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THE PORTRAYAL OF THE CHICANO EXPERIENCE
IN THE NOVELS OF ALEJANDRO MORALES

By

Juan Antonio Sénchez

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of American Studies

1999

ABSTRACT

THE PORTRAYAL OF THE CHICAN O EXPERIENCE
IN THE NOVELS OF ALEJANDRO MORALES

By

Juan Antonio Sénchez

One common characteristic to the novels by Alejandro Morales is their portrayal
of Mexican American society. Morales' social and cultural commitment to his people
consists of the recreation of the life and history of the Mexican Americans in the United
States from a Mexican American point of view. The historical reformulation of the
experience of the Chicanos stands out as one of the most basic techniques of this
recreation.

As shown in his novels, there has been an evolution in Morales' commitment. In
his ﬁrst novels, the denouncement of marginalization and exploitation of the Chicanos by
Anglo Americans and the preservation of Hispanic culture were the most noteworthy
elements. In his most recent novels the Mexican American is increasingly seen as part of
the American ethnic mosaic. Morales' recreation of present-day Mexican Americans
intends to assist Chicanos to face the challenges they have to deal with in a post-
industrial society where identity is a concept in constant process of reconstruction.

Alejandro Morales' social and cultural commitment and its evolution is studied in
three of his novels: Cams viejas y vino nuevo (1975), Reto en el Parar'so (1983) and The

Brick People (1988).

There is undeniable evidence that the 19703 will
witness the emergence of many Mexican American
novelists who will relate the experience of their
people who are truly unknown men to the vast

majority of the American people.

—Helena Monahan, 1972

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance of Professor Javier
Duran who assisted me through the difficult process of working through the subject,
structuring the thesis and improving it in several ways. Professor Nancy Marino lent an
invaluable contribution as editor and also made important suggestions. Doctor Manuel
Chavez kindly offered himself as a third member of my committee just at the right
moment and has always been available to discuss matters concerning the thesis. I would
not like to forget Professor Mary S. Vasquez, with whom I began working on Alejandro
Morales' novels, and Professor Jose Antonio Gurpegui, who got me in touch with the
novelist.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Department of
American Studies at Michigan State University. All the members of the Department,
from its directors, Professor Peter Levine and, then Professor David Cooper, to
Rosemary, secretary of the Department showed for me a special care and understanding
not only during the research and writing process of the thesis but throughout the entire
course of my studies. They contributed to make of my stay at Michigan State University

one of the most interesting experiences of my life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: THE PORTRAYAL OF THE CHICANO EXPERIENCE

IN CHICANO LITERATURE ................................. 1
CHAPTER I: CARAS VIEJAS Y VINO N UE V0: THE PORTRAIT

OF THE BARRIO ................................................. 19
CHAPTER 11: RE T0 EN EL PARAISO: THE CONQUEST OF THE

SOUTHWEST ....................................................... 45
CHAPTER III: THE BRICK PEOPLE: THE BUILDING

OF CALIFORNIA 74
CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 103
APPENDIX: ALEJANDRO MORALES: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .112

INTRODUCTION

THE PORTRAYAL OF THE CHICANO EXPERIENCE IN CHICANO

LITERATURE

The reformulation of the Mexican American experience in Chicano literature

Nowadays the themes and literary techniques that Mexican American1 writers use
are very diverse and each author has a different experience to tell. However, when
Mexican Americans became more acutely aware of their identity in the sixties and
seventies a common theme with these writers was the narration of the problems that the
question of identity arose. A great part of the literature created in that period shows the
need that Chicanos had to find the cultural parameters with which to deﬁne themselves as
a social and political entity. Literary critics have grouped all the works of this period that
responded to a search for identity under the name of "narrative of self identity": "En el
caso de la literatura chicana de los setenta, la narrative of self-identity se establece como
el nuevo género" (Hemandez-Gutiérrez 39-40).2

One of the most usual ways that Chicano writers had to explore the question 'who
am I?’ was to portray themselves in their literature. Self-representation became a common
technique and served also as a mirror for Mexican-Americans who wanted to learn more

about themselves.

Self-representation for Mexican Americans was also a way to guarantee the
survival of a culture and lifestyle peculiar to the Chicanos. Furthermore, it was also a way
to oppose this lifestyle to the hegemonic culture that had ignored and had tried to
suppress it for decades, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The historical
marginalization suffered by the Mexican American communities in the Southwest was
therefore portrayed in short stories, autobiographies and novels with an aim to preserve
the life of the Chicanos, to reforrnulate their historical and present reality and to
denounce the social injustices they had been subjected from mid-nineteenth century,
when "the Mexican American people were created as a people" (Alvarez 37). Many of
the Chicano writers that began publishing in the sixties and seventies were Mexican
Americans born and raised in barrios or in rural Chicano communities who had shared a
common experience of social discrimination, cultural confusion and identity crisis. As
they grew up, their literary vocation and social consciousness developed jointly. By the
time they began to publish, they felt the need to contribute to an explanation of the reality
of the Mexican Americans to themselves and also to give a response to the conditions of
poverty, exploitation and oblivion in which millions of Mexican Americans lived. Their
own personal experiences and a feeling of social responsibility moved them to portray the
social and historical condition of a marginalized minority, the Chicanos.

The literature of the Mexican Americans did not just follow the aesthetic doctrine
of "Part pour l'art." It manifested a social commitment: it was meant to establish a literary
tradition that filled the Chicanos' need of a culture that reinforced their identity as a
people. Ramon Saldivar has analyzed the ideological framework in which Chicano

literature can be inserted. He states:

In the decades since its contemporary renaissance, Chicano narrative has
contributed to a general reassessment of the cultural and historical
situation of Mexican Americans in the American West and Southwest. It
has provided a mediated truth about a culturally determinate people in a
historically determinate context. (Narrative 5)

The crossroads many Americans of Mexican origin faced at the beginning of the

seventies is well expressed by the poem “1, Too, America,” written by Leo Romero in

1971:

America

blue eyes and blond hair
America from England
Protestant America

pilgrims

Dutch New York

America of George Washington
America I too

live on this continent

and in this country

I too am an American

and my eyes are brown and my hair
obsidian black

America from Spain. . . . (1-7, 97-103)

Up to the sixties and seventies being "American" in this country meant being
white and speaking English. Life in the United States was dominated by the doctrine of
"Americanism," an exclusivist model that denied the possibility of access to high culture,
society and development to American citizens and residents with Mexican ancestors.
Mexican Americans did not have an ofﬁcial existence since they were not part of
mainstream culture. They were as invisible to the mass of the population (those with the
trademark of "Americans") as the man in the novel The Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison.
If in need to identify this reality, Americans used denominations attached to Mexicans in
a shallow attempt to deﬁne them: “immigrants,” “foreigners” and others. The Mexican
Americans were an unknown "silent minority."

It is precisely this exclusion and marginalization of the Mexican Americans in the
context of American society that has forced such a response by the Chicano minority.
This response has taken different forms. One has been a literature that attempts to
“represent” Mexican Americans from their own point of view. The contents and the
forms of this literature are different from one Chicano writer to another. What is common
is a desire to portray a faithful image of Mexican Americans by Mexican Americans,
their cultural peculiarities, their institutions, traditions and history. Some historical events
seem to be a recurrent theme: the Korean War, the Mexican Revolution, the immigration
to the United States, the Chicano movement of the sixties. This reassessment of the place
of Mexican Americans in the United States takes history as a starting point and some
Mexican American writers turn to history as a source of inspiration and foundation for
their art: “For Chicano narrative, history is the subtext that we must recover because

history itself is the subject of its discourse. History cannot be conceived as the mere

'background' or ’context' for this literature; rather, history turns out to be the decisive
determinant of the form and content of the literature” (Saldivar, Narrative 5).

Thus, in order to understand the motivations that lead to Mexican Americans
writers to create, one must study not only the way in which they document their society
but also how they use history since "literary texts will show how aesthetic and cultural
productions oﬁen turn out to be the ideological rewriting of that banished history"
(Narrative 19). For some of these writers, history functions as one of the main point of
reference to build up a reevaluation, a reinterpretation of the role and experience of the
Mexican Americans. In many cases, history is the "subtext", the underlying support on
which these writers' portrayal of Chicano society lies.

Alejandro Morales' social and cultural commitment

The literature of the Californian novelist Alejandro Morales participates of that
self-representative ideological project characteristic of the Mexican American narrative
of the seventies. Morales documents the Chicano experience both from a social and
historical perspective. Rodriguez del Pino, in his book La novela chicana escrita en
espaﬁol, has pointed to the key concept of "commitment" to understand the literature of
the Chicano writers that began to publish in the sixties and seventies: "Dentro de este
compromiso, la preocupacion ha sido documentar la condicion social e historica de un
pueblo marginado economicamente e ignorado culturalmente" (Cinco 3). Alejandro
Morales is one of the representatives of this kind of commitment, which consists of a
written representation of the Mexican American society from within (that is, from the
point of view of a Mexican American author) and a re-writing of their history in order to

achieve what Saldivar calls a "retention 0 cultural integrity and an organic sense of unity"

(Narrative 3), both in the context of a racial discrimination in the United States. Morales'
"self-representation" is both "synchronic" and "diacronic". On the one hand, he presents
aspects of Chicano contemporary society, not frequently treated by other authors before
him. For example, he portrays the youth in the barrio where he spent his childhood
(Caras viejas y vino nuevo) or deals with the racism experimented by some Chicano
middle-class professionals (Eutemio, el "Proferor Morenito," en La verdad sin voz,
Dennis Berreyesa Coronel en Reto en el Parat'so). On the other hand, he reformulates the
historical experience of the Mexican Americans in the Southwest3 by rescuing the
memory of the decline and disappearance of the Califomios. The reformulation of the
history of Chicanos is one of the basic characteristics of Morales' literature. In his study
on the use of history in The Brick People, John Waldron comments on Morales'
contribution to the study of the history of the Southwest: "Writing a historical novel, the
marginated voice adds another text to the many texts which make up our memory of a
past event" (105).

The Chicano movement represented the most forceful attempt in Mexican
American history to get organized and ﬁght for civil rights. The movement was also
associated to a cultural nationalism that defended Mexican heritage and opposed to
assimilation as the ultimate goal for Chicanos (a phenomenon that has been disdainfully
referred to as ’pochoization‘). In order to materialize the aspirations of the Mexican
Americans and to hold demonstrations, strikes or walkouts, the movement had its own
leaders, from César Chavez to José Angel Gutierrez or Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales.S On
an intellectual level, scholars and university professors pushed for protection and

promotion of Spanish and the culture and traditions of the Chicanos and theorized from

different disciplines on the life and history of this minority. Some of the concepts
introduced by these intellectuals, from the idea of Aztlan to the re-interpretation of the
Mexican American war and its consequences, were used by Chicano politicians as
arguments in their struggle for an improvement of the socio-economic circumstances of
their people. The 'boom' in Mexican American literature in the seventies was clearly
connected to the social claims of the Chicano movement and some of the authors that
critics judge today as the most representative of this generation, such as Alejandro
Morales, adopted a kind of political militancy during that period. It is understandable that
Morales' literature, and especially his ﬁrst books, like many by other writers,6 reﬂect to
an extent the inﬂuence of the thought that characterized the movement and the theories
that some of the scholars associated to it used.

The young Alejandro Morales was aware of the ideas and concepts created in the
political and intellectual circles of the Chicano movement. For example, the theories of
the Conquest of the Southwest and internal colonization developed by Tomas Almaguer,
Mario Barrera or Rodolfo Acuila,7 the argument that Mexican American literature is born
out of the encounter of the Mexican Americans with the Anglos, as seen by Americo
Paredes,3 or his concern with Mexican American identity.9 The denunciation of American
society in his Alejandro Morales’ novels is connected to the denunciation of these
scholars. Through a process of recreation of the historical and contemporary
representation of Mexican Americans, his novels present the injustices, marginalization,
and socioeconomic oppression from which Chicanos suffered throughout the years.

Through the recreation of the life and history of Mexican Americans, Alejandro Morales

is able to portray Chicanos as one of the worst treated minority groups in the United
States and also show their sociopolitical aspirations and claims.10

Morales' ﬁrst books (Caras viejas y vino nuevo, La verdad sin voz) present
Chicano characters living in the barrio in desperate circumstances. They are victims of an
oppressed society that lies beyond the limits of the barrio. At the core of the narration is
what Ramon Saldivar calls the dialectic of difference11 between Anglo Americans and
Mexican Americans: the Mexican American is the exploited, living as an outcast, and the
Anglo is the exploiter. Not only the Chicano is segregated geographically but also
condemned to be unemployed or to be given the least desirable jobs. In the class structure
of American society, Mexican Americans occupy the bottom layer. From a historical
point of view, this situation is the product of the arrival of Anglo Americans to the
Southwest and the transition from an agriculture and ranching-based economy to full-
blown capitalism.

Alejandro Morales also shows in his ﬁrst books a cultural commitment. As it is
the case with other novelists that published their works when Morales began his career as
a writer (for example, Tomas Rivera with y no se lo trago' la tierra, Miguel Méndez
with Peregrinos de Aztlan or Aristeo Brito with El diablo en Texas), he wrote in Spanish.
The option of choosing Spanish over English had an ideological and symbolic intention:
the need to go back to the Hispanic roots of the Chicano people. If the aim was to
preserve and continue Chicano traditions, that preservation could not be carried out
through the use of English, but of Spanish. From a symbolical and practical point of

view, this commitment towards a language involves the decision on part of Mexican

Americans not to give in to a culture foreign to them: the hegemonic American culture,

"implica cierta rebelion en contra del sistema social dominante, y en esto el autor Chicano
ha encontrado un arma poderosa de lucha cultural" (Rodriguez, C inco 4).

Alejandro Morales' cultural commitment to the preservation of Mexican heritage
and the rejection of assimilation to mainstream society was born out of the "renaissance
in Mexican conciousness" (Acuﬁa 320) promoted also by the Chicano movement. It can
be stated therefore that the Chicano movement, and its radical attempt to "redeﬁne the
political, social, economic, and cultural status of millions of persons of Mexican descent"
(Del Castillo 125), was the greatest single inﬂuence on Morales' ﬁrst novels.

Nonetheless, the concept of “commitment” in Morales has evolved as the author
has grown from a young to a mature writer. This evolution, as seen in Morales' latest
novels, reﬂects a new way to perceive Chicano society and literature in the post-
nationalistic scenario of the end of the twentieth century. His ﬁrst books were inﬂuenced
by the atmosphere surrounding the Chicano movement, with the idea of helping to form a
collective identity, through the preservation of a common culture, and assisting Mexican
Americans in gaining an improved socio-economic status in the all-dominating Anglo
society. His most recent novels (Reto en el paraiso, The Rag Doll Plagues) are
increasingly concerned with the new challenges that Chicanos face in a post-industrial
society. They portray a society that breaks the simple dichotomy Mexican American
(Mexican culture, Spanish) - Anglo American (American culture, English). Instead they
reﬂect a multicultural, transnational scenario where the characters, in order to survive,
have to reinvent themselves. Morales believes that Mexican Americans still need to learn
about their Hispanic past. However, at the same time, they have to learn to adjust

themselves to the contemporary conditions of United States' society.

Morales' ﬁrst novels (Caras viejas y vino nuevo, La verdad sin voz) linked
Mexican Americans with a ﬁxed identiy. To be Chicano, according to the ideology of the
movement, was to speak Spanish and to ﬁght to protect and preserve Mexican traditions
against the incursions of the American way of life. In Reto en el Paraiso, The Brick
People and The Rag Doll Plagues, the writer present characters who question their
identity, who develop in a world of constant changes. Those characters accept their
"mexicanida " but, at the same time, are open to a reconsideration of their cultural
heritage to adapt it to new circumstances. Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez, in his analysis of
The Rag Doll Plagues, presents this idea as a characteristic of Morales latest ﬁction:

Roots and traditional culture are not invoked here in order to provide a
safe anchor, but rather to emphasize change, transformation, and
transculturation as it affects even those roots. . . . Indeed, Mexican culture
and mestizaje are not presented here as the never-changing roots to which
one could go back whenever in need of cultural afﬁrmation. They are not a
product, but a process; they are a hybrid in mutation, rather than a static
essence. (“Global” 92-93)

Morales' latest novels reﬂect the interest of the writer in philosophical and
aesthetic ideas developed by such intellectuals as Brian McHale, Gloria Anzaldua or
Michael Foucault. Signiﬁcantly, in his critical works Morales has incorporated to his

vocabulary such post-modem terms as "heterotOpia"'2

and multiculturalism, and he is
trying to describe a country where the crossing of borders is a daily phenomenon.

Chicanos live in a environment characterized not for a single border that separates two

cultures but for a multiplicity of them that run through race, language, class and

10

nationality. Rubén Medina wrote in a 1986 poem: "A donde quiera que vayas / este pais
es una frontera" (35-36). Alejandro Morales has applied this concept to Southern
California: "Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia explains the border culture
experienced daily in the urban zone between Santa Barbara, California, and Tijuana,
México. We live in a time and space in which borders, both literal and ﬁgurative, exist
everywhere" (“Heterotopia” 23). People living in Los Angeles or San Diego need to
enter, re-enter and leave territories alien to their culture, language or religion. They have
become permanent migrants in their own land. Although most of them need a refuge, an
environment where to feel secure and understood, the daily process of trespassing borders
repeats itself frequently. From Beverly Hills to Montebello, from Venice Beach to Santa
Ana, from Newport to San Luis Obispo millions of Americans, Mexicans, Chinese,
Guatemalans, Irish, Germans, Indians, Salvadorans, Native Americans and others learn to
co-exist in a fragmented world that requires from its inhabitants a pioneering attitude to
cross over to the other side and relate with individuals from different communities. These
people show a geographical dynamism but also a spiritual one. The web of freeways that
covers the region is symbolic of the net of connections that individuals have to establish
in order to survive. The very pattern of the geographic proﬁle of Southern California, a
set of hundreds of small, medium-size and big urban nuclei without an established center
helps to give an idea of the enthropic scenario where citizens, residents, documented and
undocumented inmigrants have to work, live and interrelate. It is a place of permanent
transformation, of unending movement, of constant dynamism, of a ceaseless ﬂowing of
cars, dreams, people, time, transactions, relationships, money, hopes and

disappointments.

ll

Mexican Americans, as any member from any of the communities that populate
the area, struggle to assimilate the never-ending metamorphosis of his homeland and
learn to move around jumping from one ethnic environment to another, from one
language to the next. The identity of the Mexican American is dynamic. It is one that
avoids the empty attempts at self-deﬁnition that intellectuals and artists have made in the
last decades. That is precisely the kind of identity that Morales tries to portray in his
latest books: not a ﬁxed one like in his ﬁrst novels but one that changes and develops
constantly.l3

Morales increasingly sees the Mexican American as an individual living in the
context of American society, in a perpetual act of self-deﬁnition. He is part of the
American mosaic. However, American society is becoming more and more diverse. As a
Chicano writer his commitment is to document his society, in order to give the Mexican
Americans a "cultural mooringz"

Chicanos/as need a cultural foundation, a recognizable cultural place
composed of memory, nostalgia, history, mythology, spirituality, tierra,
family, the elders' world. They must build and fortify a cultural base
where change, if preventing it is impossible, might at least decelerate.
Chicano/a writers today are dedicated to recording, re-creating, I and
preserving this cultural mooring in literature. (“Heterotopia” 24)

The society he perceives has changed. He has changed alongside his peceptions of
Mexican Americans. His portrayal of society cannot follow the aesthetics, ethics and
ideas proposed by the Chicano movement of the sixties and seventies. Mexican American

society, especially the middle class to which Alejandro Morales belongs, has integrated to

a great extent into mainstream society.‘4 In order to survive in a post-industrial society, in

a world where one of the main activities is to cross borders, the Mexican American needs

a "new mode of thinking:"
a mode of thinking that is neither ﬁxed nor stable, but is one that is open
to the prospect of a continual return to events, to their re-elaboration and
revision. This retelling, re-citing and re-siting of what passes for historical
and cultural knowledge depend upon the recalling and re-membering of
earlier fragments and traces that ﬂare up and ﬂash in our present. . . .
These fragments that remain as fragments: splinters of light that illuminate
our journey while simultaneously casting questioning shadows along the
path. (Chambers 2)

Mexican Americans need a mode of thinking that helps them, for example, to
combine their cultural background with the continuous metamorphosis that contemporary
life demands from them. They need to re-elaborate their identity permanently, building
up from a common past that goes back to their Mexican origin. This mode of thinking
will re-consider the place of the Mexican American in society and its relationship with
the other groups that make up the heterogeneity of the present-day United States.
Alejandro Morales has looked for this "new mode of thinking" in some of the post-
modernist thinkers and writers mentioned above. In the philosophy of Michael Foucault,
the reﬂections about the border by Anzaldua, and the writings of other contemporary
scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari, Morales seems to have found useful concepts to
analyze and portray the experience of Mexican Americans living in a post-capitalist,

post-industrial world. In the writer’s most recent novels there is a wider variety of

themes. For example, in The Rag Doll Plagues, Alejandro Morales introduces ecological
criticism. There has been a shift from Spanish to English. His characters leave the barrio
and show their experience in a contemporary setting (adding up a new dimension to their
original Mexican culture). Alejandro Morales, as a Chicano writer, is still commited to
the documentation of the experiences of Chicanos. However, in order to do that, he has to
use "a new mode of thinking."

Aim of the thesis

The aim of this thesis is to suggest that one of the key concepts to understand
Alejandro Morales' literature is his "social commitment" to Chicanos and to establish that
this commitment is achieved through the portrayal of Mexican American society and,
especially, through a reformulation of Chicano history from a Mexican American
perspective. The thesis also states that there has been an evolution in Morales' concept of
"commitment" from a more ideological stance in his ﬁrst novels, characterized by an
open denouncement of the marginalized situation of Mexican Americans and a purpose
of preservation of Hispanic culture, to a more neutral recreation of Mexican American
life and history in the context of American society.

In order to achieve its purpose and aim, the thesis carries out a critical study of
three of Morales' novels analyzing speciﬁcally the way in which he recreates three
characteristic experiences of the Mexican Americans. The thesis looks into Morales'
picture of life in a barrio in Caras viejas y vino nuevo, and the Mexican American
reinterpretation of two historical process, the Conquest of the Southwest by the Anglo
Americans in Reto en el Paraiso, and Mexican immigration and establishment in the

United States in The Brick People.

14

In Caras viejas y vino nuevo Morales' portrayal of a Chicano barrio in the sixties
is analyzed. The barrio can be considered a space subordinated economically and
politically to another people, "los del otro lado." The inhabitants of the barrio belong to
the lowest socio-economic layer in the labor market. The culture of the members of such
community is underrated and in the process of being substituted by the culture of the
dominant people. Alejandro Morales focuses his portrayal on the life of young people in
the barrio. Youth live in a cultural no-man's land: without professional perspectives and
rejected by the hegemonic power of "los del otro lado," fall back on drugs and marginal
activities. They are only considered as potential cheap labor. Caras viejas y vino nuevo is
a pessimistic document that denounces the life of Mexican Americans trapped in the
barrios. History functions as a "subtextz" at the end of the story the reader learns that he
has been reading the "intrahistory" of the second generation of Mexican Americans living
in the United States. Written in Spanish, it is one of the most socially committed novels
by Morales.

Reto en el Paraiso is a transitional novel. It marks a change in Alejandro Morales'
perception of Mexican American society. This is symbolized by the bilingualism of the
novel (it is written in English and Spanish) and the division of its plot in two parts: a
historical half (from the second half of the 18403 to around 1930) and the portrayal of the
life of two contemporary characters, Dennis Coronel Berreyesa and Rosario Revueltas.
The historical part is a ﬁctionalized reformulation of the story of the decline and fall of
the Califomios, narrated in the context of the occupation of the Southwest by American
citizens (following the end of the Mexican-American war and the signing of the treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848). This occupation is presented as a Conquest in accordance

15

with the view of the history of Mexican Americans that the Chicano movement proposed.
In fact, some of the passages of the book are inspired in chapters from Acuila's text,
Occupied America: The Chicano 's Struggle Toward Liberation. This book, inﬂuenced by
the writings of anti-colonialist intellectual of the sixties such as Frantz Fanon, faces the
task of rewriting history to account for the suppressed Chicano point of view. That is
precisely what Alejandro Morales attempts to do in Reto en el Paraiso: to give the
Mexican American version of the historical facts. The second story-line of the book deals
with the importance for Chicanos living at the end of the twentieth century, both to learn
about their historical identity and to re-invent themselves adapting their lives to the
demands of contemporary American society. For the ﬁrst time, Morales creates a
character, Rosario Revueltas, who lives happily outside of the barrio and is capable to
succesfully combine her Mexican heritage with her life and experience in the United
States to become a true "Mexican American." She is an example of what the writer calls
"dynamic identity."

The Brick People is the ﬁrst novel by Alejandro Morales written entirely in
English. It is a historical novel: it covers events going from the nineteenth century to the
19408. The setting is the Simons brick factory which was built at the beginning of the
century in Los Angeles and employed thousands of Mexican immigrants. Morales
portrays the history of his parents migrating from Mexico and raising a family in the
United States. The writers’ approach to history has changed. Although he is still trying to
give Mexican Americans their historical memory back (as his commitment to his people
demands), he moves away from a militant presentation of facts that confronts kind and

innocent Chicanos with perverse Anglos who rob the former of their land, language and

16

culture, as occurred in Reto en el Parar'so. The Brick People is the story of immigrants
arriving in the United States and becoming Americans: Octavio, Malaquias, Nana and
others. There still remains the element of condemnation of the exploitation and
segregation of the Mexican American community. The Mexicans arriving in the factory
are used by the owner of Simons as a cheap labor force. However, the way of presenting
history has moved from sanctioned re-writing as encouraged by Chicano movement
intellectuals (Reta) to a more impartial approach. The novel has different historical
layers: Mexican history, Mexican American history, Chinese history, American history,
Japanese history. All these layers superimpose on each other to form the novel. From the
tragedy of the Conquest of the Southwest the mood changes to a poetic re-elaboration of
what can be called the "reconquista."15 From a twisted and ﬁxed realism, characteristic of
Morales ﬁrst socially-committed novels, the book evolves to the use of some techniques
that mix "10 real" with "10 maravilloso" (achieving what Morales has called "10 multiple
maravilloso"). The focus of the writer is not only focused on his commitment. He is
beginning to introduce new techniques, to experiment with other themes. Characters are
also busy developing a new identity, reinventing themselves, crossing borders.
Methodology

The basic assumptions on which the thesis rests have been drawn from Rodriguez
del Pino's ideas on Chicano literature present in his book La novela chicana escrita en
espaﬁol (most especially his concept of "commitment"), and Ramon Saldivar’s reﬂections
on the importance of the ideological rewriting of history in Chicano authors in his book
Chicano narrative. The Dialectics of Diﬂerence. Interviews and articles by Morales have

been consulted to analyze the ideological evolution of Morales as a writer and an

intellectual. La verdad sin voz and The Rag Doll Plagues, the other two novels written by
Alejandro Morales, and his short stories, were also read and studied in order to
incorporate a global vision of his literature and conﬁrm the shift in Morales' artistic
inﬂuences and interests. The limited bibliography and criticism about Alejandro Morales
served as an introduction to his literature and were taken into account as a background for
the research (especially useful were Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez’ ideas on Reto en el
Paraz'so and The Rag Doll Plagues). Works by historians of the Mexican American
experience (such as Rodolfo Acuﬁa, Leonard Pitt or George J. Sénchez) have also been
used to study the process of historical reconstruction in his novels (that is, how Alejandro
Morales incorporates history to his narrative and ﬁctionalizes it: the way he chooses what
facts and data to introduce, the presentation of speciﬁc historical episodes drawn
faithfully from the books mentioned above, changes in the order of chronological events

and so on).

18

Chapter I

CARAS WEJAS Y VINO N UE V0: THE PORTRAIT OF THE BARRIO

Introduction

Alejandro Morales presented a personal portrait of a Mexican American barrio in
his ﬁrst novel, Caras viejas y vino nuevo, published in 1975.16 Many Chicanos have
shared the experience of living in barrios. In a section entitled "Los Barrios de Aztlan,"
the editors of Literatura chicana: Texto y contexto, comment on some inherent
characteristics of the barrios: “A common denominator in the life of most Chicanos is the
fact of having lived in a barrio, whether in a rural or urban locale. More than a
geographic reality, barrios are spiritual zones where the dynamics and vitality of the
Chicano experience are formed, deﬁned, and distilled” (Castaneda, Ybarra-Frausto, and
Sommers 151).

Most Chicanos lived in urban areas in the seventies, when Morales published his
novel. Although barrios were found all over the geography of the United States (from
Michigan to the State of Washington), the biggest barrios or urban villages were to be
found in cities of the Midwest (Chicago, Kansas city), Southwest (San Antonio, El Paso),
and the West Coast. Mexican population was so concentrated in barrios around Los
Angeles that Stan Steiner wrote in La Raza. The Mexican Americans: "The barrios of Los

Angeles are the third largest Mexican city in the world. Guadalajara and Mexico City

19

alone have greater populations" (141). The process of “barrioization” followed two main
paths: some of the barrios are in the center of the city, right where the cities were founded
by Mexican and Spaniards centuries ago (Santa Fe, New Mexico; San Antonio, Texas).
Others have been created as a result of Chicano migration to big cities from rural areas
(Seattle, Washington).

Each barrio has always had its own personality, its own design and aesthetics.
However, they all had a characteristic trait: it was the urban home of people who shared a
common experience of oppression. Many of the inhabitants of the barrio lived in Third-
world conditions and developed a feeling of second-class citizenship. In these
circumstances, some Chicanos instinctively saw themselves as living in a colony:

Life in the barrios is like living in "a colony" to Esteban Torres. . . . The
streets may be poorly paved, or unpaved. Sewers do not always extend to
the edges of the barrio. Even the mail deliveries do not always reach into
the streets where people are so poor they cannot afford mailboxes. There
is little native industry and few but menial and manual jobs. There is less
local capital. If there are businessmen in the barrios with money to invest
they must go ouside of the barrios to invest it. (Steiner 155-156)

Many Chicanos have suffered from an experience of segregation living in the
barrio and have also had the feeling that they were a conquered people. In these
circumstances of poverty and marginality, phenomena like violence, criminality and the
use of drugs increased. On the other hand, barrios were also a place where Chicanos
developed a communal spirit and where a great part of Mexican American culture was

born. As they saw themselves forced to move back to a familiar environment in order to

20

survive, they developed a communal consciousness of solidarity with other Chicanos as
well as a spirit of resistance against those who lived beyond the limits of the safe zone of
the barrio. The struggle to preserve the Spanish language, and the Mexican culture was an
element that united Mexican Americans.

The creation of Mexican American culture and identity took place in these "urban
villages." Second-generation young Chicanos, the Pachucos, invented in the 19405 "e1
calo," a personal dialectal version of Spanish (with English and Mexican terms and new
slang) that has inﬂuenced Mexican American writers. Since many Chicano writers have
had the experience of living in these communities, it can be stated that Chicano literature
itself comes to a great extent from the barrios. The same can be said of other cultural
manifestations, from Texano music to contemporary Latino hip-hop, from the special
cholo calligraphy and grafﬁti to Chicano painting. When more and more Mexican
Americans became ethnically conscious in the 19605, the barrio joined the Chicano
movement. Although the movement was born in rural areas, it developed in the barrios
where young activists founded groups like the Brown Berets, MEChA and fought issues
like the chronically high rates of educational failure and occupational discrimination. As
it has been argued before, there has been a mutual inﬂuence between the Chicano
movement and Chicano literature. One cannot understand Chicano literature without
understanding the effect that the movement and life in the barrio had on its writers.

Morales grew up in Montebello, a barrio within the Chicano district of Los
Angeles (“Eastlos”). Mexican American culture is visible throughout that section of the
city. It was there that Alejandro Morales started to write Caras viejas y vino nuevo when

he was in high school. He saved all the pieces and put them together in the mid-seventies

21

to create a story of life in the barrio in the sixties. Alejandro Morales had ﬁrst-hand
experience of the problems Chicanos had to face in their communities. Although, thanks
to a positive family environment, Morales never had to suffer the hardships of poverty ("I
lived a happy life, that is to say I was never abused, hungry, dirty, without clothes, books
or love" [“Heterotopia” 17]), he witnessed the physical and moral degradation of some of
the people living in the barrio.

Caras viejas y vino nuevo was one of the ﬁrst Chicano novels to deal with life in
the barrio (Morales calls it "one of the ﬁrst barrio gang novels" [“Heterotopia” 17]). The
same topic has also been treated by other Chicano writers.l7 However, the majority have
dealt with the banio only to exalt its positive qualities, considering it as a protective and
safe environment where the Chicano could always take refuge from the outside world.
Morales takes a different starting point in his portrayal of the barrio. While not ignoring
the positive elements of living in the barrio, he does not leave aside the most sordid
aspects of urban life existence. Violence, prostitution, drugs, alcoholism, death are
essential parts of the plot of the novel. His image of the barrio reﬂects with accuracy the
description offered by Luis Valdez:

A microcosm of a Chicano City, a place of dualities: a liberated zone and
a prism: a place of hatred and violence, where most of la raza live out their
lives. So it is a place of weddings, bautismos, tardeadas, bailes, velorios,
and patriotic enchilada dinners. It is a place of poverty and self- reliance,
of beloved ancianos, of farnilias, of compadres. (Valdez and Steiner 145)
In this analysis of Morales' portrayal of the barrio, the ambivalent meaning of the

barrio for the Chicanos is discussed: the barrio means home but is also a trap for its

22

inhabitants. It is a place where one can address people in one's own language, where
familiar food and music are found, where traditions are carefully preserved. On the other
hand, it is an environment with no escape, a ghetto, a segregated community in search of
a new identity. Morales pictures both sides of the same reality. Since one of his aims is
the denunciation of the oppressed conditions in which the life of the Chicano barrio
people have to develop, he concentrates speciﬁcally on the description of their
marginalization by mainstream society and the dramatic consequences that
marginalization has on their lives.
The barrio as home

Mateo, whom Morales uses as narrator, is the central character in Caras viejas y
vino nuevo. It is Mateo who reveals the barrio to us. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry has even
suggested that "the source of the novel has been Mateo's memory as he lies dying in a
hospital bed" (70). We see the barrio through Mateo's realistic and critical eye. However,
in spite of all the degradation that the barrio suffers, and the desintegration that
constitutes its most evident feature, the novel still offers its positive side. The barrio
means home. It is the place where Chicanos ﬁnd their identities, their feeling of
belonging to a community, their roots, their origins: "La vecindad lucia una belleza
intima: el barrio es un lugar bello si uno lo siente como lo sentia 61" (41).18

Mateo describes Catholic rites that tie the community together in the barrio, even
the most marginal people. In one of the celebrations of Christian tradition, Christmas,
Mateo explains how the barrio lived it. "Navidad," or Christmas, has a more profound
meaning for the Chicanos: "Para algunos la Navidad era solamente un viejo gordo,

vestido de rojo con largas barbas blancas, muchas luces y regalos, pero para él era otra

23

expresién" (60). When Mateo makes a distinction between the Christmas celebrated by
the Anglos and that celebrated by the Chicanos he is just underlining a feeling of pride in
his culture and recording the peculiar identity of the raza in the barrio. Among all the
difﬁculties and dark shades that characterizes the existence of most of the residents of the
barrio. Christmas is a moment of beauty. It is a time to renew old family ties, a time of
forgetting arguments and forgiving, a time of friendship. Christmas is presented as a
period of the year when the community is most active: preparing dinner, visiting relatives
and talking about common subjects like the Revolution. The occasion serves to reinforce
values and reﬂect upon their plight. All of it creates a sense of solidarity and identity or
"carnalismo":
Era el 24 de diciembre y toda la familia estaria alli. Las tias ya estaban
para ayudarle a la madre. Cada tia tenia su plato especial que todo el
mundo decia era el mejor hecho. Ya la casa sentia mucha gente en sus
entraﬁas y las forzo afuera. Era la época de discusiones, algunas
vehementes, y luego carcajadas. Los hombres y las mujeres se peleaban
constantemente, era el dia de ﬁesta y las discusiones, las bromas se
inspiraban por el espiritu de felicidad navideﬁa. (43)
These are the positive aspects of the barrio. They are too few to counterbalance its
negative aspects: in actuality, the barrio is a trap for its inhabitants. In his portrayal of the
barrio, the novel focuses on the psychological and social conﬂicts that the brutal

segregation imposed by "Americans" on "Mexicans" creates on the Chicano youth.

24

The barrio as a trap

Aside from the life and reﬂections of Mateo, Caras viejas y vino nuevo develops
other two basic story lines: 1) the story of Julian, his family, and acquaintances, other
"vatos locos"; 2) the marginal life of the barrio derelicts - war veterans who, on their
return to the barrio, do not ﬁnd a place in society and take up drinking.

It is the story of Julian what makes Caras viejas y vino nuevo a story of Chicano
youth trapped in the barrio. Mateo is the narrator of the facts and he introduces the
characters that bear the brunt of the narrative action: Julian, the Buenasuerte, Melon,
uncle Tony, and the rest. The main focus is the story of Julian. Julian is a good
representative of the disrupted youngsters Morales met in his childhood. Mateo is Julian's
best friend. He loves him and feels deeply sorry about the path of life that Julian decides
to follow. Julian, a young man who could have done well at school and apparently could
have made a good professional baseball player, joins a gang and becomes a drug addict
and alcoholic as a result of conﬂicts with his parents and the marginalization that Chicano
adolescents suffered in the American society of the sixties. When Julian discovers that his
father sleeps with a woman in his parent's own bed, he becomes desperate. He faces his
father and his lover, argues with them in their own house and leaves. Immediately after
that, Julian and the Buenasuerte brothers, the other members of the palomilla, die in a car
accident.

Julian and his friends reﬂect the circumstances in which Chicano youth grew up
in the sixties in the United States. Victims of a ghettoization, condemned to survive in a
world that do not offer professional opportunities and lacking a sense of identity,

youngsters in the barrio fell back on self-destructive activities. They did not have any

25

models to follow. Not even their parents, some of them born in Mexico in a very different
social environment. The Anglo world was an alien culture that rejected them. As a
consequence they may have seen themselves trapped in a situation with no way out. They
determined their own future based on the circumstances in which they had been born.

Julian drops out of elementary school early because of the social rejection that he
ﬁnds there. At school, kids from the barrio are the subject of ridicule and prejudice from
the white population who consider them stupid (since they cannot even speak English)
dirty and lazy, following the traditional stereotypes. Barrio kids do not ﬁnd role models
to follow there and many assimilate the idea that they are worth nothing. School officials
only think of them as a way to improve their sports teams. Julian could have been a good
baseball player but he resists the idea of living in such an adverse atmosphere. As a
consequence, he has to revert to the barrio as a refuge where he can look for a self-
deﬁnition and acquire a personality. However the barrio is a trap. There are no role
models there either.

Julian is immersed in a family crisis since the relationship with his parents is a
negative one. Don Edmundo, Julian's father and a product of the Mexican Revolution
who now just makes a living selling the food that his wife prepares, has old fashioned,
erroneous ideas about how to educate children:

Las reglas de la revolucion inﬂuian lo que el creia que era el papel del
buen padre: proveer un techo, ropa, comida para la familia; él como padre
tenia e1 respeto completo de la farnilia, y podia decidir entre la vida y la

muerte para un hijo desobediente o que habia avergonzado al nombre de la

26

familia. Y los azotes eran e1 castigo y el tratamiento para los malvados.
(92-93)

This philosophy of education is manifested in other places of the book. Even
Mateo's father is depicted as strict, easily angered and with a strong voice. However, Don
Edmundo is too tough and authoritarian with his son. Julian, of a rebellious nature,
clashes with him and life at home is a series of battles and physical and psychological
aggressions. Julian's mother is weak and completely submissive to the patriarchal
structure of the family.

Julian has also already received the negative evaluation that people from outside
of the barrio have about it. His culture is rated low and that fact contributes to poor self-
esteem. On the other hand, there are few elements that could contribute to self-deﬁnition
and pride in his own cultural identity: he does not know the history of his people, his
language is a marginal vehicle of communication, the Catholic church is a passive
institution that preaches a heavenly reward from the hardships on earth and so on. In
short, Julian suffers from a cultural crisis. Willy O. Muﬁoz sees the expulsion of Julian
from his house as a symbol of this crisis:

Entonces don Edmundo echa a Julian deﬁnitivamente de su casa; asi el
hijo es excluido del mundo, de la tradicion de sus padres y empujado a
otro que no es mas que un laberinto de confusion en el que nada tiene una
fundacion sélida ya que es sirnplemente el resultado del caos y de la crisis
cultural. (172)

Julian preferred to spend his time with his friends, los Buenasuerte, rather that at

home. One of the responses of adolescents to the social and familial disintegration they

27

suffered was to join gangs or palomillas. There they ﬁlled the lack of self-deﬁnition and
family ties they needed. These gangs or "gangas" had become famous since the incidents
in the ’403 with the "pachucos" or "zoot suiters." They have their own set of rules that
regulate their function and form an important kind of organization among young people
in poor areas. In these "palomillas" youngsters find the escape and acceptance that not
only the barrio but the Anglo world denies them.19 In Caras viejas y vino nuevo there is a
passage which explains what it means for this marginal youth to have a place where they
can feel comfortable, as a defense from a world lacking in understanding for their
behavior and reactions:
Vienen a nuestro mundo. gQué no ves? Este es nuestro mundo privado y
todos los que entran en él son extranjeros. No los queremos aqui; les
decimos algo, nos contestan y tenemos opinion. Los ajenos cultivan una
imagen preconcebida y lentamente todos ellos llegan a pensar lo mismo de
nosotros y nuestro mundo. Los nativos tambie'n tienen prejuicio hacia
ellos. Es un problema de comunicacién y entendimiento. Todos los
participantes no quieren dejar sus actitudes determinadas; estan demasiado
interesados en adquirir lo que nunca han tenido, o prohibiendo a alguien
obtemer lo que necesitan, o vengandose, o sencillamente siendo
demasiado estupidos para acercarse a las lacras de la realidad. (73)
Morales belonged to one of these gangas. He was involved in some of their
activities and it was from his life experience with the members of these gangas that the
writer drew most of the material for his novel Caras viejas y vino nuevo. He used the

friends and neighbors in his barrio as models for some of the characters in the narrative.

28

That fact made him suffer from feelings of guilt: “Often I write with the guilt of knowing
that I used as my literary guinea pigs the kids I grew up with and those alcoholic,
drugged, abused neighbors. My observation and recording of their lives were my true
guilt-ridden obsessions. In order to write about them, I experimented with them”
(“Heterotopia” 17).

Maybe those feelings of guilt were what persuaded Morales to write the
introductory dedication of Caras viejas y vino nuevo at the beginning of the text of the
novel: "Para mi barrio, que estara conmigo siempre" (7). In this way, Alejandro Morales
transforms the novel in a homage to the people that populated the barrio where he spent
his early years.

As a way to escape reality, the members of the "palomilla" usually take refuge in
drugs. There is no other way to tolerate the nightmare that they are living. In a state of
insensitivity they can forget the pain. Their only ambition is to be "mistico." In a way
they substitute the solace with which religion traditionally provided the members of the
raza with another kind of religion. In fact, Morales compares playﬁrlly the "misticismo"
of the barrio with some of the rites and dogmas of the Catholic church. For example, in
the next paragraph, Morales portrays a very peculiar consecration of the Mass:

sobre la mesa habia, no le sorprendio, una lata del misticismo cuyos
poderes estaban desparramados sobre un mantel ange’lico. 5Qué chingados
estas haciendo, Julian? Ese, pues, rollando unos toques para la salud. . . .
El cuerpo se levanto, conto diez hostias, e1 resto del pan lo puso de nuevo
en el copon que limpio con el mantel puro, lo doblo, lo coloco

cuidadosamente sobre el copon; e1 cuerpo giro, dio unos pasos hacia la

29

pared, abrio y escondio e1 copon con las hostias, cubierto con el pafio
sacro en el sagrario. Se volvio, metio una hostia en la boca, comié. Orale,
Mateo, esta si es buena. Ten, gno quieres? Trucha, Julian, esa cosa me
chinga el seso. (71)

Young Chicanos fall back on other consciousness-numbing activities like
addiction to alcohol or sex. Throughout the novel, sex is described in a raw, dramatic
way. The characters do not recur to sex as a path of fulﬁllment but as another escape
from a too unbearable reality.

This is the reaction of Julian and his friends to an oppressive and adverse
environment. They are not the masters of their own destiny but victims of the
circumstances. That is one of the reasons why Morales structures the book in reverse
order, showing in the ﬁrst place the death of Julian and his ﬁght with Don Edmundo (the
novel is much better understood if read from the end to the beginning). His purpose is to
state that behind that event (an event that can lead to misinterpretation, to prejudice for
instance if one has not seen a reason why it should occur) there is an explanation for it.

Alejandro Morales reﬂects the puppet-like existence of the residents of the barrio
in different ways, for example, through language. Objects act upon them: "El cuarto de él
lo recibio" (51); "Ya la casa sentia mucha gente en sus entraﬁas y los forzo fuera" (43).
As Maria Herrera-Sobek puts it "life, reality happens to them" (149). It is not the
characters that act, move, drink and eat. Apparently they are not in control of their own
movements: this symbolically refer the extent to what Mexican Americans are controlled
by Anglo society in the context of an "internal colony." Morales uses the motion picture

technique of close-ups and has parts of the body or things as subjects and actors of the

30

action: "Y los ojos vieron a las manos saludar. . . . sintio los zapatos bajar la escalera"
(18).

Even Mateo, the only character who tries to ﬁght his environment and not fall in
the same trap as his friends, sometimes does not understand his own actions. For
example, after his sexual encounter with Barbara, the prostitute, and despite enjoying it
thoroughly, he asks himself: "gpor que chapetee' con esa puta? . . . Ay Dios, gpor que' hice
eso?" (90). In his love/hate relationship with the activities of those neighbors with whom
he shares a common identity, sometimes he cannot help behaving like them, joining them
in their groups rituals.

The second theme of the novel, the existence and activities of Vietnam ex-
combatants, can also be explained in the same context as the youth represented by Julian.
Melon, Lucio, Tio Tony and Benny are just a bunch of human spoils living in the barrio
and submitted to the rules that govern it. Born and raised in the barrio, they were used by
the government to ﬁght in an alien war. Melon and Tio Tony were even decorated for
their deeds. After the war was over, the only place they had to go was the same barrio.
Forgotten by the government, lacking any other option but to live as parasites dependent
on the money that they receive as, they just wait for death: a wait that consists of a slow
degradation caused by the consumption and abuse of alcohol and drugs. They have also
fallen victims of the barrio. In fact, they could be considered members of a past
"palomilla" and represent the future of Julian and the Buenasuerte. Their way of life is
transformed into a permanently conforrnist attitude. They drag through life, they do not
care much whether to continue in this world or disappear forever. In this sense, they are

similar to the group of criminals that constitute Chaparro, Tonqui and Gregorio (also a

3]

foreseeable future for the members of the young gangs): they are not afraid to die: "Ellos
no tenian miedo a nada; lo ultimo que la sociedad les podia hacer seria matarlos y a eso
no le tenian miedo" (67).

All these characters live a non-sensical existence, both young people, like Julian,
and old men, like Tio Tony. They are products of certain socio-economic conditions and
all their attempts to give meaning to their lives are bound to fail. They have taken refuge
in the barrio only to ﬁnd that is a closed atmosphere, a conﬁned reality, a prison. The
worst of it all is that, to a great extent, the control of that reality is not in the hands of
their own people. It is controlled from the outside by those ones living outside its
boundaries. Unable to defeat the constraints imposed on them, the characters of the barrio
prefer continue their indolent, slow, evasive, addicted journey to nowhere.

El otro lado

Morales presents a clear-cut division between the barrio and the Anglo world ("el
mundo de aquellos"). This distance with "el otro lado" is more social, spiritual than
physical. Although all of the action of the novel takes place in a Chicano environment
and the words "Chicano" or "Anglo" never appear, the reader becomes aware of the
constant presence of this other side and how it conditions the existence of the barrio. The
segregation of races is more a product of the people outside of its limits. For a Chicano,
to leave the barrio is to be exposed to their hatred, racism and control:

En el barrio lo respetaban, a él y a su familia; nadie los miraba con desdén.
Se sentia muy c6modo; pero en el mundo de aquellos sentia que sobraba, y
sabia que lo jodian constantemente. Lo usaban, lo veian como un

fenomeno, como algo muy inesperado, fuera de lo comun. A veces él

32

mismo se chingaba, hacia el papel designado como un animal bien
entrenado. (45)

They are second-class citizens if regarded as citizens at all: "Mi padre ni podia ir
al otro lado para hacerse cortar el pelo, se podia quedar alli sentado por horas y siempre
lo ignoraban, si él insistia en su tumo llarnaban a las lloronas y lo echaban" (116). The
only way to improve one's social and economic status is to assimilate to the dominant
society, adopting their language, their behavior and their culture. Therefore, the tragic
existence led by people in the barrio is a direct consequence of the isolation and
indifference imposed from outside. A way to represent the control of the barrio by
external forces is the use of the police, "la pistola loca" (a character that Morales also
portrays in his second novel, La verdad sin voz) and its vehicle, "la llorona," a name also
applied to ambulances. The mythical wailing woman in search of her children becomes in
the book the sirens of the police car and ambulances announcing the death of the
members of the "estirpe" (this identiﬁcation seems obvious, for example, at the beginning
of the novel: the police car chases Julian and the Buenasuerte to their death).

The barrio residents feel all this social violence imposed on them and sometimes
are ready to counter-attack. Even the boys that go to school for the ﬁrst time perceive the
racial tension and the spirit of animosity with their fellow students:

Sabian que iban a meterlos en clases con los del otro lado y tenian un poco
de miedo de la reaccion. Por supuesto, no sabian e1 por qué del cambio,
pero si sabian que iba a haber chingadazos con los de alla, y estaban
preparados ﬁsica y mentalmente. Si esos cabrones empiezan a buscar pedo

conmigo los voy a brincar. Y si chingan a uno de nosotros todos brincan.

33

Orale, tu sabes que si. Nadie chinga con nosotros; si empiezan algo les
vamos a contestar. (124)

There is a natural rejection of the world outside the barrio. It comes as no surprise
that the inhabitants of the barrio have a negative view of "los del otro lado." The people
in the barrio do not want to join a society where they know beforehand that they are
going to be rejected. Their relationship with characters from outside is marked only by
everyday life circumstances (boys going to school, men looking for a job). Mexicans
prefer to stay in their barrio, a familiar, if degraded, place. The negative opinion about
people "del otro lado" is symbolically represented by some of the "Anglo" characters that
appear in the novel, for example, Barbara, the prostitute, is used as an instrument to
satisfy the sexual desires of the vatos. Her "pelo rubio," "ojos azules," and "blanco
carnal" is seen negatively and she ends up being the recipient of the violence and
vengeance of the raza. At the same time, she is also used to afﬁrm their masculinity.
Matilde, the woman that assists (and maybe is sexually involved with) Don Edmundo
after his wife dies, the focus of contention between Julian and his father, arrives
appropriately from the other side.

There are only two characters presented in a positive light: Cohen (a busdriver)
and "la maestra." Those two characters are also symbolic: they understand the Chicanos
and know how to treat them. They respect them and teach them how to respect others.
Cohen, a Jew, wears a Star of David, a positive image for the young Chicanos, somewhat
related to father Carlos and their church. They see the star and feel there is something in
common between the struggle of the Jewish and their own for survival and

understanding. The teacher, on the other hand, has that rare ability to look through her

34

student's eyes and recognize their potential. These two characters empathize with them
and show comprehension of their situation. They represent the claim for understanding
that runs through the core of the novel. They are the only characters that do not hold
prejudice against or reject them. As a result, people in the barrio accept and care for
them.

But these Anglo characters are the exceptions in the novel. The image that
remains in one's mind aﬁer having read the book is that "los del otro lado" are exerting an
indirect violence on the people in the barrio by isolating them in a separate space and
letting them cross their boundaries only when needed. Barrio people hardly participate of
the advantages of the more technologically advanced society outside. From an economic
point of view, Chicanos depend on Anglos to survive: they are the owners of the
factories, of the land, of the businesses. Every important decision concerning the future of
their community is taken by the Anglos (for example, the closing down of the brick
factory). From a social, cultural and political point view, they are second-class citizens,
barbarians in some of their customs and for some people they do not even have the
capacity of becoming civilized. The book does not show any effort on part of the Anglos
to understand their traditions, since they are considered far from the sophistication and
reﬁnement of a "superior" culture. The more acculturated the Chicanos become, the more
civilized they are considered and the more they will be permitted to enter the world of the
Anglos. Chicanos are not organized enough to break the dynamics of domination that the
others have imposed on them. They submit to their control in exchange for some second-
rate beneﬁts: a job, a stable atmosphere where to raise a family and so on. The price to

pay is too high: the degradation of human beings. Alejandro Morales reﬂects this power

35

relations in the description of the barrio where Julian and Mateo grow up. A bitter
denunciation of this situation lends bitterness to the whole book.
Parece quejamds cambiarti
Salvador Rodriguez del Pino considers the true starting point of Caras viejas y
vino nuevo its second paragraph, where Mateo climbs to a place where he contemplates
the whole panorama of the barrio. However, Mateo is not only an observer and critic of
the reality of the barrio: his personality develops throughout the book. Julian and Mateo
are the most powerful characters of the story. In a sense they are opposites. While Julian
suffers a quick and continuous decadence that ends up in a disintegration, Mateo is the
positive side of the coin: he tries to overcome the obstacles set up by the barrio and ﬁghts
not to fall into Julian's trap.
In the novel, Mateo is ambitious; he is willing to change and even join the people
"del otro lado" to fulﬁll his ambitions: "me gustaria hacerme uno de esos profesores
famosos, 0 un escritor famoso, uno que gane premios, que lo respeten por lo que sabe"
(68).
On the other hand, Julian belongs to the "conformist" type:
Y aqui vivo y aqui duerrno, como, y aqui rne siento sobre una silla hecha
por animales que lo ignoran todo, porque reciben los servicios mirando a
las madres que libremente se aﬂigen. Estos son los pensamientos y los
pilares de la libertad sufriendo sobre una colina y alli mueren en el sudor
natural de la verdura creada por Dios. Todos estuvieron alli, mi abuelo, mi
padre, mis hermanos, todos y todavia existe, ahora tal vez mas intenso

porque nos darnos cuenta de 10 actual y del pasado. (116)

36

Due to the segregation of the barrio from mainstream society and the lack of
appropriate role models for its adolescents, old problems tend to subsist or worsen rather
than disappear. An atmosphere of disillusion and apathy exists. The barrio creates a cycle
difﬁcult to escape. Kids imitate the destructive behavior of the elder in sirrrilar situations.
If Melon, Miguelito and the other social spoils mock each other's sickness ("cuando estan
enfermos o espiritualmente decaidos, se hacen burla, se maltratan; son brutos, saben que
a cada uno le tocara algun dia" [334]), the most recent generations internalize that kind of
brutality and exert it on their peers: "Constantemente usaban este humor negro siempre
enfocando los temores de cada uno; siempre rie'ndose cuando uno estaba lastimado o
tenia miedo" (125). There seems to be a generational gap between parents and children
that parents try to breach increasing the level of violence. Parents do not seem to
understand that the physical pain they cause their children translates into a psychological
deformation of their behavior (Julian is just an example. The "acomodador" of the church
where young Chicanos attend mass on Sundays, for example, also destroys the lives of
their children with savage treatment.) It is not easy to break the dynamics of
dehumanization created within the same structure.

Mateo understands that the only way to progress in the world he lives, in order not
to fall in the permanent degradation to which people like Julian are subjected, is to be
successful in "el otro lado." He has seen some of his brothers trying to make it on the
other side and he makes an effort to do well at school so he could attend college. Unlike
Julian, Mateo ﬁnds emotional support in his family and also, in the barrio, where he is
respected and has some good friends like the "compadrito," who encourages him to

overcome his fears to enter the world outside the barrio and compete on equal terms with

37

the people there. He is the most promising ﬁgure in the novel. Although he does not like
the Anglo world, as any other barrio youth his age (and is continually aware of the risk of
losing his identity), he seems decided to make someone of himself and probably help his
people in the future. It is the only way to break the circle of degradation where the
community lives: "Los camaradas ya no estudian; estan en el ejercito por aflos. Vuelven y
empiezan a andar el mismo circulo que antes repetian los otros. Se tendria que romper ese
circulo; se encuentra en todas partes pero esta mas sucio en sitios de mayor
concentracion" (27). Mateo is not the rule but the exception. The others follow the law of
destruction inherited from their parents, and from which they do not see a way to escape:
"Julian criara a su hijo como su padre lo crio a él y tendra el mismo resultado. Es un
circulo vicioso y horrible pero qué se puede hacer" (30). Julian ends up dying in a violent
way, drugged, after having exerted physical violence against Matilde. It seemed the
anticipated, logical conclusion for a life with no direction or meaning

Even Mateo cannot escape the environment of the barrio completely. He feels a
conﬂict within himself. Although, from an observer's point of view he rejects the
perverse life that Julian and the Buenasuerte live, sometimes he cannot help participating
in it, getting drunk, having violent sex, or masturbating (as he seems to be doing in the
second passage of the novel). Critics like Willy O. Munoz believe that, in spite of
Morales afﬁrmative intentions of succeeding, the novel records the decadence of Mateo.
Munoz thinks that Mateo does not manage to avoid the black hole in which other
Chicano youngsters have been trapped and falls in the same spiral of alcohol and evasive

sex that the others began years before him:

38

se somete voluntariamente a la presion de grupo: se emborracha, se
endroga, se da cuenta de que es un sinvergﬁenza pero sigue adelante a
pesar de su miedo. Por su afan de pertenecer y ser aceptado, esa misma
noche participa en el asalto a dos trasei'mtes que son vejados sexualmente.
Al amanecer estaba bastante ebrio y al regresar a su casa tropieza en su
cuarto, cae a su cama y pierde el sentido, y a manera de comentario el
narrador concluye, ‘Sélo Dios sabe cuanto apestaba esa noche.’ (171-2)

It is uncertain what happened to Mateo's life after Julian's death. Alejandro
Morales leaves the conclusion open. However, what really matters is the piece of news
the epilogue gives right at the end of the novel. In the ﬁrst part, Mateo seems to be
looking for the happiness that he once felt in the barrio. In the second, we are informed of
his death in a hospital on the East Coast. Therefore, the only character with a certain
degree of sensitivity and intelligence and with a chance to escape the circle of destruction
of the barrio makes it to the East of the United States only to die from leukemia. The fact
that he expired on the arms of a girl, "la Tenista", while he was also married and with two
kids, apparently indicates that he had committed adultery. With the accidental demise of
the only character that could have helped to improve life in this Mexican community, the
barrio continues its permanent circle of hopelessness.

History in Cams viejas y vino nuevo

History functions in Caras viejas y vino nuevo as a subtext. All the episodes
narrated in the novel are the consequence of historical events that Alejandro Morales
describes in full in other books, especially The Brick People. Chronologically, Caras

viejas y vino nuevo begins with the founding of the Simons Brick Company, and the

39

immigration of hundreds of families to the area in search of better living conditions and
unaware that "en este lugar, como en los otros latian problemas viejos y nuevos, quizas
mayores de los que dejaron alla" (126). Alejandro Morales describes how the factory
worked day and night and how a barrio was born around it. It is the beginning of the
Mexican community in Los Angeles called Montebello, where Morales was born in 1944.
Although the owner of the Brick Company sold it in the ﬁfties, the Mexicans who came
to work for him stayed on.

Caras viejas y vino nuevo is a socio-historic document that focuses on the lives of
a second generation of Mexicans, the children of those born and raised in Mexico, now
living in the United States in a speciﬁc barrio, Montebello. Many of the parents came
escaping the Mexican Revolution, an event that marked the lives of millions in Mexico. It
comes as no surprise that the historical period is still fresh in the minds of those who
suffered from it and is treated in family gatherings such as the Nochebuena: "La
Revolucion reciente era un tema predilecto, describian en detalle a los generales y sus
personalidades, las batallas y los pueblos que habian ganado" (43). The story of their trip
to the north also evokes memories: "Hablaban del viaje, lo describian en detalle, con
carifio, los difuntos de ese viaje aparecian y llenaban el ruido con silencio. Los oian y
seguian las aventuras del viaje" (45). Life in Mexico, and speciﬁcally the Mexican
Revolution, seems to have had a deﬁnite inﬂuence on the behavior of those who crossed
the border.

Parents also fail in their attempt to pass on to their children a feeling of pride and
importance of their history and traditions, and the children end up internalizing the

pejorative view that mainstream society has about everything that sounds Mexican.

40

Living as a marginal group, they are not able to participate in the historical process of the
United States of America, other than as subordinate labor. The United States just makes
nominal use of them, as when Mexicans are sent to wars in distant countries like Korea or
Vietnam (a situation represented in the novel by Melon or Tio Tony). They never
incorporate them, after their service, into society.

Conclusion

Caras viejas y vino nuevo presents some years in the life of a barrio. Based on his
life experience, Alejandro Morales' main goal is to give a portrait of the intrahistoria of
some characters of Montebello. As we have seen, most characters succumb to the
oppressive circumstances imposed by social segregation and cultural alienation. The
book explores above all the negative effect of discrimination on Chicano youth,
represented by Julian and his friends, who die at the end of the story, and Mateo. Mateo
manages to leave the barrio, thanks to his sensitivity and intelligence, but also dies soon
after. The novel begins and ends with the death of the two protagonists.

However, in spite of the pessimism of the novel, it was not created to instill in the
souls of Mexican-Americans feelings of defeat. It does not teach the Chicano population
to give up a spirit of ﬁght and give in to docile conformity and nihilism. It is not written
either as a touching tragedy with the sole intention of moving the reader to tears. The
novel attempts to bring into relief the plight of the youth trapped in the barrios.
Characteristic of Alejandro Morales' commitment to his people is the denunciation of the
imposed suffocating circumstances imposed that do not let them develop naturally as

individuals, as a people, and as a collectivity.

4r

The story stresses on several occasions the ignorance of millions of people of the
small tragedies of others: "Millones nacieron, millones murieron, mucho forrnaron
habitos horribles, otros se descubrian y asi pasaban" (99). Caras viejas y vino nuevo gives
some of the historical reasons that gave birth to the Mexican-American communities and
tries to make visible to the population at large the social forces imposed on this marginal
group and their destructive reaction to them. Those forms of segregation have to be
eradicated. There has to be a greater understanding of the problems of the segregated
communities. Mateo's aspiration to be loved, if only for an instant, can be translated into
the barrio's need for love:

Cuantos son amados; ser amado por un instante es la recompensa de toda
una vida; el mr’rsico al terrninar su set que recibe una reaccién tremenda
del publico. . . . los Beatles en medio de un estadio al sonar la r’rltima nota
son amados. Un escritor al lograr una reaccion a la obra, poesia, prosa, es
también por un instante amado. Es un momento intimo de amor; es una
comunion total entre seres humanos. (29)

Alejandro Morales shows that it is possible to leave the barrio and start a new life
outside its boundaries. Mateo manages to do it although in the end is victim of a fatal
disease. Furthermore, with the example of Mateo, Morales gives a word of advice to the
people living in the barrio: it is necessary to recover a feeling of pride in their culture.
The Chicanos have to learn to take care of their traditions and study their history. That is
the right way to ﬁnd an adequate self-deﬁnition and to get rid of contemptuous
evaluations by other ethnic groups: "Tu sabes lo que necesita esta gente, lo que necesitan

es saber la historia de los antepasados, pero esa historia tiene que venir de los padres, los

42

de aqui, y también los de alla" (74). Mateo, the most perceptive character in Caras viejas
y vino nuevo, feels the power of the cultural ties with those millions and millions of the
ﬁlo de la estirpe that came before him, and the strength of their culture. It is his great
discovery in the novel. At one point, he feels sure that the future of the Chicanos depend
on that effort of self-deﬁnition:
Y ya e1 manantial mental ha surgido a mostrarles la ﬁlente que rellenara el
rio con los globos de la estirpe. La vena esta para brotar y la antigua
pasién de todo hombre se presentara para declarar que no es lo que ellos
dicen sino e1 antiguo ﬁlo de la estirpe que se hace agudo y mas agudo. Es
un abolengo especial, una cancion antigua cantado por el oro y la cruz.
(26)

This is another sample of the ties of the writer with the Chicano movement: he
understands the need to re-educate the people, to make them aware of the value of their
own culture and history. It is necessary to educate the Mexican Americans to give them
enough strength to break free of the socio-economic oppression they have been submitted
to and empower them to leave the ghetto, to compete with the same opportunities in the
outside world, to make them feel proud of their traditions. Following the Chicano
terminology of the sixties and the portrayal of the barrio in Morales' novel, one also
might add that education is needed to create an America where the dichotomy
Anglo/oppressor — Chicano/oppresssed disappears into a multicultural environment with
equality of rights for all its members.

Alejandro Morales received many negative responses when trying to get Caras

viejas y vino nuevo published. The Chicano publishers rejected it. They considered that

43

the dark image of the barrio that the book presented would not help the Chicano
movement at all. As Morales himself said: "It was written in a convoluted Spanish that
offered a vision, de un mundo torcido, for which the Mexican American community was
not ready" (“Heterotopia” 17). At that time, it was thought that what could really help the
Chicano cause was to portray the barrio in a positive light. However, Morales shunned a
false idealization and presented a realistic vision of the barrio. As a writer who felt the
need to help his people in an improvement of their socio-economic and cultural
conditions that was the appropriate line of action to take. Although it brought him
problems at the time of publication of his ﬁrst novel, it did not matter: it was his way of
showing the truth to both societies, Mexican and American, and encouraging them to face

their responsibilities together.

44

Chapter 11

RE T 0 EN EL PARAISO: THE CONQUEST OF THE SOUTHWEST

Introduction

Alejandro Morales' third book, Reto en el Paraiso, released in 1983, was his ﬁrst
to be published in the United States. His previous two texts were written in Spanish but
this time Morales took a step further in his attempt to portray the conﬂict of cultures in
California by writing a bilingual novel. Seventy per cent of the novel is written in
Spanish, the rest in English. The main narration is in Spanish and the characters use their
native language. The result is, as Alejandro Morales points out, "an anxiety-provoking
cultural object, a work of art that unites the readers by making them recognize linguistic
challenges" (“Heterotopia” 20).20

As with Caras viejas y vino nuevo, Morales breaks the chronological order of the
events. He develops two story lines: 1) the story of the Coronel/Berreyesa family versus
the Lifford lineage from the second half of the 18405 to around 1930, and 2) several
months in the life of Dennis Berrreyesa Coronel, the last descendant of the Californio
family, in the 19603. The text is divided into eight chapters or Conﬁguraciones, meaning
that every "conﬁguration" presents a different situation that contributes to the whole
structure of the book. The ﬁrst plot (1) is narrated in the even conﬁguraciones (II, IV, VI

and VIII); Dennis' life (2) is told in the odd conﬁguraciones. Reto en el paraiso can be

45

read following the printed order, from the ﬁrst page to the last, or the reader can focus on
the even conﬁguraciones and after that follow the odd ones. In the second case, it is
easier for the reader to assimilate the narration since he or she will be offered an
approximately chronological succession of events. In the ﬁrst kind of reading, the reader
is presented with some circumstances (Dennis' existential difficulties) and then given,
conﬁguration by conﬁguration, the historical background that leads to that situation (in a
sense, it is the same technique Alejandro Morales used in his ﬁrst work, Caras viejas y
vino nuevo).

There is temporal fragmentation in the novel. This feature, that reveals an inner
fragmentation of some of its characters, is underlined by the broken outline of every
conﬁguracio’n into sections of unequal length (from a paragraph to several pages) and
each with a title that summarizes, or relates in some way to, the content of its section.
The historical novel: The Decline of the Califomios

In his analysis of Reto en el Paraiso, George Mariscal indicates one of the basic
goals of the novel: "Morales gives the Chicano his memory back. Put another way, the
Chicano is resituated into his own history" (82). In Caras viejas y vino nuevo Mateo
pointed out how important it was for the Chicanos to learn their own history. It was the
ﬁrst step to acquire an identity, take pride in their ancient cultural heritage and start a
struggle to improve the degrading social conditions imposed by the marginalization of the
mainstream population that saw the Mexicans in the barrio just as mere newcomers.
Mateo was voicing the hunger of memory that characterized the Chicano Movement of

the late 19603 and early 19703. Alejandro Morales takes up Mateo's challenge of placing

46

Chicanos in the context of their own history in Reto en el Paraiso. Here the writer
functions as the memory and voice of a people.

The writing process involved a great deal of research. In an address at Stanford
University, the novelist said:

Para esta novela empecé con varios estudiantes a hacer varias
investigaciones de la historia del Rancho Irvine. . . . Reto en el Paraiso es
la historia de la familia James Irvine. Todo el texto lo escribi a través de
mucha investigacion que hice en la Biblioteca Bancroft, en la Huntington
y en otras bibliotecas como la de Irvine, que contiene textos, fotos y
documentacion que yo presento en el texto en la familia de Dennis
Berreyesa Coronel. (“Stanford” 8)

After his investigation, Morales translated the results of his research into a novel
in order to bring to light some of the facts in the history of California, neglected by
"ofﬁcial" history. It tells the history of a geographical space in Southern California: the
lands that the ranchos Lomas de Santiago and San Joaquin occupied at the beginning of
the XIX century and that is now Orange County. Alejandro Morales keeps faithful to his
literary universe: his focus is the recreation of the world of the Los Angeles area. The
novel opens in Orange County and ends in Simons. From a historical prospective the ﬁrst
narrative block covers the years from the 18403 to 1930 in the history of California.

The main focus of the historical narrative of the novel is what has been called
since the 19603 the Conquest of the Southwest by the Anglos. The Chicano Movement
granted great importance to the clash of cultures that began in the mid-nineteenth century,

since it was considered that it was then that the Mexican Americans were created as

47

people. Following these lines, Alejandro Morales begins Reta at the point of the ﬁrst
encounters between Californios and Anglos immigrants. Mario Garcia has afﬁrmed:
"While inﬂuenced by the Pre-Columbian themes, Morales sees Chicano history, like
Acuﬁa in Occupied America, as essentially commencing with the Anglo conquest" (190).
The origin of conﬂicts between both cultures dates back to that point in history. The
present difﬁculties in the coexistence of both races are hardly understood without a look
back at the genesis of the historical controversy.

In California, the so-called Conquest had as a consequence the "Decline of the
Californios", an expression taken from the book of the same name written by the
historian Leonard Pitt, and the rise to positions of political and economic power of the
new Anglo immigrants from the East. The Californios were the original inhabitants of
California, of Mexican descent. Morales tells how, in spite of their efforts, they were
denied their legitimate rights and pushed aside in the formation of a new society. In Reta
en el Paraisa, the Californios are represented by the Coronel/Berreyesa family. The
Anglo conqueror is portrayed by James Lifford and his family.

The ﬁrst push in the immigration of Anglo Americans was due to the Gold Rush
in California. Thousands of adventurers and families came to San Francisco in search of
quick money. James Lifford, an Irish pioneer, ﬁmctions in Reta as the representative of
all those immigrants. The novel narrates his journey from New York to the promised land
of California, through Central America. Morales portrays Lifford with some of the
characteristics common to many of the newcomers. In the ﬁrst place, he is highly racist
(he calls the Central Americans, "monkey men" [82]).21 He also has blind faith in

progress. Progress is his bible and everything should be allowed in its name. When he

48

ﬁnally makes it to California, he exclaims: "At last I had made it to the land of my
fortune. I was grateful, for it was God's will. On that day I swore that no one would stand
in my way, in the way of progress of my plans" (87). Lifford is also a good example of
the doctrine that pushed so many individuals to come to the west coast: Manifest Destiny.
He feels that it is God's determination that he arrivs in California and become rich. He
has been chosen: "I believe God made my trip to California possible because He has a
plan for me. I have been chosen by God to accomplish great feats and to do great works
in California" (82).

It is people like Lifford that the Californios had to confront in their native land.
The Californios led a comfortable life taking care of their ranches. Before the Mexican
American war22 their relationship with Anglos had not been traumatic. Some Anglos had
even entered the Californio society and married women from prominent families. For the
most part, although some of them favored an independent California, they sided with the
Mexican government and fought the US. invasion. They even won the only memorable
battle of the war in California, San Pascual. In the end, they could not hold against the
better organized US. army. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ofﬁcially put an end to
the war in 1848 consummated the military occupation, that they saw as a conquest, and
the beginning of the end for them. The treaty granted rights of ownership over their lands
to the native Mexicans that opted to stay in the Southwest. However, after the war some
of them soon realized the difﬁculties to preserve their rights before a money-hungry new
population. Antonio Coronel, the patriarch of the Coronel family, became rich in the
Gold Rush but also witnessed the change in the legal status of the Californios: "Era

nuestro derecho, claro, teniamos derecho, garantias, y todavia las tenemos, nos

49

corresponden bajo el tratado, bajo la constitucion somos ciudadanos" (21). The treaty
soon becomes "documentos de ningun mérito" (23). The Californios are subjected to the
Foreign Miners’s Tax Law of 1850, known as the Green's law, which treats them as mere
foreigners. In the mining towns of California, Coronel looks for gold dreaming of the
possibility of building schools to educate poor kids. The gringos just have the dream of
accumulation of money (gold). At the end, after witnessing the lynching of some of his
fellow miners and maybe fearing for his own life, he is forced to give up mining and go
back to his ranch. Prophetically, Coronel reﬂects: “Tengo miedo de que lo que representa
nuestra cultura terminara. Sufriremos una defuncion forzada, acelerada por la avaricia de
los invasores, nuestra cultura no se desarrollara hasta llegar a una orbita natural, y menos,
ver la justicia, el inﬁemo, y la gloria. Quiza esto sea el principio de la época infernal”
(22). It was indeed the beginning of hell for the Californios. Coronel's intuition was
destined to come true. The treatment that he and the other Californios had received as
second-class citizens was only a premonition of what would happen to them in the near
future.

The economic power of the Californios lay in the possession of huge land
holdings granted to them by the Spanish crown. After the gold fever passed away in
Northern California, the prospect of the newcomers was to establish themselves in the
"empty" lands of both the North and South. Taking advantage of the legal vacuum
regarding land ownership, many of these new individuals squatted in territories belonging
to the Californios. The legitimate owners tried in vain to turned them away from their

possessions. This is how Morales contemplates the dramatic situation:

50

Los conquistadores blancos agotaron el oro y ahora quedaban los ranchos.
Sobre esa batalla se uniﬁco un sentimiento en ambos carnpos, los anglos la
explicaban desde un punto de vista de superioridad, con la cual se daban la
razon y la autoridad para adueﬁarse de lo que no les pertenecia, y los
mexicanos defendian su patrimonio con el conocimiento comr’rn, todo el
mundo sabia que ellos eran los verdaderos dueﬁos, que ellos habian
trabajado mucho para ganar y mantener su propiedad. (120)

Ignorant of the legal system of Washington, the only way the Californios had to
respond to the situation was to delegate the defense of their right to Anglo Americans
lawyers, the "enemigo mismo". Many of these lawyers cared more for their own proﬁt
than for the welfare of their defendants:

gDe quién conseguir ayuda? De ningt'm mexicano, porque no habia
ninguno que conociera bien el sistema legal de Washington, sino del
enemigo mismo, porque de repente surgio un sinﬁn de abogados de
buenas conciencias que se atropellaban uno a1 otro para ayudar a los
desamparados mexicanos. Y asi gradualmente el mexicano se hizo
dependiente del invasor y empezo a perder los derechos y el control que
hubiera podido tener de su destino. (120)

In 1851 the United States introduced the Gwin law in order to establish the
validity of the claims of the Californios to the land. This Land Law created a three man
commission, the Board of Land Commissioners, to go through the proofs of the
titleholders: "The board's function was to weed out the valid titles as deﬁned by Spanish

and Mexican law, the provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the principles of

51

equity, and the precedents of the United States Supreme Court" (Pitt 86). However, the
slowness of the procedures (when the number of squatters on the ranches increased by the
day), together with the incompetency of the judges, who could not speak Spanish or did
not know Mexican law, and the proﬁt-making approach of the lawyers made the
commission useless to the aspirations of justice of the Californios.

Alejandro Morales describes the Land Law of 1851 in embittered terms: "La Ley
Gwin de 1851 fue una declaracion de robo legalizado que permitia a los gringos, por
medio de procedimientos legales y en nombre de un sistema democratico, despojar al
californio de sus bienes y su propiedad" (151). Reta en el Paraz'sa illustrates the
dispossession of land of the Californios with the story of the loss of several ranchos: the
Milpitas, the ranch of the Berrreyesas, the Rancho San Joaquin, belonging to José Andrés
Sepr’rlveda, and the Rancho Lomas de Santiago, of the Yorba family. The most detailed
description of the loss of a ranch concerns the holdings of the Yorba. Morales explains
how Teodosio Yorba considered surprising the fact that he had to legally document the
borders of his ranch, going against the tradition of drawing its limits with rivers or trees.
The novelist creates an allegorical scene where Antonio Coronel declares in favor of
Bernardo Yorba to save the ranch Santiago de Santa Ana before a commission of three
officials: a bear (symbol of California) and two eagles (symbols of the United States and
Mexico). The Californios are referred to as goats (an animal that in the Bible is used as
victim of a sacriﬁce). In spite of the allegations of Coronel, the judges declare against the
Yorba. The scene shows the lack of seriousness and faith in the government of
Washington to respect the rights of the Mexican that only tried to cooperate with the new

legal system:

52

El 030 cubierto de saliva, las aguilas llenas de sangre salieron fuera del
salon, no se llevaron los pergaminos, los testimonios, los recibos, las
cartas. Todos los documentos que costo tanto tiempo y dinero encontrar,
juntar y organizar para la presentacion fueron desechados. La ultima
aguila que salo se detuvo ante Coronel.

- Tell the goats to leave these worthless documents. They will not
need them anymore. (154)

Morales does not hold the gringos as the only party responsible for the loss of
economic power of the Californios. He also puts the blame on the owners themselves
who do not know how to react to the new socio-economic situation. Some, as in the case
of José Andre's Sepr’rlveda, who were accustomed to the luxuries of a wealthy life, could
not stop betting on his new horse until he drowned in a "sea of debts" (145). Morales also
criticizes the disunion of some families in adversity. For example, instead of presenting a
single front against the enemy, the members of the Yorba family were just interested in
protecting their individual interests and so they fell not together but one by one.

As a consequence of all of these factors, many Californios lost all political and
economic clout in the social life of the new California. As Morales puts it: "El Mexicano
vivia bajo un ataque legal, mental y ﬁsico gradual y constante que lo mato
espiritualmente, y quedo convertido en un cadaver zombi existiendo en un estado
colonizado" (151).

Unlike the Californios, the Anglo Americans kept prospering. James Lifford
acquires all the land of the Ranchos Lomas de Santiago, San Joaquin and Santiago de

Santa Ana. Again Lifford symbolizes the transfer of power from the dominant class of

53

the Californios to the new ruling class formed by the newly rich that arrived in California
only years after the signing of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Antonio Coronel becomes aware of the historical change and makes an effort to
adapt to the new circumstances. Conscious that the Californios are losing their lands to
the gringos, Coronel enters the capitalist game to minimize his own losses: “la realidad es
que los capitalistas mas astutos saldran adelante. Los que hacen la competencia, no los
que siguen, son los que lo ganaran todo" (123). He also keeps the family united to defend
their land. After the death of Ignacio Coronel, his sons and daughter, Antonio, Manuel
Damian and Refugio agree to remain united to protect their ranch La Perlita: "los tres nos
encargaremos de la administracion de nuestras tierras, tenemos que mantenernos unidos
porque si no somos fuertes los gringos nos las quitaran. Unidos, fuertes y listos para pisar
a cualquiera que trate de robarnos el rancho. Asi lo quiere nuestro padre" (158).

However, the Coronel family cannot escape the destiny of the rest of the other
Californios. They fall into the same mistakes that their fellow Californios and lose their
lands. The fortune of the components of the family are representative of the destiny of
many of the Californios. Manuel Damian becomes a labor hand in a nearby ranch, San
Fernando. There he works bagging wheat. Devoid of all his political rights, he is no more
or less than one of the Mexicans who crossed the border. His wife Rafaela Coronel
changes her name to Fae Crown and transforms herself into an enterpreneur. She adopts
the manners and behaviors of an Anglo American woman and saves her family from
complete bankruptcy. However, the cost is losing her identity. The gringos run the rumor
that the Crowns are a European family, from France or England. The California heritage

dies with her.23

54

Refugio, Antonio's sister, keeps faithful to her heritage: she retreats into herself
and becomes a living legend of the Californios society. Refugio disconnects herself from
an exterior reality, loses contact with the historical process and turns into a “black ball”,
the widow of a past race. She is just a distorted image of what the Californios once were:
"En ti reside el pasado vivo, en ti vive Nicolas y su historia. T11 10 preservas, lo celebras,
lo amas. Y nosotros te vemos como loca. Pero queremos que alguien preserve nuestra
memoria" (204-5). Refugio's logical end is to die suffocated by the clothes that she wore
to symbolically protect herself from any inﬂuence from the outside. Her refusal to
participate in the new socio-historical circumstances led her to a premature death. People
help her die by covering her body with more and more clothes. After she is gone, the
hypocritical memory of the Los Angeles inhabitants intends to make of her an "homenaje
y testimonio a la inteligencia y poderes creativos y organizadores del pueblo mexicano"
(207).

Antonio Coronel also keeps faithful to his heritage and tries to preserve it.
However, his memory is distorted and he is used as a symbol of the so-called "Spanish
fantasy heritage:"

the Spanish Fantasy ignored the Mexican contribution to California
history and instead suggested an authentic and quaint Spanish or other
European cultural presence in California which Anglo tourists could enjoy
upon visiting the Golden State. Instead of Indians, mestizos, mulattos,
friars, soldiers, peasants, and landowners all living in relationship to each
other in a harsh frontier environment, the Spanish Fantasy romanticized

their experiences by references only to handsome Spanish Dons and

55

beautiful Spanish Seﬁoritas, always dancing, singing, and making merry.
Into such a bucolie society, Anglos entered and easily resettled. (Garcia
190)

When Coronel dies, the media echoes the fact that the last “Don” has died.
Coronel's wife, Marina Rodilla y Herrero, believes that she is direct descendant of a
Spanish family and supports the Spanish fantasy by going to parties and ceremonies as a
sample of the ﬁrst Spaniards that settled California. She becomes a "payaso de la
historia" (268) by giving the Los Angeles population what they demanded: the illusion
the Californios had not been a mestizo race but that their blood was purely Spanish. This
provided the Americans with a double beneﬁt: a feeling of pride in the past of California
and an excuse to continue to subject to racist measures the most recent Mexican
immigrants to the state (since the link between them and their "Spanish" ancestors had
been erased):

Doﬁa Marina acabo en el hipérbole completo en que llego a bailar el
ﬂamenco sobre una mesa en medio de la sala de su casa; no sabia nada del
ﬂamenco pero revelaba mucho seno, nalga y pierna, lo cual animaba gritos
de "olé" y "bravo" de los turistas que entraban a reirse y beber una cerveza
o refresco. Toda la historia de la cultura mexicana fue reducida en la
forma de una mujer demente vestida en trajes de alegres colores, quien
bailaba el ﬂamenco sobre una antigua mesa de madera, quien recibia como
salario las monedas que tiraban los turistas. (267)

This Spanish Fantasy was invented by the media, historians and ﬁction writers.

Doﬁa Marina is the creator of a lie. In Reta en el Parar'so, she gives herself the title of

56

novelist just because she makes up something new. She distorts history in order to proﬁt
from it. What is more, with her vision she eclipses the real memory of the Californios. By
giving the denomination of novelist to Doha Marina, Alejandro Morales accuses the
ﬁction writers who have given a biased, unauthentic image of the Mexican Americans,
their culture and history. "No permitiré que se reconozcan los verdaderos artistas" (265),
she says. Who are for Dona Marina, and for Morales, these true artists?

Morales compares the practice of Doﬁa Marina to that of his husband, Antonio
Coronel. Coronel writes a novel with a clear intention: to narrate the true history of those
who lost California.24 In the novel, Coronel is supposed to explain the reasons for the
decline and disappearance of the Californios and to correct or eliminate all the erroneous
interpretations created by American authors. At Antonio Coronel's death, a critic
evaluates his main work of art: "Don Antonio empezé a sintetizar y recuperar la historia
de una enajenacion cultural que se inicio hace mas de veinticinco aﬁos y que continuara.
El nos ensefro que la literatura e3 fuego y arma de combate" (270). A novelist is not one
who writes something new (Dona Marina). Antonio Coronel shows that the writer works
in order to achieve something.

What Antonio Coronel does is what Ramon Saldivar thinks is the main
characteristic of Chicano ﬁction: an ideological rewriting of the past. The parallelism is
even more obvious when we learn that Antonio Coronel's novel in called Reta en el
Paraz’so, which is the same name that Alejandro Morales gives to his. That is, Alejandro
Morales, as a Chicano author, assumes the task of rewriting the past of the Californios in

Reta en el Paraisa, something that Antonio Coronel could have done in the nineteenth

57

century. Morales' social and cultural (even political) commitment to the Mexican
Americans is implicit in the same parallelism.

Why is so important for Alejandro Morales to rewrite the history of the Chicanos
in California? As mentioned above, Morales attempts to resituate the Chicanos in their
past. The Chicano have lacked for decades a historical identity or have been subject to a
. false account of their past. The Chicano writer feels the need to cover that vacuum and
undertakes the task of rewriting the lost memories of his people. The history of the
Californios is one of hardship and sorrow:

the vast majority went to their graves embittered. . . . they were a ruling
class militarily conquered, bereft of national sovereignty and a
constitutional framework, and alienated from their land, homes, civil
rights, and honor. They had retained little else besides their religion and a
thin residue of honorary political inﬂuence. (Pitt 278)

However, without the narration of the decline of the ﬁrst Mexican settlers in
California from a Mexican perspective that history is incomplete. With this account
Mexicans grasp a better understanding of themselves and their past and Americans hear a
different version of the same historical facts.

Guilt in Reta en el Paraisa

One of the recurrent themes in Reta en el Parar'sa is that of guilt. It runs through
all the novels by Alejandro Morales. In Caras viejas y vino nuevo, for example, one of
the open questions was who was to blame for the self-destructive activities of Julian, the
Buenasuertes and the ex-combatants. While Mateo is set on the idea that only they are to

blame for their acts and confesses these ideas to his mother, one is led to believe that the

58

social conditions in which the character grows bear the brunt of the blame. Jose Monleon
affirms that the true protagonist of the novel "es una especie de supraconciencia que va
arropando a todos los personajes . . . y que se va replegando poco a poco en busca de un
feto libre de culpas. Es una empresa, de antemano, destinada a1 fracaso, porque la culpa
no habita 3610 en uno" (7).

It is in Reta en el Paraisa where the theme of guilt is more amply treated. Manuel
M. Martin-Rodriguez has shown how this theme touches many of the characters in the
novel and how the guilty feelings are made to disappear:

El sentimiento de culpa es producto de una etnicidad alterada; en el
conﬂicto con una segunda cultura opresora, lo que resulta en la alienacion
del individuo y su pérdida de identidad. S610 mediante una comprension
del pasado y una aceptacién de la propia realidad llegan los personajes a
darse cuenta del origen de la situacién. (“Culpa” 89)

In Reta Mexicans are nulliﬁed, “ninguneados,”25 by an oppressive culture. As it
has been stated, different people adopt a different response to the Anglo oppression.
Those who try to adapt to the new circumstances without losing their identity are the less
conﬂictive ones, as is the case of Antonio Coronel. The others become misﬁts in their
own land. Refugio, for example, reverts to her culture but cuts off any possible contact
with her surroundings. She understands the past of her people and carries it with her but
she feels out of place in a new, multirracial society. Refugio becomes a Mexican relic and
dies happy and lonely. Others, like Rafaela Crown, deny their roots and, although she
acquires wealth in the Anglo society for a period in her life, loses her identity. The result

is sorrow and guilt:

59

La vida traicionera, Rafaela y Manuel Damian deberian ser felices, eran
una pareja de poder economico, dueﬁos de Crown Tailors and Clothiers,
mas en el momento en que se encontraban solos, desnudos ante si, en que
se quitaban las mascaras, revelaban uno al otro un rostro cansado por la
tristeza, por cargar lo que ellos consideraban un pecado familiar. (250)

The concept of guilt is related to the idea of paradise. Alejandro Morales refuses
the idea of paraz'sa. Reality is dynamic, not static. The Paradise is a static idea that serves
to oppress, not to liberate. In the novel, Morales does not portray any Eden. Both the
Anglo and the Mexican worlds live an eternal conﬂict. From that conﬂict a new reality
grows. The concept of paradise is associated an acritical acceptance of the traditions
(hoping that way to return to a mythical state in the past where there nothing existed but
continuous happiness). The characters that are able to understand their past also realize
that its idealization is as harmful as its distortion: there was never a moment in their
history when life was paradise. Living involves conﬂict, change. Therefore, identity
cannot be associated to a utopic past where traditions guaranteed happiness.

When dealing with the second and third generations of Californios after the
Mexican American war, Alejandro Morales presents the theme of guilt related to paradise
in allegorical terms with two couples: Antonio and Beatriz, and Antonio and Maria.

Antonio, the son of Refugio and Nicolas Berreyesa, and Beatriz, the daughter of
Fae Crown and Manuel Damian, are pictured as a sort of Adam and Eve that discover sex
in Fae Crown's clothing shop. They experiment with each other’s bodies. They kiss, hug
and masturbate. One day they naturally make love: "Pelo contra pelo, testiculos y pene

contra vagina y matriz, se vieron por primera vez y de nuevo el hombre y la mujer se

60

expulsaron del paraiso" (257). They are instinctively aware that they are committing a
sin. On the one hand they consider it just as a game. On the other, since it is a new thing
they cannot help considering it may be something prohibited: "Por tanta precaucion, a los
jovenes, por primera vez, de lo profundo de su mentalidad, les nacio la idea de que
cometian un mal, que el comportarniento del cuerpo para gozar y sentirse felices era un
pecado" (258). Although they are just cousins, when Beatriz's parents discover what they
consider to be incestuous love, they expel them from paradise. Manuel Damian wants
them out of sight because he would not be able to put up with the shame of having to
confront his neighbours when Beatriz's womb began to grow. The couple accept their
parents' decision and abandon the ranch. They do not stop for a minute to contemplate
their behavior, to wonder whether their conduct was sinful or as bad as to deserve the
punishment. The tradition, the God of their parents, even condemn them not to have more
children.

Antonio and Maria behave in a different way. Antonio is the son of the former
couple, Antonio and Beatriz. Maria is a cousin of his (she is the daughter of Jaime
Coronel and Diana Angela Matinez and shares grandparents with Antonio, Fae Crown
and Manuel Damian). However, from the beginning, Antonio is presented as a character
with high awareness of himself. He knows that he is a bastard and that his parents are
cousins. But he does not feel the burden of guilt because he accepts the situation. Donna
Russell initiates him sexually and he regards sex as an instinctive force, not as the sin that
has destroyed the life of his parents:

No me importa pero si me daﬁa mucho saber que ellos se sienten

culpables, que siempre han vivido con ese peso sobre el corazén y la

61

mente, el pecado, la vergiienza, la culpa. . . . Me siento libre pero ellos
siempre seran esclavos. A través de la sabiduria de Donna entendi la vida.
Soy un hombre totalmente libre, no puedo pecar, no hay ley que pueda

violar. Desde ese despertar, ese reconocimiento de identidad, he vivido

feliz. (349)

The same self-awareness is shown with the sentence: "Por primera vez la vision

estaba clara: por primera vez Antonio Berreyesa Coronel sabia quién era" (362).

Therefore, Antonio liberates himself from any guilt when he accepts his past critically in

order to ﬁnd his own identity. He does what his parents should have done before:

question the validity of some ideas imposed upon them:

Por medio de los estudios [Antonio y Maria] habian cuestionado varias
tradiciones y creencias religiosas. El resultado de cada interrogacion fue
que los dos se alejaron de la religién. Por lo tanto no accedian a1 concepto
de que cometian un pecado contra la iglesia ni contra la naturaleza. . . .

Antonio y Maria se consideraban libres de las ideas que esclavizaban a sus

padres. (367)

The main difference between Antonio-Beatriz and Antonio-Maria is that the ﬁrst

couple accepts without criticism an external judgement that condemns them and they live

in guilt until their death. The second couple questions the same conventional values and

rejects them in order to affirm their identity. Antonio reaches that wisdom through the

knowledge of history (which is what helps him to question the tradition):

El pasado perdura, nunca se pierde todo. Descubri que como seres

humanos pensamos con una pequefiisima parte de nuestro pasado, mas es

62

con la totalidad de nuestro pasado que desearnos, ordenamos y actuamos.
Solamente conocemos de nuestra acumulacion historica. Para saber
nuestra totalidad, quiénes somos, ésa es la meta sagrada. Somos
acumulacion del tiempo, entendia, asi que el futuro nunca puede ser igual
al pasado porque una nueva acumulacion se crea a cada paso. (353-354)

Antonio becomes aware of himself and his identity after he learns his past and
approaches it with a critical perspective. Once he is given to know the culture of his
parents and other cultures, he feels free to choose what he wants to be. Antonio is
intelligent enough to realize that identity is a complex reality, constantly in movement.
Therefore, he moves away from the restricting idea of paradise, a concept that creates a
monolithic view of reality, and is more comfortable with the idea of a fragmented,
everchanging idea of identity and the being. That is what he learns in the light tunnel
where he works: "Estoy libre de las ideologias, los discursos, del marxismo, del
cristianismo, sicoanalisis, soy un ser sin unidad, con una pluralidad de entendimientos,
que va agregando imagenes nuevas, innovadoras, en la frontera del lenguaje" (357).

At the end of the book, Antonio undergoes a peculiar evolution. Once he
discovers that his identity is a continuum that renovates itself everyday, he believes he
can get rid of his cultural and historical background. He becomes a man without roots.
This comes as a "revelacion gravemente perjudicial... No tengo orgullo de mi familia, si
10 tengo de Maria y de mi, y no quiero saber nada de su historia" (378). Antonio presents
the opposite evolution to a character like Refugio, the character most representative of a
static view of identity. He manages to understand that identity is a concept submitted to a

permanent recreation. However, he fails to comprehend that the identity of an individual

63

has to have necessary social, historical and cultural foundations. What is more, he creates
the idea of a new paradise, Simons, a miraculous city where everything is possible.
Antonio dies devoured by the machine he was operating (a metaphor) and all that is left
of him is an empty urn.

Morales rewrites the history of California to give the Chicanos a historical
background that makes it possible for them to discover their links to members of another
culture and become more knowledgeable about their identity. This knowledge enables
them to drop a feeling of guilt that has been imposed by the members of the dominant
social group. However, the individual that discovers a new historical background should
not change an absolute (the ideas received so far) for another absolute (the new learned
concepts). Morales' works tend to support a dialectical vision of identity since, as
Antonio said, "somos acumulacion del tiempo" and "una nueva acurnulacion se crea a
cada paso" (354).

Being Chicano in the eighties

George Mariscal has stated that Reta en el Paraz'sa is "above all else about being a
Chicano in Southern California in 1984" (78). In the second story line of the book,
Morales narrates the identity crisis of Dennis Berreyesa Coronel, a young professional
Chicano and last descendant of the Berreyesa/Coronel family, in the sixties.

Dennis is an architect. Altough his ancestors are important ﬁgures of the
Californio society, he has lost all links with the history of his family. His father (Antonio)
died when he was young and his mother (Maria) became a prostitute. Dennis has grown
up in a gringo environment. His only contact with the Chicano reality seems to have been

his grandmother, Beatriz. Morales introduces the character of Dennis when he is in his

64

thirties and working for Jean Lifford, the descendant of James Lifford, in the territories
that once belonged to Dennis' family. Although educated in the Anglo American system
and having mostly non-Chicano friends, he cannot escape his Mexican heritage ("I feel
pain in my head, my brain is split by a Mexican past, a gringo education, which creates a
Frankenstein" [278]). It is his Chicano background that he tries to avoid. Alienated by
education, he abounds in his alienation by consciously buying into the American way of
life and rejecting his Chicano identity: "I'm not like them, not in any way am I like them.
I've got an education, I'm an alienated genius and I love it" (278). He feels guilty of his
ancestry and, at the same time, realizes that he cannot run away from himself and what
makes him different from others. So he builds in his apartment an artiﬁcial paradise
where he takes refuge from the outside world that reminds him constantly of his cultural
background, and from the conﬂicts that spring from himself. Instead of confronting his
reality he escapes from it to an unreal world. He spends days in his apartment avoiding
thinking, crawling naked on the carpet, only moving to defecate and piss in a receptacle
in his bathroom.

His escapism proves to be useless, since he still is confused by the impossibility
of ﬁtting into a totally white population and losing all differential characteristics. When
he meets Rosario, a young Chicana proud of her heritage, he falls in love with her.
Suddenly his Mexican dimension comes to the surface and Dennis idenﬁes with Rosario,
the girl that his grandmother described for him as the ideal woman. Encouraged by
Rosario to look for his roots, he makes a feeble attempt to ﬁnd them in Mexico. Before
that he goes to visit his grandmother, Beatriz. She suggests that he look into himself for

his roots: "Siempre las has llevado, en cualquier lugar que pises estaran contigo. Nunca

65

las perderas, si no estan forjadas en tu cara, en tu piel, las tienes guardadas en las arrugas
de tu mente. Presta atencion dentro de ti" (306). His grandmother also advises him of the
importance of transformation, of change.

However, his understanding of both Anglo and Mexican traditions is a
unidimensional, monolithic one (for example, he spoils his relationship with Rosario
because he cannot accept his open sexuality that contradicts the closed View of the sexual
role for women in the most pure Mexican tradition).26 Rather than accepting his own
reality, he embarks upon a futile trip to Mexico, more as a tourist than as a man looking
for an identity. He substitutes his responsibility of coming to terms with himself for a
journey throughout the land where his ancient ancestors were born (his closest ancestors
he could ﬁnd without moving from Los Angeles).

At the end of his story, Dennis has not changed at all. He remains the same
character as in the beginning and "constitutes in itself a closed, poetic whole. . . . It is cut
off from a historical whole" (Bakhtin 114). He still denies the Chicano component of his
personality: "Ahora me doy cuenta de que [Chicano] contienen la palabra ano. No
solamente se niegan pero también se denigran, 3e embarran con mierda" (323). However,
he is unable to live as any other non-Chicano person. As Dennis refuses to learn about
himself and to accept his reality, he ends up existing outside of both cultures. Mariscal
says: "This uncanny creature, both inside and outside the system, is in reality nowhere at
all. . . . He is neither the negation of opposites nor even the synthesis of opposites; rather,
he occupies the space of potentiality, of the always unrealized" (81). In these
circumstances, the only place Dennis can come in search of solace is the loneliness of his

apartment, his "Jardin del Edén" (334). So when he feels that the outside worlds is

66

threatening, he runs to his place to submerge in a feeling of nothingness and escape
reality.

The last image we have of Dennis is that of a crippled ﬁgure, naked on the ﬂoor
of his apartment: "formaba una enorrne bola cilindrica, sin miembros, con un ano
pulsante, un pene enorrne y una cabeza ciega, con la boca grotescamente abierta.
Constituia una maquina del deseo que esperaba ser satisfecha" (334).27 Dennis
remembers the teachings of his grandmother about the importance of change, of
transformation. However, his dream is once again not of internal metamorphosis by the
embrace of a racial reality, or the ﬁght for the change of social conditions of his Chicano
brothers, it is an image of turning into a butterﬂy and ﬂying free in paraisa: the dream of
escaping from himself forever.28 Rather than becoming conscious of the problems that
worry him and making an attempt to solve them, Dennis Berreyesa Coronel prefers not to
have any consciousness at all.

The ﬁgure of Dennis is counterbalanced with that of Rosario Revueltas. As her
own name indicates,29 she represents active transformation, struggle for ideals. Rosario is
an architect, the same as Dennis, and she is also a product of the Anglo American system
of education. She shares with Dennis the same split identity. However, instead of
scurrying away from herself as Dennis does, she joins the Chicano social movement with
the intention of cultivating the Mexican side of her personality and making a change in
the still conservative Anglo Saxon society of the sixties to improve the conditions of the
Chicanos that did not have the chance to have an education and to enjoy her social status.
Unlike Dennis, always full of guilt, she confronts guilt by learning about her roots, taking

pride in her heritage and understanding her bi-cultural identity:

67

Most Mexicans are poor, uneducated and down. I made it because I look
gringo, act gringo, and used to think gringo. But not anymore, my mind is
my own, I'm free from your oppressive educational brainwashing. It's
happening at all levels, there are little internal, personal revolutions going
on in every Mexican in this country. Everybody has to deal with this new
force, everyone must react, pro or con, no matter, but they must. My
response is aggressive, I ally myself with the militant Chicanos who have
a deep and intense understanding of themselves and their historical and
present situations. . . . I have liberated my mind from inferiority feelings,
controlled brainwashing, oppressive educational thought and the colonized
mentality you, the gringo oppressor, have forced upon me and my people.

We're no longer waiting for the institutions to decide, we will act. (281)
Rosario is in the novel the representative of the Chicano Movement of the sixties,
a movement that does not think, like Dennis, that "change happens only when a cultural
accident breaks the societal wall" (280), but encourages crisis and calls on the Mexican
Americans to participate in it. The ideology of the movement spreads to other characters
in the novel. Nat Martinez,30 one of Dennis's tennis partners, explains his goals with these
words: "The Chicano movement will cause a reaction, a crisis in all of us, and we're
going to have to be strong enough, individually and collectivelly, to overcome this crisis.
That's the whole idea, collectivelly, someday we're going to be strong and together"
(329). Dennis cannot understand the idea of a collective ﬁght. Rosario is intelligent
enough to develop a professional career as an individual, to transform herself into a more

authentic and conscious woman and, at the same time, to share a collective struggle.

68

Inﬂuenced by her militant position she also questions the role of women in society and
shows a disinhibited social behavior that contrasts with the traditional role that Dennis
envisions for women. She takes pride in the word "Chicano" and does not avoid it. But
more important, with her healthy attitudes, she breaks the negative stereotypes that had
been imposed on the Mexicans of California. Rosario represents the future of the
Chicanos, a person that is capable of confronting the past to gain a complete identity.

One of the goals of the Chicano Movement was to recover a history that had been
intentionally forgotten. Rosario, as the representative of the movement, is the connecting
line that goes from the past to the present in Chicano history. Antonio Coronel had the
hope that some day, the Mexicans would be capable of repairing the damage that the
Americans had caused them: "Algun dia mexicanos, miles de mexicanos, tomaran de
nuevo lo que nos pertenece. Tendremos nuestro tumo, siempre serrnos una estaca en las
costillas" (68-69). That was one of the motivations that encouraged him to narrate the
true history of the Californios so that Rosario, and people like her, could one day go back
to the books and understand what really happened. The Chicano Movement is the dream
come true of the Californios.

Conclusion

As we have seen in the introduction, Alejandro Morales wrote, in an essay
entitled Dynamic identities in heterotopia: "Chicano/a writers today are dedicated to
recording, re-creating and preserving this cultural mooring in literature" (24). The kind of
literary activity that Morales is referring to is born originally as a response to the
traditional American representation of the Chicano in literature. The only representation

that the Mexican Americans had of themselves was that one the Anglo Americans

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presented. This portrayal was usually a highly romanticized version of what these writers
thought were the most notable characteristics of the Mexican living in the Southwest.
Those features used to be negative; for example, their violence and their outlandish,
unexpected behavior.31

The interest of Chicano writers to re-create, as Morales states, the experience of
their people also reﬂects the omission in American history texts of their contribution to
the historical formation and growth of the United States. Mexicans only appear in history
to remind them of their failure to retain Texas from American pioneers, with the catch
phrase "Remember the Alamo," or when the cameras capture the farm workers protest-
marching in the ﬁelds of Delano, California. Stereotypes still hide the true face of the
Mexican Americans. As Jesus Rosales comments: "En la mente de los angloamericanos
el rebelde, cobarde y pasivo mexicano del Alamo se convierte en el rebelde, cobarde y
caricaturesco Frita Bandito de los aﬁos 1960" (64).

In order for the Chicanos to grasp an authentic image of themselves, they needed
to ﬁnd a real self-representation. That was the objective not only of Morales but of many
of the Chicano writers that began their literary careers in the seventies. Reta en el Paraiso
could be included in the group of works that tried to document a more positive portrait of
the Chicanos and provide a fairer treatment of their historical evolution and contribution
to California (amending in this way the distortions produced by their absence in
traditional American history and reference books). The book serves as a tool for Chicanos
to learn about themselves and reconstruct their cultural and historical identities.

Morales' introduction of history in Reta en el paraisa is still close to Chicano

historiography: the history written by such intellectuals as Rodolfo Acuﬁa, with a heavy

70

political orientation (see, for example, Acur‘ia's opening words to the Preface to the third
edition of Occupied America: "The political consciousness of North America has
changed since Occupied America was ﬁrst published in 1972. . . . Its purpose [of the third
edition] is to dispel the myths that are manufactured by scholars who take reﬁrge in
patriotism" [ix]). Morales borrows concepts such as "Conquest," "occupation" or
"invasion" from these scholars. He also follows the same purpose in his literature: "to
dispel the myths" about Mexican Americans and their place and intervention in history.
Morales' explanation of the decline of the Californios ﬁts adequately with the goals of the
Chicano movement and its theoreticians. They still constitute an important inﬂuence in
his literature. A more diversiﬁed, plural approach to history has not been adopted yet: the
history of the Chicanos in the Southwest has a uniquivocal version: that of their
confrontation and humiliation by the Anglos, their ﬁght to win lost rights to the land and
preserve cultural integrity.

However, if his historicism is in debt with the Chicano movement's scholars,
something has begun to change in Morales' thought. There has been a change in his
perception of American society and the role of the Mexican Americans in it. As a sample
of the transition in Morales' thought, the second story-line of the book moves away from
some of the movement's principles on what a Chicano should be. The novelist abandons
the idea of Chicano identity as a static formula. The confrontation is still between Anglos
and Mexican Americans. But the most successful character in the book do not claim a
simple return to Mexican culture and traditions and a refusal to "sell out" to Anglo
civilization. They become more sophisticated than that: they recover from oblivion all

their Mexican background and combine it with the most positive aspects of modern

7]

American society to become more complete individuals, proud of their historical past and
conscious of their responsibility as members of today's society. Identity seems to become
a negotiation for Morales.

Alejandro Morales knows that identity is "a perpetual act of self-deﬁnition"
(“Heterotopia” 24). Every new generation of Chicanos has to look for a new identity,
according to the circumstances that they had the chance to live. He states: “However, it is
a visionary effort to ask children to live and plan their future by the ways of the viejitos
when society demands that they survive and succeed in a world that is radically unlike
that of their granparents, great grandparents, an in many cases their parents” (24).

While having as a reference the tradition of their elders, the younger Mexican
Americans have to learn to deal with the challenges that their historical period poses.
That is why Morales not only rewrites the historical experience of Chicanos but he also
presents as the most attractive characters those who are ﬂexible, who are able to adapt to
new environments and times and evolve with them. Antonio Coronel and Rosario are two
good examples of Chicanos who are happy to preserve tradition, in so much as tradition
helps them to learn about themselves. However, they are not ready to be crushed by it.
The message that Morales communicates to the reader is that history is important for the
self-deﬁnition of the Chicanos as long as it is a factor of growth and not a burden to bear.

Morales' contribution to the welfare and progress of Chicanos is not only that of
recording their experience and recreating it in order to spread the knowledge of a speciﬁc
historical background. The purpose of the Chicano writer is also to encourage Chicanos
to re-deﬁne themselves freely. He challenges us to understand that "identity is not ﬁxed,

that nothing is certain in the Southwestern heterotopia border zone" (“Heterotopia” 24).

72

Therefore, it could be stated that Reta en el paraiso is a transitional novel.
Alejandro Morales is still inﬂuenced by the Chicano movement and its particular way of
understanding history. However, the writer has begun to formulate an original theory
about how present day Mexican Americans should face the challenges of their lives in the
United States. At this point, he has found useful some ideas by contemporary thinkers.
He goes from an essentialist, rigid interpretation of history (characteristic of a doctrine
with ﬁxed principles: the Chicano movement) to a very ﬂexible conception of what the
individual is or should be. The human being becomes multidimensional, not
unidimensional. His personality needs to be ever-changing, dynamic. To some extent
Alejandro Morales has “deconstructed” the Chicano and pictured him in his “postmodern

condition.”32

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Chapter III

THE BRICK PEOPLE: THE BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA

Introduction

Alejandro Morales published his fourth book, The Brick People, in 1988. Based
on his parent's life (Juana Contreras Ramirez and Delﬁno Morales Martinez, to whom the
novel is dedicated), the story focuses mainly on the experience of two characters, Octavio
and Nana, their migration from Guanajuato, Mexico to the United States and their
settlement in Simons, California. Their story represents that of thousands of Mexicans
migrating to its richer neighbor at the beginning of the century. It is also the story of the
Simons Brick Company: from its foundation in 1906 until the late 19403 and the creation
of the barrio where Morales was born. Also, by extension, it is an account of the
contribution of Mexican labor to the growth of California since 1892.
Mexican immigration

Approximately one and a half million Mexicans crossed the border to the United
States and established themselves in the Southwest from 1900 to 1930. It has been
estimated that Mexico lost ten per cent of its population this way (G. Sénchez 18).
Although some of those immigrants relocated in the mining areas of New Mexico or

Arizona or in the farms of south Texas, for most of them their ﬁnal destination was

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California. Many chose Los Angeles as the end of their journey, a burgeoning city whose
population increased from 50,000 to 1.2 million between 1890 and 1930.

Morales' mother, Juana Contreras, came to the United States in 1912, whereas his
father, Delﬁno Morales, arrived in 1918. In The Brick People, Octavio and Nana, literary
personas representing Morales' parents, stand out as examples of the big migration of
Mexicans at the beginning of the century from states such as Chihuahua, Sonora or
Jalisco. Morales' parents departed from Guanajuato, the same as so many workers that
ended up in Simons. Migration for some families of the impoverished working classes
was not a free choice. The picture of Octavio and his relatives roaming Mexico,
depending on any job to survive and ﬁghting not only social but natural elements, shows
that it was more a matter of life or death. The proﬁle of their journey made of them real
pilgrims, suffering from serious hardships. Octavio's brother, Julio, dies on the way to
California, a place that becomes the "promised land." It is precisely the rage and outrage
towards an invisible power that Octavio suffers when they bury eight-year-old Julio that
makes him determined to carry his family to Simons: “In those moments I” hated but I did
not know at whom my hatred was directed. I crawled shivering underneath the railroad
car until I ﬁnally fell asleep and in my dreams I swore to Julio that all the family would
make it to Simons. I knew that was what Julio wanted the most - to reach Simons”
(294).33

The reasons for the migration to the United States are historical. The land policy
followed by the Porﬁriato, the reign of dictador Porﬁrio Diaz, supporting a feudal system
of haciendas added to the population boom of the late nineteenth century, created a

period of poverty and a labor surplus throughout Mexico. This situation became worse

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due to the Mexican Revolution. The economic and political unstability (unemployment
and inﬂation grew) encouraged many campesinos to ﬂee the country for personal safety
or just to look for a better life. As Octavio explains in the last chapter of The Brick
People, his family migration to Simons is a product of the Mexican Revolution. He
illustrates the sociopolitical state of disruption with some historical episodes: Pancho
Villa's rebellion and the particular war that General Francisco Murgia waged against the
villistas, the killing of Zapata or the execution of Felipe Angeles in Chihuahua. Octavio,
for example, witnesses how Murgia threatens to kill the railway workers if they do not
repair a bridge in time: "'I swear to you, that if I cannot pass by two in the morning, I will
execute every one of you'" (296). The Mexican Revolution had both an indirect and direct
inﬂuence on the lives of millions of families.

What Alejandro Morales does is to describe the trajectory of the Revueltas family
in their search for a better economic and social environment. The Revueltas leave
Guanajuato and pass through Quiseo de Abasolo, Irapuato, Torreén and Chihuahua until
they arrive in El Paso. Typically, they walk the path taken by travellers to the north ﬁrst
by the Spaniards and their Camino Real, and later by Mexicans, following the recently
established railroad tracks. The creation of a railway system was one of the most
innovative policies of the Diaz' government in an attempt to unify the country and
modernize its economy. Although most of the monetary investment for the construction
of the railway came from American businessmen, making Mexico more dependent on its
neighbor, Mexican labor was used on both sides of the border. It gave many families a

temporary relief from the ﬁnancial crisis in which the whole country was involved. At

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one point Octavio, determined to go to the north, helps his family dig up "tracks that the
water had buried" (296).

El Paso-Ciudad Juarez was the major entry point of those on their way to Los
Angeles in this period. Labor agencies located in El Paso sent Mexican citizens to work
all over the United States.34 Although the Revueltas attempt to cross the border as wet-
backs with the help of a coyote, they soon realize the lack of serious restrictions on
border crossing. They arrange their documents and enter the United States through El
Paso on the same day. In spite of the procedure instituted by the immigration act passed
by Congress in 1917 (a literacy test, a medical examination, a head tax, and an
investigation about the likelihood of the individual to occupy a public charge) - which
Alejandro Morales does not portray in the narrative -, crossing the border to the United
States was fairly easy for Mexicans. Octavio's father signs up with a labor contracting
ofﬁce. There he discovers why so many of his compatriots made their way to this
country: "There were plenty of contracts for everywhere" (299).

From El Paso, Octavio and his father, Damian, manage to arrive in Simons and
begin working at the brickyard. Then, in another usual feature of Mexican migration, they
save enough money to send for their family to join them. This is the end of the pilgrimage
and the beginning of their identity as Mexican-Americans: “We received a second
telegram indicating the time and date of arrival of the train. My papa and I went to meet
them in Los Angeles. When they got off the train we all embraced and I thought of Julio.
We had ﬁnally made it to Simons” (300).

Despite all the suffering and disgrace the Revueltas family suffers on their way

north, their arrival brings a new beginning: the promise of a new life, a new home and a

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new cultural conﬁguration, the future of an American family with a Mexican
background: “The novel portrays the Mexican as a builder and highlights the unsung
contributions of the Mexican population to the economic and cultural development of
California. It is a novel that offers the reader positive images and hope” (Morales,
“Heterotopia” 21).
Mexican labor in Southern California

The expansion of agriculture in California created a need for labor that was
increasingly ﬁlled by Mexicans. Irrigation revolutionized California farming,
transforming arid lands into new farms, and the state served as a sponge absorbing hand
workers that found it rather proﬁtable to live and work in the Golden State. Although
wages were inferior to those of Anglo American workers, Mexicans noticed a rise in
living standards: from twelve cents a day in their native land they could make 50 a day
clearing land in the Southwest (G. Sénchez l9). Apart from farming and other traditional
jobs as railroad/railway section-gang members, and construction day laborers, Mexicans
began to ﬁnd new jobs in other sectors of the job market. The beginning of the twentieth
century also brought a new industrial expansion to California. The expansion of industry
called for cheap labor. This demand for labor rose in a period of political curtailment of
Asian and European immigration: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the 1907-8
Gentlemen's Agreement with Japan, and ﬁnally, the Immigration Acts of 1917, 1921 and
1924 restricted the sources for inexpensive labor. This made employers look to Mexico as
the main source for workers.

The Brick People narrates the foundation and development of the Simons Brick

Company, one of the factories that employed Mexican labor from the very beginning.

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The company was run almost exclusively by Mexicans from Michoacan or Guanajuato.

Morales himself gave the date of birth and death of the company:
Simons, una ladrillera en el Este de Los Angeles y también en Montebello,
California, fue fundada en 1906 después del terremoto en San Francisco y
existio hasta 1952-53. Para esos afios el dueﬁo, Walter B. Simons estaba
de edad avanzada y nadie en su familia queria seguir con la administracion
del negocio; ademas, el ladrillo ya no se reconocia como material
importante para la construccion. Después del terremoto de Long Beach, en
1933, el uso del ladrillo empezo a decaer. (“Stanford” 12)

Part of the success of the Simons factory was product of the construction boom
that took place in the growing economy of the state of California. But it was the use of
cheap labor from Mexico and its organization as a highly productive working group that
allowed the Simons to amass their fortune. Walter Robey Simons applied the most
modern industrial techniques to the making of bricks. By the 1920's, a Los Angeles
photographer stated that the Simons Brick Company was the world's largest, producing
over half a million bricks per day.

At the same time, Simons transplanted the semi-feudal social system supported by
Porﬁrio Diaz in Mexico, represented by the hacienda, to his factory. He imported the
dictator's vision of law and order and translated it into a patronizing relationship with the
worker. In the novel, Morales describes Walter R. Simons' journey throughout Mexico in
his attempt to understand the living conditions and psychology of his workers: "Walter

had studied the Mexicans in an attempt to identify what made them happy and angry and

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what their limits of endurance were. He wanted to know how far he could push them"
(29).

Simons introduces new technology in his plant in order to make it more
competitive. However, his beneﬁts come largely from the measures taken as a result of an
analytical approach over nineteenth-century Mexican society. Walter R. Simons attempts
to build a utopian society. However, his models are not those of utopian socialism but
Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Simons is not at the service of its inhabitants but of the
company productivity. It is just an adaptation of classical capitalist doctrine to some
speciﬁc circumstances: Mexican labor. It is the idea of transplanting the exploitation of
the working class in England to a new American reality that marks Simons' actions:

The peasants' faces reminded Walter of his father's description of the
hollow, hungry faces of enslaved British miners, factory workers young
and old, men women and children denied their humanity and forced to live
like beasts. Walter found similarities in the effects produced by the
enclosure of the English commons and the Mexican hacienda. (35)

The Mexico that Simons discovers in his journey is paradise for the wealthy and
purgatory for the peasants. The hacienda is the basic model of working organization. As
opposed to the demands imposed by a free market society, the hacienda enjoyed a non-
risk status: its success did not depend on the whims of the market. It had secure labor and
the backing of the government. This allowed the owners to live a leisurely life and not
worry about improvements in the productivity of its lands. Some of these wealthy

landowners did not even live on their properties but delegated on their capataces the

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running of their business while they traveled through the most glamorous capitals in
Europe: Paris, London or Madrid.

The haciendas recall the plantations of the Southern states since the status of the
peanes in Mexico were very similar to that one of the African Americans in Virginia or
Alabama. Not only did they depend on the benevolence of the patra'n to get a job, but
they were forced to buy their basic commodities in the tienda de raya of the hacienda.
The tienda de raya was an enslaving mechanism since the administrators could charge
anything they wanted for the products. That forced the workers to go in permanent debt
with the hacendadas. In some cases the workers were even born into debt because they
inherited their parents' obligations or had to pay their own baptism with money borrowed
from the tienda. Walter ﬁnds it amazing that that kind of social structure could be
happening so close to his brick factory. However, in that system he sees the demise of
Mexican civilization and a promising future for his own business. In an acute remark,
Walter ﬁnds that "the hacienda was a metaphor for Mexico" and, also, that "what he saw
of peasant life was the destiny of just about all of Mexico's population" (3 7).

In the best of cases, the owners of the hacienda exerted a more fair treatment of
their employees. The magnate William Randolph Hearst takes Walter to an hacienda that
left a deep mark on him: the Amor family hacienda, in the state of Morelos. The Amor, a
family with a strongly ironic name, exerted a paternalistic approach in their relationship
with their employees. Believing themselves semi-gods, with a power of life or death over
their peanes, they treated them a little bit better than other hacendadas their own peanes.

A nun came periodically to give education to the workers' children and a priest arrived to

81

celebrate Mass and other Catholic rites. The Amor family even had a doctor on their
staff. They also lent some lands to the peanes for private use.

It is on this hacienda that Walter Simons discovers the key elements to be applied
in his plant in California. Simons seems to be modeled on the Amor hacienda. The
enslavement the workers had suffered in Mexico becomes capitalist exploitation. The
company store substitutes the tienda de raya. Gonzalo and Rosendo play the role of
capataces. In their hands is the responsibility of running the plant successfully
(sometimes they behave as Rurales - Porﬁrio Diaz's strict rural police -, as when they
control the employees with arms on pay day). Walter becomes the owner of the labor and
destiny of his workers: “Walter was completely involved in the expansion of the yard and
the town he founded in Simons. He considered the Simons project his personal toy yard
and the town and people who worked and lived there his dolls who existed only for his
enjoyment and waited for his bidding” (52).

Simons reﬂected faithfully the Mexican environment of the less cruel haciendas.
A grade school educated the children (and intended to Americanize them), a hospital
maintained by the patron, with a company doctor and a visiting nurse, took care of the
sick, and there was even a Simons band that participated in the Rose Parade.35 However,
all these attractive beneﬁts for the workers were only an attempt to keep the employees
ﬁt for their jobs and happy to increase productivity. Walter's aim was always to
"inculcate a spirit of loyalty among his Mexican employees" (142) to avoid any talk of
trade unions.

To Americans eyes, Simons had become a dream, the realization of the

impossible. The Eastern businessmen that Walter invites to his plant for Christmas

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congratulates him for his achievements: “Many in the group considered the social unit of
Simons a utopian achievement. Everyone afﬁliated with Simons seemed happy and
content. The newspaper reporters and observers from the East were amazed at how well
the workers were served for their toil” (140). But from a purely Mexican perspective the
utopian experiment was nothing more than a sample of the American way of doing
business in the Southwest: "Simons was a showcase town, an example of the success of
Walter's benevolent exploitation and control of Mexican labor" (140).

The novel does not simply describe the situation of virtual enslavement the
Mexicans are submitted to, but it also portrays the reaction to the new scenario the
workers ﬁnd in Simons as an indication of the active attitude that Mexican American
workers took in Southern California in defense of their interests. The ﬁrst one to ﬁght the
system imposed by Walter R Simons and his subordinates is Malaquias, Nana's father. He
refuses to live on the deceptive credit with which the store provides the inhabitants of
Simons and purchases all his clothes, food and basic necessities in the neighboring towns.
When the capataces in the plant attempt to curtail his mobility, he responds by buying a
third horse. He even encourages his fellow workers to be independent and autonomous.
Gonzalo Pedroza, one of the capataces, sees all these movements suspiciously and puts
pressure on him. For example, Gonzalo gives Malaquias the less desirable posts. But
"Malaquias represented an option opposed to the Walter Robey Simons philosophy of the
Mexican worker, and thus he was not tolerated in Simons" (104). At the end, in a ﬁnal act
of liberation, he abandons Simons with his family and takes up farming. In that way
Malaquias escapes the semi-feudal system of the plant and becomes a self-sufﬁcient

individual.

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Octavio considers Malaquias as an example and the very moment he watches him
leaving the plant, he promises that he would never allow anybody to step on him. He
makes a conscious analysis of the relations of power in Simons and, when he realizes
how Walter Simons had managed to have the Mexican workers trade their freedom for
work and lodging, he makes vows not to submit himself to those rules: "Like Malaquias,
Octavio would rather face the consequences than live enslaved by fear" (104). The
bravest example of an attempt to subvert the power relationships in Simons takes place
during the Depression in the 1930's, when Octavio and others leaders organize their
fellow workers and hold a strike in order to improve working conditions. Under a new
capitalist framework to which the Mexicans were not used, they become members of the
proletarian class. Assuming a socialist ideology, Octavio joins a trade union and becomes
one of its most active members in the plant:

Octavio became annoyed at the suggestion that the Mexican workers, who
had been working hard all along, should work harder for no additional
compensation to maintain a ﬂame of hope for a better society in the future.
He disliked the word hope. Hope, he believed, was a concept of
oppression used by the dominant society to rule the mass of people. Hope
represented non movement, never advancing forward, never bettering the
worker's economic state. Hope was a void, a holding zone used to control.
Octavio would not be controlled. He rejected hope and searched for a plan
of action against Walter. (188-9)

Mexican-Americans become more politically conscious of their identity during

the Depression and The Brick People echoes the birth of that political consciousness. One

84

of the ﬁrst attempts to unify the efforts of all Latinos in a Civil Rights organization took
place in 1939 with the ﬁrst meeting of the "El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Espanola"
(Congress of Spanish Speaking People) held in Los Angeles under the leadership of
Luisa Moreno (in an anachronism, Morales has Octavio attending this meeting years
before). Mexican Americans also started to unionize. Organizations like the
Confederacién de Uniones de Carnpesinos y Obreros Mexicanos (CUCOM), the United
Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) became
more and more inﬂuential among the Mexican population. The Cannery and Agricultural
Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) was born in 1931 as a reorganization of a former
union. CAWIU directed most of the thirty-seven major strikes called in 1933, a year of
intense labor activity in the state of California. Morales refers in the novel to the El
Monte berry strike, and links the wages increases achieved in this Chicano movement
with the desire of the Simons workers to improve their conditions. CAWIU was involved
in this strike that mobilized seven thousand men and their families.36

CAWIU is also the union that instructs the Mexicans on the measures to be taken
in a strike. Three ﬁctitious leaders from that union, a Japanese Mexican, Armando
Takahashi Subia, Caroline Decker and Carlo Lanzetti (whose last name quickly recalls
Vanzetti, the Italian anarchist), none of pure Mexican ancestry, help to organize the
strike. However, Morales pictures these characters as unionists in search only of their
own beneﬁt. As opposed to them, the Simons Mexican leaders are honest and sincerely
believe they could effect a change in the system established in the plant. They are the best

example of Mexicans in the United States ﬁghting for their rights.

85

Octavio, perhaps the more capable leader, is also one of the ﬁrst to develop a
class consciousness: "we need a workers' union to protect the workers and their jobs"
(154). At the risk of losing his job, he begins a campaign against the measures taken by
Walter R. Simons, not to dr0p productivity during the Depression. He sees him as an
"enemy," living the same leisurely life as the hacendadas:

'And Mr. Simons always on his trip,’ Nana said. 'why doesn't he do
something?’ she added angrily. What concerns him is proﬁt and if he
concludes that it is necessary to ﬁre workers he tells Gonzalo and William
and they decide who to ﬁre.’ Octavio pushed the door and from outside he
waved good-bye. (178)

In the strike, he shows up as one of the ﬁrmest defendants of the rights of
workers. Against all odds, he manages to make some improvements in their lives. He
raises the wages by several cents per hour, for example. In an attempt to free the
Mexicans of the enslavement that the credit at the store puts on them, he tries to organize
an independent store, run by the employees. However, he becomes disappointed with the
results of all his efforts: the strike is a failure, partly due to the lack of solidarity of
African-American workers, his idealism clashes with the greedy-for-money union
representatives and the Mexican Americans are not ready for a store run by their fellow
workers: they make its success impossible through an excessive buy-on-credit policy. His
only beneﬁt for having led the strike is to be "blackballed" by the Simons foremen: "The
administration had warned him, black-balled him, and identiﬁed him as a union supporter

and as a man not willing to cooperate" (270).

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Unable to break the structure of power created by Simons and supported by his
capataces, Octavio turns more and more to himself and his family. His goal changes into
becoming independent from the brick factory since he "did not possess the power to
overcome the gringo adversaries" (271). The only viable alternative is to save his income
and increase gambling proﬁts to buy some land where he can construct a house and start
again not depending on Simons to survive: "Octavio gambled and won obsessively. It
was one way he took revenge on the decadent, obscene, diseased world which had
infected and murdered his brother Maximiliano" (214). Octavio is representative of many
Mexican Americans turned into "proletarians" who arrived to the United States. As a
"proletarian" he contributes to the expansion of the industry in the Southwest and, as a
consequence, to the wealth of the area. He was one of many Mexican immigrants that
built up the prosperity of California. Although exploited in most of the cases, they did not
remain always passive. Those immigrants showed a capacity for organization and
solidarity in a ﬁght for their own rights as their participation in trade unions (CUCOM,
CAWIU) and protest movements demonstrates. Alejandro Morales denunciates in The
Brick People the exploitation of the Mexican factory workers in California but he also
portrays those same Mexican workers as hard-working and with a dynamic role in
political organizations and the taking up of active measures. In a sense, the novel could
be considered as a homage to the lives of all those dedicated Mexican immigrants (the
"brick people" of the photographs of the book)37 and its contribution to the history of the
Southwest.

On the other hand, Octavio is at the same time a good example of an independent

Mexican able to break free from the abusive conditions of a job, become self-sufﬁcient,

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start over again and make himself a place to live and grow a family in an adverse foreign
society. Octavio's life is very similar to that of millions of other resourceful immigrants
who came to United States and hoped ﬁnally to make their home in it. Mario T. Garcia
sees in Octavio the traditional American Dream: "He possesses not the Mexican Dream
of the immigrant - the hope of return to a better life in Mexico - but the mythical
American Dream of individual success and a good life for himself and his family in the
United States" (195). In The Brick People Alejandro Morales has changed his literary
tone of voice: he does not present, symbolically, the Mexican imprisoned in his world
(the barrio) or being colonized by the Anglo: a loser. The portrayal of Octavio is more
realistc. The character appears with his positive and negative points. He also possesses a
dynamic personality able to assimilate to new situations and to build up from there (see
other cases in Morales' literature, for example Rosario in Reta en el paraiso). He crosses
over from Mexico to the United States to work in Simons. Once there he. tries to grow
economically and personally. When he ﬁnds obstacles to this growth, he leaves Simons
and starts again. It is the story of a motivated immigrant from Mexico to the United
States who does not settle for a mere job to survive but grants also due importance to
freedom, dignity and independence. As a hardworking, strong-willed, charismatic
individual he breaks many of the characteristics of the distorted archetype of the Mexican
American, created by mainstream society. Octavio's portrayal is closer to the resourceful
immigrant with the clear goal of settling successfully in a new land than to the Chicano
character defending himself from the assault of the Anglo. That is the most important
characteristic in The Brick People, which shows Morales' change of focus in his self-

representative technique: Octavio and his family are not victims of history but creators of

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history. With the example of Octavio and other characters in The Brick People, Morales
does not show the Chicanos as a marginal group relegated by a historical process but as
the contributors to the history of the United States. The story of the settling of the
Revueltas in the new country is considered part of the Mexican American history, which
is part of the history of the United States.

History and wonder in The Brick People

In The Brick People Alejandro Morales is aware that he is primarily dealing with
what Miguel de Unarnuno deﬁned as "intrahistoria."38 The writer has agreed with the
term as applied to his ﬁction. In an interview, he said: "Oh, I agree with your analysis,
The Brick People is intrahistory. It's popular history. It is the history that gets ignored by
historians. It is the domain of novelists. Yes, my books deal a lot with intrahistory"
(“Chicano Writer” 1 1 1-1 12).

Morales narrates the particular history of his family: their disappointments, their
happiness, their arguments, their dreams. The innovation is to frame the particular, day-
by-day happenings of his relatives with the most relevant events of world, American and
Chicano history. In this way, the novelist shows how History (in capital letters) has a
visible inﬂuence on the daily life of people and how both kinds of "history" (the history
of big events and the history of a family’s everyday life) are interconnected. Sometimes
Morales achieves this effect in a subtle way. In other instances, he falls short of that
subtlety, as, for example, when he limits himself to state, one after the other, a list of
historical facts. As Antonio C. Marquez comments, in some points of the novel "Morales
seems impervious to the caveat that an engaging historical ﬁction is not a simple

enumeration of names and dates" (81):

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The war in Europe was ending; Hitler and the German armies suffered
defeats on all fronts. On May 8 the war ended in Europe. By late July the
Japanese were brought to the brink of surrender but the Japanese Emperor
would not capitulate to the United States. . . . The Paciﬁc war came to an
end on August 14, 1945. On the next day the United States began to
celebrate. The news traveled slowly throughout the Paciﬁc until ﬁnally,
weeks later, on September 2 it was hoped that nowhere in the world were
American boys dying. And along with the rest, the Mexican boys from
Simons were coming home. (250-1)

The Brick People is a historical novel that covers part of the nineteenth and
twentieth century from the French invasion of Mexico to the post-World War II. There
has been a change in the way Alejandro Morales deals with history. In Reta en el paraiso
the writer followed Chicano historiography closely: one of his aims was to reveal to
society the history of the Soutwest from a Chicano point of view. The book gave an
account of how Anglos conquered the lands of defenseless Mexicans and colonized them.
There was a marked line that separated culturally, economically and socially Anglos from
Mexicans. Chicano history opposed Anglo history. They were mutually exclusive. The
portrayal of history seemed to be ﬁlled with moral outrage against the Anglo population.
The characters in the novel became symbols of their respective people in the context of
an epic confrontation. Alejandro Morales offered a historical discourse intended to
correct another: that of the "ofﬁcial" American history created by Anglo historians. As
we have seen in the previous chapter, with the introduction of history in the novel

Morales tried to achieve Acufia's stated purpose in Occupied America: "to dispel the

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myths that are manufactured by [Anglo] scholars who take refuge in patriotism" (ix). In
The Brick People, there is a different, more contemporary approach. The characters may
be representatives of other Mexican Americans but not symbols of people. The story is
part of Mexican American history (which at the same time is one of the layers that form
part of American history).

There have been several interpretations on the use of history by Morales in The
Brick People. Gutierrez-Jones, for example, in Rethinking the Borderlands analyzes the
relationship of the novelist with Foucault's philosophical concepts (80-89). The most
detailed analysis of the presentation of history in The Brick People was developed by
John Waldron in his article "Uncovering History in the 'Postrnodem Condition':
"(Re)Writing the Past, (Re)Righting Ourselves in Alejandro Morales' The Brick People."
Waldron refers to the novel as an example of the contemporary (postmodernist) rejection
of a totalitarian vision of history as proposed by scholars like Hayden White or Linda
Hutcheon. The shift here goes from a static vision that follows the teachings of the
Chicano movement on how history should be written to a portrayal by a Mexican
American of the history of his own family coming and establishing in the United States.
In the second case Morales' perspective is more relaxed, more realistic and more
contemporary, introducing some postmodernist features like, for example,
multiculturalism (the history of other racial groups).

More and more studies agree that history cannot be contemplated as a monolithic
discipline in the hands of a hegemonic group. This is especially true in the United States,
where people from different cultures have arrived, each one with a different historical

experience and a unique way of interpreting their past, sometimes in conﬂict with the

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traditional writing of the events. This can be interpreted as the break-up of national
identity or as a way of enriching the unity of the country through the appreciation and
approximation to other ways of being and living.

Historical novels by minorities have contributed in the transmission of past events
to those individuals belonging to their ethnicity and have helped to reconstruct the
memory of themselves. As Waldron puts it: "Writing a historical novel, the marginated
voice adds another text to the many texts which make up our memory of a past event. In
this way the marginated voice, slowly (re)writes its way back into history and the society
from which s/he has been excluded" (105). That is the case with such works of ﬁction as
Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Revolt of the Cackroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta,
and Morales' The Brick People.

From the beginning, Morales is set to recover those layers of forgotten history that
are necessary to redesign the content of the past. The emphasis now is not just to
introduce Chicano history in a novel to oppose it to Anglo history but to create a story
with different historical discourses. Taking as the starting point the discovery of a great
number of Asian corpses buried where the Simons yard is to be located, Morales literally
unearths an old a love story concerning two Chinese youngsters that ended in tragedy and
violent riots (where all the Chinese found were killed). Alejandro Morales also brings to
light the drama of thousands of Japanese farmers who lost their lands and were forced to
migrate as a result of the racism of the American population that resulted in the
Immigration Act of 1921. The writer unveils fragments of history suppressed by a
discourse of those in power willing to impose a unique model for American culture and

history.

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Naturally, the interest of Alejandro Morales lies in the history of the Mexican
Americans. The Brick People is introduced on its ﬁrst page by a quote from Terra Nastra
(the novel by Carlos Fuentes that had so much inﬂuence on Morales' latest work, The
Rag Doll Plagues): "The world dissolves when someone ceases to dream, to remember,
to write" (5). Alejandro Morales writes, remembers and dreams in The Brick People. He
writes and remembers the history of the Mexican Americans. Another of the layers in the
complex history of Southern California is that of the presence of the individuals from
Hispanic origin. Alejandro Morales not only recreates the history of the people with
Mexican roots in the USA but also shows the consequences of ignoring their past.

From the beginning, we are shown that there is a connection between the
precarious working force of Simons and the land. The history of the decline of the
Californios is represented by Dona Eulalia Perez de Guillen (an actual historical ﬁgure),
owner of El Rincon de San Pascal, and the tragic story of her family, "based on an actual
memoir dating from the period of US. colonization," according to Gutierrez-Jones (86).
She identiﬁes Mexicans with the land when, after planting a tree she comments to her
husband: "Juan, I am this oak. It will grow as certain as my love for you and the land.
The day they chop it down I will die and I'll become an insect of the land" (9). As we will
see, the prophecy comes true. The other character that represents the legitimate right of
the Mexicans to the earth is Doha Bartolo. When she comes out of the room where she
has signed the deed letters that grant Walter and Joseph Simons the ownership of her
land, they notice how on the bottom of her dress she had two brown insects. The Simons
family has some intuition of the ties of the Mexicans with the earth. Walter keeps telling

to himself, when alone, that the Mexicans were the earth. But they prefer to ignore the

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past. This willful ignorance of the past is best illustrated with the episode of the discovery
of the Chinese bodies. The ﬁrst reaction of the Mexicans that ﬁnd the bodies is to stop
working on that part of the brickyard. They think that what they have come across is an
Indian burial ground and they respect its sacredness. The reaction of Joseph Simons and
the authorities is quite the opposite:
Joseph notiﬁed the authorities of the discovery. The reply was a simple
"Burn the remains," a statement made by an unidentiﬁed messenger who
rode off as suddenly as he had arrived. . . . Joseph was prepared to
eliminate anything from the past that might halt the successful progress of
the plant . . . By the late afternoon Joseph Simons got his wish. The only
physical evidence left of the dead were ﬁve mounds of ash, blown away
that evening by a strong warm wind that came from the east and ﬂew to
the east. (21)

Morales uses at the end of "Chapter One" the same metaphor with which he
begins the chapter. The novel starts with the sentence, "From the east where time begin,
the wind blew" (7). The purpose of the Americans, like a new wind coming from the east,
is to erase from the land any trace of the previous past. Time begins with their arrival.
They impose their own culture without taking into account the survival of the ways and
traditions of those who were there before them. Morales warns Anglos about the
consequences that the willﬁrl ignorance of history may bring. Furthermore, as capitalists,
Americans' only goal is to exploit the earth. They do not possess that special relationship
with the land that Mexicans like Dofla Eulalia (or Malaquias, always wanting to return to

farming) have. They only want to extract wealth from it.

94

Alejandro Morales makes use of magical realism to denounce the Anglo's taking
over of the land of Simons and their conscious attempt to extirpate the historical
background that belongs to it. When alien individuals profane the land, insects appear
and take revenge on them. The Simons pay for their refusal to accept the past with their
lives. The ﬁrst one to suffer from this curse is Orin Elmer, over whom crawl the same
brown insects that ﬁlled the pit where the owner of El Rincon de San Pascual fell. The
insects penetrate the body of Orin Elmer and ultimately cover him in a "cocoon."
Continuing with the magical element, and given that modern medicine proves unable to
cure him, Rosendo informs the Simons family that Orin Elmer is under the effects of an
hechiza and suggests to bring a curandera home to take care of him. Again Joseph shows
his disdain of Mexican American's culture and hinders the salvation of his brother:
"Joseph considered curanderos quacks who thrived on the superstitions of the Mexicans"
(80). Orin Elmer dies in a matter of hours.

Joseph becomes aware of his own mistakes but it is too late. Since 1929 (the year
of the New York stock exchange crash), when he observes millions of insects coming
from a pit near his house, he suffers from a peculiar kind of madness. When Walter
encouraged his brother to sleep "Joseph answered that he did not understand what sleep
meant and if he did before, he had now forgotten the concept. He would die from being
wide awake forever" (185). In other words, he has woken up to reality and realized all the
destruction he has caused. As if recognizing that the insects represents life more than
himself, he starts to eat them. Walter ﬁnds him with his skull split by the oak tree. It may

be the same one that Doﬁa Eulalia planted.

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Walter also falls victim of the ubiquitous insects in a hotel in Paris. Even
Rosendo, the Mexican that had betrayed his land and his fellow countrymen, dies
enigmatically in what seems to be an Indian sacred sacriﬁce. The reader realizes that the
magical use of the insects in the book is in actuality allegorical when he/she understands
that the millions of bugs that put an end to the lives of the greedy Simons brothers
represent the millions of Mexicans who return to California to recover in a symbolic
recanquista the land that was always theirs. Alejandro Morales introduces a symbol
already used by Zeta Acosta in The Revolt of the Cockroach People and compares the
existence of the Mexicans in the Southwest and that of the cockroaches. The parallelism
is supported by the Mexican themselves (Octavio condemns himself for making his
family live like "cockroaches of the earth"). However, it is the Anglo population of Los
Angeles that develops the idea. Edit Simons, Walter's wife, expressed the similarity
spontaneously: "Mexicans, like cockroaches, are extremely adaptable. They will survive
anything. Many might perish but there will always be survivors to propagate the race.
They're just like cockroaches" (126). A doctor, an American scientist, persuades the Los
Angeles city council of the fact that "the Mexicans were subhuman creatures,
cockroaches equipped by nature to be unconsumed in such horrible living conditions"
(258).

Another example of the introduction of magical elements is a dream of one of the
daughters of a Simons worker. She describes the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906
in mythological terms. The dream presents the theme of la recanquista employing pre-
Columbian religious symbols, especially the ﬁgure of Quetzalcoatl - the Plumed Serpent

and symbol of greatness and humanity in the Pre-Columbian world:

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She saw the city destroyed before her eyes. She suffered great pain which
caused her to see everything clearly. Her vision penetrated the earth itself.
She witnessed ﬁre consuming the city and she heard the screams of
children who burned. The earth moved, El Eco [the daughter] told us, the
earth shook. And then she stared at the earth and told us of a pltuned
serpent so large, so great, that it could not ﬁt in our mind but she saw it all.
That serpent was an energy twisted and turned within the earth, causing
great tremors. El Eco said that a part of the great serpent ran throughout
the state, north and south. . . . before she slept peacefully she told us that
the great serpent would twist and turn until we as a people would have the

necessary children to reconstruct a homeland here in this place. (55)
Therefore, in the presentation of the different historical experiences of different
ethnic groups and the response of Mexican Americans to those events, Alejandro Morales
introduces some "fantastic" elements that some critics consider as inherited from
"magical realism." Mario T. Garcia, for example, deﬁnes the novel as "a combination of
the exhaustive historical novels of James Michener with their casts of hundreds and the
Latin American Boom Novel with its stress on magical realism" (189). Morales’ magical
realism would be similar to that of writers like Garcia Marquez or Juan Rulfo. However,
the techniques employed (the metaphor of insects or the plumed serpent for the Mexicans
or the Chicano struggle) are, in the ﬁrst place, limited and, on the other hand, just refer to
historical realities: the increasing population of immigrants from Mexico in the
Southwest of the United States. Therefore these elements work in the novel more as

symbols than as a disruption of the faithfulness to history (or intrahistory). For example,

97

the death of the Simons family caused by millions of insects symbolizes the decline of
the brick business that submitted its obreros to virtual enslavement and the ﬁnal triumph
of the Mexicans who arrived by thousands to California to found and settle a barrio
where the plant had once been. In this sense, Morales introduction of wonderful elements
may be said to be closer to the sphere of Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravillosa than to
magical realism. Carpentier believed that 10 maravillosa (with the meaning of
“extraordinary”) was ordinary in the history of Latin America: “gPero qué es la historia
de América toda sino una crénica de lo real-maravilloso?” (5). There is a dimension of
wonder in the daily life and history of Latin Americans. The fact that, due to economic
necessity, millions of Mexicans are going back to work the land that belonged to their
ancestors (and may well return to their hands) is a “historical-extraordinary” fact:
something real and wonderful at the same time, as deﬁned by Carpentier in his
introduction to El reino de este munda.39 While there is a decline in power of the Anglos,
the Mexicans are increasing in number in the Southwest. It is wonderful that history turns
around and in a kind of poetic justice honors the people who were mistreated in the past.
This combination of the real and the wonderful is expressed by means of the fantastic
elements analyzed above (the cockroaches, the serpent). It is interesting to notice that the
connection that one sees between Carpentier’s 10 real maravillosa and The Brick people
is extended by Morales himself to the literature of others Mexican American writers:
Alejo Carpentier recognized the fusion of European, African, and Latin
American cultural inﬂuences as a magical and marvelous dimension of
Latin American daily reality. To capture in his novels the magical and the

marvelous condition, he introduced the term and technique of “10 real

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maravilloso.” Similarly, Chicano/a writers are attempting to describe the
daily life, the allluring sense of strangeness in the southwestern
heterotopian region. Here in the borderlands of heterotopia Carpentier’s
vision may well apply, although “the multidimensional real” might be a
more appropriate term for the phenomenon. (“Heterotopia” 26)

What is important to notice is that Morales is increasingly moving away from a
rigid Chicano historiography to a more contemporary concept of history. The
denunciation still exists. However, the historical approach is different. The introduction
of several layers of history (the history of the Chinese or Japanese) contradicts former
historical representations by Morales that opposed two totalitarian historical
interpretations: that of the Anglos to that of the Chicanos. From the simple introduction
of the dychotomy Chicano history/Anglo history, he goes on to narrate realistically the
life of a Mexican American family settling in the United. On the other hand, techniques
like the use of 10 real maravillosa or intertextual elements indicate the increasing interest
on part of the writer to explores new narrative strategies. Some of them he used in in Reta
en el paraisa. Some others he will use in his subsequent novel, The Rag Doll Plagues.
That is an important evolution from his ﬁrst, more openly "Chicano-committed" novels,
Caras viejas y vino nuevo and La verdad sin voz, where the characters were the victims
of a historical process not the creators, the builders of that history.

Conclusion
Antonio Francisco Coronel, the protagonist of Reta en el Paraisa, discovered:
que el escribir memorias, historias verdaderas o ﬁcciones es permanecer

en una soledad personal, que un escritor llega a sentirse abandonado, que

99

se convierte en amante de la soledad. En ella va recreando los
acontecinrientos del pasado e imaginando una interpretacion de la vida. De
esa manera el artista crea una vision original y auténtica del mundo. (191)

Alejandro Morales begins in Reta his wish to "recreate the events of the past" in
his novels: the authentic history of a barrio in Los Angeles. It is a history that without his
contribution would have been lost, forgotten: "Para mi era esencial salvar una historia
totalmente perdida y olvidada por los historiadores anglo-americanos; una historia que
jamas fue reconocida" (“Stanford” 12). However, if the main source for the novelistic
history of Reta is pure research, in The Brick People predominates memory: not the
memory of ancestors, like Coronel, but that of his family arriving and settling in the
barrio Simons. The main source of inspiration for the book is his own experience of the
facts and the memory of the great numbers of people, mostly of the generation of his
parents, that Morales interviewed to write it. Morales says: "Sus padres [de Dennis and
the youth in his generation], que trabajaban en los carnpos, 0 en las ladrilleras, asi como
en The Brick People, no desarrollan una capacidad economica y politica como la que se
les presenta a sus hijos" (“Stanford” 9).

Although on the last page of the book one reads the classical warning that protects
the author against a hypothetical legal suit (afﬁrming that the novel is just a book of
ﬁction and all the characters in it are ﬁctitious), the reader identiﬁes many historical and
real ﬁgures. The text is the memory of the beginning of a new life for Morales' parents in
the south of California, in Simons. However, he novel is not just the story of the life of
the Revueltas family. Through the story of his family immigrating and joining the

working force in the Simons Brick factory, Morales retells part of the history of the

100

immigration from Mexico. "The Brick People is a text that narrates how Mexican labor
contributed to the capitalistic development of California," the novelist has written
(“Heterotopia” 21). Morales makes us relive the experience of destitute Mexican farmers
on their long way north and how in a new capitalist environment in the US. they undergo
what Caramillo in his study of Santa Barbara's Mexican community calls
"proletarianization."40 It also shows how the immigrants learn to ﬁght (in a movement
that serves as a direct precedent for the Chicano mobilization in the 19603).

The Brick People teaches how the arrival of millions of Mexicans to the
Southwest of the United States was not just a new phenomenon, as the Americans
seemed to try to demonstrate, but had a link with the ﬁrst Mexicans that established
themselves in the states of Arizona, New Mexico or Texas, who, like Doha Eulalia,
"understood the earth in a special way and possessed powers of the earth" (11).
Moreover, those millions of Mexicans are here to stay. At the end of the book, Octavio
looks at his son Arturo and the father recognized himself in the son thirty years earlier. A
tradition has been created. The Mexican-Americans are not only part of the
heterogeneous history of this country ("Histories such as The Brick People slowly
changes our perception of our past and makes us recognize our multicultural identity,"
says John Waldron [102]) but a socio-political force able to reconﬁgure it. Those
cockroaches that crawl the pages of the novel are part of a prophecy, or a hechiza like the
one which fell on the Simons family, that warns the Americans against any abuse of
power. With the introduction of the metaphor of the cockroaches he seems to be giving a
warning: it may come the time when those cockroaches take all those lands from where

they once were expelled, in a new recanquista.

101

Alejandro Morales portrays the dramatic events in the history of the Mexican
Americans but ﬁnishes with hope. Like Miguel Méndez suggests at the end of Peregrinos
de Aztla'n, tomorrow more and more Mexican Americans will be proud of their heritage:

Regresad mas alla de la cruz de caminos, romped e1 silencio de las
centurias con la agonia de vuestros gritos. . . . El destino es la historia y la
historia es el camino tendido ante los pasos que han sido. éQuién les ha
hecho creer que sois corderos y bestias para el yugo?

[Caballeros tigres, caballeros aguilas, luchad por el destino de
vuestros hijos! Sabed los inmolados, que en esta region, sere'is alborada y
también seréis rio. (184)

Although the narration follows the style of traditional realism,"l the shift to
English, the different approach to historical writing and the introduction of postmodernist
elements42 shows how Alejandro Morales is moving away from the inﬂuence of the ideas
of the Chicano movement to a more innovative thought, portraying now the Mexican
American experience from a more contemporary point of view: that of a middle class
Mexican American Californian writer who teaches at university, whose parents came as
immigrants to the United States but who sees himself as part of the multicultural mosaic

of races that live in the country.

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CONCLUSION

For many years, the knowledge about Mexican Americans and their culture was
distorted by ignorance and their image in literature was based on established stereotypes.
The portrait of the Mexican American by writers like, for example, John Steinbeck, was
that of corrupted or degraded human beings.43 In the sixties and seventies, the Mexican
American self-awareness grew intensely. Contradicting the ofﬁcial version that
eliminated the Mexican presence in the Southwest by ignoring it in the media or in
academia, this minority afﬁrmed its reality and deﬁned it in correlation and opposition to
Mexico and the United States."4 The Chicano Movement channeled all the restlessness of
a people, anxious to appear as a singular group with peculiar characteristics in American
society. The ﬁnal goal of the Chicano Movement was, through the afﬁrmation of a
culture, to win certain civil and human rights denied to it. The ﬁrst step leading to the
creation, or unveiling, of an identity was to adopt a term to name the members of the new
nation. The Mexican Americans of the sixties adopted proudly the term Chicano. The
adoption of that self-denomination was a way to say, as Leo Romero stated: "America I
too / live on this continent / and in this country" (1-3). However, in order to explain to
themselves and to others what it was to be a Chicano and to eradicate the mangled
portrait that Anglo Americans have created of the Mexican Americans through the media
and the arts, Chicanos needed a group of artists and intellectuals capable of faithfully

representing the Mexican American experience.

103

Many of the writers that began their careers in the seventies embraced the
Chicano Movement and set about recreating that experience. They identiﬁed themselves
with the sociopolitical struggle of the Mexican Americans in the United States and did
not mind calling themselves "Chicano". Bruce-Novoa points out this connection between
Chicano art and politics in his collection of interviews Chicano Authors. Inquiry by
Interview: "That the early Chicano literary production was closely intertwined with the
sociopolitical Movement is clear" (9).

When the Chicano Movement began, Alejandro Morales was still a student.
Nevertheless, as other writers in his generation, he became inﬂuenced by the cultural and
political proposals and claims of the Movement.45 When he began writing, the young
author joined them in their efforts to represent the Mexican Americans. Morales accepted
the term Chicano: "I have never denied that I am a Chicano or Latino or mexicano or
Mexican American or Hispanic, spick, greaser, mojado . . . I am all those names; I don't
have a problem with them" (“Interview” 7).46 His characters also reﬂect the experience of
being Chicano: "The character I work with are all those words and represent all those
experiences" (7).

Alejandro Morales, and other writers such as Miguel Me'ndez or Rolando
Hinojosa, share the same self-representative technique. It is an ideological self-
representation intended to make the American (both Mexican and mainstream
Americans) more aware of the Chicano experience: to preserve their reality in writing
(and to explain it to the bulk of society) and claim certain rights for the Chicanos.
Morales' representation of the Chicanos concentrates on a geographical space (Southern

California) and draws its material from two sources:

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1) "Southern California, the area from Santa Barbara to Tijuana, Mexico, is a
place that for the past one hundred years my ancestors helped to build," the novelist has
written (“Heterotopia” 22). Apart from La verdad sin voz, set in Mathis, Texas, the South
of California, and more speciﬁcally the Los Angeles area, is the stage where the
characters of his novels evolve. As a writer, he uses his own experience as a Chicano to
portray the experience of this minority: his life in the Barrio, the migration of his parents
to Simons, his work as a teacher of literature in a University in the Los Angeles area. He
creates a personal cosmology based on places that left a mark on him from his childhood
and creates a series of intertextual elements that cover most of his novels. For example, in
Caras nuevas y vino viejo Morales recreates the life of the barrio created with the
families of the Simons workers. In The Brick People, he tells the history of the Simons
factory. Dennis Berreyesa Coronel is also born in Simons and apparently goes to live to
Mathis (setting of La verdad sin voz) with his grandmother Beatriz.

2) Sometimes personal experience is not enough. In order to recreate the whole
experience of the Chicanos in Southern California the author needs to portray a historical
background. There is a period of historical research previous to the actual writing of the
story. Therefore, it could be said that the main sources of material for Morales' ﬁction are
historical research and his own experience of Mexican American life:

I guess I always interject events or things that I've heard that are based on
reality. I guess all my books in one way or another reﬂect that, my
particular experience or somebody that I knew; so there is the interjection

of autobiographical elements, of biographical elements, of history, of

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community history, family history, state history, national history.
(“Interview” 10)

This thesis has analyzed the importance of the concepts "social" and "cultural
commitments" in Morales' novels through an ideological self-representation of Mexican
American society and a reformulation of Chicano history. Especial attention has been
granted to the study of the use of history by Alejandro Morales since his commitment
depends to a great extent on his writing and re-writing of the history of Mexican
Americans in the Southwest from a Mexican American point of view, and most of his
novels present historical elements. Morales carries out a "revision" of the Chicano
evolution in history that falls into what Ramon has described as ideological rewriting of
the past.47 However, his novelistic vision is increasingly moving from Chicano
historiography to a more fragmented, disrupted and cyclical approach. He is becoming
closer to what Hayden White demanded in his book T ropics of Discourse: "We require a
history that will educate us to discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity,
disruption and chaos is our lot" (50). Morales' commitment to Chicano history has
followed the author's personal evolution.

Morales commitment evolves from an attitude of more open criticism of social
injustices towards Mexican Americans and a desire to preserve Spanish and Mexican
heritage (seen both as the backbone of a Chicano identity) to portray Mexican Americans
as part of American society and in a continuous process of self-deﬁnition. The role of the
writer in his last novels is to resituate the Chicano in a tradition, in a culture and history

so that he can succesfully live in an environment of permanent change. The thesis has

106

pointed out that the two main inﬂuences in Morales' literature have been: 1) the Chicano
movement; 2) post-modemist artists and thinkers.

These ideas have been studied in three novels by Morales, that reﬂect three
different experiences characteristic of the Mexican American population in the United
States: Caras viejas y vino nuevo, Reta en el Paraisa and The Brick People.

If we take into consideration the three stages into which Tomas Rivera included
the evolution of Chicano literature (preservation, struggle and invention)48 the conclusion
is that most of Morales' novels ﬁt into the category of "struggle" (novels asking for "e1
reconocimiento a la vez de sus [de los Chicanos] derechos humanos y politicos y de su
derecho a preservar la herencia y cultura chicanas" [Rodriguez, “Setenta” 243]). Some
passages are merely written to preserve ("recrear la historia pasada del pueblo Chicano,
para preservar las tradiciones y los valores culturales que lo identiﬁcan" [“Setenta” 242]).
In Alejandro Morales' novels, and most notably in his ﬁrst novels, there is an element of
recreation of the past in order to recover it from oblivion, and there is also a need to
denounce the marginalization (and its consequences) of Mexican Americans in the
United States: that was the author's commitment in the seventies. A change of approach
to that commitment took place in the novels published in the eighties, beginning with
Reta en el Paraiso, and ending with The Rag Doll Plagues.

Morales' ﬁction is in constant evolution. American society has become more and
more pluralistic and mainstream culture accepts the reality of the Mexican Americans.
Many Chicanos have risen in socio-economic status and some of the social and political
claims of the sixties or seventies have been accomplished. As society changes, the role of

the writers, the recorders of the experience of society, also have to change. In Morales'

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latest creations the element of denunciation does not appear as intensely as in his ﬁrst
novel. His characters have traveled from the geographical, cultural and spiritual
segregation of the barrio to the heart of American society, becoming inﬂuential members
in it. It is in the context of American society that Alejandro Morales places Mexican
Americans. If in Caras viejas y vino nuevo, Julian and Mateo were still more Mexicans
than Americans, Octavio Revueltas symbolically "becomes American" in The Brick
People and in the second part of The Rag Doll Plagues Gregorio Revueltas is more
American than Mexican.
As Morales states in an interview with José Antonio Gurpegui, Mexican
Americans "should not completely assimilate":
JAG: The characters in your novels seem to be more and more
assimilated, or at least they progressively seem to admit the Anglo culture.
In later novels we don't ﬁnd the "ﬁghters" of Caras viejas y vino nuevo or
La verdad sin voz. Why is this 30?
AM: This is another tough question. I can't think of a response to that,
what could I say? I don't know, I think you're right. That has evolved in
the novels; maybe it's because it is my own personal experience. Not that I
say we should completely assimilate. I don't think that we should; we
should maintain language, certain traditions... But I think that my
education has affected me and will affect many many people. (“Interview”
11)
The Mexican American still needs to preserve a degree of cultural integrity and

care for their traditions. In this sense, Alejandro Morales has referred in several

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interviews to his intention to go on writing in Spanish. However, Mexican Americans
have also to incorporate their American lifestyle to their Mexican cultural heritage and
learn to live in an environment maybe different to that of their ancestors, but to which
they belong by birth and education. The United States is their country, and they should
graciously accept it. Their success as individuals depend to a great extent on their ability
to integrate in themselves both heritages and give birth to a new concept: not "Mexican
but American," but "Mexican and American." The acceptance of a double culture is a
personal enrichment (the same as the rejection of one of them leads to spiritual
impoverishment).

Morales' personal evolution has had an inﬂuence on his literature. His latest books
seem to be advancing more and more to that stage that Rivera denominates as
"invention." The change from Spanish to English, the introduction of postmodernist or
magical realist elements, the ﬂexibility in the treatment of the subject of identity,49 the
creation of futuristic scenarios or the introduction of new, contemporary themes (for
example, ecological criticism) can be used to prove this shift. A novel like The Rag Doll
Plagues, for example, might have not been possible in the seventies at the peak of the
struggle of the Chicano Movement, when the pressure on the Chicano writers was to
denounce the marginalized situation of the Mexican Americans and ﬁght for rights.50 In
the same way, one reads with a different perspective in the nineties his ﬁrst books
(Morales himself posssibly reads now his books from a very different point of view).

Be it as it may, the Californian writer's ﬁction has preserved the same self-
representative quality. The writer has found in concepts, like derrridean

deconstructionism, Foucault's conception of time and space, or Gloria Anzaldt'ra's

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reﬂections on "the border" a new way to record reality in his literature. Contemporary
historians (like Hayden White), scholars (like Brian McHale or Linda Hutcheon) and
artists are supplying him with the tools to analyze and recreate the experience of the
Mexican Americans. From a literary point of view, he continues to read the most
innovative American and Latin American writers (the fact that the epigraph to The Brick
People comes from Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra is signiﬁcative of Morales' new
approach to historical treatment). From an intellectual point of view, he enjoys
discovering new ways of interpreting reality presented by Chicano and non-Chicano
fellow scholars, and continues to take up creative challenges that will lead his literature in
new directions (for example, he is writing now a biographical novel about Paul Jean
Goullet, a Frenchman who became famous in doing Japanese wood block prints).5 1
What makes of Alejandro Morales a Chicano writer is that he still represents
faithfully in his literature the changing experience of the Chicanos in Southern Califonia.
His portrayal of Mexican American life and history assists Chicanos to build a cultural
base with which they can face the continuous change and need for re-invention of
identitiy of a region characterized by its border culture. Southern California is part of the
herida abierta that the U.S.-Mexico border is:
The U.S.-Mexico border is una herida abierta where the Third World
grates against the ﬁrst and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages
again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a
border culture. Borders are set up to deﬁne the places that are safe and

unsafe, to distinguish us from them. . . . A borderland is a vague and

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undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural

boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. (Anzaldua, Borderlands 3)

Southern California: a border, and a border region and culture for which
Alejandro Morales still feels fascination. It is the source and setting of most of his
literature. It may well be since, as he has written, "fantasy is reality, and reality is fantasy
in Southern California" (“Heterotopia” 26). To help his fellow Mexican Americans in
learning to live in a region where identity is always reformulating and individuals
become perpetual border crossers through language, culture, music, dress, religion,

architecture, etc is his commitment.

lll

APPENDIX

112

APPENDIX

ALEJANDRO MORALES: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Alejandro Morales is part of a group or writers that constituted the so-called
Chicano Literature "boom." Many of these writers began publishing at the end of the
sixties or beginning of the seventies and they are still considered by the critics as the most
inﬂuential Chicano authors. Their writing is usually connected in some way with the
political and social claims of the Chicano movement of that period. Some of them took a
public stand on issues affecting Mexican Americans. Apart from Tomas Rivera (who
died in 1984), most of these writers52 are still alive and working. Alejandro Morales is
probably the best known Californian Chicano writer of a group that also includes
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Miguel Mendez, Ron Arias and Rudolfo Anaya.

Morales was born on the 14th of October, 1944 in Montebello, California.
Montebello is a barrio in Los Angeles, within the Mexican American area of the city,
East Los Angeles (or Eastlos, as some Chicanos refer to it). East Los Angeles also
comprehends other barrios, such as Boyle Heights or Maravilla. This section of Los
Angeles has been the traditional destination of migrant Mexicans arriving in the city.
Mexicans, pushed by the socio-economic conditions established to a great extent by the
Anglo population, created a semi-independent urban space where they could survive in a

farrriliar atmosphere. The experience of living in the barrio left a deep imprint in Morales'

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memory and the portrayal of this microcosm would become a recurrent theme in his
ﬁction.

Alejandro Morales spent most of his early youth in East Los Angeles. In 1963, he
graduated from Montebello High School. From 1963 to 1965, he attended East Los
Angeles College. As an adolescent, Morales belonged to the "palomillas" or "gangas"
characteristic of the disillusioned Mexican American youngsters in the barrios of big
cities. Out of his desire to help the Chicano community and as a means to avoid the
obscure future of many of his friends, already involved in drugs and marginal activities,
the future writer continued his academic education. In 1965 he began working towards a
BA. in Spanish at California State University at Los Angeles. He graduated in 1967.

At the university Alejandro Morales came in contact with the Chicano movement
of the sixties and found in it a way to focus his disposition to ﬁght for an improvement in
the socioeconomic conditions of Mexican-Americans and the recognition by the rest of
society of the cultural peculiarities of the Chicano population. He continued his
commitment to the Chicano movement at Rutgers University, an institution he attended
as a graduate student after he had spent a year as a teacher of Spanish at Claremont High
School in Claremont, California. Morales worked as a Teaching Assistant while studying
for his MA. (completed in 1971) and received a fellowship for the completion of his
Ph.D. in Latin American Literature in 1975. One of the goals of his Ph.D. dissertation
was to reafﬁrrn the existence of a Mexican-American identity through the creation of the
ﬁrst history of Mexican American literature. After completing his Ph.D., the writer began
his academic career at the University of California-Irvine in 1974. He is now Professor in

the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the same University.

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In addition to his critical work, Alejandro Morales has written ﬁve novels and he
is currently working on another. Two of his short stories, "Cara de Caballo" and "The
Curing Woman" were included in an anthology of short ﬁction by Hispanic writers in the
US, published by Arte Pr’rblico Press. In most of his literary production, Morales shows
an interest in contributing to a better understanding of Mexican American history,
eliminating historical inaccuracies created by misinterpretation (such as the extended idea
that portrays the founding of the main cities-of California by just pure race Spaniards),
and giving Chicano history a status that helps the Mexican Americans in the difﬁcult task
of consolidating a cultural identity.

Morales’ ﬁrst three novels are in some respects linked among themselves,
forming a trilogy. The ﬁrst two were written in Spanish and published in Mexico. Caras
viejas y vino nuevo (1975, the ﬁrst Chicano novel published in Mexico and translated in a
polemic version - since it was published with a different structure - as Old Faces and
New Wine in 1981), records the problematic world of a Mexican American barrio through
the experience of two teenagers, Mateo and Julian, living in the '503 and '603. The
dedication "a mi barrio, que estara conmigo siempre," indicates Morales' celebration and
love for the place that forged his character and the people he grew up with. At the same
time, the book adopts a pessimistic tone when none of the characters (not even the
promising protagonist, Mateo) can escape the fate of life in the barrio.

La Verdad sin voz (1979), translated as Death of an Anglo in 1988, deals mainly
with the difficulties of a medical doctor, Logan, of establishing and running a medical
clinic in the Mexican American section of Mathis, Texas. The humane idealism of the

doctor meets the strong racist opposition of the community, and the book ends with the

115

murder of Logan. La Verdad sin vaz also contains two other story lines: the life and
activities of the "Seﬁor Presidente" and of the US. government, and the difficulties
experienced by "Profesor Morenito," a Mexican American professor attempting to get
tenure at a university in Texas. This last story-line seems to be autobiographical to some
extent and denounces racism in the United States academic world.

In 1983, Alejandro Morales published Reta en el Paraisa, his longest novel to
date and the ﬁrst to be published in the United States. The book follows historical events
closely to give an account of what happened to a land grant53 from the beginning of the
nineteenth century to the present. Although the book is dense and many characters run
through its pages, it focuses on the declining history of the Coronel-Berreyesa family,
originally “Californios,” owners of the Santa Ana ranch, and the rise of the Irish
immigrant Lifford family, beginning when James Lifford becomes rich in the gold rush
of 1849. Reta en el Paraisa is a truly bilingual novel since it is written part in Spanish
and part in English.

The Brick People (1988) is the ﬁrst novel by Morales written entirely in English.
In this work Alejandro Morales also portrays the history of two families to examine the
establishment and development of the Simons Brick Factory and its inﬂuence on the life
of thousands of Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles. The “Simons Brick Factory” was
real. It was a company founded in 1906 that existed until 1952-3. It was located very
close to where Alejandro Morales spent his childhood and youth. The portrait of the
family of Mexican Americans in the novel is based on Morales’ own family.

Morales' latest novel, The Rag Doll Plagues, was published in 1991. This text

follows another historical outline. In this case, the action takes place, in three different

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episodes, in the past, present and future. A doctor faces a battle with a plague in colonial
Mexico, present day southern California and, ﬁnally, in an imagined country, LAMEX
(consisting of Mexico plus California).

Many of the writings by Alejandro Morales have a historical background. His
novels are the product of mixing history with ﬁction and he usually researches historical
documentation as part of his writing process. This also applies to his short stories. "Cara
de Caballo" portrays Arcadia Bandini's marriage to Abel Stearns, two nineteenth century
Californios. "The Curing Woman" traces the life-story of Concepcion Martinez from
Spain to Simons, California. Alejandro Morales may be one of the Mexican-American
writers who makes the most detailed use of history in his narratives.54 At the same time,
he reﬂects in his novels the conﬂicts and challenges that Mexican Americans have been
facing more recently, from the sixties to the nineties. Therefore, his ﬁction documents the
life of this minority from a historical and a contemporary point of view. This portrayal of
Mexican Americans is more than an evasive artistic endevour. All Morales’ narrative
efforts are charged with a social and cultural commitment towards the people he knew,

his barrio and Mexican Americans in general.

117

NOTES

118

 

I For many years there has been a debate about the diverse adjectives that should
be attributed to the population of people with a Mexican origin living in the United
States. “Chicano,” “Mexican,” “Hispanic,” “Mexican American,” are some of the names
given to the members of this minority (not to mention some more despicable ones like
“spic” or “mojado”). Some authors have pointed out the difﬁculty to choose among these
terms (see for example George J. Sénchez in his Introduction to Becoming Mexican
American. Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945). Others
do not even refer to this minority as an isolated group but prefer to include them in a
larger group, that of “latinos” or of people of “Spanish origin” (Carey McWilliams’
groundbreaking text was called North from Mexico. The Spanish-Speaking People of the
United States). It seems to be a hard task to ﬁnd a term able to accurately deﬁne (and at
the same time please all the members of) such a heterogeneous group of people. This
thesis works with the (apparently) most widely accepted terms, “Chicano” and “Mexican
American,” and uses them indistinctively to designate Mexican-origin people in the US,
their culture and art. The word “Mexican” refers to immigrants from Mexico born in that
country. One is aware of the subtle differences between “Chicano” and “Mexican
American.” The term “Chicano,” for example, has especial social and political
connotations, associated with the sixties and the ﬁght for civil rights, that the more
neutral “Mexican American” lacks (like analogous hyphenated words - “African
American,” “Native American,” and so on- created in the eighties in an effort to come up
with purely denotative expressions). In consequence, a distinction will be used for
methodological reasons in the sections dedicated to the criticism of Alejandro Morales’

novels: the word “Chicano” will be more recurrently employed in the ﬁrst part of the

119

 

thesis to indicate the important inﬂuence of the ideas of the Chicano movement on
Alejandro Morales’ ﬁrst novels (Caras viejas y vino nuevo, La verdad sin voz). “Mexican
American” will be more frequently used in the second half of the thesis to underline
Morales’ increasing view of the Mexican Americans as part of the United States society
(on equal terms with such minorities as, for example, “Asian Americans”). With that
change from “Chicano” to “Mexican American” the thesis intends to mark the evolution
in Morales’ literature and ideas: from a more militant and etnically committed stand to a
more integrative view of the Mexican American as part of present-day America.

2 In the prologue to The Road to T amanzunchale, by Ron Arias, Tomas Rivera
wrote: "I think it is imperative that those Chicanos who need it, immerse themselves in
the profound and satisfying of ﬁnding their identity" (9).

3 As Luis Leal says: "En su narrativa, Alejandro Morales con gran pericia ha
sabido enmendar desde una perspectiva chicana, la historia de California" (31).

4 Rodolfo Acui'ra uses the word in his history of the Chicanos. He also explains
there the term pocho as “used by Mexicans, applied to U.S.-bom Mexicans who speak no
Spanish or speak it poorly. In a broader sense, a pocho is neither Mexican nor American”
(320).

5 Cesar Chavez became a national hero among Chicanos in the sixties. Born in
Yuma, Arizona, he spent his childhood as a migrant worker. He mobilized thousands of
farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley and through strikes and boycotts managed to
raise their living standards. José Angel Gutierrez was a founder of the Mexican American
Youth Organization (MAYO) and a leader in the student movement. He became famous

when he succesfully campaigned to gain political power for Chicanos in his hometown

120

 

Crystal City. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales was the most dynamic Chicano leader in
Colorado during the sixties. Based in Denver, he entered young the world of politics and
founded the Crusade for Justice, an organization intended to protect and defend the rights
of his people. He called the First Annual Chicano Youth Conference and helped to
establish La Raza Unida party in Colorado. He also wrote one of the most famous poem
associated to the movement: I Am Joaquin.

6 Ramon Saldivar considers this attitude as characteristic of most Chicano ﬁction:
"Chicano narratives, individually as texts and together as a genre, confronts and
circurnscribe the limiting ideologies imposed upon them (and sometimes created from
within Mexican American culture itself) and . . . have in complex ways determined the
horizons within which their history has emerged" (Narrative 6).

7 See Tomas Almaguer. "Toward the Study of Chicano Colonialism;” Mario
Barrera, Carlos Muniz and Charles Omelas. "The Barrio as an Internal Colony;” and
Rodolfo Acuﬁa. Occupied America.

8 See Americo Paredes. "The Folk Base of Chicano Literature."

9 In a series of interviews with Chicano writers conducted by Salvador Rodriguez
del Pino during the Spring of 1977 (Encuentro), Tomas Rivera, Miguel Me'ndez, Aristeo
Brito, Alejandro Morales and others agreed that the subject matter "br’rsqueda de
identidad" dominated over others in the literature written by this minority (Rodriguez,
“Setenta” 242). In his Ph. D. dissertation Morales states as one of the goals of his study,
to establish "the approximate date of when the Mexicans began to identify or feel
themselves not as Mexicans nor Americans but as a different group living in the United

States" (“Visi6n” II).

121

 

'° In this sense, some critics and scholars have related Chicano literature to the
narratives and poetic works of the colonized or oppressed people of countries ﬁghting for
emancipations. "It allows us justiﬁably to think of Chicano narrative as a 'resistance
literature' and, thus a coparticipant in the broader struggles of national liberation and
resistance movements in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East" (Saldivar,
Narrative 24).

H See Ramon Saldivar. Chicano. The Dialectics of Diﬂerence.

'2 “Heterotopia: a disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible
orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite... in
such a state, things are laid, placed, arranged in sites so very different from one another
that it is impossible to ﬁnd a place of residence for them” (Foucault xviii).

'3 According to Morales:

Chicanos have become trapped in the process of self-deﬁnition and have
splintered, shattered their identity, made themselves an ambiguity,
strangers in their own land, constantly moving like migrants, now
knowing who they are, where they come from, nor where they are going.
They fail to understand that identity is not ﬁxed, that nothing is certain in
the Southwestern heterotopia border zone. (“Heterotopia” 24)

"' It is representative of this way of thinking, Morales' opinion about Chicano
literature: "I consider it to be part of American literature. . . . It is a part of American
literature the same way as Irish American literature, German American literature, Italian
American literature, Afro-American literature are different expressions of it. All these

voices contribute to the American literary mosaic" (“Interview” 5).

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'5 Given that for many Chicanos the territories of the Southwest of the United
States were won in a “Conquest,” the concept that some day they would “reconquer”
what John Chavez called “the lost land” (in his book The Last Land: The Chicano Image
of the Southwest) was created. It is an idea that has inspired some authors (see for
example Gloria Anzaldt'ra’s verses:

This land was Mexican once,
Was Indian always
And is.
And willbeagain. (55-58)
Alejandro Morales re-elaborates the idea from a symbolic and poetic point of view.

'6 He had recently graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph. D., and this
would be the ﬁrst step of his writing career. After looking some time for a publisher
within the United States, he took his new work to a publishing company in Mexico,
Joaquin Mortiz. Mortiz read the text and called Morales to sign the contracts that made of
him the ﬁrst contemporary Chicano writer to publish in Mexico. Alejandro Morales
referred to this fact in a declaration before the body of the novel: "espero que pronto
llegue el dia en que no me vea obligado a salir de mi propio pais para publicar una novela
escrita en espaﬁol" (7). However, Morales’ next work, La verdad sin voz, also appeared
in Mexico, published by the same company, and it would not be until his third novel,
Reta en el Parar'sa, that Morales' desires would be fulﬁlled.

'7 Mario Suarez writes in the late 19403 the story "El Hoyo", about life in a
Tucson barrio. More contemporary is Richard Vésquez's Chicano (1970), the story of a

family of Mexicans that come to live in the barrio of East Los Angeles. Sandra Cisneros

123

 

portrays the experience of a young Chicana in a barrio in Chicago in The House of
Mango Street (1984). Many other writers have treated this subject, including John Rechy
("El Paso del Norte"), Ernesto Galarza (Barrio Bay) or poets like Alberto Urista
“Alurista” ("Nuestro barrio").

’8 All the quotes from Caras viejas y vino nuevo in this chapter have been taken
from the original edition of the novel (Mexico: Editorial Joaquin Mortiz, 1975).

19 Celia S. Heller, in her book Mexican-American Youth: Forgotten Youth at the
Crossroads, makes the following remarks about this pecularity of the Chicano
"palomilla:” “The conditions that have been attested as conducive to gang formation -
such as sharp cultural differences, distance between youth and parents, living in the
slums- are operating in the case of Mexican Americans, and some of them to a greater
degree than among other lower class groups” (62).

Joseph Spielberg also discusses the "palomilla" in similar terms:

Only in the palomilla could a young man display the full personality of an
adult male, untrarnmeled by the inhibitions of family authority and
proscriptions; nor by the equalizing tendencies of the dominant anglo
society's authority and institutions. In this limbo the palomilla represented
one of the few viable social units possible; a microsc0pic version of the
larger, essentially hostile and impersonal world, but one wherein a man
could make a place for himself among and even above his fellows. (49)

2" Morales has recorded some of the negative consequences of such an

experimental measure:

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Perhaps if I had written the text in English readers would have received it
more enthusiastically. Although it is one of my more engaging novels,
critics have ignored it. . . . The third concern is economic. Writing a
bilingual novel can mean a loss of readers, those people who do not read
one or the other language. This will affect the sales of the novel.
(“Heterotopia” 20)

21 See Reta en el paraiso (Ypsilanti, MI: Bilingual Press, 1983) for all the quotes
from the novel.

22 In the Mexican American war (1846-1848) the United States annexed the whole
Southwest (half of the extension of the former Mexico) to the Federal Government. The
Mexican troops commanded by general Santa Ana were defeated by the US. army,
whose soldiers occupied Mexico City at the end of the war. The peace was signed in
Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo gave Mexico $15 million
in exchange for the loss of land (that included the present-day states of California, New
Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona and Utah). Mexico accepted the Rio
Grande as the Texas frontier. According to the treaty, Mexicans living in the Southwest
could go back to Mexico or stay in the new nation. In the latter case, they would be
considered American citizens and their rights, land titles and religion would be protected.

2' Leonard Pitt, author of The Decline of the Californios, gives a historical
background to Rafaela's transformation: the transfer of power from one ethnic group to
another: "If in the olden days the dominant Mexican culture had transformed some
Yankees into 'Mexicanized gringos,’ now the new culture created a class of 'gringoized

Mexicans.’ This did not, however represent a true blending of two cultures but rather a

125

 

triumph of the most aggressive and a defeat of the most recessive cultural characteristics"
(269).

2' This is a task that real Californios saw as a necessity. Some of them, after the
ﬁrst thrust of Anglo settlement had taken place, felt the need to preserve their history:
“Not to romanticize but to debunk Yankee myths and lies became the task of the moment.
Mariano Vallejo . . . started writing a multivolume history 'a true history of the country" -
to tell the Americans that the early Californians 'were not indigents or a band of beasts,’
but an 'illustrious' race of people" (Pitt 280).

2’ Dennis Berreyesa Coronel expresses very well in the Reta how Californios and
their descendants are “ninguneados,” made into a no-ane (or “un don nadie”) by people
from the hegemonic culture: “rne doy cuenta de que soy un nada. Me desprecia la gente
que trabaja y que sabe menos que yo, esa gente me considera un ninguno” (48). The
marginalization of Californios involves ignoring any value or merit that the individuals
from this social group, their accomplishments or their culture may have.

2‘ Martin-Rodriguez sees in Dennis' failed relationship with Rosario an "edipical
projection" that points the connections mother/virgen/whore (“Culpa” 97). He refers to
Dennis’ own words: "I refused because I thought she was perfect, my virgin. gMi virgen?
[Mi virgen es una puta! Abuelita, mi arnor me ha traicionado. Abuelita, [mi virgen es una
puta" (334).

27 In his interview with José Monleén, Alejandro Morales said:

Se me viene a la mente 1a imagen -que estoy usando en mi nueva novela-
de la 'maquina del deseo:' un hombre, en este siglo, desnudo en la

alfombra de su apartamento, con la boca abierta y lo unico que quiere es

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que le den. Ese hombre es una maquina de deseos, pero no tiene miembros
ya. Quizas, siguiendo esta imagen de la separcién de las partes del cuerpo,
terrnine esta novela con este hombre con una enorrne boca abierta que hay
que satisfacer. Es 1a enajenacion maxima del ser humano. (“Entrevista”
l6)

2" There is another occasion when Dennis aspires to become a entity without
consciousness: "I will someday be a butterﬂy or a hummingbird. I'm sure of it now. If
Kafka did it I can too" (325). As George Mariscal recalls, Gregor Samsa "was
transformed not into a butterﬂy of a hummingbird but into a cockroach" (81). Dennis
almost ends up accomplishing his dream of metamorphosis.

2” The last name "Revueltas" is intertextual and ever-present in the novels of
Morales. It shows in The Brick People (Octavio Revueltas, for example), Reta en el
Paraisa (Rosario Revueltas) and The Rag Doll Plagues (Gregorio Revueltas). It comes
from the Mexican writer and political activist José Revueltas (1914-1976), one of the
originators of the new Mexican novel. The importance of the Revueltas family in the
cultural development of the twentieth century Mexico is extremely important. The
recurrent use of the “Revueltas” last name in Morales' novels is one of the ways with
which the Mexican American writer pays homage to and shows his admiration for the
Mexican author. The epigraph at the beginning of La Verdad sin Voz is a quote from one
of Revueltas' books, El luta humano. José Revueltas is also one of the "eruditos y
artistas" Alejandro Morales thanks for his "excellent works" in the section

"Reconocimientos" of Reta en el Paraisa.

127

 

3° Nat Martinez or Pato is also one of Michael Logan's friends in La verdad sin
vaz.

3' Raymund Paredes, in his Ph.D. dissertation, concludes:

A ﬁrndamental distrust of the Mexican racial characteristics has been the
most compelling factor in shaping American literary views of the
Mexican. As a mestizo, the Mexican was thought to be heir to the twin
savagery of the Spaniard and the American aborigines, and as a mestizo,
he was a new racial combination and breed, unsettled and susceptible to
ﬁts of eccentric behavior. These two qualities - simultaneous inclinations
to violence and unpredictable, eccentric behaviour - are common
denominations of American literary depictions of Mexican character from
the earliest days to the present. (327-8)

32 Rosaura Sénchez researched into the impact of postmodernism on Chicano
literature and found that Reta en el paraisa was one of the ﬁrst Chicano novels were
postmodernist elements were introduced "at the level of subjectivity." Considering anti-
essentialism as one of the features of the postrnodemistic credo (the resistance of
postmodernism to accept "essences" such as Anglo or Chicano as truths), she sees Dennis
as a character: “unwilling to accept any ethnic essentialist characterization of himself . . .
he despises the word Chicano, but he is not free of humanist discourses or a priori
illusions, since he sees himself as an intellectual able to go beyond ethnic surfaces to the
real essence, the individual" (9). From this critic's point of view, Dennis ends up with a

modernist/postrnodemist contradiction:

128

 

schizoid and asocial, he is unable to communicate with anyone, preferring
the company of a text, the narrative left by his great-granduncle, the
California Antonio Francisco Coronel. When social mobility and
professional status prove to be failed desires, he ﬁnds refuge in what is a
pastiche of utopia, a living room ﬁlled with potted plants, in which he
reenacts the forest primeval of pastoral California, the lost paradise. In a
society marked by commodiﬁcation, wherein desires are ruled by sex and
the consumption of consumer goods, Dennis creates a new metaphysics,
textualized history, which he devours onanistically while lying naked
under the potted foliage. (9)

According to the author, the novel is characterized thus by a mixture of modernist and

postmodernist elements,.

33 The page numbers included in all the quotes from The Brick People correspond
to the ﬁrst edition of the novel (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1988).
34 George Sénchez acknowledges the importance of labor agencies for Mexican

immigrants at the beginning of the century:
The importance of these labor agencies in distributing Mexican labor in
the United States is conﬁrmed by the fact that in 1910 some 43,548 alien
Mexicans were shipped from El Paso alone to points throughout the
Southwest and Midwest. This compares with a total Mexican-bom
population of 221,915 in the United States, according to the 1910 census -

little more than ﬁve times the number shipped in one year! (52)

129

 

35 "Simons even had a band that marched in the Rose Parade and won ﬁrst prize in
1925" (Morales, “Heterotopia” 21 ).

36 More information about labor organizations and Chicanos in the thirties can be
found in Caramillo, Albert. Chicanos in California. A History of Mexican Americans in
California.

37 The novel includes two photographs of the Simons factory at the beginning of
the century: one is a panoramic view of the brick factory, with all its buildings, such as it
really was when it was open. The other one portrays some of the workers of Simons.
Both photographs are referred to in the body of the text. Talking about the second one,
Milagros criticizes the explotation of the Mexicans in the brickyard: “It is a photograph
ﬁlled with repression. The men are stiff, tense, as if they were dead, all with hats on. The
serious faces are faces of fear or hate. Very few of the men are smiling. It is a photograph
of sad prisoners, of tired slaves. Of men angered for being where they are at” (119).
Morales also referred to this one in his address at Stanford: “Ustedes se dan cuenta de que
en la portada del texto esta la foto de mi papa, e1 senor Delﬁno Morales. En el texto se
encuentra el nombre de Nana, que es mi mama; también e1 seﬁor Revueltas, que esta
retratado con mi padre” (12).

38 In En tarna al casticismo Miguel de Unamuno distinguishes between history
(“historia”) and what he calls “intrahistoria” or “tradicion etema de los pueblos.”
“Intrahistoria” refers to the real, daily, sometimes monotonous, life of people, with its
customs and traditions, as opposed to the big historical events portrayed in books or told
in newspapers. For Unarnuno, the foundations of history are to be found in this etema]

tradition:

130

 

Los periodicos nada dicen de la vida silenciosa de los millones de hombres
sin historia que a todas horas del dia y en todos los paises del globo se
levantan a una orden del 301 y van a sus campos a proseguir la oscura y
silenciosa labor cotidiana y etema, esa labor que como la de las
madréporas y suboceanicas echa las bases sobre que se alzan los islotes de
la historia. (110)

39 La real maravillosa is, for Carpentier, a basic concept to explain the history of
Latin America:

Lo real maravilloso se encuentra a cada paso en las vidas de hombres que
inscribieron fechas en la historia del Continente y dejaron apellidos ar’rn
llevados: desde los buscadores de la Fuente de la Eterna Juventud, de la
aurea ciudad de Manoa, hasta ciertos rebeldes de la primera hora o ciertos
heroes modemos de nuestras guerras de independencia de tan mitologica
traza como la coronela Juana de Azurduy. (4)

4° See Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: F ram Mexican Pueblos
to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930.

4' "The Brick People had to be told in a more traditional style of storytelling. I deal
with a biography and generational family experience. I wanted to tell the particular
history of my mom and dad. I wanted to be very clear; I wanted to be easier to
understand, easier to follow" (Morales, “Heterotopia” 12).

‘2 Martin-Rodriguez has postulated the inﬂuence of the ideas of authors such as
Brian McHale (Pastmodernist Fiction) on Alejandro Morales in the 19903. Referring to

the use of postmodernist techniques on The Brick People, he says:

131

 

As one example of Morales' playful intertextual dialogue with Latin
American authors see Brick People (175), where the protagonist plays
cards with Pierre Menard (a title character from a story by Borges) and
Federico Robles (a character in La regio'n mcis transparente by Carlos
Fuentes), among others. This episode is also a wink to McHale, who calls
this borrowing of characters "transworld identity," and to Fuentes, once
again, because he had used a similar technique in Terra Nostra. (“Global”
96)

‘3 Manuel de Jesus Hernandez-Gutierrez has recorded the basic stereotypes

created by mainstream America writers:

En su inicio, los narradores anglosajones de la postconquista, cuyas obras
publican y distribuyen las casas editoriates de Nueva York y de Filadelﬁa,
reducen a1 mexicanoestadounidense a un mestizo cruel, maton, un
conquistado acobardado, inferior, un ser lleno de odio, el vibora, e1
grasoso, un perro medio indio. En las ultimas editoriales, los narradores
anglosajones partidarios del romanticismo decimonénico moderan un
poco e1 discurso normativo pero no dejan de presentarle a1 lector un ser
estereotipado: el grasoso angelical, e1 aristocrata peninsular, la bella
castellana de ojos azules, un ser apasionado pero violento, la beata
inﬂexible y arrogante, el hombre natural, un barbaro. . . . 8610 con la
aparicion de los narradores liberales, aunque éstos heredan el discurso
normativo, 3e humaniza un poco la imagen del mexicanoestadounidense,

pero todavia persiste la inclinacion a esterotipar. Tenemos ahora al

132

 

 

mestizo del espiritu indomable, un ser exotico y extraﬁo pero todavia
violento - aunque algo paciente -, en ﬁn, un ser de determinacion pero
primitivo, el marginado. (29-30)
It is also interesting to notice some Mexican Americans' reactions to these Anglo
Americans archetypes:
I don't know if he [Steinbeck] was talking about early California or what,
but to me he was talking about raza and really putting them down. These
were animals that used to screw in the mud, and forever drinking and
ﬁghting. To me no eran raza, yet they were. Los conoci, I knew what he
was talking about, but I didn't like the way he was writing about them.
(Montoya 49)

‘4 Ramon Saldivar explains the achievement of the Mexican American identity in
dialectical terms. The diﬂerance in literature is what results from the the new Mexican
American self-deﬁnition:

In a relationship between opposed terms, one annuls the other and lifts it
up into a higher sphere of existence: development through opposition and
conﬂict - neither Mexican, nor American, nor yet a naive Mexican
American, but something else. This something else is the diﬁerance of
contemporary Chicano literature, which allows it to retain its special
relation to both its Mexican and American contexts, while also letting it be
marked by its relation to its own still unconditioned future. (“Theory” 27)
‘5 Salvador Rodriguez del Pino remembers the political consciousness of the

young Morales: "La direccion politico-social del movimiento [Chicano] abrio nuevas

133

 

vistas para el joven Morales. . . . Morales participa en los 'walkouts' y 'sit-ins', muy
populares en los sesenta como forma de protesta en los planeles educativos" (“Cinco”
68).

4" It is interesting to note how Alejandro Morales mocks, in Reta en el Paraisa,
the attitude of José Antonio Villarreal, author of Pacha, towards the Chicano Movement
and the word Chicano. In an attempt to denounce the contradiction into which Villarreal
falls by rejecting the term, admitting at the same time that he writes about "his people"
(and also pointing out his intentional omission of the beneﬁts of being included in
Chicano literature manuals), Morales effects an ironical rewriting of the interview that
Bruce-Novoa conducted with J ose’ Antonio Villarreal:

The term Chicano, I cannot grasp its meaning. I am truly uncomfortable. It
restricts me from attaining the universal aesthetic level I seek. But I guess
I'm not really disturbed by being classiﬁed as a Chicano writer. I guess
you wouldn't be here interviewing me if it wasn't for that word Chicano.
But I do write about my pueblo. I share an experience with the Chicano
people and I try like hell to recreate it. (322)
See Villarreal’s words in his interview with Bruce Novoa:

Yet, although I do not call myself a Chicano writer and I do not think of
myself as one, mainly because the name alone implicitly brings out
restrictions and inhibitions detrimental to my achieving the aesthetic level
I seek, I am not disturbed by being classiﬁed as such. This is because I
write of my pueblo [people], I share an experience with Chicano writers,

and I make every effort to re-create it. (42)

134

 

4' Because of their "revision" of history, Luis Leal considers Alejandro Morales'
historical novels to be part of the New Historical Novel: "son representativas de la
llamada 'nueva novela histérica,’ que se caracteriza no por producir los hechos historicos
de acuerdo como ocurrieron, sino por su funcion revisionista" (31). For a study of the
New Historical Novel in Central and South America see Menton, Seymour. Latin
America's New Historical Novel.

'3 Idea presented by Tomas Rivera in "La novela chicana: forma en busca de
vida," a lecture offered in the class "The Chicano Novel" (Santa Barbara, 31 May 1977).
Rodriguez del Pino discusses it in his article "La novela chicana de los setenta comentada
por sus escritores y criticos" (242-3).

4" In Morales’ words:

To certain people it's an important issue because the so-called dominant
culture has made all the efforts to break down others' identity. To me the
whole question of identity could be a trap. We can spend the rest of our
lives trying to deﬁne and answer the question Who are we? and go
nowhere; and ﬁnd at the very end that we are still asking the same
question. It could be a dangerous question to be caught up in and hung up,
bound by identity. (“Interview” 8)

5° Martin-Rodriguez sees in this novel a change in Morales' attitude towards
literature and society: "I would like to explore the possibility of the language [from
Spanish to English, in the novel] switch being related to a different perception of
Chicano/a literature and society on the part of Morales, a perception that better reﬂects

the realities of the postnationalistic 19903” (“Global” 88). A few pages later, the critic

135

 

continues: "Plague is one of several recent Chicano/a novels whose focus has shifted
from epistemology (what the truth is about the Chicano/a experience, how history can be
rewritten to account for the suppressed Chicano/a point of view, etc) to ontology (how to
create a world or world)” (91).

5' The writer has discussed the project in an unpublished interview:

Mi proyecto es escribir una novela biograﬁca de Paul Jean Goullet. De
nuevo, ésta es una novela que trata fronteras, fronteras culturales, un
france's en Japon. He hecho bastante investigacion. Fui a Japon, tuve uno
de los mejores viajes de investigacion que pudiera haber tenido ya que me
ayudaron varios profesores japoneses. Hice muchas entrevistas con
personas que conocieron a Jean Goullet. F ui a la casa donde vivid, a sus
estudios... Y quiero escribir una novela de este seﬁor porque me ha
fascinado. (“Barrio” 7)

’2 The generation of writers of the 19603 and 19703, a group of men of letters self-
conscious about their ethnicity and the oppressed status of their people, included poets
like Tino Villanueva, Alurista or Ricardo Sénchez. Critics have considered the poem I am
Joaquin (1968), by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez, as one of the ﬁrst-published poems
linked to the Chicano movement. The Chicano novelists had a greater impact. The most
widely read may be Rudolfo Anaya. His book, Bless me, Ultima, became a best-selling
novel. Other notable novels published during the explosion of the Chicano movement
were “... y no se la traga' la tierra,” by Tomas Rivera, Peregrinos de Aztlan, by Miguel
Me'ndez and the books by Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buﬂala and

The Revolt of the Cockroach people. This explosion of creative writing has been called

136

 

"Chicano Renaissance" by some intellectuals. See, for example Chapter IV ("Mid-
Century and the Chicano Renaissance") of Philip D. Ortego's dissertation. For an
introduction to the writers belonging to this “generation” see Charles Tatum, Chicano
literature. For more information about Chicano ﬁction of the sixties and seventies see
Salvador Rodriguez del Pino’s La novela chicana escrita en espaiial: Cinco autares
camprametidas, Hemandez-Gutie'rrez’s El Colonialisma interno en la narrativa chicana:
El Barrio, el Anti-Barrio y el Exterior and Ramon Saldivar’s Chicano Narrative. The
Dialectics of Diﬂerence. Juan Bruce-Novoa published a book of interviews of Chicano
writers called Chicano Authors, Inquiry by Interview.
53 Ramon A. Gutierrez, in his book When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went
Away, explains the customary granting of lands to colonists by the Spanish crown:
So that the ‘land becomes their mother and as sons they love, honor, and
defend her,’ the crown ceded mercedes, grants of land, to the colonists.
Mercedes usually encompassed terrain of various sorts: a well-watered
plot for crops and household gardening, wooded areas for building posts
and ﬁrewood, and meadows for livestock grazing. Seventeenth-century
mercedes were primarily given to individuals, but as time passed
(particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) grants to
communities and groups of landless and land-poor households became
more common. (105-106)
In many occcasions the Courts constituted by the newcomers to the Southwest rejected or
gave no credit to these mercedes, an actual proof of the legitimate ownership of the lands

by the descendants of the ﬁrst colonists. It was not until the sixties that leaders from the

137

 

 

Chicano movement brought to light the rights of the Chicanos over the land of the
Southwest that dated back to the seventeenth century. See for example such episodes as
the Reies Lopez Tijerina’s occupation of the national forest campgrounds known as the
Echo Amphitheatre to give back their ejida (originally, a “land grant”) to the people of
Pueblo de San Joaquin de Chama.

5" The portrayal of historical events in Mexican American literature dates back to
the "corridos" that reﬂect the cultural clash that took place in the Southwest after the
signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Americo Paredes' studies of such corridos as
"El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" in With His Pistol in His Hand are very instructive in
this sense. Other historical events have been recollected in "corridos" (such as the
immigration to the United States). In the nineteenth century, there already were some
historical novels, for example, The Squatter and the Dan (1885) by Amparo Ruiz de
Burton. Chicano writers have continued the tradition in the twentieth century, mixing
ﬁction with history in his novels, for instance, Aristeo Brito in El diablo en Texas or
Nash Candelaria in Memories of the Alhambra. Ramon Saldivar has studied the use of
history as "sub-text" in books as different as José Antonio Villarreal's Pocha or Rolando
Hinojosa's Korean Love Songs. However, out of all the novelists of the 19603 and 19703,
Alejandro Morales seems to be the most concerned with a rewriting of history from a

Chicano point of view.

138

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