Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño del Retorno

3. The Dream of Return to the Homeland

cHapter 3 THe dReam of ReTuRn To THe HomeLand Tal vez sería mi destino venir a tierras extrañas pero algún día a las montañas de Adjuntas yo volveré y mis despojos dejaré guardados en sus entrañas. —“LamenTo de un JíBaRo,” anónimo pauL wHite Has asserted that “amongst all the literature of migration the highest proportion deals in some way with ideas of return, whether actualized or remaining imaginary” (14). Most Hispanic immigrant literature likewise promotes a return to the homeland and, in so doing, is antihegemonic and rejecting of the American Dream and of the melting pot. The ethos of Hispanic immigrant literature is based on the premise of return after what authors and community expect to be a temporary sojourn in the land where work is supposedly ubiquitous and dollars are plentiful and the economic and political instability of the homeland is unknown. Authors or their narrators (or both) dissuade readers from investing in the American myth of creating a new life, a new self in the United States, where one is supposedly free to develop one’s potential, climb the social ladder, and become independently wealthy. With equal conviction they discredit the idea of a melting pot in which all races and creeds are treated equally and have equal opportunity to attain the benefits the United States has to offer. The last lines of Daniel Venegas’s novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (1928) state this disdain in no uncertain terms: “Los mexicanos se harán ricos en Estados Unidos, cuando los pericos mamen” (Mexicans will become rich in the United States when THe dReam of ReTuRn To THe HomeLand 53 parrots suckle their young, 159). The attitude of not assimilating goes back to early days of Hispanic immigration. An editorial of March 24, 1880, in El Horizonte expressed it as follows: Los mexicanos, bien lo sean o hayan renegado de este título, son siempre tratados con injusticia y prevención, por los jueces, los ciudadanos , los pudientes, y en general todos los hijos de esta nación. Por consiguiente, si no se ha de lograr ningún mejoramiento, y de ello estamos todos convencidos, ¿a qué renegar el título de hijos de la República de Méjico . . . [ya que] permaneceremos extrangeros en los Estados Unidos y como tal nos considerarán siempre?1 It is noteworthy that at this early date the writer employs the term renegado (renegade) to invoke the fear of identity loss in the United States. The term will be used time and again in the twentieth century in Mexican immigrant literature, both oral and written, to bring home a moral lesson about the dangers of assimilation. One’s ethnic or national identity can disappear under the crushing pressures exerted by the American mainstream and its national myths. Of the three terms employed by public commentators and writers, pocho2 (non-Mexican, applied negatively to Mexican Americans), agringado3 (gringoized or Americanized), and renegado, the last is by far the strongest, reminiscent even of the New Testament reference to those who denied Christ. Agringado, on the other hand, was widely used in the nineteenth century , for example in an editorial in the El Paso newspaper El Monitor on August 13, 1897, chastising agringados for not donating money for the celebration of Mexican independence day: “A esos agringados que niegan ser mexicanos, por el solo hecho de haber nacido en los Estados Unidos, les preguntamos, ¿qué sangre corre por sus venas? ¿Acaso pertenec éis a la raza sajona y sois trigueños por el hecho de haber nacido en la Frontera? ¡Qué barbaridad!” (We want to ask those agringados who deny they are Mexican based on the sole reason that they were born in the United States: What blood flows in your veins? Can you possibly belong to the Saxon race, and are you dark-skinned only because you were born on the Border? How ridiculous!) As can be seen from the quote, identity and national allegiance at this time were becoming associated with racialization. It is ironic that transmigrants, who were inclined to identify themselves regionally or tribally and had no real awareness of national identity before immigrating to the United States, suddenly found themselves 54 Hispanic immigRanT LiTeRaTuRe imagined by the receptor nation as Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Spanish, terms often applied indiscriminately to a host...