Among the contributions are:
Introduction
A “Southern Renaissance” for Texas Letters
—José E. Limón
The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writer’s Sense of Place
—Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
The Rain Parade
—Paul Pedroza
Among the contributions are:
Introduction
A “Southern Renaissance” for Texas Letters
—José E. Limón
The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writer’s Sense of Place
—Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
The Rain Parade
—Paul Pedroza
New Border Voices: An Anthology
292
New Border Voices: An Anthology
292eBook
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Overview
Among the contributions are:
Introduction
A “Southern Renaissance” for Texas Letters
—José E. Limón
The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writer’s Sense of Place
—Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
The Rain Parade
—Paul Pedroza
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623491635 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 292 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
New Border Voices
An Anthology
By Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, Erika Garza-Johnson
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2014 Texas A&M University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-163-5
CHAPTER 1
A "Southern Renaissance" for Texas Letters
JOSÉ E. LIMÓN
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T. S. Eliot
... Home to Texas, our Texas That slice of hell, heaven Purgatory and land of our Fathers.
Rolando Hinojosa
The foremost of the few critics of "Texas Literature" has come to believe that there is no such worthy thing. Larry McMurtry started out on his path to judgment with his 1968 essay "Southwestern Literature?," which really dealt substantially only with Texas literature defined as the books "native in the most obvious sense: set here, centered here, and for the most part, written here." (McMurtry defines literature as not only fictive writing but history, social analysis, and the essay; I too am speaking of literature in this broader sense.) Most of these Texas books were also contemporary, for, critically speaking, McMurtry saw "no point in going back beyond the thirties." Some thirteen years later he decided fully to answer the question in his title with a new essay whose subtitle explicitly tells the whole story.
In "Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature," McMurtry arrives finally at a harsh judgment. The entire enterprise has been largely an exercise in literary failure from its start with Webb, Dobie, and Bedichek to the present-day efforts of their literary sons and daughters. There is more judgment than explanation in McMurtry's account, but he seems to find at least two major reasons for this failure: a lazy overindulgence in a Texas version of the pastoral and a related apparent reluctance on the part of Texas writers to read broadly and deeply. These two factors come together in a disastrous mix, producing "a limited, shallow, self-repetitious literature" dealing with "homefolks, the old folks, cowboys, or the small town," a literature "disgracefully insular and uninformed." Texas has a literary culture, but one more akin to a biologist's sense of that term, for in McMurtry's estimation, this culture has become "a pond full of self-satisfied frogs."
There is an old Mexican saying, "Silencio ranas, que va a cantar el sapo" (Be silent, frogs, the toad is about to sing). Yet even as I inject my voice into this discussion, it is not really to dispute McMurtry's critical claim, which, frankly, I endorse, albeit with an endorsement based on a more limited knowledge of the subject. Rather, I want to explore the possible reasons for this failure from a cultural anthropologist's perspective; I also want to point to one Texas regional/ethnic area not included in McMurtry's discussion, an area that might be an exception to his general indictment.
Let me begin with McMurtry's notion of the "here," for he suggests that it is the Texas writer's obsession with the rural Texas sense of time and place that vitiates this literature. Two questions emerge. First, is a concern for the "here" really the source of the problem, and second, is a significant literature of the "here" possible? I submit that McMurtry has made a too simple association between the "here" and bad literature, that the two are not necessarily correlated.
Another American region with a distinctive literary identity might provide a useful comparison. I refer to the South, and specifically what scholars call the "Southern Renaissance"—that great flowering of literature between the two World Wars that included Faulkner, Wolfe, Warren, Welty, Tate, and Ransom. In The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South (1963) Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has this to say about that period and its literature: "A time and a place have produced a body of distinguished writing. No one would think to explain the nature of that distinction merely by examining the time and the place...." However, he cannot finally deny time and place—a sense of the "here"—for, while great art is in one sense transcendent, "even so, when one looks at William Faulkner and his contemporaries, observes their sudden arrival on the literary scene when before them there was very little, notices the many similarities in the way they use language, the way they write about people, the kind of life that interests them, one is convinced that literature grows out of a culture, and that theirs has grown out of the twentieth-century South, and has its roots in Southern history and life."
Another perceptive student of the South has carried further what Rubin implies about Southern history and culture and its connection to literature. In Consciousness and Change (1975), the anthropologist James L. Peacock argues that many factors—the South's intense concern with the past, with kinship, hierarchy, race, and most fundamentally with a sharp insider/outsider distinction vis-à-vis the North—together have provided the nutritive matrix for a great literature as gifted Southern writers have responded with their individual talents to the interplay of this tradition and to a period of social change.
If these sorts of cultural concerns—this sense of the intense "here" and major social change—do have some responsibility for the enlargement of literature and intellect, at least in the United States, then we may wish to reconsider the Texas literary effort and ask why it failed, and has continued to fail, although, at first glance, this same anthropology of literature might seem to hold for Texas as well.
It seems to me that to the extent that history and society are responsible for the creation of literature, the general Texas experience has simply not been intense enough in comparison with that of the South—not enough group sense or sense of history, kinship, hierarchy, and race—so that when change came to Texas at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, it was gradual; the nurturing crisis, therefore, was insufficiently intense. We must not forget that we are talking about slightly less than one hundred years from the time that the first English-speaking Texans appeared in this area to the beginnings of Texas literature. Not long, as history and society go. This was a relatively mobile, open, and geographically dispersed society, from the first English-speaking illegal aliens who flooded the area in the Mexican period to today's unemployed seeking the Sunbelt.
Such mobility might not make for a group beset with intense and enduring concerns for kinship, hierarchy, race, and religion. These concerns were present, as they are in most societies; they simply may not have been particularly intense or salient.
To be sure, Indians, Mexicans, and blacks were possible foils for the development of a Texas racial consciousness, but these were small in number and either quickly exterminated or pushed to the margins of white society. They could never become a haunting, stimulating influence in the development of a Texas literature comparable to the black presence in Southern fiction or the formal negation of that presence in Southern poetics. Only the Mexicans come close, particularly in the works of Webb and Dobie. In our time, non-Texans have become the primary outsider reference group for the creation of an "insider" mentality, but nothing, of course, comparable to the Southerner's consciousness of the alien North.
In short, if the particular features of Southern history and culture explain anything about their significant literature of the "here," we can sense why a great Texas literature could not be, and why McMurtry is right, even while his explanation is limited. In spite of all its real and significant differences from other states, Texas has simply not furnished sufficient cultural metaphorical depth for its writers. Certainly enough dramatic history happened here to make for literary stimulation—but not enough to provide the intense sociological conditions that could be sharply exploited by talented writers.
We come to the question of individual talents. As noted earlier, McMurtry believes that most Texas writers are intellectually ill-prepared for their task. For McMurtry (and I can only agree), "Writing is nourished by reading—broad, curious, sustained reading; it flows from a profound alertness, fine-tuned both by literature and life. Perhaps we have not yet sloughed off the frontier notion that reading is idle or sissified. At the moment our books are protein-deficient, though the protein is there to be had, in other literatures. Until we have better readers it is most unlikely that we will have better writers."
We can easily see why books might not have been central in nineteenth-century Texas life, but I, for one, am at a loss to explain why this condition should continue to prevail among Texas writers. The real problem, I suspect, is not the lack of well-read Texas intellectuals and potential writers, but their lack of interest in Texas. Texas may be simply an insufficiently compelling literary resource which, by default, goes to minds generally of a second order. The real question is not why Texas writers fail to read, but why the best Texas minds take their intellectual and artistic energies to cultural domains other than Texas.
Allow me to speculate a bit. Had the conditions of long tradition, intense social change, and interested first-rate minds prevailed in Texas, it is possible that we might have seen a flowering of literature and intellectual life somewhat like that of the South—a literary culture with the concreteness of the "here" but with a larger, deeper exploration of the human condition everywhere. There might have developed, therefore, a successful Texas literature and not the failure generated by less favorable conditions. The "here" as such is not the problem; it is the lack of historical, cultural, and intellectual prerequisites for the significant use of the "here."
Yet it seems to me that there is at least a possibility for such a Texas literary/intellectual culture of the "here," one which to some degree might resemble that of the Southern Renaissance. I refer to a group not included in McMurtry's discussion and indictment: that is, Texas Mexicans, with their historical and cultural predominance in their own "South"—the southern part of Texas, including San Antonio (or at least that city's southwestern quadrant). From these people another limited American literary "Southern Renaissance" may be emerging, although such a formation is still in its early stages. It is a discourse which already includes, among others, the fiction of Rolando Hinojosa and Tomás Rivera, the urban San Antonio poetry of Carmen Tafolla, the poetics of Gloria Anzaldúa, the literary criticism of Ramón Saldívar, Juan Rodriguez, and Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and the socio-historical analyses of Arnoldo De León, Emilio Zamora, Victor Nelson-Cisneros, and David Montejano. At a moral and intellectual center of this emergent culture, like some combined John Crowe Ransom, Howard Odum, and C. Vann Woodward, is the figure of Américo Paredes, whose work informs and whose presence guides this developing discourse.
This comparison with the South may begin with history. As Ricardo Romo has noted, one could argue that the first European literature native to Texas soil took the form of Cabeza de Vaca's fantastic reports from his travels "here" in the sixteenth century. In his essay "This Writer's Sense of Place," Rolando Hinojosa reintroduces us to a more recent, relevant history, one that most of us first learned from Américo Paredes's classic With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958)—the work that began this new emergence of Texas Mexican letters. Both Hinojosa and Paredes tell us of the arrival of their ancestors in South Texas as part of the mid-eighteenth-century settlement of the area that occurred even as Georgia, the last of the English colonies, was being founded. Texas Mexicans, therefore, have a long history as a unified, settled group occupying one distinctive geographical area. When change began to come to this group in the mid-nineteenth century, it did so against the grain of long tradition which had nurtured a distinctive culture.
Hinojosa's account and that of Paredes also reveal a Texas Mexican society intensely concerned with cultural themes not unlike those of the South. Here to geographical place is important for self- and group definition. There is a keen awareness of social hierarchy, a sharp articulation of patriarchy, intense patterns of kinship.
We also find in both accounts the historical and continuing problem of race, which has haunted the Southern imagination, but in South Texas there is a complex difference. In one sense Texas Mexicans, like Southern blacks, were the victims of racial violence and outright segregationist practices, the latter continuing well into our time. Unlike blacks, however, Texas Mexicans did not suffer slavery and discontinuity from their homeland; thus, they were more like Southern whites in relation to the North. Here we may have the most fundamental parallel to the American South. As Hinojosa notes, South Texas was Mexican, and thus Texas Mexicans have operated under a historically derived insider/outsider distinction between those who were from here and those largely English-speaking outsiders who, like so many "Yankees," began to enter and dominate the area as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. Much of the literature of the Southern Renaissance can be read as symbolic response to the Northern presence in the Southern way of life. Similarly, Texas Mexicans had their "Northerners," and, as Paredes has shown us, they were called fuerños and gringos (foreigners), and the very old people of South Texas still speak of the country beyond the Nueces as el norte.
This unwelcome appearance of the Northern outsiders brings us to the theme of intense social change which has occupied such a prominent place in Southern history. More like the Southerners and less like their fellow Anglo Texans, South Texas Mexicans experienced severe social disruption, which spawned different forms of class and cultural rebellion and resistance. And it produced, with decidedly mixed blessings, the slow pressures of long-term acculturation.
Social change also came from the other side of the Rio Grande as a result of the chaos of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and its aftermath. That was a war, in comparison to the small affair of 1836. Thousands of impoverished refugees crossed the river to join their cultural kinsmen in South Texas, and, as Romo has shown us, this increased migration in turn produced the phenomenon of urbanization as Mexicans found their way to San Antonio, Houston, and Corpus Christi.
Finally and most importantly, this entire process of intense social change has been coming to a climax in the last ten to fifteen years. Texas Mexicans now are in a position analogous to that of the South between the two World Wars as tradition meets the most far-reaching social change, including the potential loss of tradition itself. Texas Mexicans, in coming to terms with an intense cultural past and therefore a greater cultural threat in the present, appear to be responding, as did Southerners, with a rich array of symbolic forms, not only literary but critical, historical, and sociological.
Another important element which must be added to this formative mix of traditional and social change is the role of learning and intellect. As McMurtry has noted, the Anglo-Texas literary tradition has not been particularly blessed with either of these, but Texas Mexicans may be in a better position in this regard. Paredes has pointed to this community's long tradition of folkloric literature, as well as an extensive written literary tradition, principally in the medium of local Spanish-language newspapers. Those writers and intellectuals who are beginning to give us the first impressions of the new Texas Mexican renaissance are drawing upon and reexamining these two traditions.
There is also a third source of learning, and herein we find a bit of irony. This Texas Mexican literary-intellectual community is a product of the institutions of higher education created by Anglo Texans, and several are now faculty members at these institutions. (Indeed, this new artistic and intellectual concern with southern Texas is being articulated principally at or through the University of Texas at Austin. Although South Texas Mexican faculty at California institutions, such as José Saldívar and the present writer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, are also participants in this emergence, South Texas Mexicans generally seem to have found both their Vanderbilt and their Chapel Hill at the University of Texas.) As such, these writers and intellectuals have a large and firm acquaintance with world letters and learning. It is an acquaintance of some intensity. As Frantz Fanon noted some years ago, the peculiar marginality which is the condition of "native intellectuals" leads them to feast "greedily upon Western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating the new family framework at the moment when a minimum nucleus of security crystallizes in their psyche, the native intellectual will try to make European culture his own. He will not be content to get to know Rabelais and Diderot, Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe; he will bind them to his intelligence as closely as possible."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Border Voices by Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, Erika Garza-Johnson. Copyright © 2014 Texas A&M University Press. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
Introduction, by José E. Limón,
PART I. The Border's Literary Tradition and Its Sense of Place,
A "Southern Renaissance" for Texas Letters José E. Limón,
The Texas-Mexico Border: This Writer's Sense of Place Rolando Hinojosa-Smith,
PART II. De las voces de muchos,
The Rain Parade Paul Pedroza,
One Pinto Bean,
When I Was Younger,
Ancient Houses Ray Gonzalez,
Voyeurism, or the Third-Party Politician Dalel Serda,
Ojos de Dios,
That's What I Said Tammy Melody Gomez,
Coyotes Cooper Renner,
Invocation El Amor Prohibido El Paso,
Abigail Carl-Klassen Southbound Genaro Gonzalez,
How to be La Llorona for the City of Sullivan that has no Sidewalks Veronica Sandoval,
Escalera Ben Roberts,
Ursular,
Calm licks the night Joseph Daniel Haske,
Popeye Was an American Citizen and So Am I René Saldaña Jr.,
Border Illusion,
Silence Gene Keller,
The Window Brian Van Reet,
Serape,
Prospective Titles for a Border Thesis Rodney Gomez,
La Huesera, or, flesh to bone Ire'ne Lara Silva,
Ode Por El Amor Imprevisto John D. Fry,
Fertile Gabriela Ybarra Lemmons,
Wireless Panteón Lauren Espinoza,
The Border Is a Good Place to Live Agustín Cadena,
Wild Woman of the Navidad Shawnee Wren,
From Mariguano: A Novel Juan Ochoa,
Border,
El Paso Women Sheryl Luna,
The 29th of April Flores,
Dear Celan,
[magic needed] Emmy Pérez,
Corrido Brian Allen Carr,
El Paso and the Sister City Jorge Azcárate,
LoneStar Special David René Solis,
Quitclaim Sean Chadwell,
Sonnet for Human Smugglers,
Tough Guy Octavio Quintanilla,
The Loss of Juárez Sergio Troncoso,
And Old Guerrero Waits,
Across Chip Dameron,
stupids Christine Granados,
Santa de las Embarazadas Beatriz Guzmán Velásquez,
Cobb and Me Robert Paul Moreira,
Daiquiri Pat Mora,
un frontera pocho en san antonio Isaac Chavarria,
Contrabandista Epistle Jim Sanderson,
El Paso Kevin Prufer,
Vozilencio: River of Voices Richard Yañez,
La Polvadera: Border Murder,
Desert Nectar on Scenic Drive Robin Scofield,
Baseball over the Moon Kathryn Lane,
The Bone Box/Waka Tupapaku Carmen Tafolla,
A Starving Indian Woman John MacAyeal,
Raspas, Tequila y Balazos,
Where Are You, Home? Brenda Nettles Riojas,
My Better Border Chuck Taylor,
Contributors,
Credits,