"How Do You Change This Tragedy of Vision?": Subversion and Citizenship in Victor Villaseñor's Rain of Gold

Published in 1991, Victor Villaseñor's Rain of Gold is a national best-seller that has received scant critical attention. The lack of literary criticism, especially within the subfields of multi-ethnic literary studies and US empire studies, is particularly surprising given the book's engagement with a century of international struggle between Mexico, Old Europe, and the United States. Informed by critical work on the imperial histories and cultures of the Americas, this study traces several intersecting narratives within the text, which document the experiences of individuals crossed by the expanding political, economic, and territorial borders of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These stories provide critical insights into the tensions experienced by a nation struggling to reconcile its socially inclusive mythologies with its systemic oppression of certain American subjects. In conversation with Chicana/o cultural critics, including Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Ramón Saldivar, this article reads Rain of Gold as a feminist dismantling of binary choices between assimilation and marginalization initiated by the book's matriarchs, who work to subvert nativist constructions of citizenship on both sides of the US-Mexico border. The focus on the resistance efforts of Villaseñor's ancestors through the layering of private lives and public histories exposes the domestic and foreign operations of US empire and reveals common patterns of marginalization left out of the official historical record. By unsettling codes of spatial and political belonging, the work produces alternate strategies for creating community from divisive social and political landscapes, a project of critical importance in today's twenty-first-century America.