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

America. The poor quality of the earth in which the tomato is planted shows the foolish care shown the earth in modern America, further evidenced in the crop of a few pathetic tomatoes. Perhaps a trademark of Chicana/o and Latina/o literatures, Wood’s play evokes a gentleness of spirit that creates a backdrop from which the community draws its strength and determination under grim social circumstances.
    Josefina López wrote her highly acclaimed play
Simply María or America’s Dream,
second-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest. The play questions the heterosexist romantic fantasy at the heart of both North American and Mexican cultures that often predetermines the lives of many women. María is the daughter of Carmen, herself once a rebellious daughter who, in her youth, had eloped with a still-married man, María’s father Ricardo. In pursuit of better economic opportunities, the family ventures pa’ el norte, but María follows her own American Dream. In María’s version, she wants to pursue an education and wins herself a scholarship to attend university. Pulled by tradition, María’s parents forbid her to pursue her dream because they believe an educated María will frustrate her scripted obligations of future wife and mother. The drama that ensues incorporates alter egos in the form of three girls who expose María’s inner conflict between becoming American, maintaining her place in Mexican culture, or falling outside both to pursue her own individual calling. Still a significant theme in Chicana/o literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Simply María or America’s Dream
is very much a Chicana tale of the difficulties of negotiating gender roles between two cultures. The sets, placards, and the unexpected inclusion of cameo narrators show the legacy of the important techniques pioneered by El Teatro Campesino. López’s aesthetic of truncated dialogue in the form ofpartial conversations, dramatic lines that punctuate the action on stage in a performative way, the dream scene, and the sparse voices of the three girls make evident that this theme only requires an abbreviated treatment to be intelligible to a Latina/o audience of the 1990s, and by this moment in time, to mainstream audiences as well. In addition to the dramatic interrogation of the heterosexist family,
Simply María or America’s Dream
illustrates that contemporary Chicano theater had successfully educated its audiences to the epistemology of Chicano cultural production. The scene presented here portrays the social forces that María and Carmen will have to contend with in America forewarned by their first experience of downtown Los Angeles.
    From Alberto Ledesma’s collection
Poetry for Homeboys on the Foul Line
, first-prize winner of the 1988-89 contest, are three poems: “José,” “82nd Avenue,” and “Ay-ay-ay!” Each portrays a vision of barrio life from three discrete spaces: the home altar, the family room, and the city street. These three spaces allow for two different selves to be explored. The domestic realm is the space where the poetic voice ethnically circumscribes himself Chicano. The public sphere is where the Chicano self is contested as Other. Racist paradigms are enacted that create an internal and external tension between the self as Subject and the self as Other. The first poem “José” draws out the religious contradiction of these spaces represented in kneeling at the altar in his home while preparing for a drug deal to be enacted on a street corner. The second poem “82nd Avenue” draws this comparison between the life of empowered citizens and the continuity they enjoy with the privacy of the home and the public space of the street. For the economically and ethnically oppressed, the sense of self and safety procured in the home is disrupted by suspicion and surveillance that deterritorializes the self in the