756 The American Century: Literature since 1945specifically, about the imprisonment of women, denied the possibility of realizing
their dreams even – especially – by their own men. “I could’ve been somebody,”
sighs Esparanza’s mother, and she speaks for so many others. Finally, it is about the
mind-forged manacles from which the narrator is freed through her writing: literally
so, since by the end of the book she is ready to depart. “One day I will go away,”
Esparanza explains, to a house of her own: a true house that is, in part, the house of
fiction, like the book she is telling and Cisneros is writing. “They will not know I
have gone away to come back,” she says of the friends and neighbors she will leave.
“For the ones I left behind. For the one who cannot out.” Cisneros has continued to
explore her ambivalent position as a woman and writer, and the rhythm of departure
and return it seems to impose, in her second collection of stories. A similar rhythm
is at work in The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) by Ana Castillo (1953–), where the
blueprint of the narrator for feminist liberation requires persistent returns to
Mexico: “home,” she says, “of my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother.”
The feeling of solidarity with other Mexican-American women that permeates The
House on Mango Street is also a marked feature of other recent fiction by chicana
writers, as that remark from Castillo’s novel illustrates. It is there, for instance, in
The Ultraviolet Sky (1988) and Naked Ladies (1994) by Alma Luz Villanueva (1944 –).
And it is an even more marked feature of Face of an Angel (1995) by Denise Chávez
(1948–), an account of the trials and tribulations of a waitress as she writes her Book
of Service that incorporates the trinity of grandmother, mother, and daughter and
the web of relationships between them.
As the work of Cisneros and her contemporaries and predecessors indicates, what
is remarkable about chicano/a writing is its sheer formal variety; it is not simply
protest or political fiction. There are, of course, novels and stories that use naturalist
techniques, the strategies of the documentary or the literature of commitment to
make their point about life in occupied America. Chicano (1970), for instance, by
Richard Vãsquez (1928–1990), is a politically inclined chronicle of a family over
several generations, from their passage through Mexico, torn by revolution, to the
barrio of east Los Angeles. The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) by Oscar Zeta
Acosta (1935–1974) is a harsh record of events in the heyday of chicano nationalism.
Caras viejas y vina nuevo (1975) by Alejandro Morales (1944–), reissued as Barrio on
the Edge (1997), documents crises in the lives of two teenage boys in the urban
barrio. And Rain of Gold (1991) by Victor Villaseñor (1940–) chronicles the lives of
three generations of one family, as they cross the Rio Grande to become “border
Mexicans with American citizenship.” Even here, however, in these fictions, there are
cultural and linguistic tensions that the authors feel, and that then filter into their
characters: a dual literary and verbal inheritance which pulls these stories away from
simple naturalism. And other chicano writing is even more notably experimental,
on the edge. There is perhaps no better example of this than The Road to Tamazunchale
(1975) by Ron Arias (1941–). In this novel, a dying man, Fausto Tejada, escapes the
realities of a Los Angeles barrio for an imaginative land far away. He finds his own
forms of resistance and rescue, as his creator does, in the fiercely relevant dreamscapes
of magical realism.GGray_c05.indd 756ray_c 05 .indd 756 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM