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PAGES: 207

​Available on Amazon

​On August 2, 2018, what might have been the first encounter between Mexican academics and Chicano writers took place in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México, at the Fifth Annual International Conference on “Latin America: Tradition and Globalization in the 21st Century,” hosted by the Universidad Internacional, in coordination with St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. Professor Álvaro Ramirez, a member of the Modern Languages department at St. Mary’s, the organizer of the conference, asked Armando Rendón, the Somos en escrito editor, if he would be interested in assembling a panel to discuss Chicano literature at the conference.
Seizing the opportunity for a first encounter with mexicanos on the subject, Rendón invited three Chicanan writers to speak on the nature and scope of Chicanan literature and its symbiotic relationship to Mexico in particular and the Américas in general. In order of their presentations, they were Rendón, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Roberto Haro, and Felipe de Ortego y Gasca. Illness kept Dr. Ortego from attending at the last minute but his colleagues stepped in to discuss the main themes of his essay.

​By Armando Rendón

The intent of my remarks is to lay the first few bricks to a bridge between Mexico and the rest of Latin America into the United States. It’s a notion that has threaded my thoughts going back to the early years of the Chicano Movement, the latter 1960s—that the way to span our two-fold worlds is through literature and the other cultural media.
In mid-1970, I was in the final stages of completing Chicano Manifesto, the book that has served as a touchstone for many Americans in addressing and understanding issues which impelled the Chicano Movement and the underlying philosophy of chicanismo.
After 300 pages of trying to portray what it meant to be a Chicano, I asked, not knowing the answer as I wrote the words: “What does this kind of multicultural intuition promise for the future of the Chicano, of the United States, or of the world.”
I remember the answer coming to me out of the blue. I wrote: “Fundamentally, I see the Chicano as the prototype of the citizen of the Americas a century from now.” –We’re halfway there!
I went on to develop this thesis, but in no way did I mean that everyone would be a Chicano or Chicana in 2070, but that through the process of osmosis, rubbing cultures together, learning each other’s language, getting to know each other, contending against each other, an “assimilation or distillation” would occur which would allow for our better angels to prevail.
Then I ran across this quote from Walt Whitman, written 87 years before my “prophecy:” Speaking of 1880s America, he stated: “Character, literature, a society worthy the name, are yet to be established. To that composite America of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts. No stock shows a grander historic retrospect, grander in religiousness and loyalty, or for patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity, and humor.” (From a letter dated July 20, 1883, Camden, NJ., 135 years ago almost to the day)
The term, globalization, had not been invented yet in 1970, let alone 1883, but Whitman foresaw that the force of contact, of cultural abrasion, and inter-dependency with its neighbors to the South would serve the Anglo American society best by civilizing it, unless whites succeeded in wiping out the indigenous peoples and Hispanic colonizers, who had preceded the European incursions.

Here’s what I figure: Whitman did not define what he meant by “Spanish:” we probably all looked alike to him even though by the 1880s, Mexico was a mestizo nation. The Chicano embodies that mestizo character Whitman perceived but also has the advantage of having lived and survived in the belly of the beast at least since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the invasion by the U.S. of this, our mother country. Of course, Mexico and all the countries to its South have borne the savagery and greed of its neighbor to the North for centuries. But generally, Latin America, as a geo-political montage in the Western Hemisphere, has not had to cope with the threat and familiarity of the White Anglo society on a daily basis, generation after generation.
This is where the Chicano comes in: we know the Anglo American society better than it knows itself. It does not know us yet, us Chicanos, Latinos, Hispanics, whatever they may call us. Remember the terms, Latino and Hispanic, were stamped on us by government agencies. Today, certain demagogues, in the shadow of racists going back to the likes of James K. Polk, have painted Latinos, to use the most generally familiar term, as invaders, murderers, rapists, though “there are some good people.” Thus, the indigenous-hispanic character is persistently portrayed as immigrant, ignorant and debased, racially inferior, unable to deal with lofty affairs, let alone help to run the country. Mr. Whitman, where are you? ¿Dónde está?

​In spite of the demeaning history books, of ill-intentioned political motivations, of a racism evolved over half a millennium at least and sustained for the sake of maintaining white supremacy, we have survived. We have contributed great minds, awesome musicians and artists, terrific baseball players, and significant literary works. We are about the task of civilizing America, never mind its current leaders.
Which brings me to my central point: The notice about this conference suggested that Latin American literature basically ends at Mexico’s border with the U.S. I’m here to make a case for the fact, as I see it, that Latin American literature, broadly understood, extends into the U.S.A.
The potential exists for “Latin America” to grow even stronger politically, economically and culturally by recognizing not only the presence of Chicanas and Latinas in the U.S. but our growing influence on America and the significant role we can play in the evolution of an even more glogal presence for the peoples of Latin America. For future conferences such as this one, perhaps the emphasis should be placed on uniting the Latin Americas through the arts, culture and literature.
The Chicano, I believe, is the link to the future for a stronger collaborative effort. Or, put another way, there can be no role for Latin America in a globally connected world without embracing and coalescing with the indigenous-hispanic peoples in the U.S. How can Mexico, let alone Latin America, engage in affecting the nature and direction of globalization, if it skips over the 61 million indigenous-hispanic Americans of the U.S.A. We have been the principal driver of U.S. demographic growth since 2000, accounting for half of the population growth in the U.S. And about two-thirds of these are of Mexican origin. Our median age in 2015 was 28, up from 25 in 2000, but Whites had the highest median age, 43, in 2015.
(From Antonio Flores, Pew Research Center, September 18, 2017)
 What we here propose is that a beginning point is in the written word, in literary endeavors, in inter-American tertulias. It is in poetry, the novel, the short story, and critical writing that greater understanding and collaboration can evolve.
To sum up, while we are concerned with globalization as a geo-political phenomenon and worldwide evil, I urge that Mexico –perhaps at this most timely change of leadership here–  look to the north and refocus its view of Chicanos and Mexican Americans as partners, compatriotas, and joint creators of a new society, a new global standard of “patriotism, courage, decorum, gravity, and humor.”

​Armando Rendón, a native of San Antonio, Texas, is the author of Chicano Manifesto (1971, 1996), author of the award-winning The Adventures of Noldo book series and the founder/editor of “Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine.” He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

​On August 2, 2018, what might have been the first encounter between Mexican academics and Chicano writers took place in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México, at the Fifth Annual International Conference on “Latin America: Tradition and Globalization in the 21st Century” hosted by the Universidad Internacional, in coordination with St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. Professor Álvaro Ramirez, a member of the Modern Languages department at St. Mary’s, the organizer of the conference, asked Armando Rendón, the Somos en escrito editor, if he would be interested in assembling a panel to discuss Chicano literature at the conference.
Seizing the opportunity for a first encounter with mexicanos on the subject, Rendón invited three Chicanan writers to speak on the nature and scope of Chicanan literature and its symbiotic relationship to Mexico in particular and the Américas in general. In order of their presentations, they were Rendón, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Roberto Haro, and Felipe de Ortego y Gasca. Illness kept Dr. Ortego from attending at the last minute but his colleagues stepped in to discuss the main themes of his essay.

​By Rosa Martha Villarreal

For American writers of Latino descent, we have resided in a Dantesque valley of exile. The gatekeepers of the American letters have considered us Latin writers because we write about our culture. The gatekeepers of the Latin American letters consider us American writers because of our nationality. We, like Sisyphus, futilely push the boulder uphill from one gate to another, only to be denied entry proper. But as our political and economic clout has increased in the last half century, our literary production has aroused interest from both the American and Latin America academia. We are too many and increasingly too affluent to ignore as outsiders on the margins of both societies. In the United States, we occupy positions of power in politics, industry, and art. (And perhaps it is because we do have real power—outsized in places that have been historically Hispanic such as California and Texas---that we face a vigorous antipathy by those who want to take “their country back” [sic]. But that’s a topic for separate discussion.)
Thus, academicians on both sides of the border ask anew: Is our work North American or Latin American? Is it both? Or is it neither but rather a new form born of dispossession?  To answer this question, I must refer back to what my literary god Carlos Fuentes calls “the genealogy of literature.” It is from this point, that I posit that we belong to both just as the creative production of Sor Juana Inezmakes her simultaneously a Mexican writer because of her geographical origins and the influence that it exerted on her sensibility, and a Spanish writer because she wrote in Castilian and its literary traditions.
Like all aspiring writers, I set forth to study literature, its form, its history, and the criticism of scholars. Inspired by the works of William Faulkner, I wanted to write serious literature with the themes of the human aspiration for a high consciousness. There was never any doubt that my subject matter would be about persons of Mexican heritage and that these stories would be set, partially or entirely, in Mexico. Although I was born in Houston and raised in California, my roots in Mexico and its norteño history have dominated my imagination. Both my parents are natives of Coahuila, and my father’s family were among the original colonial settlers of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila. My ancestors include the Tlaxcatecan and Spanish founders of Saltillo and Monterrey, among them Alberto del Canto, Diego de Montemayor, Bernabe de las Casas, and Juan Navarro. The past events of the northern frontier were living memories. I can still hear the stories of the past as recounted by my grandparents---stories that their grandparents and great-grandparents had told them—on winter nights as we warmed ourselves next to the cooking fireplace in the kitchen. On those nights, time was not erased but evoked into a simultaneous presence with our time.  We could hear the hooves of horses, feel the wounds and terror of the battles with the nomadic Indians, and despair at the cruel indifference of nature.  I set out to write similar stories about Mexico but in the American literary tradition.

II. Hawthorne and Faulkner

The American writers who most influenced me were William Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne. To better understand why they were so influential, I must refer back to the 19th century and its two competing national and literary visions of the American nation. The first was inspired by the Jeffersonian vision of a new Eden in North America, with the “American” as a new Adam, the farmer citizen free from the bitter memories and conflicts of Europe. The critic R.W.B. Lewis succinctly summarized this worldview in his brilliant book, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Opposite this worldview, said Lewis, was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne foreshadowed later discoveries in human evolution by recognizing the dark animal nature—evil, or the potential for evil—as an integral part of the human psyche. Even before formal existentialism existed, he pondered the human existential dilemma vis-à-vis this inherent darkness, “the stain of sin.” Ironically, Hawthorne posits that our inner darkness and our ability to sublimate evil into something positive is the road to authenticity and, ironically, natural empathy. For Hawthorne, the greatest sin was not that of passion but of the mind, of a “reason that never sleeps,” as Fuentes says in Constancia. Hawthorne’s writing can be interpreted as a critique of his Puritan ancestors’ excessive reliance on the Word, Logos. The Puritans believed that by suppressing natural passion, the human could elevate himself and grow closer to God. For Hawthorne, this amounted to a mutilation of the human soul as he demonstrates in his short story, “The Birthmark.” The scientist, an agent of pure reason, resolves to remove his wife’s birthmark, a symbol of hereditary sin. His effort results in death not perfection.

​Hawthorne’s use of allegory and symbolism as his philosophic vehicles guided my development as a writer both philosophically and technically. I emulated his use of the allegorical journey in my novella, Doctor Magdalena. My creature of reason, Magdalena Ibarra navigates within the human landscape of inner darkness and discovers what Hawthorne calls “a perfect place of beauty.” In The Scarlet letter,it is from her position of sin and exile that Hester Prynneacquires true compassion and wisdom, not the empty piety of religious doctrine. Like Goodman Brown, Hester can discern in the averted glance of young women their own sexual transgression. Because of her own alienation, she truly feels the pain of others, as if all suffering is one thing. Hester and Doctor Ibarra’s suffering is the path of authentic enlightenment, their felix culpa. The road to redemption repudiates innocence. As the character of Catherine of Aragon in the mini-series The Tudors, says, if she had a choice between compete happiness and complete sorrow, she would choose sorrow because happiness makes one forget God whereas suffering opens a true path to him.
Another aspect of Hawthorne’s work that influenced me is his creative use of enigma and ambiguity, which reminds me of the poet king Nezahualcoyotl’s declaration that true meaning can only be intuited in “flowers and song,” i.e., in metaphors. In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne does not tell us for certain if the young man embarked on a physical journey or merely dreamt it, but only that it was true because he was subsequently wise. One criticism of the ending of my novel Chronicles of Air and Dreams: A Novel of Mexico is that I don’t reveal Maria Elena’s ultimate discovery in her journey of many languages and dreams.

​The dreams, silences, fragments of histories and memories are the partial relics of a past that cannot be completely recovered. I, much like the character of La Nahua who collects omens on the peripheries of Mexico City, cannot offer a single interpretation of the many dreams, desires, and the floating fragments of conversations of ghosts because they are only partially known. The storyteller acts as the presenter of images that, according to Carlos Fuentes, the reader must arrange and interpret according to his/her desires.
A close cousin to ambiguity is Hawthorne’s use of enigma. Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is a favorite subject for analysis, but for me Parson Hooper in “The Minister’s Black Veil” poses a more complex situation. The veil simultaneously conceals and reveals. T.S. Eliot famously said that we “prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.” So, is that face, our identifier to the world, false? Worse, are we aware that it could be false? By concealing the face, does the parson reveal his true inner self? Or is the veil/mask an active agent that allows him to become someone else? Kobo Abe explores the same existential question in his 1964 novel, The Face of Another. I experimented with identity and the human face as an enigma in Doctor Magdalena. Is she just a face, a creation of her father’s ambitions? If so, is that constructed face now her true self, an integral part of her inner being? Or is there another embryonic self who exists within her primal self?
Her allegorical journey into the world of ancestral memory makes her question whether, contrary to conventional feminist criticisms, the male constructs can be a positive component to the development of feminine psyche. Whether she actually dreams or physically experiences her journey of discovery, her story is true on some level because its seeps into the mass unconscious. In the songs and fables, there is now a story about a woman who had her memory removed.
Aside from Nathaniel Hawthorne, no one influenced me as much as William Faulkner, who, besides exploring similar philosophic themes as Hawthorne, revealed a writing style that could be adapted to the sensibility of the Mexican dreamscape. When I first read Faulkner in my freshman English composition class at San Jose State University, I was jolted by the revelation that the English language could be molded in such a manner as to conjure the memories and histories suppressed by triumphalist historians.
I heard in his writer’s voice the soft murmurs of the Mexican storytellers of my parents’ native Coahuila. Faulkner’s writing style demonstrates a preference for the cumulative sentence and elaborate phrasal modifications that suspends time, creates metaphor, conjures the simultaneity of conflicting desires, equivocations, moral ambiguities, and resurrects a world remembered in dreams. I adapted and modified the Faulknerian style to evoke the sensibility of the Spanish language and the emotive world of my ancestors.
Second, I was influenced by Faulkner’s use of circular time. By arranging his narrative in a circular rather than linear narrative, he summoned the past into the present, permitted two times to exist simultaneously in the space of a single story. Thus, the narrative is one and many. There is not a single truth but competing truths born of competing longings that defy easy moral definitions.
In Faulkner’s short story, “Barn Burning,” for example, the boy, Colonel Sartorius Snopes, is torn between the reality of his father’s time which is passing but not passed and the ethos of an emerging civil society. He is conflicted between his natural love for his father—“the pull of blood”—and a hatred of what his father stands for and doesn’t stand for. He must choose between blind familial loyalty and the desire to be free to create himself. This existential dilemma occupies my fiction as well: to be what is expected is to deny what can be created.

​III. Carlos Fuentes

Many of my reviewers have classified my fiction as an example of Latin American Magical Realism. That’s not surprising because the writers of the Latin American Boom were very influential in my development: Gabriel García Márquez, Elena Garro, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Octavio Paz. Of that group, I gravitated the most towards Carlos Fuentes, both thematically and structurally, because, although Fuentes intended his fiction to be Magical Realism, it can also be read as speculative science fiction. I say speculative science fiction because I developed an affinity for physics during my university studies and could subsequently identify aspects of Quantum Theory in Fuentes’s fiction such as the Many Universe Theory, time travel, consciousness and the holographic universe, and the manipulation of sub-atomic particles.
Unlike Magical Realism, speculative science fiction has an empirical basis, and thus, has the element of plausibility. For example, there is nothing in our known science that explains the growth of the corpse in García Márquez’s “The Third Resignation.” However, the Many Universe Hypothesis can explain the phenomenon of Señora Consuelo’s simultaneous manifestation as a young and old woman Aura. Her ability to go back in time is theoretically possible.  Felipe can be both Felipe and General Llorante. The study of quantum mechanics has challenged the conventional thought of our empirical reality.
As William Blake intuited in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” Perhaps Fuentes was thinking of Blake when Felipe discovers a new world through the doors that open with the slightest touch in Aura. The plausibility ofAura has been my guiding principle. I try to keep all phenomena in my fiction within the plausibility and the limits of science.
The second aspect of Fuentes’s writing that made a lasting impression werehis existential themes and his assertion that a book is a conversation with another book, one author responding to another. Just as Aura is Fuentes’s response to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, my Doctor Magdalena is a thematic response to The Death of Artemio Cruz, with regards to the role of identity, memory, and betrayal. I revisit the role of betrayal, identity, memory inChronicles of Air and Dreams, and like Artemio Cruz I set it in two times, alternating the chapters between the past and the present. However, it was Auraand its theme of erotic love and identity that has fascinated me. It took me 10 years to finally continue that conversation with Carlos Fuentes with The Stillness of Love and Exile (La quietud del amor y del exilio).
Fuentes discusses Aura in “How I Wrote One of My Books” in his collected essays, Myself with Others. His criticisms of patriarchy and its marginalization of women is one of the most eloquent polemic on patriarchy. He fictionally depicts his criticism of a world where “Man divided between his divine thought and his carnal pain is the author of his own unbearable conflict.” Felipe, blinded by the light of masculine constructs, discovers a new world in the dark rooms of Sra. Consuelo’s apartment. Aura (Consuelo) represents the primal woman who “is the owner of her time because she is the owner of her own body.” The ending is both beautiful and grotesque, or perhaps it is beautiful because it is grotesque, so far from the conventional ideal of beauty and youth, yet so authentic.
The juxtaposition of the grotesque (and absurd) manifests itself again in his novella, La Desdichada, where the feminine principle is trapped and encompassed in the form of the mannequin. However, in both of these novellas, as in Constancia, and The Death of Artemio Cruz, he examines the feminine principle from the point of view of the male: Felipe, the law students, Hull and Plotnikov, and Artemio Cruz.

​What I wanted to do was to continue this conversation but from the point of view of the woman, Lilia Cantú, who unlike Regina in The Death of Artemio Cruz, does not fall in love with her rapist but detests him. She uses the same silences of Fuentes’s mannequin (La Desdichada) to resist him, to lock him out of her inner being. But her self-exile, like Felipe’s, ultimately makes her incomplete, alienated from intimacy, uncertain of her self-worth, and unknowingly untrue to herself. Her journey through love, first through her friendship with Gabriela, and later with her love affairs with Javier San Andres and Miguel Treviño, liberate her from her self-imposed exile.
In my writer’s conversation with Fuentes, I wanted to show the female’s perspective in a world where there is still an imbalance of power, where violence is still a tool of intimidation, and where fear forces the repression of the self for the sake of preservation. Whereas, a woman creates higher consciousness in men in Fuentes’s fiction, I responded by portraying self-realization from the woman’s perspective, not as the passive but active agent. Not the one who is discovered by men but who discovers the passion of men as a vehicle for self-actualization.

IV. Conclusion

The making of a writer begins with the books one reads. Just as the apprentice learns from the master craftsman, the writer absorbs the style and substance of his/her art from learning from the masters of literature. For Latino writers, we have the influence of our formal education and with it, the literary traditions of England and the United States. Furthermore, with very few exceptions, we write in English.
But unlike other national groups that have forgotten their mother cultures, we retain distinct Hispanic characteristics. Perhaps it is because of our proximity to Latin America. Or perhaps it is because Hispanic culture changes and remains the same. Despite our Americanness, our attraction and affinity to our ancestors’ culture invariably draws us to the Spanish letters, and thus, we draw influence from that source as well. A close examination of our work will, to varying degrees, show descent from both traditions. It is not a unique literature that stands outside of both traditions, but a literature that simultaneously belongs to both thematically and structurally. Because of the strong influences of two literary traditions, we are writing in both traditions in varying degrees.
Some works such as Ron Arias’ The Road to Tamazunchale, for example, is American literature because it takes place in Los Angeles, its characters are American, and it is written in English. But it is also Latin American fiction because of its magical realism and Latino themes. The Rain God, by Arturo Islas, is American Literature because it is set in the United States and is written in English, but its subject matter are the Mexican Americans of New Mexico, and he employs the circular narrative style invented by Faulkner and popularized by the Boom writers. My creation, The Stillness of Love and Exile, is more of a Latin American novel in English although it relies not on magical realism but American-style science fiction.
One can go on, but that is an endeavor for scholars and not a novelist. I hope that this conference is a new beginning for the classification of the work of American Latino writers, who offer a window into the inner collective mind of our community in the United States and has emerged as the latest historic permutation of Hispanic culture.

Works Cited or Consulted

Arias. The Road to Tamazunchale. New York: Anchor, 1992.
Asimov, Isaac. Understanding Physics. New York, Dorset Press, 1966.
Faulkner, William. “Barn Burning.” The Collected Stories, Vintage, 1977, pp. 3-26.
Fuentes, Carlos. Aura. Translated by Lysander Kemp, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965.
-------. Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins. Translated by Thomas Christiansen, Harper Perennial, 1991.
------. The Death of Artemio Cruz. Translated by Sam Hillman, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
------. “How I Wrote One of My Books.” Myself with Others: Selected Essays.”New York: Noonday, 1990.
García Márquez, Gabriel. “The Third Resignation.” Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Perennial Library, 1984, pp. 3-12.
Gribbin, John, Unveiling at the Edge of Time. New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1992.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” The Literature Network. The Literature Network, http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/125/.  Accessed 13 Jul 2018.
----. “Young Goodman Brown.” An Anthology of American Literature: Colonial Through the Romantic, 2nd ed., edited by George McMichael, Macmillian, 1974, pp. 1135-44.
-----. “The Minster’s Black Veil.” An Anthology of American Literature: Colonial Through the
Romantic, 2nd ed., edited by George McMichael, Macmillian, 1974, pp. 1152-60.
-----. The Scarlet Letter. An Anthology of American Literature: Colonial Through the Romantic, 2nd ed., edited by George McMichael, Macmillian, 1974, pp. 1211-1322.
Hirst, Michael, creator The Tudors. Showtimes, 2007.
Islas, Arturo, The Rain God. Palo Alto: Alexandria Press, 1984.
Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Talbot, Michael. Mysticism and the New Physics. New York: Penguin, 1993.

​Rosa Martha Villarreal, a Chicana novelist and essayist, is a descendant of the 16th century Spanish and Tlaxcatecan settlers of Nuevo Leon. She drew upon her family history in her critically acclaimed novelsDoctor Magdalena, Chronicles of Air and Dreams: A Novel of Mexico, and The Stillness of Love and Exile, the latter a recipient of the Josephine Miles PEN Literary Award and a Silver Medalist in the Independent Publishers Book Award (2008). She currently writes a column, “Tertullian’s Corner,” for the Latino literary magazine “Somos en Escrito.” She lives near Sacramento, California.

​On August 2, 2018, what might have been the first encounter between Mexican academics and Chicano writers took place in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México, at the Fifth Annual International Conference on “Latin America: Tradition and Globalization in the 21st Century” hosted by the Universidad Internacional (UnInter), in coordination with St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. Professor Álvaro Ramirez, a member of the Modern Languages department at St. Mary’s, the organizer of the conference, asked Armando Rendón, the Somos en escrito editor, if he would be interested in assembling a panel to discuss Chicano literature at the conference.
Seizing the opportunity for a first encounter with mexicanos on the subject, Rendón invited three Chicanan writers to speak on the nature and scope of Chicanan literature and its symbiotic relationship to Mexico in particular and the Américas in general. In order of their presentations, they were Rendón, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Roberto Haro, and Felipe de Ortego y Gasca. Illness kept Dr. Ortego from attending at the last minute but his colleagues stepped in to discuss the main themes of his essay.

​By Roberto Haro

The northward movement of Latinos from Latin American countries, and especially Mexico, to the United States caused the development of a literary subculture that continues to evolve. A significant part of this process is the creation of a window, a portal through which the Latino community views the larger society, and where America can also see into the Latino community and culture. While other ethnic and racial groups in the US have influenced American literature, only one or two have created a unique window through which the expression of ideas and emotions is available for comparison and exploration by the country of origin and the immigrant nation. 

Non-Latino American writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexi and James Baldwin come to mind as new world writers that explore the intermix of native and different/ external cultures. Yet, for the most part, the unique, viable and impressive Chicano subculture remains tangential to traditional American historians, literary scholars and critics. 

They do not fully understand or appreciate the important subculture that reflects Mexico and how it has joined with American social and cultural factors
to construct a new identity; the Chicano. While the different US environments and provincial cultures influence and condition that identity, there is an overarching communality in America that binds together Chicano society and culture. And Mexican antecedence plays a major role in the development of this identity.

Over the years, Chicanos moved past simple graffiti to murals, oral and written music, and then to poetry, essays and other forms of literary expression to forge their identity. The advent of new sources of media, film and audio recordings, expanded the avenues for the projection of Chicano self-identity. Films like Tortilla Soup are important visual dramatizations of the emotions, sentiments, language and social behavior of Latinos and Latinas that graphically dramatize the Chicano family in today’s America. 

While films like Tortilla Soup are infrequently prepared, there is a growing appreciation by movie moguls that a large and expanding Chicano audience is ready to pay to view films about their experiences in America. However, the dissemination of Chicano ideas, especially in literary narrative, is not well served by the publishing industry, traditional communication outlets, and the media. 

Latino writers continue to be marginalized, especially by white editors and literary critics. These traditional gate keepers in the publishing industry continue to favor simpering memoirs and formulaic mysteries and detective stories (particularly spy thrillers and international intrigue novels), and occasional sops about the “immigrant experience” in America that are sanitized for the average American reader. While self-publishing, the internet, and a vigorous expansion into radio and TV have helped Chicanos, many challenges remain that limit the full dissemination of Chicano literary expression and the rich culture on which it is based.

What can Mexico and the United States do to promote the identification, preservation and dissemination of ideas, feelings and experiences of Chicanos in the US? We need to hear more from writers like Michael Nava, Maria Nieto and the creative Rocky Barilla. These three authors are examples of inventive, talented and award-winning Chicano spokespersons. They have engaging stories to share about Chicanos and their lives in America. It is essential, therefore, that a form of cooperation exist among literary scholars and social scientists in both countries to share and understand the unique writings and communication of Chicanos that benefit all people. 

Moreover, it is imperative that the media and publishing gatekeepers recognize and respect the work of progressive advocates like Kirk Whisler and his important creations: The International Latino Literary Awards and Latino Books into Movies competition. When combined, these efforts promise a full and rich interpretation of what it means to be Chicano, and how our lives have played a very significant role in the history of the United States.
​

​Roberto Haro, who writes under the pen name, Robert de Haro, is a retired university professor with a doctorate in higher education administration and public policy and career service as a senior level academic administrator at major universities in New York, Maryland and California, His 13 novels to date, many of them award-winning, employ historical fiction between 1900 to 1950, contemporary detective yarns, and tales about the Mexican American experience in the United States. He resides in Marin County, California.

​On August 2, 2018, what might have been the first encounter between Mexican academics and Chicano writers took place in Cuernavaca, Morelos, México, at the Fifth Annual International Conference on “Latin America: Tradition and Globalization in the 21st Century” hosted by the Universidad Internacional, in coordination with St. Mary’s College of Moraga, California. A few months prior, Professor Álvaro Ramirez, a member of the Modern Languages department at St. Mary’s, the organizer of the conference, had asked Armando Rendón, the Somos en escrito editor, if he would be interested in assembling a panel to discuss Chicano literature at the conference.
Seizing the opportunity for a first encounter with mexicanos on the subject, Rendón invited three Chicanan writers to speak on the nature and scope of Chicanan literature and its symbiotic relationship to Mexico in particular and the Américas in general. In order of their presentations, they were Rendón, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Roberto Haro, and Felipe de Ortego y Gasca. Illness kept Dr. Ortego from attending at the last minute but his colleagues stepped in to discuss the main themes of his essay.
There’s already a good chance that another encounter between Chicanan and Mexican writers may be part of the agenda for the 2019 conference at UnInter.

The presentations are published here as separate features, but under the title, “The Cuernavaca Papers”

Forging a literature of opposition
in which the periphery becomes the center

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Prologue

Literature is not the product of a vacuum, nor is a literary text a divine inspiration as John Milton rhapsodized. Literature is work. It’s a strand in a bundle of strands that comprise human acti­vity. As such it is engendered by factors in a com­plex matrix of cultural production. And equally complex factors determine a reader’s response to a text, depending on cultural affiliation or association. No one reader is privy to the read­ing of a text.

To understand a literature, a text, one must con­sider the back­grounds out of which a literature emer­ges. Writing is a cultural act surrounded and im­pacted by historical for­ces. What is written depends on the motivations of the writer. As readers and crit­ics, we cannot accurately discern those motiva­tions, we can only approximate them.
More to the point,­ however, is the question: What is Mexican American Liter­ature? Simply, it’s literary production by Mexican Americans, literary production which before the Chicano era had been marginaliz­ed by the hegemonic forces of the Ameri­can literary establish­ment and its minions.
Ortego, “Mexican American Literature: Reflections and a critical Guide.”

1.   Backgrounds
Mexican American/Chicano literature is as American as apple pie. It draws its parentage from the homeland of Chicanos which now constitutes the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma, states that once were part of northern New Spain and identified as “the Mexican Cession”—that part of Mexican territory sundered by the United States as a booty of the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) and ratified by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. All this by way of establishing the bona fides of Mexican Americans many of them now identifying themselves ideologically as Chicanos—a self-designation of protest, resistance, and opposition (see Ortego, “Forging a Literature of Opposition”). Terms of identity have become significant (see “Masks of Identity: The Space of Liminal Possibilities,” latinoopia.com/Bravo Road with Don Felipe, July 2017)
But they are Mexicans ethnically and Americans (U.S. citizens) politically and geographically. The conquest generation of Mexican Americans did not cross a border to abide in the territory they lived in; the border crossed them. Many of their families settled in that territory from the time of Spanish exploration and subsequent settlement with the growth of population spanning almost three centuries before the U.S.-Mexico War. To think of them as immigrants is historically erroneous. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo clearly bestows American citizenship upon those inhabitants of the Mexican Cession who chose to stay within the territory of the Mexican Cession (actually their homeland). Those who chose not to stay moved into the newly designated though restricted space of Mexico as Mexican citizens. Those who stayed became Mexican Americans.
Unfortunately there is no accurate count of the Mexicans who remained within the territory of the Mexican Cession. Jingoist American historians claim the territory was wild and inhabited only by renegade and uncontrollable Indians. This was the message of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 Frontier Thesis arguing that the growth of the United States was its “westering tradition” that tamed the wild and uninhabited west. This vision lost track of the theretofore population centers of San Antonio, El Paso, Santa Fe, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterrey, San Francisco, the San Luis Valley of Colorado and the hundreds of smaller settlements that dotted the landscape between these larger population centers. Fantasy histories of the Mexican Cession rise to the risible. More likely estimates by Chicano historians and demographers suggest a population of 3 million including indigenous populations.
It would be an egregious error to conclude that Mexican Americans were passive in defending themselves against Anglo American aggression and discrimination. In post-conquest New Mexico they struck for better wages and working conditions, they formed private and parochial schools to overcome the deplorable education offered them by the American government. To protect themselves from violent oppression they organizedLas Gorras Blancas for vigilance regarded by whites as marauders. 
Admittedly the population growth of Mexican America had to include a migration stream of minimal density from Mexico to the United States much like the migration stream of “return” by Palestinians to their biblical homeland. The population growth of Mexican Americans to the current 40 million is not due solely to the fertility and motility of the conquest generation. Three factors have spurred that growth:  (1) the migration stream of minimal density, (2) the million and a half Mexicans who fled north from Mexico to the United States during the destabilization of Mexico and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1921, (3) the million Braceros who harvested American crops during World War II from 1942 to 1962 and form the basis for the 40 million Mexican Americans in the current census count.

I​n that 60 million total count of Hispanics and Latinos in the 2010 Census two-thirds (40 million) are Mexican Americans. That is not a trifling figure. Yet they are the least publicly visible in the media, politics, and education. In the public schools of the states of the Mexican Cession they are the largest demographic group being taught by the standards of the colonial curriculum, denied information and knowledge about their history, culture and language (see Ortego “Montezuma’s Children”). In this regard, laws in states like Arizona and Texas have been unduly harsh and apodictic comparable to what I have called “the Mexican Dixon Line.”
Recently, however, there has been a break in the hardline stance of the Texas State Board of Education in not approving a Mexican American Studies course for Texas schools. The course was finally approved to the cheers of Texas Mexican Americans. The course has been too long in the offing, especially in Texas. In Arizona a federal judge ruled that banning Mexican American Studies in the state was unconstitutional and that, moreover it violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. This victory was the result of concerted efforts by Mexican Americans everywhere but certainly in Arizona and texas with Librostraficantes--a book-smuggling operation to take banned books into Arizona where they have been forbidden by a state imprimatur.

II. Opening Salvos

Vis-à-vis harsh and apodictic laws, in 2010 I wrote:

There’s a nativist streak in the American psyche that emerges periodically to unravel the constitutional gains of American society, moving the nation more to the right—in a sort of dance macabre of the American national zeitgeist; in other words: something akin to an American Nazi Party (with the word “Nazi” being short for “National”). What has kept this Nazi zeitgeist at bay has been the vigilance of Americans working to create “a more perfect union,” committed to the preservation and process of democracy as articulated in the American Constitution.  What is little cogitated is that democracy is a process.
Ortego, “Arizona Goes Bonkers.”

This brouhaha erupted over the context of the instructional materials in the Mexican American Studies courses in the Tucson Independent School District. Both the Superintendent of the Tucson School District and the state Superintendent of Public Instruction proclaimed that the material was inflammatory and harkened sedition and insurrection. In toto it was thoroughly un-American.
Nonsense! The aim of Mexican American Studies was and is to acquaint students (principally Mexican American students) with the history of Mexican America as detailed in the preceding section. In the summer of 1969 at the request of Louis Bransford, Director of the fledgling Chicano Studies Program I developed a course on Mexican American/Chicano Literature at the University of New Mexico (Ortego, 2007). I was a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English finishing up the Ph.D, in English. It was the first such course in the country.  
Research for the course led to my dissertation on Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature (1971) first study in the field and to the essay on “The Chicano Renaissance” published in Social Casework, May 1971. The article attracted considerable attention immediately, and is considered a seminal essay in the field—it has been included in a number of readers and anthologies, though surprisingly the piece was ahead of the curve of the Chicano Renaissance though no journal of English accepted it for publication.
Recently, as a guest panelist for the Western New Mexico University MEChA (Chicano Student Organization) Forum on the Status of Education for Chicanos, I mentioned in my commentary that my PhD dissertation was on Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature at the University of New Mexico in 1971, first study in the field. It occurred to me to explain why I chose that topic. Easy! Because no one else had and I wanted to quaff my ignorance.
I was 40 years old when that revelation hit me. There I was a Mexican American knowledgeable about British and American literature with a respectable bibliography in the field but totally bereft about Mexican American literature--I had studied Mexican literature.
Ahem! Mexican literature is not Mexican American literature (Ortego,“Mexicans and Mexican Americans: Prolegomenon to a Literary Perspective”).  Therein lies the rub! During 123 years since the U.S. War against Mexico (1848-1971) why had no history of Mexican American Literature been undertaken? Bits and pieces had been penned by various Mexican American scholars but no “grand sweep” had appeared. That lacunae was and still remains a mystery.
As a population, the assimilation rate for New Mexico Mexican Americans grew apace, the traditional ways held sway, The English language and American mores inched along depending on the strength of the Anglo-Hispanic contact. In the main the two cultures did not coalesce—no assimilation though acculturation had established a toe-hold. Anglos saw Mexican Americans as a mongrel race; Mexican Americans saw Anglos as uncouth and boisterous. Anglos called them Greasers. Mexican Americans called themselves Hispanos. By mid-20th century the American Census referred to them as Hispanics.
Despite the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexican Americans were not welcomed nor wanted. They were outrightly caricatured and demonized.

In 1856, W.W. H. Davis, United States Attorney for the state of New Mexico wrote a propos of his experiences with Mexican Americans that “they possess the cunning and deceit of the Indian, the politeness and the spirit of revenge of the Spaniard, and the imaginative temperament and fiery impulses of the Moor.” He describes them as smart and quick but lacking the “stability and character and soundness of intellect that give such vast superiority to the Anglo-Saxon race over every other people.” He ascribed to them the “cruelty, bigotry, and superstition” of the Spaniard, a marked characteristic from earliest times. Moreover, he saw these traits as “constitutional and innate in the race.” In a moment of kindness, though, Davis suggested that the fault lay no doubt on their “spiritual teachers,” the Spaniards, who never taught them that beautiful doctrine which teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Ortego, Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature, pp 68-69.

This was the opening salvo for Mexicans now Americans confronting a new language, a new political system, and a new modus of education. What they faced would turn Odysseus pallid. But it was what it was—obstacles to be surmounted—a sort of Navy Seal crash course for Demi Moore as G.I. Jane. Through thick and thin Mexican Americans have shown their mettle and survived.  And like Joaquin in Corky Gonzalez’s poem: W shall survive! No! We will survive!

III. Crux of the Struggle

More to the point, during my Ph.D. studies I was developing a field-theory of literature by which could compare literary production by genre across the globe. That’s when periodization of Mexican American literature dawned on me (see Periodizaton Chart) and enabled me to see the historical sweep and development of Mexican American literature.
What became apparent was that the literary tradition of the Conquest Generation changed little during the period from 1848 to 1912, the year New Mexico acquired status as a state (64 years). Just as it had before the U.S.-Mexico War, Mexican American poetry abounded in the newly reshaped Mexican American homeland—identified later by Chicanos as “Aztlan” (mythical homeland of the Aztecs). Hispanos kept diaries; maintained assiduous correspondence with geographically distant friends and family, established community newspapers, wrote tracts, memoirs, and plays with regular performances. All the while they maintained and preserved the historic texts. There was no lull of intellection. They were becoming bilingual, holding on tenaciously to their culture and language.
In the process, the inevitable cross-fertilization  of English and Spanish gained ground to the consternation of linguistic purists who dubbed that emerging patois as Spanglish, little realizing the historical linguistic phenomenon taking place, unaware that many languages are the product of linguistic blending—English, Spanish, French, Italian. Unaware of these auguries, Mexican Americans had no prescience that their lexo-cultural experiences would become foundational features of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s.

​The Chicano Movement began long before 1960. It started the day Father Martinez of Taos, New Mexico, railed against the American invasion of northern New Spain (Mexico) which came to be known as the Mexican American War—in reality the American War against Mexico—President Polk caterwauling about aggressive Mexican trespass onto American soil at Brownsville, Texas—a trumped up ploy disguised to cloak the long simmering ambitions of the United States to secure by fair or foul the Mexican land mass that became known as the Mexican Cession—more than half of Mexico territory seized as a prize of war. 
Treachery, treason, and temor on both sides carried the day for American victory in the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848). The American villain of the piece was President Polk. The Mexican villain of the piece was Santa Anna who headed the Mexican government on 11 occasions as Mexico's president, four times before becoming a military-backed dictator. Santa Anna accepted $15 million dollars and agreed to settle all claims of U.S. citizens against Mexico. In 1853 the United States negotiated the Gadsden Purchase for $10 million extending the U.S.-Mexico boundary line to its present southern site. This extension included the people living on the Gadsden Purchase. Again, as in the Mexican Cession there are no real figures as to the size of the population. All the statistics are guesstimates.
If “Spain in America is a more substantial subject than England in America as the historian Charles Gibson commented, then it stands to reason that the “substantial” population of the Mexican Cession plus the population of the Gadsen Treaty would include more than weavers, hunters, and gatherers. The fruits of the golden Age of Spain reached every corner of Spanish settlements. All knew who Juana Inez de la Cruz was.
In terms of literary output, Spain in America is indeed a substantial subject. That substantialization was everywhere present in New Spain and its northern frontier and was everywhere present in those frontier settlements when Spain in America became the Independent Republic of Mexico.
Most of the literature of this period consists of memorials, reports, and correspondence. Old folk plays like Los Pastores were produced regularly in town squares. Poets read their works and the works of established Spanish poets in selected areas of marketplaces. Cuentos (stories) were popular but not novels or tales of wizardry banned by Spanish imprimatur as outrageous and salacious. Here and there literary bent gave rise to newspaper publishing. Father Jose Antonio Martinez, Curate of Taos, for example, published the newspaper El Crepúsculo (the Dawn), the first newspaper in New Mexico as a forum for dissent (North from Mexico, 118).
More contemporary plays by the Mexican playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reflected the consciousness of new-worldness, according to Anderson Imbert (130) 22, infused with a colonial Mexican character reflecting the new society. Though Mexican Americans strove to become part of the American mainstream in their own way they were nevertheless regarded with disdain by a sizeable segment of the Anglo American population crowding the territory of the Mexican Cession. Inevitably Mexican Americans were becoming strangers in their own land. Statehood did not buoy their aspirations. Mounting racial antagonism led to the creation of the Alianza Hispano-Americana in 1895 some 10 years before the creation of the NAACP—so much for the proposition of Hispanics riding the coattails of African Americans.
Major public figures of the time included the New Mexican folklorist Aurelio Espinosa, Napoleon Vallejo and his father Mariano Vallejo, last Mexican Governor of California.  Miguel Antonio Otero was the 16th Governor of New Mexico Territory from 1897 to 1906 appointed by President McKinley and in later life the author of several books on Western lore, among them The Real Billy the Kid. In 1916, a collection of Vicente Bernal’s poetry, Las Primicias (First Fruits) was published to rave reviews about Bernal’s command of the English language dubbing him a man of “double portions” as a bilingual Hispano. 
But all was not serene in El Dorado. By 1912 Mexican American communities along the U.S.-Mexico border had trebled—shades of future portents. El Paso, Texas, became the gateway to the American Midwest—especially Chicago which today has a Mexican American population of some 400,000 pressed in the Pilson Area, once a predominantly Middle-European neighborhood.

​IV. Forging a Literature of Opposition


Invariably social and political dissatisfaction leads to a rupture prompting some physical action intended to remedy the aggravation. Most often that remedy engenders political results that may or may not resolve the aggravation but allays momentarily the inconsequential results of the unsatisfactory remedy.
​
This was the ponderable situation of Mexican Americans in post-World War II America. Of the 16 million American men and women in the armed forces during the war (1941-1946) Between 250,000 and 500,000 Hispanic Americans (mostly Mexican Americans) served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, out of a total of 12,000,000, constituting 2.3% to 4.7% of the U.S. Armed Forces. The exact number is unknown since, at the time, Hispanics were not tabulated separately, but were generally included in the white population census count. They fought in every major American battle of the war as marines, airmen, soldiers (including WAACS) and sailors (including WAVES) earning more medals of honor than any other ethnic group. Mexican Americans served in the American armed forces during World War II despite their progenic status as a conquered people in an internal colony of the United States(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_Americans_in_World_War_II).
Essentially, Marvin Lewis is correct when he explains that Chicano literature “did not evolve in a vacuum.” It does represent, as he points out, “the culmination of cultural dynamics that have been in force on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border for many decades”—a clear progression from Mexican (1848-1912) to Mexican American (1912-1966) to Chicano literature (1966 to the future).
The emergence of Chicano literature in the 1960’s was a response to the domination of Chicanos by the centers of political powers in the states. Chicano literature was excluded from the American literary canon. A homologous fracture between exclusion and selection in the American literary canon depreciated the value of certain texts because they were produced by outcast groups like African Americans, women, Chicanos, and other minorities.
In 1966, a group of Mexican Americans from the periphery (the Quinto Sol Writers) chose to define themselves as Chicanos in the presence of an already established image of them from the center. By that act, Chicano literature sprang into being as a literature of opposition, determining its stance in terms of its distance from the center, staying clear of the center’s destructive gravity and its ontology of domination. Such an affirmation was, in fact, a statement of renewal—thus, “the Chicano renaissance.” Ortego, “Forging a Literature of Opposition”
I agree now as I did then with Wal­ter Ong that most Americans “share a high­ly standardized cul­ture” (3). Indeed as Ameri­cans we all share a com­mon base of culture under-pinned by shared technol­ogies. In my youth there were differences, of course, between the various ethnic groups. ­While tortillas were a staple in our house during the period I was grow­ing up in the Unit­ed States, tortillas were not staples in non-Mexi­can Ameri­can households. My mother made them at home; today I buy them at the supermarket and “everybody” eats tortillas. Al­though now I also eat bagels and various kinds of breads that in my youth we regar­ded as Grin­go food. The re­mains of tradi­tional Mexi­can culture in the lives of many Mex­ican Americans are now only me­mories as tech­nology and shared space homogenize all of us. To be sure, there are still differences. I con­tinue to speak Span­ish though my children don’t. Today the things that make me “Mexican” and Ameri­can are more subtle than they once were. Only physiognomy­ identifies me as a child of blended In­dian and Span­ish genes.­ Many Mexican Ameri­cans look like the rest of dominant Ameri­ca and are not per­ceived as Mexican Americans.
The most prickly considera­tion anent American literature rais­ed by Walter Ong’s essay is that “one cannot teach every­thing” (6). Why not? We just need to make space for the literatures of the others. Who says that in teach­ing American literature we need to read ad infinitum the words of Sarah Kem­ble Knight’s journey to New York? There is much in the presentation of Ameri­can lite­rature that we can whit­tle down to make room for other American litera­tures, including Chica­no literature as part and parcel of American literature rather than as something foreign. Per the dictum of the Latin dramatist Terence: “homo sum; huma­ni nihil a me alien­um puto (I am human; noth­ing human is for­eign to me).”
The 1970 edition of the Norton Anthology of Amer­ican Literatureincluded no Chicanos. It was to be another 20 years before a Chicano writer made it into the Nor­ton. As concluded in Searching for Amer­ica in 1973 and as is still the case today, the absence of Chicano wri­ters in such wide­ly used an­thologies of Ameri­can literature perpetuates the dis­tortions that have rendered Chicano and minority writers invisible. The one anthology that has made progress with inclu­sivity is the Heath Anthology of American Literature edited by Paul Lauter and which includes Hispanics on its editorial board.
There is, unfortunately, condescension in Wal­ter Ong’s Introduction. His imploration for inclu­sion of Chicano writ­ers in American literature is promp­ted with expressions of validation based on improving the well-be­ing of the body Americana rather than calling attention to the agency of literary value in minority and Chi­cano litera­tures. He does say, however: A minority literature often negoti­ates for its own identity with the majority culture and constantly redefines itself, ultimately bringing the majority culture to define itself more adequately, too. (3).
As it was in the beginning, this is the stance of Chicano writers today.

​Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D., (Renaissance Studies/Chicano Studies) is Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Public Policy, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English (Retired), Texas State University System—Sul Ross. He lives in Silver City, New Mexico. Felipe is especially recognized as the earliest proponent of what he called, The Chicano Renaissance, based on his seminal studies of Chicano literature.

​For Works Cited and Consulted, click here to continue.

V. Works Cited and Consulted

Imbert, Enrique Anderson, Spanish American Literature: A History 1492-1910, Detroit, 1969.Ong, Walter, “Introduction to Three American Literatures,” Edited by Houston Baker, Modern Language Association, 1982.Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de, “Mexican-American Literature,” The Nation,September 15, 1969  _____________________, Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature (Diss,), University of New Mexico, 1971.
_____________________, “The Chicano Renaissance, Social Casework, May 1971.
_____________________, “The Mexican-Dixon Line” (reprint from El Grito) in Voices: Readings from El Grito, Octavio Ignacio Romano-V., editor, Quinto Sol 1971.
_____________________, We Are Chicanos: Anthology of Mexican American Literature (Editor) Washington Square Press (Simon & Schuster), 1973.
_____________________, “El Renacimiento Chicano” (translation of “The Chicano Renaissance” 
The Journal of Social Casework”) in Aztlan: Historia Contemporánea del Pueb­lo Chicano,
Mexico: Secretaria de Educa­ción Publi­ca, 1976.
_____________________, The Chicano Literary World--1974 (editor with David Conde), Albuquerque: National Education Task Force de la Raza, 1975. ERIC 101924.
Reprinted as a Special Issue of De Colores, 1 No. 4, 1975.
______________________, “Chicanos and American Literature” (with Jose Carrasco, reprinted from Searching for America) in The Wiley Reader: Designs for Writing, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976.
______________________, Special Issue on Chicano Literature, English in Texas (editor), Summer 1976.
_____________________, “Chicanos and the Pursuit of a Literary Identity,” English in Texas, Summer 1976.
_____________________, “Prolegomenon to the Study of Mexican American Literature,” English in Texas, Summer 1976.
_____________________, Milestones in Chicano Literature (A Guide and Reading List), Austin: Texas Council for the Humanities, 1982.
_____________________, “Are There U.S. Hispanic Writers?” Nuestro Magazine, April 1983.
_____________________, “The Cross and the Pen: Spanish Colonial and Mexican Periods of Texas Letters (monograph) Washington, DC: The Hispanic Foundation, 1985.
_____________________, “Chicano Literature: From 1942 to the Present” in Chicano Literature:A Reference Guide, Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985.
_____________________, “American Hispanic Literature: A Brief Commentary,” ViAztlan, (International Chicano Journal of Arts and Letters), Part I, January-February 1985; Part II,
March 1985; Part III, May 1985.
_______________________, “Mexicans and Mexican Americans: Prolegomenon to a Literary Perspective, The Journal of South Texas, Spring 2005. Posted on Somos Primos, January 2016.
_______________________, “Mexican American Literature: Reflections and a Critical Guide,” From Chicano Studies: Survey and Analysis (3rd Edition) edited by Dennis J. Bixler-Marquez, et al.  Kendall/Hunt, Dubuque, Iowa, 2007.
_______________________, “Mexican American Literature: A Survey of Genres,” Chicano Critical Review, December 2006. Prepared for the Sabal Palms Lectures, University of Texas
at Brownsville, Summer 2004.
_______________________, “Chicanos Writers and the Art of the Novel,”Somos en escrito: the Latino Literary On-Line Magazine, November 12, 2009; posted on Pluma Fronteriza, December 22, 2010. Updated July 26, 2011.
_______________________, “Arizona Goes Bonkers.” From Heritage of America Foundation, June 3, 2010; posted on Immigration, Education, and Globalization: US-Mexico, June 21, 2010; Newsdrome, June 30, 2010; posted on Somos Primos, July 2010.
_______________________, “Forging a Literature of Opposition,” Somos en Escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine, February 11, 2010; April 2017.
_______________________, “The Art and Practice of Mexican American and Chicano Fiction,”
Somos en Escrito: The Latino Literary Online Magazine, December 26, 2017
_______________________, “Some Cultural Implications of a Mexican American Border Dialect of American English, Studies in Linguistics,Volume 21, 77, October,1970.
Reprinted in Introduction to Chicano Studies edited by Livie Isauro Duran and H. Russell Bernard, Macmillan, New York, 1973.
Reprinted in Bridging Two Cultures: Multidisciplinary Readings in Bilingual Bicultural Education, edited by Marta Cotera and Larry Hufford, National Educational Laboratory Publishers: Austin, Texas, 1980.
_______________________, “Which Southwestern Literature and Culture in the English Classroom?” Arizona English bulletin 13 No. 3, 15-17, April, 1971.
_______________________, “Sociopolitical Implications of Bilingual Education,” Educational
Resources and Techniques, Summer 1972.
Reprinted in Mano a Mano (5:1, February 1976), publication of the Chicano Training Center, Houston, Texas.
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Prepared for the 2002 U.S.-Mexico Cuernavaca Transculturation Program, Texas A&M University—Kingsville.
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Posted on Somos Primos, April 2012


PERIODIZATION OF MEXICAN AMERICAN / CHICANO LITERATURE:
ROOTS AND TRADITIONS

By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

While Chicano Literature is identified as such only since the “Chicano Renaissance (1966-1975), the literary tradition of Mexican Americans stretches back to the beginning of the major civilizations in the Americas (Aztecs, Olmecs, Toltecs, Mayas). The literature of Pre-Columbian Mexico is as much part of Mexican America as the Medieval literature of England is part of Anglo-America. This approach divides Chicano Literature into two periods: (1) Roots and (2) Traditions.

ROOTS

I. AUTOCHTHONOUS MEXICAN ROOTS / SPANISH PENINSULAR ROOTS (0000-1521)
The works of this period are antecedently part of the literary roots of Mexican Americans. The book of Chilam Balam and the Popul Vuh, works of the Americas before Colon and Cortez, are as important to Mexican Americans as are, for example, El Cid or Don Quixote. This period reveals how these two literary roots figured in the development of Mexican literature and how, in turn, they have influenced Mexican American literature about the concept of Quinto Sol.

II. SPANISH COLONIAL ROOTS (1521-1821)
This period includes those works of the Spanish Colonial presence in Mexico and what is now the Hispanic Southwest of the United States, works of the period whose focus deals not with Mexico but with some part of what is now the United States, comparable to the works of the British Colonial period (1607-1776) which are now considered American literature.

III. MEXICAN NATIONAL ROOTS (1821-1848)
Continuation of the previous period except that the geography of the above is now controlled by the Republic of Mexico. The focus here is on literary production in what is now the American Southwest before 1848, the northern Mexican borderlands.

TRADITIONS

IV. EARLY MEXICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: The Period of Transition (1848-1912)
Just as American literature really begins in 1776, so too Mexican American literature begins in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2) and the American acquisition of Mexican territory (now comprising the American Southwest) and the inhabitants of the severed territory. This is a period of transition for Mexicans–now Americans–towards a bilingual and bicultural lifestyle reflected in their literature–the literature of the Conquest Generation.

V. LATER MEXICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: The Modern Period (1912-1960)
The beginnings of this period (the Modern period of Mexican American literature) coincide roughly with the beginning of the Mexican Civil War (1910-1921) and the exodus of one-and-a-half million Mexicans to the United States. In this period, Mexican American literature, the literature of the Assimilationist Generation, is characterized more by its pastoral impulse than by its efforts to come to terms with the realities of Mexican American existence.

VI. THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD AND THE CHICANO RENAISSANCE (1960-present)
Publication of Pocho (1959) marks the beginning of the Chicano period of Mexican American literature, writing characterized by a stridency drawn from the Chicano Movement (1960). The appearance of El Grito magazine in 1967 marks the beginning of the Chicano Renaissance. The Quinto Sol writers are regarded as the vanguard of this literary movement.