Chicano renaissance
Michael Sedano
I rode shotgun up from Deming to Silver City, New Mexico. We were heading up to meet with the vato who first published the phrase “the Chicano Renaissance,” Felipe Ortego. ¡Saludos Don Felipe!
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| Felipe Ortego |
The first time I read the phrase “the Chicano Renaissance” I understood Ortego’s enthusiasm. Anyone surveying the United States literary landscape between the late 1960s through the 1980s would share Don Felipe’s comprehension that el movimiento was producing a new cultural current, and his metaphorical “renaissance” echoed historic emergences like in Florence or London or Harlem.
A new renaissance is stalking America, the Chicano Renaissance, and this time, it really is. The “Chicano Renaissance” grew from regional small press and newsmedia publication. Taken up by big publishing, Chicana Chicano literary production joined the institutional rat race.
Early literatura chicana mirrored and helped create the community ethos that, in multiple languages, featured images of la tierra and farmworkers, noble outcasts or hagiographic antepasados, a separate eden, a battle against a blue-eyed devil, a lost and ruined homeland.
A catalog of such dominant themes fails to capture the elegance, wit, and capacity of Chicana Chicano writers of that time and now. Then, it was chest-thumping time.
Today, a writer is likely to see the label “Chicana Chicano Writer” as a boundary against work being considered simply “American Literature.” That’s an irony that an apex of success for a Chicana Chicano writer would portend the end of “Chicano Literature.”
Fortunately, there’s likely a new Chicano Renaissance on the horizon, one that portends global penetration of raza writing into every market where readers who have a computer or an e-book reader can choose to read all manner of Chicana Chicano literature.
How does it look from your horizon? Leave a comment below, how does it?
Banned Books Update
Arizona’s laws remain on the books. The day after Veterans Day, it’s a good time to acknowledge my 19 months in uniform defended their hateful power. But we draftees were not going to roll over and play dead, we would actually die, if it came to that, so Arizona could elect people like those. Oh well.
Carmen Tafolla’s landmark collection, Curandera, is banned in Arizona. That doesn’t prevent people in Arizona or any place in the world, from buying the 30th Anniv
1 Comments on Chicano Renaissance. Banned Books Update. On-Line Floricanto., last added: 5/30/2012
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el chamaquito was my little brother; my cousin; me.