ABSTRACT
City life has been a generative context and a persistent content of Latino literary expression since the late nineteenth century, when exiles José Martí of Cuba and Francisco Gonzalo Marín of Puerto Rico penned their brief journalistic crónicas (chronicles) of New York. Martí and Marín found the city alternately exhilarating and troubling. But their reflections made little or no reference to the actual experience of Latinos in the city. That specific adaptation of the crónica, occurred in the 1910s and 1920s, when cronistas such as Mexicans Julio G. Arce and Daniel Venegas, Cuban Alberto O’Farrill and Puerto Rican Jesús Colón addressed the situation of growing Latino colonias in San Francisco, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and New York. Regional differences notwithstanding, the crónicas of the Mexican Southwest and the Caribbean Northeast shared some topical interests in humorously satirizing the confusions of greenhorns in the big city, and skewering the cross-cultural adaptations of Latinos to the Anglo-urban cultural milieu (Kanellos 1998). The emergence of the crónica as a foundational urban genre revealed a symbiosis of context and content in Latino expressive practice, wherein the substantial expansion of urban Latino communities begat a ready and spatial concentrated readership for the Latino press even as it provided a field of observation for its urban chroniclers. Fictional narratives also appeared in this period. In 1914 Colombian exile Alirio
Díaz Guerra published Lucas Guevara (2001), recounting the unhappy travails of a Latino immigrant in Manhattan. Observing his decline and disillusionment, we witness early iterations of a Latino community presence and the tempting corruption of metropolitan life. Mexican journalist Daniel Venegas published his 1928 satirical novel, Las aventuras de Don Chipote (1999), about the hapless Don Chipote’s passage from rural Mexico to Los Angeles. With misadventures en route in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, he falls victim to several unsavory types who exploit his greenhorn vulnerability in situations that place it squarely, like Lucas Guevara before it, in the tradition of “literatura picaresca y urbana” (Kanellos 1999: 7). While these early expressions mocked or lamented the travails of Latino urban
immigrants, those same immigrants were settling into their metropolitan places, seeding the ground of modern barrio communities. The Memoirs of Bernardo Vega [Memorias de Bernardo Vega] (Vega 1984) document the early twentieth-century genesis of El Barrio in New York, showing the Puerto Rican cultural habitation of its residential milieu and the reaction beyond its borders. Life there “was very much
like it was back home.… There were many Hispanic bodegas, barbershops, and butchers. … In the stores and in the streets, all you heard was Spanish. But other national groups living in the area resented the constantly growing Puerto Rican population. For them the way of life of the boricuas was scandalous … ” (1984: 151). His memoirs straightforwardly narrate the institutional and social evolution of El Barrio in its formative interwar years, concluding after World War II, when Puerto Ricans cemented their position as the major national-origin Latino group in the Northeast. At this time, Puerto Ricans flooded north in the first great air migration, expo-
nentially multiplying their presence in New York. Several writers who passed through or resided in New York in this period produced key texts in Spanish during the late 1940s and 1950s about the barrio community. The stories of Pedro Juan Soto (Spiks, 1956), novella of José Luis González (El hombre en la calle, 1948), personal narrative of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner (Trópico en Manhattan, 1951) and drama of René Marqués (La carreta, 1953) offered various perspectives on this defining urban exodus. Soto and González stressed the migrant’s victimization by revealing the sordid circumstances and personal pressures of their underclass situation. CottoThorner noted their social marginalization but recognized the community’s positive capacity to transform, or tropicalize, its residential milieu in culturally resonant ways. Marqués’s cautionary drama made an explicit call for returning to the island, as he dramatized the insurmountable odds confronting a family in each stop of their tragic odyssey. But, whatever ideas they expressed, the fortunes of the expanding barrios were increasingly bound to their American urban milieu. In this regard, Jesús Colón stood apart from this period cohort with his collection, A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (1961). Written in English during the same period of demographic expansion, its individual portraits, urban observations, and corrective historical vignettes manifested the community’s increasing rootedness and rights in the city, voicing a novel perspective of “Puerto Ricans who were in New York to stay, and whose life-drama came to hinge less on their sense of contrast with the Island than on their individual and collective interaction with North American society … ” (Flores 1982: xv). This generation of mid-century urban authors had no other Latino equivalents.
Chicana and Chicano authors paid scant attention to the situation of their urban compatriots, despite the fact that Chicanos were already a majority urban population by the 1920s. Instead, period writers revealed a preference for agricultural, pastoral, rural, or small town settings, sometimes lamenting the lost era when landed Mexicanos maintained dominance in the pastoral economy and culture of the borderlands. A notable exception was the fiction of Mario Suárez. In the late 1940s he published a series of sketches (reprinted in 2004) about the central barrios of Tucson, Arizona. They reveal the Chicano community’s social complexity, its unexpected multicultural elements, and its tense but functional relations with the greater Anglo city. Their historical value was enhanced when some of those barrios were later leveled in the urban renewal of downtown Tucson, granting them an unanticipated and spectral poignancy. Their singular legacy would be revived in the 1970s, when the Chicano Movement heightened attention to the conditions of barrio life and inspired a new literary generation, simultaneous to an urban Boricua cultural florescence in the East Coast.
