Traditions of Mexican Corridos in Rolando Hinojosa’s “The Valley” and “Klail City”

The paper dwells on the traditions of Mexican and Mexican-American ballads called “corridos,” such as “Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” in the novels of Texas writer Rolando Hinojosa. Corrido that emerged in the XIX century and continues developing today is a unique phenomenon of Mexican and Mexican-American literature. It serves as a worthy material for understanding the problems of cultural interaction, cultural border and multiculturalism. The paper aims at defining the role of corridos in the fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa, the novels “The Valley” and “Klail City” were taken to be analyzed. It gives a brief overview of the genre development based on the key works of the top scholars who study corridos in Russia and abroad. The article also dwells on the creation of the corrido about the folk hero Gregorio Cortez. There is a hypothesis proposed to explain Hinojosa’s decision to opt for the Mexican ballads: the writer was averse to the didactic and propagandistic ideas of Chicano literature of that time which prompted him to use corridos as a means of the hidden moral. Traditional corrido motifs such as revenge, injustice and social inequality are analyzed. The article concludes that in Hinojosa’s polyphonic and fragmented novels, corrido type stories perform plot-forming and compositional functions, direct the reader’s perception.

Homes on Borders in Chicano Literature

In “Borderlands/La Frontera” (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa writes about the “tradition of long walks” (11) across physical and imaginary borders, which defines her Mexican-American people. The borderland is both a space of transit and a state of transition from where the Chicanos venture into unknown territories. Their identity is constructed around and across space(s). In this paper, I seek to examine the Chicanos’ fluid spatial identity in their searches for a real home, in Pat Mora’s “House of Houses”, Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street”, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera”. I argue that in these literary and autobiographical works, the cosy domestic home is impossible to find because of constant displacement and imposed mobility.

Chicano Literature

Chicano literature began as a critical and creative response to discrimination and prejudice that affected Mexicans who immigrated into the United States after the 1900s, as well as those naturalized citizens who became Mexican Americans with roots in the American conquest of the Southwest after 1848. The term “Mexicano” was initially pronounced “Meshicano” during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Centuries later, the “sh” sound became a harder tonal “ch,” spelling it with an “x” and linguistically evolving into a hard “ch” sound. Chicano then became a shortcut term for Mexicano as working-class youth adopted it. Thus, Chicano is pronounced “Xicano,” with a “ch” sound for the “x.” Many Mexican Americans who were naturalized Americans after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo used the term “Chicano” derisively to identify working-class Mexicans not fully accepted by their Mexican compatriots because they were mestizo, they lacked education, and they spoke a mixture of English and Spanish, forming clever neologisms. The term “Chicano” itself was also embraced by a growing base of Chicanos, who rejected Latin American, Mexican American, Hispanic, and even Latino (“I don’t speak Latin, therefore I am not Latino”) during the nascent Chicano movement, along with the farmworker movement. Although scholars tend to trace the embryonic origins of Chicano literature to writings that derive from the explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Hernan Cortés, these writers did not use the term “Chicano” in their references, nor did they call themselves “Chicanos.” What is striking, however, is that the tales, legends, and myths passed down orally manifested themselves in the folktales, legends, and stories of la llorona (the Weeping Woman)—a version of La Malinche, the betrayer of the Aztec Empire and paramour of Cortés, known as Dona Marina. Historically, these stories of conflict and conquest, of love and rejection, of heroes and traitors, of tragedy and comedy, become enmeshed in the social, geographical, and environmental landscape that eventually became Chicano literature. Chicano literature is therefore written by a group of people who identify with the political, cultural, and social Chicano movement, and who use expository writing, autobiography, fiction, poetry, drama, and film to document the history of Chicano consciousness in the United States. From this early Chicano movement, and the long marches of the United Farm Workers, emerged a literature giving voice to the disenfranchised, the working-class, the migrant worker, and the field hand, both male and female alike, as they fought for the right to tell their story in the growing body of American literature, just as the once rejected Walt Whitman fought to have his musings and writings accepted in the years following the American Civil War. The collective stories of sin and redemption, of territories lost and gained, of legends and myths ingrained in the greater Southwest are reflections of hundreds of years of human toil as Chicano literature evolved into another chapter of American literature.

Chacón, Eusebio

Eusebio Chacón was a Mexican American (sometimes referred to as Chicano) figure who straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is someone who was forgotten and overlooked for about eighty years within the annals of Southwestern literature. He resurfaced in the mid-1970s as a key missing link in what is now called Chicano literature, at a time when its literary lineage was blurry and unknown. He was, therefore, instrumental in allowing critics to look back into the dusty shelves of libraries to identify writers who embodied the Mexican American experience within specific moments in history. Both his person and his writings provide an important window into subjects that interfaced with identity, literary formation and aesthetics, and social conditions, as well as how such early writers negotiated a new sense of Americanism while retaining some of their cultural background. Eusebio Chacón stands out as an outstanding example of turn-of-the-century intelligence, sensibility, versatility, and historical conscience in his attempts to educate people of Mexican descent about their rightful place in the United States as writers, social activists, and cultural beings. He fills a significant void that had remained up to the mid-1970s, which reveals how writings by such Mexican American writers were considered marginal.

The Magic of Blood

Gilb’s short story collection encourages students in a Chicano Literature course to analyze “class, gender, and ethnicity together.”

Spanish Language in Chicana/o Literature

Spanish-language Chicano literary production is rich in tradition and scope. This article intends to provide a brief comprehensive summary of the Chicano literary representation of some of the most important writers and works written in Spanish. Most critics of Chicano literature will agree the Mexican American or Chicano had its symbolic birth in 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War. It is important, however, to begin by talking about this as a literary tradition that predates the war: Spanish colonization and Mexican independence from Spain are important in establishing an essential foundation for this literature. Representative Chicano literature in Spanish will be highlighted from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, with those from the second half of the 20th (1965 to 1990s) receiving more emphasis. It is during this period that Spanish-language Chicano literature offered its most important contributions: not only in the number of texts produced but more importantly in how this literature reflected the social and cultural manifestation of the Chicano ethos. (Note that the term “Mexican American literature” will be used to describe work leading up to the Chicano Movement, approximately 1965; “Chicano literature” will be used to identify the Chicano’s new post-1965 political and social consciousness.)