The Essays
I dedicate this collection to the writers, artists, teachers, students, community activists, politicians, and all who have worked purposefully and diligently to achieve social and political justice for the Mexican American community.
Our civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s included an outpouring of artistic work. We called our efforts el Movimiento Chicano, the Chicano Movement. We marched and demanded equality in all fields of endeavor from the mainstream society.
I presented many of these essays and lectures at state and national teachers’ conferences. I read them at community gatherings and in university settings. One of my objectives was achieving equal educational opportunities for Mexican Americans. Looking back, Chicanos and Chicanas involved in the Chicano Movement can say we did make a difference. In many positive ways we influenced this country’s relationship to our community. Old prejudices began to fall away as many heard our call and joined the struggle.
Some of my compatriots from those years are dead; some are still working and contributing. We fought for justice, not only for our community, but for all people. Now it’s up to new generations to work at making this a better world. Much remains to be done.
PRAISE OF THE WRITING OF RUDOLFO ANAYA
“An extraordinary storyteller.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“One of the nation’s foremost Chicano literary artists.” —The Denver Post
“[Anaya’s work] is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing.” —Newsweek
“One of the best writers in the country.” —El Paso Times
“The godfather and guru of Chicano literature.” —Tony Hillerman, author of The Blessing Way
“Poet of the barrio … the most widely read Mexican-American.” —Newsweek
Alburquerque
Winner of PEN Center West Award for Fiction
“Alburquerque is a rich and tempestuous book, full of love and compassion, the complex and exciting skullduggery of politics, and the age-old quest for roots, identity, family … There is a marvelous tapestry of interwoven myth and magic that guides Anaya’s characters’ sensibilities, and is equally important in defining their feel of place. Above all, in this novel is a deep caring for land culture and for the spiritual well-being of people, environment, landscape.” —John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War: A Novel
“Alburquerque portrays a quest for knowledge.… [It] is a novel about many cultures intersecting at an urban, power- and politics-filled crossroads, represented by a powerful white businessman, whose mother just happens to be a Jew who has hidden her Jewishness … and a boy from the barrio who fathers a child raised in the barrio but who eventually goes on to a triumphant assertion of his cross-cultural self.” —World Literature Today
“Alburquerque fulfills two important functions: it restores the missing R to the name of the city, and it shows off Anaya’s powers as a novelist.” —National Public Radio
“Anaya is at his visionary best in creating magical realist moments that connect people with one another and the earth.” —The Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Anaya’s prowess shows through on every page.… Thumbs up.” —ABQ Arts
Tortuga
Winner of the American Book Award
“A compelling story of a young man who suffers and learns to make peace with who he is, Tortuga has that touch of magic, of fantastical characters, of dreams as real as sunlight, associated with the best of Chicano literature.” —Roundup Magazine
“Tortuga is one those rare works that speaks to the human condition across time and space, and it well-deserves to find a new generation of readers.” —Southwest Book Views
“A highly emotional tale of a young soul who turned from a turtle into a human all in the span of 200 pages.” —Reviewers of Young Adult Literature
My Land Sings
Winner of the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award
“Rich in traditional Mexican and native American folklore. Every story spins its magic effectively.” —Booklist
“Haunting. Compelling twists will keep the pages turning.” —Publishers Weekly
“Anaya champions the reading of a good book or listening to a folktale as an opportunity to insert one’s own experiences into the story and, hence, to nurture the imagination. This appealing volume will add diversity to folklore collections.” —Booklist
“The wide variety of stories demonstrate a mature understanding of life’s trappings and dangers, but retain a healthy sense of humor about the human predicament.” —Kirkus Reviews
Serafina’s Stories
“[Serafina’s] stories are simple but vivid.… There is magic and mystery too.” —Los Angeles Times
“Anaya’s prose offers … purity. [Serafina’s Stories] will restore to all but the most jaded reader a necessary sense of wonder.” —National Public Radio
“Like Serafina, Anaya is a powerful storyteller whose cuentos and other writings are a balm for the soul.” —New Mexico Magazine
“It is not hard to predict that Serafina’s story will be hypnotic and entertain.… With Serafina’s Stories Anaya again reminds us of the importance of maintaining an oral tradition.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Rudolfo Anaya is both a wise man and a gifted storyteller. Serafina’s Stories [is] a series of engaging tales.” —Santa Fe New Mexican
“Anaya’s new book is a spellbinding account of a Native American woman who spins tales to enlighten the Spanish governor into setting her people free. Clearly conceived, Serafina’s Stories contains 12 folk tales that are as absorbing as the main plot.” —El Paso Times
Heart of Aztlan
“In Heart of Aztlan, a prose writer with the soul of poet, and a dedication to his calling that only the greatest artists ever sustain, is on an important track, the right one, the only one.” —La Confluencia
“[Heart of Aztlan gives] a vivid sense of Chicano life since World War II.” —World Literature Today
“Mixed with the Native American legends and Hispanic traditions of this wonderful book are the basic human motivations that touch all cultures. It is a rip-roaring good read.” —Cibola Beacon
Jalamanta
“A parable for out time … We are in deep need of simple truths, of rediscovering our ancient teachings, and Jalamanta may provide that opportunity.” —The Washington Post Book World
Zia Summer
“A compelling thriller … Though satisfying purely as a mystery, the novel sacrifices none of Anaya’s trademark spirituality—a connectedness to the earth and a deep-seated respect for the traditions of a people and a culture.… Read this multicultural novel for its rich language and full-bodied characters. Anaya is one of our greatest storytellers, and Zia Summer is muy caliente!” —Booklist
“[Anaya] continues to shine brightest with his trademark alchemy: blending Spanish, Mexican, and Indian cultures to evoke the distinctively fecund spiritual terrain of his part of the Southwest.” —Publishers Weekly
Rio Grande Fall
“This is a completely entertaining mystery novel, but Anaya offers two parallel lands of enchantment. One is temporal New Mexico; the other is Nuevo Mexicano, a land of santos, milagros, spirits, visions, and even brujas (witches).” —Booklist
Shaman Winter
“Be aware that if you only skate on the surface, you will miss the depth of the story. You have to dive head-first, literally, into the waves of poetic prose to catch a glimpse of the forces that keep our universe together.” —La Voz
“The fast-paced story line of Shaman Winter is fascinating and absolutely eerie as the master paints a vivid picture of the spirituality of another culture.” —Thrilling Detective
Jemez Spring
“Jemez Spring is meant to appeal to readers of conventional mystery novels, but there is nothing conventional about it.… It taps into primal and universal fears and longings but plays them out in a uniquely New Mexican setting. And the master tells his tales with worlds and images so rich and strange that it is almost as if he had invented a language of his own.” —Los Angeles Times
“Jemez Spring again blends the Spanish, Mexican, and Indian cultures that made the three earlier works in the series such good reads. Anaya is at his best when writing about the people of New Mexico, their traditions and their lives and how they clash with the influx of Anglos.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Anaya takes the reader beyond detective fiction.… His mysteries fall into the criminal and the spiritual, which makes them both inspiring and electrifying.” —St. Petersburg Times
“Unique and exciting … Readers thirsty for philosophy and the supernatural will devour this book.” —Daily Camera (Boulder)
“Anaya, godfather and guru of Chicano literature, proves he’s just as good in the murder mystery field.” —Tony Hillerman, author of The Sinister Pig
Foreword
The Essays by Rudolfo Anaya presents a fresh view of this major writer by bringing together in one volume all fifty-two of his essays. For almost forty years, the world has known Rudolfo Anaya as an important novelist who wrote the classics Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Heart of Aztlan (1973), Tortuga (1976), the Sonny Baca novels, and many other successful novels, short stories, and plays. With this volume of essays, readers will discover the full range of Anaya’s formidable powers as an essayist, his poignant and still timely observations, his wit, and his sure touch as a writer of nonfiction prose. These essays also establish his status as a shrewd commentator on the world around us—about literature’s ability to probe the deep myths underlying our culture, the workings of censorship, land-use policy, the value of tradition and the past, Chicano literature and art, the sense of place in literature, and respect for the environment, among other vital topics.
With this volume people will learn that Anaya is a major essayist as well as a major novelist. Why don’t more people know that fact already? One answer is that he is well defined by his reputation as a novelist, but it is also true that essays get published once in magazines and newspapers and then typically are “lost.” This fact is a hazard for essayists, as over time there is no convenient way for readers to locate previously published essays, while novels and even short stories often are excerpted and otherwise kept in print. Even the most brilliant essays flash like meteors in the dark sky and then disappear—that is, unless they are gathered and published in a single volume like this one.
The publication of these fifty-two essays is an important literary event, as an almost lost side of Anaya’s work is being unearthed for general and scholarly readers to enjoy. The moment is especially timely for highlighting Anaya as the public intellectual these essays show him to be. The current debate on “green” policies and the environment touching almost every aspect of our lives draws attention to the ideas that were always visionary and ahead of their time in Anaya’s essays. Current discussions, in other words, need the insights that Anaya provides, especially concerning our sacred relationship with the earth.
This volume shows that his essays deserve an even larger audience than they found the first time around. Since 1972 he has shared his insights on the clash of traditional values and the forces of modern commerce and unbridled land development. He explores as few others do the value of cultural traditions and embracing a relationship with the sacred, and no one has so fully analyzed, as Anaya has done, the devastation that may occur when communities lose touch with their pasts and their origins.
Literary scholars will need to consult the corpus of Anaya’s essays for the light they shed on his other work. The early career struggle to get published, his commitment to his “New World” vision, and his broad reading in European and American literature are all clarified in these essays. The freshness of these essays, however, advances an especially strong case for making them widely available for a general reader. The foremost Latino writer of his time, Anaya probes the myths, especially in his essays of the 1980s and 1990s, underlying cultural and social values and choices for how we live, and especially the relationships between people and the land they inhabit. That relationship points to critical ethical decisions in relation to land and the sustainability of communities. He discussed this broad range of social and cultural choices before such questions became fashionable and “green.” Public intellectuals like Anaya, especially when not originally from the mainstream, can see the dominant culture aslant and, in so doing, can make connections otherwise unavailable and can even see ahead to points where present issues intersect with future possibilities.
Anaya’s essays address a rich array of topics in literature, art, society, and culture. Most importantly, they highlight a large-scale reorientation currently taking place in America. In dramatic fashion, and with rare effectiveness, Anaya foretells a massive shift in the way we understand American culture. He argues for shifting to a new focus with a north/south axis of orientation to the Americas that links the United States to Latin America—what he calls a “New World” perspective. In this view, the U.S. is no longer the isolated “exception” to culture but an active participant in a five-hundred-year historical and cultural drama taking place in our own backyard. This hemispheric view of the U.S. focuses less on Dutch and English settlement and more on the great variety of developments taking place in the Americas during this time.
His promotion of a north/south orientation competes directly with the traditional east/west orientation emphasizing American exceptionalism and westward expansion. Anaya and a few others—especially Genaro M. Padilla, Ramón Gutiérrez, and María Herrera Sobek—effectively addressed these issues in the second half of the twentieth century, and others have followed suit. Even now, however, not every cultural historian working in this area wants to emphasize the U.S. from the “north/south” viewpoint that Anaya emphasizes, a lack owing surely to the influence of “official” histories oriented toward the East Coast and the east/west perspective over the last two hundred years.
In this “New World” perspective, the diversity inherent to U.S. national culture reflects the influence of life in the Americas and says little about Dutch and British colonization. The traditional view focused on the eastern seaboard belies the rich traditions of the ancient peoples of the New World and extensive Spanish settlement before the British arrived. David J. Weber and other historians have discussed this perspective on cultural development over the whole of North and South America (see especially The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale University Press, 1992).
Anaya’s essays tell this big story about modern America’s need to rediscover itself within the diverse cultures and rich traditions of this hemisphere—regarding trade routes, shared religions, wars, marriages, and other New World developments contributing to the growth of the mestizo (mixed heritage) cultures of the New World. This dramatic shift of perspective to a north/south orientation is happening at a time when Latinos are ascending to economic, political, and cultural power in the U.S. Globalization is also revealing the cross-cultural ties that already exist and the long-standing internationalism evident in so much of the United States. The limited history that highlighted European immigration, westward expansion, and domination of Native cultures is passing and giving way to a hemispheric view of cultural and social history.
Anaya attempts to focus this more expansive view by demonstrating at close range how the world looks when books, people, land, and art are viewed from the New World perspective. This perspective is partially empowered by the rise in Latino populations and economic growth and also by the work of writers like Anaya. The commentary in his essays about life and culture in the Americas, and his reframing of “American” culture within the larger context of Latin America and its history in the New World, is not about promoting a tribe or recognition of Native sovereignty. His more expansive view promotes a permanent shift of perspective that begins with the assumption that Latin America is the proper stage for understanding culture in our hemisphere over the past five hundred years.
Anaya details this hemispheric, cultural context in the essay “Aztlán: A Homeland without Boundaries.” This essay shows that Mexican folklore long ago identified the American Southwest as a sacred site of origin for Aztec culture. Whether this claim is historically accurate or not, it has long been said that Mexico City provided the staging for mythical/historical acts and dramas that possibly began in New Mexico, particularly in Santa Fe. In “The New World Man” he asserts that “the indigenous American perspective, or New World view … is at the core of my search.” The story that emerges from both essays tells about a large stage upon which the Spanish and the English stepped briefly. He emphasizes the cultural drama of glimpsing the larger view of Spanish and native peoples, a view that was previously foreclosed as “western expansion” focused on Anglo culture and its impact. “We must know more of the synthesis of our Spanish and Indian natures,” he writes, “and [also] know more of the multiple heritages of the Americas” (“The New World Man”).
The New World as Anaya defines it is grounded in the rich mix of the multiple heritages that actually make up our area of the world. Anaya’s articulation of this emergent perspective foregrounds Native culture but includes all that has happened to make the New World an incredibly rich sphere of cultural possibilities.
This revolutionary perspective informs all of Anaya’s work, his essays and fiction, from his earliest through his most recent work. In effect, any cultural event, book, person, or theme that Anaya writes about promotes an understanding of the New World perspective that he defined and embodies. Each of his essays stages an encounter of this perspective in relation to an issue that can be used to clarify a little more about life in the Americas. How would a particular book, artist, commercial practice, or cultural event such as censorship, the loss of a historic land grant, or the emergence of the Chicano tradition be understood in the perspective that Anaya advances? Each of his essays answers this question anew, and each essay conveys the New World inflection in everything it says.
The vision of Anaya’s essays can also be seen in his novels, short stories, and plays. He argues that the totality of America’s sense of itself—what it has been and what it will become—needs to incorporate a vision that arises from indigenous traditions in the Americas. A vision of this magnitude, challenging and potentially disruptive to received notions of the hemisphere, could get deliberately suppressed, marginalized, or simply ignored. Truly challenging ideas commonly get such treatment. Anaya succeeds in publishing many essays that are challenging in this way—I would argue—because they are exceptionally engaging and are kept below the culture’s radar by being published in academic magazines and journals.
Two characteristics of his essay writing—pertinent to the classical tradition of the essay—help to explain this success. First is the voice of Anaya himself. In essays like “Requiem for a Lowrider,” “The Journal of a Chicano in China,” “Shaman of Words,” and “Take the Tortillas out of Your Poetry,” he has mastered the art of speaking in an unassuming and personal voice. He does this by drawing examples from personal experience (as with the story of his friend Jessie in “Requiem for a Lowrider” and his travel to China in “The Journal of a Chicano in China”), and he lets these stories speak as stories without extensive analysis to establish their own authority. He could cite statistical trends or sociological literature that would be relevant to the contemporary scene, but he uses stories to let his readers participate in the cultural perspective he is trying to foreground. In so doing, Anaya establishes the authority of his argument not in an external source but in the reader’s assessment and experience of the essay.
“Voice” in Anaya’s essays is a constructed effect created by the persistence of certain patterns of diction and examples and references from the U.S. Southwest, as well as values that seem to arise from life in the Southwest. Anaya makes frequent use of the eastern New Mexico setting and the famous llano (plains) that are also common points of reference in his fiction. He grounds his own spiritual and ecological commitments in relation to New Mexico culture and geography. We see this when he encourages readers to associate great energy and discovery in eastern New Mexico with the llano and placidity and nurture over time with the mountains nearby and the agrarian life at their base. His “voice” in these essays comes from the totality of choices he makes—cultural and geographic references and language range (diction) and also how he frames his values within those details. Readers come to value these references as belonging to Anaya’s voice and his worldview.
Adopting this voice also means using accessible and non-specialized language. He has a good ear for reproducing working-class speech and creates the impression of using the “plain” language of local communities instead of sociological insider talk. Anaya’s essay about lowriders and Chicano youth who need to stay in school could easily fall into professional “education speak” and sociological jargon about latchkey children, demographic trends, and parental responsibility. Anaya never chooses to go in that direction. Readers may not be immediately familiar with New Mexico culture, but Anaya’s repeated use of that setting creates familiarity. In other words, the voice in Anaya’s work comes from his choices to avoid specialized language, to stay within a geographical frame, but also to take the time to effectively orient his readers to his material.
The second characteristic occurs when he makes his essays a response to a recent event, an occasion for writing the essay in the first place. In “Return to the Mountains,” Anaya uses the death of Frank Waters, the acclaimed scholar of Mexico cosmologies and observer of Southwest culture and geography, in 1995 as an occasion to address the need to remain open to experience and to continue to reopen oneself to the world. In “Model Cities/Model Chicano/Norma Jean,” Anaya references the 1992 opening of the “South Broadway Cultural Center” in Albuquerque and describes this community center as raised from a “model cities library,” the product of a defunct program started by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s. This same event becomes the occasion for reflecting on the nature of community and communal health.
This practice of referencing public and cultural events has a strong pull for readers, reminding them that serious thought exists to illuminate and bring about effective change in the world. Anaya invites readers to step with him into the world of serious reflection and potential action and to begin to do the work of improving the world. Not surprisingly, there is often a sense of urgency in his essays, as they attempt to create a bridge into the world with the potential of renewed, effective action. His personable tone in response to crises often suggests that people need to take responsibility for their world and act to advance the good, one of the major themes, by the way, articulated by Ultima in Anaya’s first novel, Bless Me, Ultima.
While Anaya’s approach to the culture of the Americas is visionary and could lead to fundamental change, his essay writing, however, is a classic version of the essay form. His style derives from the Western essay tradition of open and lively writing. The essay as a genre, dating to Michel de Montaigne’s Essais in 1580 and Francis Bacon’s Essays later in the sixteenth century, treats weighty topics, as Anaya’s essays do, but also shuns technical language. The traditional essay, also consistent with Anaya’s work, responds to an event in a personal manner.
Historian of the essay Claire de Obaldia describes the traditional attitude of the essay as the “essayistic spirit,” the willingness to be personal and rational at the same time. The classical essay makes sense of an event or issue for a nonspecialist reader, and the essay’s loose form, as described by Montaigne (the Renaissance originator of the genre), projects exactly this sentiment and approach—the invitation to take a serious look at something of importance in concert with other well-meaning people who are not experts either. One adopts the essayistic perspective at a moment of encountering an occasion in which to make discriminations on behalf of someone or something of value. Essays typically do not give a definitive answer to a question but emphasize the particularity of perspective, often a personal perspective, and a non-specialized exploration of an occasion that has given rise to an inquiry. The traditional essay has this strong degree of worldly connectedness and the commitment to ethical responsibility.
Along with Anaya, the modern essayists who practice this tradition are a “Who’s Who” of essay writing and are generally the nonfiction prose masters of the West. Think of the essays written in this manner by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Joan Didion, and Susan Sontag, and you have identified many of the great modern essayists. Like Anaya’s essays, their essays advance a discussion through non-specialized language that is inclusive and engaging. It is this classic form of the essay that Anaya writes with great skill and loyalty to the requirements of the form.
This volume would not exist without the support of Charles Rankin, John Drayton, Jay Dew, Julie Shilling, Kimberly Wiar, and Byron Price of the University of Oklahoma Press. Early in this project, John T. Allen, an OU student and intern working for me, established many of the texts for the essays in this volume. Julie M. Davis made valuable contributions at every stage. Staff members at World Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma—Marla F. Johnson, Daniel Simon, Terri D. Stubblefield, Victoria Vaughn, Laura M. Johnson, and Merleyn Bell—also supported this project in various ways.
I would like to thank the author Rudolfo Anaya for his fierce investment over a forty-year career in bringing to light truth and beauty and for the incredible essays that convey that commitment on every page. We were all honored to work on this project and to make available his large and masterful body of work.
Robert Con Davis-Undiano
PART ONE
Living Chicano
PART TWO
Censorship
PART THREE
The Southwest
Landscape and Sense of Place
PART FOUR
Culture and Art of the Southwest
PART FIVE
Literature of the Southwest
PART SIX
Modern Ethnic Literature and Culture
I’m the King
The Macho Image
The word “macho” has one of the shortest definitions in the Spanish language dictionary, and yet the cult of macho behavior (machismo) is as ambiguous and misunderstood as any aspect of Hispanic/Latino culture. To be macho is to be male, that’s simple, but when the term is applied to Hispanic male behavior, then the particulars of the role are defined according to the particular culture. From Spain to Latin America, from Mexico to the USA Chicano communities, one gets a slightly different definition of the macho image at every turn.
Being macho is essentially a learned behavior; as such it is a conditioned behavior. We males learn to act manly from other males around us; the macho behavior that preceded us was learned from the cultures from which it evolved. Many forces impinge on the Hispanic/Latino cultures, so throughout history, machismo—or the conditioning of male behavior—has attracted all sorts of positive and negative elements.
Many cultural forces (from literature and religion to the latest musical fad, movies, MTV, or car styles) play a role in promoting the behavior of the macho, and these influences are the issue here. Still, beneath the conditioned behavior, the essence of what maleness means remains largely unchanged across time. We can describe conditioning and its effects; it is more difficult to describe the essence of maleness, especially today, when males seem to be retreating from describing, or laying claim to, a positive macho image.
Drunkenness, abusing women, raising hell (all elements of la vida loca) are some mistaken conceptions of what macho means. And yet the uninformed often point to such behavior and call it machismo. In fact, much of this negative behavior is often aped by a new generation, because as young men they are not aware that they are being conditioned. Young men acting contrary to the good of their community have not yet learned the real essence of maleness.
Sex
Our generation passes on to the next its ideals and rituals, and also behavior patterns that have to do with our sexuality. People have always composed games around sexuality. In this respect, the macho image has a history. The cock-of-the-walk behavior is game playing. Games and sex go hand in hand.
The game can be spontaneous and fun, reflecting the courtship and mating we see in the natural world. Part of the purpose of gender games is to reflect nature’s dance of life, evolution playing itself out in each new encounter. Animals, insects—high and low organisms—engage in this dance of life. We are caught up in “nature’s game,” this vast and beautiful dance that is part of the awe of life. We feel love in the harmonious flow of nature, the movement of birth and death, and we take meaning from our sexual natures.
But the game has taken on a manipulative aspect. The assertion of one person over another is part of our conditioning. The game has turned ugly in many ways, and we are numbed by the outcome of the conditioning factors. But we can still be in charge of the game and change the negative aspects of the game. We can choose not to play a power game that hurts and demeans women.
Macho behavior, in large part, revolves around the acting out of sex roles. The games the macho plays may be part of nature’s dance, with the goal of procreation imprinted on the cells long ago, but the power to subjugate is also inherent in out relationships. When the male gets caught up in superficial power plays that have to do with sex, he is acting against his community. It’s time to analyze the social forces that condition negative behavior and toss out the ones that destroy family, friendship, and community.
For the Chicano, the roots of the idea of maleness extend not only into the Mediterranean world but also into the Native American world. We still act out patterns of male behavior emerging from those historic streams. To fully understand our behavior requires a knowledge of those literary and cultural histories. The Don Juan image and how it sets the tone for a pattern of behavior from the Mediterranean Spain of the past to the present day is only one aspect of a behavioral legacy. We need to know the role of the Native American warrior and how he cares for the community. The Chicano is a synthesis of these, and many more, streams of influence.
“I Can Piss the Farthest”
Little boys like to brag about the length of their penises, or they have contests to see who can piss the farthest. Acting out “I’m bigger, I’m better,” the game begins to have its built-in power aspect. Later, boys will brag about having scored with a girl, and in the boast is contained a hint of the power they have exercised. Those who haven’t yet scored have less power. They’re virgins in the game. Those who don’t see girls as the goal to be conquered have even less power. A hierarchy of needs and behavior begins to define the male role and the power inherent in it. The truer essence of male and female doesn’t need this hierarchy, for hierarchy implies the use of power over others. And why should that which is most natural to our nature, our sexuality, require us to deal with others as objects?
Macho needs partners, not objects.
Until my father’s generation, the men of the Mexican culture of the southwest United States could continue to speak Spanish and interact within the parameters of their history. That is, they set the code of behavior, one that was communal and focused on survival in an often harsh land. As Anglo-Americans moved into the territory, a wrenching of male relationships took place. The language of domination shifted from Spanish to English. Anglo-American law came to New Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, but the rule of law in daily life and most communal enterprises remained Spanish. It was not until after World War II that the ways of my ancestors were overwhelmed. And therein lies an epic tragedy.
My father’s generation had to adjust to the new language, the new man in town, the new laws. To be a man under Anglo domination was difficult if you didn’t have the tools. I saw men broken by the new time, the new space. If they didn’t adjust to the new language, they were demeaned. I now better understand my father’s behavior, why he gave up. He didn’t have the language, the tool with which to protect his own dignity, his own concept of macho. An excellent example of this meeting of cultures is shown in the movie The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, a film that takes its story from a real corrido.
In some areas the males did absorb one another’s concept of maleness. For example, the New Mexican land owners, lawyers, and politicians (those generally known as los ricos or los patrones) quickly learned to work with their Anglo counterparts. The Mexican vaqueros taught the Anglo cowboys the trade, so there existed some camaraderie on a macho level in those endeavors. But overall, the power of law and language was too vast and overwhelming. The Anglos could dictate roles; they could piss farthest, so to speak.
“I’m the King”
“Sigo siendo el Rey.” “I’m the King” are the lyrics from a popular Chicano rap song I hear on the radio. The words and rhythm are catchy. I listen to the song and find myself repeating the lines.
Macho behavior is instilled in us as children. Both father and mother want their boys to grow up to be manly. Usually, the more traditional the rules of behavior are for the macho, the stricter the behavior the child learns. When he becomes a man the child sings, “I’m the king. I rule the family, like my father before me, and what I say goes.” The child is the father to the man. But fathers at home are more and more rare. The child turns to the gang in the streets. A new style of being king is learned.
My parents knew a wonderful couple, old friends who came to visit. My mother and her comadre would cook up big meals, my father and his compadre would buy the wine. It was fiesta time. The old man would have a few glasses of wine and start acting like the king. “Yo mando,” he would tell his wife, and the teasing about who ruled, the man or the woman, would go on. Visiting across the kitchen table and drinking wine, they were caught up in discussing the roles of man and woman.
It has always been so. In that space of the family fiesta in the small kitchen, they could define and redefine their roles. The mask of gaiety put on for the fiesta allowed them to speak freely. But beneath the surface a real dialogue was going on, defining and refining the roles of the men and the women. Do we have that dialogue about machismo going on in our community today, or have we accepted old roles conditioned by forces beyond our control? Are we too programmed to see the light?
The male child observes and learns to be the king, how to act as número uno, how to act around men and women. In a community that is poor and often oppressed there is much suffering, so he is taught aguantar: to grin and bear it. “Aguántate,” the men around him say. A macho doesn’t cry in front of men. A macho doesn’t show weakness. Grit your teeth, take the pain, bear it alone. Be tough. You feel like letting it out? Well, then let’s get drunk with our compadres, and with the grito that comes from within, we can express our emotions. Lots of essays could be written on aguantar. The women also learn aguantar: Bearing it crosses the gender boundary. How women express the flood-waters of the aguanto is now being documented by Chicana writers.
The macho learns many games while learning to be número uno. Drinking buddies who have a contest to see who can consume the most beer, or the most shots of tequila, are trying to prove their maleness. From the pissing contest to drinking, the wish to prove his manliness becomes antisocial, dangerous. The drunk macho driving home from the contest he won can become a murderer.
The car in our society has become an extension of his manhood for the macho. The young male hungers for the most customized, flashiest car. It replicates him. It is power. The car is used in the mating ritual. As in our small villages generations ago the young vaqueros came into town to show off their horses and their horsemanship, the young now parade the boulevard showing off their cars. The dance is the same; the prize is the same.
To other males, the vato with the best car is saying, “I’m bigger, I’m better, I’m the king.” Exactly the lyrics to the rap song. “Sigo siendo el Rey,” he sings, “I continue being the king.” The song describes one goal of the macho, to be king, to be número uno, to answer to no one. The message is aimed not only at other males, it is also for the female of the species.
Outside Influences
But guns have entered the game. Perhaps they’ve always been there, because certainly the Mexican charro and the cowboy of the movies both carried pistols, both fought it out with the bad guys, and the fastest draw won. In the rural areas hunting is most often male behavior. The gun extends the power and the sexuality of the young men. Now you can strike farther and deadlier.
It is time to call that behavior that is good, good. And that which is negative to the self and the community, not good. To be unkind and violent is not macho. The vato in the song who wants to be the king needs to find positive ways of acting for his community.
In my generation the “attitude” of James Dean influenced young male behavior, as did that of black musicians and black talk. Today, parents worry about the violent influence of the movies. The characters portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger (and other such exaggerated macho images) and the Power Rangers have become the symbols of violence in our society. Machos seem to solve problems only through violence, and quickly. Discourse and problem solving, which take time, are not honored in such movies. Parents worry about the influence such media are having on the young. Macho has really gotten out of hand; in fact, it’s been perverted by those who use a false ideal of manliness to achieve their goals. We need to stand up and say loudly and clearly, that violence and oppression are not macho.
As more Chicano families become single-parent families, the traditional role of the father and of males in the extended family will not be as influential in shaping the behavior of boys. The boys are being conditioned instead by the behavior they see on TV, in movies and music videos. Boys loose in the hood are being shaped by the gang instead of the father.
La ganga shapes behavior, provides initiation, belonging. (Life in the gang—whether it’s a neighborhood group of boys; an athletic fraternity, “the jocks”; or a gang that is into la vida loca, cruising, drinking, drugs, and guns—is a subject that requires a book to itself.) In the traditional culture, we didn’t practice drive-by shooting as initiation into maleness. Young Chicanos moving into the maleness of the gang now practice a more violent form of initiation.
Young Chicano males learn from the past generations (drinking is often learned from brothers or close relatives), and such behavior is greatly influenced by the mainstream society. The influence of the Anglo-American culture on the Chicano culture cannot be overlooked. We can no longer speak of a continuum of learned behavior that is solely Mexican macho, because young males are greatly influenced by the totality of the culture around them. MTV, music, movies, television, and the behavior of other cultural groups all influence the behavior of the young Chicano male. To truly understand himself, and his maleness, the young male must ask himself: “Who is affecting me?” “What do they want of me?” “How can I take charge of my own life?”
There is a lesson to be learned here. Let us not repeat the loss of the prior generation, a loss we see today in the streets. Let us not be “powerless” as men. Let us not act out negative behaviors. We have within us the power to change. We have the future of our community at stake, so macho behavior has to be used positively for the community.
Los Chucos
Each generation becomes a new link in the group’s tradition, but also transforms behavior. My adolescent years saw the advent of the pachuco, a radical departure in the male behavior of the small New Mexican town I knew. Who were esos vatos locos imitating in the forties when they invented the pachuco argot, the dress, sexual liberation in attitude and action, use of drugs, use of cars, and so on? Was there a continuous line of macho behavior in which the chucos were a link? Or was the behavior so spontaneous and new that the pachucos initiated a new definition of what it meant to be macho? After all, being macho does mean to defend the territory, and the chucos did defend their barrios against mainstream encroachment. Were the pachucos a reaction to the growing oppression by Anglo America? Partly, but once the warriors defined themselves, they spent as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the enemy, el gabacho.
The pachuco became a new model of behavior, breaking with the past, and yet in his role vis-à-vis la chuca, the male-female dance contained the same old elements embedded in the Mexicano culture. The power play was definitely at work. La chuca, as liberated as she was from her contemporary “square” sister who remained a “nice” girl, was still subservient. The pachuco loved to show off his baby doll.
This makes us question if breaks with the past are really radical, or does only the surface dress of the macho change? Beneath the zoot suit of the pachuco, old cultural forces and conditioned behavior continued to define the relationship between the macho and his woman. “Esta es mi ruca,” he said proudly, introducing the woman as property in which he was pleased.
The pachuco practicing la vida loca continued to influence the definition of macho behavior in the nineties. They were the early lowriders. They spawned the baby chooks and those Chicano males who today are acting out roles, sometimes unknowingly, with roots in the pachuco lifestyle. (The Chicano rapper borrows from the Black rapper, but in his barrio and in his strut and talk, he is borrowing as much from the old veteranos.) This role of an “unconscious energy” in the community is something we can’t measure, but it’s there. History is passed on not only in stories and books, but by osmosis.
It makes us ask: Is behavior only learned? Or is there real maleness, a golden rule not only in the blood but in the myths? I look at the young machos parading down the street, acting out their roles, and I wonder how much of their behavior comes from that unconscious influence, something inherent in maleness itself. There is something in that dignity of maleness we don’t want to give up. But what is it? We know those negative forces that condition us have to be repudiated. But we also yearn to be noble men, and to act in a noble fashion for our families.
La Familia
The pachuco macho behavior, while very visible in the barrio (and introduced to a larger audience by the U.S. Navy anti-pachuco, anti-Mexican riots during the early forties in Los Angeles, and made more visible through the Valdez “Zoot Suit” film), was not the only model of maleness in the community. A far greater percentage of the men of the barrios went about their work, raising families, trying to do the best they could for them. Macho means taking care of la familia. Perhaps this is the most important definition of macho, the real, positive meaning of the word. And yet it is often given short shrift. Critics often look at the negative behavior of the macho and forget the positive.
In the villages and barrios of New Mexico when I was growing up, being manly (hombrote) meant having a sense of honor. The intangible of the macho image is that sense of honor. A man must be honorable, for himself and for his family. There is honor in the family name. Hombrote also means providing for the family. Men of honor were able to work with the other men in communal enterprises. They took care of the politics of the village, law and order, the church, the acequia, and the old people.
The greatest compliment I could receive as a child when I did a job well was to be called hombrote. I was acting like an hombre, a man. This compliment came from both males and females in the family and in the extended family. By the way, this compliment is also given to the girls. They can be hombrotas, as well as muy mujerotas, very womanly. Either way, the creation of male and female roles are rewarded with the appropriate language, and the language is male centered.
Much is now written about male bonding, how the father and other males in the community shape the macho image. In Hispanic culture the role of the compadres is such a role. (The compadres are the godfathers, for lack of a more thorough definition.) The compadres bond at marriages, baptisms, or other family celebrations. Their goal is to ensure the welfare of the child that one of the compadres has baptized or confirmed. The best man at the wedding becomes a compadre. Compadrazgo has a very positive role to play. The compadres act manly toward one another, and the children of the compadres learn male behavior through those interactions.
Still, it’s not just the males that are in charge of shaping the macho image. Women play an important role.
The Woman Creates the Macho
Talking about being macho also means talking about the role of women in our lives. In a traditional setting, the Mexican mother raises the male child and has a great influence on the learned macho behavior of the child. We learn a lot about the sexual behavior from the males of the clan, but the mother, if she does the raising of the male child, is a most crucial ingredient in the evolving macho role.
Food, warmth, protection, the first sounds, and all that has to do with the tactile sense of the first years on earth are provided by the mother. In our culture the mother is the first confidant of the male child. The mother imprints her femininity on the child, and the child’s response to that feminine aura is formed in the womb. No wonder mothers exclaim at birth, “I have created.”
In her novel, Face of an Angel, Denise Chávez explores the role of women in the formation of macho. By exploring the lives of women in the culture, she gives us an excellent, uninhibited view of the woman’s influence on the life of the male. Other Chicanas are also doing this in their writings. Ana Castillo in her essay on machismo (in Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, University of New Mexico Press, 1994) has much to tell us of the history of the macho image. We need to listen to the ideas of such writers as the role of the macho is transformed. By us, by them.
Oedipal complexes and fears aside, we are our mother’s creation, and so early macho behavior will be shaped actively and by nuance by the mother. Perhaps this is what we recognize when we attribute great value to the family. A mother who is active in shaping the maleness of her child will produce a more integrated man; if the mother is not there or if her behavior has been conditioned by an oppressive patriarchy, a more dysfunctional child will emerge. (This role of the woman who has historically been controlled by the demands of a male-oriented society has been amply analyzed by Castillo.)
Chicano males brought up in a positive atmosphere do not hesitate to say they love their mothers. Embracing (el abrazo) is as common for the mother as for the father. A continuing relationship with the mother as a guide who provides warmth, love, strength, and direction is integral to the culture. Our community did not traditionally initiate a cutoff age when the young male had to leave the household, that is, leave his mother’s side. Both father and mother remain confidants—thus a description of the closeness of the family. Only recently, as we copy Anglo-American behavior and as the status of the culture has changed from rural to urban, do some Chicanos begin to practice readying the child to be more independent of family.