The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize by Stephanie Fetta Read Free Book Online

by hospital authorities and the remainder of the story describes Strawman’s struggle to perform sanity as determined by particular social norms. Gamboa explores Strawman’s circumstance and condition brilliantly by the way he teases out Strawman’s heightened consciousness that understands the game at stake between himself and Mary, his hospital psychotherapist, for his freedom. Strawman’s sudden insights into the artificiality of the conditions of sanity deconstruct the binary sane/insane into liminal degrees of moderated yet pervasive insanity demonstrated by all. Gamboa writes a highly sympathetic protagonist in this first-person narrative that compels his reader to reconsider the notion of sanity, and to question the legitimacy of the asylum as a rehabilitative institution.
    Demetria Martínez, well-known for her 1991 novel
Mother Tongue
, is also a wonderful poet as her first-prize collection of 1987-88 attests. Included are two of her poems, “Chimayó, New Mexico” and “One Dimensional Man.” “Chimayó, New Mexico” situates a landscape as the central character of the poem through which a pair of lovers fails to emotionally and spiritually connect. Here, Martínez contextualizes the architecture, topography, and the flora and fauna of Chimayó, New Mexico, to tell of a spiritual desire for an erotic encounter. Perhaps related to Martínez’s interest in the Sanctuary Movement, “One Dimensional Man” speaks in staccato-like spurts of a postcolonial fantasy where an imperialist male’s sexual interest in the oppressed Other is energized by his prejudice. The implication is that sexual attraction nor intimacy necessarily compels the racist to challenge his/her beliefs. Rather, the attraction is often rooted in an erotic of oppression. Martínez unfastens the myth of biracial romance through a poetic voice that links the heterosexist and racist desire of Other with the desire to annihilate the Other, themes developed as well in
Mother Tongue
. True in the best of Chicana/o literature, Martínez establishes Chicana/o subjectivities within social, historical, and economical contingencies and sets them to poetry, concise, biting, and lyrical.
    Silviana Wood’s story “And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him?” won her first prize in 1987-88. Through the genre of the Bildungsroman, Wood’s tale conjoins the coming of age of a young girl with her cognition of racism and the subsequent material conditions of poverty. This process begins with the difficult circumstances with which her community lives that become a source of social shame. The story embraces with humorthe ingenuity of a group of sixth graders, the young Chicanos of Miss Folsom’s class, who protect themselves from being institutionally demeaned. They circumvent their teacher’s chastisement when they distract Miss Folsom from recognizing symbols of their poverty like lice and ill-fitted clothing, and from their ethnicity represented by un-American lunches, and their willingness to accept English names. Told in a child’s voice, Wood subtly exposes the larger project of education in the United States—to indoctrinate the young in a skewed value of nationalism to distinguish the selfproclaimed real American citizen from the ethnic “imposter.”
    Silviana Wood in her play
Una vez, en un barrio de sueños …
, first-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest brings her reader into a barrio where generations at odds merge together. Don Anselmo, a grouchy old man, leaves the scolding behind when he finds a common bond of intellectual curiosity with a neighborhood boy, Federico. Together, Don Anselmo and Federico grow a tomato plant that embodies their collective dream of renewal and sustenance in the midst of a hardened urban slum. The fact that the tomato is selected ties this spiritual and communal act to the tomato’s indigenous roots in