“But It Should Begin in El Paso”: Civil Identities, Immigrant “World”-Traveling, and Pilgrimage Form in John Rechy’s City of Night

I know things older than Freud, older than gender.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza

My hometown exists now for me as two cities, the one I wrote about and the one I see when I return periodically, adding new memories.

John Rechy, Postscript, “El Paso del Norte”

With gender as the central concept in feminist thinking, epistemology is flattened out in such a way that we lose sight of the complex and multiple ways in which the subject and object of possible experiences are constituted. The flattening effect is multiplied when one considers that gender is often solely related to white men. There’s no inquiry into the knowing subject beyond the fact of being a “woman.” But what is “woman” or a “man” for that matter?

Norma Alarcón, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of
This Bridge Called My Back”

Much of the initial polemics surrounding the relationship between John Rechy’s identity and the publication of his first novel, City of Night (1963), have undoubtedly been resolved. For example, we no longer need to question if City of Night is a Chicano novel or, more alarmingly, whether Rechy is a real person.¹ We have, moreover, moved well beyond Juan Bruce-Novoa’s early complaint that the Chicano canon rejected writers such as Rechy because “he revealed the irony of homosexuality’s close link with machismo, undermining the chauvinistic stalwart of the male dominated Movement” (121–22). As early as 1997, leading Chicano literary critic José David Saldívar cited City of Night as an example of a hemispheric text in his foundational work on literature of the Américas, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies.² Rechy is now routinely canonized as a Chicano, Latino, and gay writer.³ In contrast to the unnamed protagonist in City of Night (whose most secret identity is, ironically, not that of being a male prostitute nor of being from a poor, Mexican family, but of being an avid reader and author), the real John Rechy has been publishing for the past sixty years and has enjoyed numerous literary awards and steady employment as a creative-writing instructor at various universities.⁴

Written in the early seventies, however, James R. Giles’s essay on the confessional form in City of Night represents an anachronistic reading of the text that admirably circumvents the either-Chicano-or-queer polemic that characterizes the early reception of Rechy’s first novel. As one of Rechy’s earliest literary critics, Giles accomplishes this circumvention by displacing the primacy of the author’s identity when reading City of Night without forgoing the political and aesthetic importance of recognizing a queer of color novelistic tradition. In other words, Giles does not attribute the problematic reception of City of Night to the invalidity of sexuality and ethnicity as analytical categories. Instead, he reconsiders the polemical response to City of Night as one operating within, and meaningfully opening the critical parameters of, an American literary history. For example, Giles compares Rechy to John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, novelists who, in Giles’s literary moment, faced similar critical challenges given that their aesthetic experimentation was often overshadowed or misunderstood in relation to their use of “reportage.” Giles also places City of Night’s confessional form in dialogue with its pre-Stonewall interlocutor, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953).⁵ Giles’s comparative reading of Baldwin and Rechy marks an early consideration of a queer of color novelistic tradition, although, of course, Giles does not use the term “queer of color.” As Giles was writing in a moment prior to the canonization of Chicano literature—a literary moment that was also without the benefits of queer studies (and, hence, had yet to register the historical significance of the term pre-Stonewall)—I attribute Giles’s ability to bypass the either-Chicano-or-queer critical impasse of his moment to his implicit yet undertheorized thesis concerning the relation between processes of racialization, sexuality...