Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas

2. Bio-Graphé

TWO Bio-Graphé The hard-won publication of his novel The Rain God in 1984 secured Arturo Islas a significant place in the field of Chicano/a letters. Today, The Rain God appears in the syllabi of colleges and even high schools across the nation. Of course, there is much more to Islas than The Rain God. There are his other novels: the boldly poetic, darkly complex sequel, Migrant Souls (mystifyingly out of print), and his La Mollie and the King of Tears (published posthumously). As far back as his undergraduate creative writing days at Stanford in the late 1950s, Islas was making visible a multiplicity of Chicano/a voices, experiences, and visions in his short stories, poetry, and beautifully crafted letters.1 A central motif in Arturo Islas’s work is that of recovery. Often his deserts recover bodies and voices as wind-whipped sands sweep across high-desert Del Sapo (his fictionalized El Paso) and the U.S./Mexico bor25 derland plains. His sands cover over such bodies and voices—and recover or uncover and make visible others. The act of reading Islas through his writing is an act of recovering a complex individual. Islas’s writing not only cycles through acts of re-covering (making disappear) and recovering (making appear by narrating, remembering, and forgetting ) but also speaks to those Chicano/a subjects that inhabit a constant state of “recovery” and longing for health and life in a society permeated by racism and by heterosexism in two forms, Euro-American and Chicano —neither of which is hospitable to the gay or lesbian Chicano/a. The act of recovery was not just a clever literary trope for Islas. As a Chicano teaching the first Chicanas/os at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he knew that there was much to be recovered and discovered in Chicano/a textual productions. He looked to his students’ creative writing as one such site of literary recovery. By 1970 there were nearly two hundred Chicanos enrolled at Stanford: seventy freshman, twenty transfer students, and nearly forty graduate students. During the early 1970s, Islas encouraged his students to write narratives about the Chicano/a experience. As time passed, he amassed a sizable collection of their short stories, prose poems, and literary essays. He called these first-generation Stanford undergraduates his “pioneers ,” applauding their dedication to making visible Chicano/a creative expression and their struggle against institutional and individual racist acts. Islas described his course as giving “Chicano upperclassmen the opportunity to read and write about the literature that derives from their own background. It will also provide students the opportunity to write fiction and poetry which draws from their Chicano heritage and experience . There is a dearth of literature from the Spanish-speaking culture in this country. Its particular language is rich in possibilities and has been explored only recently by contemporary poets Alurista and Omar Salinas” (Chicano literature lecture; box 33, folder 1). The 1974 publication of a journal Islas pushed hard to establish, Miquiztli: A Journal of Arte, Poesía, Cuento, y Canto, marked a moment at Stanford when people were ready to pay attention to Chicano/a creative expression. The journal’s focus was the U.S./Mexican borderland space, where culture, history, and racial identities and experience would inter26 b i o - g r a p h é sect. In the inaugural issue, Islas’s introduction identified this as the journal that would give voice to “the fact of our double heritage” and that would provide the venue for Chicano/a literary expression for an “audience interested enough to understand and appreciate it” (box 6, folder 12). Its multiple junctures—not unlike Islas’s multiracial El Paso—framed a less parochial understanding of the world. Miquiztli marked a significant moment in the rise of Chicano/a literary studies at Stanford, for it gave Islas and his students a way to articulate the vast spectrum of Chicano/a experiences through poetry and prose, short story and autobiography. It introduced poetry by José David Saldívar, one of Islas’s first Chicano PhD students, and by the writer Bernice Zamora. Significantly, Islas believed that a writer’s work merited treatment as literature only if it held up to an evaluation based on form and content. In the second volume of Miquiztli (1975), for example, Islas writes, “More often than not, much of the...