The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (4 page)

Chicano detective novelist Michael Nava, tied for third prize in the 1980-81 contest, intimates the inner life of homoerotic love in his collection, “Sixteen Poems.” The poetic voice emerges during silent moments of erotic tenderness. The poems “Long Distance,” “For David,” “The Lover,” and “For W.” demarcate the construction of physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries between the inside and outside. Love and sexual desire become emotive dynamics that challenge the authority of Western concepts of space and time. The poems entitled “Translations from Neruda” and “Translations from Rubén Darío” share the conjunction “from.” “Of” would have suggested Nava as linguistic translator or interpreter of the poems whereas “from” proposes something different. Nava's own poetic sensibility concerned with chicanismo and queer loving are developed through his perspective of the work of Darío and Neruda, an interesting intertextual approach. Homoerotic love, time, and being are themes that Nava will explore again at book length such as in his 1992 detective novel,
The Hidden Law
.

Jesús Rosales, short story winner of the 1980-81 contest, divides “Parte del proceso” into three sections: “Tal vez al hablar más con ellos,” “Imposible en el extranjero,” and “Sin duda aquí.” These titles are the first indicator of a narrative construction that challenges the formalistic notions of the genre of short story. Partial sentences that suggest conversational responses begin a dialogical narration of a young adult coming of age during his college years. For Latinos, the coordinates of this process are particular in the requirements of geographical movement, initiation rituals into the subculture as a young adult, the confrontation of the subject as Other, and in the negotiation of subjectivity in multiple spaces and registers. I argue for an understanding of a Latino Bildungsroman with this specificity.

The first part is made up of six stories that tell the tale of Alberto's trip to Mexico. Told in first person, the narrator changes unidentified and without contextualization. The geographical and cultural space of the mother country allows Alberto to ponder border architecture, the social structure of rural Mexico and who/how his father is Mexican. At the trip's end, Alberto returns to the university where he encounters the pressures and pleasures of college life for Chicanos in a Spanish department. The second part “Impossible en el extranjero” traces Alberto's tenure as an exchange student in Spain, an important element of the Latino Bildungsroman—the postcolonial fantasy of the return home. In a somber tone reminiscent of Carmen María Gaite's
El cuarto de atrás
, Alberto's presumed ethnic connection to Spain erodes into vignettes of isolation and disillusionment. The third part “Sin duda aquí” resituates Alberto at his American university, placed in a social milieu in
which he is uncomfortable. While in this environment, Rosales's stories highlight ethnic and class differences within drug and music cultures, hallmarks of student life. As the title infers, this maze of events is critical in the trajectory to Latino adulthood as “parte del proceso.” Rosales's Bildungsroman shares with many other Latino coming-of-age stories the specificity of this ethnically marked process.

Mary Helen Ponce won honorable mention in 1981-82 for her short story “Recuerdo: When Rito Died,” that later became part of her autobiography,
Hoyt Street: An Autobiography
(1993). Melancholy marks the tone of her tale as she recounts the death of her brother, Rito. She describes this pivotal event of her childhood in Pacoima, California, as tender with love and kinship but stark with the silence of mourning. Her memories are rotund in scope. As she allows the reader entrance into the inner perceptions of a Chicana girlhood, the reader becomes privy to the difficulties of living between the interstices of race, gender, and class which are at times tragic, but which occur alongside inspired moments of love, compassion, and sometimes beauty. Ponce's “recuerdo” is almost ethnographic in the way that Pacoima, California, experienced Mexican immigration, and the ways that these immigrants interacted, negotiated and adopted Anglo-Euro culture as well as institutional cultures like the Catholic Church. True to Ponce's aesthetic of her autobiography, “When Rito Died” brings with it pulchritudinous sobriety.

Wilfredo Q. Castaño won first prize for his poetry collection called “Bone Games” in 1982-83. Castaño's poetry explores different vantage points from which to consider the possibility of innocence in modern day America. There is a tension between its minute expressions and an environment of cataclysmic decadence, evil, and decay in which they occur. The first poem “Dedications” exemplifies this dynamic found throughout the collection. It begins by describing a birth, a death, and sexual intercourse as specific onthe-edge-moments of life where the relative inability to control the body implies a moment of innocence. These moments are consecrated in an almost religious sense by a human “I” who is described as an eagle in flight that, as it peers down at the chaotic world, notices horrendous things, nonsensical things, and yet, wonderous things. When read in full, the three poems here elaborate an image of awakening to the reality of our contemporary world described as “… innocence / betraying itself and capitulating / to its own suicide, …” (63).

Jack López deals with the themes of friendship and recollection in his winning short story of 1982-83, “The Boy Who Swam With Dolphins.” In this early work, López writes a fictional account of what he will later address in his autobiography,
Cholos and Surfers: A Latino Family Album
(1988). In “The Boy Who Swam With Dolphins,” López looks at a Chicano middleclass adolescence experienced through the surf subculture of Southern California. The protagonist is a young Chicano intrigued by his interethnic experiences
of “riding the waves” with Anglo-Euros and African Americans. The story's plot takes the reader on a surfing trip to Mexico with a group of friends, when one of its members becomes lost at sea. Eventually, the narrator sees the character Po Boy riding with dolphins on the Mexican coast. The scene is almost surreal when the narrator believes Po Boy has become a dolphin. López writes a touching and important story in its depiction of the surf sub-culture that allows for a particular intimacy among men and nature. In a broader sense, this story trumps the reductive notion of the inherent dominance of ethnicity in the conceptualization of the self to open up discursive space to explore other foundations of self.

Luis J. Rodríguez, author of the acclaimed
Always Running La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
(1994), took second place in the 1982-83 contest for his story “Sometimes You Dance With a Watermelon.” Rosalba, a Mexican immigrant and mother, tells her story of misery and isolation in a shanty home in Los Angeles which she shares with her current husband, Pete, her twenty-four-year-old daughter, Sybil, Sybil's drug-addicted boyfriend, Stony, and her four children. The story plays upon the contrast between the sunny climate of Southern California—one of the wealthiest regions in the world—and the stark poverty of many of its residents; in this case, Mexicans and Chicanos living in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. Rosalba awakens to a glorious sunrise, sensitive to the hunger of Sybil's children. Frustrated, Rosalba thieves Stony's car to go downtown to find some way to earn a few dollars for food. Beaten down by an American life that has fallen short of the American Dream, Rosalba trudges forward, spirit unbroken, when she begins to dance in the middle of the hustle and bustle of downtown LA with a watermelon on her head, as she had done as a young woman in Oaxaca. The dance conjures smiles, applause, curiosity, and indifference, but she is momentarily freed from the juggernaut of racism, sexism, and classism that underlie her life circumstance. This story is a tribute and a celebration of people who refuse to surrender their true selves to a society that denies them their humanity.

The well-known poet Francisco X. Alarcón won the 1983-84 poetry contest for his collection “Tattoos.” Alarcón's poetry instructs its reader on social issues and alternate realities manifest in a mostly bilingual format. Alarcón unveils the extent to which what we understand to be common notions are determined by a particular and pervasive viewpoint, or hegemony. He often gives his poems brief titles that evoke specific associations. These associations are then deconstructed and recontextualized in the body of the poem. Alarcón isolates a term and, with his rhythmic yet terse verses, he arrests a hegemonic subjectivity that lies at the base of our cultural cognition of the word, and its reflection of the world. In its place, Alarcón makes lyrical an alternate economy of meaning informed by racialization and oppression. The imagistic cadence of this dynamic is represented as light and
shadow, or rather shadow and light. From the socially marked body of the speaker comes the darkness, but only as a shadow made from the light of his inner self. Graphically, Alarcón seldom capitalizes proper nouns which creates fluidity in his poetry, allowing the reader to take in the graphic form. Through these processes of defamiliarization, Alarcón's “Tattoos” upsets a hegemonic mindset that presumes universal understanding and complicity.

In “Shadows on Ebbing Water,” the Chicana detective fiction writer Lucha Corpi presents an interesting story of love, death, and birth that won first prize in the 1983-84 contest. Corpi deploys a double conversation—two voices in conversation unknowingly with one another—to structure her tale. The character Eva authors the first voice in a series of journal entries. Through these entries, Eva tries to piece together three unexpected events that have disrupted her life: the suicide of her beloved cousin Silvia; the riff between her and her husband Laz; and her unexpected pregnancy after fifteen years of marriage. The questions that Eva asks in her diary are inadvertently addressed by the second voice, the voice of Laz. These entries are interspersed without explanation by this second voice written in the form of a stream of consciousness, unconcerned with documenting complete thoughts. Instead, this voice gives the reader scant details that, when taken together, form a second narrative, the story of Laz's secret life. When Eva's long-lost cousin Silvia comes home to California, a type of love triangle is set in motion. Laz, Eva's husband, immediately senses a shared bond with Silvia founded on emotional grief and sorrow. The subtlety with which Corpi writes this story of a moment of re/cognition in a woman's life—of her true nature, of the ways she avoids pain, of her past naïveté—is most delightful for a reader who can savor the balmy, incandescent language and style that create a narrative that reads like “shadows on ebbing water.”

Bilingual Review Press editor Gary D. Keller was given honorable mention in 1983-84 for his short story, “The Raza Who Won Big in Anáhuac.” “El güero valín” or the “fair preppy” is the protagonist of this story of a Chicano's symbolic return to the country of his ancestors, Mexico. Once again, the theme of the return to origin is an important one for most immigrant populations in the United States, but it is particularly so for Chicana/o(s). Through the form of the Latino Bildungsroman, the acceptance of ethnic ambivalence seems a critical step in the formation of the Chicana/o adult subject. Keller's story is unique in the way he explores how the Chicano becomes a Pocho in a Mexican socioscape, drawing out the types of cultural capital as well as cultural deficit he is seen as possessing. “El güero valín” and his Mexican friend pretend common cultural space of Mexicanness to found a shared understanding that differential poverty will override, but to no avail. Keller, along with several other C/L writers, points to the reality of incommensurable differences that disrupt this postcolonial Chicano idealization.
Keller writes with great wit and is especially adept at mixing registers of discourse with bilingualism and code-switching.

Deborah Fernández Badillo's 1984-85 collection of poetry points to her frustration with social roles that women play. In the first poem “Pinched Toes” the poetic voice comically complains about the demands on an exasperated mother, who is also a wife to a dependent husband, and a worker. These roles leave her no space for herself as an autonomous person. The image of the cheap shoes she must wear that painfully pinch her toes represent her frustration. “Soltera” also explores the theme of loss of self as a woman. Cloistered in her room, the voice is physically hemmed in and spiritually frustrated and disappointed. The poem calls out to God to recognize her true self, but this gesture seems doomed by the poem's end when we find the speaker under her bed, pounding her feet in desperation. The third poem “Terror Eye” moves from the collection's present to her girlhood past. In “Terror Eye,” a friend and a friendship is torn asunder by domestic abuse, excising her old friend Tina from the power and freedom Tina used to express with the unadulterated laughter of her youth. Read in reverse order, the three poems point to a trajectory of a girl's passage from youth to adulthood. Even when humorous, this passage is pained, devoid of illusions. Badillo's poetry is narrative in tone with a cadence that conjures the poet's presence for the reader, like that of a performative monologue.

Juan Felipe Herrera wrote “Memoir: Checker-Piece,” second-prize winner of 1984-85. This short story takes a critical look at the generation of Chicano students at the end of the Chicano Movement. The political battles of the movement are becoming innocuous expressions of “initiation rites” carried out with drugs, tortillas, and in the making of an obscure film. The subtitle “checker-piece” evokes the notion of everyman's game of strategy, but becomes more complicated in this story as a trope to tie architecture with the ultimate stagnation and unexpected gentrification of Chicano students. The narrator fixates on the homogeneity of the endless drone of LA houses that feel to him like a “checkered infinity” as does the endless drive down the highway. The sameness meets the sweltering heat of summer in inland Los Angeles to set the stage for the only element of contrast: a group of four Chicano university students meeting up to make a counter-culture 8mm film. While their presence and aims as Chicano activists of the 1970s could have undercut the pervasive sense of oppression of both the weather and the infrastructure of the city, these students' endeavor feels like more of a pop version of chicanismo made up of gesture and posturing. Herrera writes of the amusing side of chicanismo, but there is also a criticism of the devolution of the movement reaffirmed by the final image of the story: a beige checker-piece looms behind the vato-mobile “la cucharacha” under an oppressive sun, symbolizing the power of hegemony at isolating, and to perhaps a significant degree, domesticating student rebellion.