the character who comes to embody the values central to the novel and who thus becomes the...

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