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Notes
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chapter 1 1. The novel, written in Spanish in 1928, was translated as The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed. All quotations in Spanish are from the original version published by the Mexican Secretary of Public Education (SEP) in 1984, and all quotations in English are from the version published by Arte Público Press. However, this translation by Ethriam Cash Brammer for Arte Público Press is not accurate in some cases, especially because the characters speak with a U.S. southern accent; therefore, I will edit such translation in brackets, when necessary. It is critical to include the Spanish version of each quotation to offer the bilingual and bicultural reader the opportunity to discern the comedic aspects of the novel that are lost in translation. Therefore, I incorporate each quotation in Spanish in the endnotes. The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter states: “La palomilla de cómicos que la vacila en los Estamos Sumidos, sabe que la chicanada se pone de puntas cuando le ponen por enfrente algo que le recuerde su santa nopalera y, como es natural, esta flaqueza se la explotan por todos lados. De allí que no hay teatro o jacalón en donde tengan contrato cómicos malos o buenos, en el que falte el peladito borrachento.” 2. The novel has two titles divided by “o/or”; the second one is a popular saying in Latin America regarding the impossibility of something happening. 3. Elliot presents a detailed study on the topic of satire, stating that “the satirist never actually brings about reform”; in other words, although satire may be used to strongly criticize society (as Venegas attempts to do in this novel), this ultimately does not mean that the author’s purpose is to change the social structures (1960, 271). 4. Broyles-González (1994, 7) defines this term as a “tent show. [But] it is impossible to define the Mexican carpa as one thing, for it encompassed a field of diverse cultural performance practices popular among the poorest segments of the Mexican populace. The carpa’s central association with the blood, sweat, and tears of the disenfranchised masses of Mexicans certainly accounts for the obscurity of its origins and evolution.” 5. Muñoz (1999, 4) states that “disidentification is meant to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” 6. There were other writers who published these types of commentaries on the notes Mexican community of the city. Two of his contemporaries were Julio G. Arce, who is better known for his pseudonym, Jorge Ulica, and Benjamín Padilla, known as Kaskabel (Rattlesnake). 7. This information is taken from Kanellos’s introduction to the first edition (1984) of Don Chipote in Mexico (8, 14, 15). 8. I will use the terms Chicana and Chicano when referring to women and men, respectively, who belong to this ethnic group, as well as to working-class Mexicans who reside in the United States. Kanellos 1984, 8. 9. Ibid. 10. For an in-depth analysis of Ulica’s Crónicas diabólicas (1982) see J. Rodríguez ’s introduction. See also Lomas 1978. 11. Lomas (1978, 48) criticizes Ulica’s elitism in the following manner: “Within a limited number of chronicles there is not a single one where Ulica explicitly exalts the positive qualities of the Mexican people. Nevertheless, in the majority of the chronicles, [he] depicts himself as a character/narrator relating his own experiences . . . as a learned, audacious person [who is] a sharp observer with a good sense of humor [and] with good command of English. Within the chronicles, he has an elitist attitude displaying his upper class status, [as] he conducts himself in an acceptable manner and with a respectable distance from the Anglo community in general.” My translation; unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 12. Mexico’s Department of Education, Center for Border Studies in Northern Mexico. Arte Público Press published the novel for the first time in Spanish in 1998 and added a glossary of terms. It also published the English translation two years later. 13. The novel starts at the end of Porfirio Díaz’s regime, a dictatorship that was responsible for the country’s poverty, which in turn caused a massive migration to the United States. Acuña writes: “Modernization had led to the demise of the communal village...