The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (7 page)

Terri de la Peña's short story collection
Ventanas
constructs interesting plots and characters, depicting the joys and struggles of urban Chicana lesbians. The selection included from the first-prize winner of the 1991-92 contest is the title story “Ventanas,” a story of two police officers' encounter with homophobia. Set in Los Angeles, partners Ron and Lu face the terror of harassment from the point of view of its victim, Chicana lesbian Pat Ramos. Ron, a Chicano divorcé, and Lu, an African-American widow, are confronted with Gus Becerra, a homophobic vigilante who threatens beautiful Pat and her friends. What becomes perhaps the more interesting problem for the story to examine is the pervasiveness of homophobia, not merely in the fringe figure of Gus Becerra, but in Ron and Lu, the police officers on the case, the police captain McNeill, and nearly every other character in the story. The day-to-day way this homophobia is expressed as well as the degree to which Pat's sexual orientation subtly yet strongly disturbs Ron illustrate the extensive and ingrained nature of homophobia in American society. The emotivity of racialization, sexual orientation, and gender expectations interweave from one character to the next and, in so doing, take these issues out of the particular context of victim/perpetrator, law officer/civilian, or straight/gay to create a worldview where average people are brought to their lowest common denominator by their homophobia, racism, and sexism. De la Peña's characters are written well so that the reader feels them as realistically heroic and flawed.

Prolific playwright Elaine Romero's drama
Walking Home
, first-prize winner of the 1993-94 contest, broadens the concerns of Chicanos to focus on the condition of womanhood in the continent of North America. Predicated on race, the play draws upon historical documents and interviews to portray how African-American, Chicana, Mexican, and Anglo women have lived, suffered, died, and sometimes survived their circumstances. The drama converges on the body of moribund María, a young Chicana who has attempted suicide on a Los Angeles beach. As her body lapses into death, she is visited by her alter ego, Woman in the Sand, who will be her guide through a Dickenesque tale of the ghosts of women past. Woman in the Sand is a haunting figure who delivers María from her reverie of indifference to face her impending death, compelling María to reveal the events that led to María's decision to commit suicide. María's story is intercalated by stories of oppression from women that vary in ethnicity, historical moment, and circumstance over generations. The breadth of characters appreciates the suffering of American women across the continent and across time. Their stories build a common history of racial and sexual oppression that will enable
María to come to terms with the source of her misery, her abandonment by her father at a young age. María's ensuing death is interwoven with the physical demise of Woman in the Sand's who languishes alongside María, trying to convince María to surrender to her truth. Woman in the Sand's agony provides María with a corporeal reflection of her dying body and consciousness cannot recognize or accept. Structurally, María's story is knowable only in relation to the suffering of these women; their stories make space for María to tell her story, bit by bit. María's denial of her personal drama is countered by a dramatic insistence on returning the reader to the physicality of María's dying body, reminding the reader of the type of day-to-day suffering that does in fact push many to suicide.

In 1994-95, Evangeline Blanco won first prize for
Caribe
, a historical novel that relays the failed attempts to politically and psychologically free Puerto Rico from its colonial status. The novel opens and nearly ends with the life of Rafael Rodríguez, son of an incestuous union between Mamá Tumbú, voodoo priestess, and her brother, Uncle Moncho. When Rafael becomes Dr. Rodríguez, he defies his cruel upbringing by his white “aunts” that had threatened to crush his sense of self. However, Dr. Rodríguez did not leave his “aunts'” home unscathed. As a professional, Dr. Rodríguez perversely uses his title to exact sexual services for medical ones. He inverts his traumas into a delirious fantasy of creating a great mixed race by taking advantage of white female patients. This abuse is committed in the name of creating a biologically appropriate Puerto Rican race of mulattoes who, under Dr. Rodríguez's tutelage, should become Puerto Rico's liberators. At the heart of the text lies a cultural critique of the nationalist use of mestizaje and the concomitant denial of racism set within the context of Puerto Rico's struggle for liberation. While Blanco may have generalized the particular situation of Puerto Rico by implicating the Caribbean in her title, this fast-paced novel opens up the subject of the particularity of racism and its political implications in a Caribbean context.

Mike Padilla presents a touching collection of short stories called
Hard Language
that won first prize in 1995-96 as well as the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. His stories vary in subject matter as well as geographic space, but offer a notable breadth of perspectives. What unifies his protagonists is their subject position as Chicana/os. Far from a facile understanding of what that implies, Padilla uses the term Chicana/o as a rubric to understand its polyvalency. The situations of the protagonists are so different that what becomes the collection's larger project is how these characters, situations, and spaces can correlate under the auspices of the term Chicana/o. Padilla is adept at focusing in on the mini-dramas of the everyday that present themselves to Chicana/os in specific ways. Padilla's writing tenderly perceives what motivates the human heart in such a way that his stories, grounded in the particular
circumstances of members of the Chicano community, effortlessly unravel the politics of race, class, and gender that precipitate such subject positions. The title story “Hard Language” is the story of Pilar and Antonio, a married couple who has recently immigrated to the United States from Mexico, who then decide to learn English in their efforts to economically get ahead. A seemingly innocuous decision, the implications of bilingualism are explored in this subtly gripping story of the effect of the American Dream on marriage, migrancy, and self-construction.

The late Andrés Montoya's
The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems
, the 1996-97 first-prize winner for poetry, is a moving collection of poems taken from the life of a young Chicano in the urban slums of Fresno, California. Winner of the American Book Award, the ice worker of the title is the poetic voice of the collection who counters the monotonous and physically challenging work of stacking blocks of ice by tending to his soul through song and verse. The emotional rigor of his poetry defiantly exposes a barrio's heart of darkness set up by a capitalist system that leaves millions of people undereducated, emotionally broken, and impoverished. Unrelentingly, the voice finds in each poem a moment of beauty, of tenderness, of spirituality in the most decrepit of circumstances. His work does not glamorize or romanticize violence and poverty. Nor should his treatment of religious faith be confused with facile escapism. His Christian images emanate from the street, in the bodies—whether drugged, orgasmic, beaten, or dead—that he encounters. Rather, the work of Andrés Montoya turns violence and poverty into poetry. Montoya's poetry distinguishes itself with his agility of imagery, the determination of tone, and his message of deliverance.

In 1997-98, Angelo Parra's
Song of the Coquí
won first prize for drama. Set in the present, this play dramatizes the American Dream in crisis. Edna and Ramón (now called Raymond) are a couple in their sixties who migrate from Puerto Rico to New York after World War II. Their only son Ray embraces and then dispels the American Dream of his parents. Each family member portrays the hollowness of this dream: Ray is disillusioned with his law career and is stuck in a relationship with a drug-abuser; Edna is a depressed alcoholic, and Raymond, his father, lives his life in front of the television where he argues and criticizes his wife and son, in place of facing his own misery. The American Dream interpolates the intergenerational dynamics of a Nuyorican family in a lively, well-paced drama that more poignantly delineates the fall out racialization on C/L manhood. Hence, the “coquí,” as Ray was once known, the small singing frog of Puerto Rico, becomes the metaphor of his fate to survive in the United States, but he “will never sing again.”

Combining a sense of humor with the realities of raising a large family on a modest income, Patricia Santana's 1998-99 winning novel
Motorcycle Ride
on the Sea of Tranquility
examines a Chicano family and its experience of the Vietnam War. Set in a barrio in San Diego, California, during the late 1960s, Santana frames this discussion with the well-written coming-of-age story of Yolanda Sahagún which is juxtaposed against the trials of her older brother Chuy. Yolanda's childhood of tranquility suggested in the title is disrupted by her experiences of miscegenation, racism, and sexual oppression. Chuy is a Vietnam veteran who escapes his internal horror of war on long motorcycle trips, distraught with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. While Yolanda experiments with her budding sexual awakening, she is simultaneously confronted with her gender inscription caring for the Sahagún men. And her beloved Chuy no longer talks. In fact, he has disappeared.
Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility
situates the Chicano family not only in relation to global history vis-à-vis the Vietnam War, but it also places the Chicano subject into the socio-economic realm of the middle class where the Sahagún family is embroiled in this historic moment. Santana's novel suggests that this family will retain its sense of Chicanoness, that their ethnicity is a pillar of emotional stability despite the personal catastrophe of war.

Over the twenty-five years compiled here, it is clear how the CLLP has supported Chicana/o and Latina/o writers in many ways. The contest has helped launch careers of writers whose quality and quantity of work have come to form a substantial part of the Chicana/o Latina/o canon. The CLLP has been a community contest, drawing talent from non-professional writers evidenced in their many winning entries. The contest has also provided a space for the fictional writing of a third community of writers, Chicana/o and Latina/o academics. The CLLP's malleability in terms of the types of writing it supports—mixed genres, style, theme, linguistic register, and language—is invaluable in doing the cultural work of authorizing C/L letters in their multiple dimensionality. The winning entries reprinted in this anthology show the intellectual and creative openness of the contest's directors, demonstrating a commitment to follow the artistic pulse of a given historical moment. Now entering its thirty-fourth year, its longevity has created a dependable and accessible base for Chicana/o and Latina/o communities to share our voices both in and outside the academy.

The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize

An Anthology of Prize-Winning Fiction, Poetry, and Drama

Ron Arias

First Prize: Short Story

That afternoon Mrs. Rentería's neighbor's grandchildren discovered David in the dry riverbed. The young man was absolutely dead, the children could see that. For a long time they had watched him from behind the clump of cato'-nine-tails. His body lay so still even a mouse, poking into one dead nostril, suspected nothing. The girl approached first, leaving behind her two brothers. David's brow was smooth. His gray-blue eyes were half-closed. His hair was uncombed and mixed with sand. His dark skin glistened clean and wet; and the rest of him, torn shirt and patched trousers, was also wet.

“He drowned,” the girl said.

The boys ran over for their first good look at a dead man. David was more or less what they expected, except for the gold tooth in front and a mole beneath one sideburn. His name wasn't David yet. That would come later when the others found out. David was the name of a boy who drowned years ago when Cuca predicted it wouldn't rain and it did and the river overflowed, taking little David to the bottom, or to the sea, no one knew, because all they found was a washtub he used as a boat.

“How could he drown?” one of the boys asked.

“There's no water.”

“He did,” the girl said. “Look at him.”

“I'm telling,” the other boy said, backing away.

The boys ran across the dry sand pebbles, up the concrete bank and disappeared behind the levee. Before the crowd of neighbors arrived, the girl wiped the dead face with her skirt hem, straightened his clothes as best she could and tried to remove the sand in his hair. She raised David's head, made a claw with her free hand and raked over the black hair. His skull was smooth on top, with a few bumps above the nape. Finally she made a part on the right side, then lay his head on her lap.

Tiburcio and the boys were the first to reach her, followed by the fisherman Smaldino and the other men. Most of the women waited on the levee until Tiburcio signaled it was okay, the man was dead. Carmela helped Mrs.
Rentería first, since it was her neighbor's grandchildren who had discovered David, then she gave a hand to the other older women. Mrs. Rentería, who appeared more excited than the others, later suggested the name David.

For some time they debated the cause of death. No bruises, no bleeding, only a slight puffiness to the skin, especially the hands. Someone said they should remove the shoes and socks. “No,” Tiburcio said. “Leave him alone, he's been through enough. Next you'll want to take off his clothes.” Tiburcio was overruled; off came the shoes, a little water and sand spilling out. Both socks had holes at the heels and big toes.

“What about the pants?” someone said.

In this way they discovered the man not only lacked a small toe on one foot but also had a large tick burrowed in his right thigh and a long scar running from one hip almost to the navel.