Life in Search of Readers: Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature

Introduction

ix Introduction This book is a reader’s book. Its topic (reading), its author (a reader), and its intended recipients (academic and other interested readers) all point toward this often overlooked but most essential element of literary communication. In the field of Chicano/a literature, not much has been written on readers and readerships to date. The relevant studies on the subject will be quoted as appropriate in the following chapters.But those studies,because of size or other limitations,have not attempted to analyze in depth the ways in which Chicano/a literature connects with and is shaped by interaction with its audiences. The challenge was, then, to reverse that trend and to embrace readerships and response-related issues as the center of a scholarly project. To that end, and through several stages, I started working with a retouched definition I appropriated from one of Tomás Rivera’s most influential essays, “Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature.” In that essay, first published in , during a period in which Chicano/a scholars and authors were intent on defining what Chicano/a literature was, Rivera proposed to characterize it as “life in search of form.” As a writer, Rivera rightfully emphasized the creative part of the literary process, that of giving form to an experience so as to translate it into art. But urgent as that task was for Chicanos/as in the s,Rivera the reader knew that there was much more to be said about that definition and, as I will discuss in chapter , he gave us a coded expansion of his characterization at the end of his celebrated novel . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra. As the novel closes, its young protagonist climbs a tree and starts waving to someone he imagines perched on a distant tree.With his hand signals, the boy wants that other person to understand he knows s/he is there. To me, that represented the ultimate poetics of silent communication: reading. It was this symbolic formulation of the reading process that firmly grabbed my attention in , as I started teaching Rivera’s novel to my students at Yale University (where research for this book also started).  2 As I proposed to them, and as chapter  will detail for you, Rivera’s novel (his ability to translate life into form) is also the realization that a work of literature has no existence beyond the materiality of its physical components without a reader or a group of readers who would respond to, interact with, and make their own the precise formal arrangement of materials that a text or a book offers them.It was thus that I reformulated Rivera’s definition for my own purposes to define Chicano/a literature as “life in search of readers.” In the ensuing years, a clearer structure began taking shape for my project,eventually resulting in this book.In the process,I benefited from the continuous study of the several schools of so-called reception theory, as well as from other theoretical approaches that will be evident throughout the book. Along with the works of Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Umberto Eco, and Hans R. Jauss, of particular relevance for my project are the ideas of Michel Foucault,Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Homi Bhabha,and others,both in their own right and in their application to the field of Chicano/a studies that scholars of this literature have undertaken over the years. Needless to say, my work dialogues (both in conformity and in scholarly disagreement) with many of the leading voices in Chicano/a (and other) literary criticism, and they have also helped to shape this book with their insights. The main claim of this book is that historically, Chicano/a literature has been defined as much by its readers as by its texts and authors. Expanding that main hypothesis, I was interested in researching how writers and audiences interacted in different periods,from colonial times onward. My study reveals that Chicano/a literature has had diverse audiences since its origins in those colonial texts.Consequently,Chicano/ a literature has manifested different characteristics based on who its intended readers were, what the material conditions of publication and distribution were like, the linguistic choices available for literary communication, and the geographical mobility of writers and readers. Other factors, both literary and extra-literary, have played a role in shaping Chicano/a literature as well, including class status of its ideal readers (with the attendant...