The Construction of Latina/O Literary Imaginaries

The Construction of Latina/o Literary Imaginaries The Construction of Latina/o Literary Imaginaries: Essays on Alternative Worldviews By Donna M. Kabalen De Bichara The Construction of Latina/o Literary Imaginaries: Essays on Alternative Worldviews By Donna M. Kabalen De Bichara This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Donna M. Kabalen De Bichara All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0889-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0889-7 To my husband Roberto: Thank you for your patience, for your encouragement and for the gift of time to create. To my children: Monica, Roberto and Denise To Manuel Tapia Becerra and Fabián Montemayor Morales: Many thanks, for without your technical support this book would not have been possible. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part One: Border Newspapers and the Conservation of Cultural Memory The Hispanic Periodical and Promotion of Moral and Cultural Values: La Prensa .................................................................................................. 11 Expressions of Conflicting Worldviews in Religious Print Culture: Casa Editorial Revista Católica and Casa Bautista de Publicaciones ...... 23 Part Two: Memory, Life Writing, and Fictions Unhailed Heroines ..................................................................................... 41 Performing Autobiography and Identity in The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breastfeed, by Daniel Venegas ..................................................................................... 63 Narrating a Clandestine Existence: Ramón “Tianguis” Pérez´s Diary of an Undocumented Immigrant ...................................................... 75 Part Three: Border Literature and the Articulation of Identity Self and Collective Representation in the Essays by Chicano Authors Rolando Hinojosa and Sergio Troncoso ................... 91 Transcendental Train Yard and the Creation of Poetic and Visual Texts: The Construction of Cultural Memory and Identity ................................ 111 Works Cited ............................................................................................. 127 INTRODUCTION The essays that make up this volume are the result of research that has focused on recovered Latina/o literary texts and recent publications by contemporary authors. Much of my work draws on the comprehensive bibliography available to scholars as part of the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, which includes collections of literary works written by Latina/o authors dating from the colonial period until 1980. The wealth of information made available by the recovery project includes historical articles, pamphlets that provide information on religious and political issues, historical newspaper and periodical collections, and historical books. I would also like to clarify that throughout this book I refer to concepts such as literature and literary. My use of the terms involves a broad spectrum of writing that includes not only the novelistic and poetic form, but also articles and essays that can be found in the more than 1,400 historical newspapers included in the Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 and 2 and the University of Houston collection of Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808–1980, now available through Readex Collections. For the purpose of classifying the collection of texts examined in The Construction of Latina/o Cultural Imaginaries: Alternative Worldviews, I have chosen to use the term “Latina/o” rather than “Hispanic.” The use of the term Hispanic in reference to literary works has traditionally encompassed print culture that has its origins in Spanish-speaking countries, and often references the Iberian Peninsula. For instance, a major anthology of US literary production from the period of exploration and colonization of the New World to the present uses the term in its title: Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002). The Spanish version of the same text uses the term “hispana”: En otra voz: Antología de la literature hispana en los Estados Unidos (2002). The editors chose to use the term “US Hispanic” because “[i]t is a literature that transcends ethnicity and race, while striving for a Chicano, Nuyorican, Cuban American, or just Hispanic or Latino identity” (1). Furthermore, with the publication of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature in 2010, the change in usage from “Hispanic” to “Latino” was 2 Introduction discussed by one of the anthology’s editors, Ilan Stavans,1 who points out that: Two prominent terms, “Latino” and “Hispanic,” refer to people living in the United States who have roots in Latin America, Spain, Mexico, South America, or Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries. “Hispanic” is a reference to Hispania, the name by which Spain was known in the Roman period, and there has always been strong ambivalence toward Spain in its former colonies. Hispanic was the term adopted by the government—by the Nixon government in particular—and that made the community feel it was being branded. The term “Latino” has emerged as more authentic, although it’s gender specific. In any case these two terms, at present, keep on fighting for space. Newspapers will sometimes use both in the same article as if editors chose not to choose. The anthology’s editorial team endorsed the community-preferred word and made that clear in the preface. (Schama) In addition to Stavans’s comments, I find Linda Martín Alcoff’s scholarly argument in “Latino vs Hispanic: The Politics of Ethnic Names” to be enlightening. Her analysis focuses on the cultural relevance surrounding the “descriptive adequacy” (396) of the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino,” and she suggests that Hispanic refers more specifically to a historical past marked by Spain’s role in the colonization of the Americas until 1848, when: the Spanish Empire controlled most of the land mass of the Americas, reaching from what is now California and Colorado to Chile and most of Argentina, and also to Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. By 1920, nearly all of these lands were independent of Spanish colonial rule but had come under various amounts of control by the United States, either through annexation, colonization or a more diffuse but still very powerful control exerted through territorial treaties, military occupation, and neo-colonial relations of economic subordination. (401) Based on her reading of Walter Mignolo’s perspective on the effects of the Spanish American War, Martín Alcoff further explains that, “historically, the term Latino signiﬁes and is itself marked by that moment of crystallization in the colonial relation between, not Spain and Latin America, but the USA and Latin America” (402). Neither Stavans nor Alcoff provides a definitive answer to the debate over whether Hispanic or 1 The complete interview with Chloe Schama and Ilan Stavans is available at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/what-defines-latino-literature- 73399798/#71fpMtC72V5r2TPh.99. The Construction of Latina/o Literary Imaginaries 3 Latino is a more appropriate term, but the term Latina/o is used in a recent publication: The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016). The critical essays that make up the volume follow a chronology that takes the reader from studies on trans-American encounters of the early nineteenth century to contemporary Latina/o literature that focuses on topics such as migration, transnationalism, questions of the American dream, and literature about undocumented immigration. Therefore, in keeping with these recent scholarly views, and in line with The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, I have chosen to use the more gender-inclusive term “Latina/o” to define the corpus of texts selected for this study. A defining characteristic of this book is to pull together different forms of Latina/o literary production that are informed by elements such as nationalist and religious concerns, self and collective memory, exile and immigration, and Latina/o identity and cultural memory. Interestingly, in Imaginary Ethnographies, Gabriele Schwab posits the connection between literature and its function in cultural production: “Literature is a medium that writes culture within the particular space and mode of aesthetic production” (2). A perception of literature as a means of writing and creating culture underlies my analytical approach to texts that include non- fiction, fiction, poetry, and the text image. The essays gathered here also expand on my work in Telling Border Life Stories: Four Mexican American Women Writers, which focuses on a historical, cultural, and ideological reading of autobiographies written by Latina women. My intention in The Construction of Latina/o Cultural Imaginaries: Alternative Worldviews is to demonstrate the way the threads of the texts and their various layers of information contribute to a clearer understanding of a cultural continuum that links the past with the present. In keeping

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