Heterotopia: Re-imagined Communities and Barrios Borderlands

Little Nation and Other Stories is a collection of five stories by Alejandro Morales that expands Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities” from Chicano perspectives. Translated from the Spanish by Adam Spires, the publication of the original text, Pequeña nación. Tres novelas cortas debuted in 2005 with the second publication in 2008. In its original language, the text is a composite of three tales: “Los jardines de Versalles,” “La penca” and “Pequeña nación.” In comparison, this new publication features two additional stories in the following order: “Quetzali,” “Mama Concha,” “The Gardens of Versailles, “Prickles,” and “Little Nation.” This English-language version includes an introductory essay by Adam Spires titled, “Alejandro Morales: Writing Chicano Space,” which elaborates on the complexity of “Chicano national space within the United States” (vii).

As a leading Chicano writer, Morales offers a range of stories about Montebello, The Simons Barrio and East Los Angeles, urban geographical sites that show an intimate geographical relationship with the spaces that throughout the author’s life he has called home. And while the scenario where the majority of his stories unfold is Southern California, two of the tales show the transnational and intersectional identity of connected events independent of geography. One tale focuses on the chaotic clash of cultures which defines the core principles of Chicano identity as a result of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. The rise of the nation-state during that time frame is as important in structuring the core principles of Chicano identity as is a second tale that traces the geospatial of Chicano identity to modern-day Northern California.

In the introduction, Spires expounds on Morales’s examination of Chicano identity from the perspective of a “Southwestern heterotopia border zone” (ix). Drawing from an array of contemporary scholarship—Gloria Anzaldúa, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, and Francisco Lomelí—Spires cultivates awareness on the mastery of the author’s ability to lead the reader through a journey across the “chaotic” terrain of writing a Chicano space in non-hegemonic circumstances. The influence of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, for example, enables one to understand Morales’s turn to creative writing to map out geospacial realities of Chicano identity in contexts previously ignored or made invisible by dominant history.

Spires elaborates on the spatial dynamics of Morales’s work to reflect on the author’s use of space, time, and place. Space, time and place, additionally function as a threefold method to bring justice to untold, disregarded or ignored tales that shape Chicano history. The critic understands Morales’s conviction to tell the ethnographic history of communities displaced by law, order and “civilized” progress. The text explores an array of perspectives on the origins of nation building from the gazes of the colonized and the colonizer to inspire an assessment of human geography, the unraveling of social forces, and effects of geopolitical spaces across dimensions of intersectionality. The finesse in which the author strings different tales separated by time, space and place make for a read that is global; localized and at times intimate narratives become situational circumstances from which to understand the global connections that alter the view of Chicanos as a (dis)placed nation of peoples.

“Quetzali,” a word in the Nahua-language meaning a quetzal feather or something precious, is the chosen title of the first story. Quetzali is also a popular female name in the Americas, which means preciosa. As such, this short story brings to the fore the shifting terrain of power from Aztec rule to the imposition of a new civic order upon the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors during the 16th century. Quetzali is a mother of two indigenous children, who is searching for her husband one year after the fall of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, now present-day Mexico City. In great despair, Quetzali steps out from the periphery of the ancient city into the city center with Xochitl and Cuicatl at her side. She...