A History of American Literature

748 The American Century: Literature since 1945

he takes another human being as a means rather than an end. In the process,

he commits child abuse and statutory rape. But that is subsumed, for Nabokov,

under the determining, damning fact that he has acted like a moral totalitarian with

Lolita. He has imprisoned her within his own reality, denying her her right to hers –

and, as a corollary to that, her specific right to be an ordinary, vulgar, obnoxious but

charming but not charmed or enchanted or mesmerized child. Momentarily,

Humbert senses this when, in the last chapter of Lolita, he hears from his cell sounds

coming from the valley below. “What I heard was but the melody of children at play,”

he confesses; “and then I knew that the poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from

my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” The note of longing and

loss was one that Nabokov was particularly inclined to sound. He once said that

“the type of artist who is always in exile” was one for whom he felt “some affinity,”

which was perhaps natural for someone who spent nearly all his life as an émigré.

What charges it with a tragic pathos here, however, is the pain of knowing, as

Humbert does for a brief, enchanted moment, that there is nothing worse than this:

to rob someone of their childhood – to steal from them the chance to say, right from

the start, this is my reality, my life.

Remapping a nation: Chicano/a and Latino/a writing

Different, in turn, from those who came to the United States from the east or west

are those who entered from the south: Mexican-Americans. Some trace their

ancestry from the approximately 100,000 Mexicans who constituted the host culture

of the Southwest and California when that area was taken from Mexico in the 1840s.

Even more came over, or their ancestors did, in successive waves of migration. In the

years after 1910, almost one-eighth of the population of Mexico, overwhelmingly

rural in complexion, migrated to the United States. Those who arrived after 1940

were particularly numerous, thanks to the much heavier influx of immigrants

during the fifty years of exceptional economic expansion in the Southwest that was

initiated by World War II. By 1993 there were over 14 million Mexican-Americans,

constituting more than 64 percent of the Hispanic population. Many of them were

the victims of hostile immigration policies: manipulated, it might be, to allow them

across the border when cheap labor was required, only to be deported again when

the demand was no longer there (the so-called “revolving door” policy). Most were,

and are, subject to a kind of colonial situation. Living in what has become known as

occupied America – formerly Mexican land now owned and controlled by the

United States – they form a richly hybrid culture, founded on mestizo or mixed

origins. Mexican-Americans negotiate a border territory, la frontera, where

competing languages and cultures encounter each other. Here, notions of migrants

and natives, the local and the national, the periphery and the core, appear to coalesce

and come together in a potent mix of transcultural forms. “Every Mexican knows

there are two Mexicos,” one Mexican-American commentator, Américo Paredes,

has observed, “– the real one and Mexico de Afuera (Mexico abroad) as Mexicans

call it, composed of all the persons of Mexican origin in the United States.”

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