The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (2 page)

Hey Chicano, ¿qué no miran que tienen que trabajar?
A unirnos en el pleito para el saco no arrastrar.
A juntarnos todo el bonche y peliar con el patrón.
Sean trucha, no pendejos, no les den ya su pulmón!
A enseñarle, que cabeza también nosotros tenemos.
Hey, patrón, mucho cuidado, los Chicanos—ahí venimos. (1-6)

In contast, the speaking voice's will to agency in Villanueva's poetry no longer bases itself in power relations between institutions and the community. Here, Villanueva develops an aesthetic that situates the poetic voice through its relation to the universe and simultaneously, through its earthy
feminine body, uncovers political agency from within itself. Both poets respond to the real constraints of their historical moment but respond with a different literary approach. The anthology provides a good diachronic data set to witness how the literatures move from a political poetic to an agential aesthetic. However, a diachronic analysis will resist facile conclusions as the work of Mendoza and Villanueva evidence. Those social and political issues that motivated the Chicano Movement and its letters are still with us, and therefore consistently present in the writings over the twenty-five year span of the anthology.

The project of this anthology was to collect and present the winning entries of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (hereafter CLLP) from the year of its inception, 1974, to its twenty-fifth anniversary, 1999. While the first-prize winners were to be the foundation of the anthology, the second- and third-prize winners as well as those texts that won honorable mention were also considered for inclusion. Selections were based on the aesthetic merit of the entry, and/or the history of the writer in question. The remarks below are written as a critical introduction to this anthology. For each text, the reader is given a synthesis, rather than a summary, of the complete text of which s/he will find an excerpt in the anthology. A critical perspective is also proposed as a way to understand how deeper arguments emerge of significant social and political significance through each text.

The beginnings of the anthology show an aesthetic and range of thematic concerns as evidenced by its first winner, Ron Arias's “The Wetback,” and again, in the fifth year, with Helena María Viramontes's “Birthday.” The variety of themes engaged challenges the assumption of C/L letters as simply a minor literature bound to political aims. Its aesthetic breadth trumps the position of literary critics who minimize, if not infantilize, Chicana/o and Latina/o writing as unsophisticated.
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A picture forms from the anthology of a more complex and dynamic literature than the one sometimes thought of.

The anthology presents a diverse and thoughtful literature, a compendium of texts written by novices as well as some of the best-known Chicana/o and Latina/o writers. In fact, many of the pieces included here have been published as books, becoming foundational texts of the Chicana/o Latina/o canon, reprinted many times in as many venues. The contest has drawn texts what have become instant classics like Manuel Ramos's
The Ballad of Rocky Ruíz
, and the late Andrés Montoya's
The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems.
The anthology also presents texts of lesser-known authors that merit scholarly study. In this introduction, the texts are presented in chronological order and, where appropriate, are contextualized within the body of the author's
work. The introduction gives particular critical attention to those texts that may only appear here,
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and so their corresponding analyses are deliberately more extensive than those better-known texts that already enjoy significant bodies of critical study. It should be noted that most, but not all, of the winning entries are included in this anthology. Certain authors did not grant permission to reprint their entries or could not be located
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which has sadly resulted in no entries for 1992-93.

The selection chosen from each work depended upon the availability of original manuscripts. In the case of poetry, few complete manuscripts were available. Where collections were complete, a limit of four to five pages of poetry was put in place as a measure of consistency. In some instances, the type of poetry, like Juan Felipe Herrera's poems of 1978-79, where the rant stylizes the form, or in the case of Andrés Montoya's work that, to adequately convey its essence as a collection, the editor felt compelled to break the previously imposed limit and to extend the number of poems or pages included. In many cases, poems previously selected and printed in the contest's yearly publication were the only poems available for consideration, so they, by default, are again printed here. As an editor, this is not to suggest any disappointment. On the contrary, their original selection infers their merit. Collections of poetry are indicated by title whereas untitled poetry collections are simply referred to as “Poems.”

The case of selecting excerpts from dramatic work was more strategic. Often in anthologies, the first act of a play is selected as standard to anthologize. Rather than take the conventional route of a comfortable read of introducing the plot and characters provided by the first scene or act while the brilliance of the writing goes un- or under-noted, here, I choose an excerpt that best demonstrates the author's talent.
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The reader should therefore allow a moment to orient his/herself as the excerpt sometimes begins
in medias res.

Short stories presented their own challenge given the condensed nature of the genre and the difficulty of extracting a section from a work that tends to explore a single aspect of the human condition in just a few pages. Among them, “shorter” short stories are printed in full while an excerpt from longer short stories was sufficient to demonstrate the writer's ability. For novels, this intention was easily achieved with the selection of a single chapter.

As the following will show, the CLLP has drawn writings that run the linguistic gamut. A critical study could be done on the range of multilingual
expression alone found in the anthology. Most entries are written primarily in English, some exclusively in Spanish. Others code-switch between English and Spanish, while others insert sporadic Spanish phrases in an English text, and still others use some English phrases in a Spanish text. These works demonstrate multilingualism as a valuable aesthetic tool for these writers and shows the richness of our lived experience from which writers draw their literary sensibility. I object to graphically separating Spanish and Chicano words from English by conventions that would suggest a foreign quality to the experience expressed by these writers. As such, monolingual readers should expect to elaborate a context for themselves from which to gloss the meaning of certains words. It should be noted that those texts written exclusively in English or Spanish most likely will not be accessible to monolingual readers.

Even though some of the prominent C/L writers chose not to include their work in this anthology, the CLLP has helped promote a significant percentage of writers whose work has become part of the C/L canon. That is to say, the anthology demonstrates the importance of prizes and university backing in the authorization of marginalized voices. The Quinto Sol prize has proven this point well but the contests at the University of California, University of Notre Dame, University of New Mexico, and others have also laid significant groundwork in creating literary and intellectual space for these writings to develop into literatures. An appendix of all the CLLP's winners shows the extent of well-known C/L writers recognized by the University of California's contest.

The anthology shows that, over time, a pact forms among and between C/L writers and their audiences. Writers begin to demonstrate a basis of mutual cultural intelligibility with their audiences. The case of theater demonstrates this point clearly. If we consider the actos of Teatro Campesino, it is important to recognize how much dramatic time was spent on instructing its audience on how to cognitively understand it; that it was a political theater hoping to inspire social action from its viewers, that the social problems that it sought to dramatize were to be type-cast as recognizable stock characters.
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Teatro Campesino worked to create a cognitive register for what it was presenting as Chicano theater to its audiences. In the anthology, we see an evolution of this pact between drama and audience when we consider Josefina López's play,
Simply María or America's Dream.
Winner of the 1988-89 contest, López writes in set descriptions and dialogue
that are impressionistic rather than realistic. The work of Teatro Campesino, that of many playwrights in between, and in fact, the totality of the cultural production of Chicana/o and Latina/o cultures from the 1960s through the cusp of the 1990s, allows López to write of random shouts of Los Angelesstreet characters and know that her audience will understand that the shouts signify the shock of immigration and the deception with the American Dream. This impressionistic approach builds its communicability upon the didaticism of the work by Teatro Campesino and others, demonstrating the strengthening of a system of referenciality of C/L literatures within themselves and their audiences over time. López writes on the assumption that audiences—Chicana/o, Latina/o, and hegemonic alike—already understand the basic tenets of the enterprise of C/L literatures.

Over the course of the years, the reader will notice that certain symbols recur with enough frequency that a system of ethnic signs develops. Thinkers like William Boelhower (
Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature
, New York: Oxford UP, 1986), describe such a system as an “ethnic encyclopedia” where this coding and auto-referentiality creates the parameters of how a particular ethnic population will articulate itself. Far from static, these signs are represented and renegociated as a dynamic of the individual writer, and his/her moment and place, in relation to the development of this canon. Angelo Parra's
Song of the Coquí
is a great example of this dynamic. Parra presents the coquí, the native Puerto Rican frog whose song typifies life on the island. When taken off the island, the coquí will not or cannot sing much like the protagonist in the play “Ray,” a Latino in New York. Ray's internal dilemma of living between two cultures and not feeling really a part of either leads him to an uneasy, unsettled, indeterminate existence. The motif of the coquí is readily understood by the Puerto Rican community and probably by most of the Latino community in New York. Parra explains the motif for other audiences who are perhaps more familiar with Chicano nomenclature and less so with Puerto Rican or Nuyorican. This theme and its representation in the symbol of the coquí exemplifies the process of codification of how C/L writers construct their sensibility of ethnicity through symbols and figures to be understood by their readers as commonalities of their collective ethnic experience.

Another example of this production of signs is found in the figure of the loving, yet resentful, daughter who serves the male members in her family. Deborah Fernández Badillo's poems and Patricia Santana's
Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility
show sexism, gender performance, and subordination as prevalent themes of C/L literatures. That these themes are constructed around the figure of a woman doing domestic work for the men of her family engages a bigger social issue of gender oppression, a definitive theme of Chicana and Latina literatures. The figure of the daughter depicted in this
way also works to become a sign of the literatures themselves, as literatures with a primary feminist concern.

This system of signs broadens with time, and simply as a consequence of the amount of texts that will be written. But who is writing, or rather, whose writing will be allowed to be inscribed as C/L, will broaden too. The CLLP has sought to include a variety of voices within the Chicana/o and Latina/o communities—those who have been typically denied access and authority as writers, or those whose writing has been considered marginal within a “minor” literature. Here, I refer to lesbian and gay C/L writers, women writers who portray forbidden themes of feminine sexual desire and deviance, abusive mothering, as well as pinto poets, biracial themes, and themes and concerns of the Chicana/o and Latina/o middle-class. The anthology shows the expansion of what is to be considered thematically legitimate to the canon of C/L literatures by recognizing and thereby validating writing like Cherríe Moraga's
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lesbian biracial poetry, Ana Castillo's
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sensibility that may fall in the face of traditional notions of how a “Mexican” woman should be, Jack López's middle-class youth in Orange County, California, and Andrés Montoya's treatment of God and gang-banging. The anthology privies the reader to the appearance, validation, and incorporation of these voices that has opened up the thematic specificity of C/L letters as literatures.

In this anthology, we are presented with an opportunity to understand this group of writings in the process of forming literatures and literary canons, observing how they specify who, what, and how they will be. The perspective provided by the anthology is unique in that the reader is able to discern particular dynamics of canon formation as an outcome of the concerns of the literatures, but the reader can also witness this formation in relation and response to postmodernism and postcolonial theory; they too impel their implications into the processes of C/L canon formation. The observation that the thematic concerns and aesthetic treatment of these writings does not follow some kind of narrow linear development but seems to weave through and within demonstrates the literatures' postmodern reality. An example in the recurring image of the uneasy Chicano or Latino male in the writings from the 1970s through the 1990s responds to a contingent postcolonial reality that challenged many C/L males in the 1970s as it does today.