(Top two panels of page 80)

This particular two-panel progression highlights one of the most unique elements of the pivotal WEM (or Water! Electricity! Meat!) Protests that occur in the graphic novel Citizen Rex by Gilbert and Mario Hernandez. While on first glance the protests seem to serve primarily as a stage for major plot points (the injury to Ms. Skink, the frightening return of Rex to public view) but as the reader attempts to unravel the true meaning (if there is one) to the novel, a few major elements of the event come to view. One of those is captured in these two panels, and the representation of the robots within.

Though time progresses between the two panels, that isn’t their primary focus, and indeed the expansive way they are laid out on the page, and the space behind the foreground figures, gives a certain stillness to both images, as though stopped in a moment before violent action (as it turns out, they are). The exchange is, as Scott McCloud calls it in Understanding Comics, a “Subject to Subject” transition: we are less interested in the progress of action, witnessing a moment or capturing a setting, than we are in observing two characters (or in this case, a character and the group to whom he’s speaking). Rex, blackened and terrifying, but still essentially humanoid and of godlike proportions, with a dramatically clenched first incites his robotic brethren to “cry out,” to, as the cliché goes, “throw off their shackles and revolt.” This image of Rex is at the top of the page, stacked (significantly) on the crowd of robots, the rabble gathered at the protest.

If the robots reacted passionately, if the dialogue boxes in the lower panel were filled with complaints about their mistreatment at the hands of humans and how the machines were not going to take it anymore, the sequence would be in keeping with countless other works. The reader anticipates, skipping from speech bubble to speech bubble, some sort of anger. This isn’t simply an expectation built from science fiction works, but rather the execution of the two panels taps into a deeper-set convention iconic to literature from subjugated minorities the world over. We have Rex, the charismatic leader, the best and most demonized of his group, and those he persuades to join the fight. But the Hernandez brothers, perhaps surprisingly (to those familiar more with their Chicano roots than their work) have other plans. Rather than screaming about the behavior of their humans, the robots have no interest in rising against their owners. Indeed their complaints are either about a lack of instruction, the absence of their “master,” or mundane operational issues – “My eye’s busted.” While this catches the reader off-guard, it is, indeed, in keeping with the theme of the protest: “Humans are humans, robots are robots.” The Robots, who are dehumanized structures, with strangely shaped geometric heads and bodies, do not desire to be independent, while the perhaps more-human-than-human Rex preaches to them a message they have no interest in.

Questions:

“Why?”

Who, if anyone, is the story’s true antagonist?

Does she or doesn't she?

What hair colors has Arlene had recently? What is noteworthy about these hair colors? What implications does this have in regards to Arlene’s (and subsequently her daughter’s) perception of beauty, in relation to their race?

What is the nickname of the daughter in “Miss Clairol”? What is the significance of the girl being named this to the story? What commentary about lower-class Mexican-American households, and girls from such, might Viramontes be making with this choice of name?

Broken, Suddenly Heartbreaking, English

Richard Rodriguez’s half-memoir, half essay “Aria,” published in 1982 as part of the book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, was met upon publication with wildly divided response. It was lauded for its heartfelt, intellectual vantage point on the issues of Mexican-American youth and bilingual education by many critics, while it simultaneously generated backlash from the Chicano/a community, who saw his opposition to bilingual education, and indictment of those “middle-class ethnics” who supported it, as traitorous. It is this latter response, and the opinions that incited it, that the piece is, today, most remembered for: in part due to the considerable growth of minority populations in relation to the nation as a whole, Rodriguez’s opposition to bilingual education as present in “Aria” is increasingly aligned with conservative political thought that at the time it might well not have been intended to share voice with. Considering all of this, it would seem (on the surface, at least) unlikely that the piece would share much in common with …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, which was immediately embraced as an emblem for social action by the Chicano/a movement during el movimiento. While both written by Chicano authors, and both at least partially autobiographical – Rivera expressed his desire for …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him was to paint the “people he knew” from his time growing up as a migrant in Texas – the social and political lights they are remembered in association with are so vastly different that it would be easy, in fact, to see them on opposite ends of a spectrum, as opposed as the work of Langston Hughes and George Schuyler. But this view is belied, somewhat, by the stories Rodriguez tells of his childhood – stories of loss, due to the world that is America. “America isn’t a country of family values;” he says. “Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.”

Though the “individuality through assimilation” that Rodriguez espouses would likely fall poorly on Tomás Rivera’s ears, his depictions of a child born and raised el otro lado to Mexican parents, still caught in the traditions of the home country, echo some of those endured by the nameless boy in Rivera’s novella. Where Young Richard Rodriguez was “unsettled” by hearing his father struggle with English (15), the nameless boy is frustrated by his parent’s continued ascription to a religion that does them no favors (“And the Earth Did Not Devour Him”); where Rodriguez’s sense of security at home is undermined by his parents agreement to “give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness” (21), the nameless boy’s sense of domestic security is stricken because his parents’ wishes for a better life for their child can’t surmount the reality of his otherness (“It’s That It Hurts”). Rather than far ends of a spectrum, the experiences here are two sides of a coin – that of the American child born to Mexican parents – but they are separated, and shaped, by the social environments they occur in. Rodriguez admits that there was very little bigotry directed towards his family where he grew up in Sacramento (12), and his family always felt as though both a financial and social future were open to them, and especially to their children, and as such providing the most advantageous path to achieving those was appropriate. This is in contrast to Rivera’s nameless boy, who, when faced with racism that excludes him wholly from equal interaction with his birth country, has nowhere to turn but to go “home to get his father” (103), sending him back to the isolation of his racially, culturally and linguistically segregated family.

Question: To what extent do we feel that Rodriguez’s viewpoint is dictated by his background?

No, of course not. I see.

"This happened, too. I swear I'm not making this up. It's all true. It was the last time I was going to be with your father. We had agreed. All for the best. Surely I could see that, couldn't I? My own good. A good sport. A young girl like me. Hadn't I understood... responsibilities. Besides, he could never marry me. You didn't think...? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican... No, of course not. I see. I see."

Though brief, this passage, appearing midway through “Never Marry a Mexican,” is among the story’s most emotionally resonant. Coming directly after two sections that traded narrative audience, it capitalizes on the mild confusion bred by the transition. Throughout, the piece is written in a subjective narrative first-person: our protagonist is telling her story. Less consistent, though, is to whom, and the answer changes several times, here being particularly noteworthy. Whereas the opening portion feels as though (or at least doesn’t dissuade the reader from believing that) it is directed at the reader, this passage, as with a few others in the piece, is directed very specifically at someone within the story: the son of her ex-lover, whom, despite her claims, she still loves dearly, and whose decision to end their affair has left a permanent blemish she can’t escape. These shifts in audience are accompanied by shifts in tone: as the material becomes increasingly personal, and often enough increasingly dark with it, it also becomes increasingly conversational. This allows Cisneros a greater flexibility with the structure of the language – unlike the opening section, which reads as her telling a story, and as such relies on traditional sentence structure, the passage where she’s telling the son of the last time she saw his father is a conversation, an emotionally-charged one, at that, and reads as such. Few of the sentences are complete, and one of those is just the assurance “I swear I’m not making this up.” The most substantive, “It was the last time I was going to be with your father,” comes early in the paragraph, and is followed by a string of broken statements, headed by “We had agreed,” and degenerating into a string platitudes, “All for the best,” “My own good,” that makes the entirety reek of a pained disingenuousness. It is largely the structure – the fragments, the statements trailing off into ellipses -- that convey the narrator’s state, driven to distraction by the memory of it.

For a story dominated by the tragic romantic misadventures of its protagonist, very little is invested in characterization of the two primary romantic counterparts: Drew, the father, seems complex from an objective distance, but all his traits are being filtered through the anguish of our narrator, as it standard for a subjective narration; the son serves as little more than a confidante and prop for her sexual revenge. This flatness might seem peculiar, if the audience were at any point mislead to believe that her romances were the piece’s central theme. But no, of course not – there is a reason the story begins at the border, and the first portion is devoted to her family’s, and her own, identity crisis. In this passage, that confusion expressed as a child comes back with bruising pertinence, riding on the back of a motif, suddenly and surprisingly doing double-duty. When the piece opens, her reflection on her mother’s advice to “Never marry a Mexican,” and how she’d extended that to all men, but with particular focus on a laundry list of Central and South American nationalities, gave the impression of an independent young woman, yes, but as importantly one defining herself (and being defined as those around her) as from “el otro lado,” primarily American. Here, though, the very same mantra is being applied to her, giving reason (whether unspoken or not) for her romantic abandonment. And her understanding and acceptance of this – “No, of course not. I see. I see.” – is devastating.

Discussion question: is there a particular significance to the gummi bears? If so, what?

Tabula Raza

In spite of the remarkable breadth of poetry born of the Chicano Movement, I Am Joaquín by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales is almost certainly the most famous and influential. One could argue, in fact, that it was the most important artistic and cultural statement of El Movimiento, treated of equal importance to the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. It was hung in houses and on doors throughout Chicano neighborhoods in the late ‘60s, and acted as a catalyst for both political and artistic revolution. Why exactly this was, though, is worth consideration.

Part, certainly, stems from its date of publication: 1967 was ideally timed, as the Civil Rights Movement was at its most impossible to ignore, and Reies Lopes Tijerina’s Land Grant Movement in New Mexico was drawing the attention of Chicanos from everywhere within the Southwest. As well, part stems from the celebrity of the author: “Corky” Gonzales was a professional boxer, even then culturally well-regarded and considered a potential avenue financial escape among the Mexican American community, of reasonable success. Much as Muhammad Ali’s dominance within the boxing world made him an icon to the African-American civil rights movement and positioned him well for effective political motivation, so, too, was “Corky” Gonzales recognized within the Chicano community. This experience as a boxer is even touched on in I Am Joaquín, if tangentially: “I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger/Cut my face and eyes/As I fight my way from stinking barrios/To the glamour of thing ring/And lights of fame/Or mutilated sorrow.”

The glancing nature of this reference to his personal experience is noteworthy, though, as it gets to the poem’s defining characteristic. Though the poem’s opening lines are devoted to being “lost in a world of gringo confusion,” “American social neurosis” and the “industrial giant called Progress and Anglo success,” this section is segmented apart by the line, in all caps, “MY OWN PEOPLE,” at which point the poem shifts away from a contemporary focus. The very next line says “I am Cuauhtémoc, proud and noble,” referencing an Aztec ruler in the 16^th century. The next hundred lines recall figures from Mexican history, both before and after Spanish conquest, of legendary or infamous standing, repeatedly introduced with the declarative “I am,” or, increasingly as it progresses, “I was.” It does not, in fact, return to the United States until beyond the poem's half-way point, after traversing some four hundred years.

It might be wondered why a work, seemingly focused from the outset on Chicano peoples’ (the mestizo, mixed race, as Gonzales refers to them) experience in the “American social neurosis” would depart for so long from the present day and place. By contrast, one could look to a similarly famous poem from a different American racial divide, Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” which has a similarly stated intent, but remains entirely in the present day, and within the narrator’s particular life experience, mentioning the place he lives, down to the apartment, the music he listens to, down to the singer and genre. One learns a great deal not just about the experience of the African American from “Theme from English B,” but also Hughes himself. This dissimilarity, though, is tied to the core difference between the African American and Chicano civil rights movements, the conflicts facing those cultures, and in turn the two works: even by the Harlem Renaissance, the African American community, though long oppressed, had a history in the United States that could not be ignored. The Chicano Movement, though, was as much an attempt to reclaim a historical identity as a place within the nation. As Gonzales says within I Am Joaquín: “I/of the same name/Joaquín/In a country that has wiped out/all my history…” As great threat to Mexican American unity as the cruelty of the fields and the welfare line was a loss of background. Whereas Hughes’ poem was to give voice to the inherent humanity, both difference and similarity, of a culture long established, if by nature and history made contradictory, Gonzales’ work is to unite, engage and remind a displaced multitude of a shared history in danger of being lost. To do that, though, required an entity all of those multitudes could live through: so here on the page lives Joaquín, of a million lives, but also none, as the necessity for a conduit, a cipher, an every-Mexican, means he himself cannot be in any way specific. 

Discussion Question: Gonzales includes no line-breaks whatsoever in his long poem I am Joaquín. Is there a purpose behind this stylistic decision?