The American Century: Literature since 1945 751Juan, we are told, “became a part of the great exodus that came of the Mexican
Revolution” – people who crossed the border by the thousands believing that “a short
walk through the open door would deposit them in Utopia.” Possessing no great love
of either Spanish or “gringo” civilization, he falls back on the values of honor,
manliness, and courage – machismo. Of the firm belief that “people who are pushed
around in the rest of the world” come to the United States “Because here they can
maybe push someone else around,” he eventually becomes a homeowner. As he does
so, the narrative discloses, “he was unaware that he was fashioning the last link of
events that would bind him to America and the American way of life.” As a young
man, his son Richard resists this “strange metamorphosis” he witnesses in Juan and
other members of his family. Yet, by the end of the book, Richard Rubio is also going
through his own experience of acculturation. Joining the martial virtues of his father
and his generation to a developing spirit of patriotism, he enlists in the armed forces
of the United States. That message of assimilation meets its opposite in a novel
published ten years after Pocho, The Plum Pickers (1969) by Raymond Barrio
(1921–1996), which is set, as Villarreal’s book is, in the Santa Clara Valley of
California, but sounds a note of radical resistance. The Plum Pickers is different from
Pocho in formal terms. Highly experimental, it combines documentary realism with
political allegory and satirical fantasy; sometimes, the prose breaks into a poetic riff
or prophetic comment. It also differs in its conclusions. “Moving, moving, always
moving,” the central characters of The Plum Pickers, the migrant couple Manuel and
Lupe Guitterez, experience California as “the newest of modern tortures.” They are
also dimly, inexplicably aware that the new world they encounter is a bizarre system
of oppression, a postmodern parody of Eden: “quite a remarkable, sophisticated
invention,” the narrator observes, “as the US headed towards its glorious 21st century,
combining big land combines with perpetual migrant slavism.” Lupe is torn between
the old and the new, to neither of which she really belongs. “Where did she come
from? Why was she here?” She “often talked about Mexico,” we are told, “but Mexico
was nowhere to her. It was as foreign to her as Belgium.” Manuel, however, begins to
feel “a thrill of power” as he stands up to his oppressors. Another, younger character
called Ramino Sanchez, in turn, embodies a still firmer hope. “He would find a way,
some way out,” Ramino believes. And he begins to find that way through a will to
action that does not stop short of violence – and that embraces both restoration
of the past and revolution in the future. Ramino anticipates “the return of the
natives,” the recovery and reconstruction of an indigenous history based on
authentic Mexican sources. He hopes, too, for a real share for his people of “the
most productive chunk of rich earth in the world.” Working toward all this, he seems
to link up with a myriad others involved in a struggle against oppression, “from
prehistory into glassbright civilization.” In an epic story of resistance, he is the rebel
as culture hero.
Two books published shortly after The Plum Pickers in the early 1970s announced
the arrival of chicano fiction as a major presence in American literature. The first
was ...y no se lo trágo la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) by Tomás
Rivera (1935–1984). The son of Mexican citizens who migrated to Texas in theGGray_c05.indd 751ray_c 05 .indd 751 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM