Good-Bye Revolution—Hello Cultural Mystique: Quinto Sol Publications and Chicano Literary Nationalism

The year 1970 marked the presentation of the First Annual Premio Quinto Sol Literary Award to Tomás Rivera, an associate professor of Spanish at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas. Sponsored by Quinto Sol Publications, a recently established independent Chicano press in Berkeley, Premio Quinto Sol represented the first literary prize promoted nationally for the best fictional work authored by a Mexican American. The award and the publication in 1971 of Rivera’s “. . . y no se lo tragó la tierra” / “. . . and the earth did not part” as a bilingual edition marked a watershed moment for Quinto Sol and the Chicano Movement, one that followed on the heels of Quinto Sol’s 1967 founding of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought, the first national academic and literary Mexican American journal in the United States, and its 1969 release of El espejo—The Mirror, the first anthology of Mexican American literature.

The efforts of Quinto Sol had a powerful impact on El Movimiento’s attempts to mold a national Mexican American culture and community through the production and dissemination of a critical discourse, literature, and art labeled exclusively Chicano. The institutional claims, editorial decisions, and aesthetic sympathies of Quinto Sol, along with the literature and art it popularized within the Chicano Movement, played a leading and influential role in establishing what Michael Denning terms a “cultural formation.” For Denning, who follows Raymond Williams in applying the concept, a cultural formation comprises a “cultural politics” and an “aesthetic ideology,” with the former signifying “the infrastructure of any cultural initiative,” while the latter represents “the conscious and unconscious ways of valuing that a cultural formation develops and inculcates, its ‘aesthetic,’ its sense of what is good, true, and beautiful,” which is “rarely straightforward and uncomplicated” (202). By the mid-1970s, the cultural politics and aesthetic ideology prompted by Chicano Movement radicalism expanded to include several independent publishing outlets and numerous national newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, not to mention the institution of Chicano Studies and Ethnic Studies programs on college and university campuses across California and the Southwest. Quinto Sol and the intellectuals, artists, and writers associated with it proved vital to this historical, political, and cultural process.

The texts distributed by Quinto Sol from 1967 to 1974 stand as the earliest and perhaps most influential scholarly and literary works of Chicano Movement participants struggling to forge an autonomous and self-sustained intellectual and creative space for the development and self-definition of the Chicano community. Shortly after receiving El Premio Quinto Sol, Rivera confessed that the contest and award “me reveló entonces que nosotros los chicanos teníamos vida que buscaba forma [revealed to me that we Chicanos had life in search of form]” (“Chicano” 5). Life in search of form, an account of Chicano literature to which Rivera would continually return, draws attention to the significance of the printed word in the formation of a Chicano collective identity and self-knowledge. Likewise, Rivera, who worked closely with Quinto Sol throughout the early 1970s, underscores El Movimiento’s outlook on the necessity and key function of unbiased artistic and academic venues for publication.

For the editors of Quinto Sol, the fight for self-determination, self-government, equality, justice, and political autonomy—rooted in what Lorena Oropeza describes as a “transition from the politics of supplication to the politics of confrontation” (49) that occurred during the Vietnam War era—had to be waged not solely in the fields, on the streets, and in the barrios, but also in the intellectual and literary circles of the Academy and the publishing industry. Universities, colleges, and mainstream presses discriminated against Mexican American communities through exclusionary policies and prohibitive practices as well as through the production and distribution of scholarship and creative fiction that promulgated racist ideologies, stereotypes, and images. For this reason, explains Octavio I. Romano-V., one of the founding editors of Quinto Sol:

We [Chicanas/os] needed some kind of outlet to express ourselves that would not be edited and modified. There wasn’t a single farmworker’s home that I...