1. Spanish-speaking writers before this period were primarily poets who were published in Spanish-language newspapers. Their poetry has not been researched in depth, but several studies appeared in the 1970s. One example concerning New Mexico, whose inhabitants have traditionally claimed Spanish rather than Mexican origins, is Doris Meyer, "Anonymous Poetry in Spanish-Language New Mexico Newspapers (1880-1990)," Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 1 (Sept.-Dec. 1975). 259-275. Meyer gives examples of poetry written by New Mexican Hispanos. Anselmo Arrellano introduces the poetry of a literate class in New Mexico in Los pobladores nuevo mexicanos y su poesía, 1880-1950 (Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications, 1976). Tomás Rivera, foremost Chicano novelist of the 1960s, stresses the importance of Mexican-American newspapers as a vehicle for the literary contribution of writers of Mexican descent in the nineteenth century in "Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature," New Voices in American Literature: The Mexican American. A Symposium (Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University, 1971). One difference between the poems presented by Meyer and Arrellano and those referred to by Rivera is that the former were composed to be read and the latter were composed to be heard; only later did they appear in print.

Written literary works in various areas of the Southwest before World War II require further study and research before the historical and cultural relationships between the poetry of Spanish-speaking writers, regardless of their self-declared Hispanic identity, and the "new" literature that is the subject of this book can be explored.

2. Among the most important contributions to the genre of the novel are Tomás Rivera, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra / And the Earth Did continue

Not Swallow Him , bilingual ed. (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971); Rolando Hinojosa, Estampas del Valle y otras obras , bilingual ed. (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1973) and Klail City y sus alrededores (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1976); Rudolfo Anaya's trilogy, Bless Me, Ultima (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972), Heart of Aztlán (Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications, 1976), and Tortuga (Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications, 1979); and Miguel Mendez, Peregrinos de Aztlán (Tucson: Editorial Peregrinos, 1974).

The playwright who best represents the dramatic output of Chicanos in this era is Luis Valdez, who organized El Teatro Campesino in 1965. His early presentations aroused in César Chávez' farm workers an awareness of the socioeconomic conditions that affected their lives. His theatrical production of Zoot Suit (1978) at the Mark Taper Forum was the first drama about the history and culture of Mexican-Americans to be produced in Los Angeles.

Alurista, the most prolific of male Chicano poets, published three collections of poems between 1971 and 1976: Floricanto en Aztlán (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1971); Nationchild Plumaroja (San Diego: Toltecas en Aztlán Publications, 1972); and Timespace Huracán (Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications, 1976). Other important Chicano poets are José Montoya, El sol y los de abajo and Other R . C . A . F . Poems (San Francisco: Ediciones Pocho-Che, 1972); Tino Villanueva, Hay otra voz Poems (Staten Island: Editorial Mensaje, 1972); Raul Salinas, Viaje / Trip (Providence: Hellcoal Press, 1973); and Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), The Tale of Sunlight (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), and Where Sparrows Work Hard (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

Elizabeth Portillo-Tramley wrote plays and short stories. Her best-known drama is "The Day of the Swallows," in El Espejo-The Mirror (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971), pp. 150-193; Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Berkeley: Tonatiuh International, 1975) is a collection of short stories. For reasons noted in the text of this chapter, no novels by Chicanas appeared in the period 1965-1975. Two novels published since then are Isabella Rios, Victuum (Ventura, Calif.: Diana Etna, 1976), and Gina Valdés, There Are No Madmen Here Tonight (San Diego: Maize Press, 1981).

3. The term "Chicano" designates the totality of experience of both men and women of Mexican extraction who live in the United States. As the Spanish language allows for gender specificity, Chicano may also refer to the male of this culture. Although my usage of the term includes both meanings, I frequently use it in its more limited sense, that is, to specify the male counterpart of Chicana. A Chicana is a woman of Mexican heritage who lives in the United States. To encompass the cultural and historical continuity between Mexico and certain geographical areas of the United States, I sometimes use the term "Mexican-Chicano." break

4. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Joseph Sommers is the author of a landmark article in Chicano literary criticism, "From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Application to a Chicano Literary Text," New Scholar 6 (1977), 51-80.

5. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Bernice Zamora is the only Chicana poet discussed by Bruce-Novoa.

6. Santa Barbara: Editorial La Causa, 1982.

7. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982.

8. Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 316-339; Alejandro Morales, "Terra Mater and the Emergence of Myth in Poems by Alma Villanueva," Bilingual Review 7, 2 (1980), 123-142; Marta E. Sánchez, "InterSexual and Intertextual Codes in the Poetry of Bernice Zamora," MELUS 7 (Fall 1980), 55-68.

9. Tomás Ybarra, "The Chicano Movement and the Emergence of a Chicano Poetic Consciousness," New Scholar 6 (1977), 83.

10. Sommers, "From the Critical Premise to the Product," 70.

11. El Grito 1 (Sept. 1973).

12. I am thinking here of Alurista's early poems in which he propounded the idea that northern Mexico and the American Southwest together formed a native Chicano homeland called Aztlán. He opposed Aztlán to the values of white America, presented as sterile and vacuous. Elements of the same dichotomous tendency appear in the novels of Rudolfo Anaya and Miguel Mendez.

13. Huerta, Chicano Theater , pp. 18-23, 195-199.

14. Sonia López, "The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement," in Essays on la mujer, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martinez Cruz (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1977), pp. 16-29. See also Adelaida R. del Castillo, "Mexican Women in Organization," in Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present , ed. Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. del Castillo (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1980), pp. 7-16.

15. For a penetrating study of the writings of black women, see Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980). Clearly black women faced the same kinds of problems as Chicana poets during the same historical period. Some outstanding black American women poets are Sherley Anne Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Ai, Sonia Sanchez, and Colleen McElroy. Curiously, none of the Chicana poets I discuss are indebted to black women writers. Although Elizabeth Ordóñez claims ("Sexual Politics," p. 319) that the Chicana poet, Ana Castillo, empathizes with the processes and goals of black women's literature, there is little evidence that black women poets have influenced Chicana poets. The influence on Chicana poets, as on Alma Villanueva, for example, comes from white women writers. break

16. Conflicts stemming from social class also arose, to some extent, when Chicanas interacted with white women's groups. Some Chicanas in the movement realized that they came from communities whose per capita income and educational level were significantly lower than in white communities. In emphasizing the categories of ethnicity and gender, I am not suggesting that the dynamic of social class was of no significance. I stress those categories because Chicana intellectuals and writers were more conscious of race and gender than of class as factors shaping their lives.

17. Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez give detailed accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican women active in the public sphere in La Chicana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 68-95, 233-234. I would add two names for the contemporary period: Dolores Huerta, vice-president of the United Farm Workers Union, and Irma Castro, president of the San Diego Chicano Federation.

18. Mirandé and Enriquez give a helpful summary on the issue of Chicana feminism and list some primary sources in their bibliography ( La Chicana , p. 234). Some women, such as Marta Cotera, Anna Nieto-Gómez, and Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, gave that issue a central position in their critical essays. Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, "The Mexican-American Woman," is reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement , ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 426-432. See also Cotera, The Chicana Feminist (Austin: International Systems Development, 1976), and Profile of the Mexican-American Woman (Austin: National Educational Laboratory Publishers, 1976).

19. Other important Chicana poets are Carmen Tafolla of Austin, Xelina, of Calexico, California, now living in Colorado Springs; Olivia Castellanos of Sacramento; Margarita Cota-Cárdenas of Tucson; and Gina Valdés of San Diego.

20. For discussion of the personal confessional mode of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, see Karl Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 89.

21. Chicano interest in Octavio Paz resulted more from his essay on the pachuco (El laberinto de la soledad [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959]) than from his poetry. Pachuco is the generic name for the self-styled heroes of barrio culture in the 1940s who were identified by their dress, language, and behavior. See Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude , trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 13-18.

22. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

23. Bilingual ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

24. For further information on la llorona , see Américo Paredes, ed., Folktales of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. xvi.

25. Walter Ong, "Literacy and Orality in Our Times," in Profession 79 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), p. 3. break

26. I refer to that body of literary criticism which posits the notion of the text as plural. Among the many critics who have written on the idea of intertexuality, and whose presuppositions are reflected in my analyses, are Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974); Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

27. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

28. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980. Villanueva's book includes a detailed introduction to Chicano poetry and historical and literary essays on Chicanos.

29. Ed. Toni Empringham (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1982).

30. Numerous Spanish-language radio stations flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s in cities of the Southwest.

31. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

32. Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook , p. 252.

33. Allen, New American Poetry , p. xii.

34. For two different readings of Alurista's poetics, see Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, "Alurista's Poetics: The Oral, the Bilingual, the Pre-Columbian," in Sommers, ed., Modern Chicano Writers , pp. 117-132; Bruce-Novoa, "The Teachings of Alurista: A Chicano Way of Knowledge," in Chicano Poetry , pp. 69-95.

35. Part of Bernice Zamora's ambivalence as Chicana, poet, and woman comes from her identification with an Anglo-American tradition (see chap. 5). Whereas Eliot and Pound looked to classical literary expression because they found contemporary culture insufficient, Zamora reacts and responds to the English sonnet tradition and American writers such as Robinson Jeffers because they exclude a woman's voice.

36. For sources for my comments on the implied audience, see chap. 2, n. 39.

37. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , esp. p. 226, n. 10.

38. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation , p. 16.

39. I am indebted to Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 179-205, for the term "muted discourse." Showalter describes woman's writing as a "double-voiced discourse," or a combination of two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously at play with each other: an "orthodox" (or "dominant") and a "muted" story (see esp. p. 204).