Interview with John Rechy

For half of his nearly sixty-year writing career, John Rechy was recognized primarily for his contributions to homosexual literature in the United States, even as from the beginning of that career he consistently cast his major protagonists as young men of mixed ethnicity, part-Mexican and part-Scottish, hailing like him from the border city of El Paso, Texas. As the fields of queer and US Latinx literary studies emerged in the 1980s, critics and scholars began to study the important intersectionalities of Rechy’s multiple identities more explicitly and intentionally, and that attention has been sustained ever since, leading to a significant rethinking of earlier responses to Rechy’s literary work, and a significant opening of the possible viable readerly approaches to Rechy’s entire writing career. Underrepresented in this matrix of critical approaches toward Rechy’s work that favor issues of identity, however, is a more direct, committed interest in describing the specifically literary, and aesthetic, aspects of Rechy’s contributions to the cultural traditions to which he matters, regardless of whether that interest foregrounds or not the understandably compelling factors of identity (ethnic, gender, sexual, class, geographic, etc.) that drive so much extant Rechy criticism. That critical project will surely benefit from a greater attention to, for example, Rechy’s experiments with form, style, and the materiality of print across the six decades of his career, very likely discovering there that those experiments can open alternative doors to understanding not only Rechy’s artistry, but also the unique qualities of his queerness, and the unique qualities of his latinidad.

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John Rechy, James Baldwin and the American Double Minority Literature

The Journal of American Culture ◽

10.1111/j.1542-734x.1983.0602_70.x ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 70-74

Author(s):

Emmanuel S. Nelson

Keyword(s):

James Baldwin ◽

Minority Literature ◽

John Rechy ◽

Double Minority

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The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

Religion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation ◽

10.1525/rac.1999.9.2.03a00040 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 205-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Luis León

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

American Literature ◽

Cultural History ◽

Mexican American ◽

Literary Work ◽

The United States ◽

Emile Durkheim ◽

The Past ◽

Mexican American Literature ◽

John Rechy

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.—Mircea EliadeThere are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.—Emile DurkheimWas that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?—John RechyThe past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

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