by Linda Zamora Lucero

Papa’s funeral, spring 2009. In the tiny chapel are my sister Ellie and her clan from Phoenix, my brother Tito, both of Tito’s ex-wives, and Papa’s best buddies—Montez leaning on his cane, Garcia in his wheelchair, reeking of cigar—both retired welders from Hunters Point shipyard. Papa radiated so much love even my newly ex-boyfriend Julián shows his face to pay final respects. Only Mama is missing. When Tito went to pick her up, she insisted she was too distraught to come. Great, I think, although I don’t believe it for a second. Sure enough, just as the service begins, she materializes in the middle of “Gracias a la vida” in a red coat and yellow hat with feathers.
 
“I don’t need help to sit down!” Mama says, slapping the usher’s hand away.
 
“You’re late,” I whisper, grudgingly making room for her in the pew. Dressed up for Papa, I’m wearing a fitted black dress with tiny hand-sewn turquoise flowers, a Oaxacan shawl, large hammered gold hoops, black hair pinned up.
 
“Hello, Raquel,” Mama says pleasantly, sitting on the fringe of my shawl. “Such beautiful music.” And she commences to hum along with the vocalist. Yanking the shawl loose, I close my eyes and pretend she isn’t there.
 
                                                                ****
 
After the service, our family gathers at Tito’s house, where we wolf down plates of homemade chile verde, throw back shots of Herradura and recount the same cherished stories we always do whenever we get together. A favorite is how one Thanksgiving—this was before Mama abandoned us—we children were squabbling over the drumsticks—and Papa asked if he could just this once have some peace around the table. Seven-year-old Tito, thinking he was being real hilarious, smugly handed Papa the bowl of peas, whereupon Papa angrily slammed his fork on the table. We watched in horror as the fork slowly became airborne and cracked the kitchen window. We ate in chilly silence until the pumpkin pie with whipped cream made us boisterously happy again.
 
Tito says, “’Member?” We laugh at the timeworn anecdotes, fall silent with grief. At the ripe age of thirty-nine, Ellie gets up to dance, leading us in a raucous chorus of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Missing Papa’s delighted belly laugh at his youngest daughter’s antics, I suppress a shuddering sob. Ellie’s kids bickering over a toy feels like the saddest thing in the world. Tito brings Mama a cup of té manzanilla and fusses over her. She eyes the proceedings from a corner armchair, the feathered hat like some ridiculous canary atop her head. She’s on her best behavior.
 
Of course, it doesn’t last. Barely three weeks pass before the director of the Thirtieth Street Senior Center calls me at Galería Libertad, the community art center I direct, asking to meet with Mama’s family, meaning Tito and me, since Ellie is safely back in Phoenix. Thirtieth Street is where Mama eats lunch on weekdays, takes piano classes, and is an active member of Mr. Topper’s Mission Tappers, no tapper under seventy-five. Before he died, Papa spent his Saturdays playing poker at Thirtieth Street.
 
“I realize this is a difficult time, so I do apologize,” Mrs. Whitmark says, her lipstick pomegranate pink. She pauses, looks up through bifocals, and an all too familiar despair washes over me. To most people, Mama is an eccentric elder with a mind of her own. Some of us know otherwise. “Mrs. Flores is accusing people of stealing from her purse. Everyone is suspect—the other seniors, the janitors, the cooks, even myself. It’s quite upsetting. Your father helped calm her whenever she got this way, and now we need her family to step in.”
 
“Of course,” Tito says, nodding. “We’ll talk with her.” Tito is a machinist for the transit system. He’s completely overbearing, but somehow women find him fascinating. He’s been married twice with no children, while I can’t seem to find my match, romantically-speaking. Tito has no idea what I do at Galería Libertad. He teases me by introducing me to his friends as “my sister, the starving artist,” and he’s not far wrong. But in the Mission arts community, I have found friendship, love, sustenance. My home.
 
“Losing Dad hasn’t been easy for Mom,” Tito continues. I love my brother, but when it comes to Mama, he ticks me off.
 
“She’s crazy,” I say flatly, brushing a strand of hair from my eye. After Papa’s funeral I’d shorn my long hair into an asymmetrical what-I-hoped-was-stylish cut.
 
Tito shoots me a foul look. But crazy explained my mother who, one ordinary morning after Papa had gone to work, made us children breakfast and sent us off to school, then took a train back to her hometown in New Mexico. To stay.
 
Tito was ten; Ellie, six. I was twelve.
 
In the chaos that followed we all pitched in to help Papa with shopping, cooking and housekeeping. That was the easy part. After Mama left, Ellie suffered from debilitating headaches and Tito was suspended from school every other week for one thing or another. Papa began drinking heavily. There was no one to turn to. My parents had grown up in New Mexico, but we were born and raised in San Francisco in four rooms on Shotwell Street, miles away from kinfolk who gossiped about the neighbors, shushed children at weddings and offered solace when worlds shattered. I was raw with anger at Mama, praying that she’d return to us, declaring that she wouldn’t dare.
 
“Maybe,” my best friend Anna said, “she ran off with a lover.” Prone to dramatic flights of fancy, Anna with her black cat’s-eye glasses concocted wildly romantic stories about our favorite middle school teachers. Now she had one for my mother.
 
Maybe you can just shut up,” I said. A weak response, but heartfelt.
 
Crazy explained Mama’s sudden reappearance in San Francisco five years later. That was the first time a social worker told us Mama was “mentally and emotionally unstable.” But I knew he meant crazy, and for that I was grateful. It explained her crying jags, her periodic paranoia, her denials that she needed help, her refusal to take prescribed medication. Crazy summed it up.
 
In Mrs. Whitmark’s office, Tito loudly clears his throat and promises that he will get Mama to take her meds.
 
“Good luck,” I say, grabbing my daypack.
 
Tito is uncharacteristically silent as we leave Thirtieth Street, his broad, good-natured face splotchy. As soon as we reach my beat-up Toyota, he lets loose. “You were out of line, Rocky, calling Mom crazy! She’s our mother!”
 
Tito and Mama wrote each other regularly after she left. She worked in a café near Taos, and, as we found out later, had reconnected with a high school flame. I was horrified. Tito and Ellie visited her summers, but I refused. When Mama returned, my siblings were elated, being younger and obviously needier than I was. In the five years she’d been gone, I had become 100% Papa’s girl, Athena sprung from Zeus’s head, full grown and battle-ready. Papa never dissed her, but I held her responsible for his alcoholism, his melancholy, for all of us having had to answer endless questions from teachers, busybody neighbors, and shitty strangers who felt sorry for us. Because what’s more pitiful than motherless children in a strange land?
 
So when Tito says, “She’s our mother,” I say, “You’re entitled to your opinion, Tito. I have to go. We have an exhibit of Cuban posters opening in a week.”
 
“Weird haircut,” he snorts. He gets into his car and peels out, as if he were sixteen instead of forty-one. I burst out laughing as his Midnight Blue Chevy leaves fat skid marks on the asphalt.
 
The next time I see Tito, I’ll ask about his prize roses. We Flores don’t say Sorry, even when it’s called for, or a straight-out up-front I love you, even though we do. After an argument, when one of us asks about the weather, it means I’m over it. Dancing salsa after a backyard barbeque means I love my family, or I love the whole fucking world and everything in it. Things go unsaid for days, even years, the love, anger or sorrow pent up inside like a great accumulation of molten lava below surface, wanting release. It’s the Flores way.
 
Friday evening, I’m at home on the computer, writing wall text for the exhibit, half listening to Jeopardy. The category is “Shakespeare,” the answer is “Doubtful Dane.” My cell buzzes—Ellie in Phoenix. I ignore it. We used to watch Jeopardy, Papa and me. He admired Alex Trebek. Debonaire, brainy and not above showing it.
 
A contestant hits her buzzer and shouts “Who is Hamlet?”
 
On Ellie’s third call, I answer, muting the TV.
 
“Mom’s not answering her phone,” my sister says.
 
“I wasn’t answering my phone either,” I chuckle.
 
Ellie ignores me. “Mom was perfectly fine yesterday—Tito says she’s taking her meds, but now I’m worried.” Usually, Ellie asks about what’s happening at the Galería, or about my mostly pathetic, sometimes hilarious dating forays in the six months since I broke up with Julián. Not this time. “Have you seen Mom since the funeral?”
 
On television, Alex Trebek’s lips announce Final Jeopardy, inspiring looks of consternation in the contestants. The category is “San Antonio, Texas.”
 
“Remember the Alamo?” I ask Ellie, wishing she didn’t live so far away. I miss our sisterly heart-to-hearts over her homemade biscochitos and wine.
 
“Come on, Rocky, would you just get over there and check on how she’s doing? Tito’s in L.A. this week.”
 
I sigh loudly, meaning yes.
 
“Great! Love you!” she says, and hangs up. And the burden shifts to me.
 
Mama lives in the same paint-peeling, rent-controlled Edwardian flat we were raised in, located in the heart of the Mission—what the realtors gleefully call “a neighborhood in transition.” No doubt. Since 1492.
 
The door cracks open.
 
“Hi.” I slide my foot inside before Mama can decide whether or not she wants a visitor. “It's me, your daughter.”  
 
“I know.” Hazel eyes peer up at me through huge red eyeglass frames. Mama is queen of her private little planet. She’s wearing a crimson apron with gold rickrack trim over a blue sweater shot with silver on top of a fuchsia dress. Purple leggings, lambswool slippers and a silver “Hottie” pendant complete the look.
 
We are nothing alike. Born in the history-rich Abiquiú, New Mexico, Mama grew up speaking Spanish but she looks like a gringa with pale skin, auburn hair, light eyes like a wary cat. I’m dark like Papa, and proud of it. His first language was also Spanish, but his maternal grandparents were Taos Pueblo. I dress in black: turtleneck, jeans, boots. I do rock the earrings, however; the showier, the better. Today’s earrings are humongous crimson Lucite hearts, a gift from a Oaxacan artist.  
 
“What happened to your hair?” Mama says.
 
“Why don’t you answer your phone?” I counter.
 
The flat smells of Papa’s Tiger Balm and tobacco. I have to stop and catch my breath.
 
“What’s wrong with you, fighting with me already?” Mama looks down the street before closing the door. “I thought you were someone else.” Her tone sweetens. “How are you, anyway, Raquel?”
 
An ordinary question in an affectionately maternal voice, perfectly calculated to derail me. She does this every so often, and when she does, my heart flips like a kite in high wind, and I wonder what it would be like to have a real mother. Would we go to museums together? Would we shop for shoes, get our nails done? What do regular mothers and daughters do? The question slams into me whenever I run into girlfriends with moms, enjoying themselves. Mama hadn’t been there to help me buy my first bra or see me win first prize in a high school art contest. There was more I’d missed, things more profound. I just didn’t know what.
 
The hallway is piled with boxes.
 
“What’s this?” I ask.
 
“I called Goodwill, but they’ve gotten choosy…your father kept everything: clothes, magazines, rusty tools.”
 
A wave of fear hits me. “Goodwill? Where’s his brown suitcase?” Blood thunders in my ears. I catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. I look exactly the way I feel, bug-eyed and off-kilter.
 
“There’s more in the garage. Not interested in old junk. Old junk, old men, old ideas.” Mama laughs, apparently delighted with herself.
 
Old junk? “Please, please, don’t give anything away! I’ll get Tito to bring his pickup next weekend and we’ll take it all.”
 
She disappears into the front room where the furniture—sofa, coffee table, Papa’s La-Z-Boy—has been moved against the walls. She pulls aside the lace curtains on the bay windows and looks out to the quiet street. “The piano should be here by now.”
 
“Piano?” She doesn’t need a piano. Tito gave her an electric keyboard on one of her birthdays. It’s programmable, so that she can play tango, classical or her pop favorites. Papa would read his detective novels in his recliner, foot tapping while she plinked out Beatles tunes note by note.
 
I never understood why he took her back.
 
“Respect your mama,” Papa admonished me when I gave her attitude. “No matter what, she is your mother.” Respecting Papa, I shrugged. I was seventeen when she returned to Shotwell Street, my eyes were already focused on college and the wider world.
 
Turning from the window, Mama says, “Can I borrow ten dollars until Friday?”
 
I dig into my bag and hand her a ten and a twenty. “Just keep it.” I feel vaguely virtuous, giving her something without begrudging it.
 
“I said borrow, Raquel, and only ten until Friday when my social security arrives.” The folded bill disappears into her apron pocket.
 
“Whatever. I’ll have some water and then I’m out of here.” Running the faucet in the kitchen, I check for signs to report to Ellie. Cereal bowl in sink, oatmeal encrusted. Golden moth orchids I’d bought for Papa at the Alemany Farmer’s Market, shriveled and fallen onto the windowsill like exploded firecrackers. Portrait of the recently-elected President Obama. Wall calendar from La Palma Mexicatessen, inked Xs marking the days. Today is April 6. No X as yet.
 
Mama is right on my tail. “I pay my debts. I’m not like that Julián of yours. He still owes me money.”
 
Here we go.
 
“Jeeze. It was change for a parking meter.” I feel my temperature rise. “I’ll repay you! And you can forget Julián because Julián and I are not together!”
 
Papa’s eyes got cloudy as he aged, but not Mama’s. Her eyes are like new-minted dimes, bright with gotcha. “I don’t forget. Julián shouldn’t be borrowing from old ladies. I’m glad you’re rid of him. It’s better to be alone, Raquel. You’re smart, like me. The smartest of my children.”
 
I’m floored. Mama has never expressed the slightest interest in my life or anyone else’s for that matter. Although mortified by the comparison, I can’t help being flattered that she considers me the smartest.
 
“So,” I say, softening. “You’re renting a piano?”
 
Her arms fold defensively. “It was on sale.”
 
“You bought a piano?” Baffled, I pull out a chair and sit at the kitchen table.
 
“For my music lessons, Raquel.” Still standing, she bristles with nervous energy, her pendant flipped so that it reads “eittoH”.
 
“What about the keyboard Tito got you?”
 
“I need a real piano. Besides, Tito steals from me.”
 
Yup. Genial to eccentric to crazy at maximum velocity. The woman who brought me into this world is fundamentally incapable of being the mother I long for. I know this in my heart, in my brain, in my gut, in my very pores, and yet she gets me every time. I rise to tighten the dripping faucet, then turn to face her.
 
“Look, Tito’s here every weekend, and when he can’t, he calls to see how you’re doing,” I say, defending my brother. “Why do you give him such a hard time?” A better question is why am I trying to reason with her?
 
“You know damned well I can’t trust him.”
 
I take slow, deep yoga breaths. Do not engage. Do not engage. Mantra for Mama.
 
Outside, a vehicle rumbles to a stop. “It’s here!” she says. I follow as she rushes down to the sidewalk, patting her hair in the mirror on her way out. A deliveryman in a maroon jumpsuit strolls toward us from a double-parked delivery truck.
 
“Piano?” he asks me. He has sleepy eyes, a pencil-thin mustache, a clipboard.
 
“You’re late!” Mama says.
 
“Sorry, ma’am.” He tips his cap back. “I’m Jesse and that’s Murphy.” Murphy is pulling a ramp from the back of the vehicle. Mama ignores Jesse’s proffered hand.
 
“Where does it go?” he asks me.
 
I blink, smiling. “I’m just an innocent bystander.”
 
“Up here,” Mama interjects, leading us up the steps and into the living room.
 
“You ordered a Yamaha grand?” Jesse is finally addressing questions to the right person. “Ma'am, we get a nine-footer in here and you won’t have room to sit down and play.”
 
“There must be a mistake,” I say.
 
“I don’t need much room,” Mama says, shooting me a dark look. “Move, Raquel, you’re in the way.”
 
So be it, I think. I’ve always been in your way, we all have, Papa, Ellie, Tito. You could have continued therapy, taken the pills, and avoided the crises that your family—not that you recognize us as family—have had to rescue you from over the years. Selfish, selfish, selfish. I back myself against the hallway wall as the movers expertly rotate the piano to make the tight turns. Well, I’ve done my duty. My report to Ellie: Mama is alive. Mama is well. Mama is impossible.
 
“I’m coming back this weekend for Papa’s stuff,” I say, “and will you please answer your telephone? Because Ellie and Tito worry about you.”
 
As I take off, I hear Mama telling the deliverymen, “There’s ten dollars for you when you’re done.”  

                                                                ****
 
On Sunday Tito is wearing his annoying “I’m just a regular vato from the barrio” get-up—Ben Davis work pants and his “Stay Brown” t-shirt from the San Jose Flea Market. We’re both wearing Giants caps. The sun is out, there’s a game this afternoon. I’m anxious to get back to the Galería where volunteers are painting the walls.
 
“We’re here for Papa’s things,” I say, when Mama comes to the door. She is channeling Cher today: red tunic, shaggy vest, ankle boots. Gray wisps escape a blue-sequined beret the size of a small pizza. “God, open a window! Aren’t you hot?”
 
“Leave me be, Raquel. You know I’m always freezing,” she says. “I'll make coffee now that you're here, Tito.”
 
My brother is definitely her favorite child. There are times I believe he is the only person in the world who can get through to Mama, but when I really think about it, I shake my head, No. Because after his visits she accuses him of stealing and she cries. Always.
 
“Momskh!” Tito says, draping his beefy arm around her shoulder, “Where’s the pianoskh?”
 
Mama’s eyes light up. Tito has invented this Russian-esque language just for her.
 
“Who told youskh?” she giggles, leading us to the living room.
 
Tito halts theatrically in the doorway, throws his hands up in wide-eyed astonishment, “Whoa! That’s some piano!” 
 
The piano is impressive, gleaming ebony, padded leather bench tucked underneath, filling the room like one of those clipper ships crammed inside a tiny glass bottle.
 
“What do you think?” Mama is giddy.
 
“What do I think?” Tito bellows. “What do I think? Takes up a lot of space!”
 
Somehow this is the right answer. Mama practically squeals with pleasure. If there were room she’d be pirouetting around the piano.
 
“It's ridiculous,” I say, addressing Tito. “If she needs a so-called ‘real’ piano, which I doubt, a used upright makes more sense.” Tito’s look tells me to can it. “This is a piano for professionals,” I emphasize, unable to help myself. I’m the director of a community arts center. I believe that everyone has the capacity to make art, to enjoy a creative life. This is my work, yet I can’t manage to extend this value to Mama. I feel like a miserable imposter.
 
“I love it,” Mama says, defiantly.
 
“Play us something, Mom!” Tito doesn’t have to ask twice. Mama climbs onto the bench and sorts through dog-eared sheet music. She begins playing “De Colores” and Tito, leaning over her shoulder to read the lyrics, sings with her. Both are seriously off-key.
 
I escape, taking the kitchen stairs down to the backyard where weeds are suffocating Papa’s tomato plants, and enter the garage from the side door. Underneath the floorboards, the caterwauling is mercifully muted. Papa sold his car awhile back, so the garage is now storage space. I wade through boxes and furniture before I find what I’m looking for: Papa’s brown leather suitcase. Wrenching it free, I wipe the cobwebs with an old t-shirt and sit cross-legged on a box, my heart at peace. The tarnished metal fasteners make a satisfying pop.
 
Lifting the lid, the faintest scent of tobacco in the yellow silk lining sweeps me back to another time. It must have been fall. The living room windows were dripping condensation. Mama had been gone a year. I was still crying myself to sleep.
 
Papa set the suitcase on the coffee table. “Let’s see what we have here,” he said, a cigarette in one hand, a can of beer nearby. His hair was still coal-black, but he was starting to get a paunch. He’d drag out the suitcase now and then, often during the holidays, to show us his treasures—a jumble of photographs and souvenirs—a pretext for his stories of back home.
 
That day it was only me sitting by his side on the worn sofa. I reached for a sepia-tone studio portrait of an elegant native woman in a 1940s fur coat. “Who’s this?” I knew the story by heart, but I never tired of his stories of wicked uncles and chain-smoking grandmas, homesteads and adobes, farmers and dressmakers, sheepherders and coal miners, pueblos and penitentes, trains, abductions, adoptions, fires: tales of love, tragedy and survival reaching back across generations to New Mexico Territory and beyond.
 
“My first cousin Josie, on my mother’s side. She had a tailoring shop in Santa Fe. She was a sharp cookie, married and widowed three times, the last husband a Navajo. She liked them young but it didn’t matter. They still died on her.” We chuckled.
 
I pulled up an unfamiliar snapshot of a couple picnicking on a blanket at Ocean Beach, the Cliff House in the hazy distance. “And this one?”
 
A shadow crossed Papa’s face. With a sinking heart I recognized my youthful parents in a happier time. Silence flooded the room. Papa’s thoughts seemed to alight on something not in the picture, the ashes on his cigarette trembled. Finally, he smiled, seemingly chagrined by his thoughts.
 
I switched the photo for one of Papa as a boy and his older sister posing in front of a Ferris wheel.
 
“I wished I’d known Auntie Rose,” I said. Papa never returned to New Mexico after he and Mama moved to San Francisco—his immediate relatives had moved away or died by then. If there were other reasons, he never shared them.
 
“You remind me of Rose, mi’ja,” he said. “Sparky as hell.”
 
Besides photos, there is a ledger of the early 1900s written in Spanish and English, discharge papers, faded postcards from distant relations we children never knew, yellowed newspaper obits, a ruby ring won in a poker game, a ring neither ruby nor gold. 
 
This is what I came to rescue from Goodwill. My father’s life in a suitcase—all we have left of him besides his stories etched into our memories, tales that kept our family tethered to our history, to this land, to each other. 
 
I secure the suitcase, one snap at a time, and haul it up the back stairs to the living room where Tito and Mama are hammering out “That’s Amore.”
 
Tito insists on getting burritos and a six-pack for lunch. We dine on the kitchen table of our childhood, while Tito tells us about his new lady friend, a teacher. Mama tracks his every word, the better to throw in his face one day. Tito is oblivious.
 
Someone in the building has the game on, radio turned full blast. “The bases are loaded with two men out! Herrrrrre’s the pitch!” When we were kids, listening to the Giants with Papa was the best. Halting in the midst of whatever we were doing—peeling potatoes or washing the car—to visualize the players at the ballpark, we held our breaths, waiting to hear Jon Miller yell, “The ball is up, up…it’s out of here!” My spirits lift remembering how we’d yell and high five each other. Then the heaviness in my chest returns.
 
I claim the suitcase when it’s time to go. The rest of Papa’s things will go into Tito’s garage until Ellie can come out to help sort it all. On the sidewalk, Tito stretches and grins. “Mom’s doing okay,” he says. “We’ll just have to check in on her more often.”
 
“Do you know what a piano like that costs?”
 
Tito’s smile vanishes. “Don’t worry about it, Rocky, I got it covered.”
 
“She can’t wait to get rid of his stuff.”
 
“You can’t know how anybody feels except for your own damn self.” Tito’s voice is hard. “Mom does the best she can. You’re past forty. Is this who you want to be? We grew up with her too. And what’s with that haircut?”
 
Glaring at my brother, I slam the trunk lid closed and get into my car. Wiping away tears, I turn onto Valencia Street, glad to be heading to the Galería. Three signal lights later, I realize I’ve forgotten my Giants cap and make a U-turn in the middle of the street. On Bartlett I drive by two little girls playing hopscotch on the chalked sidewalk like Ellie and I used to do, and pull up in front of the Lermas’ building that has a For Sale sign. Sal is sitting on the stoop, drinking beer and listening to oldies on KPOO.
 
“Hey Rocky. Sorry about your father,” Sal says, as I exit the car. “We lost a good man.”
 
“Thank you.” I’ve known the Lermas since forever and wonder whether they’ve found a place to move to. Before I can ask, I’m distracted by the faint sound of music coming from Mama’s flat. I climb her stairs and peer through the open bay window, past the lace curtains, where she sits half-hidden behind the big, lacquered instrument. Her fingers strike the keys as she squints through her enormous, red-framed glasses at the sheet music, her voice tentative.
 
“Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you…”
 
The playing is measured and precise. The voice not so much, even as it picks up tempo and exuberance.
 
“Sweet dreams that leave all worries far behind you…”
 
I take a breath as my heart unexpectedly catches on a surging memory of Mama sitting on my bed when I was a girl, singing me to sleep. Cozy in pajamas, bed covers pulled up to my chin, lulled by her voice, drowsy. Back when she was still my Mama.
 
“And in your dreams, whatever they be…” Mama warbles with joyful enthusiasm.
 
The afternoon’s heat has eased. Rising above the ambient sounds of the street—a plane overhead, a skateboarder rolling past—is my mother’s voice falling in and out of tune like a kid learning to ride a two-wheeler. Mama in her blue-sequined beret is swaying, creased fingers moving over the black and white keys of the piano, focused on the task, determined like all of us to catch beauty in this precarious life. The sound of the music awakens a raw tenderness in me, if only for the moment. Brushing unexpected tears from my eyes, I sink onto Mama’s front steps to listen.

Linda Zamora Lucero is writing a collection of short stories set in San Francisco’s multicultural Mission District where she was born and raised. She identifies as Chicana, and attended Mission High School, City College of San Francisco and SFSU. Her published short stories are: “ZigZag,” LatineLit Magazine, 2022; “Speak to Me of Love,” first prize winner, DeMarinis Short Story Contest, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, 2021; “When It Rains,” Yellow Medicine Review, 2020 Pushcart nominee; “Mexican Hat,” Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century 2020 Anthology; “Balmy Alley Forever,” Yellow Medicine Review, 2016; and “Take the Money and Run–1968,” Bilingual Review, 2015. Lucero's day job is directing the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, an admission-free outdoor performing arts series in San Francisco.

By Armando Rendón

A life-long friend and colleague, Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, has passed away today; he is now one with the universe as he was one with so many of us in life. 

Felipe invented Chicano literature because, as I see it, his studies into the early writings by Chicanas and Chicanos provided not only a scholarly basis for the field as a genre of American literature but inspired many of our indigenous-hispanic writers to put pencil or pen to paper, pick out letters for a manuscript on the old manual typewriters, and today tap out a poem or novel on a laptop while commuting back and forth from a job.

We go way back to 1972, when an ambitious young man (I think we were all something like that then) named Dan Lopez got the idea for a print magazine he called, Nuestro. The project was ahead of its time and folded in a few years, but Felipe and I were recruited by Dan to help make the magazine go, Felipe as editor and I as a freelance writer and photographer. We struck up a friendship and kept in touch over the years.

I learned much later that Felipe had dropped out of high school in 1943, yet wisely took advantage of the G.I. bill to get a BA at the University of Pittsburgh in 1948, then a Master’s degree in literature at Texas Western College in El Paso, followed by his Ph.D. in literature at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1971. He eventually earned a post-doctoral degree in Management and Planning for Higher Education at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business’ Harriman Institute in 1973.

It was when I launched Somos en escrito Magazine in late 2009 that we hooked up again. So much of what Felipe wrote about Chicanismo from the literary aspect had not been broadly circulated that he found Somos a perfect vehicle to inform a new generation, and I gladly partnered with him in publishing as much as I could of his stories and literary critiques. I intend to work with his wife of many years, Gilda Baeza-Ortego, a scholar in her own right, to reveal other works he might not have yet offered to us.

Felipe’s early service as a U.S. Marine during World War II—a feature on his tour of duty that took him to China accompanies this eulogy to him—served him well in recent years when he battled a variety of illnesses, such as the shoulder replacement he underwent earlier this year. I had invited him last spring to join me and a couple other Chicanan writers for a panel on Chicano literature to be presented in Cuernavaca in early August. I knew he was not at his healthiest but how could I not first ask the father of Chicano literature to address a conclave of international scholars on his favorite topic?

He had accepted my invitation in a flash, but as it turned out, Felipe’s health failed him and he had to cancel the day before his and Gilda’s flight to Mexico. For sure, only a very severe ailment could have forced him to bow out. The other two panelists, good friends of his as well, Rosa Martha Villarreal and  Roberto Haro, and I stepped up to present his “Cuernavaca paper” on his behalf.
(Click on the link to read de Ortego y Gasca's  Cuernavaca paper: FelipeCuernavacaPaper)

Felipe de Ortego y Gasca lived a long and eventful life, leaving among many other contributions to Chicanismo and society in general, a legacy as a visionary scholar. Who would have guessed that today we would have the breadth of writing by Chicana and Chicano authors, in every genre and on every topic. He invented the Chicano Renaissance so he himself deserves to be called a Renaissance Chicano.

May you rest in peace, old friend.


Armando Rendón is founder/editor of Somos en escrito Magazine. 

​

​By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

This is a story about a Christmas in China after World War II and how the world changed for me as a consequence of that Christmas. Hard to believe that almost six decades have passed since VJ Day (Victory in Japan, August 14, 1945) and the end of hostilities for World War Two.
By Christmas of 1945 the war had been over more than four months, just after President Tru­man had authorized dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and one on Nagasaki on August 8.
I felt ancient at war’s end. War has a way of ma­turing youngsters, growing them up quickly. There is also a mantle of invincibility that cloaks the young, woven of equal parts of arrogance and igno­rance, strands of curiosity, and large patch­es of naiveté. It’s a wonderful time of life: full of joy one thinks will last forever; full of agony that seems inter­minable.
I was a Sergeant of Marines then, filled with the exuberance of victory marking the end of a life and death struggle between the forces of good and evil, a struggle that claimed 50 million lives worldwide.
I was 19 years old that August and the fates had kept me from harm thus far. Just two years earlier, on my 17th birth­day, I had enlisted in the Marines, during the dark, grim days of the war when victory appeared implausible and the fate of democracy hung in the balance.
The San Antonio of 1941, where a branch of my mother’s family settled in 1731, was a place of “brown blood and white laughter” as I wrote in a poem years later, remembering the city’s segre­gated schools and its English-only rules. Though the war trans­formed the city economically, a different kind of war would vanquish the barriers that had made San Antonio a divided community and strangers of Teja­nos in their own land.
At war, Tejanos showed their mettle, Boys became men. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) sus­pended its annual conferences for the duration. On the home front, Mexicana Americans built planes, subs, and gliders; handed out donuts and coffee to Amer­ica’s youth training at Fort Sam Houston, Kelly, and Lack­land Air Force bases in San Antonio. Many became air raid wardens. On the West Side, Teja­na mothers placed gold stars in their windows.
On the day of infamy, I wondered if I could pass for 17, hoping the war would wait for me. I tried to enlist in the Army in 1942 but was turn­ed away be­cause I was too young at 15 for military service they told me even though the coun­try was desperate for troops. I got as far as the physical before I was found out and turned away with an admonishment veiling a smile and an encourage­ment to try again next year. Did I know, they asked, that I had flat feet?
By next year, I thought, there would be no glory left. But I waited, tough­ing out the 9th grade of school. I should have been a Ju­nior but instead I was a high­ school Freshman, two years older than my classmates because I had re­peated the 1st grade and had been held back in the 4th. I started public school as a speaker of Spa­nish in segregated schools and didn’t improve until I made it to the 5th grade.
In January of 1943 I tried enlisting in the Navy but was re­jected because of “color blindness,” not because of my age. When I turned 17 that year, I tried the Ma­rines, color blindness, flat feet and all. They accepted me, and after boot-camp at Parris Island, South Caro­lina, I was assigned to the Marine Air Station at Cher­ry Point, North Caroli­na, from where I was sent to the 8th and I (Eye) Marine barracks in Washington, DC. From there I was ordered to the Marine barracks at Air Station Quantico, Virginia, from where I shipped out to the Pacific. After a stop at San Diego and Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, I was part of the tail-end of the last campaigns in the Pacific.
When Japan surrendered, Amer­ican GI’s in the Pacific were group­ed into those who had earned sufficient points for immedi­ate return to the states and a victor’s welcome, and those who didn’t. Wartime service was after all for the “duration” and the war was not officially over until December of 1946 even though the fighting had ended more than a year earlier.
Troops not returned to the states were massed into a force of military occupation for Japan and those headed for mainland China as an army of liberation to disarm the Japanese troops in China and to oversee their evacuation.  China had been occupied by the Japanese since the 30's and at the outbreak of hostili­ties had interned the 4th Marines who had been sta­tioned in Shanghai. China would be freed at last.
The hop from Okinawa to Shang­hai was short. On that rain-wash­ed day I did not know my journey to China would mark the beginning of my search for America.
An early day harbinger of Battle­star Galacti­ca, the rag-tag fleet of American ships trail­ing up the Yang­tze River toward Shanghai was heralded with cheers of jubi­lation and gratitude by the Chinese. “Ding hao!” they shouted. “Ding hao! Good, good!” But that mood quick­ly sour­ed when the hive of sampans crowd­ed the spa­ces between the ships and the smiling Chi­nese held out their hands for some token of largesse signaling our arrival.
What turned the scene ugly was when the Captain of the U.S.S. Monro­via ordered the fire hoses turned on the Chinese clambering up the sides of the ship trying to get on deck. The Chinese were eager to greet us, but that greeting was met with disdain by those Americans who saw the Chinese as nothing more than “gooks” and could not differentiate them from the Japanese.
The force of the water hoses sent the Chinese back into the mass of sampans, some of them falling into the water through the spaces between the flat dugouts. The scene became a melee when the sailors decided malevolently to aim their hoses at the people on the sampans. The Chinese were bewildered. Why would a liberating force treat them that way? Chi­nese women screamed as their babies were flushed out of their hands by the force of the water from the fire hoses.
What should have been a celebration became a melee of confusion and grief. That was not our finest moment. Those images have remained with me ever since. Little wonder we lost China to Mao Tse­tung in 1948, forced to take our troops to Korea. I was gone by then. I left China in 1946.
But the specter of that moment did not deter me from savoring the experience of being in China, the land of Cathay, of Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. The Yellow Sea washing against a land al­ready an­cient when the sailors of Colón flitted from fleck to fleck looking for Cipango (Japan) was not yellow but emerald green in the time of my youth when all my dreams were green. Years later I would realize what a profound effect that experience in China had on me.
My stay in Shanghai was brief. My outfit moved on. I was assigned ­to temporary duty with the 6th Marines in Peking and Tientsin. I was post­ed to duty with Marine Air Group (MAG) 24, First Marine Air Wing at Tsing­tao, a key airfield in the Japanese occupation of the Shantung Peninsula just across from Korea.
Tsing­tao is a port city and at war’s end was once more bustling with the hum of interna­tional trade. In Tsing­tao (which sounded like Ching­doh) I was look­ed upon with puzzle­ment. Was I an Ameri­can Chinese? A Migua Chinee? They had never seen a Mexican American before. Yes, I nod­ded, good-naturedly. “Ding hao, ding hao!” Good, good! the Chinese re­sponded with smiles of approbation.
Was I the first Chicano in China? No. Twenty-five years later in El Paso I would meet a Chicano, Cleofas Callero, who had been a China Marine in the years between the World Wars. There were probably others before him.
Some 30 years later, Carlos Guerra, the journalist from San Antonio would travel to China. So would Patricia Roybal of El Paso and her husband Chuck Sutton, heir of the publisher of The Amsterdam News. And in the 80's Rudy Anaya, the Chicano novelist, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, would ven­ture to China and record his impressions in a work entitled A Chicano in China.
My affection for the Chinese was regarded with mischief as word spread that the Sarge was a Chink-lover. Fortunately, hierarchy and rank are powerful investitures in the military, especially the Marines. The troops may have disliked my affection for the Chinese but they took orders from me, like them or not. Every day I dress­ed down some troop for diss­ing the Chinese. They were not our beasts of burden, though we employed them on the air base as if they were.
In China, American forces rode roughshod over the Chinese, acting more like Alex­ander’s Macedonian soldiers than emissaries of freedom. The Chinese quick­ly saw me as a friend. I was invited into their homes. I became good at ping-pong. I went everywhere with confidence.
American troops in China, as almost everywhere else, did not carry currency. Instead we were issued scrip—paper money backed by the U.S. Armed Forces. Chinese money was out of the question. With infla­tion, Chinese money was almost useless. GI’s col­lected it as souvenirs or for prospective wallpaper.
The brothel of “white” Rus­sian women in Tsing­tao preferred goods for their services. Ciga­rettes were most prefer­able. Chi­nese mer­chants accepted scrip which they exchanged for currency. In Peking, Chiang Kai-shek was strug­gling to stabilize the mone­tary woes of the country.
One evening, not long after I arrived at Tsing­tao, the base res­ponded to a fire alarm in the city. The British Officer’s Club had caught fire and needed help in put­ting out the blaze. The fear was that the fire would spread into the city and become harder to control. From the airbase, three run­way fire trucks with foam scream­ed into the night roaring to­ward the glow of the fire in the distance.
As NCO of the day, I was responsible for dis­patching the fire trucks. The old China Marines used to tell stories about Chinese fire drills which I didn’t understand until the night of that fire in Tsingtao.
What confronted us was both risible and tragic. Attempting to put water on the fire were Chinese fire­men struggling with old-fashioned wheeled water pumps. One man pumped while the other directed the hose barely trickling onto the fire. The Chinese fire­men smiled politely as they greeted us. We ushered them out of the way, and quickly funneled a sheet of foam over the fire. We had arrived just in time. Though the Chinese firemen could not have contained the fire, their efforts had given us suf­ficient time to get there and to put the blaze out.
I recognized that the caricature of Chi­nese inept­ness was compounded by their lack of avail­able tech­nology. Mao Tse­tung recognized that lack also which is why he launched the Chi­nese Revolution. China had to enter the modern age despite its legacy as a victim of colonialism.
The week before Christmas some of the men in my troop wondered if we could find a Christ­mas tree in the hills beyond the air base. “Whadaya think, Sarge?”
“Sure, why not?” We weren’t prohibited from go­ing into the hills, though we were counseled to be care­ful. The Chinese Communists had been massing in the North and there were reports that some of their units were heading south.
I check­ed out a truck from the motor pool and with a patrol of men headed toward the rise of hills some four or five miles west of the base. Once there, we head­ed off-road toward a clump of Chinese pine trees and settled on a good-sized tree that we chopp­ed down quick­ly and load­ed onto the truck. As we were ready to mount up and head back to the base, one of the men called out, “Sarge, take a look!”
Coming out through the trees were a number of platoons armed with carbines and wearing drab uniforms with no insignia. The one who seem­ed to be the leader came up to the truck, surveyed it, walked around to­wards the front where I was standing, all the while with his finger on the trigger of what look­ed like a rapid-fire carbine.  His men stayed at a distance but with fingers at the ready on the triggers of their weapons.
We had brought axes not weapons. I was the only one with a sidearm. I beseeched my men to stay calm. I could see they were nervous. But they were sea­soned men. I mustered a subtle smile as the leader of the hostiles acknowledged me and proceeded to inspect the cab of the truck.
On the passenger side of the cab lay the book in Spanish I had been reading off and on for some time: La Vida Trágica, The Trag­ic Sense of Life, by the Spanish philosopher, Mi­guel de Unamuno. Picking up the book, the leader of the armed men who by that time we had all surmised were Chinese com­munists, asked: “Y este libro, de quién es? Whose book is this?” I was startled by the expression, little expect­ing a Chinese to speak Spa­nish, at that moment and in that place. “Mine,” I said. “Es el mío.”
“Hm,” he murmured, pursing his lips, studying me intently for a moment. He put the book back on the seat of the cab and mustering an equally subtle smile motioned his men back into the anonymity of the woods. Before disappearing into the trees, the leader turned and with a most subtle smile, waved. I waved back wan­ly, relieved that the inci­dent turned out as it had.
“What was that all about, Sarge?” one of the men asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
Years later I would know, years after I had ac­quired a struc­ture of knowledge into which to fit that experience. One day, epiphanous­ly, I understood the significance of that moment in North China and the Christmas tree incident of that December.
By then the homecoming parades had all been held and the heroes all properly heralded. The Unit­ed States was almost back to normal. Uniforms with plast­rons of medals had been hung in closets for a day when they would no longer fit. I was ready to begin my search for Amer­ica.
The roots of that search lay in China where I saw “the others” and saw myself in them. Though I had grown up in a segregated soci­ety I had never thought of myself as “the other.”
But the war changed me and the way I was to see myself in the context of the United States. I learned that no matter that Mexican Americ­ans had won more Med­als of Honor than any other ethnic group in America’s defense, we would have to fight far fiercer battles to secure for ourselves and our children the fruits of American democracy.
Though I had completed only one year of high school, nevertheless on the GI Bill I went to college after the war at the Univer­sity of Pittsburgh where in text after text I studied I did not find myself nor my people. I did not find my people in the texts I stu­died at the University of Texas either where I pursued the Master’s degree in English. They were also not in the texts I studied at the University of New Mex­ico where I completed the Ph.D. in English renaissance studies, Amer­ican literature, and Behavioral Linguistics. And because I could not find Mex­ican Americans in those texts, my life’s work became a crusade for their inclusion.
In 1947 the city of Three Rivers, Texas, shame­lessly refused to bury in its municipal cemetery a Mexican Ame­rican GI whose body had been exhumed in the Philippines and brought home for a hero’s burial. Adamantly the white city power brokers would not yield from their decision. At that point Sen­ator Lyndon Baines Johnson approach­ed President Truman on the matter and he directed that Felix Longo­ria be buried in Arling­ton Cemetery among the valiant of the nation.
Out of that incident emerged the American GI Fo­rum, a separate organization for Mexican American veterans, an organization I joined. Since then, numerous like incidents have necessitated creation of many separate Mex­ican Amer­ican organizations. It didn’t need to be that way. Once, we were all brothers-in-arms.
In my search for America, I have often thought of that young Chinese communist who bade me good luck in a language my country sought to strip me of. I have thought often of that China of so long ago. Once, I harbored thoughts of returning to China to look for that young man who had perhaps read Una­muno’s Tragic Sense of Life−in Span­ish and who at that moment may have seen me not as a Migua Chi­nese but as a literary kinsman.
Who was he? And how had he come to learn Spanish? Was he perhaps a child of a Chinese Communist who had participated in the Spanish Civil War of the mid ‘30’s and was now a Maoist? Hm? The question has remained pervasive for me during all these years.
Thinking back—over the years—the gains have been worth the struggle. Mexican Americans did their part in World War II. And in subsequent conflicts as well as prior wars.
This is our country, too, for we are in the land of our ancestors when this part of the United States was Mexico; and when it has called, we have served.  But I’m still looking for America, in the nooks and crannies of those years since VJ Day, the end of World War II, and that Christmas in China.

​​Felipe de Ortego y Gasca was Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, and Social Policy) and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philology and Cultural Studies at Texas State University System-Sul Ross. This memoir, which first appeared in the Alpine Avalanche, August 3, 1995, was presented at the Multi-Ethnic Christmas Celebration hosted by the Jernigan Library, Texas AandM University-Kingsville, December 6, 2004, and includes material from the author’s piece in 1941: Texas goes to War, University of North Texas Press, 1991. Copyright ©2001 by the author. All rights reserved.

*Photograph by U.S. Marine Corps, http://www.qingdaonese.com/us-marines-in-qingdao-1945-48/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32891790

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, Rendóninvited 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.

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

​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 Inez makes 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 norteñohistory 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.

​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 Prynne acquires 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 afavorite 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 apositive 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 SartoriusSnopes, 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’tstand 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.

​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 of Aura 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 were hisexistential 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 in Chronicles of Air and Dreams, and likeArtemio Cruz I set it in two times, alternating the chapters between the past and the present. However, it was Aura and 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, andThe 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.

​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 novels Doctor 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.

​​By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

The English Dictionary defines “fiction” as “the act of feigning, inventing or imagining; that which is feigned, i.e., a fictitious story, fable, fabrication, falsehood.” In The Language of Fiction, Margaret MacDonald informs us that “fiction is often used ambiguously both for what is fictitious and for that by which the fictitious is expressed” (in Perspectives in Fiction, Edited by James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver, New York: Oxford University, 1968, 55). Indeed, “fiction” is opposed to “fact” as what is imaginary to what is real. But this is not an absolute boundary. How is one to know where fiction begins and reality leaves off? Fiction is a contrivance “but the content of very little fiction is wholly fictitious” (67).
Perhaps the expression “truth is stranger than fiction” says much about fiction. That fiction often reflects reality; and reality often reflects fiction. Odd as that may sound, fiction is meant to reflect the imaginary, the “not real.” But the touchstone of fiction lies in the real world and ergo actuates the fiction.
The worlds of fiction in the short story and the novel (and other forms of fiction) are created by the storyteller with details and personages that may or may not correspond to the real world. In the Star Wars stories, for example, the world of those stories has some general correspondence with the world as we know it. There, fact and fancy are mixed in a blend that covers a canvas we seem to recognize–almost. That which we don’t recognize on the canvas is “invention”–perhaps the key ingredient of fiction. Fiction is thus never 100 percent invention. It’s a blend of the real and the made up. The story.
To work, fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief, as T.S. Eliot called that process of getting into a story. MacDonald adds: “one must be able to enter imaginatively into its (fiction) emotional situation though its emotions need not be felt” (63), adding: “To create a story is to use language to create the contents of that story,” closing with “characters play a role; human beings live a life” (65). Texts tell us about stories; sometimes they tell us about people. Always they reveal more about the writer than he or she imagines. Subtexts and intertexts are like scalpels in the hands of literary critics in their efforts to anatomize fiction.
Fiction is a verbal construction; life is not–except when we seek to explain or describe it to someone else. Despite fiction being life-like on occasions, it is not life in vivo. Fiction is not life but an image of life as created through the filters of the storyteller. Many times those filters give us a fiction of perplexity, leaving us wondering what the point of the fiction is/was/can be.
In large part, social realism has dominated much of fiction since the 19th century. But for some time since World War II, fiction has undergone a transmogrification–a breaking out of or breaking away from the traditional bounds of the genre. One such effort has been “magical realism,” a technique merging fantasy and realism. Another emerging technique in fiction is “minimalism”–spare prose with a minimum of details. There are still writers of fiction who use the technique of density–giving readers a plethora of information.
Gustave Flaubert believed in giving readers the maximum amount of details in order for the reader to really “see” the scene. He believed that in fiction the writer had to be both objective and unobtrusive. Guy de Maupassant, on the other hand, believed there was no such thing as objectivity. Subjectivity was everywhere in the fiction, in the selection of words, the architecture of the story. The hand of the author was everywhere visible.
What seems to characterize much contemporary fiction is its search for new forms, new boundaries, and new ways to engage the reader in the story. Aristotle first laid down the dictum of fiction in his theory of drama: unity of action, place, and time. Any response to a literary work presupposes a relationship between the reader and the text. By and large, any response is predicated on what the reader brings to the reading. For example, a 12th century text in Old English requires of a reader some facility with Old English and some understanding of the times that engendered the work. 
A response to a literary work must be more than “I didn’t like it.” That’s certainly a legitimate response. But such a response should be shored up by concrete considerations. Perhaps the plot was weak or too contrived, the characters too wooden or stereo-typed, the point of view too disjointed. There is no right or wrong in a response to a literary work. Important to bear in mind, however, is that a literary work is the way it is and not the way it is not.
The strongest part of the literary equation lies between teller and tale, both of which must link up successfully with a reader or auditor. As story, fiction is always colored by the teller just as a joke succeeds or fails depending on the teller and the details of the story. In the main, writers of fiction work with material they know. A good story is one in which the writer knows his or her stuff. Some writers focus more on description, others on narration, while others prefer to have the story develop through dialog. Short fiction is a craft of its own. Practitioners of the longer form find the short form restrictive, characterization being difficult within the bounds of the short form.
Fiction doesn’t always start at the beginning–it may start in medias res, the middle, which William Saroyan, the Armenian American writer from California, described as jumping in the middle of the river and starting to swim. In addition to plot, setting, point of view, and characterization, fiction also includes style, theme, mood, atmosphere, and tone. While verisimilitude was once an important feature of fiction–is the work believable–it has become less and less a consideration of contemporary fiction.
More important now in fiction is novelty and the brilliance of the writer in terms of his or her style. In literature, style is usually defined as the habitual manner of expression of an author, choices made consciously or unconsciously about such things as vocabulary, organization, diction, imagery, pace, and even certain recurring themes or subjects. Most often style is identified in terms of an author’s language and its intellectual use. The French define style as l’homme–the man, recognizing that style is by and large a personal characteristic unique to the individual. Which is why we can recognize the style of particular writers like Hemingway, for example, or Steinbeck, or Thomas Wolfe.
​
Mexican American Short Story

Thomas M. Leitch contends that “everyone knows what stories are–fortunately; for it is excessively difficult to say just what they are” [emphasis mine]. Brander M. Matthews, the best known philosopher of the short story as a genre, articulated some of the key features in what constitutes a short story. But Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of the short story has become the more popular. According to Poe two things were essential to the genre: (1) that it shall be short and (2) that it shall possess coherence sufficient to hold the reader’s or listener’s unflagging interest from beginning to end. Immediately the length of a story becomes a problematic, such that the genre has been subdivided into (1) the short-short story, (2) the short story, and (3) the long short story–sometimes: the long story, of novelette length.
Story may be as old as humankind–from the earliest times of language which enabled one human being to transmit some piece of information to another human being. Story is the tale, the telling and the teller. It is also audience, ready for the story, able to understand the story, and able to appreciate it at once as information and as invention. In antiquity, story tellers wielded considerable power, not just because of their ability to tell stories dramatically but because a repertoire of stories was a reflection of learning and of more than passing knowledge and facility with language. He who knew language was thought to have some special relationship with the gods. In Africa, the Griot, the storyteller, is a revered person.
In the main, the short story is actuated by the dicta of Aristotle’s theory of drama: unity of action, place and time. But much has changed in short fiction as it has in long fiction. No longer just the mode by which to tell a short tale to raise a moral point nor the format through which history was kept alive at the tribal fires or clan gatherings, the short story has acquired literary dimensions that have transcended its historical functions. Writers of the short story do not engage in the genre because it is short and less difficult to write than the longer form, say, the novel. Indeed, not. The short story is a craft of its own. Many practitioners of the longer form find the tight form of the short story restrictive, complaining that characterization is difficult within the bounds of the form. But Raymond Chandler qvels with the short story.
For Chicanos, the short story lies rooted in the cuentos (stories/tales) of Hispanic culture, told and retold orally as part of the “folk” lore, the memories of times past. Hispanic tale tellers were always welcome at the table, the hearth or festivities. Legends, myths, and stories of the macabre were told countless times to audiences that seemed never to tire of the tales.Cuentos were the stock-in-trade of every family’s repertoire. From infancy, Hispanic children learned about brujas (witches), calaveras (skeletons), and la Llorona, the weeping woman looking for her children. Hispanic cuentos tell of lost gold and silver mines, of saints, and of things that go bump in the night. Essentially, the cuento is designed to be instructive, to teach a moral lesson.
By and large, though, Mexican American writers made the transition from Spanish to English during the period from 1848 to 1912, and in the period from 1912 to 1960 were busy producing literary works in English. But the allure of the cuento, focusing on the mythic past, was strong in Mexican American literary production as evidenced by the creative works of Mexican American writers like Arturo Campa, Fray Angelico Chavez, Juan Rael, Jovita Gonzalez, and Aurora Lucero during the period between World Wars–1920 to 1940. The stories of this time were characterized by themes and motifs of the past in which Mexicans or Mexican Americans were cast as gentle, peace-loving, and wise with the knowledge of God and things of the earth.
Breaking free of the “pastoral” bonds of the cuento does not occur until after World War II with short stories like those of Mario Suarez. But the real break with the cuento tradition in Mexican American literary production comes after 1960 with the Chicano Movement and the Chicano Renaissance. It’s not a clean break, however, for threads of the cuento are still visible in early modern Chicano fiction from 1960 to 1970 and still visible in some Chicano literary production since then.
Like Chicano poetry of the Chicano Renaissance, Chicano fiction of that period is equally strident and shrill in its fictive posture and ideological thrusts. It wasn’t mainstream American fiction to which Chicano writers gravitated but to Third World models. Like black writers of the Civil Rights Movement, Chicano writers wielded the pen as a sword to thrust the Chicano agenda and to parry what they perceived to be mainstream threats aimed at Chicanos. In Chicano Movement fiction Anglos became bad guys and Chicanos donned white hats. More importantly, though, in Chicano fiction of the Movement the focus of the story was on Chicano life as it was lived both within the parameters of Chicano existence and within the parameters of existence in the United States.
Chicano fiction after 1960 was full of sound and fury signifying everything. The full range of Chicano particulars sought expostulation in public and in the media, particularly in print. Waves of Chicano publications emerged to press for “demands” or “redress” and then faded. Literary publications like El Grito, Con Safos, and De Colores came into existence for Chicano writers as alternative for mainstream publications which had long excluded them. Here and there, Chicano writers like Daniel Garza found their way into mainstream magazines but, by and large, Chicano writers were absent from those pages. Chicano publications like La Luz(first national Hispanic public affairs magazine in English) published scores of works by emerging Chicano writers as well as works by already established Chicano writers.
Chicano short story writers whose works appeared in El Grito were thought of as theQuinto Sol Writers, while Chicano writers whose works appeared in Con Safos and Caracol were considered Chicano Wave Writers. Chicano writers whose works appeared in publications like De Colores, La Luz and Revista Chicano-Riqueña in the 70's to mid 80's were thought of as New Wave Writers. And Chicano writers of the later 80's to the present whose works have appeared in publications like ViAztlan are talked about as Third Wave Writers. The distinctions are nominal but the distance between the Quinto Sol Writers and theThird Wave Writers is a matter of function versus form. One was a literature of liberation, the other a literature of consciousness looking for the best artistic form for Chicano expression.

Mexican American Novel

The word “novel” is a term difficult to define, but in the main it refers to an “extended” work of prose that employs the techniques of fiction: plot, setting, point of view and characterization. As fiction it also employs various approaches associated with fiction–psychological approach, sociological approach, archetypal approach, etc. Just as the short story is short, so too the novel is long–longer, that is. One could say the novel is an extended short story, but that isn’t quite accurate because the short story is bounded by particular elements of unity that do not inhibit the novel. Analogously, the short story is like a backyard; the novel is a ranch. There’s considerably more room in the novel to tell the story, elaborate more pieces of the story, space to develop character(s), plumb their being(s), exposit relationships, span generations. The novel is a canvas; the short story, a snapshot.
Like people, novels come in all sizes, shapes and forms. While Bocaccio’s Decameron is a series of stories told by narrators hiding out from the plague, the work has been variously identified as a novel. In many ways, the word “novel” is a catch-all term for a variety of prose manifestations.
The origin of “the novel” is hard to place, but in English the novel had its beginnings in the early 18th century. It takes 100 years for the novel to migrate to the United States. And given the character of America, the American novel grows self-consciously from the genteel traditions of New England, giving way to novels of social commentary.
Emulating first “the romance,” the American novel evolved through naturalism to realism. After the Civil War, the American novel was regarded as an instrument for social commentary. Richard Chase explains that “the American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience.” (The American Novel and its Tradition, Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1957, 1) Generally, our assessment of American novels has focused on those contradictions and extreme ranges of experience. Henry James defined that range of experience as “what happens to us as social creatures.” (Ibid, 21) That has been the general canvas of the American novel– what happens to us as social creatures. For this reason American novelists have tended to create in their novels a verisimilitude of the society in which their characters move, patterned in terms of human relationships and the human predicament.
Since 1945 the American novel has tended to reflect the uncertainty and ambiguities of modern life. Some critics of the novel suggest that as a consequence the American novel has become too stylized, too personal. The large vistas of traditional American novels have given way to narrow perspectives and a banality of language, say many critics of the genre. The upshot is that the American novel provides a range of critical assessment, depending on what we think the function of the novel ought to be. Lionel Trilling thought the novel was “a kind of summary and paradigm of our cultural life.” (“Art and Fortune” in The Liberal Imagination, 1950)
While there is some controversy about some forms of short fiction–whether a short work is a piece of folklore, a tale or a short story (something more fictive than the novel)—the novel as a genre has raised more questions as a literary form than any other of the literary genres. Discussion of “cataloging” the novel is much like the story that the only thing one can be sure of when the person driving a car in front of you puts his or her hand out the driver’s window to signal a turn in the old-fashioned way is that the window is down. There is, of course, the meaning of the word “fiction.”
What exactly does it mean? Is a “novel” still a “fiction” when it is so apparently autobiographical or patently realistic in the details about the characters that their live counterparts are easily recognizable? In The Four Forms of Fiction, Northrop Frye points out the distinction between fiction as a genus and the novel as a species. Of course, none of this sheds light on what the novel is, except to say that as a species, it is not short, otherwise it would be a short story. Few critics would call a short story a short novel.
Origins of the novel as a genre are obsolete. And trying to date the novel historically leads us back to the chicken-and-the-egg question about fiction. Though as Frye argues, the novel should not be constrained by the strictures of fiction. In loose terms we can say that The Decameron is a novel–an episodic novel–much the same as Tomas Rivera’s work, And the Earth Did Not Part is a fragmentary novel. The structures of the two novels are pretty much the same. But if we allow that The Decameron is a novel, what do we make of The Canterbury Tales? Is it an episodic novel as well? Do purpose and intent help us ascertain when a particular work is a novel? Henry Fielding conceived the novel as a “comic epic in prose,” a definition that cuts out most “novels.” To work around the constraints of definitions some works have been called “romances,” a term older than the term “novel.” The distinction between the two is that we do not find “real people” in the “romance.”
However the novel may have come into being, we know a lot about its evolution after the Renaissance. Generally, though not conclusively, we can place the novel first in Italy, then in Spain, and identify the Spanish influences in the early English novel. In the 19th century, the strongholds of the novel were in France and Russia, giving way to its ascendancy in the United States toward the end of the 19th century and continuing until well into the third quarter of the 20th century.
Since World War Two, however, the stronghold of the novel seems to be in Latin America. It’s a genre that migrates with ideas and with the imagination. The current trend of “magical realism” in the novel is of Latin American origin, though that origin springs from the tradition of the fabula (fable).
The Chicano novel dates from 1959 with publication  of Pocho by Jose Antonio Villarreal. There were Mexican American novelists before 1959, however, unfortunately, we do not have a record of all the novels written (or published) by Mexican American  writers between 1848 and 1959, although the University of Houston project, “Recovering the Hispanic Literary History of the United States” is uncovering that trove. By 1969, ten years after publication ofPocho, there were only eight novels published by Chicano writers. Later scholarship would reveal five novels by Mexican Americans produced between 1892 and 1928, all in Spanish. Research into those forgotten pages of American literature continues, and other novels by Mexican Americans produced between 1848 and 1959 will surface.
From the perspective of the 21st century and four decades of Chicano fiction, it’s easier to make historical and critical judgments about Chicano writers and the art of the novel. To begin with, one of the major obstacles in Chicano critical theory about the novel has been one of nomenclature: namely, how does one define “the Chicano novel?” Is Famous All Over Townby Daniel James, for example, a Chicano novel since the work deals with the Chicanos of East Los Angeles and all its characters are Chicanos?
Some Chicano critics dismiss as Chicano novels works by Chicano writers because they are not “movement” novels or don’t address themselves to the social or political issues affecting Chicano communities or barrios. For example, in her commentary on the Chicano novel, Carlota Cardenas Dwyer excludes as Chicano novels the works by Villarreal, Rechy, Salas, Barrio, and Vasquez on grounds that their novels do not promote a specific social or political issue unequivocally Chicano. Rafael Grajeda excludes the works of Villarreal and Vasquez in his selection of Chicano novels on grounds that “the works do not confront clearly and honestly the implications of their premises,” namely, that the central characters arrive at an understanding and acceptance of themselves as Chicanos.
In 1970 with publication of Y no se lo trago la tierra by Tomás Rivera, Chicano literature bifurcated along language lines–Chicano works in English and Chicano works in Spanish. These forking paths did not (and do not) signal a philosophical rift between two camps of Chicano writers. It means, rather, that there are some Chicano writers who prefer to write in Spanish or English or are more comfortable in one or the other language. However, many Chicano writers work in both languages, like Rolando Hinojosa or Alejandro Morales, to name but two.
This raises again the question of linguistic realities for Chicanos who may be monolingual or bilingual and/or may participate to varying degrees in Chicano English and/or Chicano Spanish. Manifestations of these linguistic realities crop up in all the genres of Chicano literature. The question is: are these linguistic manifestations congruent with the realities of Chicano existence? Or does the language of choice predicate a particular perspective or point of view?
In his essay on “Contemporary Chicano Prose Fiction: Its Ties to Mexican Literature,” Charles Tatum raises an important point in getting at the wellspring of Chicano literature, particularly Chicano prose fiction. While Chicano fiction–in this case, the novel– has obvious connections to Mexican literature, it also has obvious connections to American literature. Chicano literature is not simply an extension of Mexican literature in the United States, anymore than it is simply an outcrop of American literature in a distinct region of the country. One cannot talk about Chicano writers in the same way one talks about “Southern writers,” say. While both are geographically bound, more or less, the latter is part and parcel of American culture, the former still shares a culture with Mexico. Ultimately, the assessment of the Chicano novel will be in terms it brings to the discussion, much the way Louis Gates talks about Black literature.