Re-release of 'Chicano'

Daniel A. Olivas at The Elegant Variation reviews the new release of Chicano, thirty-five years after the landmark book by L.A. journalist Richard Vasquez first made it into print. Rubén Martinez introduces the new edition. Olivas writes: "In 1970, Doubleday did something that was rather unusual for a major press at the time: it published a novel by a Mexican-American author. That author, the late Richard Vasquez, was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who had toiled for a decade in writing his multigenerational family saga..."

Martínez tells us that prior to Chicano, the only other Mexican-American novel was José Antonio Villareal’s Pocho which Doubleday also published—in 1959. It was through Vasquez’s daughter’s efforts that Rayo has reissued this noteworthy novel.

The initial publication of Chicano is an example of being in the right place at the right time. Martínez explains that the manuscript landed on the desk of Luther Nichols who was then Doubleday’s west coast editor in San Francisco. Nichols, an avowed liberal, saw the novel covering “fresh territory” and that Vasquez would be “opening a door” for similar works by Mexican-Americans. In 1970, the Chicano movement was gaining steam nationally as were the Black Power and women’s movements. When Doubleday released Chicano, sales were respectable but not spectacular. And Vasquez suffered what could only have been a great personal blow: while white critics praised the novel, Chicano critics, for the most part, wrote “scathing” reviews. Martínez explains that the Chicano reviewers thought that Vasquez was not radical enough (he was forty-two in 1970) and that he was nothing more that an “apologist for barrio pathologies.” Martínez asserts that much of this criticism can be “written off as heated rhetoric of the political moment.”

The great strength of Chicano is Vasquez’s ability to combine his journalistic training with his experiences as a veteran, construction worker, boxer, cabbie and grape picker to produce a highly-detailed narrative that follows the gritty saga of the Sandoval family from the Mexican Revolution to the late 1960s....Vasquez follows the Sandoval clan through four generations as they splinter and struggle to become part of the American Dream primarily in their modest East Los Angeles community.

Meanwhile, in contemporary Los Angeles, pollster Andre Pineda blogs that there is no powerful Latino political bloc "because there is no such thing as a Latino political identity."

My mother was born in Nicaragua, my father in Costa Rica. My wife was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States with her parents. My brother married a woman of Puerto Rican descent; one of my Nicaraguan-born cousins married a Miami-based Cuban immigrant. As much as our cultural heritages overlap – the value we place on family, our Catholic upbringings – we nonetheless do not share a common political identity. For example, my in-laws and my parents live within 10 miles of each other in suburban Los Angeles yet do not think in terms of a collective “we” when it comes to politics. My parents’ Mexican-American next-door neighbors view the new mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, as one of their own. My parents do not. Just because Villaraigosa speaks ever-improving Spanish does not make my parents identify with him.