Chicano Identity in Chicano Fiction

University of Aberdeen

Chicano Identity in Chicano Fiction

by

Markus Widmer

In this essay, I will address the question of Chicano identity by investigating two very different texts, that both deal with a quest for identity in a Mexican-American context: Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. I will first discuss the contextual differences between the two works. Then I will consider the definitions of identity upon which the texts are based. Going deeper into the works themselves, I will finally discuss along which lines the two quests for identity develop. In conclusion, I will connect my investigations to the question of whether Chicano identity is unified or fragmented.

Both Tomás Rivera’s ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Richard Rodriguez’ Hunger of Memory are about an individual searching for his identity. In both works, the protagonist is a Mexican-American or ‘Chicano’. However, the differences between the two books are huge. The generic difference is most obvious: Rivera’s work is a fictional narrative, which Héctor Calderón termed ‘novel-as-tales’.¹ Rodriguez, referring to his book, speaks of ‘[e]ssays impersonating an autobiography’ (p. 7). This entails that the subject searching for identity is, in Rodriguez’ case, the author himself, or rather his literary image. In Rivera’s case, the subject is purely fictional, although some critics have identified this literary subject with the author.²

Moreover, Hunger of Memory is overtly political and ‘basically polemical: it lays out an argument and draws conclusions’ (McKenna p. 63).³ The political nature of ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him is not that obvious. The text certainly criticizes social oppression and discrimination against Mexican-Americans in the USA. The essential political value of the text, however, is its purpose as a text written by a Chicano writer for the Chicano community. It is a text born out of the Chicano movement.

[T]he book parallels the Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies through its reassessment of traditional culture, its historical selfconsciousness, and, specially, through its developing sense of group solidarity. (Calderón p. 102)

It is obvious that the political ideas of Rivera and Rodriguez are at the opposite ends of a spectrum. Rivera was one of the main intellectual leaders of the Chicano community, whereas Rodriguez became the Chicanos’ pet hate through his advocacy of assimilation and his denial of the Chicano community.

[...]

1 Héctor Calderón, ‘The Novel and the Community of Readers: Rereading Tomás Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra’, Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology, Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar (ed.s) (n.p. :Duke University Press, 1991), p. 100.

2 Daniel P. Testa, ‘Narrative Technique and Human Experience in Tomás Rivera’ Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (ed.s) (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1979), p. 93.

3Teresa McKenna, Migrant Song: Politics and Process in Contemporary Chicano Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).