Crowding Out Latinos

7. Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez: Educating Mexican American Students

Americo Paredes's George Wasltington Gomez: Educating Mexican American Students merico Paredes's George Washington Gomez in many ways is the master Chicano narrative produced by a Mexican American writer so far. Finished three generations ago, in 1940, but not published until exactly half a century later, in 1990, this novel by all rights should have exerted an enormous influence on all Chicano literature that has emerged since.Jose Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959), Raymond Barrio's The Plum Plum Pickers (1969), Abelardo Delgado's Chicano: Twenty-Five Pieces ofa Chicano Mind (1969), and the other Chicano novels published in the period before Chicano literature emerged in the 1970s did not have the benefit of Paredes's novel. That, indeed, is what happens when one generation suppresses a book that should have enlightened the following generations ofwriters. For fifty years, Paredes's work remained tucked away in the author's dresser, reportedly the object ofcold rejections. "Who would be interested in reading a novel about Mexican Americans?" publishers asked in the 1940s.1 During that and the following decade, though, Mexican Americans, including Paredes, would serve in World War II and the Korean War. It was not until Quinto Sol Publications in Berkeley, founded by Octavio Romano and Herminio Rios, awarded their first $1,000 fiction prize that considerable interest in Chicano literature was created among Mexican American Copyrighted Material 82 Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez 83 writers. That first award went to Tomas Rivera's ... y no se 10 tragola tierra/ . . . and the earth did not part in 1971, the same year that Alurista brought out Floricanto en Aztlan in Los Angeles. While the earlier Chicano novels and collections of poems that I mention above showed us that we could write and publish, the books by Rivera and Alurista awakened Chicanos and other readers to the possibility ofcreating a new literature . These developments set in motion the gradual publication of the roughly 180 primary texts and 40 secondary books that today constitute the emerging field of Chicano literature. Paredes's George Washington Gomez is a semi-historical novel set in the fictional town ofJonesville, humorously pronounced "Hon-esbil" by its Mexican American inhabitants. Paredes's fictional community is modeled after his hometown of Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley directly across from Mexico. The novel begins when World War I erupts in Europe and continues through the 1920s and 1930s. Had the work been published when finished in 1940, it should have earlier alerted educators to the disastrous educations that Chicanos tend to receive . Paredes's narrative on how Mexican Americans are educated, ironically, still ought to serve as a major point of departure for today's Chicanos. The novel is the ur-Chicano text because it carefully chronicles the spiritual, social, and psychological growth prompted by the education received by one George Washington Gomez, a young Mexican American citizen from south Texas. Although Rivera's 1971 novel also addresses the importance of education for a first-language Spanishspeaking youth whose family follows the seasonal crops, it is Paredes's text that best establishes the psychologically destructive grade-by-grade educational progress that too many young Chicanos and Chicanas experience in the schools ofAmerica.2 Paredes's bildungsroman remains unsurpassed in detailing the educational journeys ofseveral Mexican American students. His narrative also remains timely, even though it depicts the type of education that Chicanos received when most schools in Texas were segregated according to race. For, despite some current research and dialogues on how best to educate Mexican Americans, readers need to recognize that the educational practices and attitudes revealingly dramatized by Paredes in the 1920s and 1930s still largely shape the educations that Chicanos and other Latinos and minority students experience in the United States. Educators may argue differently and may even defend current classroom practices, but Texas Education Agency and U.S. Department of Copyrighted Material 84 Chapter 7 Education statistics have showed that throughout the twentieth century Hispanic students have had one ofthe highest high school dropout rates in the country, the numbers varying depending on how dropout students are actually counted.3 Literary critics have not addressed the issue ofthe education ofMexican Americans in Chicano literature because such subjects are assumed to be obvious and the purview ofeducators, the social sciences, and public policy. But since improving the educational realities of a growing population of Mexican Americans and other Latinos is...