Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing

Review Essay: Recent Chicano Writing Raymund A. Paredes University of California Los Angeles Chicano (or Mexican American — I use the terms interchangeably) writing has grown remarkably since 1965 when Luis Valdez yoked his considerable playwrighting talents to the cause of César Chavez's farmworkers' union and launched a literary movement . The publication of a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is no longer a rare event; indeed, two publishing houses, Arte Público Press of Houston and the Bilingual Press of Tempe, Arizona, seem to be flourishing by specializing in just such works. Some Chicano writers, Gary Soto for example, have acquired national reputations while others, most notably Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, have won prestigious literary awards in Latin America. This surge in creative activity has been accompanied by a rise in literary criticism. In the past year, two ambitious studies have appeared: Marta Sanchez's Contemporary Chicana Poetry (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985) and Cordelia Candelaria's Chicano Poetry (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood, 1986). One of the most gratifying developments in Chicano writing recently has been the expansion of its ideological perspectives. Always innovative in its structural and linguistic features, Chicano writing, especially in the first decade of its emergence, often verged close to predictability in its presentation of the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of Chicano life. This quality was not surprising, given that Chicano writing initially evolved in a highly charged political context and that authors felt obligated to promote a program of social reform and cultural preservation. That Chicano writers as a group no longer felt bound to a particular political and ideological agenda became clear in 1981 when Richard Rodriguez assailed bilingual education and affirmative action programs in his autobiographical Hunger ofMemory, much to the astonishment of numerous Anglo reviewers who lavished praise on the book in journals ranging from the New York Times Book Review to People magazine. The continued diversity of current Chicano writing, ideological and otherwise, is evident in works that have recently appeared. Of all the works under review here, Lionel Garcia's Leaving Home is the most predictable and the least satisfying. The novel traces the experiences of several Mexican Americans who live in California just before and during World War II. Like José Antonio Villarreal and Rudolfo Anaya before him, Garcia focuses on this period as a watershed for Mexican Americans, a time when their patriotic feelings turned irrevocably away from Mexico and they found themselves involved in the central events of American Ufe. Leaving Home is that most typical of American ethnic works: the generational novel of conflict, acculturation, and, inevitably so it seems, assimilation . Garcia is an ambitious writer; he has in mind nothing less than a Mexican American epic, a chronicle of ethnogenesis (to use Werner Sollors' term) that delineates the development of Mexican American culture and character. Unfortunately, Garcia's achievement falls short of his ambition. First, the novel is ineptly written, occasionally to the point of unintended humor. No editor seems to have glanced at the manuscript. Garcia writes that sweaters are "hanged" on 124 Book Reviews125 clotheslines and that a character "had drank too much." A female character has skin that "was smooth, though wrinkled and very pale" while a male character, we are told, is "mostly in a bad mood all the time." In addition to his grammatical and logical errors, Garcia develops his plot clumsily. Characters come and go and reappear improbably. And both major characters are flat and hardly more than conveyances for Garcia's careless observations about Mexican American experience. Garcia seems to have learned much of what he believes about Mexican Americans from John Steinbeck. Many of Garcia's characters resemble thepaisanos of Tortilla Flat, stupendously ignorant and complacent, unconcerned about pulUng themselves out of their cultural muck. Garcia connects their behavior to the long history of bigotry against Mexican Americans in California but much too weakly to mitigate the novel's portrayal of Mexican American culture as inherently and severely pathological. The uninformed reader might conclude from Garcia's work that Chícanos deserve every act of malfeasance directed at them by Anglo society and that assimilation is the only remedy for the scourge...