Crime, Liminality, and the Uncanny in Early Chicano Literature

Latin American Literary Review Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University • Ithaca, NY 14853 • 607-255-4155 Volume 44 / Number 88 2017 E-mail: [email protected] • Website: www.lalrp.net Are Pachucos Subalterns?: Crime, Liminality, and the Uncanny in Early Chicano Literature Paco Martín del Campo ABSTRACT: This article studies the novels of Daniel Venegas, Jovita González, and Américo Paredes that they wrote between 1928- 1938. Indigeneity, marriage, liminality, and volition are major themes in the works of each author, all of which analyze the state of Chicanos in the Southwest during the first decades after the Mexican Revolution. While their plots and characters differ, they are all rooted in the conflict between First Nations and colonial settlers and had to grapple with the existence of pachucos. Because it was necessary for pachucos and pachucas to mediate between their Mexican-born relatives and Euro-Americans, they best represented the state of Mexican America during that era. KEYWORDS: Indigeneity, la chicanada, crime and punishment, liminality, settler-colonialism From 1925 until 1938, three writers named Daniel Venegas, Jovita it is now much easier to access both of González’s works, which González, and Américo Paredes wrote novels that analyze the state she titled Caballero and The Dew on the Thorn, and Paredes’ George of Mexican emigrants and their children living in the U.S. Southwest Washington Gómez. The recovery project allowed Latina and Latino in the decades after the revolution. The characters of their novels intellectuals to analyze these novels in relation to those of contem- exhibited lingering effects from the U.S.-Mexico War, discrimination poraneous authors such as Venegas’ Las Aventuras de Don Chipote. due to legal status, and the pressure and incentives for emigrants’ If those scholars had not undertaken the recovery project, it would children to assimilate. Despite their many differences, both indig- not have been possible to write this article. enous and Tejano characters in their novels find themselves shar- For many reasons, the post-revolutionary era was a critical and ing a state of liminality. The pachucos, or cholos, represented the highly contingent transition period between the Porforiato and the chicanos’ state of liminality as well as anyone, because they had the PRI regime that caused rather contradictory effects to manifest in uncanny ability to mediate between Mexican and Anglo-American Mexico. As certain sectors of the Mexican economy improved dur- communities. For the pachucos, daily life entailed traversing not ing the 1920s, popular social movements demanded the enforce- just distinct environments and languages but also mores and cus- ment of the provisions of the new constitution that mandated re- toms from either side of the border. forms in labor, land redistribution, national ownership of resources, Despite their distinctive plots, characters, settings, and cat- and church-state relations. As agricultural, mining, and oil prices egories of analysis, each author sought to understand the pachucos plummeted towards the end of the decade, Elias Plutarco Calles re- either explicitly or as a subtext. These specific efforts were part of sponded by consolidating power over the national government dur- their larger explanation of the state of Mexican America after the ing the Maximato. The national government eventually established revolution. Some of the major themes in their novels are indigene- an uneasy truce with popular movements during the sexenio of ity, marriage, liminality, and volition. While each of these themes Lázaro Cárdenas through a state-led labor organization called Con- poses a significant issue or question about the motivations of each federación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) that lasted through character, is rooted in conflicts between First Nations and colonial the postwar period. settlers. At critical junctures, both indigenous and Tejano charac- Despite a lingering and pervasive sense of uncertainty” and ters must choose between strategies of resistance and accommo- eliminate the dependent clause “apparently unmolested by the dation. Though the ways each character either resists or accommo- protracted political crisis, Mexican artists used a variety of mediums dates differ for each novel, their actions are all responses to their such as painting, literature, and later film to better understand the liminal state. meaning of Mexican national identity, which was a goal they shared These novels were, for a long time, unavailable to scholars. In with the so-called “indigenista” intellectuals. By the 1940s, the liter- fact, the novels of González and Paredes remained unpublished for ary critic Octavio Paz and others were taking the changing meanings approximately half a century. This article owes much to the efforts of “machismo” in contemporary Mexican society as their subject of of a group of scholars who labored to recover the writings of Latino inquiry. In El Laberinto de la Soledad (1950), Paz analyzed both the novelists that had been lost until the 1980s. Because of their work, collapse of the Mexica Empire during the sixteenth century and the Are Pachucos Subalterns?: Crime, Liminality, and the Uncanny in Early Chicano Literature Latin American Literary Review • 3 pachucos (who were also known as “Zoot Suiters”) who emerged in masculinity in South Texas. González set both of her two unpub- East Los Angeles during the decades after the revolution. For Paz, lished novels, The Dew on the Thorn (which remained unfinished) both the history of Spanish colonization in Mesoamerica and the and Caballero, in Texas during the first half of the nineteenth centu- present state of Mexican-American youth in the U.S. were essential ry. Both describe how “the Border People” adjust to U.S. rule during for understanding lo mexicano. Some scholars such as Carlos Mon- the U.S.-Mexico War as the U.S.’ victory causes a crisis in the self- siváis argued later in the century that it was this “golden age” of cin- image of hacendados and rancheros who live in the region. That cri- ema during the 1940s and 1950s that the controversial, “modern” sis is represented best by the decline of the prominent hacendado notion of machismo originated. Santiago, who is the great-grandson of the first surveyor, Ramón, If the works of Venegas, González, and Paredes were part of who received one of the first land grants from the Spanish viceroy this larger effort by intellectuals to examine the crisis of masculin- during the 1740s. ity in post-revolutionary Mexico, those authors wrote also had to González evidently had much insight into the inner workings answer an additional set of questions related to emigration. While of Tejano society during the early nineteenth century. In each of her the novelists wrote about typical themes related to immigration sto- novels, plot development and character motivations are rooted in ries like language acquisition, family unification, and educational at- social relations between indigenous people and Spaniards living tainment, they also had to confront that which was particular about on the hacienda. While the attitudes of hacendados range from a Mexican migration to the U.S. By some estimates, approximately genuine desire to educate indigenous people to unabashed racism 1,500,000 Mexicans emigrated north of the border from 1900 un- and prejudice, social life in every hacienda is characterized more til 1940. The major issues these authors considered in their writing than anything by the competition for prestige among hacendados were the U.S.-Mexico War, mass deportations and repatriations, and and rancheros. Though they only realize it after they lose their sov- segregation in the U.S. Southwest. It turned out that sharing a land ereignty, hacendados’ paternalist ideology proves to be quite pre- border with the U.S. was a peculiar experience indeed. carious when their self-image is contradicted by the consequences As is true for any writer, Venegas, González, and Paredes’ per- of military defeat. One of González’s most provocative suggestions sonal background and circumstances while living in the U.S. had was that at least some Tejanos of the present might repeat the past a tremendous influence on their work. Previously, Venegas had mistakes of hacendados such as Santiago. worked as a writer for two Spanish-language newspapers in Los An- South Texas was home of several writers whose work during geles, El Heraldo de México and La Opinión. At various times during the 1930s became centerpieces of the recovery project. One of his stay in the U.S., he also worked for the Southern Pacific railroad González’s contemporaries was a young, cisgender Tejano named in the Southwest, led a theater company, and published a periodi- Américo Paredes. His unfinished novel, George Washington Gómez, cal, El Malcriado, which was also his writing pseudonym. El Malcri- describes the education of a Tejano adolescent named Guálinto— ado was, of course, also the name of the United Farm Workers’ of- known later as George—who is comes of age during that pivotal de- ficial newspaper during the 1960s and 1970s. While reporting for El cade. Born in Brownsville on September 3, 1915, Paredes was, like Heraldo and La Opinión, Venegas collected testimonies from many González, a descendent of Tejanos who had arrived at the end of Mexican emigrants living in the U.S. Soon after the publication of the eighteenth century. Also like her, Paredes used historical fiction his novel in El Heraldo during 1928, Venegas joined one of the first to analyze the decisions made by the novels’ protagonist. However, groups of repatriados, who, in this case, were mostly white-collar in George Washington Gómez, the major event that bears its influ- writers from Mexico. ence on the present is not the U.S.-Mexico War but rather the Mexi- Many scholars consider Las Aventuras among the first, if not the can Revolution. first, chicano novel. The novel’s protagonist, Don Chipote, is a com- While both novels share a certain degree of historicity, George posite character based on the emigrants Venegas encountered dur- Washington Gómez also differed from González’s work in terms of ing the mid-1920s.

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