The American Century: Literature since 1945 757The fiction of Helena María Viramontes (1954 –) measures the capacity for
experiment shown by chicano/a writers, especially the more recent ones. It also
reveals how permeable the barriers are between the chicano/a and the wider latino/a
communities. In her short story collection The Moths and Other Stories (1985),
Viramontes uses a fractured narrative technique to disrupt our reading of the text.
The effect is one of strangeness, disorientation, so that we, the readers, experience a
disturbance, a dismay analogous to that felt by her characters, the immigrant workers
entering a culture not their own – and one that values them only intermittently,
as useful tools. It is a strangeness that the chicana poet Pat Mora (1942–) also arouses
in poems like “Border Town: 1938” (1986) and “Unnatural Speech” (1986). As
readers, we are hurled here into forms of broken speech and narration that imitate
precisely the immigrant experience of shifting, suspected, multiple identities. “An
American / to Mexicans / a Mexican to Americans /” as Mora observes of such
people, in one of the poems, “Legal Alien,” from her first collection, Chants (1984):
this is “the discomfort / of being pre-judged / Bi-laterally,” “sliding back and forth /
between the fringes of both worlds.” Viramontes adds to the discomfort announced
and aroused by Mora by subverting the traditional Mexican-American notion of
familia. This she does in two ways: by opening up concepts of the family and the
community to feminist perspectives, and by enlarging those concepts to embrace los
ores Americanos – other refugees and immigrants from other hispanic cultures. Her
characters are, many of them, women; many are also people fleeing oppression in
central America. They come to the United States in a state of fear: fear of men, of
strangers (which is just about everybody), of the immigration authorities, and of the
police (who, they believe, are merely “La Migra in disguise”). The only community
they have is with those in the same state as themselves, others in flight in a world
turned upside down. And Viramontes makes us share that state for a while, through
the creation of a narrative that is the imaginative equivalent of trauma. Her books,
including the novel that took her seventeen years to write, The Dogs Came With
Them (2007), cut across the boundaries between chicano and other hispanic
cultures, not only because they exploit the magical, experimental techniques of
Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but because they incorporate
people and memories from countries like El Salvador. They remind us, in effect, that
there is a wider Hispanic community to which Mexican-Americans belong: which is,
more often than not, a community of the oppressed.
This is particularly true of those from Puerto Rico, who began coming to the
mainland in large numbers after World War II. Puerto Rico has the unique status of
an American commonwealth, so the more than half a million Puerto Ricans settled
in the United States by 1955 were and are officially classified as migrants rather than
immigrants. Nevertheless, concentrated mostly in New York City, they face the same
sense of dispossession as chicano immigrants, a similar experience of disorientation
and division that is simultaneously linguistic and cultural. One of the most
outspoken writers, as far as the Puerto Rican experience is concerned, is the poet
Pedro Pietri (1944–2004). One of the so-called Nuyorican poets who began to read
at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe in New York City, Pietri is typical of these poets as aGGray_c05.indd 757ray_c 05 .indd 757 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM