Alex and the Hobo: A Chicano Life and Story

Notes

177 Notes 1. Introduction 1. My understanding of how he created his story came from his “oral literary criticism” (Dundes 1966), which I recorded between 1998 and 2002. 2. See John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1992: 39– 44, 155–178) for the inscription of colonialism on the body and the body as a construct in Western social thought from Durkheim to Foucault. 3. See Rosaldo (1997: 37) and Lamott (1994: 9) on writing to become visible. 4. V. Simmons (1979: 43– 48). 5. My account of the Mexicanos’ settlement of the Culebra Creek and Conejos River comes from V. Simmons (1979: 43– 47), who notes that the Sangre de Cristo and Conejos land grants had very different histories. While both were originally created by the Mexican government, the original grantees of the Conejos land grant were Mexicano families who had come from a number of communities in northern New Mexico, including Taos, El Rito, Rio Arriba, Rio Colorado, and Abiquiu (V. Simmons 1979: 43). V. Simmons (1979: 47) noted that Charles Beaubien, who by 1848 had gained possession of the Sangre de Cristo land grant, encouraged Mexicanos to settle the Culebra Creek area right after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The narrators of oral histories that I collected in the valley declared that their ancestors settled along the Culebra River because they needed land and water. Some may have been driven from northern New Mexico by Anglo pressure coming in from the south. See V. Simmons (1979: 79–83) for a description of the legal and political process by which Anglo-Saxons acquired the bulk of the land in the Conejos and Sangre de Cristo land grants. 6. V. Simmons (1979: 91) and Petty (1997). 7. T. Rivera (1987, 1988). 8. Olivares (1989: 9–10, 73–74). 9. Anaya (1972). 10. See Radin (1963: 1), Kluckhohn (1945: 79), and Dwyer (1982 [1987]: 271). 11. See Paredes (1977 [1993]: 73–110), Rosaldo (1989: 25– 45, 153–175), and Limón (1989, 1994). 12. Comaroff and Comaroff (1992). 13. Deutsch (1987). 14. The qualities that make Alex and the Hobo a valuable cultural document are different from those that critics use to judge “literature” as art. Raymond Williams (1977 [1992]: 45–54) interpreted the meaning and the history of the term “literature ” in a way that has a particular bearing on Joe Taylor’s story. Williams explained that the modern concept combines a sense of “the ‘artistic’ and the ‘beautiful’” with the notion that fiction bears “imaginative truth.” The modern concept originated in the Renaissance and developed as a reaction to the demands imposed on the human condition by the Industrial Revolution. Critics of “literature” developed standards for judging aesthetic merit based on criteria of “taste” and “sensibility,” which were “unifying concepts in class terms.” The notion that aesthetic standards are related to a class system based on a particular mode of economic production helps to place Joe Taylor’s story in a broader perspective. As the son of a cobbler and a worker, he wrote from a different class position than the one that produced those standards that some might use to judge his story. Alex and the Hobo is nevertheless a work of fiction that contains a powerful “imaginative truth” about being a Mexicano boy on the cusp of manhood in the 1940’s. 15. See Briggs (1988: 59–99) for an account of northern New Mexican historical discourse in a conversational context. 16. Cited in Linger (1993: 3). 17. Diana Tey Rebolledo (1994: xx) coined the term “narrative strategies of resistance ” for the ways in which Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s stories marked Mexicano culture in the New Mexican landscape. The term also applies to Joe Taylor’s writing. 18. See Counihan (1986: 7) on Antonio Gramsci’s definition of the organic intellectual . Limón (1994: 26 –35) applied the term to John Gregory Bourke, who wrote about Mexicanos in the Rio Grande basin from a different class position. Zavella (1997) and Limón (1994) have drawn attention to the importance of understanding social location in the presentation of Mexicano culture. 19. Briggs (1988: 92–99). 20. Rael (1957, vols. 1 and 2). NOTES TO PAGES 4 – 8 178 NOTES TO PAGES 8 – 76 21. Rosaldo (1989: 153–175) relates an incident involving Geertz (1968: 152– 153), who was working with a young Javanese man who told him “myths and spells” and asked to borrow the...