A fierce struggle over identity is occurring within the Latino community: over who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. To be Latino in the United States today means to question one's identity and history. It is a question of being.
Like all other ethnic communities in this country, Latinos are a people with a wide variety of lifestyles and perspectives. Still, transcending this diversity is a common belief in a unity among us; a knowledge that we are bound despite our differences; a shared history and view of the world that have brought us together in this time, in this country.
Different versions of Latino reality are represented by each of the books reviewed here, but our future may rest in none of them. What is important is that at the very least they represent the Latino collective past.
Only a small sampling of the huge resurgence in Latino literature--a second renaissance after the cultural explosion of the late '60s and early '70s--is reflected by these writings. Although these books focus on the Chicano experience in California, the view of reality they offer is one shared by many Latinos: an urban life with roots in the south and a yet uncertain future in the United States.
Victor Villasenor's Rain of Gold takes us back to our roots, creating a masterpiece that could speak for most Chicanos living in the United States today. This history has interesting parallels to the more recent mass immigration of Central Americans to the United States during the last decades.
Rain of Gold traces the path of the author's family from its 19th-century origins in Northern Mexico to the barrios of California during the first half of this century. Fleeing their war-ravaged country during the Mexican Revolution, the Villasenor and Gomez (the name of the author's mother) families went through separate, though equally terrifying, ordeals to reach El Norte.
The country they arrived in was hardly the Promised Land they were expecting. The author repeatedly portrays the racism toward brown-skinned Spanish speakers that existed (and is still present) in the United States. Readers are reminded of the difficulties many of our families--Latino and European--had to contend with when this country's arms reluctantly opened to the "humble and wretched masses" of arriving refugees.
Victor Villasenor begins with the story of Dona Guadalupe, his maternal Yaqui grandmother (and mother of one of the book's main protagonists, Lupe, the author's mother), in the little Chihuahuan village of La Lluvia de Oro. The centrality of Dona Guadalupe's faith represents a very deep--and very Mexican--spirituality throughout the book.
As with many Mexican mothers, it is the power of her heart and soul that creates a true home for the family. She rises to the occasion again and again to protect her four daughters and son--and later her prodigal husband Don Victor--from alternating invasions of plundering Mexican revolutionaries and gold-hungry U.S. capitalists, as well as from the untiring poverty that dogs them at every turn.
It wasn't three meals that made a day for this side of Villasenor's family; it was the three daily miracles of God--the awakening of life, the coming of light, and the beginning of work.
The family life of Juan Salvador, the author's father, was certainly different, but no less difficult. Having lost nine older brothers and his father in the upheaval of the revolution, Juan matured quickly, relying on his ingenuity to become a primary provider for his mother and three surviving sisters.
Juan Salvador's relationship with God was the polar opposite of faithful Lupe's, Dona Guadalupe's daughter, who he would later marry. Juan struggled and fought with God and, in a desperate moment on the banks of the Rio Grande, forsook his faith altogether.
Once again, it is through the life of the poor that we are educated as to the true meaning of life. Rain of Gold is filled with a richness of life few of us notice while it is going on, a beauty inherent in the process of coming to love life, and the discovery of a sense of wonder that can even wash away the pain and loneliness of the moment. It tells the tale of a life so rich that one almost forgets that it is always being lived on the bottom rungs of society.
This is the "real" love story found in Rain of Gold. From the cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking mother of Juan Salvador to ever-optimistic, ever-stoic Dona Guadalupe who works the fields long into old age with her husband, Don Victor, a real love for life exists, resistant even in the midst of terrible hardship and ignobility (see "A Myth of Origin," this page).
FOR LATINOS the search for identity has always been an important part of literature and the arts. Ruben Martinez's The Other Side: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints and the True Heart of Rock 'n' Roll uses essays from Los Angeles and points south to search for this identity.
Martinez, of Salvadoran-Mexican descent, writes on some of the most contemporary phenomena taking place today in the youth culture of Southern California, Mexico, and El Salvador. His explorations, based on personal experience, are as diverse as his ancestry, covering the "true heart of rock 'n' roll" (which surprisingly he finds in the rebellious barrios of Mexico City!), earthquake recovery work with student revolutionaries in San Salvador, the combustible rituals of avant-garde performance artists in Tijuana, and a Mass offered by the progressive priest Father Luis Olivares at LA's oldest parish, La Placita.
For Martinez, the cultural and racial borders he writes about are fault lines--political and social fractures as real as the physical cracks beneath LA--that, though breaking apart, nevertheless remain connected through the presence of a certain postmodern tension. Coming of age too late to remember Che Guevara, but before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ruben Martinez reflects on the lingering uncertainty shared by many in the "twentysomething" generation. Coupled with the Latino concerns of cultural ambiguity, Martinez writes of his experience of not feeling authentic anywhere, and of his explorations on both sides of the border for a sense of wholeness.
Martinez's world is dominated by youth, the children of immigrants to this country. It is a place where Filipino and Latino teen-age graffitti "writers" work together to redefine the cityscape, where young Salvatrucos and African Americans find unity through a shared hip-hop culture. The Other Side explores a growing underground multicultural reality that adults are in many ways just beginning to recognize as legitimate.
Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father is a very compelling, though occasionally pedantic and smug, account of California life from the perspective of a Chicano who has moved out of the barrio toward a more traditional middle-class lifestyle.
I once heard Richard Rodriguez referred to as "an ardent speaker for assimilation," so I wasn't especially eager to read his book. Though not always "politically correct," Rodriguez is no Hispanic Rush Limbaugh either. And though I don't agree with some of his political opinions, Rodriguez is an extremely insightful author in a time of dissolving paradigms.
Latino, Catholic, conservative, and gay, Richard Rodriguez challenges stereotypes. His collection of essays transcends the shallowness of partisan arguments about assimilation and goes deep into the quest for identity. He constantly confronts the hard issues, often with great irony and a confidence that belies his relatively comfortable position in life.
Days of Obligation presents the emerging Latino community as a challenge to the North American, puritanical vision of life that quickly separates and categorizes. Distinctions aren't so clear for those from Latin America: We are American Indians, Spanish colonizers, Africans stolen as slaves, mestizos, and working-class and postmodern North Americans. With such a mixed and even confused heritage, we can easily see ourselves in a pluralistic sense--as one people of many communities.
Thus the great Latino influx into this nation is destroying the artificial Protestant constructs of "separateness" and "purity." Yet, paradoxically, by breaking down these walls, Latinos are also helping to restore the ideals of diversity on which the United States was founded. This subtle effect will eventually open our eyes, relieve our loneliness, and build a new, living model of American society.
LUIS RODRIGUEZ'S Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.--though its story is already 20 years old--goes to the heart of life for many Latinos in the United States, cutting deeply into the contemporary life of gangbanging that is the daily reality for many young Latinos. For young men and women in every city of the country, and many rural areas as well, the violent rage of gang warfare is an initial organized response to the structural injustices that threaten them and their families.
Luis Rodriguez, "Chin" as he was called in his days as a gangbanger, bridges the gap between his own youth and that of his 17-year-old son Ramiro, who is caught on that poignant border between the chaos and chivalry of full gang involvement and the grace that comes when one's gifts are discovered and begin their transformative work on the spirit.
Always Running is about the struggle of conversion, no doubt being waged by many involved in gangbanging today. After having waged warfare, viewed the broken flesh of homeboys, and stared into the eyes of the living dead, Luis Rodriguez returns home to tell the story of transcendence from the depths of pain. This story of resurrection is missing from the other books.
For me, Always Running stirred up a lot of deep and unreconciled emotions. Though somewhat younger than Luis, I spent the late '60s and early '70s running the same streets and being shuffled back and forth across the same LA urban sprawl by a family seeking safety from the violence.
My father and grandfather were involved in one of East LA's longest surviving gangs, White Fence, and it was certain I would have been as well, had I not been lifted out of LA before my teen-age years. To this day I can remember the powerlessness I felt as LAPD helicopters closed in on my family at night, the macabre view of my father shooting la carga (heroin) at the kitchen sink, and the withering abdomen of a teen stabbed in the park.
Yet, as much pain as this book brought up for me, it created a sense of undeniable hope. Always Running resurrected in me the discipline of life that those of us who made it out alive must maintain. So, orale Luis, orale Ramiro, orale ese, fight for the light that overcomes death, for the light that leads us out of the madness.
Luis Rodriguez quotes a barrio boxing coach as saying, "You cholos have great stories about climbing fences," and these books take a look at some of these stories. The perspectives they offer scale the fences between the two (or three or four) worlds that occur in the modern "border regions" of America--which in our time include every place where large populations of Latinos are living with, surviving, assimilating to, and dominating over mainstream America.
The ideal of America as melting pot has long since seen its heyday. What exists now is a truly pluralistic and complex American socio-landscape. The beauty of America is found in this mosaic, made up of pieces, each one beautiful in its individuality yet incomplete if it is not a part of the larger picture. The works reviewed here offer all of us a glimpse into this world, and tell us that we have not yet discovered where it is we are going--or what we are becoming.
Latinos in the '90s are a border race, a group with its soul in its Latin American past and its body in a North American future. We are a people of many communities, struggling to define ourselves, and in the process helping to bring to birth a New America.
Aaron Gallegos was editorial assistant of Sojourners when this review appeared.
A Myth of Origin
Rain of Gold offers Chicanos a myth of origin comparable to Alex Haley's Roots. The myth idealizes the strength and virtue of Latinos, while never failing to remember the suffering and pain endured by our ancestors.
Victor Villasenor fought with Putnam to print Rain of Gold under his own terms. The publisher intended to release it as fiction, so Villasenor raced to New York to return his $75,000 advance and buy back the manuscript.
For the author, Rain of Gold was not only a story of his family, but an archetypal history of Latinos and other immigrants to the United States. It was autobiographical and not fictional, and it needed to be marketed as such. The importance of this decision for the entire Latino community wasn't lost on Arte Publico Press, a small publishing company in Texas, who agreed to publish the hardcover version as non-fiction. Dell subsequently published the book in paperback (pictured here).
Though Rain of Gold reconstructs hundreds of historical situations and detailed conversations of the past, it won't be found on the fiction shelves of your local library or bookstore. It's our history, told through hearts and tears, hope and despair, rather than names and dates. It's our story, and we didn't make it up.
This non-exact, mythological way of looking at history is deeply rooted in the non-Western heritage of Chicanos. For our Native American ancestors, storytelling was an act of creation, not simply an exercise in form and facts. For Pre-Columbian peoples, like traditional societies everywhere, storytelling was a ritual used to define the community--a ritual that brought to life actual identities who then served as bridges to the ancestors or gods of the people. Villasenor's Rain of Gold creates a myth-of-origin for Latinos and helps to define us through the establishment of a collective sense of where we came from and who we are.
Rain of Gold. by Victor Villasenor. Arte Publico Press, 1991. $19.95 (cloth): Dell Publishing, 1991. $12 (paper).
The Other Side: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints and the True Heart of Rock 'n' Roll. By Ruben Martinez. Verso, 1992, $24.95 (cloth).
Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father. By Richard Rodriguez. Viking, 1992. $21 (cloth).
Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. By Luis J. Rodriguez. Curbstone Press, 1993. $19.95 (cloth).
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