Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Introducing a Second Wave of Chicano/a Visual/Verbal Artists

Introducing a Second Wave of Chicano/a Visual/Verbal Artists Juan Bruce-Novoa’s Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview, which identified a first wave of post–1960s/1970s writers, was followed by a deluge of new Chicano/a voices. Today, Chicano/a visual and verbal artists—novelists, short story and children’s book writers, comic-book storytellers, poets, and playwrights, as well as performance and film artists—dazzle mainstream and multiethnic readers and audiences alike; their creatively crafted worlds, born out of a complex Chicano/a point of view, open their readers’ and audiences ’ eyes to new and different ways of experiencing and understanding the world we inhabit. This “second wave” of Chicano/a sculptors of themes and forms has provided us with fresh new visions while fundamentally reshaping the contours of today’s American cultural landscapes. Many of the writers who make up the second wave of Chicano/a crafters of verbal/visual narratives are included here. They represent an array of artists who work in a variety of genres, including novel, short story, poetry , drama, documentary film, and comic book. They have succeeded in creatively reframing reality using strict and compelling means. They have developed an artistic ethos through a creative dialogue with the courageous artists of the first wave, who forged the instruments needed to make starkly visible a Chicano/a experience and imaginary: Alurista, Rudolfo Anaya, Ron Arias, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Harry Gamboa Jr., Miguel Méndez, José Montoya, Estella Portillo, Bernice Zamora, Patssi Valdez, and José Antonio Villarreal, among many others. From this perspective, Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia could be considered a follow-up to Bruce-Novoa’s collection of interviews with the first 1 2 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia wave of Chicano/a artists (mainly writers). As Bruce-Novoa said, those writers represented “what we can call, perhaps, the first generation or, as Tino Villanueva suggests, the generation of Chicano renaissance writing” (30). Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia also exemplifies the way a later generation of verbal/visual artists deals formally and conceptually with the aesthetic and sociopolitical dilemmas of our society and with the rich landscapes that make up the great canvas of past and present cultural arts worldwide. Of late, several important interview collections that texture such emergent second-wave writers have been published and should be acknowledged. Bruce Allen Dick’s A Poet’s Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (2003) frames its questions around the role of poetry in a range of emerging and established Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Cuban poets. Two other collections of interviews that shed new light on the formation of Latino/a writers are Karin Rosa Ikas’s Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers (2001) and Bridget Kevane and Juanita Heredia’s Latina SelfPortraits : Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers (2000). These two collections make visible the significant contributions of Latina writers, an especially poignant task given the traditional exclusion of Latina writers from the mainstream publishing marketplace and from traditional American literary scholarship. Although these collections focus on fiction writers and poets, they provide great insight into how Latinos/as generally continue to encounter a racist and sexist society. Indeed, Latino/a artists face many obstacles when trying to clear the space for creating, producing, and publishing their work. While the representational map has changed significantly since the 1960s, Chicano/a writers, artists , directors, andpensadores continue to encounter a deep-seated bigotry in the cultural marketplace. Historically, such bigotry has often worn the garb of “aesthetics” to exclude Chicano/a artists and pensadores. In the name of aesthetics—a sense of art containing an inherent beauty—non-Anglo and non-European art has been excluded from the canons of literature, drama, film, and fine art. Not surprisingly, when the first wave of Chicano/a artists and intellectual scholars began to come into their own during the surge of late 1960s civil rights activism, they protested not only social and material inequality but also exclusionary cultural practices: the Eurocentric identification of a lowbrow (bad/street/impure/political) vs. highbrow (good/museum/pure/apolitical) aesthetics. Because this formulation of aesthetics had been deployed by media pundits, editors, and academic scholars to exclude Chicano/a, African American, Asian American, and Native American artists, the new generation linked aesthetics with an Anglo dominance at home and an imperialist stance abroad as well as with a more expanded view of...