Megan Yeates
27 November 2002

Crossing Borders:  Mexican American Literature

             In 1842, United States Michigan senator Lewis Cass bluntly expressed his views on the possible annexation of New Mexico:  “We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or as subjects.  All we want is a portion of territory…with a population, which would soon recede, or identify with ours” (qtd. in Tindall 589).  What Cass was suggesting was an obliteration of Mexican history and culture.  Indeed, the eventual signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 was a great loss to the Mexican people, yet their culture continued to survive despite losing their land.  Cass’s crude (but unfortunately popular) viewpoint did not ring true entirely; the people of Mexico failed to recede or identify with European Americans in the manner he suggested.

            After Guadalupe Hidalgo, the term Mexican American became a true reality.  A minority in their own home, Mexican Americans occupied the Southwest (namely New Mexico), while others emerged from Mexico to seek work in Texas, Arizona, and California.  Culturally, the turning point for Mexican Americans came in the mid-1960s when Cesar Chavez led the movement that sparked Hispanic civil rights efforts in the United States.  Fused with social and political statements, Mexican American art began to flourish.  “Chicano” literature was soon being published by authors like Rolando Hinojosa, Tomas Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Estela Portillo, and being read by both Chicanos and Anglos.  Popularity of many Mexican American writers of poetry, prose, and drama arose in the 1970s and continues to rise in the twenty-first century with writers like Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Gary Soto.

            Mexican Americans are still crossing borders.  Their literature is filled with unanswered questions.  Second and third generation Latino writers often wonder if they should be considered Mexican or American, if they should speak English or Spanish, or if their culture and history is disappearing the longer they stay in America.  But Mexican Americans are a dynamic people.  Their culture, history, and language are so rich that they are constantly redefining the norm in terms of literature, visual arts, music, and theater.

            From the llano to the barrio, this journal attempts to recognize various artists and forms of Mexican American literature.  In Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros, Chicano literature emerges from two different generations, with different themes and viewpoints, but ultimately with the same connection of Mexican American ambivalence.  Using their own words (through interviews), they attempt to tell their stories as writers and Chicanos.  In the examination of three studies of Mexican American literature, the distinct patterns and characteristics of Chicano writing become vital in developing critical ideas concerning this literature.

            Never static, Mexican American literature implores the reader to take in everything about Chicano culture – the good, the bad, the ugly – and value its importance and influence in American culture and history.  In part, the Mexican Revolution of the 1840s still continues through literature, in a challenge to be heard, received, and to be free.  As Chicana poet Lydia Camarillo writes:

“I am the reflection of the oppressed. / I am half the struggle… / And my companion is the other. / / I have come to knock at your door, / To tell you, / “NO MORE!” // WE ARE THE REVOLUTION!”  (qtd. in Rebolledo 98).

Rebolledo, Tey Diana.  Women Singing in the Snow:  A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson:  U of Arizona P, 1995.

Tindall, George Brown and David Emory Shi.  America:  A Narrative History.  5^th ed. New York:  W. W. Norton, 1999.

Rudolfo Anaya

            Rudolfo Anaya brings to the world of Mexican American literature mystery, magic, and the power of the lands of the Southwest.  At the rise of multicultural efforts in politics and education, Anaya was one of the first Chicano authors to receive recognition as a writer with the 1972 publishing of the now classic Bless Me, Ultima.  While many contemporary Mexican American writers focus on the urban struggles of the culture, Anaya examines the mystic, ambiguity, and beauty of a culture immersed in the natural.

            Anaya was born in 1937 in Pastura, New Mexico, in a small village on the llano, much like his character, Antonio, of Ultima.  Influenced greatly by the land, and describing his connection to it as “almost a religious experience,” the llano “plays a major role in the literature [Anaya] writes” (Bruce-Novoa 184).  Still a young child, his family moved to Santa Rosa, New Mexico, which is the geographical setting for Ultima, and Anaya grew with his many brothers and sisters.  In the small village of his boyhood, Anaya was surrounded by elements of his heritage:  “The sense of culture, of tradition, of history was always around us.  People told stories when they came to visit.  The elders would sit around the table playing cards or dominoes, or just talking, and we would listen to the cuentos” (Bruce-Novoa 186).  Also a prolific reader and a frequent visitor of the library, Anaya was continually caught up in words, whether in the oral tradition or the printed word.

            Spanish was spoken at Anaya’s home as a child, but when he entered the first grade, he began to learn English, and now, as an adult, he feels he speaks and writes more fluently and comfortably in English (Bruce-Novoa 189).  Anaya feels that the educational system did not give the help needed to many Mexican American children in maintaining and developing their Spanish, so it was unfortunately lost for many (Bruce-Novoa 189).  Wanting to write, Anaya faced a school system that did not teach Chicanos their own work, so models to emulate were unavailable, and Anaya felt isolated as a writer, as he was unable to find works “that had a relevance to [his] internal being” (Bruce-Novoa 198).  Faced with no examples of contemporary Chicano literature in the 1960s, Anaya was forced to forge his own way in the literary movement.

            As an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico, Anaya began to write seriously, writing two or three novels on his own.  However, he destroyed them:  “They were exercises in learning to write.  They weren’t worth keeping” (Bruce-Novoa 187).  In the early sixties, Anaya began to work with characters that would eventually become part of the world of Bless Me, Ultima.  He lacked inspiration to fully develop the story until “Ultima came to me and appeared as a full-fledged character.  She stood beside me and pointed out things I had to do with the novel if it was going to work” (Bruce-Novoa 187).  After completely rewriting Ultima seven times, it was finally published in 1972, and was awarded the Quinto Sol Prize for literature.

            While writing and rewriting Ultima, Anaya completed his M.A. in English at the University of New Mexico.  Influenced by the Romantics, the Imagists, Shakespeare, and the poetry of the Beat generation, Anaya stresses the importance of education for Chicanos:  “There are those who say that education will change who you are, how you think, destroy your culture, assimilate you – I think that’s nonsense. […]  We cannot hide our heads in the sand and pretend that everything that is important and good and of value will come only out of our culture” (Bruce-Novoa 188-189).  Anaya spent many years as a teacher of creative writing and Chicano literature at the University of New Mexico, emphasizing the need for formal education.

            Anaya continued his New Mexican trilogy with Heart of Aztlan (1976), and Tortuga (1979), and wrote prolifically throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with landmarks like The Silence of the Llano (1982) and Albuquerque (1992).  Retired from teaching in 1993, Anaya continues to write and pursue other interests:  “I don’t view leaving the University of New Mexico and teaching as a retirement.  I view it more as a mid-career change, to do a lot of writing and other things, like reading. […]  I think it’s just a shift of energy into new areas” (Anaya).

            As a primary author in the Chicano literary movement, Anaya has many thoughts on young Chicano writers.  While most of Anaya’s works are set in ranches and farms of the Southwest, he feels the inclination to the urban, barrio setting is natural.  However, he is weary of the loss of roots and history if one focuses too much on the chaos and violence of the urban setting:  “If we are going to reflect only on the disorientation and the chaos, then the question is, What do we reflect to our community?  Part of my role as a writer is to reflect the deeper meaning of our universal experiences” (Anaya).  Ultimately, Anaya anticipates a continuation of the second phase of the Chicano movement (or what he calls una nueva onda (Anaya)).  Continuing to write in the Chicano tradition, Anaya calls to strength all Mexican Americans:  “We have to remember one of our first jobs as Chicano artists is to try to reflect our own community and our own deeper reality of who we are as Chicanos” (Anaya).

Anaya, Rudolfo A.  “Songlines of the Southwest:  An Interview with Rudolfo A. Anaya.”

Interviewed by Ray Gonzalez.  Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya.  Ed. Bruce Dick and Silvio Sirias.  UP of Mississippi. 1998. UH-Clear Lake Library.  Gale Database:  Contemporary Literary Criticism.  4 Nov. 2002.  www.galenet.com/servlet/GLD.html

Bruce-Novoa, Juan D.  Chicano Authors:  Inquiry by Interview.  Austin:  U of Texas P, 1980.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is at the forefront of contemporary Chicana literature.  Through astounding poetry and prose, Cisneros develops her work to confront issues facing Mexican American women and children.  Highly praised, her work is “characterized by the celebratory breaking of sexual taboos and trespassing across the restrictions that limit the lives and experiences of Chicanas” (Madsen 105).  An innovator in the realm of Mexican American literature, Cisneros has helped progress the contemporary literary movement.

            Born in the Puerto Rican district of Chicago, in December 1954, Cisneros was the third child to her Spanish-speaking Mexican father and her English-speaking Mexican American mother.  During her childhood, Cisneros and her family moved frequently between Chicago and her grandparents’ house in Mexico City, always living in urban neighborhoods, creating an early division between the two cultures.  As the only daughter among six brothers, she often felt alienated because of her gender, which is reflective in many of her stories about girls and women.  Despite feeling marginalized, Cisneros began writing, as a young girl, “in spiral notebooks poems that only her mother read” (Madsen 107).  Cramped in small apartments, Cisneros sought books to keep her life filled with stories:  “We couldn’t afford [books], so I never knew you could own a book until I was about twelve.  We did go to the public library, though, and our house was always filled with borrowed books.  I think that was very important in nurturing me as a writer” (Cisneros).  While Cisneros’s mother was very supportive of her literary endeavors, her father, who only read in Spanish, was rather indifferent to her talent, thinking she “was only a girl and therefore what harm could come of it?  I would eventually get married and if I wanted to go to college and major in creative writing or literature, that was okay because I’d get married anyway” (Cisneros). 

            But Cisneros did not marry, and remains unmarried even today.  Her love of literature took her elsewhere – first to Loyola University in 1976, and then, two years later, to the creative writing program at the Iowa Writers Workshop.  Cisneros views her college experience as both curious and fortunate: 

At the time I entered [the University of Iowa] rather naively, I had no idea that it was a prestigious workshop or that it was quite unusual that I got there.  I was the only Chicano writer […] I didn’t find it a very supportive community, at first, and didn’t write anything for a year.  It wasn’t until the second year that I decided I would write something no one else in the class would write about.” (Cisneros) 

Eventually, Cisneros would discover her own voice, “the voice she unconsciously suppressed, […] the voice of the barrio” (Madsen 106).  Once her voice was discovered, Cisneros’s writing began to exist as she wanted it to.  To support her writing, she worked variously as a teacher, college recruiter, counselor, arts administrator, poet-in-the-schools, and at the University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

            Her first published book, Bad Boys, appeared as Chicano Chapbook No. 8 in 1980, followed by the critically acclaimed The House on Mango Street, published originally by Arte Publico press of Houston in 1984.  Awarded the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award, Mango Street was Cisneros’s attempt to “write stories that don’t get told – my mother’s stories, my student’s stories, the stories of women in the neighborhood (Cisneros).  In 1987, a collection of poetry, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, was published.  During a 1996 interview with Martha Satz, Cisneros comments on the personal feelings that accompany poetry: 

After [My Wicked, Wicked Ways] I decided to publish only my fiction and keep the poems private.  A lot of my private life was being gobbled up by the public, and I wanted something for myself, and no one seemed to care about poetry anyway.  […]   and I don’t even write like that anymore.  I’m embarrassed because the poems are just my juvenilia.” (Cisneros) 

A second collection of poetry, Loose Woman, was published in 1994, and Cisneros wrote with a determination, pretending “that what I’m writing is so dangerous that no one can see it in my lifetime” (Cisneros).  Her short story collection, Woman Hollering Creek, printed in 1991, was well-received and quickly became a valuable text for Chicano and feminist literature. 

In October 2002, Cisneros released her much-anticipated novel, Caramelo.  Ten years since Woman Hollering Creek, Caramelo promises to be worth the wait.  As a writer, a Chicana, and a feminist, Cisneros has made incredible strides for her culture and her gender, and continues to do so:  “It’s important […] to come to terms with our Mexican culture and our American one as well. […]  I think many of my stories come from straddling two cultures, and certainly it’s something I’m going to deal with in future stories” (Cisneros).

Cisneros, Sandra.  “Returning to One’s House:  An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Interviewed by Martha Satz.  Southwest Review.  Vol. 82.  1997. UH-Clear Lake Library. Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism.  4 Nov. 2002. www.galenet.com/servlet/GLD.html

Madsen, Deborah L.  Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature.  Columbia:  U of South Carolina P, 2000.

Lomeli, Francisco A., Teresa Marquez, and Maria Herrera-Sobek.  “Trends and Themes in Chicana/o Writings in Postmodern Times.”  Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends.  Ed.  David R. Maciel et al.  Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000.  285-305.

In Francisco A. Lomeli, Teresa Marquez, and Maria Herrera-Sobek’s essay, “Trends and Themes in Chicana/o Writings in Postmodern Times,” an examination of the events and styles in Chicano literature of the 1980s and 1990s explains the reemergence of the literary movement into a new and exciting height.  The essay, in a collection entitled Chicano Renaissance, focuses on the rise of popular Chicana writing (especially that of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros), the events of the two definitive decades, and the ever-growing market of Chicano detective novels and the Mexican immigrant story.

            Lomeli and the other essayists are quick to point out the implications of postmodernism on Mexican American texts:  “Postmodernism has derailed the search for the absolute truth.  Contemporary writers, although greatly conditioned by their Chicano background, are now seeking answers in the personal experience” (286).  With this considered, as the essay explains, the 1980s began with an absence of politically fueled Chicano writing, and a larger interest in the autobiographical, personalized story.  While the early eighties were slow in Mexican American literary production, the mid-eighties exploded with work from Chicana authors, resulting in the honorary title, “Decade of the Chicana” (290).  Authors like Helena Maria Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Cecile Pineda, Sandra Cisneros, and Denise Chavez “spawned a renaissance of literary production […] focused on the re-conceptualization, re-presentation, and recovery of women’s voices” (291).

            In part, the popularity of Chicano literature during the 1980s was due to European connection and interest in Latino culture, with their promotions of the International Conference on Chicano Culture and Literature in 1984 and 1986.  Two other events increased the reception of Mexican American Literature:  the University of Houston’s Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project’s campaign to recover forgotten texts, and, secondly, many authors from the seventies made their mark again at the close of the 1980s.  Continuing in this pattern, the “Chicana/o writers in the 1990s, perhaps more than ever before, create[d] texts that defy easy classification as literary products” (296), pulling them in the postmodern literary world.

            The essay completes itself by examining two major trends in Mexican American literature in the 1990s:  the detective novel and the Mexican American immigrant novel.  Using Rudy Apodaca’s The Waxen Image and Max Martinez’s White Leg as models, the essayists point out that novels in the Raza / Aztlan detective tradition “not only reflect the oral tradition and the custom of storytelling found in Chicano / Mexicano folklore, but also share an emphasis on signs, symbols, behaviors, and manners” (299).  The white, middle-class detectives of Anglo mystery stories become the Raza working-class persona, commenting on the Latino culture and values.  Also popular in the 1990s is the Mexican Immigrant novel.  Speaking specifically about Alejandro Grattan-Dominguez’s The Dark Side of the Dream and Ofelia Dumas Lachtman’s The Girl from Playa Blanca, the Mexican immigrant novel illustrates the positive and the negative implications of the integration into North American society.          

“Trends and Themes in Chicana/o Writings in Postmodern Times” relies on the reader’s basic knowledge of Chicano literary background.  Overall, its thesis is straightforward and clear, explaining the movements in Mexican American literature throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century.  An appropriate essay for examining trends in Chicano literary endeavors, it also offers points of history and culture that relate to the movement itself.  Concisely and clearly written, “Trends and Themes in Chicana/o Writings” officially serves its purpose as a study for understanding postmodern Mexican American literature.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana.  Women Singing in the Snow:  A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson:  U of Arizona P, 1995.

With Women Singing in the Snow:  A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature, Tey Diana Rebolledo offers a wonderful guide to understanding the origins, meanings, and development of Chicana literature.  Using the image of Mexican American women giving their story to a blank page, Rebolledo begins with early Hispana / Mexicana writers and continues by examining the attributes of contemporary Chicana writers, all while offering in-depth examples of each form. 

            Rebolledo attempts to begin at the roots of the Mexican American experience, but with special emphasis on the women of the culture.  Very early material of Chicana literature (of late nineteenth into the early twentieth century) came from oral histories, folktales, and stories, creative material published in Spanish-language newspapers, and creative material published in English.  Writers like Jovita Gonzalez began to write in English to record the history of her people in the Southwest (26).  During the 1930s through the 1950s in New Mexico, several women, including Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert (We Fed Them Cactus), Nina Otero-Warren (Old Spain in Our Southwest), and Cleofas Jaramillo (Romance of a Little Village Girl), wrote books “meant to preserve, in writing, the Hispano oral tradition” (29).  Each woman desired a preservation of her culture, and strong, capable females were an integral part of these stories.

            Literary myths and archetypes, a common thread between early and contemporary Chicana writers are examined in the third and fourth chapters.  La Virgen de Guadalupe, Guerrillas, Soldaderas, La Adelita, and other symbols fuel Chicana literature.  The striking figure of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the reclusive nun of Mexico who was forbidden to study, symbolizes the mind and the intellectual woman (58).  La Malinche and La Llorona, opposite symbols to the Virgin Mary, and the positive and negative curandera / bruja are all powerful images in Latina literature.

            Women Singing in the Snow also addresses the struggle of finding an identity both as a woman and as a member of an ethnic group, as well as the problems of writing.  Finding a voice and an identity is difficult for Chicana writers, who “had to struggle to write, to articulate that which had never been articulated, to speak the unspeakable and unacceptable” (148).  Another overwhelming and interesting question of Chicana writers is: In what language should I write?  Rebolledo affirms that “no matter what language they speak, Chicana writers always feel a void, an exile from language” (157).  With this consideration, Rebolledo also cites two contemporary Chicana authors who have written novels in Spanish, Margarita Cota-Cardenas with Puppet and Erlinda Gonzales-Berry with Paletitas de guayaba, but “both have been largely ignored by teachers and critics” (171).  Despite Spanish or English, Chicana writers all engage in images and symbols of the body, sexuality, and the self, constantly breaking taboos, both culturally and sexually.

            Full of examples of poetry, short stories, and small excerpts from novels, Women Singing in the Snow is a smart, poignant, and informative text.  It does not limit itself to one time period, but considers Chicana literature as a whole, before the definitive “movement” began.  The text defines terms and issues clearly and thoroughly.  Placing an importance on the dynamic art of Chicana literature, Rebolledo asserts that a “clear message from Chicana writers is that we must learn to accept ourselves as we are: our history, our culture, our positive and negative aspects” (208).  Women Singing in the Snow is an excellent companion for those wanting to further their understanding of the Chicana literary tradition.

Perez-Torres, Rafael.  Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins.  New York:  Cambridge UP, 1995.

Rafael Perez-Torres’s book, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins is divided into three central parts: “The Postcolonial,” “The Postmodern,” and “Confluences.”  The study examines the poetic traditions of Chicano culture, the critical discourses of post colonialism and postmodernism, and contemporary Chicano poetry.  Much of the book concentrates on the problems and difficulties with Mexican American literary criticism.  Perez-Torres raises the questions:  Is Chicano literature truly postmodern by its literary definition?  and Can Chicano literature be studied without the history and culture in mind?  The answer to the latter, Perez-Torres insists, is most definitely “no:”  “To deny the history imbedded in Chicano literature is to displace its aesthetic significance” (54).  At times, it seems critical discussion in general overwhelms the book, failing to highlight “movements in Chicano poetry” as the title promises.  Much cultural and historical information is discussed, including the idea of Aztlan and the Borderlands.

            The focus on culture, however, is important to the work of Chicano poets, so Perez-Torres establishes some common concepts before entering into the examination of the poetry.  In a chapter entitled “The Reformation of Aztlan,” several poets and poems are looked at in themes connecting them to Aztlan, or their homeland.  Jimmy Santiago Baca (“Invasions”), Rodolfo Gonzales (“Yo Soy Joaquin”), Lorna Dee Cervantes (“Poem for the Young White Man…”), and Gloria Anzaldua (“To live in the Borderlands means you…”) all describe alienation and a sense of Chicano nationalism.  Another chapter focuses on three types of Mexican Americans addressed in poems:  the migrant, the pinto, and the pachuco.  The migrant is represented in the works of Abelardo Delgado (“El Imigrante”), Tino Villanueva (“Que hay otra voz”), and Gary Soto (“Mexicans Begin Jogging”), and the image “figures as a metaphor for the position of Chicanos whose movement across the United States – whether literal or figurative – connects with economic and social displacement” (105).  Then, the pinto (the subject of the three that I found the most fascinating), who is represented in “prison poetry,” is usually imprisoned due to border violence, becoming “a figure trapped by America” (115).  Poets Ricardo Sanchez (“Reo Eterno”) and Judy Lucero (“Jail-Life Walk”) both served time in prison during the 1960s and 1970s and created their own pinto poetry.  Lastly, the pachuco is a symbol of Chicano nonconformity and resistance; a historic example would be the young men of the zoot suit riots during World War II.  As a character of “hopeless rebellion” (126), the pachuco manifests himself and herself in Jose Montoya’s “El Louie” and Evangelina Vigil’s “to the personalities…”.

            Also beneficial is the study of pre-American imagery in Chicano poetry.  Many poets work with images and ideas of the past, primarily with references to Nahua culture and symbols.  Sandra Cisneros (“New Year’s Eve”) and Lorna Dee Cervantes (“Astro-no-mia”) both use mythic (Nahua and Greek) and legendary figures in their poems.  In closing the postmodern section of the book, Perez-Torres discusses the characteristic of Chicano culture of moving “across numerous textual terrains” (208).  Many Mexican American works are English texts that use Spanish intermittently as well, making them “polyglossia,” using “more than two varieties in the languages Chicanos employ” (212).

            Overall, Movements in Chicano Poetry addresses the answers to questions about contemporary Chicano literary criticism.  Its focus on poetry offers a look at the works of prominent and less-prominent poets.  The study is very useful in terms of finding patterns in poetic movements, as it efficiently organizes, compares, and categorizes the most distinct forms of Chicano poetry.  However, the text is slightly unforgiving to the lay-person who is just beginning to study Chicano literature, as it warns from the start, “The present study is not a survey of Chicano poetry or a critical introduction to the literature” (4).  Despite this, Movements in Chicano Poetry is highly useful when seeking knowledge on the various forms Mexican American poetry takes.

Blurring Borders: What Now?

            It has been suggested that within a few decades, Mexican Americans, as an ever-growing population, will no longer be a minority in the United States.  What will this do for Chicano literature?  Will it create an entirely new reason to write and create?  This journal has not attempted to answer that particular question; rather it has been a pursuit in discovering the patterns of Mexican American literature.  The “Mexican Revolution” of literature has proven (in my minimal research) that history and culture cannot be separated from this literature.  As a weapon or tool to create social and political change and awareness, Chicano writers must create their work with their culture both consciously and subconsciously in mind.

            By reading the biographies and samplings of writings from Mexican American authors, the various dilemmas of being a Chicano artist are clear.  How does one find balance when the cultures in which he or she exists are divided?  To what language should one be faithful?  What part do myths and religion play in contemporary times?  It seems that these questions are worked through (but never definitively answered) in every poem, short story, and novel by a Mexican American writer.

            In doing this research, the things I learned were of a vast importance.  Even prior to this course, the only Mexican American writers I was aware of were those on our syllabus, Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros.  What a great fortune to discover other Chicano authors, especially Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Gloria Anzaldua, who, with different styles, tell their individual Mexican American experience.  In Anaya and Cisneros, I found their lives, although somewhat different in situation, to be of the same emphasis.  As young writers, both struggled to find their authentic voice among few examples of Chicano literature.  Cisneros and Anaya were reading American and European classics, and were able to emerge with a style uniquely Latino.  Too, both writers were fortunate enough to receive formal educations, and continued the process by becoming teachers of literature and writing.  And the important question of language divided them both:  Anaya struggled to keep his Spanish when he entered primary school, while Cisneros, from birth, was back and forth between her mother’s English and her father’s Spanish.  (In fact, Cisneros’s father did not read Mango Street until it was translated into Spanish several years after its initial English publication.)  Although separated by years and geography, Anaya and Cisneros both engaged in similar experiences as Mexican American writers.

            In most of the literary criticisms I explored, I often found that the critics had to struggle to find a clear definition of Mexican American literature.  It is full of contradictions; just as a pattern has been discovered, another one comes to throw the theory off balance.  Most criticism emphasizes the history and legends of the Mexican people, but it too eventually converges with modernity and the circumstances of the present.  Also, because most of the criticisms I read referred to the Mexican American people as “Chicanos,” I too (although rather consciously) implanted this word into my journal.  “Chicano,” “Latino,” “Hispanic,” and “Mestizo” are used throughout many of the texts, as it seems not only to justify ethnicity, but culture as well.  After reading La Chrisx’s poem “La Loca de la Raza Cosmica,” I felt more comfortable using these various terms:

            Soy Mexicana

            soy Mexican-American

            soy American of Spanish Surname

            soy Latina

            soy Puerto Riquena

            soy Cocoanut

            soy Chicana

            (qtd. in Rebolledo 106)

This “I am / Soy” poem suggests that the speaker is all of these words that may possibly define her.  It is as if to use just one term, as in an attempt to define something, would lessen the culture.

Mexican American literature still lacks considerable recognition among mainstream literature.  This journal is merely a glimpse of the richness of Chicano literature.  Living in Texas, where Mexico is so near, we must attempt to see a part of Mexican culture beyond that of tacos, enchiladas, chips, and salsa.  (We often forget that the food we eat at local Mexican-food restaurants is Tex-Mex, a blending of two different things.)  The Latino community of Houston is bustling in the arts, and it will not be long until more and more Mexican American literary artists will be heard and recognized in Texas and beyond.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana.  Women Singing in the Snow:  A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson:  U of Arizona P, 1995.