Hispanic literature in the United States develops out of both the Spanish-and the English-language literary traditions. In what has become the United States, Hispanic literature has roots that predate the landing of the Mayflower and go deeper than just the European layer of culture that was brought to the Americas by the Spaniards and the English. In Spanish America, in particular, a blending of European, African and Amerindian cultures produced one of the most broadly embracing literary and artistic traditions known to man. Through time, both an oral and a written literature have prospered and survived in the descendants of that encounter of peoples that began in the late fifteenth century. This literature has prevailed in what has become the United States for as long as it has in the rest of the Spanish-speaking hemisphere.
Primarily a working-class people to this day, Hispanics in the United States have produced a living corpus of oral lore that reflects their history, religion, language and, most importantly, their alternate or outsider status to “official” culture and society in the United States. Their ballads, songs, prayers, proverbs, legends, stories and personal experience narratives provide not only an ongoing narrative history and political perspective but also a school for storytelling, for communicating efficiently and eloquently through the spoken word. The immediacy, rhythms, formulas and reverence of working-class people as manifested through their oral expression characterize much of Hispanic narrative, even among the most stylized and academic of writers. Related to this reverence for orality as both a communicative and ideological strategy—because identifying with working-class roots is a conscious political choice among our writers—is the importance of the short story as a genre throughout the Spanish-speaking world. No matter how much their American education has fixed the models ranging from Hawthorne to Hemingway, Hispanic writers in the United States soon encounter and commune with Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and, most importantly, Juan Rulfo and others who, through the short story, have identified with the indigenous and marginalized peoples of the Americas. This is without even mentioning the strong influence on both the oral and written traditions of Spanish medieval tales and fables, Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels (which are really more akin to short stories than novels) and the whole picaresque narrative tradition, which itself has roots in medieval Arabic literature.
Through the evangelization of the American Indians, the colonization of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Southwest, and the importation of African slaves, this Judeo-Spanish-Arabic literature eventually merged with the dance-drama and the epics of both the Amerindians and the Africans (much of this is the subject of ongoing research today). The most powerful remnants of non-European contributions, of course, are to be found in the folk songs and folk tales, the syncretic religious practices and their own literature and the overall non-European—call it mestizo or creole or New World—sensibility. This sensibility is most manifest in the contestatory nature of the literature, its resistance to the establishment and to Eurocentrism, its tenaciously open and embracing definition of culture in the Americas (including the United States and Canada) as incorporating the European background as an important factor in a far more complex and encompassing equation. Included in that equation is bilingualism and biculturalism and a complete range of icons, experiences, lexicon and rhetoric that derive from the African and Amerindian cultures presumed to have been obliterated by melting-pot theorists—and targeted for extinction by nativists and the English-only movement.
More than ninety percent of creative writing by Hispanics in the United States has been produced in Spanish. Up to World War II, most of the short stories, local-color chronicles (crónicas) and poetry were published in Spanish-language newspapers. Longer, more substantial works were issued by publishing houses which flourished in the major Hispanic population centers of Los Angeles, San Antonio and New York. San Antonio alone served as a home to fifteen or sixteen publishing houses during the 1920’s. The Great Depression and the forced repatriation of Mexicans dealt a death blow to much of that industry. After the war, Hispanic communities turned their attention to becoming “legitimate Americans” and began to demand their civil rights on a large, organized scale. The returning veterans struggled to obtain the rights that they had protected by spilling their blood on foreign soil—even while their younger siblings were being assaulted as un-American by the yellow press and rowdy servicemen during the Zoot Suit Riots of Los Angeles. After the war, the conversion to a peace-time economy and meeting the demands of mass production required a larger and more educated work force. Greater access to schooling resulted for Hispanics in the United States. By the 1960’s, there was a critical mass of Hispanic students in college, and they pressed for the next wave of open education and civil rights gains. Along with the greater access to education and the greater representation of Hispanics—if not their culture—in mainstream institutions, came greater use of the English language and greater acceptance and identification with the Anglo-Saxon American tradition and its literature.
Resistance to languages other than English goes back to the nineteenth century in the United States, but it became more intense and aggressive during the McCarthy era and the Cold War, a period when it was a common practice in such states as Texas to punish and fine little children for speaking Spanish on school grounds. To this date, nativists are attempting to outlaw Spanish in government institutions and functions, including elections. The publishing industry in the United States is still predominantly monoliterate, even to the extent of being inaccessible through translation for many of the world’s most important writers. And, of the major European-origin languages, Spanish still remains the least translated in the book industry.
Needless to say, there were few options for Hispanics in a literary world that only published, reviewed, distributed and awarded prizes for books in English. (There is no need to review here all the barriers that still exist for racial minorities in the publishing and the teaching of literature in the United States.) Hispanic authors either had to try to write and get their works published in English or they had to publish abroad. During the 1960’s, two other options surfaced: Spanish-language and bilingual newspapers began to reappear, and small, alternative Hispanic literary magazines and publishing houses were born. Both participated in a civil rights and education movement that gave strength to the resurgence of Hispanic writing in the United States. At the same time, from the post-war period to the present, Hispanic culture in the United States has been renewed and reinforced by an unending wave of Hispanic immigration that has continued to expand the need for print and electronic media in the Spanish language. Although we are still living in an age where to be well published and widely distributed in the United States, one has to write in English, the day is not far off when a novel written in Spanish in New York can be published in Houston and distributed from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Today, it is not difficult to foresee the editing and composition of a Spanish-language magazine in Miami to be downlinked from satellite to printing plants—or even home computers—in Buenos Aires, Lima and Mexico City.
Many Hispanic writers of the United States are not only bilingual, but they are biliterate and write in both English and Spanish, despite the frustrating reality that their works in Spanish may not get published or distributed. This has been the reality for such writers as Lucha Corpi, Roberta Fernández, Roberto Fernández, Rolando Hinojosa, Alejandro Morales, Elias Miguel Muñoz and Tomás Rivera. These writers are among the most familiar to Hispanic communities in the United States, but they are virtually unknown to the mainstream. And, they are probably the writers most representative of the larger Hispanic writing culture that exists today in the United States. There are too many bilingual authors to count, and there are just as many writing only in Spanish as there are those writing only in English. That the names of those who write in English have become better known than those of the Spanish-language authors is attributable to the inability of small or large presses to distribute and sell their works, given that the reviewing media and distributors in this country uniformly deal only with books written in English and that Spanish-language bookstores and distributors only serve as importers, because of the profits to be made through the high mark-ups given books published in Mexico or Argentina. Quite often, librarians and critics have said that U.S. Hispanics no longer speak or write in Spanish. This simply is not true; it is that their works in Spanish do not have access to the publishing, distributing and reviewing networks.
The present anthology, therefore, has the limitation of presenting only a partial segment of the community of Hispanic short fiction writers—those who write in English. And although it is a sampling of writers published over the last decade in a small press, Arte Público Press, it is a segment that is representative of the breadth and depth of Hispanic writing emerging from Cuban American, Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities in the United States. In these pages the reader will not find the picturesque and touristy rendition of our culture that may prevail in more mainstream publications. Rather, here are writers committed to a clear and incisive vision of themselves and their community, knowing full well that they will not be regaled with wealth and celebrity for their commitment to literature, truth and the authenticity of representation that has often eluded a community maligned by stereotypic representation in all of the media.
Whether in Max Martinez’s outrageous challenge of prevalent racial and sexist social structures in rural Texas, or Roberta Fernández’s construction of literary models from women’s handicrafts, or Victor Villaseñor’s veneration of his family’s personal experience tales, or Rolando Hinojosa’s and Roberto Fernández’s linguistic code-switching and literary inversion of Hispanic/Anglo tropes and styles, U.S. Hispanic authors are engaged in an esthetic and epistemological experiment that is preparing the United States for the multicultural, hemispheric reality of the next century. In every respect, Hispanic culture in the United States will and must serve as a bridge to the creation of an hemispheric identity that has been five centuries in the making. The scope of their literary experimentation has implications far beyond the small, independent presses that are struggling to impress upon the national conscience the important role that Hispanics—as well as other racial and cultural minorities—play in redefining our nation’s culture and the role our nation has to play in the newly reconceived and ever-evolving cultural makeup of the world.
That this literature—no matter how humble and reduced the scope of a particular story—can have such weighty implications may be beyond the understanding or even concern of the casual reader. It is the very inter-cultural nature of these works that breaks down barriers of race, language, nationality—the great themes of these last two decades. But these stories can and should be appreciated in a more direct and less self-conscious manner. They are inventive, ingenious, entertaining; they open windows upon scenes rarely represented in most media today.
It is my wish that this somewhat professorial exposition not get in the way of the pure enjoyment of what these writers have to offer the reader. Perhaps I should have placed this paragraph at the beginning of the introduction with instructions for skipping it in order to get to what is really valuable about this book: American writing at its best.