Chicano: A Novel

467 Pages·2005·1.214 MB·English

by  Richard Vasquez

C H I C A N O

• A NO V EL •
R I C H A R D VA S Q U E Z
With a Foreword by Rubén Martínez
To my wife Lucy
. . . without her this would not have been written...
Contents
Foreword
In the early 1970s, my cousin Mario Castaneda often
visited… v
A Note from Sylvia Vasquez
My father, Richard Vasquez, was about thirty years
old when… xxi
PART ONE 3
1 The locomotive roared out of the narrow stone canyon
and… 5
2 The shrill, cold air knifed through his clothing to the… 33
3 Julio Salazar, age thirteen, awoke and stretched lazily
on the… 91
4 Angelina Sandoval arrived in East Los Angeles and
stayed with… 133
5 The few days Pete had spent with his parents in… 157
6 Although Neftali Sandoval was in his late fifties,
he looked… 195
7 All the residents along Corson Street in the Dow
Knolls… 225
8 Julio and Angie’s restaurant had been doing a
substantial business… 265
PART TWO 285
1 On one of the two giant university campuses which
punctuate… 287
2 David Stiver and Mariana Sandoval found all parking
places taken… 319
3 Saturday. Pete and Minnie had gone visiting. Sammy
was off… 369
4 Traffic was light as Sammy approached the border
stop. A… 411
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
by rubén martínez
I
n the early 1970s, my cousin Mario Castaneda often visited
my family’s home in Los Angeles along with his wife and
young children. He ’d arrive, as usual, unannounced (Chi-
cano style, Mario would say), and my parents would hastily
prepare a snack and bring out cans of pop for the kids.
I looked forward to Mario’s visits because he was the only
member of our extended family with long hair and who wore
bell-bottom jeans. He also spoke in a tongue largely foreign to
our household, one that connected us to a particular culture—
Chicano radical chic, let’s say—that my parents could never in-
dulge. “Qué pasa, homes?” Mario would greet me. “How’s my
little primo doing in la escuela?” He delivered lines like these
while cocking his head back slightly to emphasize his Chicano-
cool detachment.
I understood, and I didn’t understand. Mine was a bilingual
family, but our tongues were separated by clear and present
borders: my parents spoke formal Spanish to each other, used
English with us kids, who in turn spoke solely in Spanish
F O R E W O R D
with our grandparents. Mario was the only one to speak both
languages at once. In fact, he was the first person I ever heard
utter the word Chicano, because that ’s what he considered him-
self.
The thing is, Mario was not a Chicano, at least not in the nar-
row sense (a Mexican born in the U.S., that is, a Mexican-
American). Mario was a Salvadoran-American, born in Los
Angeles to parents who’d emigrated from Central America in
the 1940s and settled in the Pico-Union neighborhood west of
downtown. When Mario was growing up Pico-Union was a
largely Chicano barrio, and at Belmont High School he was
weaned on the dominant culture of the neighborhood. (Years
later, ironically, Pico-Union became the hub of Salvadoran
L.A., receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from the
civil wars of the 1980s.)
As for me, growing up with a Salvadoran mom and a
Mexican-American dad in largely Anglo neighborhoods, I
never knew what the hell to consider myself. In elementary
school, I invoked “Spanish” to avoid being a “dirty Mexican.” In
middle school, I said I was Mexican to avoid questions and jokes
about Central America. In high school, I wanted to eschew race
and ethnicity altogether and play rock ‘n’ roll (I suppose I just
wanted to be “white,” or better yet, British). Later, I undertook
“roots” journeys and tried to reclaim my Mexican-ness and
Salvadoran-ness to the exclusion of my American-ness. Today,
I’m just your typical Salvadoran-Mexican-American.
I always had trouble claiming the term Chicano for myself,
though. I clearly recall my Salvadoran grandfather admonish-
ing me, after one of Mario’s visits, to never “speak like that” and
to not be “confused” like my cousin about who I really was
(according to abuelo, simply a Latin American lucky—or
vi
F O R E W O R D
perhaps unlucky—enough to be born in the States). Then there
was the issue of who other Chicanos would recognize as a Chi-
cano. Could a Mexican-Salvadoran-American be a Chicano?
My cousin Mario certainly seemed to evidence that this was a
possibility, but when I was coming of age as a writer in the
1980s, I shuttled frenetically between East Los Angeles (the ul-
timate Chicano barrio) and Pico-Union, between Chicano art
gigs on Brooklyn Avenue (now César Chávez Avenue) and
Central American solidarity meetings on 7th Street. I earnestly
tried to “belong” in both realms, wanted to inhabit them simul-
taneously in fact. Largely from this tension came the words that
I wrote back then and indeed, the words that I write today.
With luck, middle age grants belated answers to the existen-
tial quandaries that torture the young, and in recent years I’ve
been given the simple gift of this idea: that I was Chicano all
along, precisely because I was Mexican and Salvadoran and
American all along as I grew up between Spanish and English,
on the political and cultural border that divides—and yet does
not separate—the U.S. from the Southern lands that reach to
Tierra del Fuego. Mario—who went on to become an activist-
teacher, fulfilling the basic Chicano tenet of giving back to the
community that formed you—taught me that Chicano-ness
has less to do with nationality than it does with the deconstruc-
tion of the very idea of a fixed identity. Chicanos and Chicanas
are always trespassing across territorial divides, linguistic and
political and even historical markers. It’s an exhilarating space
to inhabit, and also a very troubling one, because it seems that
many, if not most, people in the world still cling to the notion
that their lives have singular meanings in the cultural, or na-
tional, sense. There is nothing singular or unitary about being
Chicano.
vii
F O R E W O R D
Conservative commentators in recent years have feasted on
a caricature of Chicanos as crazed nationalists hellbent on re-
conquista. And while it is true that separatist notions were popu-
lar in the early days of the movimiento (notions that owe as
much to Malcolm X as to firebrand Chicano nationalists), Chi-
canismo was always a much larger realm, one that could never
be completely circumnavigated by its theorists. Indeed, the
movement was in many ways merely retracing the path of an
epic journey across generations, the evidence of which was in
the language, music, food, style, and even religion of the mil-
lions of pilgrims who’d undertaken that journey. Yes, Chican-
ismo was and is a political movement. And it was also always a
way of being in which a culture not only flowed from history,
but made it. So if you’re looking for Chicano history today, you
can find it in an activist manifesto as much as in an East L.A.
homegirl’s slang, the chrome-gleam of a Chevy Impala’s rims,
a rapper’s bilingual rhapsody, or even in my Salvadoran-
American cousin Mario’s sense of place in the world.
Maybe in the end there is something essentially American
about being Chicano. Wasn’t it our great bard that said “I am
large, I contain multitudes”? Walt Whitman: the first Chicano.
P
erhaps more than any Chicano writer in his time, Richard
Vasquez made a herculean attempt not only to “explain his
people” to others, but to reconcile the contradictory signs
clashing in the soul of Chicanismo itself. And of course he
failed in this regard. When the novel was published, Chicanos
were not magically re-cast in the white American imagination,
nor were Chicanos suddenly relieved of their identity ques-
viii