LITR 4332: American Minority Literature

Kyle Rahe

Where the Buffalo Once Roamed

            The special circumstances that led to the birth of Native American culture and Mexican American culture are the reasons these two groups’ story is more minority than immigrant.  The immigrant makes the choice to leave their homeland, ostensibly for a better one or at least more economic or cultural freedom.  Natives and Mexicans never received that choice and it is highly possible that their stations would be vastly improved if the white man had never come or at least if they had never lost their land.  Coping mechanisms have been instituted culturally for both of these groups to deal with this sense of loss.  Natives keep their culture separate and rejoice in traditions and use humor as a device to understand the way of the world.  They also keep hope alive for a mythical day when the land will be returned to them with the buffalo as plentiful as ever.  Mexican Americans are ambivalent towards America because the land in which many of them live was originally Mexico.  Mexicans also do not have the foreboding ocean voyage to break ties with their homeland.  Many re-visit their family in the motherland and are able to keep their culture because of the predominance of Mexicans in the American Southwest. 

Sherman Alexie is a preeminent literary trickster.  He explains the heritage of his people through irony and humor.  The psychological scar of losing a land that was once so large and pristine and seeing it fenced in by your conquerors will last forever.  In his poem “Translated from the American” Alexie pokes fun of a white person’s expectations of what an Indian should be, but instead of getting outraged Alexie wraps himself in old blankets and looks the part.  The trick of conforming to people’s pre-conceived notions is a theme in Alexie’s work, especially the poetry.  Yet Alexie is no poseur or missionary; he confronts his people head on.  If his parents and most Indians he knows are alcoholics then he writes the stories the way they happened.  “Every Little Hurricane” features adults acting like animals in a Roman orgy of alcohol, but Alexie wants the reader to confront this and understand the causes of this typical reservation life.  Alexie also does a great job of reconciling the old stories and the new mythology Indians tie themselves to.  The story of Coyote clipping his toenails becoming the whites is an old explanation while the young basketball players represent the new possible heroes of the tribe whom the porch-sitters vicariously live through. 

Borders are very important in Mexican-American literature.  “We Never Stopped Crossing Borders” by Luis J. Rodriguez makes this painfully apparent with the changing of Mexican names and their own facelessness in the Hispanic-derived city of Los Angeles.  The concept of being an immigrant in your own land is repeated and the dominant culture now borders you in with the same rivers that you once revered.  Think of the importance Tony places on the river and the presence in Bless Me, Ultima.  As a youth Tony is naturally symbolic for this topic: he crosses the border into manhood, he must choose between the boundaries of the church, the divide between his father and mother.  A distrust of the dominant culture is also evident in Mexican culture.  Immigrant groups eventually dissolve their extended family in favor of jobs, money, and movement.  For the most part Mexicans try and keep the whole family together, even working extra to get a beloved across the highway.  This mentality explains the honor and responsibility to provide and care for Ultima, who is family by tradition not blood.  What is interesting and complicating about this novel is the discord in Tony’s own family about whether to follow his father’s vaquero path or his mother’s religion and farming.