The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (6 page)

From Alberto Ledesma's collection
Poetry for Homeboys on the Foul Line
, first-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest, are three poems: “José,” “82nd Avenue,” and “Ay-ay-ay!” Each portrays a vision of barrio life from three discrete spaces: the home altar, the family room, and the city street. These three spaces allow for two different selves to be explored. The domestic realm is the space where the poetic voice ethnically circumscribes himself Chicano. The public sphere is where the Chicano self is contested as Other. Racist paradigms are enacted that create an internal and external tension between the self as Subject and the self as Other. The first poem “José” draws out the religious contradiction of these spaces represented in kneeling at the altar in his home while preparing for a drug deal to be enacted on a street corner. The second poem “82nd Avenue” draws this comparison between the life of empowered citizens and the continuity they enjoy with the privacy of the home and the public space of the street. For the economically and ethnically oppressed, the sense of self and safety procured in the home is disrupted by suspicion and surveillance that deterritorializes the self in the street. The poem dramatizes this shift when describing the threshold of the house where “white wood porch steps” are traded for “a trail of asphalt crumbs” (175). The instability of self and community is registered again in the last poem included. Here, watching a televised Mexican movie on a Saturday night, Mamá remembers and reexperiences herself as freely Mexican—a luxury of home that the asphalt of Monday will contest.

In 1988-89, Liliana Valenzuela won first prize for her story, “Zurcidos invisibles,” the touching story of the dreary life of Marta, a spinster. Thirty-year old Marta works as a seamstress and is the caretaker of her three relatives and additional boarders in the family home. Her biological age is surprising given the tone of her voice that displays a level of disillusionment usually wrought by older age. The seams of her life begin to unravel while repairing a worn-out elbow of a boarder's coat as Marta compares the life lived through the worn fabric with her pristine life of duty and chastity. She pricks her finger and the globule of blood let symbolizes a longing to live outside of her imposed familial servitude. Dolores, her old abusive aunt, uses social custom to chain Marta to a life of domestic service. The story begins
and ends with an earthquake that should leave Marta's family for dead. Still alive, their survival becomes the real tragedy of Marta's life. “Zurcidos invisibles” is remiscent of Eduardo Mallea's short stories in its monotonously gray tone that aptly depicts the sadness and tragedy of constraining social arrangements.

Widely published author Benjamín Alire Sáenz won second prize for his short story “Alligator Park” in 1988-89. Jaime is a Chicano living in El Paso, Texas, who helps political refugees gain legal status in the United States. The story opens with a conversation between Jaime and Franklin, a teenage refugee from El Salvador. Franklin appears at Jaime's door looking for legal help to seek political asylum in the United States. The precarious life Franklin is forced to lead, spending his days hiding out from INS officials in their trademark green vans, is juxtaposed to the story Franklin tells of his life in his home country under siege by political assassinations, massacres of civilians and more. When Franklin asks Jaime what it is like to be an American citizen, Jaime baulks when he utters the adjective “nice” (182), and so subtly complicates the good life supposed of US citizenship. Sáenz's story unveils the reality of life in the proverbial home of the free and the brave that, in fact, looks and feels only somewhat different from the vantage point of an undocumented immigrant, and too often for citizens of color as well. Sáenz deftly imbricates the justice system into the pandemic racism of the United States when Jaime recognizes the futility of his efforts to help Franklin and others like him. In this story, Sáenz also gives voice to the experience of children of war opening a psychological window to consider the complexity of experience for a portion of US Latino communities.

David Meléndez wrote
No Flag
and won first prize for drama in 1989-90. The structure of his play draws the reader into an unexplained situation of imminent violence that is gradually understood to be motivated by ethnic and/or class strife and thus resonates the avant-gardist structure of Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
. The trope of the play can be described as
in medias res
found in its dialogic tone, plot development, and scene change. This rhetorical strategy opens up the delicate subject of ethnic rage that, in this play, foments in the premeditation of violence against unspecified hegemonic powers. There are suggestions of ethnic discord that give a scant context to understand the motivation behind the terrorist plot. Ultimately, its eventual execution and consequences are left unknown, leaving the reader with unanswered questions. Thus, the play is really about its silences rather than what is staged. The historical links to the Chicano Movement of the 1970s to the drama's late-1980s present, the objective of the terrorist plot, and the mystique of Garathy Hill, all remain unexplained. The play is located in City Terrace, California, an area of heavy gang activity bounded by East Los Angeles at one end, and California State University, Los Angeles, at another. In this sense, the true drama is the intensity of the tension of daily
life for people of color that is intimated rather than openly discussed. The reader is given decontextualized indications of the substance of these silences, such as the breakdown of our social pact, pointing specifically to compromised journalism, racist police, the disregard of women's knowledge, the dark side of human beings, the nature of subversive power, and the rational thought of a terrorist's mind.

Carlos Nicolás Flores's short story “Cantina del gusanito” for which he won first prize in the 1989-90 contest tells of an outing to Don Gallardo's bar where two old friends, Américo and Porfirio, meet, get drunk, and converse. The story is almost ethnographical in its depiction of Chicanos and Mexicans. Both intellectuals, the men expound on their frustrations, and the futility of their ability to affect their respective worlds in mid-life. The story captures a snapshot of Mexican friendship, the function of alcohol among men, their values, and their vices. It is a well-written story that on another level explores sociality on the border. The dynamic of the border infuses populations on the two sides with variable Otherness, or conversely, subject-hood. The fact that the cantina scene takes place on the Mexican side of the border is important to consider. The tension in a similar type of bar with a crowd of working-class Mexican migrants, residents, and/or citizens—all of whom are subject to suffer from second-class citizenship, racism, and poverty—would unlikely create a celebratory atmosphere. Yet, similar circumstances on the Mexican side of the border become imbued with a qualitative Mexicanness. Hence the ethnography of place allows a different type of experience for its patrons; namely, a distinct intimacy amongst men. The two characters of the story, Américo and Porfirio, draw life from the opposite side of the border; yet, they allow themselves to befriend each other in particular ways because of the cultural space of the cantina.

Well-known novelist Graciela Limón won third prize in 1989-90 for her short story entitled “Concha's Husband.” This is a story of love and deception in a small town in Mexico set sometime in the distant past. The story begins with a wake in the living room of Concha's home that acknowledges, rather than honors, the death of her husband. The writer privileges the voices of the townsmen who murmur condolences to the widow while internally chastising the dead man. The townswomen, on the other hand, lament the loss of their collective lover who had stolen the hearts and bodies of young and old. Limón draws out the distinct perception of each group of the town's lecher who drew hatred, lust, love, and envy. Limón shows the style that will characterize much of her work in which a gentle narrative pace creates a respite from which she explores difficult, and sometimes anti-social, psychologies of her characters. It is with this cadence that Limón turns the narrative focus from the grieving widow and the emotional outpour of the town to the real plot of the story: the act of murder as deliverance from a philandering husband.

Cultural critic, journalist, and essayist Rubén Benjamín Martínez won third prize in 1989-90 for his poetry “Plaza mayor” of which two poems are included: “The Borders” and “Lago de Ilopango, El Salvador, 1971.” The first poem takes the motif of borders to explore the dichotomy between two realities of the speaker. US suburbia shows an aegis of a modernist utopia, a fantasy made reality of solid construction, tidy public spaces, and a general air of ironic “frenetic” (190) contentment. Martínez contrasts this reality, or lived experience, with the underbelly that makes such a place possible; namely the sweat of underpaid laborers. As the poetic voice moves along and through suburbia, the speaker is viscerally aware of this underbelly-world that disrupts the pristine landscape in the image of cracked walls, the intrusion of ants, and exploding neon signs (189). Humanity is the other casualty in this poem that capitalism exacts for the benefit of the middle and upper classes. The quality of life that suburbia supposes is shown as hollow and elusive and the “moving border” (189) is the speaker's double-vision where he witnesses the promise and the price of late capitalism, simultaneously. A more fulfilled society is found in Martínez's “Lago de Ilopango, El Salvador, 1971.” The concrete path, met with skepticism in the beginning of the first poem, converts into a dusty, rural path made beautiful by a child's “quick / exited steps” (190). Set in a rural setting, the poem elegizes the relationship between grandfather and grandson as they set off before dawn to fish. In contrast with “The Borders,” the economic system of the pueblo of Ilopango harmonizes nature and society. Perhaps romanticized by the perspective of youth, nevertheless the rural Salvadoran village is able to connect its inhabitants to a paradigm of emotional, economic, and intergenerational interdependence and well-being, something bereft in US suburbia.

Author Manuel Ramos turns his critical attention to the Chicano Movement in his novel,
The Ballad of Rocky Ruíz
(1993), first-prize winner of the 1990-91 contest. The writing of a crime novel provides Ramos with the opportunity to examine the mythic stature of the Chicano Movement. Under his critical eye, the reader learns of the inner politics of some of its leaders, the role of the FBI in its demise, and the way the movement for some, had become primarily an occasion for fraternizing. This story is fashioned in the aftermath of the Chicano Movement, tracing the lives of college leaders some years after graduating from the University of Colorado, Denver. Rocky Ruíz, one member of their group murdered during college creates the first mystery for the novel to unravel. The remaining members including Luis are being threatened twenty years later by an unidentified man. While Ramos's depiction of heterosexual relations is perhaps realistic for many men, it is also fodder for feminist critics, and in this sense, is problematic. However, the novel accomplishes something very important.
The Ballad of Rocky Ruíz
establishes its fictional reality from within the Chicano Movement. The importance of this gesture is to move the movement from periphery to center
in America's historical memory. Ramos accomplishes this point without apology or explanation. He writes comfortably under the assumption that his readership has sufficient acumen of Chicano culture and history. This authorial position marks the impact and dissemination of the movement's cause in the realm of national culture. Ramos's textual assumptions allow a different kind of Chicano protagonist to be developed as well. Luis Montez is Chicano in a very unselfconscious, indeliberate way. His ethnicity and how it plays out in himself and in how he moves through the world is an accepted reality about which there is again, nothing to explain, contest, protest, or affirm. It just is. Based in the 1990s, the story questions the movement's future perfect that seems to be failing in significant ways. The novel in this way criticizes current Chicano activism as apathetic, embittered, or at least distracted. The corrido that ends the book reminds the reader of the importance of oral history and so re/connects contemporary Chicanos with this Mexican way of knowing. Ramos's text has become an instant classic in many circles for the quality of the writing and the way it uses the genre of the crime novel to tell a Chicano story. Ramos joins other contest winners like Lucha Corpi and Michael Nava in this first generation of Chicano detective fiction writers. Their successes highlight the CLLP's importance in acknowledging the unique merit of Chicana/o voices in the genre of detective fiction.

In 1990-91, Graciela Limón won third prize for her novel
A Voice in the Ramah
republished as
In Search of Bernabé
(1993). Located in El Salvador, this story shares a common history of civil war, US involvement, and destroyed families with other war-torn Central American republics. Set in the 1980s, Luz Delcano searches for her son Bernabé, lost in the aftermath of a government attack on civilians and rebels alike during a funeral procession honoring the murdered Archbishop Romero. Tying the fictional story to historical events seeks to ground the reading in reality. This grounding is furthered by the genealogy of two of the main characters, Bernabé and Lucio, but with an ironic intention. Genealogy is the allegorical structure of the novel that exposes the dysfunction and disunity of this nation. Through the characters of Lucio Delcano, Bernabé's unknown half-brother turned military higher-up, who is the progeny of incest between Luz, his biracial mother, and his white aristocratic great-grandfather; and Bernabé himself, the bastard child of Luz and her employer, Don Grijalva. Allegorized, these familial relations provide a critical look at the postcolonial legacies of racism and miscegenation as they play out in contemporary civil strife in this Central American story. The story of Luz Delcano is a Latino story because of what it shares with many Central American immigrants who reside in the United States. It is also the story of a subjugated woman, of her defiant ways of love and desire, her ability to provide succor to others beyond those to whom she shares biological ties, and of her ferocity of spirit to honor her love of her son. Reflecting back on the argument of this introduction, as the political contestation incorporates broader
geographic zones, Limón's Chicana sensibility acknowledges the merit and poetry of Salvadoran Luz's life. Limón's prose is diaphanous, providing a thin shield from the horrendous truths of international politics, history, and commerce in human lives in Central America.