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Three O S C A R ‘‘ Z E TA’’ AC O S TA’ S D E - F O R M E D AU T O - B I O G R A P H É Chicano/a novelists such as Aristeo Brito, Alfredo Véa, Ron Arias, Ana Castillo, and Denise Chávez often invent storyworlds whose narrators and characters do not distinguish between the unreal and the real; they use magicorealism as a storytelling mode that allows their characters to engage with and question restrictive ideologies and such divisions as those that separate Latin American from U.S., metropolitan from rural, criollo elite from mestizo campesino, Western from indigenous ; they use magicorealism as a self-reflexive storytelling mode that has the potential to expand the reader’s perception of the world. For example, Ron Arias’s use of magicorealism in his novel The Road to Tamazunchale can, as Raúl Homero Villa writes, ‘‘draw parodic attention to the Chicano community’s social geographic location in Los Angeles, while [it] imaginatively contest[s] the debilitating impacts of hegemonic urban development upon the barrios’’ (). However, here I want to turn from a discussion that focuses on magicorealism in novels—narratives that readers more readily interpret as fiction due to conventions of genre—to an analysis of magicorealism in autobiography. Certain ethnic- and postcolonial-identified autobiographers choose to foreground the fictionality of their writing of the self; these autobiographers choose to destabilize readers’ consumption of their life stories as fact. As such, these writers can employ any number of storytelling modes associated with narrative fiction. One such mode is magicorealism. One such writer who employs magicorealism is the late Chicano writer, political activist, and lawyer Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, who uses this mode in his The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo () to call attention to the fictionality of his ‘‘facts’’ and to more generally destabilize the genre of Western Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet 79 of 157 and ethnic-identified autobiography that spreads thick veneers over its manipulation of detail to naturalize as ‘‘fact’’ the centrality of its protagonist’s experience and subjectivity.1 Acosta’s use of magicorealism to reform the genre of autobiography is further complicated when we consider the traditionally marginal status accorded to the ethnic-identified narrating subject. In the canonic and juridical domains, ethnic-identified autobiography has come to stand in for the ‘‘proof’’ of the narrating subject’s human-ness. To be ‘‘recognized,’’ the racial and ethnic Other has had to convince his or heraudience of the reality of his or her experience and, thus, adhere to narrating codes that do not call attention to the gap between mimesis and reality. Such Chicano/a-marked autobiographies, then, have served to emplace and humanize racial subjects deemed inhuman by the dominant class; they have traditionally served to invest such racially marginalized subjects with, as Genaro Padilla identi- fies, ‘‘historical presence in the face of erasure’’ (). For the disenfranchised narrating subject to give a new form (re-form and deform) to the ‘‘factual’’ representation of the self and world would be akin to self-annihilation. Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta daringly defies convention by playfully and selfre flexively manipulating narrative techniques and storyworld frames to reform those referential structures that have traditionally worked to emplace the Chicano/a subject in the sociopolitical and historical U.S. landscape. Such a move as Acosta’s use of magicorealism as a narrative mode for presenting his life story is a powerful maneuvering out of what has become a restrictive convention—a straitjacket—for ethnic-identified autobiographers. The inception and publication of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo occurred during the s renaissance of Chicano/a letters—a movement that witnessed those erstwhile marginalized Chicano/a authors writing novels, short stories, and autobiographies in a variety of voices, using a blend of storytelling technique, and re-forming the genre. This became a time for narrative experimentation for many Chicano/a authors. Short stories, novels, poetry, even Chicano manifestos were being published by Chicano/a-marketed journals (Quinto del Sol and El Grito, for example) and publishing houses (Arte Público and University of New Mexico Press). These were often bold and wildly experimental. The time was ripe for Acosta to come along and complicate the Chicano autobiography as laid out by his more conventionally inclined predecessors Raymund Paredes, Ernesto Galarza, José Villareal, et al. Acosta could fashion a text that would...

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