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CHAPTER 2 John Rechy’s Bending of Brown and White Canons Outlining a Queer and Chicano Critical Frame In 1963 John Rechy published his runaway bestseller City of Night, introducing the American critics and readers alike to a fictionalized American demimonde . As guide into America’s cities at night, Rechy invented the unnamed, biracial (Mexican/Scottish) and bisexual protagonist from the bordertown El Paso. Since City of Night, Rechy has introduced his readers to dozens of other similar self-identifying characters. In spite of his long-standing emplotment of such ethnosexualized characters, however, Rechy has been traditionally identified as part of a Grove Press avant-garde—and not as a key player in the shaping of contemporary Chicano/a letters. The identification of Rechy as author of “outlaw” (queer, bisexual, and straight) avant-garde fiction is not entirely the result of mainstream critical and scholarly reception. In a number of interviews, the biographical Rechy has sidestepped identification as a Chicano writer. In a 1995 interview with Debra Castillo (“Outlaw Aesthetics,” 122), Rechy self-identifies as an “outlaw writer” and “literary saboteur” who writes novels that stretch the boundaries of “realism” (118), defy canons, and ultimately embrace all of the human experience—racial, sexual, and/or otherwise. And, in an interview in 2001 with Jonathan Kirsh (KCRW, November 28, 2001), Rechy discusses the fact that he’d always been “writing about Mexican Americans” but also expresses a “discomfort” with being “pigeonholed” in any one writerly category. He embraces instead the category that “transcends them all.” So while Rechy understands that categories such as “gay writer” as well as “ethnic writer” have helped make his work visible, his sense of himself as an author is as one who writes outside a given category. That he writes of the complex experiences of Chicano/a border-dwellers is reason enough to return to his fictions to acknowledge his position both 02-T3393 6/22/05 1:56 PM Page 47 within a literary avant-garde and a (queer) Chicano/a literary canon. Indeed, it is perhaps because of his sense of himself as a literary saboteur that he so powerfully imagines an otherwise essentialized and/or neglected queer Chicano/a identity and experience. Perhaps, it not a question of framing Rechy’s narrative fictions as within an either/or paradigm. Perhaps, Rechy as literary saboteur can complexly re-imagine what it means to be Chicano/a precisely by employing avant-garde technique to bend genre and reconfigure world literary canons. The value of Rechy’s novels as a focus of study, then, is to explore how he employs a variety of narrative techniques and genres (for instance, the picaresque mode, Joycean stream of consciousness style, and/or the mixed media pastiche of a Dos Passos or Cortázar) as a plastic form that radically reframes traditional depictions of ethnosexualized characters. Rechy’s value lies in our understanding how he makes memorable his protagonists’ sexual/racial identity and experience in the world by employing and redeploying narrative technique and genre used by authors from all nations and from all literary periods. Here I focus on several of Rechy’s early novels, Numbers (1967), This Day’s Death (1969), The Sexual Outlaw (1977), and his more recent, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez (1991).1 How each novel variously conveys the psychological transformation of a number of different Chicano/a (straight, bisexual, and gay) characters emerges from exploration of both Rechy’s use of narrative form (technique and genre) and his invention of story (theme, plot, and character ), examples being the use of modernist interior monologue to convey Amalia’s kinesis of consciousness and a postmodernist mixed-media pastiche that powerfully represents the fevered sexual self-exploration of his Jim. Queer Chicano (Con)Texts As mentioned above, even though many of Rechy’s first novels had biracial (Mexican/Anglo) identifying protagonists, he was not taken readily into the Chicano/a literary fold. During the 1960s and early 1970s when his first novels were published and offered up as tour de force imaginings of U.S. demimondes , Chicano scholars were focused on making present those authors whose work more deliberately represented the racial and ethnic experience: Alurista and José Montoya’s causa poetics and Rudolfo Anaya’s narrative reclamation of Aztlán; Rolando Hinojosa and José Antonio Villarreal’s more straightforward narratives of the everyday conflicts of the individual withinfamilia and society. While this period of shaping a contemporary Chicano...

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