University of Texas at El Paso ScholarWorks@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2020-01-01 Everything In Greg Chavez University of Texas at El Paso Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Chavez, Greg, "Everything In" (2020). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 3149. https://scholarworks.utep.edu/open_etd/3149 This is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EVERYTHING IN GREG CHAVEZ Master’s Program in Creative Writing APPROVED: Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, MH, MFA, Chair Jeffrey Sirkin, Ph.D. Annika Mann, Ph.D. Stephen L. Crites, Jr., Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Greg Chavez 2020 EVERYTHING IN by GREG CHAVEZ, B.A. THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2020 Acknowledgements I wish to express my sincerest gratitude for the entire creative writing community at UTEP. Your invaluable feedback and encouragement along the way has helped guide my writing into and out of spaces it had feared to tread. Special thanks to all my UTEP professors who challenged me to see writing and literature from perspectives never imagined. To my thesis committee, Professor Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, Dr. Jeffrey Sirkin, and Dr. Annika Mann, your patience and understanding has made this novel possible. Professor Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny, thank you for always seeing what this author could not. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v Preface ............................................................................................................................................ vi Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... xxiii Everything In ...................................................................................................................................1 Vita... ............................................................................................................................................273 v Exploring the Bildungsroman in a Cultural and Communication Vacuum What is an I without a we, and does the absence of the latter loosen, if not erase entirely, the boundaries limiting self-discovery? Or is a lack of personal, social, and cultural context its own barrier to identity? In 2018, I was reading Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera for a graduate course. I brought it to the high school I was teaching at, and it quickly became a window into an experience of identity that I thought was mine alone, when I shared the novel with my students. They, like me, saw the photos in Cantu’s novel of family, places, and cultural artifacts as familiar—in that they were similar to their own family photos. However, unlike Cantu’s speaker, they felt distant from their own family photos and could not relate as Cantu’s speaker could. These students, who like me, had familial roots in both the United States and Mexico, felt no connection to one side of the border or the other. They felt like they had no tie to either their maternal or paternal history. Above all, with no pull and no pressure to identify with either, an indifference was present—one that seemed to have the potential to remain in place forever. It was not for lack of curiosity, but in resignation that an empty set of cultural identity was the norm. It is from this place that the character and story of Andrew Salinas rises. Everything In furthers the discourse on identity and what it means to come of age when culture is withheld and the bridge spanning the gap between past and present is never constructed. Everything In is a multigenerational story focused on seventeen-year-old Andrew Salinas, whose grandmother’s death on his father’s side becomes the impetus for Andrew to see the extent to which his parents have disconnected him and themselves from any sense of culture, family, or heritage. Having been sheltered from ever knowing his white mother’s bigoted family, Carlos, Andrew’s father, complicates matters for Andrew’s understanding of family and identity when his indifference over the death of his own mother, Dani, is put on full display. Forced to reckon with vi the ramifications of an outburst he had at school over the frustration with his family, Andrew is sent to therapy to resolve his disconnect. While seemingly a simple matter of communication, Everything In explores the ways in which the past is bound to the past, and how silence and inaction work to create barriers for Andrew to ever know the Salinas family, its story, and where he belongs in it. At its core, Everything In is a coming-of-age story. To that end, my own introduction to the form is not insignificant. It was the bildungsroman that I was first introduced to while working on my undergraduate degree, and the fact that the curriculum focused on 20th Century Irish and British literature was critical as I considered the impetus and cultural differences for this novel. My focused exposure to James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and D.H. Lawrence’s Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers made clear, at the time, that this genre (Anglocentric in the course I was in) was one in which discontent existed within the protagonist, and for the hero to break free from the expectations set upon her or him, or to find one’s place within society, the hero must go on a journey of self-discovery. I walked away with an understanding that “through a harmony of aesthetic, moral, rational, and scientific education” (Castle 665) that the hero’s identity would come to light and that the genre itself “articulates the interconnection and interdependence of the hero’s inner life and the social system in which he or she moves” (Castle 671). My understanding of the genre would shift when I entered UTEP’s graduate writing program. In looking at the bildungsroman through a more modern lens, it can be said that “the relationship between the individual and society that is central to the bildungsroman has been complicated by issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Rholetter). In being introduced to novels like Parrot in the Oven by Victor Martinez and Canícula by Norma Elia Cantú, the cultural vii and socioeconomic factors associated with these novels, do not corrupt the form, but expand it to address the complications associated with coming of age. Paul Morel’s need to break from his mother’s grip in Sons in Lovers in order to form a relationship of his own with another woman is as complicated a struggle as Martinez’s hero, Manny, must deal with in Parrot in the Oven, having an abusive father and the expectation to bear the weight of how his decisions will impact the way he is perceived in his neighborhood. In light of this, the form must have a plasticity to it, and the impetus for the hero’s journey must also be able to reflect cultural shifts. In Mexican White Boy by Matt de la Peña, the author not only tackles the challenges associated with being a mixed-raced adolescent living in America, but also the complications that arise when language becomes a barrier to building relationships, and how the absence of familial connections makes one’s identity even more challenging to discover. De la Peña’s protagonist, Danny, not only surrounds himself with those cultural influences with his friends as representatives, but he is also driven to bridge the gap toward his absent father by writing him letters. Andrew Salinas in Everything In departs from this archetype. He was raised in a way that has left him resigned to what is being posited as being ‘empty of identity’. After the 2016 election, Andrew not only understands the politics of his last name, but also his position as a “white” American. Despite this recognition, prior to his grandmother’s death, the need to explain this duality for himself remained absent and fostered his indifference, leaving him to think in isolation and be the arbiter of cultural views and beliefs he has no expertise in. This is most apparent with his own father. So why, at the most random of times, he resorts to asinine and juvenile displays of identity, is just pathetic. Fortunately, I’d like to think that somewhere along the line I had imparted in me a strong enough sense of self to not get all butt hurt about a viii piñata that was more for him than it was his own son. I can only imagine that strength came from my mom (Chavez p. 38-39). In consideration of both the classic and modern interpretations of the bildungsroman, the challenge with bringing Andrew to the page lies in how his coming-of-age manifests when he seemingly has no history or culture to be drawn to or from which to escape. The novel seeks to question whether Andrew’s parents, Carlos and Karen, would be complicit should their son’s identity form completely outside the family and whether there is a moral imperative to avoid