Crowding Out Latinos

2. Chicano Literature and Irish Literature

Chicano Literature and Irish Literature eaders might be struck by the seeming disparity between my introductory remarks and the title ofthis chapter. One ofmy objectives in this study is to highlight how different expectations can give birth to different realities. With this in mind, I intend to compare two postcolonial literatures that are perceived quite differently: the literature ofMexican Americans and that of the Irish. In so doing, I seek to dramatize what can be called literary scale or value, that is, achievements and prospects, given how individual writers define themselves. These two ethnic groups in part have historically defined themselves and have been seen as living in frustrated opposition to the United States and Great Britain, two hegemonic countries that, respectively, forced the Mexican inhabitants of the Southwest and the Irish people to live under the banners and governments of larger imperial influences. Tangentially , as the frontispiece and Introduction suggest, my own professional life has provided me with an opportunity to observe the development of Chicano writing. By benchmarking the Chicano literary events I have witnessed, I hope to disclose a variety of issues, concerns, relationships, and anecdotes that the emergence of Chicano literature has helped bring to light. About thirty years ago, Chicano literature began to surface almost simultaneously in the heads and hearts ofa number of Chicano activists in the Oakland-Berkeley area; Albuquerque ; Denver; the Los Angeles-San Diego area; Crystal Copyrighted Material 18 Chicano Literature and Irish Literature 19 City, south Texas; and other Mexican American communities throughout the country. Interest in a literature ofour own was prompted by the vacuum that many Mexican Americans began to feel in the wake of the 1965 Delano grape strikes and the marches that Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association organized in California. Dolores Huerta's and Chavez's eventual slogan, "Si se puede!" ("Yes we can!"), I believe, fueled the idea that we could also have a literature, ambitious as the undertaking appeared at the time. The opinion today about what Chicano writers and commentators have brought forth remains divided. Discussions of Chicano and other American literatures, for example, still occur on separate terrains, though a few scholars have made significant advances toward bridging the two.' Chicano writers and critics tend to assume the permanence and continuity of Mexican American literature, while other literati are more inclined to see our literature as a passing infatuation, which, perhaps somewhat like American Transcendentalism , never quite lived up to the expectations about which people dreamed. Critics like Alvin Kernan and Leslie Fiedler have since predicted the demise ofall literature; but literatures, like most things in life, peak and ebb, continuing to serve civilization as the needs of authors and readers decree. In order to understand the impetus behind the writing of Spanishspeaking Americans, one needs to recall what it was like to study literature before the advent ofChicano literature. In 1970, when I began my graduate training in English, following two years of undergraduate study at Pan American University in south Texas and two years at the University ofTexas at Austin, there was not a single Chicano novel or known poem that was readily available to the reading public. Chicano literature did not exist as a field, so when it was time to select a subject area for further study I chose American literature, sensing that our literature would develop as I continued to study Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, writers whose work I thoroughly enjoyed, despite the fact that people thought it strange for a Mexican American to be familiar with works like "Experience," Walden, The Blithedale Romance , Mardi, and Pierre. Following four years of graduate study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of California Berkeley, to everyone 's surprise, including mine, hired me. I hope readers can imagine my discomfort when I soon learned that I was the first Chicano ever offered a tenure-track appointment to teach American literature in that distinCopyrighted Material 20 Chapter 2 guished English department. I have never enjoyed being an experiment, and yet that is how I knew I was seen when I first arrived and all the professors civilly sized me up. Shortly after beginning to teach at Berkeley I met Ishmael Reed, today a leading African American writer, and then a senior lecturer who had been promised tenure. Reed had just founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a circle made up primarily...