The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (3 page)

What is notable through reading the anthology is the professionalization of the writing, or the maturation of Chicana/o Latina/o letters, more than the expression of any particular writer. The texts begin to show an auto-referentiality to earlier texts and/or aesthetics that show these “minor” literatures taking on a life of their own with an organic logic and parameters
of interest and intelligibility, an aesthetic sensibility in the process of establishing itself.

“The Wetback,” the first winning entry of the first contest of 1974-75, became part of Ron Arias's highly acclaimed novel
The Road to Tamazunchale
(1975). Influenced perhaps by Gabriel García Márquez's story, “El ahogado más bello del mundo,” “The Wetback” both appropriates and parodies Latin American Magical Realism. In this Chicano tale, David, the beautiful corpse discovered by an urban Chicano community in a dry riverbed in a Los Angeles barrio, serves a similar role as Esteban does in Márquez's story. The fact that the body is brown and dead is oddly common in Chicana/o literature. Part of what is accomplished in the figure of the dead Chicana/o in society is the reduction of the Other as devoid of individuality, of humanity, of dignity, of worth.

Here, Arias co-opt the figure to reinscribe it with just the opposite set of characteristics in the vitality and freedom that David is ascribed with. As an exercise of agency in the ability to resignify its meaning, the community is fascinated with David's beauty and his imperviousness to the physical degradation of death. David conquers death in this manner and so upsets his assignation as a simple border casualty in reawakening a sense of dignity and potentiality in the community. A dead migrant would be considered a border blip from a hegemonic perspective, but for this community, the corpse is the screen onto which the town's people project their individual and collective fantasies.

The dead Chicana/o works at the level of symbol to consolidate the racialized social organization of the US capitalist system that sustains the unethical use of the migrant worker, enforces the worker's complicity with the system, and alienates the humanity of Chicana/o labor as disposable. Arias uses dark humor to criticize and subvert this ultimate idealization of white imperialist and racist fantasies of mastery and domination.

In the 1975-76 contest, well-known Chicana feminist literary critic Rosaura Sánchez fictionally explores a world of working-class Chicanos and Mexicans in unspecified urban and rural environments. Her winning collection of short stories “Transparencias” takes the form of unrelated vignettes that take the reader from an outhouse in a forgotten barrio outside of city limits to a Mexican fast-food production line where we witness the robotization of a Latino worker. Stylistically, Sánchez shows a sensibility to the age and circumstance of the vignette's particular speaker. She also varies the narration from the form of interior monologue to dialogue with equal finesse. Here, Sánchez, like Rolando Hinojosa Smith's Klail City Death Trip Series and others, the vignette is I argue a characteristic form of Chicana/o expression. Playing on Homi K. Bhabha's concept of the western narrative as the
privileged literary form that defines and contains its subject within its discourse, the vignette contests the colonizer's demand of the colonized to reproduce her/himself in the narrative which would make her/himself knowable and manageable within the political economy of imperialism. From the kidnapping and death of a Latino baby to the narration of a young person's suicide, Sánchez's texts share underlying circumstances of the internally colonized, illustrating the grip of power of global capitalism on economically impoverished Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States.

Alma Luz Villanueva's collection is a poetic tour de force, garnering first prize in the 1976-77 contest. While many rightly compare her poetry to that of Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman, Villanueva's Irvine collection later included in her collection
Bloodroot
(1977), should also be considered a treatise on Chicana feminism. The collection takes what heterosexist society might consider dirty little secrets of Chicana womanhood as her poetic
raison d'être
. The power of the female body is explored through various treatments on the menses, pregnancy, and heterosexual pleasure. Villanueva's poetry calls on women to remember their unique physical abilities traditionally revered in Indian societies and to reinscribe them as positive in our contemporary historical moment and place. Her poetry arises from her desire to valorize women in ways that Western society often demeans. The collection begins with an untitled poem which functions as a ritual invocation of a muse. Invoking her grandmother as muse challenges the traditional rhetorical device that bases itself on a heterosexual tension between male poet and female love object. Here, the figure of the grandmother as muse not only motivates the poet's writing, but much of the poetry explores the life the two shared of love and poverty. At the same time, the specificity of their relationship is calibrated by a persistent reference to the universal. Throughout the collection, the poetic I is also deeply embedded in her place within the cosmos. In this way, Villanueva understands women in relation to their particular circumstances within a celestial landscape.

Nedra Ruíz's poetry collection chosen for first prize in the 1977-78 contest takes the reader down a disparate path of poems. These poems create a syntactic and semantic journey that meanders from concrete experience to other realms of existence. The poetry becomes complicated when the ephemeral, the somatic, and the hallucinogenic form a second discursive realm interspersed with the first. Themes of writing, sexual desire, and altered psychological states create an imaginary baseline for the contemplation of landscape, everyday interactions, lost love, and human relations with inanimate objects. Ruíz's poetry boldly asserts an autonomous C/L feminine subject freeing herself from gendered social constraints. The social space into which she enters recognizes her fragmented self that she expresses as a dispersed subjectivity. Ruíz's poems rework the subject position of the
Lacanian gaze where disjointed, incongruous objects of contemplation shatter into numerous subject positions of observation.

Juan Felipe Herrera's 1978-79 collection
Antiteatro y poemas
plays upon his experience in theater to put forth a unique theatrical poetry. Herrera's
antiteatro
erodes the barrier between written word and individual reception in a poetic discourse best described as a collaborative performance of “authors and creators” (25). His intention as prefaced in “Direction Notes” is to meld object with subject, the individual with the collective, not necessarily to eradicate their autonomy, but to unveil their continuity. Blue is the color that will visually stimulate this connectivity, and ultimately, blue will reveal the futility of the same in a depressive image that ends “La carta,” an invisible jail cell of the mind too accustomed to its sociological incarceration to contemplate an escape. Technically, Herrera experiments with the theatrical in the future and imperative tenses, with verses directed to “tú” or “you,” which work in “launching a vascular electricity” in order to “decipher the impossible” (25). In Brechtian fashion, Herrera highlights the formulaic devices of Western poetry when he includes the citational norm of the backslash to indicate verse in his drama and in some of his poems. Many of Herrera's poems such as “B Street Second Floor Mural / 14x14,” “5x25 Mundo Mexicano Mural,” and “Portrait of Woman in Long Black Dress/Aurelia” of which the first is included here, are ekphrastic, using paintings as the subject matter of poetry. These poems create an intense yet scant narrative line to the paintings Herrera contemplates, and, like his antitheater, the poems tend to view humans as solitary units compelled by the power of nature to commune. Yet, the subject and object are not able to recognize or find solace in their connection. They remain immune. Other poems like “Green,” “Dudo las luces,” and “La furia de las abejas” (the first included), combine dissonant images of the pressures of contemporary life. Here, people of color punctuate the cityscape as a bodily site of the grossest objectification while, ironically, colored people come to represent the possibility of salvation. In Herrera's poetry, the reader perceives the influence in style and intent of Federico García Lorca and Antonin Artaud. Like Lorca's
Poeta en Nueva York
in Herrera's poetry there is a surreal dynamic that removes the Western subject from its central position to focus on its tangential relation to others. Influenced by Artaud's “Theater of Cruelty,” Herrera reveals global capitalism as a myopic form of oppression that mutates the cosmic order of things into a chaos of isolation and perversion.

The acclaimed writer Helena María Viramontes won first prize in 1978-79 for “Birthday,” the short story of Alice, a young woman undergoing an abortion. Her mental anguish is lyrically presented as the story explores the social inscription of maternity on women as vessels of reproduction in opposition to the sentient, sexual woman that Alice knows herself to be. Ultimately, “Birthday” makes abortion the ironic process through which Alice
rebirths herself. Along with the burden of making such a difficult choice, Alice also enjoys the newly discovered power that comes from determining her life's path. Viramontes presents sections that stylistically follow a stream of consciousness interspersed with third-person omniscient narration without remarking these transitions. These fluctuations become more complex with the temporal changes from past conversations to the present where Alice awaits an abortion in the clinic. Typographically, the story varies between the conventional presentation of text to sections written primarily in lower case with little punctuation, randomly adhering to standard English grammar. The structure of the story graphically manifests the conflict and emotional instability of the protagonist. “Birthday” was later revised and included in Viramontes's well-known short story collection
The Moths and Other Stories
(1985) and demonstrates her early interest in feminist issues as well as her unique ability with language.

Through the figure of the agricultural field worker, the theme of global capitalism is also explored in David Nava Monreal's 1979-80 first-prize novel, “A Pastoral Tale.” The story follows the lives of Rosa Ramírez and Raúl Nava, a young couple who begins their courtship in the fields as migrant workers, and then during their married life, ascend to the middle class. While the first half of the story sets the stage for a tale seemingly uncritical of its suppositions, the title is an ironic indication of the adversity to come. The subsequent reversal in the second half of the story is foreshadowed in the opening scene of Raúl and his best friend, Jorge. The pride Raúl feels in owning a humble dwelling foments a desire in Raúl to attain the American Dream of economic prosperity. This desire to climb the social ladder will be Raúl's proverbial Achilles' heel that will find Raúl, Rosa, and their son Miguel, dead at the story's end. Thematically, “A Pastoral Tale” demonstrates how cultural assimilation can exact and deteriorate one's sense of self. Monreal plays with the convention of the pastoral that normally romanticizes the countryside in the eyes of the jaded or cynical, yet sophisticated, urban poet. Here, the countryside and the simple life of migrant laborers ironizes the convention of the locus amoenous characteristic of the pastoral. The fragile life of the undocumented worker finds little respite in arduous manual labor or life in a shanty. Ultimately, the convention of the traditional pastoral is upset and laid bare by the perspective of Chicana/o fieldworkers and the project of assimilation. Monreal's “A Pastoral Tale” denaturalizes and denationalizes the American countryside to expose it as a site of international movement, oppression, and containment of Mexican bodies who perform stoop labor for capitalists.

Rubén Medina's first-prize poetry collection of 1979-80 also concerns the plight of laborers and uses nature to reveal the true state of the human spirit. In “Danzón,” Papá's infidelities and Mamá's misery were like those Sundays when Papá would take the kids to play baseball before heading off to
meet up with his mistresses. Once the beautiful grass that comforted falls, now has become the visual vantage point of the depressed speaker. In Medina's poetry, nature entices human connection and nurturance, but in the last instance, nature becomes a metaphor for human deception. The second poem “Lluvia” uses a thunderstorm to express the speaker's tender knowing of his beloved Abuela. Thunderstorms that often disrupt daily life force the child and his grandmother indoors. In images that meld Grandma's power to calm with the sun that will come out (39), Grandma is the figure who is able to manage the disruptive force of nature, the spirit world, and their impact on a vulnerable little boy. The third poem “Day-Off” speaks bitterly of domestic labor and the contrasts in lifestyle that forces a juxtaposition between differing economic classes. Leisure time for the worker is the possibility of being with one's true self outside the system of labor where a graduated depth of color—be it phenotypic or cultural—often influences economic rank. On his day off, the house servant can become the artist or the fisherman, the lover of poetry, the friend, in union with the earthly delight of a cup of coffee, the bird's song, the sweet murmur of the elderly. This weekly refuge of the true self on his day off returns in the penultimate stanza with a pledge to remember that each worker will be redeemed in the many “days off” to come. Stylistically, Medina's poetry is narrative in tone and expressed in free verse with lengthy stanzas where nature is the allegorical prism for human relations.

Juan Manuel Bernal's first-prize winning poetry entry
Confesiones de un seudopoeta: digresiones de un demente
of 1980-81 opens with a self-reflexive piece called “Él y yo” that establishes two competing internal voices of the speaker. The voice addressed as “yo” is an unassuming Chicano youth who suffers from loneliness, while “él” is a sociable college student who enjoys extensive knowledge of language and literature. This duality of the speaker is played out in the body of the work where intermittently “yo” will appear, or “tú” will be addressed. The verses directed to the reader in first-person singular and second-person singular responds to the central concern set up in the first entry—a view of the world where “[a]bsurdo hoy, absurdo ayer, absurdo mañana: absurdo siempre” (41). The thesis of the collection is expressed as the frustrated promise of modernity presented through the episteme of baroque Spanish literature, and contemporary Mexican literature. Supposing these particular genealogies the heritage of the Chicano voice, the voices of the speaker question the viability of the sociological enterprise of literature to represent human experience. Bernal stylizes classical figures and formal poetic registers with humor by interspersing free verse, dialogic form, and neologisms. His point is to juxtapose the modern legacy of history and high art with the social decay of not only today, but also of yesterday. The competing voices mock structures of hegemony such as the language and art, the artificial imposition of nations and nationality, the rigidity of hegemonic language, the hypocrisy of middle-class activists, and the tyrannical
nature of many political organizations, including the Chicano Movement. Bernal's work veers on the edge of absurdism, an appropriate aesthetic to communicate the irrationality of modern life as a person of color under late capitalism.