UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Campaign for Literary Practice: Mexican American Writers in the Age of Realism and Regionalism, 1885-1940 A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Alicia Contreras June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Tiffany Ana López, Co-Chairperson Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Co-Chairperson Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod Copyright by Alicia Contreras 2015 The Dissertation of Alicia Contreras is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to recognize and thank those who have made this project possible. In the seven years I have been at UC Riverside, I have earned, with the help of others, the three invaluable letters—Ph.D.—that will remain forever with me. As a little girl in the Salinas Valley of “Steinbeck Country,” California, I loved to write stories about familiar people. This dissertation continues that hometown legacy, and it is written in memory of Mexican-American writers who gave words and literature their all. The advice and insights offered by my committee members are, I think, at the heart of this dissertation. Dr. Tiffany Ana López’s support of my project—of its attention to U.S. literary history and genre—fueled me from start to finish. López is one of the smartest, bravest, and kindest professors I know; she is the reason I chose UCR, and I have her to thank for the fellowships I received to write the dissertation. I will miss her mentorship, and I will never forget its sheer generosity. Dr. Jennifer Doyle helped steer this project toward realism and regionalism and toward, what she called, a recovery of these authors’ “literary practice” (a term that stayed with me). I thank Doyle for her unwavering support of my work, which traces back to her years as director of our graduate program. Her attitude about enjoying reading and writing inspired me to produce a dissertation in which I can detect moments of joy and beauty. Dr. Steven Gould Axelrod taught me one of the single most valuable ways of reading American literature. I have used the terms from our modernist seminar (e.g., “unknowability”) as core concepts to understanding writing and life. I wish to thank Axelrod for his support and kindness, and for being my mentor throughout this process. iv I am indebted to UCR’s English Department and Graduate Division, particularly to Dean Joseph Childers, for funding this project. I thank Tina Feldmann who helped me navigate so many dates and deadlines. Dr. James Tobias, as former director of graduate studies, placed tremendous value in my work and helped it garner the distinction of the UC President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship. I also wish to thank Rob Latham for so generously serving on my qualifying exam committee. Tom Lutz from the Creative Writing Department (and author of my favorite regionalist study, Cosmopolitan Vistas) also served on my exam committee and provided abundant support. Lutz’s recommendation helped me win a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in 2014. My friends (and colleagues) and family have helped brighten this journey. Thank you to Ray Crosby, Eddie Eason, Rochelle Gold, Giulia Hoffman, Lisette Lasater, Addison Palacios, and Ayra Quinn for your friendship and the fun times. Thank you to my wonderful family for believing in me and valuing education, and for bringing me so much joy and laughter—my parents Ada and Lorenzo Contreras, my sister Michelle Contreras, my brother-in-law Luis Ramos, and my beautiful baby niece Paula Ramos. Finally, I am grateful I had the opportunity to complete a Ph.D. alongside my husband Justin Gautreau. This made the windy and generally arduous path of graduate school less painful and even ridiculously fun and funny at times. This dissertation would not be complete without his love and emotional and intellectual support. He is the smartest person I know, and his “clearer than real” writing inspires me to think and work harder. I am so thankful for the sweet memories we have made here. I hope that when we are retired and old we can say, “Remember how good we had it in Riverside?” v For my parents and sister vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Campaign for Literary Practice: Mexican American Writers in the Age of Realism and Regionalism, 1885-1940 by Alicia Contreras Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Tiffany Ana López, Co-Chairperson Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Co-Chairperson The Campaign for Literary Practice provides an intervention into American literary studies by reframing Mexican-American writings from 1885 to 1940 as central to understanding the value and limits of realism and regionalism. The key intervention of this project is the concept “the campaign for literary practice” that illustrates these writers’ attempts to navigate the literary marketplace of their time and partake in professional authorship, for income as well as status. In order to encourage new readings of U.S. literary genres and history, each chapter examines an aspiring yet struggling Mexican-American writer alongside a commercially successful contemporary. Chapter 1, “‘I’ll Publish Your Cowardice All Over California’: Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don in the Age of Howells and American Realism,” considers the first Mexican American to publish fiction in English alongside William Dean Howells, vii ‘the Dean’ of American letters. Using these writers’ 1885 novels, I argue for a reconfiguration of East Coast-dominated realist studies based on Ruiz de Burton’s literary production in California. Chapter 2, “Mexican Vistas in an Expansionist Literary Marketplace: Stephen Crane’s ‘Form and Color’ and María Cristina Mena’s New Regionalism,” offers a new generic framework through which to study Mena’s early twentieth-century ‘local colorist’ writings. As ‘new regionalism,’ Mena’s stories on Mexico emerge authoritatively in response to previous ruminations on the country, such as those written by the naturalist writer Crane for newspapers and magazines. Chapter 3, “‘Why Do You Hate the South?’: The Limits of Visionary Regionalism in González and Raleigh’s Caballero and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!,” reads Caballero and Absalom as failed ‘southern romances’ of the late 1930s. Together, these novels offer alternative, imaginative, and visionary ways of reading the Southwest and South during the United States’ major mid nineteenth-century wars. My final chapter, “Regionalism, Geomodernism, and the Depressions of John Steinbeck and Américo Paredes,” explores the major novels of these writers against the Great Depression and World War II. Paredes’s work, in the end, demonstrates the way global awareness emerges in the region, even if it is at odds with the nation and its rulers. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Campaign for Literary Practice 1 Chapter 1 “I’ll Publish Your Cowardice All Over California”: Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don in the Age of Howells and American Realism 21 Chapter 2 Mexican Vistas in an Expansionist Literary Marketplace: Stephen Crane’s “Form and Color” and María Cristina Mena’s New Regionalism 68 Chapter 3 “Why Do You Hate the South?”: The Limits of Visionary Regionalism in González and Raleigh’s Caballero and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 118 Chapter 4 Regionalism, Geomodernism, and the Depressions of John Steinbeck and Américo Paredes 176 Works Cited 222 ix Introduction: The Campaign for Literary Practice “Look to the East!” The Father turned, and, as the fog broke away before the waving plume, he saw that the sun was rising. Issuing with its bright beams through the passes of the snowy mountains beyond, appeared a strange and motley crew. Instead of the dark and romantic visages of his last phantom train, the Father beheld with strange concern the blue eyes and flaxen hair of a Saxon race. In place of martial airs and musical utterance, there rose upon the ear a strange din of harsh gutturals and singular sibilation. Instead of the decorous tread and stately mien of the cavaliers of the former vision, they came pushing, bustling, panting, and swaggering. And as they passed, the good Father noticed that giant trees were prostrated as with the breath of a tornado, and the bowels of the earth were torn and rent as in convulsion. And Father José looked in vain for holy cross or Christian symbol; there was but one that seemed an ensign, and he crossed himself with holy horror as he perceived it bore the effigy of a bear. —Bret Harte, “The Legend of Monte del Diablo” Published in The Atlantic Monthly amid the ongoing carnage of the Civil War, Bret Harte’s “The Legend of Monte del Diablo” (1863) confirmed to American readers that California’s romance might still be found, though it, like the Spaniards who had once ruled the region, threatened to ebb and vanish. For the eighteenth-century protagonist of Harte’s story, Father José Antonio Haro, the devil appears in the guise of a Spanish hidalgo and imparts to the missionary a vision of what the future holds: the flurry of the mid nineteenth-century Gold Rush and, thereafter, the permanent displacement of the father’s people by those of “Saxon” lineage (12). In attempt to dismantle the unwanted vision, the father musters all of his religious courage to accuse the devil of bribing him with “sordid treasure”: “This, then, Sir Devil, is your work! This is your deceitful lure for the weak souls of sinful nations!” (13). At once righteous and, throughout the story, increasingly ridiculous, Father José emerges in “The Legend of Monte del Diablo” as the 1 star in Harte’s parody of ‘legends’ such as these. Far from being an honest and reliable man of God, the father is instead a zealous frontiersman with a dubious claim to the “wilderness” and its “heathen” “savages” (4-5).