Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith’s
Estampas del valle y otras obras (1973; translated as Sketches of the Valley and Other
Works; rewritten in English as The Valley, 1983) the writers draw a connection
between Chicanos and the landscape of the Southwestern United States, a part
of Mexico until the mid^ nineteenth century. Likewise, in Homebase (1979) Shawn
Wong traces the contributions of four generations of a Chinese immigrant family
to American history as agricultural workers and builders of the cross-continental
railroad.
The struggle to define an alternative identity and positive presence in Ameri-
can letters led to a type of cultural nationalism that promoted strict and usually
narrow visions of identity. For some, insisting on a unitary identity, however,
seemed the only effective—albeit limited—means of opposing and defending
oneself against marginalization. Wong, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, and Law-
son Fusao Inada, the editors of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers
(1974) and its expanded 1991 version, The Big Aiiieeeee!, posited the notion of
an “Asian universal knowledge” embedded in “Cantonese operas and Kabuki”
and other “artistic enterprises” of Asian immigrants. In the anthology and their
respective works, these writers focused on American-born, non-Christian, male
writers; in addition, they identified writers only of Chinese and Japanese descent,
the most established Asian American groups. Likewise, works by Chicanos (a
category of Hispanic American writing) tended to define identity narrowly. Luis
Valdez, in plays such as Los Vendidos (1976) and in his work with the grassroots
theater company El Teatro Campesino, for example, distinguished Chicano iden-
tity as “exclusively working-class, Spanish-speaking or bilingual, rurally oriented,
and with a strong heritage of pre-Columbian culture” (Kanellos). Representations
of other Latinos or Asian ethnic groups were obviously excluded by these defini-
tions, as were female and gay experiences. Even in their later expanded anthology,
Chan and his colleagues singled out their contemporaries Maxine Hong Kingston
and Amy Tan for what they considered to be “fake” versions of Chinese culture
and history and described David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1986; published,
1988) as “the fulfillment of white male homosexual fantasy,” charges that ignore
the writers’ concerns with combating stereotypes based on gender and sexuality in
addition to race. Chicanas such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, too, felt
the sting of cultural nationalism when they spoke out against sexism and “were
identified as man haters, frustrated women, and ‘agringadas,’ Anglo-cized.”
Just as it is impossible to speak of American literature as a singular entity, it
is impossible to describe the literary traditions of various racial or ethnic groups
as homogenous. Writers emerging after the early attempts to establish cul-
tural literary traditions began to recognize the limitations of narrowly defined
Latino, black, Native American, or Asian American identity. While cultural
nationalisms formed a critical response to the racism and ethnocentrism of
the dominant culture, they failed to recognize that ethnic and racial identity
has always been linked to class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin,
and age. The diversity within racial and ethnic categories became increas-