By John Alba Cutler
Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the stipulations and prices of cultural swap, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the functionality of literature. John Alba Cutler exhibits how mid-century sociologists complex a version of assimilation that neglected the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterised American tradition as homogeneous, reliable, and extraordinary. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar interval to the current comprehend tradition as dynamic and self-consciously advertise literature as a medium for influencing the course of cultural switch. With unique analyses of works via canonical and noncanonical writers--from Américo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Véa, and Patricia Santana--Ends of Assimilation calls for that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language we use to speak about tradition.
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Additional info for Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature
Example text
No that ain’t going to cut it. Ask not what Cortez can do for Mexico, ask what Mexico can do for . . no that ain’t gonna cut it either. ”6 Cortez’s parody of John F. Kennedy stages the acto’s generational critique. Kennedy was the first US president to mobilize Mexican Americans effectively in large numbers, but by the late 1960s many Chicano Movement leaders were disillusioned by what they perceived as the failed promises of electoral politics, specifically with the Democratic Party. The Indians who cheer for Cortez are dupes, cheering their own imminent demise and so, by implication, were Mexican American supporters of Kennedy.
In either case, assimilation in this sentence appears as an inevitable, natural process, something that happens outside of, and even opposed to, Richard’s agency. This model of assimilation aligns neatly with Robert E. Park’s race relations cycle of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, but it diverges from the idea of individual boundary crossing that underwrites most classic assimilation theory. Pocho’s incoherent reference to assimilation indicates that the individual boundary-crossing model does not explain the novel’s vision of history.
Many critics have discussed Richard’s decision to enlist in the military, but none has commented on the way the novel portrays that decision as bound up in Richard’s identificatory desires: He thought of all the beautiful people he had known. Of his father and mother in another time; of Joe Pete Manõel and of Marla Jamison; of Thomas and of Zelda and of Mayrie—the Rooster and Ricky. Yes, even Ricky had been beautiful. What of them—and why? Of what worth was it all? His father had won his battle, and for him life was worth while, but he had never been unaware of what his fight was.