Quinto Sol, Chicano/a Literature, and the Long March Through Institutions

School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated.

Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

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In the winter 1970 issue of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought, the editorial board of Quinto Sol Publications announced the first annual Premio Quinto Sol competition. With details repeated in English, Spanish, and caló (Chicano/a slang) Quinto Sol promised a publication contract and $1000 prize for the “best literary work of 1970—novel, collection of short stories, book-length essay or experimental writing—written by a person of Mexican descent who is a resident of the US,” or in caló, “el mejor jale literario—novela, ensayo, cuentos, o vatosismos—escrito por vato que cantonea en el U.S.A.” (“Premio”). The advent of the Premio marked Quinto Sol’s entry into what James English has termed the economy of prestige, “a vast and relational field” comprising the exchange and conversion of symbolic capital among the various arenas of contemporary culture (23). English argues that cultural prizes serve as “our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion” (10), a term denoting the transformations and exchanges of monetary, cultural, social, and symbolic capital.¹ Quinto Sol aimed its marketing of the prizewinners—Tomás Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Part in 1971, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima in 1972, and Rolando Hinojosa’s Estampas del Valle y Otras Obras in 1973—aggressively at educators. The announcement of the prizewinners in the spring 1973 issue of El Grito, for example, includes a note that “these three award-winning works will be available for Fall 1973 classes” (“Winners”). The Premio thus created a circuit of capital intraconversion whereby the cultural capital of the Quinto Sol editors and writers, conspicuously manifest in their higher education bona fides and positions as academics at various universities, became the symbolic capital of the literary prize, which Quinto Sol then rerouted into new forms of cultural capital as the prizewinners became the foundation of the Chicano/a literature syllabus in classrooms across the country.

This essay explores Quinto Sol's foundational role in the formation of Chicano/a literature during the Chicano movement.² I argue that the university plays a pivotal role in this history. If the Premio serves as evidence of Quinto Sol's embeddedness in the economy of prestige, it also represents an interesting disruption of the usual centers of that economy. The Premio did not originate in New York or London; it was not bankrolled by some wealthy businessman interested in converting ill-gotten monetary capital into the philanthropic purity of a prize's cultural capital, as in the case of the Nobel prizes. Rather, it issued forth from a relatively obscure independent publisher whose editorial board comprised faculty and students from local universities. The Premio’s singularity in this regard reflects the larger importance of the university to the emergence of Chicano/a literature. For with very few exceptions, the writers, editors, and critics of early Chicano/a literature were university professors and students, including the Quinto Sol editorial board and all of the Premio winners.³ This is not to imply that Quinto Sol had a simple relationship to the university; on the contrary, Quinto Sol was founded largely to critique racist social science discourses institutionalized in universities, and its founders repeatedly insisted on their independence from university funding.⁴ Recovering Quinto Sol’s historical importance to Chicano/a literature thus promises to illuminate how the university has served at times as the object of Chicano/a literature's resistance and at other times as its most powerful champion.

Quinto Sol's visionary sponsorship of Chicano/a literature has had a lasting impact on the field; the winners of the Premio Quinto Sol remain mainstays of the Chicano/a literature syllabus to this day. Yet Quinto Sol's success has also made it an object of critique for some scholars who argue that it institutionalized an exclusionary version of Chicano/a nationalism. Juan Bruce-Novoa asserts that the canonical heft given to...