Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas

5. Being Chicano

FIVE Being Chicano Islas’s identity was very much informed by his cultural and racial sense of being Mexican and American. He was born to second-generation Catholic Mexican Americans and raised within the cultural and socioeconomic U.S./Mexico borderlands. He grew up where Mexican and Anglo bodies rubbed up against one another, where tacos and hamburgers appeared at the same dinner table, and where Spanish and English commingled; and Islas had a deep sense of himself as Mexican and American. Though he was phenotypically light enough to “pass” as Anglo, his family’s strong cultural heritage, their own spectrum of different Mexican phenotypes, and his inhabiting of a Mexican/Anglo border space firmly anchored in him a fluid yet definite sense of self as Mexican American—and as “Chicano” from the late 1960s onward. Indeed, his layered sense of being Mexican American (and later “Chicano”) in128 formed the way he inhabited, complicated, and transformed—and in turn was inhabited, complicated, and transformed by—a variety of culturally , racially, and historically circumscribed spaces. As Islas once lectured to a group of undergraduates, he, like many of them, was a racialized being firmly anchored in “history—both political and literary as well as personal” (Mark Twain lecture; box 25, folder 20). As noted in chapter 1, Islas’s sense of Mexicanness was strongly influenced by his paternal grandmother, Crecenciana, who instilled in him a pride in his “Spanish” heritage that he would recognize as myth only much later in life: his light skin, his puro Spanish, his flawless English. Islas would explore this paradigm of internalized racism in his writing; and in his sensitivity to the problem of internalized racism, he was ahead of his time. He had to negotiate a path in a complex social world, first in El Paso, as a light-skinned Mexican American, and then in Palo Alto, as a Chicano. In this negotiation, we hear the more public voice of Islas, first as a boy living in the U.S./Mexican borderlands, and later as Chicano scholar, professor, and mentor. His contributions are all the more remarkable in view of the inner doubts he wrestled with. o u t o f t h e b a r r i o Islas spent his early childhood at the margin of the southside Mexican section of El Paso known as El Segundo Barrio. His family had lived in this part of town since his grandparents migrated to the United States in the late 1910s; it was a stone’s throw from the border to the south and a safe distance from the city’s central business district, with its banks and boutiques that served the wealthier Anglos who lived in the northern outskirts. Islas’s family lived just on the other side of the tracks from El Segundo Barrio. His neighborhood was not quite Mexican town and not quite the Anglo district; it was a place where Mexican Americans, African Americans, and some older Anglos lived. Most struggled to survive by working in the Anglo-owned steel, rail, coal, and cement industries. As a young boy, Islas would hear as much Spanish as English on the streets; he would see walking in the streets both “Mexicans and blacks,” he tells b e i n g c h i c a n o 129 his students in a lecture on minority voices in American literature (Chicano literature lecture; box 32, folder 15). For the most part, as a young boy Islas never had to venture far from what was called “little Mexico”— that part of town ignored by the city’s Anglo elite. Little Mexico was a womb space where children like Islas were looked after by the tight-knit, extended family community. Little Mexico would become visible to the Anglos only when contractors needed workers or when the city’s police force would invade the neighborhood to contain the city’s “criminal” element , especially pachucos and zoot-suiters. Mexican Americans like Islas’s uncle Enrique called himself a pachuco and a zoot-suiter, proudly displaying his difference from a U.S. mainstream and his parents’ Mexican heritage by walking the streets with a bold swagger and wearing baggy “drapes” (pants) and wide-shouldered jackets. The bodies, culture , and language that flowed through the streets instilled in Islas a deep affiliation with Mexico culturally and racially. For young Islas, the borders between the...