754 The American Century: Literature since 1945elements that is his being. As the dying Ultima blesses Antonio at the end of the
novel, she tells him, “I shall be with you”; and she is still there with him, the reader
infers, all the while he narrates this story. What Antonio has been blessed with, above
all, is the power to liberate himself from the warning contraries of his inheritance by
seeing and synthesizing them, then speaking of that synthesis here. The process of
liberation, Anaya himself has suggested, is the crucial aspect of Bless Me, Ultima; it is
a process that is at once personal and cultural – and a matter, not only of action, but
of narration.
At the end of Tierra the anonymous narrator talks of the need to “discover and
rediscover and piece things together. This to that, that to that, all with all.” This is a
need felt with equal urgency by the narrator of Bless Me, Ultima. For that matter, it
is a need that drives the work of Roland Hinojosa (1929–) and one that, in turn, he
imposes on the reader. Hinojosa is the author of an ever expanding work, sometimes
described as a novel, known as the Klail City Death Trip series. The series began in
1972 with Estampas del vallo y otras obras. This first volume appeared in English, not
simply as a literal translation, in 1983 as The Valley. So far, the series has fifteen
instalments constituting, as it were, one vast, unfinished jigsaw, the aim of which is
to depict a place and its people. In The Valley a prefatory remark warns the reader
that the narrative structure may seem confusing; very much like the hair of one
Mencho Saldaña, we are advised, “the damn thing’s disheveled.” This, however, is
dishevelment with a purpose. The use of narrative fragmentation in books like The
Va l l e y must be understood, not in the modernist sense of dissolution of meaning,
but in postmodernist terms, as a sign or symptom of cultural richness and as a
source, too, of specifically social revelation. Taken together, the series constitutes an
imaginative history of Belken County, Texas, a border territory that is also a
battleground for Anglo and Mexican-American cultures. Typically, as in The Valley,
their history works through voice: the testimony of numerous people. It works
through volume: we are introduced to a cast of well over two hundred named
characters in this first volume. And it works through vision: the subtitle of The
Va l l e y, after all, is “a portfolio of etchings, engravings, sketches, and silhouettes by
various artists in various styles” and Hinojosa begins the book with a county map.
Here, and elsewhere in Kansas City Death Trap, what Hinojosa is clearly trying to do
is take possession of their geography and history for Mexican-Americans. A place,
for him, is a space given substance, significance, by people (it is notable that, unlike
Anaya, he is remarkably uninterested in describing the actual, physical contours of a
landscape). A time, equally, is a temporal space endowed with meaning, given its
story by human action and narration. What Hinojosa is after is recovery, restitution
of a land and its history, a restoration of what is rightly theirs to his people. A simple
illustration of this occurs in a section titled “Sometimes It Just Happens That Way;
That’s All (A Study of Black and White Newspaper Photographs).” Juxtaposing
newspaper accounts of a murder with oral testimony, the narrative explores the
difference between the official version and the oral tradition of the people. The one
is superficial and wrong, the other digs up a buried history that helps explain the act
of violence. The section resembles a detective novel with profound social overtones,GGray_c05.indd 754ray_c 05 .indd 754 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM