What it Means to be a Cholo

“What is Azz Lawn?” Mr. Garcia asks Victor Reyes, the young protagonist of Daniel Chacón’s novel The Cholo Tree. Mr. Garcia is the high school humanities teacher who is “tired of reading about cholos” and who fails to recognize the reference to Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Aztec people. There is a revealing irony and a poignant indictment in the failure of the college-educated humanities teacher to identify a civilization whose achievements rival those of ancient Egypt. The Cholo Tree explores how we come to see others, how social institutions influence our perceptions, and how those perceptions lead to judgments and stereotypes that restrict and confine. Victor Reyes comes of age in that environment, where he has to accept, challenge, or reject what it means to be a cholo.

The bildungsroman that is The Cholo Tree centers on Victor Reyes’s quest for self-discovery, a quest that begins after his near-death experience. Everyone around him, especially his mother Jessica, assumes Victor is a cholo. Jessica is more convinced than ever after Victor is shot, killed, and revived. Victor awakens to the reality that others view him as a stereotype, a typical gang-banger or thug. The insinuations from his mother, his teachers, and his girlfriend resonate, and Victor gradually comes to accept their verdict. In so doing, he begins turning away. He begins to reject his identity, his culture, and his origins. Victor’s journey provides Chacón the opportunity to comment on the societal forces that define identity, that impose those definitions on others, and that limit the outcomes of those who through no fault of their own live unaware of or unconcerned with the associated stigmas.

Mr. Garcia is not alone in his disdain for the cholo. Jessica, too, having taken Chicano Literature classes at City College, tells her son, “your story is so old…No one wants to hear it anymore.” She shares with Victor (in her own words) the opinion of her professor at the college:

Chicano literature isn’t even called Chicano literature no more, and you know why? Because the rest of us don’t give a damn about you cholos. You’re a disgrace to our people. You take us back to when men beat women as if they were garbage.

What can be said when even Chicanos treat cholos as undesirables? At the college, the cholo serves as a scapegoat for Mexican-Americans seeking upward mobility. It allows them to say to the cultural authorities, “See, it is not us; it is these cholos.”

There is also Dr. Green, the Oakland art school professor who rejects Victor and who explains, “a lot of your work is cultural stereotype. No one really cares about gang bangers.” One wonders how the stories and images of the cholo have permeated the social consciousness of the community. If one can place the blame on news accounts, there remains the problem of reaching conclusions about an entire community from a few representations. In a novel replete with images of sight, vision, and artistic perspective, Chacón exposes the blindness and unwillingness of academia to appreciate the artistic contributions of cholos.

At the start of the novel, Victor too is unaware of who he is and of how others see him, but his limitations result from his naiveté. Victor’s experiences before his near-death experience are organic, authentic, and lived. His language, clothes, and food form his culture. It would be odd for him to reject that culture, as it would be for someone to reject their culture if they were raised in an upper class household. Chacón points to the power dynamic at play here. It is the role of educational institutions to explain to us who we are, to label, classify, and organize elements of culture. What a cholo is, what he looks like, and how he behaves are conclusions based on criteria not developed by those who are under scrutiny...