The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (36 page)

LOUIE:
(Looking up from the paper and becoming slightly irritated.)
What's going to happen, Lilly? What? If something were going to happen, it would say so right here in the paper.

LILLY: I told you those newspaper guys don't know what they're talking about. Did they write about the kids who got beaten up by the cops on Arizona and Third? Did they write about the kids that they took away from East L.A. College last week when they had one of those … those.… What do you call them? Those sit things.

LOUIE: Sit-Ins.

LILLY: Ya, Louie. That Sit-In stuff.

LOUIE: Of course not. There are bigger colleges doing that with more kids. That's what's gonna get written up.

LILLY: And what about those kids in front of the Boulevard Theater?

LOUIE: Whispers, Lilly. There's nothing in a whisper.

Rubén Benjamin Martínez

Third Prize: Poetry

I walk down streets

newly paved and placid,

imagining destruction …

walls crack,

ants pour from the fissures,

neons explode in purple flame,

smiles tremble, are torn

by a millenia of teeth,

cars sink into cement

melted by boiling rain,

the hands of clocks fall,

eyes are blinded by firewind,

diaries scream

families hide

words no longer

say hello,

but all around me,

the work continues…

sweet tar is brushed

over the mirrors,

mall metal is polished,

the economy purrs content,

sympathetic promises are hissed

while the footsteps of the nation,

heedless of the splintered floorboards,

dance to a frenetic beat.

I imagine these things

when the two worlds

in and outside of me meet:

the complacency of one

destroyed by the urgency of the other,

the death of one

brought to life

by the death of the other…

the borders move.

Child with quick

excited steps

nears the lakeshore.

Grandfather, far behind,

net slung over shoulder,

takes two steps

to the boy's eight.

Wavelets lap, birds cry.

Cool morning air

evaporates fast.

Grandfather smiles

the boy's feet slap

the dusty path

clouds of dust

hang in the breezeless air.

Soon, the heat

will suffocate.

A fish breaks

water's surface,

catching the first flash

of dawn.

The sun, orange

with the slightest

tinge of red, slowly

rises over the mountain.

Carlos Nicolás Flores

First Prize: Novel

“… So you plan to stay in Escandón?”

“I don't think I could live elsewhere.”

“Américo is a pragmatist,” said Porfirio. “A tragedy because he is a highly intelligent man. He could have been a distinguished intellectual.”

“Nonsense,” Américo sat up in his chair. “If I were a pragmatist, I wouldn't be in Escandón. I would have earned my Ph.D. from Harvard at twenty-five and been working elsewhere. I would have done everything everyone expected me to do, except act on my deepest feelings.” He turned to Señor Gallardo. “Getting a Ph.D. meant having to live in the north, possibly stuck up there forever in all that snow. I came to Escandón to get away from the gringos.”

Señor Gallardo looked at Américo. “What's wrong with the gringos?”

Américo wished he had kept his mouth shut. Neither Porfirio nor Señor Gallardo had ever understood his feelings about living among the gringos. His companions were Mexicans; he was a Mexican-American. More than a river separated them. “Nothing, except that I didn't fit among them. Porfirio is right. I will never leave Escandón because I hate it too much. Here, every time I wake up in the morning, the thought that I live in Escandón hits me in the face like a chingazo. In the north it's easy to get lost in the delusion that everything is all right. Not here. Here every day the enormous contradiction of what I am and what the border is overwhelms me. Somehow, unless I face it every day, I don't feel alive …”

Señor Gallardo shook his head. “It's too bad you feel that way. You shouldn't let anything interfere with your professional advancement. Maybe you'll get an opportunity, a fellowship like the Licenciado's, to complete your doctorate. You're still young. It's never too late.”

There were so many things Américo would like to have said but couldn't. He would like to have told them how, during his two years at a university in Dallas, he lay awake late at night listening to radio stations beaming in from the border and swore that once he got back, he would never leave it. He wanted to tell them about the evening he was walking along a street in Dallas on his way to the opera with some Anglo friends and was halted in his tracks by the sound of Mexican music. His friends went on, and he stayed at the small restaurant, listening to the music and eating homemade tortillas. The next year he dropped out of the university and returned to the border.

Américo tried again. “It's taken me a long time to become part of something. I'm just beginning to feel this is where I belong.” He grinned. “Where in the north could I find a friend as entertaining as Porfirio Montemayor, a native son of Mexico? Or a cantina as appealing as this one?”

The two men stared at him. Porfirio, then Señor Gallardo, smiled with satisfaction.

Porfirio requested a bottle of mezcal. Señor Gallardo looked warily at Américo. A bottle meant that they might be obliged to spend the rest of the afternoon listening to Porfirio's rants. Having noted the hesitation, Porfirio pulled out a wad of pesos and cast them on the table. “I'll pay for the bottle.”

Señor Gallardo picked up the pesos, counted them with a serious face, then went behind the bar. He brought a bottle and put it, along with the change, before Porfirio. Resuming his chair he said, with a look of pride, “The best in the house.”

Porfirio examined the bottle. “Gracias. I always drink the best. Poetry demands it.”

As he poured mezcal in his jigger he added, “Caballeros, if I told you that the worm inside this bottle were alive, that at any moment it might begin
wiggling and want to swim out of the bottle, coming out of the bottle's mouth like Frank Sinatra, like that preposterous worm you have painted outside, Señor Gallardo—”

Señor Gallardo chuckled.

“—neither of you would believe me, would you?”

Señor Gallardo, with a subdued smile and his eyes hidden behind his glasses, listened to the rigamarole of metaphors. Américo took out a cigarette.

“Caballeros,” said Porfirio again. They waited. He raised his jigger in a solitary toast-like gesture, consumed the fiery liquid, flushed, and then filled the glass again. “Half of my friends are dead.”

Porfirio struck a somber note. The smile flickering about Señor Gallardo's mouth subsided. Américo, caught off guard by the unexpected revelation, wondered if Porfirio were up to his old tricks again.

“Some of them, in the early years,” Porfirio continued, “died at Tlatelolco. Later, most of them died alone in their apartments in Monterrey, in Mexico City—their skulls split in half by the Mexican government. I fled. I might have been shot at Tlatelolco. I spent the night before the massacre with a woman, a Cuban refugee, and in the morning I was too drunk to be with my dying friends.”

Américo had never heard that before. If it were true, Porfirio had been more closely linked to Tlatelolco than Américo had imagined.

“When I found out the government sought me in Monterrey, I returned to Nuevo Escandón. My parents hid me. I survived. I shouldn't have. I became a phantom, worse yet, a worm, like that worm in the bottle, pickled in our famous Mexican bitterness.”

“Mine was the generation of '68. Nightly I have asked myself, ‘Where did my generation go wrong?' Were we merely sacrificial victims of indigenous avatars, as someone has so pompously written? Today, the most mediocre university students of my generation are rich. Among the best who survived, many are underpaid teachers, irrelevant idealists in these state tecnológicos. I am one of them, having been unofficially pardoned by the government. I am a citizen in good standing as long as I keep my mouth shut.”

Américo remembered the late afternoon that Porfirio returned from Monterrey where he had just helped organize a demonstration against the government. When had it been? 1971 or 1972? Porfirio had been standing at the cash register in his parents' discotheque, pleading with his mother for drinking money when Américo walked through the front door. The faces of the latest Mexican and American rack and foil stars filled the posters on the high walls. As they paused on the sidewall outside, Porfirio suddenly raised a clenched fist and growled, “We must always be chingue, chingue, chingue! We must never stop chingando!” Américo had looked upon Porfirio's defiance with morbid curiosity but had seen it for what it was, a lot of posturing.

“For a while,” Porfirio went on, “I thought I had become one of the walking dead of the massacre at Tlatelolco. I thought the struggle was over. But today, almost a decade later, something continues to happen upon which the future of everyone on these two continents depends. The current revolutions are the most obvious front of the struggle, and the most violently and simplemindedly opposed. That in itself is remarkable—that there are still people willing to fight and die in what has been described as Latin America's second war of independence.”

Though it was difficult to tell what Porfirio's role had actually been, Américo had always been fascinated by this aspect of Porfirio's life. He himself had witnessed the students' protests in Mexico from a great distance—from inside walls of a mental ward of an American military base. The slaughter of hundreds of students by the Mexican government at Tlatelolco had so repulsed him that the event took on the quality of fiction, like the Spanish conquest of the Indians.

“American priests,” continued Porfirio, “don Mexican rebozos and their white feet appear in huaraches as they pass out the host with one hand and point to the blood in Central America with the other. Tons of cocaine and marijuana cross the international bridge every week, headed straight for the American soul, an unstoppable subversion if there ever was one. The signs are everywhere. Even the Indians have read it in the stars; they have recorded it in their myths and codices. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, unheard of and incurable diseases. In this hemisphere, we are not talking about a stupid little bedraggled revolution, with sombreros, huaraches, and cartucheras. We are talking of nothing less than the Revolution of the Americas, a crisis and a change of such a magnitude that history will make a left turn where we expected it to go right. But,” he paused, his eyes shimmered, “to speak about the Revolution of the Americas is like speaking about that worm seeking its liberation from that bottle of mezcal. No one believes it. No one expects it.”

Porfirio fell silent and drank his liquor slowly. Américo thought of something he wanted to say, but he picked up his Tecate instead. Across the bar throbbed the electronic hysteria of the Dallas Cowboys game, the air conditioner, and the inexhaustible jukebox.

Graciela Limón

Third Prize: Short Story

The night was a dark, sultry August evening filled with the dampness of the Jalisco highlands after a heavy storm. The year was 1923. Outside of Concha's tiny house the cobblestones reeked with the acrid odor of litter and droppings of mules and horses. Now and then a dilapidated old Ford could be heard lumbering down the street, and its driver—a stranger in town, no
doubt—wondered why so many people were crowding into the doorway dimly lit by a yellowish, fly-speckled light bulb.

It was the wake of Concha's husband. The dark figures stepped in from the gloomy night, each silhouette filing past Concha's hunched-over form whose face was hardly visible, hidden as it was by her black shawl. Beside her sat four boys. The last was so young that he still sucked his thumb. He was looking around him without understanding that his father had been dispatched to reckon with his maker just that morning.

“
Señora, lo siento mucho
. My deepest sympathy for you and your little sons. They've lost their father and you have lost your husband.
¡Qué pena!
Life has so much suffering but God is good and only He knows why these things happen.”

“
¡Qué vergüenza
, don Doroteo! That husband of hers was terrible, and just look at her. She weeps as if the most virtuous of all men had just died. If I were in her place I would shout with joy.
¡Qué vergüenza!
He was a good for nothing! He …
Sí, sí,
I know that the dead are to be left to God. Well, he's dead and gone and I'm sure he's burning in hell.”

The townspeople squeezed into the uncomfortably small room where the body was laid; and since there were but a few of that town's inhabitants who had not known the dead man, the room was packed beyond its capacity. Both men and women vividly remembered Concha's husband, so that now that he was dead each one of them had his or her own reason to take one last look at their town's greatest womanizer.

Memories filled the small room to the brim. The women's recollections were charged with the shame of having succumbed to lust, a strong sense of guilt which then mingled with the desire to do it all over again, if only for one more time. On the other hand, the men's thoughts were filled with the wrath felt by those cheated. It was an anger also filled with gloating; a pleasure in knowing that at last someone had laid Concha's husband in his grave, just as he deserved. Some of those men, however, had to admit that they were secretly jealous of Concha's husband because he had possessed that mysterious something that made women come panting after him just as if they had been dogs in heat. As those dark-skinned men with drooping mustaches looked down upon the body, they remembered the dead man's unsightly buck-toothed smile that had seduced so many of the town's beauties, and they were torn between hate and envy.