PART TWO
SOCIAL CONFLICT, EMERGENT POETRY, AND THE NEW EPHEBES

But, if we are to grasp the long-term significance of the ethnic revival, and not reduce it to the limited issue of the current upsurge of ethnicity in the West, which has provoked so much comment, then we have to take a much broader historical perspective and shift our emphasis away from immediate technological or economic issues to a consideration of the slower rhythms of political formation and cultural change.
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival

Cultures are slow to die; when they do, they bequeath large deposits of custom and value to their successors; and sometimes they survive long after their more self-conscious members suppose them to have vanished.
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers

4
Chicano Poetry and Politics:
The Later Recognition of the Precursor

It was a little difficult to read the rough, hand-lettered collapsing sign that once had been firmly tied to one of the oak trees on the West Mall of the University of Texas at Austin. In the early fall of 1966, a steady drizzle had done its slow destructive work, but most of the writing was legible enough to attract my attention. Scrawled on one of the several pieces of the sign, the word "Mexican," like a powerful magnet, arrested my fast walk to the library and pulled me toward the oak. I went up to the tree and visually reassembled the blurred words—"American," "students," "farmworkers," "support," "meeting," and the time and place of the latter. Another piece of the sign, already sliding close to the ground, bore some poetry—a Mexican folk proverb—"Una mano no se lava sola" (A single hand cannot wash itself). That night at the meeting, I joined what would later be called the Chicano movement—el movimiento —and lent my hand to its development.

The mixture of politics and poetry that had brought me to this first meeting continued there. As arriving students crowded into the room at the Texas Union and milled around, someone played records of corridos on a small record player. Sounds and titles from my childhood and teenage years—"Arnulfo Gonzalez," "Valentín de la Sierra," "Jacinto Treviño"—that I had forgotten in the last few years at the university gradually became familiar once again. This time, however, it was in an academic context where such "Mexican" folk songs did not belong. Or did they?

Over the years since, I was to ask myself this question in different ways and with different answers. This book is one partial answer. First, however, like a traditional corrido singer, I ask my audience's permission to continue with my narrative and set out a more extended political and poetic context for my inquiry.

I was very much like the fifty or so other students who attended that first meeting and the formation of the Mexican-American Student Or-

ganization, later the Mexican-American Youth Organization. Shortly thereafter we would discover that we were also very much like many other Mexican-American students holding similar meetings on campuses throughout the nation, particularly in the Southwest. Of Mexican-American descent and from a lower-working-class background, born and raised in a predominantly Mexican-American south Texas—the country's poorest region—I was slightly different from the others perhaps only in being a little older and a first-year graduate student in English in what then appeared to be a roomful of undergraduate sociology majors. Whether students of sociology or English, at Texas or UCLA, we had other things in common. Almost without exception, we were the first in our families to attend college, not to mention a major university; indeed, many were the first in their families to graduate from high school. We were scholarship boys and girls, the first in our families to experience the full culture of a higher education in all its negative and positive dimensions. And, while we are on the subject of boys and girls, it is essential to note what was commonplace and taken for granted in 1966: As I listened to the corridos in that Texas Union room, I started going around the room meeting men students, encountering women only when I made my way to be served at a food and drink table, food and drink they had prepared.

For most of us, attending a major university meant encountering regions, institutions, student bodies, and faculties at some social and cultural distance from our ethnic, working-class life experience. Our lives thus far had been fundamentally shaped by a sharp antagonistic relationship with precisely those sectors of Anglo-American society that predominated in our new academic milieu. Fraternity boys, our present and future rulers, riding by in expensive cars might yell, "Go home, grease balls!" We were used to that. But it was a new, more difficult, and far more unsettling experience to hear a distinguished anthropologist at Texas lecturing on the "fatalism" of Mexican-Americans and their cultural disinterest in education. (This, after I had been the beneficiary of a Mexican-American jamaica —a community church bazaar in my parish—to raise funds so that I could buy books when I left for college.)

In this moment of some ambivalence and considerable alienation, this college generation was eventually led to political and cultural action by the most deprived sector of the Mexican-American community—the agricultural workers. In the early 1960s, and on their own initiative, farm laborers in California, south Texas, and everywhere else that Mexican-American agricultural workers were to be found began, once more,

a period of intense labor unionization and a struggle for a better life.^[1] Led principally by Cesar Chavez, this farmworkers' movement proved to be a cultural catalyst for Mexican-American students, providing us with a central symbol in which to ground our political and cultural sentiments and our new education. As the least acculturated and most economically exploited members of Mexican-American society, the farmworkers were an ideal resolving symbol. Their heroic struggle both authenticated native Mexican-American culture and furnished a focal point for needed social analysis and action. It may well be said that the Mexican-American student movement started in the mid-sixties initially as a series of farmworker support committees on campuses in the Southwest and across the country. This campus committee work provided financial and material assistance to the farmworkers, usually by way of food drives, personnel to walk picket lines in the fields, and the organization and direction of boycotts of nonunionized farm products in the cities where the campuses were located.

But without ever abandoning this focal concern with the agricultural sector, the Mexican-American student movement soon embraced other political and cultural concerns, beginning with its own autonomous definition as a student movement and the formation of campus organizations such as the Mexican-American Youth Organization (MAYO) in Texas and El Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos en Aztlán (MECHA) almost everywhere else. Indeed, before long, the growing sense of autonomous cultural politics led to the articulation of a new name for this movement and its members: Chicano.^[2]

Next to standards of living in the agricultural sector, education—or lack of it—was, and continues to be, the most pressing social issue for the Mexican-American community. The high school dropout rate for Mexican-Americans was alarmingly high. Because of the problem's saliency and their own site of struggle in educational institutions, education became the paramount issue for students in the Chicano movement, and they addressed this concern in three broad ways. First, they assisted community-level groups in attacking local public school districts for their failure to properly educate young Mexican-Americans. Second, Chicano students pressured the colleges and universities they were attending to increase the admission and retention of Chicano students. Finally, and perhaps of longest-lasting consequence, the Chicano movement sought to change the cultural and intellectual climate of the university to reflect the cultural and intellectual presence of Mexican-Americans. To this end, they argued for the creation of new curriculums,

new research units, and the hiring of faculty specialists. They also emphasized the need for support and sponsorship, both within the university and in the society at large, of Mexican-American culture and the arts, particularly the literary arts (Gómez-Quiñones 1979; Acuña 1981:355–65).^[3] Given the central interests of this study, we need to say more about these literary developments.

The Chicano Literary Context

In chapter 1, I strongly implied the impossibility of imagining the turn-of-the-century greater Mexican revolutionary period without corridos. Similarly, it is equally impossible to conceive of the Chicano movement from 1965 to 1972 without its artistic literature, particularly its poetry. Though this moment of literary history still awaits an extended treatment, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto offers us a fine survey of the key features—sociological and poetic—of the period:

In the decade of the 60s, a generation of Chicano poets propelled by a new sense of identity and a profound awareness of their cultural heritage achieved prominence as their poetry questioned the limitations and presumptions of the dominant literary establishment. Seeking new forms and a new vocabulary, they created alternative outlets for publication and established the poetry reading as an integral part of the mass mobilization of the period. The creation of a mass audience through the establishment of a Chicano underground press, collective readings and sponsorship of festivales de flor y canto was an attempt at removing poetry from the market and commodity system and establishing it as a central concern of daily life. If the prevailing mood in the literature of the dominant culture was one of skepticism and anguish, Chicano poetry of the 1960s presented a positive alternative as it projected itself with human dimensions and human concerns. Poetry was made accessible, optimistic and reflective of a manifest struggle against cultural and human despoliation. (1978:104–5)

Four themes in Ybarra-Frausto's assessment bear directly on my general argument: the poetry's awareness of its cultural heritage; its intimate connection with a militant politics; the collective social circulation of this art, especially the oral transmission of the poetry at readings and at the annual Chicano flor y canto (flower and song) literary festivals; and the poetry's sense of optimism and humanity against the dominant culture's skepticism and anguish concerning the human condition—though toward the end of the period, there was a strain, never dominant,

of a modernist "skepticism and anguish." In all these respects, we can already sense an affinity with and a transforming continuation of the cultural poetics of the corrido.

One cannot emphasize too strongly the constant copresence of poetry and politics during this period. Moreover, it was a time when Chicano poetry was almost exclusively the province of male poets: José Montoya, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Tomás Rivera, Ricardo Sánchez, Alurista, Sergio Elizando, Rolando Hinoiosa, Abelardo Delgado, Rudolfo Anaya, Miguel Mendez, Tino Villanueva, and Raul Salinas, among others. Bruce-Novoa's study of fourteen Chicano authors includes only two women, Bernice Zamora and Estela Portillo, and his authoritative book on Chicano poetry includes only one woman, Zamora, among thirteen poets (Bruce-Novoa 1980, 1982).

A decisive shift toward a female-dominated poetry in the seventies and into the eighties was inaugurated by Estela Portillo's editorship in 1973 of the first major collection of Chicana writing (Portillo 1973). Marta Sánchez does not fully historicize but clearly acknowledges this interesting gender shift in her more recent study of Chicana poetry (1985), a shift sharply coincident with the historically specific emergence of other forms of Chicana feminist discourse in the mid-seventies (Garcia 1989). However, in the sixties and very early seventies both Chicano politics and Chicano poetry were dominated by charismatic men. Rodolfo Acuña, one of the most active participants in, and better observers of, the Chicano movement has offered this telling insight:

The entire Chicano leadership pattern, in face, closely resembled the pattern of the Mexican Revolution, where revolutionary juntas and local leaders emerged. These leaders took care of their home bases and were supported by their own followers . . . all adhered to this basic pattern, inspiring intense loyalty among their followers. (1981:360)

Indeed, Acuña himself is a strong example of his own description of this male legacy of leadership, with its conjunctive relationship to the influential trajectory of the earlier revolutionary, also male-dominated, corrido period.

The Corrido as Mediated Precursor

The general influence of the corrido on Chicano poetry in the 1960s has not escaped critical notice. For all of its residual character, the

corrido still had a live, direct presence in the consciousness of those involved in the movement, either from our immediate working-class background or as part of the emergent political culture. New and old corridos were sung at farmworker and other political rallies as well as at literary festivals like flor y canto . The influence of the corrido, however, was also absorbed in a mediated fashion through the widespread reading of Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand and the gradual emergence of its author's charismatic social persona. Together they also provided the continuing mediated poetics of the precursor, a poetics never separate from politics.

We can substantiate this particular relationship with extended testimony from one of the leading Mexican-American literary intellectuals of this generation, Tomás Rivera. At the time he is describing, Rivera was a graduate student at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Back in 1958, we thought writing should be a money-making proposition. To make money there had to be a gimmick, we thought, so we went to the people who were making it at the time, Mickey Spillane and people like that. We actually tried to imitate Spillane. We thought people would notice, that it would bring us fame and glory. We sent off the manuscripts y pues nada [and nothing]. Los chicanos que metíamos allí [The Chicanos we stuck in there] were cooks and prostitutes, very stereotyped characters, as were the Anglo ones. I don't demean cooks or prostitutes, just the fact that we would stereotype them without benefit of dignity.

Then, one day I was wandering through the library and I came across With a Pistol in His Hand by Américo Paredes, and I was fascinated. I didn't even know Paredes existed, though we were only thirty miles away, pero no había cornunicación alguna porque no había Movimiento ni nada de eso. Saqué el libro ese. Lo que me atrajo fue el apellido Paredes [but there was no communication at all, because there wasn't a Movement or anything like that. I checked out that book. What attracted me was the name Paredes ]. I was hungry to find something by a Chicano or Mexican-American. It fascinated me because, one, it proved it was possible for a Chicano to publish; two, it was about a Chicano, Gregorio Cortez, y sus azañas [and his deeds]. (Y los corridos, también [And the ballads, too], I grew up with the corridos de Texas .) That book indicated to me that it was possible to talk about a Chicano as a complete figure. I went back to the old newspapers and checked the accounts for how they handled Gregorio Cortez and found the grotesque exaggeration, as Américo says. Then I would go back to Américo's book and wonder which one was right. Was Américo lying too? Was he overdoing it también

[also]? More importantly, With a Pistol in His Hand indicated to me a whole imaginative possibility for us to explore. Now that, also, was in 1958, and it was then I began to think, write, and reflect a hell of a lot more on those people I had known in 1945 to '55.

That's the personal trajectory of the evolution of my role as documenter. I guess that sense of it came from feeling that Américo had documented one person para siempre [forever]. It was very important. I felt that I had to document the migrant worker para siempre [forever], para que no se olvidara ese espíritu tan fuerte de resistir y continuar under the worst of conditions [so that their very strong spirit of endurance and the will to go on under the worst of conditions should not be forgotten], because they were worse than slaves. El esclavo es una inversión [A slave is an investment], so you protect him to keep him working. A migrant worker? You owe him nothing. If he came to you, you gave him work and then just told him to leave. No investment. If he got sick, you got rid of him; you didn't have to take care of him. It was bad, labor camps and all that. (1980:150–51)

Rivera's statement is key in several respects.^[4] For one, it clearly reveals the effects of cultural hegemony on young Mexican-Americans, a hegemony that fostered an ambivalence toward their native culture and led them to internalize and reproduce negative stereotyping discourses; for Rivera, "cooks and prostitutes." But for a Mexican-American intelligentsia, particularly those with a strong desire to write, there seemed to be no alternative discourse, no useful models from which to speak, to resolve that lingering ambivalence, until "one day wandering through the library," as Rivera says, or perhaps at a bookstore, they came across With His Pistol in His Hand and then passed it around like a Holy Writ.

To find Paredes's book was to discover at least three things not at all evident to young Mexican-Americans in the early 1960s. First, young Chicanos discovered the probability that the received conventional history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest was distorted and falsified. Mexicans were not bandits; they were, or could be, like Cortez, men of honor, integrity, and courage. Equally important in this regard was the converse proposition, namely that Anglos had not always acted as paragons of virtue and civic obligation, nor was their authority legitimate. Second, young Chicanos recognized what Rivera calls "the imaginative possibility" of Paredes's book, the fascinating discovery that, contrary to dominant stereotypes, Mexican-Americans could write creatively in a modernist style. The name Paredes on the book's cover "proved it was possible for a Chicano to publish." Rivera's reading of

Paredes's book articulates, once again, Jameson's first and third levels of the political unconscious. But, in the 1960s Paredes's prose corrido also evoked an explicitly conscious sense of race and class relations, a sense evident in Rivera's reading also. For Rivera absorbs Paredes's corrido influence and uses it to focus our attention on the still continuing social plight of Mexican-Americans. He speaks of a world of politically produced social deprivation, of racial stigma, of disempowerment most visibly evident in farmworker society but by no means confined to it.

Yet even as the text of With His Pistol in His Hand provided the powerfully mediated influence of the precursory corrido to a new generation, the author of the text did so as well. When people in the Chicano movement gathered and the conversation turned to the subject of Américo Paredes, one could often detect the gradual emergence of an unsung proto-ballad of Américo Paredes. It is as if such conversations—a kind of Chicano movement oral tradition—constructed the known life and career of this man into a folklore narrative combining ballad and legend. Like all narratives, this narrative varied from group to group and performance to performance. Certain motifs were sometimes stated, sometimes implied, but the overall narrative structure that emerged recalled the traditional ballad's and legendry's thematic structure.

As with the traditional ballad, these conversations first established a setting and implied a social context for the appearance of the hero and the central narrative action. In our conversations, the story sometimes began with a confrontation between our hero and the Anglo authorities: An Anglo teacher tells the young Paredes that college is not for boys "like him"; has he considered attending vocational school? Or an assimilationist middle-class Mexican-American publisher in San Antonio refuses to publish Paredes's early stridently ethnic nationalist poems. Or, perhaps most dramatic of all, in the late 1950s the chief editor of the University of Texas Press refuses to publish With His Pistol in His Hand unless Paredes deletes all critical references to Walter Prescott Webb, J. Frank Dobie, and the Texas Rangers. Paredes refuses to do so, and the editor finally relents. When the book does appear, a former Texas Ranger tries to get Paredes's address from the Press so that he can "pistol whip the sonofabitch who wrote that book."

This conversational proto-narrative then fills in the hero's background in a way that is almost absolutely factual and yet has the aura of legendry. Our hero was born in the auspicious year of 1915, during the height of the Texas Rangers' killing of Mexican-Americans in south

Texas. He is said to be a good and simple man, but also already a bit extraordinary, highly gifted intellectually and a bit of the bohemian. He is exceptionally attractive to women and highly respected by men, a well-known popular singer on radio programs, a prize-winning poet and a journalist, a man who could and did defend his family's honor. The narrative continues. Paredes marries and divorces a well-known, equally bohemian local popular singer. Restless and curious about life beyond south Texas, he leaves the border and eventually winds up in central Texas, near Kaernes County, at the University of Texas at Austin—but not before spending a few years as a correspondent in Japan and China after World War II. "Did you know that Don Américo covered the Chinese Revolution?" says someone.

When he does arrive at the University of Texas to study English literature and creative writing—his central career goal—he faces another racially motivated confrontation: the U.S. government initially refuses a visa to his wife because she is half Japanese. For a moment Paredes thinks of living in Mexico, but the government relents. Now in his mid-thirties and a married man with children, Paredes had already completed two years of community college coursework. He completes his bachelor's degree with highest honors in one year, a master's in two, and then a doctorate in three more, while teaching several sections of freshman English to support his family. During this period, he also publishes a few scholarly articles, short stories, and poems and wins two writing prizes. He reworks his dissertation on the balladry and life of Gregorio Cortez into With His Pistol in His Hand , teaches for one year in El Paso, and is invited to rejoin the Department of English at Texas as a faculty member.

As a faculty member from 1958 to 1966, Paredes engages in an intellectual politics that continually attacks the dominant society's disparaging view of Mexican-Americans. His chief weapon is his careful creative scholarship on Mexican-American history. He also tries to promote social activism among the university's Mexican-American students, but the assimilationist perspective is still too prevalent among them at that time, and they do not respond to his efforts. Like Gregorio Cortez, Paredes finds himself engaging the opposition largely alone, although he does find a Romaldo-like "brother" in George I. Sanchez, a progressive professor.

While Cortez had aroused the consciousness of his community by riding and shooting his way toward them and soliciting their help,

Paredes's ideological and cultural community began to come to him in the mid-sixties. The hero and the nascent Chicano student movement in Texas and throughout the Southwest joined in struggle and mutual support on issues such as the farmworkers, the need for courses in Mexican-American studies, and increased political representation. (The hero's legend continues to develop to the present day: "I thought he was real tall!" says a Chicano at the University of California at Santa Barbara when he first meets Paredes.) Together, then, this author and his book provided one model for the development of the Chicano movement, and that model was itself wholly indebted to the precursory master poem—the corrido.

In this way, the corrido was historically repositioned by the Chicano movement to permit the genre to have a continuing influence on the development of contemporary Chicano literature. As Erlinda Gonzales-Berry observes, "many of today's poets were undoubtedly nourished on corridos and popular verse forms which abound in oral tradition" (1980:45). This judgment is supported by Sergio Elizondo, who notes the corrido's influence on Chicano poets, with "Alurista, Albelardo and Ricardo Sánchez, among the best known" (1980:73). More specifically, for my purposes, José Saldívar, in a fine "precis," as he calls it, offers a succinct analysis of the corrido and its influence, and argues for the significance of Jameson's theoretical work for a new Chicano literary criticism. On the corrido's centrality to Chicano poetry, Saldívar writes: "A study of Chicano literature must . . . begin with an attempt to define at least one of the cultural paradigms which emerge from the historical experience of the Chicano Border frontier life" and "I am suggesting that the corrido is the central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm" (1986:13).

Curiously, however, Saldívar then seems not to see how widespread the influence of the corrido is: "Given the strength of the corrido paradigm in the Chicano experience, it is bewildering that subsequent contemporary Chicano poets have not looked to it consciously or unconsciously for structuration and content" (1986:13). As we have already seen, the maleness of Chicano poetry from 1965 to 1972, its close identification with a charismatic male politics, its direct and mediated indebtedness to the corrido are defining characteristics of this poetic period. I would add still another: the saliency of the long poem, or what Ortega calls "narrative or saga poetry, relating a Chicano world vision" (1977:35).^[5] Formally, this saliency might be explained by the political necessity to undertake a sustained dialectical engagement with

the full scope of past and present history, a motivation perhaps, for all epic engagements. But is not such an overweening, aggressive poetic ambition also clearly related to the maleness of the period? Moreover, I propose, the Chicano long poem of the period is also generated by the continuing powerful influence of the only other long poem in the greater Mexican experience—the epic heroic corrido—and the necessity for young, aggressive Chicano males to come to grips with its daunting political and patriarchal poetics.

The Epic Heroic Corrido and Three Poetic Cultural Revisions

In the chapters that follow I chart, intertextually, the corrido's precursory poetic influence on three major Chicano poets: José Montoya, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, and Juan Gómez-Quiñones—each a charismatic figure in the Chicano movement of 1965–1972 who has continued to have a significant presence. Each of the three has authored a long poem in which there is a clear and sustained recognition of the precursor. Yet while the precursor's presence is obvious, the nature of his influence is not—that is my task in these pages. These three also represent different activist emphases within the movement—Montoya in the arts, Gonzales in public politics, and Gómez-Quiñones in intellectual life—which is not to say that they do not share these emphases as well; Gonzales, for example, continues to be active in alternative education and Gómez-Quiñones is a key figure in California politics, while Montoya is also a college professor.

For readers who wonder why I have not included Alurista, Sergio Elizondo, Raul Salinas, and Ricardo Sánchez—all authors of long poems and recognized figures in the Chicano movement—I can at first plead the worst of authorial defenses—time and space considerations—but also offer other, better reasons as well.^[6] First, notwithstanding Elizondo's observation that one can detect the corrido's influence on Alurista and Sánchez, I am not persuaded that this influence is as clearly marked and poetically negotiated as it is with the poets I have chosen. Rather, Alurista and Sánchez are engaged with a collage of influences, none really master precursors, from pre-Hispanic, indigenous poetics to the "beat" poetry of the fifties, to African American culture. The result is an interesting but rhetorically overextended and incoherent poetry in

search of a sustaining tradition. Something of this same argument applies to Raul Salinas's engaging "Trip Through the Mind Jail" (its very title and dedication to Eldridge Cleaver already partial evidence), though I find it a more successful poem, one more conscious of a sustaining tradition. But Salinas's primary precursor is not the corrido so much as, perhaps, the most famous of greater Mexican legends, la llorona (the Wailing Woman), although I am as yet not clear on this. (For my discussion of la llorona , see Limón 1986a.)

In contrast, Elizondo's own Perros y Anti-Perros (Dogs and Anti-Dogs) makes for a better case in terms of the influence of the corrido, at least on the formal grounds of structure and meter. Yet there is some question as to whether Elizondo meant his work to be an "epic" as its subtitle, an editorial appendage, suggests (Bruce-Novoa 1982:96), rather than what it most manifestly is, a collection of distinct, though related, poems.

Finally, there is the more vexing case of Rolando Hinojosa's "Korean Love Songs." Neither the poet nor his work were an organic part of the sixties political culture, though Ramón Saldívar (1984) has analyzed the poem in terms quite consistent with those employed here.

In the three long poems I have chosen, on the other hand, the influence of the corrido is most salient. Moreover, these three poems seem to me to embody and express three particular sociocultural attitudes toward history and society within the Chicano movement of those years. For the Chicano community, these poems became what anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1973) calls redressive key symbols, texts that articulate poetically discursive, narrative cultural modes of viewing and addressing one's world.

All of us who participated in the movement can recall a moment, in 1965 or 1966, of initial confusion and groping as we sought to define and then come to terms with our estranged sociocultural condition, both with respect to our present and our past. It is this initial condition of Alienation that José Montoya well exemplifies in "El Sol y los de Abajo." This alienated condition seemed to resolve itself in the late sixties, as a new mood of Assertion in conjunction with a strident and dominating cultural nationalism appeared. No one will dispute that Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's "I Am Joaquín" is the exemplary assertive statement, poetic or otherwise, of this period. Finally, the years 1970 to 1972 marked the movement's simultaneous diminishment and recognition of the need for more sophisticated, complex understandings

capable of taking us into the next decade. This new introspective attitude of Reflection is exemplified by the work of Juan Gómez-Quiñones.

At each of these moments, the long influential hand of the fatherly precursor—the epic heroic corrido and its political culture—mediated by Américo Paredes, shaped and was shaped by the new ephebes. But these new ephebes were also children of women and of modernism, and it is through these poetic and political resources that the struggle with society and the precursor were to be waged.

We lived in Oakland during the war so everyone in the family could work in the defense plant; my jefita [mother], my dad, my two sisters, and a brother. I spent my time in the streets of East Oakland. Those were the good times. In early 1950, my jeffto [father] split out to New Mexico, but we stayed.
José Montoya, "Interview"

We are alone. Solitude, the source of anxiety, begins on the day we are deprived of maternal protection and fall into a strange and hostile world.
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

5
My Old Man's Ballad:
José Montoya and the Power Beyond

No Mexican-American intellectual coming to political and cultural awareness in the mid-1960s could have missed the enormous significance of the appearance of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought , published in Berkeley in 1967. Edited by Octavio Romano and Nick Vaca in its initial phase, El Grito was the first major publication of the Chicano movement, and its effect on the emergent political and cultural consciousness of young Chicanos cannot be overestimated. The first political analyses of race and class domination, the first trenchant critiques of the social sciences, and the first contemporary creative writing by Chicanos appeared in that exciting journal. Two years later Romano published El Espejo (The Mirror), an important collection of writings from El Grito as well as new contributions.

In greater Mexican culture, a grito means a yell or cry in an everyday sense. In a more socially marked sense, however, it refers to a battle cry or a cry for political action such as that by Father Hidalgo for Mexican independence from Spain in 1810. It can also refer to a celebratory cry that men, usually, may make when they particularly like a cultural performance, a song such as a corrido. In all its denotations, a grito is usually a male-gendered performance, and the journal's title was well suited to the muscular critical character of the texts, almost exclusively by male authors, that its editors chose to print. For these reasons, José Montoya's "La Jefita," a female-centered poem, stood out among these early writings. (Jefita , "little chief," is a slang honorific for "mother.") The poem begins

When I remember the camps
     And the nights and the sounds
Of those nights in tents or
Carts I remember my jefita 's
     Rolling pin
     Clik-clok; clik-clak-clok

     And her small cough.
(I swear she never slept!)
(Montoya 1969a)^[1]

A painter and art teacher by profession, José Montoya has been and continues to be one of the premiere political cultural activists in the Chicano movement. Originally from New Mexico, now active in the Bay Area, he has worked in rural and urban community organizing, and with Chicano prisoners, has founded Chicano poetry and art groups and taught Chicano studies at California State University at Sacramento—all with a deep concern and love for his people and with a sense of barely muted outrage at their social mistreatment (Bruce-Novoa 1980:115–36).

A widely anthologized author and a prolific and engaging reader of his poetry in public settings, Montoya can be said to have launched his poetic career with the publication of "La Jefita," a depiction in verse of a documented Mexican-American farmworker's existence. At the center of this charming, well-wrought poem is a tender, sensitive rendering of the speaker's mother. She is at the heart and hearth of this dominated universe, mitigating its corrosive effects with her nurturing familial love. In contrast, the speaker's father occupies a "demanding and distant" role (Hernandez 1991:78) in this poetic world:

But by then it was time to get Up!
My old man had a little whistle
That initiated the world to
Wakefulness.
     Wheeeeeeeet! Wheeeeeeet!
Get up, you damn lazy kids!
(Montoya 1969a)

Here, social domination is countered principally by the critical transcendence of maternal self-sacrifice, and, as Guillermo Hernandez observes, "The poetic voice conveys a feeling of rebellion toward the father, a figure whose role the narrator-son is condemned to imitate in life" (1991:78).

We also note that "La Jefita," in its muted rebellion and pro-maternal stance, comes to us in a modernist idiom. Here, I refer to Montoya's acknowledged admiration for the poetry of Dylan Thomas (Montoya 1980b:50). For is there not in "La Jefita" a trace of the Welshman's rhythms and his rhetoric of remembrance of youthful innocence in the

face of change? (I think of Thomas's "Lament," "Fern Hill," "I see the boys of summer," and "Once it was the colour of saying," in particular.)

In "La Jefita" Montoya is a long way from the epic heroic world of the corrido and, for that matter, from any poetically, politically aggressive public stance. Yet it is important to begin here, with this modernist female-centered poem, because it is this sort of poetic world that suggests Montoya had available one possible alternative—one kind of counterpoetics—when he did encounter the power of the precursor. Yet rather than elaborate this alternative poetic world, rather than refuse the traditional male-centered terms of struggle posed by the precursor, Montoya accepts the latter, and ultimately loses poetically, in his long work of 1972, "El Sol y los de Abajo" (The Sun and the Downtrodden). This poetic loss also limits the poem's public political capacities, although at the moment of its writing, circa 1965 (Hernandez 1991:53), it captures well all of our alienation and incapacities.

The Argument of "El Sol Y Los De Abajo"

"El Sol y los de Abajo" opens with little to recommend it as a poem, at least in the first thirteen lines. What Montoya has to say is just that, said , with little poetic mediation. Prosaic language is arranged in the quadrangle shapes of a seeming poem to quite literally tell us that were it not for racism and class oppression, Mexicans might have made it as hacendados like one Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar. Instead, we are, like the speaker's father, descendants of the underdogs who never reached our sun. Like him, we

compounded the grief by
abandoning his land for another
so foreign and at once so akin
as to be painful.
(Montoya 1972b)^[2]

In the third stanza things improve somewhat with the poet's better sense of prosody. He seems to allude to Yeats's "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" to tell us that, like his father, "I have dragged"

Myself and soul in some
Unconscious, instinctive

Search for the splendor
De los templos del sol.

This stanza also alerts us to the poetic-political direction that the poem eventually takes. However, the poet suffers an immediate relapse as the fourth stanza returns us to an unimaginative catalogue mode of presentation. Those who did not reach the "temples of the sun," los de abajo —are to be found in the gutters, battlefields, cotton rows, and barrios, and the listing continues into the next stanza.

Nevertheless, this prosaic listing is poetically relieved in two places. Between stanzas four and five, we find the interesting though undeveloped image of a man caught inside a societal telescope; more importantly, toward the end of stanza six, the speaker compares his memories of tradition to Goya etchings. The unmediated memories of oppression dominate here, but we soon learn that the speaker also has other memories—memories of "Times that were tiempos finos " (fine times). The recollection of these better times brings forth better art.

The next nine to ten stanzas are indeed far better poetry. They are an artistic delineation of these "fine times" and emerge as a poetic and moral counterweight to the earlier poetically unrelieved catalogue of oppression. At the heart of these better, middle stanzas is a Mexican folkloric world of curanderas (female folk healers) such as the poetically well-wrought Doña Chole "la ruquilla" (little old woman):

with the ugly
Hump on her back—
La curandera, bruja, life-giving
Jorobada que curó a Don Cheno
Del dolor de umbligo y la
Calentura en la cintura.

The same jorobada (bent-over) healing bruja (witch) who cured Don Cheno of his umbilical pain and his stomach fever can also dispense potions for lovers who prayed

to a remarkably reasonable
God that their wives and husbands
Wouldn't find out . . .

I question whether the poem as a whole is a satire, as Hernandez (1991) seems to suggest; these fine stanzas, however, certainly do employ satire. These are engaging people who, with folk wisdom, try to outwit

the Virgin Mary in contests of logic: "cause if my husband / Finds out, he will kill me and you / Wouldn't want him in heaven then, / Como asesino" (as a murderer). Contrary to the usual flat stereotypes, folk Mexicans treat the spiritual world, not with unrelieved reverence, but with a living, healthy, satirical skepticism, and this world is kept at a distance, "Until times of need, death/grief, / Despair y los otros tiempos pesados" (the other bad times). It is a folk-theological relationship of contradiction and paradox paralleling what Abraham Kaplan has called "the Jewish argument with God" (1980). Satirical contradiction and paradox also characterize these people's relationships to the more institutional and secular spheres of life. Here too we find a display of folk wit and wisdom, as in Montoya's stanza of reported folk speech where the mother takes ironical note of Father Kelly, whose wandering hands can also bless an escapulary.

The children eat and go out to play kick-the-can until this folkloric world of care, pain, and love is interrupted by them —the Americans—the social worker, probation officer, school counselor, and academic who come "to crucify me with germ-bearing / Labels more infectious than rusty / Nails . . .". We are no longer in the satirical mode. However, as if the reappearance of oppression threatens once again to overwhelm the poetic itself, our poet momentarily relapses into the prosaic, albeit the angry prosaic. But he soon recalls once again that his "dismal world was so / much brighter!" and begins to breathe new, creative rhythmic life into his poem by returning to the folk world, to

the old barn across the canal
that housed a lechusa that
screeched at night scaring
the children porque era la
anima de la comadre de mi grama.

¡Oigan! (Listen!), his abuelita —his "grama"—tells the children. Listen to the screeching owl, which in her Mexican folk perception is the soul of her children's godmother Chonita. The dreary world of oppression is socially negated as the children are taken into a realm of mystery and magic that both fascinates and causes fear, but fear of a different order.

This poem now returns to the father, as the children run to him in fear. Here, the poet exploits the opportunity to remind us of his father with his "field-scarred limbs," "también arrastrado"—also a victim of oppression. But, like the women, the father also possesses the folk

resources to negate the oppressiveness. "At least," the poet tells us, "his noble deeds / Are enriched in ballads," and with these words we enter the final stanzas of the poem:

Pursued by dogs,
The horseman
Rode through the hills
Well armed.

A warrior for his cause,
Noble were his deeds.
Nor for glory nor for verse
You rode to fight for your people.
(my translation)

Turning exclusively to a formal Spanish and a formal prosodic style, the poet renders a poetic homage to his father. The father is no longer the "field-scarred" victim but rather a "jinete" (a horseman) riding through the mountains pursued by los perros —literally "dogs," but metaphorically all institutional oppressors. Our horseman is well armed, however, and he is, like so many other Mexican ballad heroes, a fighter for a cause, and he defends his cause and his raza (his people) neither for personal glory nor for the poetic immortality of the ballads but because it is right. The son then attempts to transfer this formal poetic form and its social function to his own situation. He finds himself in the same situations, but under different conditions. But he interrupts his attempted self-comparison to the ballad world with an emphatic "¡Chale! " (a folk speech form meaning no! ) And, why not? The poet returns still one more time to the prosaic, not with anger but with sadness and despair, and he tells us quite literally,

My actions are not yet worthy
of the ballads . . . me faltan
los huevos de mi jefe and
the ability to throw off
the gava's llugo de
confución . . .

His actions are "not yet worthy of the ballads"; lacking his father's huevos (balls), he is unable to throw off the Anglo's (gava 's) yoke of confusion.

His confusion, however, is not total. He abruptly turns to Mayan prophecy. In the poet's time, "Chilam Balam's prophetic / Chant has

been realized—and the / Dust that darkened the air begins / To clear y se empiesa aver el Sol" (One can begin to see the sun). Evoking the famous prophecy of the ancient Mayan priest—that one day the Spaniards would disappear and the sun would reappear—the poet ends on a note of hope, but a hope not yet fully realized: "I am learning to see the sun."

Having explicated the poem's argument, I should now like to bring to bear on it a theoretical perspective that will elucidate the relationship between this poem and traditional Mexican folklore.

"El Sol Y Los De Abajo": Gender, Folklore, and Influence

In "El Sol y los de Abajo," Montoya draws on two formative, yet contradictory, traditions. One is the raw, hegemonic social experience of racism and class domination, which at times threatens to extend its hegemony to the poem itself. That is, his experience of domination so overpowers his poetic sensibility as to become the almost wholly artistically and politically unmediated subject matter of the poem. The poem itself tends to become a reactive and ill-formed cry of los de abajo , a raw cry untransformed by a creative, critical, intelligent poetics. For a moment, this poem reminds us of what Montoya himself has said about so much early movimiento poetry, namely, that it was "really terrible" (1980a:134).

Yet there are moments when this poem does achieve a critical emergent cultural artistry. It does so when, in the manner of "La Jefita," Montoya draws on folkloric elements of his residual Mexican culture to strengthen his art. Yet this return to the residual itself does not yield even poetic profit. Montoya is far more poetically successful when he turns to the domain of female folklore than when he chooses to encounter and draw on the precursory power of the Mexican corrido. That the precursor's influence proves too great, as it did for Paredes in "Guitarreros," results in an unsuccessful public political poem. Such strength as it has—inward-facing and private though it is—results from the poet's temporary turn not to the powerful father influence, but rather to the maternal succor of greater Mexican culture.

I also read this poem as the creative rendering of a partial series of Bloom's poetic defensive strategies, or revisions. These are presented by our young poet—our ephebe—as defenses against the dominating

influence of folk tradition, particularly the strong poetry of the Mexican ballad, which, of course, appears quite literally at the end of the poem, but whose influence, I maintain, is present throughout, including, paradoxically, in its very absence.

The poem opens with an explicit reference to the father, and just as the father is quite literally present in the poet's consciousness, the father's poem, the corrido, is also quite present in the poet's unconscious, to become manifest to consciousness later. But as a work of art, the poem in its first six stanzas is a near failure, almost no work of art at all, merely a prosaic catalogue, save for the "ocular tube" image. Clearly this is an artistically unrelieved catalogue of social domination, but its lack of poetic art is also the result of a too-felt paternal poetic domination. Only social domination and the father-figure appear prominently in these six stanzas in which the poem as compelling art has yet to begin. That is, we find no evidence—no poetic evidence—that this poet is yet an ephebe, a true poetic son engaged in a serious creative poetic struggle with his announced master. The father is too much.

Only in the final lines of stanza seven, in which the speaker carries his life experiences engraved "like the etching de Goya" do we begin to edge into a palpable poetry set off by remembrance, "I remember those times . . . / Times that were tiempos finos," which in this stanza occasion a fine sensibility to the folklore of Mexican women and a fine poetry, or at least, a better poetry. Had the poet wholly persisted in the poetic elaboration of this female-centered world, as he indeed does for some nine stanzas, we would have, perhaps, a fine companion piece to "La Jefita," this time written about curanderas, comadres , and abueliras in resistance to los americanos .

But the father of the first stanza lingers, and he reappears strongly in the final stanzas—a patriarchal framing that forces us to view the intervening "female poetic" stanzas as a salient deviation. Following the paternally focused stanzas of domination, this maternally centered section is not merely an extended occasion for learning more about the poet-speaker's sociocultural life, a general opportunity for, in Cordelia Candelaria's reading, "a total immersion in that life through flashbacks to scenes from the speaker/poet's past" after stanzas that she benignly misreads as an "introduction" (1986:15). Rather, it is the poet's matriarchally focused poetic reaction and attempted early subversion of his original poetical patriarchal beginning.

Lending thus a gendered implication to Bloom's theory, I read this intervening matriarchal section as a clinamen , or Swerve, wholly away from the father. This move, we may recall once more, is a revision

marked by dialectical images of absence and presence, images that are rhetorically conveyed by the trope of simple irony . . . and that as psychic defense assume the shape of what Freud called reaction-formation. . . . Just as rhetorical irony says one thing and means another, even the opposite thing, so a reaction-formation opposes itself to a repressed desire by manifesting the opposite of the desire. (1975a:97)

Stanzas eight through sixteen constitute just such a Swerve from the father poem's influence in another direction, one marked by irony, by images of absence and presence. And, although Bloom does not explicitly say so, the clinamen is a likely province for satire, as Hernandez (1991:72) notes of this section of the poem.

Part of what is wholly absent here is not so much images of absence as absent images that might have reasonably flowed from the first seven stanzas of oppressed men in society: images of active male heroic resistance, that is, the poet's acknowledgment and rewriting of the corrido. What is wholly present, instead, are rich images of women's everyday conversational life, replete with "contradictions and paradoxes," the essence of irony, an irony almost wholly absent from the world of the corrido, where the trope of high romance prevails (White 1973:1–42; 1978:1–23).

For the corrido is a world of unambiguous right and wrong, of heroism and cowardice, of men who issue challenges in laconic boasts, who confront each other, pistols in hand, across a clear moral-political space. In the corridos the encounter is articulated in the race/class ideologemes of "Mexicanos" versus "Americanos." In Montoya's female-centered world of the middle poem, this encounter is less clear, cross-cut by internal contradiction and articulated in a welter of ironies and concrete dialogical images, that, while also ideologemes of race and class relations, are so indirectly; more truly, perhaps, they are examples of Jameson's political unconscious at its second level.

We learn of Father Kelly, who is supposed to minister to the spiritual needs of the Catholic community but cannot keep his hands off its female members. Families—to be more precise, women and young girls—quickly clean up their houses because the social worker is coming

(or the school counselor, or census taker, or probation officer), and the social condition of such families becomes the stuff of a master's thesis by some "long haired / Lost lamb maric chick." A curandera , herself physically deformed, sustains life in this community—no doubt in dire need of medical resources—even as she provides customers with love potions for illicit love affairs. With more than a bit of ironic wit, she then prays to the Virgin Mary that her customers' husbands and wives not find out and that her own husband not discover the truth and kill her because the Virgin wouldn't want a murderer in heaven. And, with another brand of paradoxical logic, a mother refuses to open an official envelope because "it may be / from the war saying Toti is dead!"

This section swerves from the corrido's influence in other ways as well. Absent are the ballad's largely monological, third-person narrative style and the central male hero. While we do hear the speaker-poet's narrative voice throughout, it participates in a Bakhtinian dialogic narration in which the principal and more vibrantly active other voice is that of the mother, who, as in "La Jefita," conversationally addresses her family continuously, thereby weaving a sociolinguistic fabric of some security against the intrusion of the outside (Bakhtin 1981). Unlike the corridista or the corrido hero, she wields no pistol or boasting words to defend her family, only her woman-centered language of advice, exhortation, and counsel. And if she is unlike the men of the corrido in sociolinguistic style, the two other central female protagonists in this section are also an imagistic swerve from the corrido's world. The old hump-backed curandera , Doña Chole, and the grandmother "with wrinkled hands" and "gnarled finger" have almost nothing in common with the relatively youthful, virile male hero of the corrido, except that their control of the community's magical folklore—healing and folk beliefs concerning owls—represents a power nearly as potent as a pistol.

I say "nearly as potent" because this Swerve, this particular poetic rewriting of women's culture, while admirable and vibrant, does not become a fully developed contribution to a strong political poetics of resistance. It does not, in well-wrought powerful verse, rearticulate this women's culture into active cultural resistance, into a well-crafted, overtly counterhegemonic emergent cultural poetics based on the residual of women's folklore, of women's voices. As Montoya has rewritten this culture, it speaks to class and race relations but not in a deeply explored, inwardly contestative manner in which the subjects draw on this folklore to politically deconstruct the authority of the

hegemonic culture. As poetically rendered here, the women's culture is more an engaging form of passive resistance. Montoya's is a culturalist rather than a political poetics, a poetics that demonstrates the "values of the dispossessed" and offers only "an implicit commendation" of those who oppress it (Hernandez 1991:53). It is not a sufficiently deep or extended female-centered response to the corrido, or to domination, but it is a beginning.

That such a rendering of women's culture as passive resistance has its critical uses is not in question. But it marks only the beginning of a more active, deeper poetic transformation of a residual culture into a more clearly counterhegemonic construct, one articulated on principles wholly different from those of the patriarchal corrido.^[3] This poem stops short of such a move, however, as the poet oscillates too quickly between both gender worlds, like a child running back and forth between two parents. Indeed, this is precisely what the child in this poem does, as the poet swerves from the father toward the maternal but then returns to the precursory father. This return begins in stanza sixteen, when the speaker and his playmates flee from the grandmother's world of scary owls and "run unashamedly / and hug our Jefito's field- / scarred limbs." As he comes to his father, the speaker asks, "¿ . . . y mi Jefito?" (... and my daddy?). Posed almost as a kind of afterthought, this question, together with the father's socially diminished "fieldscarred" status, initiates a brief movement of tessera , or Accommodation, which is carried over into the next stanza.

Unlike the Swerve, Accommodation is not a move of negation, but one of acceptance and limitation, or in Bloom's words: "the tessera represents any later poet's attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor's Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe" (1973:67). As Montoya attempts to forge this precise relationship of limitation and enlargement, he reminds us of the father's diminished, "worn out" status but then quickly tells us that "at least his noble deeds are enriched in ballads." To make the latter point, he provides us with four lines of such a "ballad," beginning with "A caballo iba el jinete." However, as Hernandez (1991:74) correctly notes, this is, of course, not a traditional ballad but rather a literary rendition, or what Bloom calls "a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe."

But the truly creative poetic son cannot rest here. He cannot merely renew the precursor's Word, even as his own "newly fulfilled and en-

larged Word." If he is to mature poetically, he must fully escape the precursor's influence and sustain the wonderful illusion that he is fashioning his own truly independent poem. This movement, however, also requires that he begin to unconsciously fully negate the corrido's power and right to speak for him at all, even as he appears to continue to acknowledge it. We then enter the revisionary ratio of the kenosis , or Withdrawal, when the younger poet seems to accept the precursor's poetics as the only way to speak, even as he wholly denies it and himself. In this movement the ephebe "seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed . . . that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems" (1973:14–15). That is, in the Accommodation, the full strength of the precursory poem is wholly acknowledged, as Montoya does when he pays a formal homage to his father as hero and to his father's poetry. But then, in Withdrawal, the ephebe humbles himself by negating his own comparable poetic possibilities. Again, Montoya is wholly literal: "¡Chale! / My actions are not yet worthy / of the ballads," also implying that he, as a poet, is not worthy of the ballad form. But there is yet a further implication: Is the ballad form worthy at all in our time?

To more fully understand Montoya's use of this revisionary ratio, we need to momentarily turn to two other, though weaker, examples of his struggle with his strong precursor: "Los Vatos" (The Guys), published in 1969, and "El Louie," Montoya's most famous poem, published in 1972.^[4] Both poems are concerned with the world of the pachucos —the Mexican-American urban youth street society and culture of the 1940s and 50s and its association with gang violence. Both also represent extended examples of the revisionary ratio of kenosis , poems written wholly in Withdrawal.

José David Saldívar (1986) describes "Los Vatos" as a quite conscious transformation of the corrido, formally and thematically, into a new poem for its own time. He is certainly correct to note the corrido's omnipresence in Montoya's poetic consciousness: "Chicano and Border history are announced in the very rhythms and structure of his running lines—namely, in the corrido -like form he employs." But the corrido's influence is even more thorough, as Saldívar notes:

"Los Vatos" in this light is an exemplar unalien Chicano paradigm. It is realist and observationist in its rhetoric, as though the singer-poet were telling us what he had seen and experienced during the pachuco epoch, guitar and pen in hand . . . an observer of concrete actualities of Fresno,

Fowler, Sanger, and Sacramento, California . . . [Montoya] conducts not only a reading of the pachuco consciousness and its effects on a Chicano family, but he also investigates and transforms the model of narration implicit in the corrido . (1986:11)

Much the same could be said of Montoya's other corrido-like poem "El Louie," although the protagonist, Louie Rodriguez, is not as engaged with his family as is Benny.

One of my two general interpretive differences with Saldívar is that in a way he is only too right about the powerful presence of the corrido in this ephebe's consciousness and in "Los Vatos." Indeed, so powerful is that presence that both "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" are not strong poems relative to their precursor, are, paradoxically, too close to actually being corridos. At first glance, both poems almost seem to be wholly in the revision of Accommodation, where the precursor's form is redeemed fully in the words of the ephebe and the corrido in its full majesty is omnipresent, if contained. But, on further reflection, both poems seem examples of Withdrawal, where both poetic son and precursor are emptied out, reduced in what they might mean or say to us, as if the precursory form had come to end and its continuation were in serious doubt. In saying this, I broach my second area of disagreement with Saldívar.

Saldívar seems to want "Los Vatos" to be as politically and socially affirmative as the Border corrido, a poem as aware of and critically responsive to the politically dominant Other as, let us say, "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez." "Los Vatos," he explains,

through its corrido -like form recapitulates the pachuco experience in its relation to a racist society and reduces both experience and vision to a paradigm. That is, Montoya's self-conscious reference to the corrido as a social and historical form evokes in Chicano readers the sense of Border and Southwest life-struggle inherent in the corrido and all but compels belief in the sociopoetic vision of reality implicit in it. . . . It draws on an historically and ideologically specific Chicano Border form and on the content of individual and collective experience, structures it and develops from it imperatives for social resistance. (1986:12)

My position is quite the opposite: that both "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" are diminished as sociopolitical statements in comparison to their precursor, and that in this diminishment Montoya is signaling an end to, or at least a severe reduction in, the corrido's ability to be transformed for our time, at least in his hands. For little is said or even implied in either poem about a political "life-struggle" against a racist society; nor

do I hear any "imperatives for social resistance." Rather, the poems depict a world of intracommunity violence, which, while socially conditioned, is nonetheless also self-generated and certainly self-inflicted. Nor is it even a cathartic violence, of the kind that takes place when two mature Mexican men stand face-to-face, pistols in hand, on a matter of honor. Instead, we are witness to the mindless violence of a gang of adolescents, first cutting Benny across the belly and then stabbing him, again and again, in the back ("here?" Benny says before he dies); or we see Louis Rodriguez dying in a cheap hotel room "from too much booze."^[5]

"My actions are not yet worthy of the ballads," the ephebe concludes in "El Sol y los de Abajo," as in recognition that in "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" he used and diminished the corrido form to demonstrate to us unworthy actions. His "not yet" hints of future worthy actions to which a creatively transformed ballad might speak. For the moment, however, the ephebe is conscious only of his failure and that of the ballad to speak for his time. He and his precursor are both empty.

In Withdrawal, the poetic son fully acknowledges the power of the precursor even while emptying out that power by denying it any continuing force in the contemporary world. It is to say, "yes, you were my strong father, but you are old and weary and mortal." Unlike Accommodation, the grudging acceptance of tradition, Withdrawal comprises both full acknowledgment and full rejection. Montoya says ¡Chale! to himself as poet but also to the continuing poetic viability of his father's ballad.

The paradoxical result is a self-created sense of freedom—illusory though it may be—as the influence of the precursor is bracketed and negated, even if it means a sense of fragmentation and loss for the ephebe. We can quite clearly see this relationship if we compare the formal rigid strength of the composition before ¡Chale! to the lines that follow, where the poet suffers the fragmenting effects of the gava's —the Anglo's—yoke of confusion. The gava is not entirely to blame; this poet is also suffering the dizzying fragmented feeling of freedom, the freedom from the precursor.

For Bloom, the negative freedom of the kenosis dialectically sets up the next movement. Kenosis prepares "the ruined way for the overrestituting movement of daemonization , the repression or hyperbole that becomes a belated or counter-Sublime" (1975a:99). In this movement "the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power

in the parent poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond the precursor" (1973:15). By locating this expressive resource, this range of power, the ephebe believes he can override the precursor and go directly to the Muse and thereby craft an original and more powerful poem. "Turning against the precursor's Sublime," Bloom tells us, "the newly strong poet undergoes daemonization , a Counter-Sublime whose function suggests the precursor's relative weakness " (1973:100).

"El Sol y los de Abajo" ends short of this revision. In the final stanza the ancient Mayan prophecy becomes this power just beyond the range of the precursor as well. At the opening of the poem the father failed to find the sun; now, with the knowledge of ancient wisdom, our young ephebe thinks that he has found the original source of power that will enable him to see the Sun—to learn the source of ultimate poetic and political power. What is missing is the actualization of this newfound power—the production of a new poem of the Counter-Sublime, a poem to match or exceed the formal thematic strength of his father's deeds and ballads. In this trial of influence, the precursor's poem remains supreme, impulsing but at the same time overwhelming our young poet's ability to craft a poem worthy of both the precursor's model and his own political moment. At this poetic juncture—¡Chale! —wearied and exasperated by his struggle with a too strong father, the ephebe cannot continue. He is "learning to see the Sun," but he cannot fully appropriate and begin to render poetically this power beyond.^[6]

Poetics, Politics, and Other precursors: the Paradoxical Power Beyond

This promise of a stronger political poetics as a result of "learning to see the Sun" would be more assuring were it not already a hint that the ephebe is about to travel the wrong road to reach his goal. If we take him seriously, as Hernandez suggests we must, this poem closes with the possibility of a turn to a pre-Conquest indigenous poetics as a source of strength for a new poetry.

Fortunately this is a promise that Montoya does not keep. Other poets, however, principally Alurista, have followed this pre-Conquest indigenous path, defining for themselves different precursors. The result, in my opinion, has been a dense, richly allusive, but ultimately opaque

and politically limited poetics keyed not on social engagement, but on inwardness, indigenous purity, and metaphysical transcendence (BruceNovoa 1982:69–95). All these spiritualist stances are, paradoxically, based on two indigenous societies—Aztec and Mayan—that practiced no small amount of social domination. This particular set of alternative "precursors," if precursors they really are, has not well served Chicano movement poetry in its struggles with past and present.

There are better traditions on which to draw in these struggles, powers "beyond" the precursory corrido. Here I am thinking of a womancentered poetics and its close relation, the Anglo-American modernist poetic tradition, and how both may be integrated with the influence of the precursor and rendered political. It is relative absence of any tradition beyond the corrido that renders "El Sol y los de Abajo" weak before society and its strong precursor. Let us consider this case within the Marxist cultural theoretical framework set out earlier.

First, while "El Sol y los de Abajo" may be read as an artistic structure of ideologemes speaking of class and race relations, the poem does not fully and adequately speak to these relations. In a sense we appeal here to Marx's distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself . It is the former, rather than the latter, that dominates Montoya's poem. In the first six stanzas we have an almost totally passive, markedly unpoetic recording of such relations, surpassed, in the poem's middle section, by a better poetics and a politics of resistance, if somewhat turned inward. However, we do not hear an active, contestative voice and stance in the poem against the day-to-day social domination that is so much a part of the poem's record, its "political history" in Jameson's first-level analytical terms.

Toward the end of the poem, our poet-speaker begins such an effort, immediately inspired by his precursor. Yet, his voice falters in Withdrawal, and he is unable to offer a political poetics that is contestative to his time and toward his precursor. At best, he can only feebly imitate the precursor and reproduce him in the present, in the movement of Accommodation, but he cannot go beyond him to construct his own poem of active class and race ideologemes. In large part, this limitation flows from another in this poem: In the final section, the strong presence of the corrido—associated with an early-capitalist, agriculturally keyed mode of production—mires the poem's ideology of form in the now too-static reproduction of the past. In Williams's terms, the poem remains too wholly residual. If this poem is to be politically vital for

its moment, it must join to a corrido aesthetic other sources of counterinfluence.

Earlier we noted Montoya's comparatively greater success in writing the poetics of women's culture, but also his failure to fully explore this poetic direction and his patriarchally destined return to the fatherprecursor. Like "La Jefita," the woman-centered section of "El Sol y los de Abajo" is a poetic achievement remarkable, perhaps, for a man. Had Montoya's patriarchally dominant Muse not pulled him back toward the male precursor, here, in this world of women, he might have found and exploited an additional voice on which to build a better poem. Such a poem would not have abandoned the oppositional poetic mission of the corrido but would have added to it the repressed, excluded voice of woman. Such an addition, however, can occur only in a far better-integrated, more subtle text than Montoya achieves in his overly gender-bifurcated poem.^[7]

Here the poet might have listened to himself, to the scene of instruction in poetry and politics that he offers in "Los Vatos." As Benny leaves his family's home to face those who would kill him, he passes his mother:

He walked past her without seeing her and in his thoughts
Illusive like a moth, the incredible notion
To crawl into her and the chance to be born again
Passed before him.

There is yet a second potential source of counterinfluence. The ephebe could establish some degree of control over this precursory form by joining it to a new modernist aesthetic form so that the poem might more adequately speak to the present. Elsewhere Montoya demonstrates a firm knowledge of such sources of emergent poetic authority—with Whitman in "Pobre Viejo Wait Whitman" (Poor Old Walt Whitman), with e.e. cummings in "In a Pink Bubble Gum World," with Dylan Thomas, again, in "Resonant Valley," and with Yeats in "El Sol y los de Abajo." In a later interview, Montoya describes his discovery of Anglo-American modernist poetics:

I also got exposed to the poets that were being read at the colleges at that time. The only poetry I had remembered before that time were those horrible, long Longfellow-type things que nos hacían leer in high school [that they made us read in high school]. So I was turned off. But . . . one vato [guy] that I read was doing something that was exciting to me because

he seemed to do it with a facility that I could relate to somehow . . . that was Walt Whitman. Me caiba su poesía [I dug his poetry] so I went with his trip for a long time. By then I was also starting to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Y me fui prendiendo con esos vatos [and I got attached to those guys]. And the other vato that I really dug a lot around that same time was William Carlos Williams. I also thought he was getting away with something. And I thought all these guys were getting away with something I was being told not to do. Por eso los veía como rebels a ellos . [That's why I saw them as rebels.] How could they get away with it and I get put down for trying it. (1980b:50)

Perhaps because of the overwhelming demand of a Chicano cultural nationalism in the political moment in which he is writing, Montoya seems not to draw fully on this Anglo-American modernist tradition in his long poem as he had done in "La Jefita." Yet here would seem to lie a better source of counterinfluence, itself critically revised, to draw upon in the poetically and politically effective transformation of the precursor for the contemporary Chicano intelligentsia. Indeed, Montoya himself has urged young Chicanos to read these modernists (1980b:49).

Ultimately, the failure to overcome a continuing gender contradiction and the failure to write a distinctively modernist poem become one issue. Together they make "El Sol y los de Abajo" an inadequate response to its present moment; they render it incapable of acting as a poetic charter to guide us through this moment in which all manner of social contradictions need to be overcome. As a poetic document, as a moment in political history, however, "El Sol y los de Abajo" speaks richly to our collective yoke of confusion in the early days of the Chicano movement.

The child has to make a choice between love of self and love of the other . . . the boy's self-love or narcissism turns him away from his mother. But the self so loved is fraudulent: self-love replaces parental love, but . . . only at the cost of splitting the ego into parent and child. . . . man finally succeeds in becoming father of himself, but at the cost of becoming his own child and keeping his ego infantile.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,
Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,
A larger poem for a larger audience
Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

6
The Daemonizing Epic:
Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales and the Poetics of Chicano Rebellion

With José Montoya we were instructed in the ways that too close an adherence to the precursor can vitiate a contemporary political poetics. We have a radically different case with Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's "I Am Joaquín: An Epic Poem," a more ambitious poem that, after a long review of the history of greater Mexico, asserts the right of MexicanAmericans to national self-determination and the creation of a mestizo nation.

In this poem, as we shall see, the dominant revisionary strategy is daemonization , which I call Rebellion, a movement that entails the poetic fiction of a radical break with the precursory poetic father. After an initial revisionary strategy of evasion and deferral and a less-thanpotent poetics, this new poetic son does begin to fashion his own strong poem but, paradoxically, not before recognizing and initially partaking of an enabling nurturance from the image of Woman. In the final analysis, however, Gonzales also prefers to struggle strictly within the realm of patriarchy.

"I Am Joaquín": Chicano Text and Precursory Origins

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales may well have been the best-known activist in the Chicano movement. The author's blurb to the 1972 edition of "I Am Joaquín" describes the breadth of his activism:

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales was born in Denver in 1928, the son of a migrant worker. He has been a National A.A.U. boxing champion, professional boxer, packing house worker, lumberjack, farm worker, and businessman. Long involved in the civil and human rights struggle for the Mexican American, he is currently director of the Crusade for Justice, a

Denver-based Chicano civil rights organization with activities throughout the West. He is also founder and president of Escuela Tlatelolco, the first all-Chicano school in America (preschool to college). He is the publisher of El Gallo newspaper, a playwright (The Revolutionist, A Cross for Maclovio ) and poet (Sol, Lágrimas, Sangre ). "I Am Joaquín" was first published in 1967.

Cordelia Candelaria has rightly labeled "I Am Joaquín" as "the most famous of all Chicano poems" and mentions its extensive distribution, including its production as a film (1986:42). In explaining the poem's immense popularity, Bruce-Novoa points to its style: "The writing is simple, free of complicated poetic tropes; the language easily accessible, communicating a readily memorable impression" (1982:48). He also notes the poem's "uncritical utilization of standard Mexican nationalistic imagery, its appeal to the clichés of Mexican populism, perpetuating stereotypical imagery, while using it to establish a Chicano heritage" (1982:56). Stylistically and in other ways, Bruce-Novoa comments, "I Am Joaquín" resembles "the simplification process of oral tradition" (1982:56); more specifically, "The poem . . . defines itself as the corrido , thus inscribing itself within its self-established code of values. This explains its use of cliché, of repetition, of simple language, of few but key images" (1982:64). Unfortunately, here Bruce-Novoa repeats a common mistake—that oral tradition "simplifies"—and he limits the familial resemblances between Gonzales's self-styled epic poem and the precursory corrido tradition to superficial stylistic similarities. Further, his reading is constrained by a neoformalist focus on the temporally bounded text open to prior texts such as the corrido only through resemblances and allusions.

My argument is quite another. Beneath the surface stock imagery of Gonzales's long poem is a more dynamic anxiety of influence in which a struggle with the precursor shapes the poem at every step and conditions its political efficacy. Candelaria comes closer to my mark in her understanding that Gonzales "modifies the epic heroic model" in which the epic corrido participates, and, more specifically, that Gonzales is "modeling his epic hero after a particular legend" and, we add, a particular corrido hero, Joaquín Murrieta of California, though Gonzales is responding to the wider epic corrido tradition as well.

About Joaquín Murrieta there is no historical consensus that separates folklore from social reality; there is even the possibility that Murrieta never existed at all. But according to legendary history, Joaquín

Murrieta was an honest Mexican miner in northern California in the early 1850s, just as Anglo-Americans were coming into newly acquired California to exploit its recently discovered gold. Murrieta turned to social banditry against the Americans, because, again, according to legend, "he had been oppressed, robbed and persecuted by the Americans . . . had been driven from a piece of land—had been insulted and grossly maltreated without justice—had been flogged—and he was determined to be avenged for his wrongs four-fold. He had robbed many—killed many, and more should suffer in the same way."^[1] Murrieta was eventually caught and killed by the California equivalent of the Texas Rangers.

Murrieta's exploits in defense of his right and honor passed into legendry and balladry. We have only incomplete versions of the latter, and they are technically not true ballads but rather descriptive songs such as this one (Acosta 1951:64; my translation):

I have ridden through California
In the year of 1850;
I have ridden through California,
In the year of 1850,
With my saddle inlaid with silver
and with my pistol full;
I am the Mexican
Named Joaquín Murrieta.
I am not an American,
But I understand English;
I am not an American
But I understand English;
I learned it from my brother
Backwards and forward;
I can make any American
Tremble at my feet.
I am he who can vanquish
Even African lions,
I am he who can vanquish
Even African lions,
I am going to cross this road
To kill the Americans.

The origins of this song are unknown.^[2] In meter, rhyme, and verse patterns, it is not a corrido, yet it does present the traditional heroic figure, pistol in hand, opposing the forces of oppression, the americanos . The text also presents the manly boasting associated with the corrido,

but, unlike the corrido, this song is one continuous first-person boast. Whereas the corridista inserts occasional lines of boasting dialogue within a larger narrative of events, this song is spoken entirely by the figure of Joaquín Murrieta. I stress this point because this self-centered poetics also characterizes "I Am Joaquín." In his daemonizing break with the traditional epic corrido, it is as if Gonzales had just such a quasi-corrido model in mind as the basis for his poetic moment of Rebellion.

"I Am Joaquín": from Corrido to "Epic"

Though the poem's title evokes the presence of the Mexican ballad hero and the subtitle announces "an epic poem," the four opening stanzas constitute a Swerve from this identification of a prior poetic presence. In these stanzas the poem deviates from the epic heroic ballad tradition in its use of English, its highly irregular meter and rhyme, and its setting in "the whirl of a gringo society."

More significantly, the opening line—"I am Joaquín"—announces an immediate contrast with the traditional corridista, who never sings about himself in the first person and rarely mentions himself at all, except to ask permission from the audience to begin his song. Gonzales's introductory statement to the poem is revealing here. "'I Am uín,'" he says, "was written as a revelation of myself and of all Chicanos who are Joaquín" (1972:1). Yet even as the narrator of this poem speaks on behalf of all Chicanos, he nonetheless does so forcefully in the first person and soon he gradually emerges as this corrido's hero as well. In contrast, the traditional corridista is an omniscient narrator who sings about others, not about himself.

Moreover, the traditional corrido hero is always introduced in classically heroic terms: honorable, strong, fearless, aggressive. But Gonzales's hero introduces himself as a postmodern "anti-hero" who, like his generation, is initially "lost," "confused," and "destroyed." If this poem is to be an epic or a corrido, then it must be so in the trope of irony—that which is not what it appears to be—which Bloom identifies as the primary trope of the revisionary ratio that I call the Swerve.

Once the poetic son has taken this initial evasive action, it is as if he begins to sense that, nonetheless, he cannot complete his poem without the precursor's help. Like a young man turning, reluctantly perhaps, to his father for help in a moment of crisis, our poet slowly

begins to acknowledge and deal directly with the master poem while still insisting on his autonomy. Through the poetic revision of Accommodation he acknowledges the master poem, even as he implicitly points to its limitations and audaciously "suggests" how it might be "improved."

The entire long section from "I am Cuauhtémoc" (line 38) through "by deception and hypocrisy" (line 261) is such a compromised return to a sustaining tradition, made most immediately evident in the linking lines 35–37, "I withdraw to the safety within the / circle of life— / MY OWN PEOPLE." What follows is a return that, as a poetic narrative account of his people, implicitly acknowledges the corrido. But it is, at the same time, the poetic son's "attempt to persuade us" that the precursory form can (and should) be "newly fulfilled and enlarged" in the hands of the new young poet (Bloom 1973:67). How does Gonzales accomplish this in this section?

If a typical Mexican corrido focuses on a single, specific historical event in a circumscribed temporal moment—the killing of an Anglo sheriff, a victory on a revolutionary battlefield—this Chicano epic has far greater narrative ambition. Like the corrido, this epic narrates history, but its poet has taken a further completing and enlarging step, namely a presumed narration of the whole of Mexican history. Further, while corridos speak to limited social conflict, this epic thematically addresses a much larger domain of conflict both within Mexican society and with a dominant Anglo culture. Included in this enlarged domain are women: the Virgin of Guadalupe (line 96), the "black-shawled / faithful women" (lines 216–18) followed by the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Indian goddess Tonantzin (lines 225–27), and the black-shawled woman who enters in line 416.

Finally, if the initiating Swerve was uttered in unconscious irony, as a corrido that is not a corrido, this supernarrative takes the predictable trope (in Bloom's terms) of synecdoche. The narrative as a whole is intended to stand for a form that is only local and partial—the corrido—just as the macrocosmic narrative of conflict writ large is a representation of the speaker's own internal conflicts and efforts to find his identity.

With line 262, "I stand here looking back," the poet inaugurates the revision of kenosis , or Withdrawal, which is

a more ambivalent movement than clinamen or tessera , and necessarily brings poems more deeply into the realms of antithetical meanings. For, in kenosis , the artist's battle against art has been lost, and the poet falls or ebbs into a space and time that confine him, even as he undoes the

precursor's pattern by a deliberate, willed loss in continuity. His stance appears to be that of his precursor . . . but the meaning of the stance is undone; the stance is emptied of its priority, which is a kind of godhood, and the poet holding it becomes more isolated, not only from his fellows, but from the continuity of his own self. (Bloom 1973:89–90)

The speaker-poet begins his account of loss and undoing, of falling and ebbing as he realizes the extent of his oppression. But in poetic terms, he has also lost his battle against art, the art of the corrido, because he is at this point unable to write a "corrido" for his own time. Yet even as he admits defeat, he extends his Withdrawal by writing a lengthy account of his political and poetical regression. This account breaks with the preceding heroic narrative, and now defeat predominates. Unable to narrate heroically, the poet, in Bloom's terms, "undoes the precursor's pattern by a deliberate willed loss in continuity. His stance appears to be that of the precursor . . . but the meaning of the stance is undone."

Such a concurrent emptying out of tradition and diminishing of the present self either leads to total poetic and social negation, as in Paredes's "Guitarreros," and in Montoya's poems, or prepares the ground for the poetic strategy that Bloom calls daemonization , or the Counter-Sublime. In this movement there is a seeming total abandonment, actually a full repression, of the precursor, in favor of a new beginning.

In daemonization the precursor, who was consciously limited in the kenosis , seems to disappear altogether as the new poet attempts a seemingly new poetic vision to replace that of the precursor. Believing that he has vanquished the precursor, the ephebe consciously thinks himself free and poetically engages in what Bloom calls "the over-restituting movement of daemonization ." Now the ephebe's imagery and tone partake of hyperbole: "the trope of excess or of the over-throw and like repression finds its images in height and depth, in the Sublime and the Grotesque" (1975a:99). For Bloom "the glory of repression, poetically speaking, is that memory and desire, driven down, have no place to go in language except up onto the heights of sublimity, the ego's exultation in its own operations" (1975a:100). Hence, I call this movement Rebellion.

Gonzales's move to Rebellion begins with line 387, as the poet concludes his litany of oppression and despair, which he has cast as an undone "corrido" of defeat that negates himself and his precursor. He

ends his own undoing by recognizing that "they," having taken and dominated everything else, have overlooked his people's art. He offers three examples of the latter: first, "the art of our great señores," the great Mexican muralists, and then "Mariachi music, the / heart and soul / of the people of the earth." Both these examples are named in clauses, but the third art form is rendered in a full sentence:

The corridos  tell the tales
        of life and death,
                     of tradition,
        legends old and new,
        of joy
            of passion and sorrow
        of the people—who I am.

Here we at last explicitly meet the master poem, semiconsciously present throughout, and it is fitting that the corrido appears by name just as the poet is about to fully enter the ratio of Rebellion. For Rebellion can have its greatest glory only when, like two corrido heroes, pistols in hands, the ephebe and the master poem fully confront each other mano a mano . Yet, strangely enough in this hand-to-hand poetics, full daemonization does not follow immediately after this identification. Woman, who has been a minor visitor in this poem twice, now reappears to fill the moment between confrontation and Rebellion, like a mother appealing to a confrontational father and son. She appears, moreover, in what are the least abstract, most imagistically detailed, vibrant, and rhythmic—all of which is to say, the best—lines in this poem.

I am in the eyes of woman,
     sheltered beneath
her shawl of black,
     deep and sorrowful
     eyes
that bear the pain of sons long buried
     or dying,
     dead
on the battlefield or on the barbed wire
     of social strife.

Her rosary she prays and fingers
endlessly
     like the family

working down a row of beets
     to turn around
     and work
     and work.
There is no end.
Her eyes a mirror of all the warmth
     and all the love for me,

"And," the poet continues in a crucial identification, "I am her / and she is me."

We face life together in sorrow,
anger, joy, faith and wishful
thoughts.

Then, in a deliberate confusion of gender identity:

I shed the tears of anguish
as I see my children disappear
behind the shroud of mediocrity,
never to look back to remember me.

Here this poetically strong turn to the maternal ends, and Gonzales immediately takes up the rhetoric of daemonization with its attendant hyperbole, its wildly oscillating poetics of low:

I have existed
in the barrios of the city
in the suburbs of bigotry
in the mines of social snobbery
in the prisons of dejection
in the muck of exploitation
and
in the fierce heat of racial hatred.

and high:

                                my faith unbreakable,
                                my blood is pure.
I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ.
                           I SHALL ENDURE!
                           I WILL ENDURE!

This is the Counter-Sublime in full view; the moment when the poetic son thinks himself wholly independent of the precursor. The latter, nonetheless, is always there , if repressed, still powerfully condi-

tioning and acting as the base for the younger one's mad flight into his "own" sublime. Joaquín is starting to write of his own deeds, of the creation of the student-farmworker movement and its heroes, always in confrontation with the precursor. Joaquín's actions are now, in Montoya's terms, "worthy of the ballads." Yet at the time this poem was written, in 1966, these were actions in progress, accomplishments largely to come. What we are witnessing here is the hyperbole of a fresh beginning rather than an accomplished poetics and politics. Nonetheless, as social poetry, the climax of this full daemonization constitutes the high poetic and political moment for the nationalist aspirations of the Chicano movement in 1967–1969:

And now the trumpet sounds,
the music of the people stirs the
    revolution

Finally, we were writing our own corridos, and Gonzales and the Chicano youth community were both heroes and corridistas. But history and the dialogue with tradition and the poem also end here. No continuing confrontation with the past follows, for this ephebe and his compatriots think they have forged a new movement that will endure, a movement indebted to history on the surface and in the depths of the unconscious, but one which at a middle level chooses to break with the past.

"I Am Joaquín": Poetic Nationalism and the Social

Tracing the relationship of "I Am Joaquín" to its strong precursor within Bloom's framework historicizes the poem with reference to its literary tradition, but not with reference to its present historical moment. Clearly, the poem is an extended exercise in the political and cultural nationalist affirmation of the Chicano movement and of the Mexican people in the United States. In Candelaria's reading, the poem moves from the self-abnegation of its historical sections to present-day affirmation: "The poet thus lays out the specific dramatic conflict as a polarity—the noble, formidable raza past pitted against the hostile dominant society's perception of raza as ignoble and without value. . . . Adopting a reflective, quiet tone, Gonzales suggests resolution of this conflict (in literary terms, the falling action) by becoming increasingly

lyrical" (1986:47). But Candelaria somewhat oversimplifies the historical dimensions of the text: "we apprehend the nature of the poet's response to the heritage that produced him, a response that does not allow the centuries of subjection and agony to overcome the human will to act as an agent of self-determination." This resolution to overcome is climactically evident in the final stanzas, in which

we rebel against the dominant culture's negation of Mexican America, and we reclaim the source of our future power which lies in the legitimation of our identity. With Joaquín "we refuse to be absorbed" by the larger society because our "spirit is strong" and our "faith unbreakable." (1986:47–48)

In a generally similar vein, although with strong religious overtones inherited from the informing work of Mircea Eliade, Bruce-Novoa reads the poem as a series of withdrawals and assertions in and out of history whose net effect is to render the poem a "rescue" from an "enveloping chaos":

The poem's main thrust is to rescue Chicanos from an enveloping chaos due to the loss of their land. The poem begins from the situation of contemporary Chicanos living in the Other's space, in Eliade's terms; within that chaotic space, Chicanos must define—cosmicize—their own area. To do so they must recall the paradigmatic process that defined the culture and renew it; they must discover the primordial hierophany. For this reason, the Chicano Everyman, Joaquín, retreats first into his people, and then into history to seek the essential knowledge. When it is found, the people can move forward in orderly fashion toward a common goal. (1982:49)

While there is truth in both Candelaria's and Bruce-Novoa's observations, neither fully explores the poem's diachronic similarities to and, more crucially, deviations from its literary predecessors, most obviously the corrido. Regarding the poem's social context or history conceived as the temporal present, both these critics focus on the poem's ethnic nationalist rhetoric. Their readings derive from what Jameson calls "political history . . . in the narrow sense of punctual event and a chroniclelike sequence of happenings in time" (1981:75). But "I Am Joaquín" does not record so much events as the rhetoric of a certain time. Within the poem's ethnic, nationalist, culturally affirming rhetoric is a historical chronicle, again not so much of events in an ordinary sense, but of "great" events, or, as Bruce-Novoa says, the clichés of greater Mexican history. More importantly, this is a poem largely in flight, in abstract

historical counterexistence to the corrido with its penchant for historical particularity. Under its rhetoric, the poem, in its nationalist abstractive language, frees itself from a compelling poetic imagistic rendering of class relations, from an artistic articulation of the ideologemes of such relations. It is, of course, the poem's very lack of historical particularity that makes this second articulation impossible. One cannot poetically craft a poem of class relations if those symbolic units that signify class are poorly developed or altogether absent. For all its rhetoric, and precisely because it wants to be a poem of daemonization against the corrido, this most appreciated of poems (by ethnic nationalists) largely and paradoxically fails to poetically address the lived experience of social domination of the greater Mexican people.

Only in one place is "I Am Joaquín" redeemed in these terms, and, once again, we are reminded of Montoya's "El Sol y los de Abajo," for Gonzales also creates an opportunity and fails to fully exploit it. Recall the particularistic, imagistically well-developed rendering of the woman/mother, her eyes "sheltered beneath / her shawl of black, / deep and sorrowful / eyes / that bear the pain of sons long buried / or dying."

Here, I come to my most fundamental disagreement with Candelaria and Bruce-Novoa. For me, these lines are a fine poetic etching of woman that any cultural citizen of greater Mexico would recognize and appreciate. Candelaria, however, does not discuss these particular lines at all, yet by her tally the poem is unfair to women:

out of the poem's approximately 475 lines, under forty acknowledge the presence of women within the Mexican-American heritage and contemporary experience. Moreover, these lines, unlike the numerous others referring to specific men in history, make, with one exception, only anonymous references to la mujer [woman]. (1986:43)

Bruce-Novoa seems of two minds about women in the poem. "The passive, stereotypical role to which the woman is relegated is lamentable, but, once again, the poem traffics in Mexican clichés. . . . The poet ignores the active role women took in history preferring to limit them to the passive mother image" (1982:58). Yet he edges close to a more complex reading of this imagery when he comments on the specific passage:

The woman's passivity continues, as does her role as a bridge to Chicano heroism. As the storehouse of tradition, she is a cultural mirror in which Joaquín studies his reflection. Simultaneously, she watches him, activating

the mirror into a judgmental instrument armed with the totality of history. Significantly, Joaquín's declaration of purpose springs from seeing himself reflected in another's eyes, which at the same time place him in historical perspective, lovingly. (1982:64)

In other words, this woman is "passive" only in the way that a seemingly calm sea is passive. Bruce-Novoa clearly senses something here but, like the poet, does not pursue it.^[3]

The appearance of the black-shawled woman, as we noted, immediately precedes the poet's leap into daemonization . Woman emerges here when the poet, in flight from the precursor, generates a psychologically predictable source for a counterpoetics. In a struggle between two political poems, however, this search for a counterpoetics necessarily has a social significance, one more profound and important than the assertion of nationalist rhetoric.

For as the poet finds a new source of imagery—woman—for a counterpoetics against the father, he is simultaneously locating a social ground and meaning for a new political poem. Like the corrido—that is, in more concrete and poetically compelling ideologemes of race and class than any set of nationalist clichés—such a poem would articulate his people's lived experience with and daily struggle against domination even while overcoming the ballad's gender contradiction. If the entire passage on the black-shawled woman is an example of this better counterpoetics, a poetics that strongly responds to the precursor and to society, then these lines within it may be its very best section. Her presence enunciates lived domination and religious-familial resistance:

Her rosary she prays and fingers
endlessly
     like the family
working down a row of beets
                          to turn around
                          and work
                          and work.
                      There is no end.

With these lines, which he does not sustain, the poet is at his momentary best relative to the precursor and to society; that is, here we see a well-done dual poetic critique. Facing backward toward the precursor, this ephebe has the opportunity to develop a new corrido, a ballad that will take up the genre's sense of socially meaningful historical particularity even as it extends its range beyond the purely patriarchal.

At the same time, an extended, well-etched rendering of woman would have enabled the poet to move beyond his conscious and rhetorical political poetics to express a deeply compelling, poetically and politically effective, figuration of the unconscious of race and class domination. Had he done so, the poem would present a strong face outward to society as well as backward to the precursor. Had he done so, the poem might have been a corrido for our times, a text partaking of, but not subsumed by, the traditional epic heroic ballad. Like the latter, such a poem would be sensitive, as these lines are sensitive, to a concrete rendering of the ideologemes of class relations even as it evolved a new hero and form for our times.

We may also note that this poetic recognition of women and a more socially engaged politics is coincident with a seeming, likely accidental, recognition of modernism. As I read and reread these lines, I knew I had read lines "like" these before, a poem with this tonality and thematic, though not with close or sharp echoes or affinities. It took me awhile, but I finally found the tonality and thematic I was sensing in T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." Yet I do not believe that this ephebe knows his Eliot, though he well may. Rather, we seem to have two independent poets, one highly canonical, one not, making roughly parallel poetic moves.

But writing an extended poem about women, no matter how wellcrafted, would itself not be enough. It would not be the strongest poem that could be written against the precursor or society. No son comes to terms with his father by retreating wholly toward his mother. This, we have seen, is Montoya's poetic dilemma. No dominated people can effectively engage their oppressors with one of the gender pair—male or female; both are needed to mount the most effective response to political or cultural repression.

Having momentarily fully recognized repressed Woman, this ephebe is on the verge of crafting such a unified poem of critical androgyny. That such a poem is possible for this male poet is intriguingly suggested by the lines immediately following this female section, when the speaker identifies himself with Woman: "and I am her / and she is me." But the aggressive nationalist poet does not pursue this androgynous identification and too soon returns to the self-assertive rhetoric of masculine daemonization . In lines that ostensibly speak to the social present we find a telling statement of the poet-speaker's relationship to his strong fatherly precursor and his desire to be a strong replacement.

I am Joaquín
    I must fight
          and win this struggle
          for my sons, and they
          must know from me
          who I am.

As it comes to a close, this poem is too anxious to be its own master, too eager to articulate its own presumed autonomy. In its anxiety, it generates a self-inflated, hyperbolic, male-centered nationalist rhetoric that stands at a great rebellious distance from its precursor and from an engaged social critique.

Influence, Epics, and the Ideology of Form

As a rebellious self-styled "epic," "I Am Joaquín" makes a strong, if unconscious, claim to replace that which came before it. Despite the litany of historical allusions, at a deeper level the poet is claiming a total break with and negation of the precursory tradition. If Montoya lacked confidence, Gonzales has more than enough. With greater maturity and development, this ephebe might come to a recognition of life's inevitable limits and return to the precursor for sustenance—poetic and political—to develop a poetic critique at once in mature revision of the precursor and in sustained engagement with society.

But that moment never comes for this poet, and his poem stands as it is, alone in Rebellion both against society and tradition. The corrido exists as a negative influence, and this ephebe will not allow it to assist him in the construction of a truly mature strong poem. Nor is he willing to turn elsewhere, neither to a prolonged engagement with a poetics of woman nor to modernism.

And yet, since "originality" in any human creation is probably our most irapulsing creative fiction, where are we to locate this poet's informing counterinfluence to his mighty precursor? At its greatest distance from the precursor, this self-styled epic may be seen as a participant in the formulaic poetic hyperbolic so characteristic of the youth culture of the mid to late 1960s with its often exaggerated male-centered ethos. As such, it also becomes representative of a social genre of Chicano poetry whose other ephebes include Ricardo Sánchez, Abelardo Delgado, and at times Alurista. Indeed, it may well be that every

Chicano male poet—indeed every Chicano male—has spent time in this sort of Rebellion, although the poets just mentioned have made their homes there. Such is certainly the case for "I Am Joaquín."

The ideological implication of this formal affiliation is, paradoxically, that such a Rebellion is less a critique of established Anglo society than it is a protest against tradition of any kind. In these terms, indeed, "I Am Joaquín" is the most "Anglo" of poems, not in the sense of exemplifying the spirit of Anglo-American critical modernism, but in partaking of the Anglo youth culture of the sixties. Retrospectively, we can now sense the socially circumscribed and at times self-indulgent character of this sixties style. Though oppositional and counterhegemonic, the style is too much an emergent creation, little sustained by any proven residual tradition and oppositional only within a limited social sphere and temporal period.

Adrift from a sustaining critical tradition (either Mexican or Anglo) and unwilling, or unable, to pursue the poetic possibilities of the more socially grounded experience represented by Woman—a turn that would have put the poem in its best posture toward the precursor—"I Am Joaquín," in its final revision of Rebellion, opts for a form that is too ideologically bracketed within a self-centered socially restricted youth culture. We can admire this ephebe's zeal, energy, and bravado and yet recognize the narrowness of his poetic victory and the thin social resonance of his poem's politics. Adolescent in its rebellious attitude toward the father, "I Am Joaquín" remains a primer for poetic and political adolescents, which we all were in 1969.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
Wait Whitman, "Song of Myself"

In the future our poetry, literature and art may become genderless. I do not mean sexless, or asexual: we have asexual poetry, or attempts at it, everywhere around us, and it is appealing in the same way that the idea of a sexless life is appealing. . . . To eliminate sexuality in language is to eliminate vitality. When I say "genderless," then, I mean not sexless but something like bisexual or androgynous or omnisexual, containing rather than excluding the two (or four or six) sexes latent in writers and readers. The greatest writers in the world are always approaching genderlessness, because there is no nook or cranny of their natures, their experiences, their dream lives, that does not get swept into their art.
Alicia Ostriker, Writing Like a Woman

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

7
Juan Gómez-Quiñones
The Historian in the Poet and the Poetic Form of Androgyny

In the last two chapters I have been evoking the image of an ideal ephebe to the strong precursory poem, the corrido. Such a poetry would need be one of multivocalic and simultaneous image, form, and social engagement; a text at once in fruitful dialogue with its precursor and in a politically creative resonance with its present. Finally, in the most creatively antithetical and completing incorporation of the precursor, it would be a poetry that responds to the latter's patriarchal epic poetics by bringing to it the poetics of woman as well as a fine but critical sense of modernism. Such a poem is Juan Gómez-Quiñones's "The Ballad of Billy Rivera," published in 1973.

Those concerned with the serious understanding and political development of the greater Mexican people know and appreciate the cultural work of Juan Gómez-Quiñones as a leading activist and intellectual of the Chicano movement and postmovement years. I quote at length from a recent literary biography written by Enrique R. Lamadrid:

His efforts have been evident on various political, ideological, and cultural fronts, from the picket lines of Delano and East Los Angeles to the reorientation of major educational institutions. Best known as a Chicano historian, his major fields of research include Chicano labor history and the Mexican Revolution. . . . He holds a B.A. in English (1964), an M.A. in Latin American Studies (1966), and a Ph.D. in History (1972), all from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he has been a professor since 1972. His community and political activities date back to his work with the United Farm Workers and the United Mexican American Students (now MECHA, Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlán), and include such positions as Chairman of the East Los Angeles Poor People's March Contingent (1968), Director of Chicano Legal Defense (1968–69), Co-organizer of the Chicano Council of Higher Education (1969–70), member of the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Urban Coalition (1970–72), Director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Center (1974–87), and member of the Board of Trustees of the California State

Universities and Colleges (1976–84). He has done important editorial work on newspapers, research journals and anthologies, and has major works on Mexican and Chicano history. . . . He also has substantial media experience with radio, television, and one film. His seminal essay on aesthetics, culture and politics is entitled "On Culture" and has been reprinted several times. (1990:5)

Yet, as Lamadrid correctly acknowledges, this important "cultural worker and ideological spokesman with roots in the struggle of his community" (1990:4) is not as well known for his poetry. Later, I will suggest reasons for the relative neglect of a poetry that, because it is wholly implicated in precursory tradition and the contemporary political cultural scene, speaks singularly and eloquently to deep cultural ideological concerns in the closing phase of the Chicano movement from 1969 to 1972.

As is most evident in his small collection 5th and Grande Vista (Poems, 1960–1973), Gómez-Quiñones's poetry is deeply influenced by the poet's professional and lived sense of history. A native of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, he moved with his family as a young boy to East Los Angeles, the large, long-standing Mexican working-class enclave of this city, and to the particular barrio at Fifth and Grande Vista. The first poem, identified as a "prologue," in 5th and Grande Vista is "Canto al Trabajador" (I Sing to the Worker; reprinted in Appendix B). The poem is dedicated to the poet's father, Juan Gómez Duarte, a working man.

The poem's opening section is a catalogue, written in Spanish, in which the poet sings in homage to a series of workers and occupations that historically have been identified with Mexicans in the United States. At once the poem evokes two precursor traditions: that of the corridos, several of which concern occupational roles, and that of Walt Whitman, whose catalogue of workers substantially constitutes "I Hear America Singing." If we look beyond surface resemblances, however, we cannot agree with Ines Tovar that "Canto al Trabajador" and "I Hear America Singing" share an ideological outlook, namely that "the listing, like a chant, demonstrates the diversity within the oneness of the trabajadores (workers)" (1975:95). Rather, in his song Gómez-Quiñnes's wellwrought ideological effect is precisely to undercut and unmask Whitman's celebratory effort in which various workers in mid-nineteenth-century America "sing" happily of their labor identities and products, "Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else." We cannot

reasonably hold Whitman responsible for knowing Marx, but even as the latter was developing his theory of labor value and the commodity form, Whitman was writing this social nonsense.

The proper relationship between these two poems is that "Canto al Trabajador" is rather a kind of radical apophrades to its quintessentially American precursor, a revision in which the latter has been incorporated in the service of a new socially relevant poem. Unlike Whitman's celebratory ideological falsification of American workers' brutal confrontation with an emerging capitalism, Gómez-Quiñones's poem is a proud homage that is fully sensitive to workers' lived experience under this same expanding capitalist culture. Refusing to mask this modern confrontation, the Chicano ephebe develops his counterthematic by appropriating another Anglo-American canonical figure into his own revisionary political poetics. For the Mexican workers, this poet tells us,

Todos los meses son crueles
     y la semilla queda aunque arranquen la mata
todos los meses son crueles
     para ellos de las manos esculpidas.

All months are cruel
     and the seed remains though they rip out the plant
all months are cruel
     for those with calloused hands.
(my translation)

As Tovar explains,

The reference to all of the months being cruel calls to mind the opening line of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, "April is the cruelest month," but, of course, in Eliot's context, April, the life-giving month, serves to cruelly irritate the sense of the bored, stupored, synthetic rich, who wonder what to do with themselves. The poet's workers, in contrast, labor all the months of the year; theirs is not the luxury to wonder what to do. (1975:95)

She might also have noted Gómez-Quiñones's continued skillful counterevocation of Eliot for his own emerging interest in community. "The seed," he tells us, "remains though they rip out the plant." Whatever the fate of Eliot's rich, these workers will persist.

Yet even as this Chicano poet incorporates two canonical Anglo-American figures, his central intertextual concern is the Mexican co-

rrido. His song to the workers is not a narrative, to be sure, but certainly a song in honor of heroic struggle and presence. And in section II the poet offers a more focused and corrido-like homage to one worker, one hero—his father—who represents all our father-workers. As if to emphasize the poet's own generational identification, he now writes in English.

My father's holy hand is etched
     in holy grime.
I remember my father's hand
     etched in cries and sweat.
Huddled on the comer
I have seen
     the men who work.

From his father's experience, this Chicano activist, intellectual, and poet has learned politics and, I would suggest, poetics.

What I know I learned
     from my father's worker's hand
who is we and who are they
     of right and wrong
     who has built the cities
and wherefrom came the riches.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
no books or street demagogues teach
we learn from bitterness and broken bodies.
My father's hand is etched in time
Canto a los trabajadores.

While not fully in the presence of the primary poetic precursor, the poet has located himself as a son of a political-cultural tradition. It is a tradition motivating his own politics and, evidently, his poetry, a poetry about social conflict and, at this point, patriarchal male heroes. From this patriarchal point of departure, our ephebe begins an even more creative struggle as he attempts to write his own ballad, "The Ballad of Billy Rivera," the next poem in the collection (reprinted in Appendix C).^[1]

"The Ballad of Billy Rivera" and the Emerging Knowledge of the Precursor

"The Ballad of Billy Rivera" brings together five distinct, though closely interrelated, historical worlds: the pre-Conquest indigenous culture of

Mexico, the contemporary dominated condition of greater Mexican society in the United States, the Chicano movement of the sixties and early seventies, Anglo-American modernism, and the political culture of the precursory corrido. Initially in seeming conflict with each other, these worlds are ultimately reconciled and crafted by this poet into an artistic statement of community against the social fragmentation imposed by domination. Simultaneously, yet another poetic result of this well-crafted reconciliation is the most revisionary incorporation of the corrido's political poetics.

The poem opens in a way that recalls José Montoya's closing appeal, in "El Sol y los de Abajo," to the poetic-political power of Mayan mythology. But whereas Montoya there made an effort to reach beyond the precursor, the initial evocation of the pre-Conquest Indian world in "The Ballad of Billy Rivera" may be taken as a Swerve from the corrido's influence. For although he calls his poem a ballad—and as a professional scholar of modern Mexican history, Gómez-Quiñones cannot utter "ballad" without thinking of the Mexican ballad tradition—the first twelve lines of his poem adopt the poetic pose or pretense that the precursor is not there, that one can simply begin a new poem wholly independent of influence. I loosely translate the poem's opening, in which several lines of Nahuatl precede the Spanish:

He who speaks with authority
all universal and pervasive
Quetzal
That time which was.

Before there was man
there was the Earth
And before all, the spirit was first
And nature speaks, the spirit speaks
     they-he take form
the spirit is reborn
     speaks and takes form
the spirit flowers

At a far distance from any "ballad," this evanescent, allusive free verse imagistically evokes a romantic dreamlike pre-Columbian poetic culture, an evocation at great remove from the corrido's thematic and formal concretion.

Beginning in 1521, this pre-Columbian culture was destroyed by the Spanish invaders. The domination of the Mexican masses is the subject of lines 13–28, beginning with "Sabes que" (Do you know that). The

people of greater Mexico became the "dispossessed," the "despised," those "who lived at the edge"; but, after enough tears, their "sentence served," from these people "came the flame." The farmworkers' strikes of the 1960s, in California and Texas, are one manifestation of this flame: "In 1965 the campesinos / struck the fields of Delano."

Nonetheless, even in the political present, our poet makes an attempt to continue his Swerve—his pre-Conquest poetics—in lines 21–28, ending with the lament "Ay Tenochtitlán, sobrevivimos" (Oh Tenochtitlán, we survive). However, I read these lines no longer as a full Swerve, but rather as an emerging recognition of the precursor in a spirit of begrudging Accommodation; that is, while maintaining some of the preColumbian tonal poetics of the poem's opening lines, lines 13–28 nonetheless are now a record of social conflict, struggle, and decline. In this limited sense, the poem begins to partake of the thematic and style of the corrido. While not yet fully engaging the precursor, the ephebe, nonetheless, is echoing the corrido's commitment to the recording of the everyday struggle of the people. Yet, at the same time, in a manner reminiscent of Corky Gonzales, Gómez-Quiñones is doing so using imagery more universal than concrete or local, as if to write a "larger" corrido, not of a specific time and event, but of general history itself. Here, then, in Bloom's terms, the ephebe acknowledges but tries to supersede the precursor by attempting "to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor's Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe" (1973:67).

But our ephebe's effort to write this larger, abstract corrido begins to falter. For even as he speaks of social struggle and focuses on the farmworkers, he seems to recognize, like Montoya, that he cannot yet truly write a corrido for his time and place. While the farmworkers are in heroic struggle, a larger sector of his political community—the urban population, particularly its youth—is failing to live up to heroic standards, and here his potential ballad falters in the face of the mighty precursor. At this moment this is a world too defeated for struggle or for heroes.

And so in lines 39–41 the young urban poet executes a Withdrawal in which he simultaneously empties out both his poetics, his community's political possibilities, and the precursor's ability to provide artistic and ideological sustenance for his world. First he tells us of a community dead to the cries of the ancient gods; then he speaks of a transformed lumpen-ersatz pop culture at far remove from the possibilities of pre-

cursory influence: "Silk and Satin, southern comfort-pepsi cops." Even the style of these lines, their hip street rhythm, empties out the corrido tradition, and at certain moments, my ear once again hears a competing precursor, the nonheroic voice of T. S. Eliot. The ephebe cannot write heroic poetry about this politically degraded state of affairs, and thus both he and his precursor are "emptied out" of their political and poetic potential. What is required is a new movement that will renew the precursor's latent presence and permit the struggle to begin anew as the ephebe attempts to speak to his time with his own "corrido."

That renewal, that beginning,

It begins somewhere in Texas winds through to California
Vuela, vuela Palomita
             Madre mía de Guadalupe
                       Por tu religión me van a matar

(Fly, fly little dove
     My mother of Guadalupe
             For your religion, I will be killed.)

By quoting three famous lines from the well-known corrido "Valentín de la Sierra," the poet rhetorically closes the preceding section of loss and reevokes the sustaining precursor, the corrido tradition, which begins in Texas and winds through California.

But having recognized the master poem, our ephebe nonetheless veers sharply away from it in a continuing search for his "own" voice. With sharper self-consciousness than during his initial Swerve, the ephebe gathers new strength, exults in his own poetic powers, and launches out in a new seemingly independent poetics, the poetics of Rebellion. This revisionary ratio is articulated in the idiom of a "power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor" (1973:15). In this case the power, the alternative poetics for the impending Rebellion, is again the poetic power of pre-Conquest and immediate post-Conquest indigenous culture—the counterpoetics that appears at the end of Montoya's poem and at the beginning of this one. Now, however, the poet focuses on the most powerful image of indigenous cultural poetics, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the central female and maternal symbol of post-Conquest indigenous and mestizo greater Mexico. The invocation of this key maternal poetics paradoxically impels the ephebe toward a sharper contestation with the father.

The long section that follows, lines 46–105, constitutes the overrestituting movement of Rebellion. As in the analogous movement of Gonzales's "I Am Joaquín," here we again find the articulation of a radical Counter-Sublime, or hyperbolic poetic highs and lows in which the ephebe presumptuously tries to write his own political poetics in the full face of the precursor. This Rebellion against poetic authority has its political correlate as well, and lines 46–57 depict the early stage of the Chicano movement, the movement at a time when it wholly identified itself with those who took the first step toward a new political moment: the farmworkers. In Dantesque imagery that slowly shifts to the pastoral, the poet sings of this agricultural prehistory of the student movement. Here I translate from the author's Spanish:

from that place
Where there is found
     the House of Torments
where the winds
     are forged.
from there it returned.
The trek began
     by garzas  and carrizales^{[ 2]}
Between rivers, silver and sown fields

This movement from the fields turns into a kind of festive politics. With a play on the word unión, the ephebe accelerates his daemonizing ratio into a new scene of politics and poetics symbolized by dance. Again, in my translation:

Only in dance
     is there union

Only in dance
     Are spirit, self, and soul
     united
That is why we love dance.

Only in song
     is giving possible
     spin, Raza.

Revenge is ours
Goodbye dear friends
     Goodbye false loves

Our poet begins to chart a new path leading to a new politics and a new poetics. For the moment, he has bid farewell to tradition, to the precursor, farewell to dear friends and false loves.

If the politics of the revolutionary corrido was centered on the reality and the metaphor of tierra (land), our new brash poet now confidently appropriates this theme for himself, an ahistorical presumption quite characteristic of the height of the Chicano student movement. As he enters full Rebellion, he speaks chiefly in English, the primary language of Mexican-Americans:

later.
tierra, tierra, tierra.
There is only one relevant demand.
freedom.
once you get over fear
the road is open

While clearly a statement about his present political moment in struggle against domination, it speaks just as well as a presumptuous statement about his relationship to his precursor(s). As he will discover, in both cases freedom is not the only relevant demand; but for the moment, he exults in it as he writes his own "corrido" (lines 76–92) about himself and his presumably autonomous politics. Here, in a formally loose, hip sixties poetic English language wholly at variance with the corrido, he finally writes his own politics and poetics:

You never saw so many fucken pigs
     in your whole life.
tripping, just tripping

followed by a Spanish passage—almost obligatory as it was in the student movement (Limón 1982a)—and the line "Que vivan los mejicanos." Like Gonzales's "I Am Joaquín," this poem could end here in Rebellion, leaving a naive reader to simply conclude that a new politics and poetics had now emerged, wholly replacing the old. But, as this particular history turns out, neither politics nor poetics could be sustained, and this poet-as-historian is wise enough to know it.

Beginning with line 93, "I just want to feel high again," the poet acknowledges that the moment of demonstrations is past. We begin to sense a faltering, a waning of poetic strength whose political correlate is the waning of the Chicano student movement in the early seventies, an attenuation caused, in large part, by its difficult recognition of its internal gender contradictions (García 1989). However, in the face of this emerging issue, the ephebe can only muster a series of sentimental verses from Mexican popular commercial songs, songs usually associ-

ated with drinking and womanizing, songs that Américo Paredes caustically labels "movie corridos" (1967:29). In translation:

I am so far from the town where I was born,
Dear, beloved Mexico
why not die
For a married woman
     crazy and in love
I belong to the movement

Politics has become self-serving personal indulgence, and poetry the babbling of sexist sentimental nostalgia. The brief emerging power of woman articulated in the initial imagery of the Virgin of Guadalupe is now recontained in a conventional sexist outlook, as it was in the student movement. The poetic attempt at Rebellion paradoxically fails in a sexist parody of traditional corridos. It is as if a truly responsive new poem—like a new politics—cannot exist without a more progressive recognition of women.

The Necessary Return to Celaya

After his aborted attempt at Rebellion, the ephebe, as if recognizing his failure, enters the poetic movement of Perspective. Now, in a kind of exhaustion after the hyperbole of Rebellion, the ephebe pauses and tums back to the poetic father for counsel as he straggles to reorient himself. This is not to say that he is ready to surrender, to empty himself out wholly, as in Withdrawal. No—now he is even more willing to be his own poet, but now he will more fully and openly acknowledge the precursor's poetic presence, if only more carefully to use that powerful poetics in his own interest to write a truly strong poem. And he will revisit the precursor not in a spirit of Swerve, Accommodation, or Withdrawal, but in a spirit of Perspective or, in Bloom's terms, askesis, in which the ephebe "yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor, and he does this in his poem by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to make that poem undergo an askesis too; the precursor's endowment is also truncated" (1973:15).

This strategy emerges beginning with lines 106–7: "corre, corre, maquinita, / triste cantan los sinsontes" (ran, run, little train / sadly

the mockingbirds sing). The first of these lines is taken from the corrido concerning the battle of Celaya, which we discussed in chapter I. Here the poet explicitly acknowledges the full presence of the precursor in its most revolutionary strength. The second line on mockingbirds, however, is not from this corrido and opens the strategy of Perspective by which the new poet both limits the corrido and yet gives up his own inflated self-concern.

That is, what follows these lines is nothing less than a truncating demythification of the epic corrido's heroic ethos as the poet records for us a likelier—which is to say, a more human—version of what happened at Celaya. It was less an occasion for heroics than for lament—"Ay Celaya," says the poet—as the cuarteles (troop formations) engage in battle, and "the river," more likely of blood than water, "flowed around the / hill." Rather than a corrido hero standing authoritatively in boasting confrontation, here we find a "he" who "saw the dust become the troop," and even as he yells to his side that they should take the heights on the far bank of the river, he recalls, in quite fond human fashion, their departure from the capital, when people in the streets shouted "Viva Villa." He also recalls the mayor's effort to stop them (most likely, he was a partisan for the other side) and how the town dealt with his interference. In my translation:

The mayor ordered the machine gun unloaded,
     since they weren't going anywhere.
because he was innocent
     they cut his head off as an example to the crowd

The traditional heroic corrido thematics are deflated and reduced, a move reinforced by the irregular meter and rhyme of this passage, its mixed use of English and Spanish, and the somewhat existentialist pose of the hero and his point of view. And yet, for all his reduction of the precursor, in the movement of Perspective, the poet has also yielded up part of his claim to an "original" poetic imagination for, like the traditional corridista, he too writes of Celaya and studies it poetically as a model for his writing. Having failed in his daemonizing original effort to write about Mexican-Americans—a failure correlated by the Chicano movement's political faltering—he has imaginatively returned to Celaya to learn how to write of defeat with poetic and political honor. He is seemingly on his way to a total acknowledgment of and a superior compromise with the precursor, but not before a kind of

necessary relapse. As if still resisting a compromise between the residual and the emergent, the ephebe utters one more hyperbolic cry of Rebellion.

But this second Rebellion is more fitful, less certain, more ambivalent, as if the poet already senses its futility. Nonetheless, if only for the sake of nostalgic history, he must try once more, and he again turns to a sustaining power thought to lie just beyond the precursor. This time, though, he does not return to the concretion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but to a conventional, vague emblem of pre-Conquest culture, as though entrapped once more in Montoya's chimeric closing vision. In translation:

To the sound of ancient prayers
     the work of creation begins
     the forgotten gods have returned

From this inspiration, he surges forward once again into poetic and political hyperbole on behalf of himself and his now nostalgic, maledominated political culture of the sixties. At the beginning and center of this second Rebellion is the key symbol, Aztlán.^[3] Again, I translate:

AZTLAN lives.
     in the fields and plains
     sown by my raza.
     —For Life—

This hyperbolic movement is sustained through lines 147–49, lines uttered in celebration of those historical predecessors of the current movement, including Joaquín Murrieta. A translation:

Cry of Joaquín
     of the peons of Texas
     of the repatriated.

But a more sober, more subtle realization seems to descend on the poet with this cry of the repatriated—those Mexicans in the U.S. who were massively rounded up by the government and shipped in boxcars to Mexico during the Depression of the 1930s, in wholesale violation of due process. This realization closes his second and last attempt at Rebellion and opens the way for a second taking of Perspective. He repeats the theme of repatriation in lines that begin to acknowledge the limits of Rebellion yet the possibilities of a more enduring kind of victory.

In.....................Mexicans on.....................
     were repatriated, but they came back.
Today the migra makes sweeps
     through the barrio
          arreando el mar.
          [trying to contain the sea.]

With the ellipsis dots suggesting "any year" and "everywhere," the poet recognizes that, despite hyperbolic efforts against or for them, Mexicans have endured, have returned to lands once theirs. Despite the efforts of the migra (the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service), Mexicans have been as constant and pervasive as the sea. Self-inflated political and poetic daemonization has not spoken authentically to this greater reality, and this poetic son recognizes the futility of such self-proclamation.

He then initiates a new antithetical movement—a necessary second Perspective—that shifts his vision away from the self toward an assessment of his community's fate and faith. Returning to Spanish, he offers a variation on lines 128–30, which initiated the second Rebellion. The fields and plains, he says, are "sembrados de la Raza," that is, both sown by the People and sown with the People. But whereas in the earlier daemonizing passage, the appearance of la raza was followed by political movement—when the whirlwind came and lifted the People, when hope triumphed over experience, here, we find a kind of stasis: the people are not necessarily going anywhere; they simply, resistively, and eloquently just are . Here we find an appreciation of the People as settled, niched, persistent, enduring in fixed social spaces—in towns and neighborhoods. They are what is sown and grown.

Paralleling this mood shift, line 159 "—Por Vida—" (By Life) repeats line 130, except that now life consists not of political whirlwinds, but of tough, reflective, introspective experience. In my translation:

—By Life—, we nail on walls.
Bitter nails leave blisters of
     hope
What future? What past?
You know.

This "You know" (Sabes ) has to be understood as a quiet, implied interrogative suggesting perplexity and doubt. This "You know" also carries us into the next section, so that the poet is also asking "Do you know?"

Yesterday two weeks after the
     blowouts, 2 buildings were burnt.
Today or was it last week? or May last year, next year
In Coachella two growers signed contracts.
Ya pasó.
Sabes.

"Ya pasó" (It's over). The period of political whirlwinds—both the Revolution of 1910 and the Chicano movement—is past, an unclear, confused memory, although its vestiges remain: in the case of the Chicano movement, the growers now sign labor contracts with recognized unions, but nonviolent collective resistance has turned to sporadic violence in the schools. We have reached an end—temporary, perhaps—to poetic and political Rebellion. It is as if this poet and his political culture have exhausted their possibilities without a strong achievement in either poetry or society. The gains have been piecemeal, a reading partially anticipated by Tovar (1975:96).

In lines 150–70 the poet executes a second moment of Perspective. Following the second fit of Rebellion, the ephebe returns to the precursor and is almost wholly open to his influence but for the purpose of emptying or limiting the precursor. In the first Perspective (lines 106–26) we saw ample evidence of the precursor's influence even as the corrido was rewritten and emptied out by the ephebe. Now, however, the ephebe makes a weaker concession to the precursor. In this quite "modernist" section the precursor is not manifestly present—no references to Celaya appear, for example—but the precursor's spirit informs the ephebe's desire to narrate a poetry of defeat and loss that focuses on his community. Yet the ephebe's principal purpose in returning to the precursor is to limit or truncate its effect. To undercut the corrido's narrative of heroic confrontation, the ephebe offers modernist lines of piecemeal victory and unclear perception, a rewriting that limits the precursor but also the ephebe as well.

As the poetic son prepares for a final movement in which he will come to full terms with the precursor, he must once more limit and contain the precursor, even if this involves curtailing his own powers. Only then can the strength and critical estimate be mustered for the final reckoning in which the latecomer's poem is at its strongest. Only when the poetic son can sing his particular ballad about his community without evasion or slavish imitation will the precursor's full measure of influence be taken, even as the ephebe's most original contribution

is felt. For the moment, as if wearied from the struggle, both poets must rest in momentary mutual defeat before their final mutually sustaining embrace. Then, in his historical intelligence, this young poet finds the alternative resources he needs to stand as a grown son, a strong poet whose strongest work is the final sections of this poem.

Life and Death in East L.A.: Modernism and the Androgynous Form

In these final sections the ephebe begins his final negotiation with the precursor's influence through apophrades (or Return of the Dead), the most mature poetic ratio. In this movement he calls upon the two counterpoetics that have appeared earlier in the poem: the not-fully-repressed voice of Woman and one strain of Anglo-American modernism. This final strong closing section of the poem opens with an observant and caring description of the poet's community:

Have you ever walked the streets of
                  East L.A.
have you ever seen them shine.
Early in the morning the air smells
     of menudo and familia, early
     in the morning, on Saturdays
     and Sundays.

Menudo, the hot (in both senses) savory beef tripe soup so favored by the working-class people of greater Mexico is both a synecdoche for this group and a ritual dish that brings familia (family) and friends together on Saturday or Sunday morning in kindred consumption and conversation.

The mention of Sunday morning and family gatherings prompts another vivid image: the cars of newlyweds "covered with paper roses. / rosas de papel." Then, addressing his community in Spanish, the poet extends his flower image to a more global political metaphor. In translation:

In this too, raza,
We remember the fields and the flowers.
AZTLAN, it must be a land of roses.
                    the land of a people of roses.

Returning to his central image of the paper roses, and in English, he explains:

Sometimes, the cars are covered with
                    charming paper maché
                    roses.
When these  people get married.

Married on Sunday mornings, of course, when families eat together and talk together, and new families are created through marriage, and reproduction of another kind is set in motion. The specific imagery of East L.A. is globalized once more with the refraining "Sabes," which each time seems to sound more assured.

Sabes.
Have you seen the streets of East L.A.,
     Been in Denver cold in Winter
     En Tejas es donde calienta el sol.
     Roses are
Rosas.

This section of the poem—this loving celebrative homage to community, family, food, roses, and marriage—constitutes the poetic son's finest hour in relation to his strong patriarchal precursor. It is the time of apophrades, when the Dead creatively return to inhabit the poetic houses of the Living; the time of a creative, loving coming-to-terms between poetic father and son.

Here the precursor poem is once more granted its traditional high purpose, though as revised by the ephebe. The corrido's fundamental thematic—a celebration of a cultural hero of resistance, a hero of a particular time and place—is reexpressed in the ephebe's celebration of the collective hero of history whose heroism does not consist of individual acts of violent resistance against Texas Rangers or rurales but of collective resistance through persistence against all odds. In the face of continuous domination in everyday lived experience, "these people" make life and love, bread and roses, and they do so throughout greater Mexico, in particular historical locales, in Texas, Denver, and East L.A. Here the ephebe has transformed the traditional corrido in the service of the present.

Paradoxically, this transformation occurs because this ephebe has turned to two other precursory influences to mitigate the corrido's patriarchal and premodern influence. The first is the voice of Anglo-American modernism, first, in the form of Whitman, whose "Song of

Myself" is everywhere present and incorporated in this section,^[4] most evidently in the repeating lines that open and close the section: "Have you ever walked the streets of / East L.A." and "Have you seen the streets of East L.A." In his prologue poem "Canto al Trabajador," Gómez-Quiñones negated Whitman's socially naive "I Hear America Singing." But now the more utopian, socially observant and caring, truly democratic Whitman reappears in the incorporated service of the ephebe to assist him in his trial of strength with his dominant precursor as he rewrites the latter in his own terms. For it is Whitman's incorporated voice that permits Gómez-Quiñones to speak particularistically, corrido-like, of streets and people in a voice his own yet never fully his own. It is the use of the quiet Whitmanesque interrogative form that shifts the poem's tone away from the strident, rhythmically punctuated, imperative linear construction of the traditional corrido line, while still speaking of particularities.

This use of Whitman—the poet of man and woman—in the service of and against the corrido is reinforced by the ephebe's closely correlated turn to a woman's voice. The presence of woman in this section is not some haphazard poetic concession to affirmative action. Rather, her presence represents a potential voice, an alternative and fruitful resource for articulating an alternative poetics for responding to the male precursor and to society. Both Montoya and Gonzales attempted a similar Incorporation, but each evoked a female presence too conventionally defined as "woman," imagistically isolated, and structurally set apart. In this section of Gómez-Quiñones's ballad, in contrast, a strongly pervasive, influencing female Other shapes the total form and imagistic mood, the "informal tender tone" of the lines ending with "Roses are Rosas" (Tovar 1975:97).

Within the terms of his culture, yet without delimiting an "image" of "woman," this poet departs from the patriarchal, confrontational terms of conventional male heroes to articulate an entirely different heroic modality: the strength of nurturing concern, of the androgynously defined persistence of life. Honor, virtue, and strength are not epitomized solely by the man with his pistol in his hand; these heroic qualities are everywhere found in the living, persisting androgynous idiom of our people, articulated in androgynous symbols of food, family, marriages, and roses. The poet has appropriated the heroic thematics of the corrido, but wholly in his own terms, replacing Gregorio Cortez with a community of men and women. This is the rare, triumphant moment in the strongest of poems, when "the mighty dead return, but

they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own. If they return wholly in their own strength, then the triumph is theirs" (Bloom 1973:141).

The poet, however, does not let his poem end on this note of triumph, "Roses are Rosas," for we have yet to hear about the eponymic Billy Rivera. The disturbing final section of the poem returns us to the "southern comfort-pepsi cops":

Saturday
     and early afternoons seeping beer
          stuttering conversations of bold
               secret lives once led and never shared
car washing, clothes-buying, body sprucing
     pepsicola-cops and maché dances
torn dresses and southern comfort breath

And Saturday yields to Sunday:

Sunday morning mass
     tired mornings that lead to tired evenings
          and then once again.

After mass, perhaps, a piece of conversation introduces us to the seeming hero of this "corrido," Billy Rivera, a wholly belated appearance.

Sabes que Billy o. d.
     they found him thursday dead two days

The official announcement, perhaps on the church bulletin-board or in the newspapers, provides the details:

BILLY RIVERA'S WAKE WILL BE
     at guerra & holman mortuary
     1724 e. florence avenue
     today 2-2-58
     from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.
FUNERAL WILL BE SAT. 2-3-58
                              at 8:30 a.m.

What are we to make of these final lines, their quiet despair, following the engaging life-centered preceding section with its androgynous sensibility? Why does the poet abruptly reverse the chronological flow of the poem, returning us to 1958, well before Delano, the noontime demonstrations, the contracts signed in Coachella? For Enrique La-

madrid the abrupt funeral announcement has the effect of "symbolically burying the admirable but anarchic nihilism of the pachuco era of the 1950s" (Lamadrid 1990:7). Indeed, as we noted in chapter 5, the pachuco has assumed a mythic, balladlike signification in Chicano literature. But why does this ballad of the pachuco Billy Rivera, properly speaking, begin here, at the end of the poet's larger ballad about la raza?

Tovar notes the paradoxicality of this belated ballad: "the corridos tell the story of superhuman men who refused to submit to oppressive forces. Here, however, we have, not a Guillermo Rivera of the earlier twentieth century, but Billy Rivera, who dies on January 31, 1958 from an overdose of drugs perhaps, but also from oppression" (1975:75). More specifically, we may say that the condensed story of Billy Rivera is rhetorically placed to serve as a potent reminder to la raza of its past and a possible future as well as to underscore the poem's final relationship to the precursor. Keyed on an indeterminate cyclical conception of time and history, our historian-poet reminds us of the origins of the Chicano movement in social oppression and of a negative patriarchy symbolized by the pachuco as hero; he warns us against relapsing into this kind of political poetics now that we have achieved the possibility of the androgynous vision articulated immediately before.

This final section on the death of Billy Rivera also finalizes the relationship of Incorporation with the precursor. As if to uphold and affirm the ephebe's new "corrido" and its androgynous ethos, this final section quietly demythifies and puts to rest the exclusively male-centered world at the core of the corrido tradition. In its purely male heroic form, the corrido is no longer a viable artistic instrument for a progressive political poetics. The traditional corrido can only afford us a vision in which men live ordinary and often defeated lives, their "stuttering conversations" recalling corrido-like "bold secret lives once led and never shared" and the ragged sexuality of "torn dresses and southern comfort breath." No longer appropriate in our time, the traditional corrido hero is dead, now the lamented subject of Sunday conversations after mass—"they found him thursday dead two days"—a "hero" whose funeral is tersely announced, not sung heroically.

These closing lines cannot but remind us of Montoya's "Los Vatos" and "El Louie"; yet we also hear the pessimistic tonalities of T. S. Eliot, in a minor Incorporation. Unlike Eliot or Montoya, however, Gómez-Quiñones contains his despair. In response to the negative social char-

acter of advanced capitalist modernity, he does not opt for Eliot's transcendent poetic ritual and religion. Informed by his greater Mexican precursory tradition, this individual talent speaks of his community in valiant struggle. Following the section on roses and community, the announcement of Billy Rivera's death is not, in the final analysis, an occasion for despair. Indeed, for us in our time, it is an occasion for the celebration of this metaphorical death, by which the corrido is transformed for our time.

Our strong poet concludes "The Ballad of Billy Rivera" by enabling the ballad hero and the precursor to have returned from the Dead, wholly informing while wholly indebted to the living. As Bloom notes, the uncanny effect is that the ephebe feels like a poet who could have composed the precursory master poem had he lived in that moment and, conversely, this is how the master poem must be rewritten in our time. No longer in straggle, precursor and ephebe—father and son—have reached a poetic understanding in which other influences have also been acknowledged and embraced.

Billy Rivera's death underscores the shift to a new poetic and political sensibility, one centered on a gender-blurred social affirmation of the community's existence and living, loving persistence in a world whose new kind of hostility must be met on other terms. No longer with his pistol in his hand, the new corrido hero is armed with the equally powerful symbol of roses, and this hero is both man and woman; the new hero is the greater Mexican community.

"Roses are Rosas," and roses are an emblem of Mexican-American life in poverty-stricken south Texas, as the Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldua recalls:

I walk out to the backyard, stare at los rosales de mamá [Mother's rose bushes]. She wants me to help her prune the rose bushes, dig out the carpet grass that is choking them. Mamagrande Ramona también tenía rosales. [Grandmother Ramona also had rose bushes.] Here every Mexican grows flowers. If they don't have a piece of dirt, they use car tires, jars, cans, shoe boxes. Roses are the Mexican's favorite flower. I think, how symbolic—thorns and all. (1987:90–91)

The Politics of the Modern Androgynous Form

With these understandings of this complex poem, we may now explore the manifest and unconscious dialectical relationship between this

poem's androgynous, modernistic revisionary relationship to its precursor and its unconscious response to social domination in the 1970s and into our time.

In an enlargement of the corrido's socially descriptive power, this poem too offers us a political history of the greater Mexican people in a broader totality, as did Corky Gonzales's "I Am Joaquín." Enlarged beyond the traditional ballad's scope, yet more compact than Gonzales's rambling "epic," this true ballad for our time presents us with a record of history from pre-Conquest times to the Chicano movement's daily praxis to the streets of East L.A. Already here, we have a revisionary contribution to social struggle at the first of Jameson's levels, for in the future, such a record, like that of Cortez and the Texas Rangers, will motivate those who will carry on the struggle.

But this is not merely a descriptive culturalist political history telling us only what life was like in East L.A. These images are also to be read as ideologemes, as signifiers of race and class relations. To read of "the dispossessed," of "those who live at the edge," of those who live lives of "tired mornings that lead to tired evenings" is to understand poetically the effects of domination, the hidden and not so hidden injuries of class (Cobb and Sennett 1973). Within this context of the ideologemes of domination, however, we also learn that "In 1965 the campesinos / struck the fields of Delano"; that at demonstrations "you never saw so many fucken pigs"; that amid domination "Sometimes, the cars are covered with / charming paper maché / roses." This community continually resists, even if sometimes in hyperbolic terms, and the poem allows us to see the entire community in struggle, not just one single Cortez or Pancho Villa as an ideologeme of the whole.

At Jameson's third, and most fruitful, level—the ideology of form—"The Ballad of Billy Rivera," like the other poems we have analyzed, again suggests the difficulty and perhaps the pointlessness of distinguishing too sharply between "form" and "content." Through the use of the voice of Woman and a correlated use of two key poets of modernity, this ephebe has created a poem that exerts a most creative and mature counterinfluential relationship with its precursor. The potent Dead return to strengthen and sustain this poem even as this poet harnesses and shapes this energy to his own purposes through these two counter-aesthetics. As before, this relationship of influence must be understood as social and not that of one solitary poetic ego in struggle against his precursor.

From this perspective, beyond its compelling ideologemes of class and race struggle, "The Ballad of Billy Rivera," particularly its final sections, offers a poetics of maximum formal political achievement on behalf of those who struggle in the present. This long poem continues the community-centered narrative tradition of the corrido, with its central thematic of social struggle, even as it also incorporates a modernist poetic form, a synthesis in which the positive traces of an older mode of poetic production are joined to those of a new one. Gómez-Quiñones brings modernism to bear on the corrido, thus containing its patriarchal, dominating ethos, even as he grounds this modernism in a social experience on the side of those who struggle—the continuing theme of the corrido. The politically ambivalent character of modernism, exemplified here by Whitman and Eliot, is now rewritten within the framework of the corrido tradition and its focused unambivalent concern for a people in struggle. This equally revisionary rewriting momentarily erases modernism's tormenting ambivalency and places the form of modernity on the side of those who struggle. Further, this Incorporation of modernist form, as noted before, is always intimately correlated with the Incorporation of Woman's voice to produce what I have called the poem's modernist androgynous form.

We are at some distance from the linear, strident, wholly masculine form of the corrido, a perhaps necessary form of response to nineteenth-century social domination and its own brute masculine character. For our time of advanced capitalism with its less strident but nonetheless powerful corrosive effects on community, its encouragement of internal class and gender hierarchy, its insistence on the assimilation of American culture—for this, our time, we need a social poetry whose formal quality speaks of an integrated androgynous strength. It is the poem's ideology of form—of resistive form—that is its final and most socially efficacious expression of its political unconscious. And the poem's form is efficacious and resistive because it is rooted in the formal culture of its principal audience in the early seventies. This is an experienced, educated, and critical Chicano intelligentsia to whom the corrido's patriarchal form could no longer speak directly, although the psychocultural need for a linkage with tradition remained. This is an inteiligentsia for whom hyperbolic political poetics had been necessary embarrassments, although the need for politics remained. This is an intelligentsia critically suspicious of Anglo-American culture, yet reared in an Anglo-American culture of oppositional high modernism.

If I am correct in my estimation of this poem, a large measure of its success may be attributable to its author's well-established sense of history. Rather than watch a poet struggling as a poet, we see the historian in the poet, a trained historian able to appreciate the political effectiveness of the residual in culture as a resource for the present emergent political response to the hegemonic, a historian sensitive to the movement of Mexican-Americans into modernity and its contradictions.

From Raymond Williams we have taken the diachronic analytical Marxist language of "residual," "emergent," "hegemony," and "counterhegemony" to describe politically the relationship of the epic heroic corrido and Chicano poetry to their respective political moments and to each other. But we must venture to question the experimental adequacy of Wiiliams's language, for although the cultural work of the dominated may on the whole be construed as counterhegemonic, its separation into distinct diachronic experiences may at times be our own reification and may have the unwanted ideological effect of too quickly separating past from present. If we read Bloom politically (not as he would have us read him), the unintended counterlesson to Williams's idea is that the residual is never quite residual and the emergent is never quite emergent; that, in fact, the residual can be overwhelmingly present and therefore the very term "residual" fails; that the "emergent" emerges only through the Incorporation of the residual. The Dead do return, not only to poets but also to people and, best of all, to poets of the people.

Juan Gómez-Quiñones's "The Ballad of Billy Rivera" is one of the best illustrations of a socially symbolic act as an artistically compelling site for this historical dialogue. In this ballad to a dead nonhero that really is a ballad to a heroic community, the mighty precursor continues its residual service to this community in the able hands of its best ephebe in the emergent modernist generation, a generation increasingly conscious of the compelling issue of gender. Appearing in the final days of the Chicano student movement period, this historically sensitive, formally capacious poem afforded us a symbolic charter to review this key historical moment in our lives. In the aftermath of struggle, following Alienation and Rebellion, a moment of critical Reflection was necessary to understand our past and to prepare us for our future.