The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize (5 page)

Margarita Luna Robles won second prize in 1984-85 for her short story, “Urbano: Letters of the Horseshoe Murder.” Implicit in the title is the suggestion, if not the normality of, then the routine violence of modern urban life in the United States. The fact that “urbano” is written in Spanish suggests a specific ethnic context to this situation. It is an epistolary story followed by a dialogue. The correspondence suggests a murder and the primary suspect is a young gregarious gang member named Randy. Held in jail, the letters of his sorrowful mother, his girlfriends, and other friends inform the reader of social issues that come to make up the urban environment addressed in the title. Some of the themes treated include brown-on-brown crime, interracial romance, broken families, the situation of the single Latina mother, the problematic relationship between the police and people of color, the prison system, illegal substance abuse, and questions of gender. The text conveys a feeling of immediacy with the reader because of the genres used like the sudden dialogue of a police shooting at a barrio party. The seriousness of the scene trumps the levity of many of the letters communicating ultimately its depressing message of urban strife.

“Sunland” is the ironic title of Gloria Velásquez winning 1984-85 short story that tells multiple histories of a small town in the United States. Perhaps influenced in tone and structure by Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, “Sunland” is the name of a village enshrouded in darkness. The obscurity creates an infertile environment, a metaphor for the social alienation and stagnation experienced by the town's people. The story begins with an unnamed female voice recounting the death of her grandmother and her estrangement from her husband. The narration turns to the family drama incited by the impending death of a neighbor, the elderly Doña Soledad. While the death of the narrator's grandmother, la Nana, is expressed with grief, and the intimate hole left by Nana's absence, the reader is brought into the physicality of Doña Soledad's agony. Culpable of neglect, the personal histories of Doña Soledad's trite children confront the emotional and practical difficulties of dealing with death. In contrast with la Nana, Doña Soledad's last days become the stage on which notions of life, family, and love display the disingenuousness of her progeny. The intrigue around Doña Soledad's moribund body plays on a deeper level as an allegory of the dark, barren, and dying town of Sunland. This story briefly mentions the year 1848—the end of the US-Mexican war—as the beginning of the period of physical darkness that slowly envelopes the Southwest and so alludes to the dark history of the conquest and subjugation of indigenous and mestizo peoples from the triumph of US imperialism in the Southwest to modern times. In just a few pages, “Sunland” weaves these themes concisely and dramatically with a kinesthetic language where humor counters the seriousness of the plot.

Gustavo Segade won first prize in 1985-86 for his poetry collection that, in three poems, traces a genealogy of his sense of becoming Chicano. “State
of the Art” is the first poem where “Pain walks a long, winding, / bitter path to anger” (123), a physical and emotional condition that leads to social disconnection. The second poem turns the discussion from the path of pain, to pain management through marijuana, political activism—specifically the Chicano Movement—and through the escape of dreams, and insanity. But the experience produces the voice's politicization as a Chicano however little need he has for the term. The third poem “Crossing” analyzes the path back to Mexico, the “home country” where lack of familiarity, particularly in socio-economic forms of slum life and desperate labor, further alienates the poetic I from a sense of belonging. Segade employs Latin phrases and Greek figures to broaden the colloquial language of his poetry. Combining erudite references with Chicano themes seen more often beginning in the 1980s compels a broader level of literary authority and reflects the reach of these poets to scholars across disciplines.

First-prize winner of the 1986-87 contest, David Nava Monreal's play
Cellmates
explores the psychological underpinnings of a sexual oppressor. Set in a jail cell, Ray, an inmate, is confronted by Luke, an unexpected visitor to his cell. Their dialogue uncovers the patriarchal basis of Ray's peculiar nuclear family. Luke, like a Dickensesque ghost of the family's dysfunctional past, coerces Ray to tell his treacherous story of physical and psychological abuse of his lover, Doreen, and their daughter, Lolly. While the play establishes Ray as an exceptional male in a negative sense, this type of cruelty is not uncommon in American heterosexual relations, when ruled by asymmetrical power relations and limited emotional intelligence.
Cellmates
is most successful where it is critical—in the reconstruction of Doreen's suicide and in the homicide of their daughter as consequences of Ray's insecure role in the heterosexual family romance.

Carlos Morton, Professor of Drama and accomplished playwright, shows his predilection for reinterpreting European classics in his 1986-87 play
Johnny Tenorio
, third-prize winner. Here, Morton reinterprets the Don Juan Tenorio legend of the nineteenth century in a twentieth-century Chicano context. The plot consists of the ghost of Johnny who, unaware of his own death, returns to Big Berta's bar to relive his last moments but finds himself forced to confront his many peccadilloes as a philanderer. The play uses dramatic tenets from the traditional Spanish tale within a Chicano cultural frame. The Chicano adaptation of the play can be interpreted from different perspectives: a criticism of Chicano intergenerational heterosexism in the adoption and the perpetuation of the figure of Don Juan; or as an inadvertent capitulation to hegemonic stereotyping of Chicanos in the figure of the Latin lover, or worse, the mongrel. The scene included in the anthology consists of the climatic moment when Berta helps Johnny face his friend Louie, his wife Ana, and his father Don Juan.
Johnny Tenorio
captures the vibrancy of the
Chicano community through Morton's wonderful use of language and humor with which important social issues are dramatized.

Well-known as a performance artist Carmen Tafolla shocks her reader into learning different truths to womanhood in her collection of poetry that won her first prize in the 1986-87 contest. In her poem “Hot Line,” Tafolla reinterprets stretch marks caused by pregnancy as a physical palimpsest that allows her to remember and communicate with her deceased first-born. The reader's curiosity and pretension to understand such a loss is left hanging by the undisclosed circumstances of the baby's death. The structure of the stanzas imitates the lines on the speaker's body, the first verse being longer than the rest, the subsequent verses taking their own routes, as do stretch marks. And so, the poem twists and pulls at the reader, bringing into poetry the physicality of child-bearing, and the interconnectedness of the processes of giving life, living, and death. “Nine Moons Dark” follows the theme of maternity in a poem that juxtaposes a spiritual exploration of pregnancy in the Native Mexican tradition with the adoption industry, delineating how the forces of capitalism intersect with these processes, rendering the sacredness of maternity into a means of survival, a way to financially profit. The poems “Sweet Remember” and “In Guatemala” interrogate patriarchy's notion of femininity and the sacred notion of justice, respectively. Both poems work within an economy of violence that virulently dismantles the pretense of each. Tafolla's poems remind the reader of the regimes of power that use women's bodies and minds as fodder for political and economic domination. These poems call the reader to replace such demeaning rhetoric with an invocation to personal and collective empowerment.

Alfred Arteaga presents the reader with a counter-nationalist discourse of the female body. His 1986-87 poetry
Cantos
won honorable mention from which his poem “Canto Primero” is reprinted here. The poem traces the cultural legacies of Mexico through its descendents who currently inhabit the United States. In Nahuatl, Arteaga writes of la Malinche, polemic Indian mother and co-originator of the mestizo people in the Mexican national myth. In an onomastic gesture, the voice focuses on geography, and moves from Tenochtitlán to the US/Mexico border and then to US Southwest renaming—no, reconceptualizing—spaces with indigenous and Mexican names. When native, this region is spoken of as sensuous female body, while the border and its man-made structures assault the senses in images like “threading the steel mesh / como nada” (149). He retraces Chicano ancestry in three languages: Nahautl, Spanish, and English. By valorizing the feminine in the concept of the mother country, Arteaga defies national boundaries and reorganizes the Chicano community through the contours of the indigenous female body thus reincorporating California into Mexico, making it a whole contiguous geographical and cultural space. Here, official boundaries are blurred, linguistic registers miscegenated, and the dominant masculine of North American
iconography overwhelmed by the supple, warm body of the Indian woman. Arteaga's collection interprets Chicano nationalism in a very sensual, erudite, yet playful way, without losing any of the seriousness of his concerns.

An American meditation on insanity is the theme elaborated in the late Reymundo Gamboa's short story “50/50 Chance” for which he won first prize in the 1986-87 contest. The character Strawman is the purported madman who has escaped from an insane asylum on his way to Santa Barbara where he longs to see the coast. He is caught by hospital authorities and the remainder of the story describes Strawman's struggle to perform sanity as determined by particular social norms. Gamboa explores Strawman's circumstance and condition brilliantly by the way he teases out Strawman's heightened consciousness that understands the game at stake between himself and Mary, his hospital psychotherapist, for his freedom. Strawman's sudden insights into the artificiality of the conditions of sanity deconstruct the binary sane/insane into liminal degrees of moderated yet pervasive insanity demonstrated by all. Gamboa writes a highly sympathetic protagonist in this first-person narrative that compels his reader to reconsider the notion of sanity, and to question the legitimacy of the asylum as a rehabilitative institution.

Demetria Martínez, well-known for her 1991 novel
Mother Tongue
, is also a wonderful poet as her first-prize collection of 1987-88 attests. Included are two of her poems, “Chimayó, New Mexico” and “One Dimensional Man.” “Chimayó, New Mexico” situates a landscape as the central character of the poem through which a pair of lovers fails to emotionally and spiritually connect. Here, Martínez contextualizes the architecture, topography, and the flora and fauna of Chimayó, New Mexico, to tell of a spiritual desire for an erotic encounter. Perhaps related to Martínez's interest in the Sanctuary Movement, “One Dimensional Man” speaks in staccato-like spurts of a postcolonial fantasy where an imperialist male's sexual interest in the oppressed Other is energized by his prejudice. The implication is that sexual attraction nor intimacy necessarily compels the racist to challenge his/her beliefs. Rather, the attraction is often rooted in an erotic of oppression. Martínez unfastens the myth of biracial romance through a poetic voice that links the heterosexist and racist desire of Other with the desire to annihilate the Other, themes developed as well in
Mother Tongue
. True in the best of Chicana/o literature, Martínez establishes Chicana/o subjectivities within social, historical, and economical contingencies and sets them to poetry, concise, biting, and lyrical.

Silviana Wood's story “And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him?” won her first prize in 1987-88. Through the genre of the Bildungsroman, Wood's tale conjoins the coming of age of a young girl with her cognition of racism and the subsequent material conditions of poverty. This process begins with the difficult circumstances with which her community lives that become a source of social shame. The story embraces with humor
the ingenuity of a group of sixth graders, the young Chicanos of Miss Folsom's class, who protect themselves from being institutionally demeaned. They circumvent their teacher's chastisement when they distract Miss Folsom from recognizing symbols of their poverty like lice and ill-fitted clothing, and from their ethnicity represented by un-American lunches, and their willingness to accept English names. Told in a child's voice, Wood subtly exposes the larger project of education in the United States—to indoctrinate the young in a skewed value of nationalism to distinguish the selfproclaimed real American citizen from the ethnic “imposter.”

Silviana Wood in her play
Una vez, en un barrio de sueños …
, first-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest brings her reader into a barrio where generations at odds merge together. Don Anselmo, a grouchy old man, leaves the scolding behind when he finds a common bond of intellectual curiosity with a neighborhood boy, Federico. Together, Don Anselmo and Federico grow a tomato plant that embodies their collective dream of renewal and sustenance in the midst of a hardened urban slum. The fact that the tomato is selected ties this spiritual and communal act to the tomato's indigenous roots in America. The poor quality of the earth in which the tomato is planted shows the foolish care shown the earth in modern America, further evidenced in the crop of a few pathetic tomatoes. Perhaps a trademark of Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures, Wood's play evokes a gentleness of spirit that creates a backdrop from which the community draws its strength and determination under grim social circumstances.

Josefina López wrote her highly acclaimed play
Simply María or America's Dream,
second-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest. The play questions the heterosexist romantic fantasy at the heart of both North American and Mexican cultures that often predetermines the lives of many women. María is the daughter of Carmen, herself once a rebellious daughter who, in her youth, had eloped with a still-married man, María's father Ricardo. In pursuit of better economic opportunities, the family ventures pa' el norte, but María follows her own American Dream. In María's version, she wants to pursue an education and wins herself a scholarship to attend university. Pulled by tradition, María's parents forbid her to pursue her dream because they believe an educated María will frustrate her scripted obligations of future wife and mother. The drama that ensues incorporates alter egos in the form of three girls who expose María's inner conflict between becoming American, maintaining her place in Mexican culture, or falling outside both to pursue her own individual calling. Still a significant theme in Chicana/o literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Simply María or America's Dream
is very much a Chicana tale of the difficulties of negotiating gender roles between two cultures. The sets, placards, and the unexpected inclusion of cameo narrators show the legacy of the important techniques pioneered by El Teatro Campesino. López's aesthetic of truncated dialogue in the form of
partial conversations, dramatic lines that punctuate the action on stage in a performative way, the dream scene, and the sparse voices of the three girls make evident that this theme only requires an abbreviated treatment to be intelligible to a Latina/o audience of the 1990s, and by this moment in time, to mainstream audiences as well. In addition to the dramatic interrogation of the heterosexist family,
Simply María or America's Dream
illustrates that contemporary Chicano theater had successfully educated its audiences to the epistemology of Chicano cultural production. The scene presented here portrays the social forces that María and Carmen will have to contend with in America forewarned by their first experience of downtown Los Angeles.