Eusebio Chacón's America

Often literary recovery projects begin by calling attention to the way a text has been unjustly ignored, neglected, or allowed to disappear. From a broad literary-historical perspective, neglect has certainly been the fate of New Mexican writer Eusebio Chacón's little book El hijo de la tempestad y Tras la tormenta la calma: Dos novelitas originales (1892) (The Son of the Tempest and The Calm After the Storm: Two Original Novelettes).¹ Yet neglect in this case seems natural. Chacón published in Spanish with a local newspaper press, El Boletín Popular, in a territory that most white Americans still regarded as remote and primitive. The book had a limited run—a few hundred copies at most—and received only local attention. Ephemerality seems to be the book's defining feature.

Indeed, the book disappeared for the better part of a century, until literary critic Francisco A. Lomelí rediscovered it in 1976. Since that time, however, Lomelí and other influential scholars have insisted on Chacón's status as an "early pioneer" of New Mexican and Mexican American literature (Lomelí 149). In his survey of Mexican American literature, Raymund Paredes describes Chacón's works as "two notable novels . . . written in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes, but [also manifesting] a familiarity with contemporary literary movements in Latin America" (801). An English translation of "El hijo de la tempestad" appears in the widely used anthology The Latino Reader, where the editors describe the stories as "the first novels to express a Mexican-American sensibility in contrast to the Anglo-dominated tradition of Chacón's education" (Augenbraum and Olmos 114).² Another fine translation of "The Calm After the Storm" appears in Marc Shell and Werner Sollors's Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, where Doris Sommer and Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, alluding to Sommer's earlier work on Latin American romances, describe the narrative as a "foundational fiction" (270). Despite the tenuous circumstances of their original publication, Chacón's stories have managed to carve out a space in the expanding frieze of Chicana/o literary history.

It would be a mistake, however, to overstate Chacón's influence. The persistence of his stories is more spectral than central. Few critics have engaged in readings of the two stories, and only a few copies are extant in university libraries. Given the impressive energies behind archival projects such as the Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage series, this critical and editorial neglect is something of a mystery. If the stories are so important, why do they not receive more attention? If they are not actually that important, why will they not go away?

Part of the difficulty of interpreting Chacón's work is the apparent disjunction between his stated aims and the stories. In the introduction to the book, Chacón says of the stories:

Son creación genuina de mi propia fantasía y no robadas ni prestadas de gabachos ni extranjeros. Sobre el suelo Nuevo Mexicano me atrevo á cimentar la semilla de la literatura recreativa para que si después otros autores de más feliz ingenio que el mio siguen el camino que aquí les trazo, puedan volver hácia el pasado la vista y señalarme como el primero que emprendió tan áspero camino. [They are the genuine creation of my own fantasy and are neither stolen nor borrowed from gabachos or foreigners. Upon New Mexican soil I dare sow the seed of imaginative literature so that hereon other authors of happier genius than my own may follow the trail that I blaze, that they may look to the past and remember me as the first to take such a harsh path.]

(2)³

Chacón situates his stories as foundational for a New Mexican literary tradition that A. Gabriel Meléndez describes as "a bold affirmation of cultural will" (135) in the face of Anglo domination during the late nineteenth century. Chacón's stories are thus explicitly not borrowed from gabachos or extranjeros, both derogatory terms for Anglo settlers.⁴ This denial of influence from Anglo sources signals the ability...