Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas

Introduction: Bringing the Dead to Life

Introduction b r i n g i n g t h e d e a d t o l i f e From an early age, Arturo Islas had an eerie understanding of his own mortality. He experienced several life-threatening illnesses and, as a child raised Catholic in a Chicano family in El Paso, was constantly reminded of the precariousness of bodily existence. To survive not only a religious culture of death but also his personal sense of mortality, Islas learned to use language creatively, to ironize and thereby transcend death. As he designed psychological spaces within which to manipulate temporal categories, he reshaped linear time into a more dynamic helical framework. These fictional realms vitalized and enriched his fifty-two years in the world. For Islas, ghosts (especially those passed down through family legends) lived in the present as part of life’s continuum. The title of this book—Dancing with Ghosts—alludes not only to Islas’s approach to life/death but also to this biography’s approach to its subject . Like Islas’s novels, poems, and short stories, which hybridize both xi time (past, present, and future) and space (north and south of the border ), the chapters of the biography are thematic clusters that speak across time and space, unrestricted by linear causality. They unfold in a kaleidoscopic manner that captures the way Islas wrote about and experienced the world. The story I tell dances, so to speak, between childhood and adulthood, past and present, thereby sidestepping conventional biographical teleologies and highlighting the fact that Islas lived as if time were nonlinear. In the dynamic of this biography, as in Islas’s life, memories behave irrespective of chronology and a single life holds a multiplicity of living selves. More practically speaking, Islas’s sense of mortality also led him to use language to preserve everything he thought and felt. He sought to slow down time by creating vortexes of textualized experience. He kept journals to chart the deep psychological conflicts he felt as a closeted gay college student at Stanford in the late 1950s; he documented virtually every thought and event, on one occasion transcribing his coming-out phone conversation with his parents. He absorbed and reflected on paper the pain and ecstasy of inhabiting in-between spaces: Spanish/English, white/brown, gay/straight, institution/family, San Francisco/El Paso, and academic/Chicano activist, to name a few. From these many worlds Islas drew a complex and irreducible network of selves. n o v e l i s t, p o e t, p r o f e s s o r This book could have been a hagiography, given Arturo Islas’s achievements . He studied his way out of El Paso, Texas, to become the first Chicano to graduate (Phi Beta Kappa, no less) from Stanford in 1960. It was not until long after the post–civil rights 1960s that Stanford’s affirmative action policy turned its sights toward Mexican Americans and African Americans. Affirmative action in Islas’s day included a laissez-faire move to diversify along lines of gender, religion, or race. Islas’s BA with honors in English (and minor in religious studies) proved his mettle. He went straight into the PhD program in English and, after taking some time off in the late 1960s (he worked as a speech therapist at a Veterans xii i n t r o d u c t i o n Administration hospital), became one of the first Chicanos to earn a doctorate in English. Soon after a brush with death that left Islas without a colon and with what he called a “shit bag” at his side for the rest of his life, Stanford’s English department hired him on as a professor. Launching into a career as a teacher, scholar, and creative writer, he wore the garb of a Stanford faculty member and remained the only Chicano professor in English until his death. He worked actively to clear a space for new Mexican American undergraduates, developing proto-Chicanostudies courses and Chicano-friendly administrative policies. Along with the few other Chicanos in academia—Renato Rosaldo, Al Camarillo , and Tomás Ybarro-Frausto—he would help build the Chicano Research Center to fund and support young Chicano/a scholars. Islas, however, did not exactly follow a 1970s brown-power ideological line. He made efforts to keep politics separate from cultural...