1In the widely acclaimed interview with Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space,” Homi Bhabha contemplates the issue of identity formation as “a symbol forming, subject-constituting and interpellative practice.” (210) Taking a post-colonial and post-structuralist stance, Bhabha attempts to decipher identity as a “third space” in-between cultures, or as a process of hybridity which “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.” (211) In line with Bhabha’s hybridization and the elusiveness of cultural identity, self-formation appears to be a fragmented and most certainly non-fossilized notion. The interventions of a multilayered daily experience and the matrices of difference in a socio-culturally demarcated world (re)direct the interpretation of identity to the realm of constant reconfiguration. Indeed, the plethora of philosophical hermeneutics perplexes the sense of selfhood as they interpret identity from various angles: temporal, spatial, cultural, socio-political and/or economic. However, the theoretical residue in most queries over the notion of selfhood is that the depiction of mundane experience in literature stands as a trope of a transcendent understanding of life. Especially in politically engagé literature or in the genre of autobiography, the understanding of individual identity elucidates meaningful explanations of collective experience and communal being. In this context, attempts at deciphering the puzzles of identity formation can offer viable interpretations to broader social crises. And despite the fact that politicized literary endeavours often opt for arbitrary generalizations or homogenizations of collective experience, they are still bold contemplations of the enigmas of social being.
2For the purposes of this paper, self-mutation and the pastiche quality of behavioral norms can best be interpreted in the context of liminal identities. Liminalities arise from within interstices, displacements and overlappings: they thrive in the border zones of existence, legitimate the praxis of marginal standpoints, and allow the liminal subject to merge and juggle with otherwise antithetical theories of existence. Liminality is a complex notion, which entails the effects of socio-cultural syncretism, the means of resistance to the empowered, and a forceful thrust towards the formation of new ideas, symbols, models and beliefs. In order to pursue a freer existence, or “freedom from a whole heap of institutional obligations,” the liminal self-identity undergoes a threshold phase of existence (Turner, 36). This involves a tripartite process: a reconsideration of the past, an evaluation of the present and a visualization of the future. Moreover, since liminalities are attempts at self-governing, individuals who escape a specific socio-political emplacement in order to withstand a different self-representation are also voicing an outcry or a manifesto against authoritarian world-affairs. And since the liminal phase takes place along the lines of a person’s cognition processes, then it is both a solitary attempt to define the self and a communal act embodying subtle political dimensions. The aim of this paper is to explore the hermeneutics of selfhood under conditions of gross socio-political injustice, and to detect the rites of passage to self-conceptualization as unravelled in two Chicano texts: Tomás Rivera’s “…y no se lo tragó la tierra” (1971), and Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993). The purpose of this study is to show how two different literary genres, namely a collection of vignettes and a book-length poem, tackle the same problematics of adolescent liminalities through the prism of Chicano experience in the borderlands. The two masterful texts present truthful and shocking testimonials of the inner conflicts endured by Mexican-American adolescents, who either toil on the soil, carving out a third space of existence among migrant campesinos, or experience marginalization in the back-row seat of a movie theatre. Rivera and Villanueva attempt bold explorations of the self-regulatory rites to ethnic identity, and also provide the readers with stunning insights into the liminal aspects of identity, as realized in contexts of discrimination and social oppression, and always en route to an esoteric understanding of life.
- 1 Subsequent references to “...y no se lo tragó la tierra” will be extracted from the edition (...)
3Tomás Rivera (1935-1984) is among the best-known Chicano intellectuals, whose work was the first to escape the confines of the Mexican American community and to receive wide critical acclaim. Rivera was born into a family of farm workers and raised in Texas. Consequently, his early experiences were inextricably related to the labor migration of campesinos. The American Southwest is the primary locale of Rivera’s fiction, and the hardships of Chicano farm laborers provide his recurrent subject matter. Nevertheless, despite the homogeneity in Rivera’s choice of characters and setting, there is a pervasive complexity in the thematic concerns running through the bulk of his literary work, which has been construed as the outcome of “an antithesis of individualism and the affirmation of the collective self.” (Sommers, 105) Rivera relates the individual mind to a deep desire for collective identification, but not in the rigid politicization invested in the latter term, where one makes conscious decisions to align with a specific peripheral group against the hegemony. Instead, Rivera’s sense of identity expresses a more philosophical insight, where the individual negotiates the self through his/her contemplation of collective history and experience. This contemplation is interpreted as a quest for the reconceptualization of the self against the background of engraved traditions and enforced stereotypes. Along these lines, the primary intention of this paper is to explore the social tensions Rivera evokes in his search for self-understanding and in his pilgrimage to collective identification, as realized in the thematic concerns and literary inventions of Tierra’s narrative structure.1
- 2 There is a notable non-uniformity in the critical response to Tierra, in relation t (...)
- 3 My reference here is to Juan Rodríguez’s harsh and inaccurate attack on Rivera in the (...)
4No one can deny the impact of Tomás Rivera’s award winning Tierra in the formation of the Chicano literary canon. Published in 1971 as the winner of the 1970 Quinto Sol prize, Tierra gave impetus and recognition to the aesthetic and ethical concerns of Chicano writing, constituted a major break from the more common la raza protest literature of the 1960s, and is probably one of the texts written by a Mexican American that has most widely evoked critical response. In an attempt to create a new form of fiction, which departs from conventional literary structures, Rivera compiled fourteen vignettes with their accompanying thirteen anecdotes, framed by the central character of a boy protagonist who appears in the first short narrative (“The Lost Year”) and in the final one (“Under the House”).2 Haunted by the inability to comprehend life in the labyrinth of time, the boy protagonist finds refuge underneath a house. Keeping an embryonic posture, where la tierra (the soil) becomes the fons et origo, the boy protagonist pursues a symbolic journey to self-knowledge, while the vignettes and anecdotes of Tierra become frequent stops in the collective life of Chicanismo. These stops reflect the degradation of subordinated Mexican Americans across the US: el pueblo’s experiences in the fields, in the barrios or on the road in search of work. But these narratives also portray a peculiar cultural identity of Chicanismo, and subtly suggest the political activism which springs out of the need to comprehend the depth of one’s personal and collective identity. Thus, although the boy protagonist’s isolation under the house has been inaccurately construed as a separatist act from the community’s material reality, this paper maintains that the boy’s confinement constitutes a political decision to experience a short-term detachment from organized social relations in order to re-emerge as a mighty carrier of collective knowledge.3 Concurrently, Tierra becomes a struggle for selfhood and a landmark text for the nascent Chicano “literature of liberation” (Grajeda, 113).
5In “The Lost Year,” the boy protagonist is in a confused state of mind. He tries to “remember and just about [when] he thought everything was clearing up some, he would be at a loss for words.” (111) This numb feeling is interpreted as a hallucinatory or liminal state where the boy’s conscious and subconscious intelligences fuse. True enough, the boy-protagonist cannot tell whether his experiences at this point are factual or just an incident in a dream-world. It is “almost always [like] a dream in which he would suddenly awaken and then realize that he was really asleep. Then he wouldn’t know whether what he was thinking had happened or not.” (111) In this semi-rational state, he hears voices calling him “by his name but when he turned his head to see who was calling, he would make a complete turn, and there he would end up in the same place.” (idem) The boy undergoes a bizarre process towards a discovery of an existential nature, but every start in this direction points to himself. In fact, everything happens in his own mind, and even the calling of his name does not come from outside. In this context, all the stories and vignettes are essentially solitary performances of a communal impetus, with the introductory frame-piece setting the inward mood of the book.
6The concluding frame-piece, “Under the House,” releases the boy protagonist from his quasi-trance of asceticism beneath the house. The cumulative effect of Tierra culminates in a regenerative and optimistic realization as the boy
had discovered something. To discover and to rediscover and to synthesize. To relate this entity with that entity, and that entity with still another, and finally relating everything with everything else. That was what he had to do, that was all. And he became even happier. (177)
7Having paved the way for his people, the boy achieves the sublime knowledge he has sought and is now prepared to convey it to the world. This tentative rite to self-awareness is a metaphor of the incubating Chicanismo, as the self-cognizance the boy achieves can grow further or rather it can multiply and opt for universal transcendence. By following the paradigm of the boy protagonist, who crawls out of the darkness under the house, climbs a tree and waves at someone perched on a palm tree on the horizon, Mexican Americans can also forge ethnic solidarity and a unique mode of communication. It is immaterial whether the boy protagonist waves to himself in a self-reflexive “projection forward in time” or whether he symbolically discovers the first like-minded person in a long chain (J. Rodríguez, 130). The significance lies in the fact that the boy protagonist’s discovery can stretch across time and space. And the triumphant identity awareness the boy hero attains in the last vignette signals a sense of optimism that Mexican Americans will reach a sense of communality upon reading the final page of Tierra.
8The cathartic last vignette creates a therapeutic effect and offers a sense of release from tension. But the state of calmness at the denouement of “Under the House” presupposes a rising action and a climax. As for the rising action, it is realized in the rapid narrative succession of the stories and vignettes between the introductory frame-piece, “The Lost Year,” and the climactic moment in the next to the last short narrative, “When We Arrive.” Each of these stories or vignettes enhances Rivera’s central thematic concerns. Put differently, each story focuses on a particular theme that also appears peripherally in other stories or vignettes. Rivera’s ingenious technique is to recycle his themes, thus creating an aura of continuity among el pueblo and promoting his people’s intellectual emancipation. The climactic moment is recognized in the vignette “When We Arrive” in which the boy protagonist synthesizes individual accounts of migrant campesinos into a collective experience. The thoughts of the various Chicano farm workers on a broken-down van form the chorus in the perception of the boy protagonist, who then transforms into an “intellectual hero,” one who grasps the “power of thought. [...] [His thoughts] generate further thoughts, which in turn lead to more thoughts etc.” (J. Rodríguez, 136) Thinking per se is power, and the boy protagonist resolves problems of selfhood with a Nietzschean will-to-power. However, the intellectual boy hero moves a step further, as he picks up the pieces of scattered life stories in “When We Arrive” and reassembles them into a communal jigsaw. Quite similarly to the poststructuralist bricoleur, the boy protagonist merges short monologues into a coherent whole. In its essence, “When We Arrive” attacks isolation and celebrates collectivization. And the boy protagonist emulates a liberal humanist who entrusts the realization of his vision for communality to the power of the individual mind.
9The theme of collectivization is further enhanced through the character of the wandering poet Bartolo. Preceding the last vignette, the character of Bartolo appears in an anecdote selling poems to Mexicanos who have returned from up north. As a vate (bard) he is very popular “because the names of the people of the town appeared in his poems.” (199) Bartolo is a street corner philosopher: not only does he recite the forgotten history of Mexican farm workers, but he also preaches the need to disperse the words of el pueblo’s social understanding “to read the poems out loud because the spoken word is the seed of love in darkness.” (199, emphasis added) In this instance, “darkness” is a symbolic state of loneliness or of a complete lack of communication, whereas the “spoken word” is the only panacea for el pueblo’s misery. Bartolo serves a double intellectual function: first, he represents the long-standing Mexican oral tradition, in which villancicos (poetic compositions of a religious nature) and corridos (narrative ballads) provide Chicanos with emotional impetus, folkloric identity and historical continuity; second, Bartolo symbolizes the need to use popular poetic forms politically, since reciting becomes a communal fiesta for downtrodden Chicanos and a call for collective action. Through the character of Bartolo, Rivera accords oral tradition a significant role in the formation of the community’s cultural identity. However, Rivera suggests that rigid cultural practices can intimidate people or halt the wished-for liberal definition of the self. A recurrent theme of Tierra is that the cultural past can retard one’s effort to exceed his/her potential, and thus that culture often becomes another master narrative or a strategy of containment, which has to be demystified in tune with people’s attempts at emancipation. In the story “A Silvery Night,” Rivera describes a boy’s determination to summon the devil. The boy’s curiosity makes him bold enough to step into darkness and head for the center of a knoll. Nature echoes the hero’s yearning for a revelation, since “everything was clear and it even smelled like day.” (139) The storyline unfolds at midnight, which is symbolic of a liminal temporal zone, when darkness merges with light, or a calendar day draws to its end and the future commences. Likewise, the boy is just about to expel an old, conditioned identity and attain a renewed self-awareness. All alone on top of the knoll, he curses the devil but nothing happens. The discovery he makes of the devil’s non-existence acquires diachronic significance: “There was no devil. [...] No, there’s no devil. There isn’t.” (141, emphasis added) The boy concocts a novel culture without the overwhelming fear of the devil, thus extending his cultural epiphany to the past, the present and the future. The boy’s transition from Simple Past to Simple Present is only symbolic of a cultural discovery, which shatters temporal barriers and reaches for the millenary. In a confused state of mind, both “disillusioned and a little brave,” the boy heads back to his house (141). The hero’s enlightenment prepares the readers for another revelation: on the way home he realizes that the sole presence in the woods is his own “voice”. And this is the greatest discovery he makes. In other words, he construes the devil as a superstitious anathema, and reinvents the self as the sole nucleus of cognizance. The narrating voice becomes pathetically fallacious and the boy’s self-confidence is so radiant that it becomes reflected onto the natural surroundings. Everything now seems peaceful and calm, and, at the conclusion of the story, the little boy falls asleep “gazing at the moon as it jumped through the clouds and the trees, as if it were extremely content about something.” (142) The hovering presence of demons or divine spirits is dissolved, while only nature and the boy’s renewed self-awareness dominate the scenery.
10Apart from displacing myths and superstitious rituals, a recurrent theme in Tierra is the reconsideration of mexicano traditional religious practices, most strongly elaborated in the story “And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.” In this vignette, a boy hero witnesses the deprivation of his family. First, his aunt dies of tuberculosis, his uncle spits blood and their children are scattered among the relatives. Then, the hero’s father suffers sunstroke while working in the fields. During all this suffering, the hero feels a rush of exasperation and anger, but does not know whom to blame. Only when his parents clamor “for God’s mercy” does the boy realize that “God doesn’t care about us.” (146) In a state of frustration, the child questions the very existence of a superior benevolent being: “Tell me, Mother, why? Why us, buried in the earth like animals with no hope for anything? You know the only hope we have is coming out here every year. And like you yourself say, only death brings rest.” (147) He even reviles his mother for entrusting life in God and cherishing hallucinations such as “the poor go to heaven.” (147) The next day the boy hero “began the day’s labor” along with his brothers and sisters (148). After a while, his little brother, who is only nine years old, suffers sunstroke. Consumed by helplessness, the boy hero asks himself “why”, and this question keeps reverberating in his mind (149).
11Unable to find an answer, he becomes furious and curses God, thus committing the ultimate sin for the pious, religious Mexican American community. Having been subjected to cultural conditioning for years, he instantly feels that “the earth [opens] up to devour him.” (149) However, he realizes that the ground stays solid, his fury becomes self-confidence and he “feels at peace as never before.” (150) The boy hero of “... And the Earth Did not Devour Him” is the eldest son of a family of migrant campesinos, and on a symbolic paradigm he occupies the liminal ground between the broken-down older generation and the younger one of confident Chicanos. In other words, the hero is a philosophical pioneer, one who opens up the cognitive frontiers for a better future. And the deconstruction of a godly figure is the boy’s rebellion against ignorance and passivity. Similarly to the boy protagonist in “Under the House,” this boy-hero considers revealing the non-existence of God to his mother. He hesitates though and decides “to keep it a secret for a while.” (150) The boy in this story is another character in Tierra who resorts to philosophical solitude. Yet, Rivera’s optimistic tone of voice implies that it is only a matter of time before the boy hero shares his revelations with the members of his community. By renouncing the godly false emblem of benevolence and hope, the hero makes the first step into a new phase of cognition. The boy’s philosophical insight is the fertile ground on which a new perception of life will evolve and then disseminate within the Chicano community.
12Except for religiosity and superstitions that torment Rivera’s young heroes, Tierra’s children are solitary characters because of their low self-esteem amidst the dominant socio-cultural forces. The hero in “It’s That It Hurts” undergoes a degrading experience when his parents encourage his schooling only to place him at the heart of Anglo racism. The school environment scars the boy with a series of traumas: when he arrives at the building, a nurse asks him to undress and then “examine[s] his behind [...] and head” leaving the boy ashamed, while in class he is ostracized “when they put [him] in the corner apart from everyone.” (124) Illiteracy becomes the boy’s worst nightmare since the whole class laughs at his inability to read. And when he stands up for himself and defends his battered dignity against an Anglo schoolboy’s racist remarks, he is expelled from school. The whole story is a retrospective account of the young hero’s recent traumatic experiences at school. It is the frantic soliloquy of a distressed child who wants to wrestle with his turbulent thoughts and resolve the tensions in his mind. Unfortunately, the boy gets entangled up in feelings of guilt towards his parents: they are the ones who cherish the dream that he will become a telephone operator and they even “pray God helps him finish school” for the fulfilment of their dream. The irony is that the parents’ dual illusion of an escape from the fields and a job, as a telephone operator, originates in Hollywood movies, the ultimate industry of image-fabrication. The fictional world on the silver screen becomes a source of hope and optimism for this handful of wretched Chicanos in “It’s That It Hurts.” In other words, the boy is encouraged to pursue an education for the wrong reasons. All these thoughts fluctuate in his mind until halfway home he stops at a cemetery, enchanted by the place’s tranquillity. The boy hero is driven to estrangement as he gradually distances himself from the rest of his family’s expectations. All alone in the cemetery, he ponders on how his family will react to the news of his expulsion from school. Fear overcomes the boy at the thought of being sent to reform school, and he even considers lying to his parents and keeping everything a secret. The lie resonates in his mind: “Maybe they didn’t expel me. Sure they did.” (125, original emphasis). This soliloquy resembles a dialogue between the boy’s rebellious conscious mind and subconscious fears, which places his experience in a dream world. Thus, the young hero becomes entangled in the dialectics of reality versus illusion, self-assertion versus self-depreciation. Nevertheless, he gradually realizes that it is his parents’ dream he is fulfilling whereas he hates reading to his padrino and does not tolerate submissiveness. The last catch phrase of the story “No, yeah” signifies the hero’s denial of the lies, not just the ones spoken to himself, but also the ones imposed on him by a delusory cultural environment (128). Put differently, it is “no” to a fallible past, and “yeah” to a rational perception of a future self-realization.
- 4 A comparison is being made here between Bertolt Brecht’s social protest Epic Theatre and Ri (...)
13Tierra provides a faithful insight into the everyday life of rural Mexican Americans. The text is comprised of realistic snapshots drafted by the boy protagonist, who also serves as a thematic binding agent. Through this character, Rivera provides Tierra with cohesiveness: the little child frames the novel and ties the in-between individual and seemingly unrelated stories into a narrative whole of Chicano la vida. Even though it is unclear whether the boy appears in the book outside the introductory and concluding stories, it can be claimed that whatever the numerous characters – the majority being children – experience in the body of the novel, the boy-protagonist experiences as well. The young child embodies the collective consciousness of Mexican Americans and constructs a “we-identity [...] through some sort of psychological or conceptual coming together of individuals, each of whom is pre-equipped with a personal identity.” (Mennell, 176) In the solitude of his mind, the boy protagonist re-enacts familiar tragedies, whether personally witnessed or heard via oral tradition. The swift succession of vignettes and the accelerating tension created by the intervening anecdotes are two of Rivera’s ingenious techniques which give close-ups of the Chicano plight. More explicitly, the rapid display of the misfortunes of life creates a Brechtian shockwave, leaving the readers reflective and critical of the storyline.4 The alienation effect achieved by the loosely related episodes and the interspersed enigmatic anecdotes is a warning against the mere identification with the story, and becomes a subtle summoning to action. Rivera seems to underline that what is repeatedly experienced can become a routine, no matter how tragic it initially appears. Thus, he assumes the political role of the intellectual who dispels the community’s automated life practices in order “to uncover the causal complex in society – to unmask the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the rulers.” (Brecht, 424) And the intention of Tierra is to sow seeds of political awareness, to “unmask” the causes of Chicano subordination, and to promote a sense of collective (re)action against the mainstream.
14To conclude, it must be highlighted that children are Rivera’s archetypal figures of resistance who embody a dual symbolic potential: first, they are most likely to perpetuate a socio-cultural legacy; and second, they are the ones who can rebel against “the often invisible social and economic forces that govern their lives, the institutions, and the physical environment in which they live.” (Grajeda, 118) Children experience the tensions created “between the opposing values of resignation and rebellion.” (ibidem, 119) In short, children can grow up to be either passive victims or active reformers. Rivera attaches great importance to childhood because he considers it the most promising phase in a person’s life cycle. Youth has the advantage of not being burdened with years of deprivation or cultural enforcement. Having witnessed the injustices of life, the children in Tierra can assume the power to react “with pride and arrogance, and perhaps even insolence.” (Villarreal, 167) This handful of children undertake the demystification of all the futile, false and repressive myths of Chicano culture. And their determination to recover a lost selfhood turns them into ruthless or even blasphemous repudiators: they question the validity of superstition, myth, religiosity and submissiveness – values that have long been revered by their Chicano forebears. In short, they deconstruct traditions and strive for the establishment of a renewed Chicano selfhood. And upon denouncing timidity, they not only unravel the overpowering Anglo hegemony, but more importantly they lay bare the irrationality of previous Mexican American generations in enduring deprivation and embracing the wrong cultural practices for too long.
An engagé poem is a call to action and a reminder […] that you can curse the darkness, but nothing nothing will change if you don’t yourself light a candle. Therefore, […] a poem is more than simply “political” for the very lines you quote: “I am free to act, but I must act to be free,” which dramatically underscore the existential will. (Villanueva “The Breath …,” 176)
15MELUS Volume 35, No. 1 features Tino Villanueva’s response to some of the undercurrents in the composition of pervasively self-reflexive poetry. Villanueva’s interview with Professor A. Robert Lee commences with a straightforward and solid identification of the poet as a Chicano coming out of the Southwest borderlands. The questions posed by the interviewer trace the poet’s tentative steps to academic education, and allow the reader to discern that fragile balance numerous Mexican Americans keep through incommensurable texts of selfhood. Born into two socio-culturally conflicting worlds, Chicano and Anglo, Villanueva is aware of tiptoeing on treacherous social and academic grounds. Due to his personal experience of living in bilingualandia, Villanueva has learned how to juggle with two different socio-politically invested languages, and how to code-switch in his attempts at academic excellence and daily social integration. Villanueva identifies his poems as “the hybridized, interlingual, bisensitive, binary, mestizo, macaronic type of poems in which […] two languages contain each other and carry the poems along their final conclusions.” ( “The Breath…”, 170) Thus, he interprets the articulation of poetic logos as a cognizant self-positioning, and as the carving out of a personal space, in which the poet is called upon to delve into his/her spatial confines and cultural history. Furthermore, Villanueva glorifies the power of conscious recollection and deems a poet’s memory archives as a vibrating and powerful source of inspiration. In his own words:
Make memory serve as an inspiration – memory as muse, and ultimately, memory as identity. […] [M]emory, for me, becomes a useful device to go back in time to recover a history which would otherwise be lost – a personal or communal history, no matter how lacklustre or unsettling that history might have been. (176)
16For Villanueva, a poem is the outcome of solitary reflection into collective past experiences. Far from aestheticizing his poetic voice, Villanueva construes a poem as a hybrid genre per se because it is the artistic prodigy of reminiscence into material history.
17Drawing upon the memories of his adolescent years in the American Southwest, Villanueva’s book-length poem Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) is a masterful account of the individual and collective anxieties endured by Chicanos/as across the USA. The poem is an autobiographic plunge into those memory plateaus which illuminate “the act of critical consciousness, an act of knowing oneself as a product of historical processes that can be interrogated, interpreted and perhaps even changed.” (Saldívar, 170) Vividly reminiscent of his rite of passage to social epiphany at the age of fourteen, Villanueva testifies in verse to his personal trauma of being unexpectedly introduced to the unjust manifestations of racism. Villanueva recollects his exposure to the ways of a ruthlessly racist society, while sitting in the back-row seat of the Holiday Theatre in 1956. The screening of George Stevens’s classic movie Giant constitutes the liminal juncture in the young speaker’s passage to maturity and self-awareness. And the experience at the movie theatre of a café owner’s “gruff voice coming with the deep-dyed colors of the screen” provides the incentive for the eventual rise of the poet’s voice (12). For Villanueva, the climactic moment of the film is played out in the next-to-the-end scene of the three-and-a-half hour Hollywood film, when Sarge, the Anglo owner of the roadside café in Texas, employs unlawful physical and verbal abuse against an old vaquero and two Mexican American women. The three characters enter the establishment for an innocent outing to a roadside diner, and are seemingly unsuspecting of the eruption of sheer animosity that is about to be released. The scene at the eatery depicts familiar images of an old Mexican American man “stooped in the ruts of old age,” his wife and another woman “in uneventful street clothes.” (20) Almost unaware of the ingrained racism in post-war America, the young adolescent viewer revels in the projection of the three Chicanos and instinctively identifies with them. He retrieves familiar frames of hard toiling Chicanos who “Show a tired look as if from a journey begun long ago/ […] A woman I could be nephew/ To and a couple old enough to call me grandson.” (idem) The three Mexican American characters are on such a recognizable cognitive tableau to young Villanueva’s perception mechanisms that “they go unnoticed.” (20) However, the womb of familiarity is abruptly breached with Sarge’s racist intervention, which displaces the Chicano element to the margins of society.
18As an adolescent viewer, Villanueva is consumed by the character of Sarge, the White American restaurant owner who dominates the poet’s memories “with too much muscle,/ Too much brawn” (37). Rising “stout and unpleased from behind his counter,” Sarge overwhelms the speaker with his sweeping force of aggression (11). The racist Anglo character despotically patrols the polarized setting of the counter, as if symbolically guarding a nation’s geographic perimeters, or defending an imagined social borderline between white and non-white subjectivities within the USA.
On this earth where
Animals have crawled into men, Sarge is tall
Among them, well past six-feet, oppressive
Everywhere, in a white shirt, sleeves rolled
Up that declare the beefiness of his arms
Which, if extended, could reach across bodies
Of water. He stands there like God of the
Plains country, heavy-footed like a troglodyte,
And what he says he says with the weight of
A dozen churches behind him: ‘You’re in the
Wrong place, amigo. Come on, let’s get out of
Here. Vamoose. Àndale. (25)
19Sarge’s exclusionary practices in the café represent how “the processes of control are manifested in the exclusion of those people who are judged to be deviant, imperfect or marginal.” (Sibley, xv) The owner’s eerie figure resembles a white Goliath in an uneven battle with feeble Other subjectivities and betrays the ferocity of his austere demeanour. And strengthened with “the weight of a dozen churches behind him,” Sarge stands almighty with the lingering echo of institutionalized racism in the background.
20When Sarge defines the ethnic perimeters of his roadside eatery by refusing service to Chicanos, he symbolically expels the spatial and cultural presence of Mexican Americans from mainstream society. By doing so, he attests to the marginality of Chicanismo, carves a sharp borderline between Anglo citizenship and the Other, and transposes the adolescent speaker to the exigencies of ethnic representation in the context of sharp racism. In its essence, the scene at the restaurant is an enactment of a social crisis based on racial classifications. Yet, the scene’s profound significance lies in the fact that it enables young Villanueva to make a transition to a twilight zone betwixt and between social and/or racial categorizations. In different terms, a White American’s wrath exerted against peaceful Chicanos may be a threadbare story in barrios, barbershop shops and resolana gatherings, but in Scene from The Movie GIANT it establishes that turning point in Villanueva’s self-cognition processes. The scene at the eatery marks that temporal juncture in which the adolescent viewer transgresses the confines of a segregated barrio existence, enters liminal anxieties of racial regulation and becomes witness to the ambiguities of adult life:
With orange soda and scoops of popcorn,
I have taken the vague wisdom of the
Body to my favourite last row seat at the
Movie house. It is 1956 … […]
I am fourteen and the
Muscles come to a stop: From the spell
Of too much make-believe world that is
Real […]. (27)
21The controversial scene at the eatery enables the young speaker to encounter some of the perplexing dilemmas arising from within the hazy boundaries between adult life and childhood. The café incident disrupts the young speaker’s utopian world view of an egalitarian enclave in the barrio, and introduces for the first time the discursive realities of institutionalized racism. In short, the young viewer at the Holiday Theatre crosses the threshold from adolescent ignorance into adult ontological queries. By entering the blurry liminality between naïveté and self-cognizance, the fourteen-year-old Villanueva displaces himself from the safety net of childhood to some of the hazardous esoteric understandings of society.
22Sarge’s violent reaction is an expression of deeply rooted racist assumptions, as he uninhibitedly refuses to serve the three Mexican Americans on the grounds of their racial difference. The discourse of difference underpins most of the Scene from The Movie GIANT, and it comprises the structural foundation of the poem’s thematic concerns. Much in accordance with Ramón Saldívar’s premise that the majority of the Chicano literary canon is embedded with dialectics of difference, Villanueva’s poetic composition “positions [itself] against both the overt and the indirect components of social power.” (24) The magnanimity of the poem is realized in the consciousness of difference it unravels, and in the way it attempts a defensive response to Anglo structures of oppression. Difference ignites chain-reactions in the poem, with the first one being Sarge’s raw outburst of discrimination. However, the significance of the café scene is that it triggers a profound transformation in the mental processes of the “thin, flickering, helpless, light, local looking, unthought of at fourteen” speaker (12). Although the poem commences with a concise description of the poet as a plain young adolescent, it simultaneously marks the point of departure from ignorance towards the emergence of a new self-identity.
23The end of the film screening asserts a symbolic rebirth in the class and race consciousness of the speaker, and the rise of an awakened self. The speaker retraces his “journey home” in a state of limbo: “my head buzzing/I arose in penumbra, vexed at the unwinding/course of truth and was now lost in my steps.” (41) Feeling numb after his introduction to racial subordination, the fourteen-year-old speaker commences his Odyssey home. His return is marked by the movie’s vigor in the young speaker’s psyche, and by the activation of his transformation as a signifying agent, one who displaces and defamiliarizes opaque aspects of daily experience:
Each neighbour,
in the ease of the afternoon
serenely grown out of something forgetful,
looks through me,
believing life goes on as before
as I pass by.
The trees the houses among them
see me staring me in muteness;
from where they stand – houses, trees,
neighbors – they cannot know
the sudden intake of all breath,
a sigh I myself do not comprehend. (43)
24This fragment of the poem signifies a symbolic mutation caused by a transition from superficiality to an in-depth perception of social being. Although the young speaker retraces a familiar route back home and revisits recognizable spatial and human images of barrio life, his cognition is enlightened with racial awareness. The young boy enters a new phase of understanding because “[s]omething from the movie screen had/dropped into life, his small shield of faith/no longer with him.” (44)
25If “deep structures of prejudice, contempt and aversion characterize the response of the centre to the marginal,” then Sarge’s apprehension of Mexican Americans in his establishment is proof of a totalitarian Anglo supremacy, which rules out the presence of Mexicanos (Rutherford, 23). As a corollary, the shocking scene in the movie testifies to Sarge’s rejection of racial difference as legitimate and righteous in a white nationalistic world order. And the Anglo character’s exclusionary stance is an exemplary indication of the dominant consciousness in post-war USA. On the other hand, the scene inspires Villanueva to an award-winning poetic composition, which is notably invested with socio-political undercurrents of Chicano pride. Should we recall the old Marxist equation of the chain reaction following praxis, the antipraxis to the Anglo character’s racist abuse of Mexican Americans is Villanueva’s insightful penetration into the incident from an ethnic standpoint. Thus, Sarge’s abuse stands as an emblematic moment in the emergence of social mobilization and in the synthesis of politically engaged verse:
[…] Never shall I
Forget, never how quickly his hand threw my
Breathing off – how quickly he plopped the
Hat heavily askew once more on the old
Man’s head, seized two fistful of shirt and
Coat and lifted his slight body like nothing,
A no-thing, who could have been any of us,
Weightless nobodies bronzed by real-time far
Off somewhere […]. (34)
26Having watched the scene, the speaker enters his own liminal rite to collectivization, and immerses himself in ethnic appreciation. The threshold passage to fully grasping the complexities of life is enacted when the silver screen makes him witness to Anglo ferocity against Chicanos.
27Tino Villanueva’s poetic diction becomes a trope of mature political awareness. Nonetheless, the critical attempt to construe the personal and political rigor of the café scene should consider the temporal distance of a forty-year lapse to the present. Cultural values and social structures are subject to transmutation, a fact which can account for many of the varied reactions Sarge’s racist outburst may launch. Differently put, the scene deploys the consistent and dominant Anglo system of values in the 1950s, whereas from the present temporal prism, this societal creed would be adamantly condemned by the majority of civil society. Real life instances evoke varied reactions across a temporal line: the poet himself witnessed the scene at the eatery in 1956, shoved it in his subconscious mind, returned to it in 1973 as a student in Boston, only to complete the poetic composition of Scene from the Movie GIANT in 1993. Villanueva’s poetic undertaking is a regression in temporal dimensions in order to record candidly the interconnected experiences of marginalization and discrimination. Claiming its distinguished space in the Chicano literary canon as the recipient of the American Book Award in 1994, Villanueva’s book-length poem is a narrative which provides its readers significant representations of the historical dramas endured by Mexican Americans in the middle of the twentieth century. Finally, as Mexican American life experiences often intersect, consciously or not, with the numerous experiences of disenfranchisement and exploitation in the present setting of a global village, and “with the interests of what has sometimes been referred to as the Third World,” it is safe to contend that Tino Villanueva’s masterful poetry is a dedicated and bold incursion into the lives of all peripheral peoples (Saldívar, 24).
28Tomás Rivera’s “… y no se lo tragó la tierra” and Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie GIANT are revolutionary repudiations of fossilized doctrines and powerful literary detours into Chicano collective experience. They stand out as differential narrative statements because “difference […] is always perceived as the effect of the other.” (Rutherford, 10) The scenes recreated in Rivera’s farm locale or Villanueva’s movie theater allow the two Chicano literary voices to emerge potent both on a personal and a communal level: on the one hand, the individual enters the public sphere and dismantles the hallucinations of an isolated existence; on the other hand, as dedicated members of a racialized group, Rivera and Villanueva resume the responsibility of fighting the systematic subjugation of Chicanismo. Personal change entails a transition to conditions of possibility, and these pivotal literary figures refute enforced histories of disempowerment by “breaking […] hierarchies and dismantling [the] language of polarity and its material structures of inequality and discrimination.” (idem, 10) When the young heroes in “… y no se lo tragó la tierra” and Scene from the Movie GIANT attest to the “second skin” growing on them, they simultaneously enter the liminality of hovering between alternate phases of existence (GIANT, 27). Moreover, their liminal existence introduces a process of defamiliarization, which includes a displacement of a person’s cognition from the habitual realm of being to novel sensations. The distinctive effect achieved in those characters’ attempts at defamiliarization is one of self-awakening to the less automated routines of everyday experience. Thus, the transparent elements of tradition and daily experience, as thematized by Rivera and Villanueva, resume their forceful social presence, and become both insightful philosophical interpretations and magnets for political investment.