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

street. The poem dramatizes this shift when describing the threshold of the house where “white wood porch steps” are traded for “a trail of asphalt crumbs” (175). The instability of self and community is registered again in the last poem included. Here, watching a televised Mexican movie on a Saturday night, Mamá remembers and reexperiences herself as freely Mexican—a luxury of home that the asphalt of Monday will contest.
    In 1988-89, Liliana Valenzuela won first prize for her story, “Zurcidos invisibles,” the touching story of the dreary life of Marta, a spinster. Thirty-year old Marta works as a seamstress and is the caretaker of her three relatives and additional boarders in the family home. Her biological age is surprising given the tone of her voice that displays a level of disillusionment usually wrought by older age. The seams of her life begin to unravel while repairing a worn-out elbow of a boarder’s coat as Marta compares the life lived through the worn fabric with her pristine life of duty and chastity. She pricks her finger and the globule of blood let symbolizes a longing to live outside of her imposed familial servitude. Dolores, her old abusive aunt, uses social custom to chain Marta to a life of domestic service. The story beginsand ends with an earthquake that should leave Marta’s family for dead. Still alive, their survival becomes the real tragedy of Marta’s life. “Zurcidos invisibles” is remiscent of Eduardo Mallea’s short stories in its monotonously gray tone that aptly depicts the sadness and tragedy of constraining social arrangements.
    Widely published author Benjamín Alire Sáenz won second prize for his short story “Alligator Park” in 1988-89. Jaime is a Chicano living in El Paso, Texas, who helps political refugees gain legal status in the United States. The story opens with a conversation between Jaime and Franklin, a teenage refugee from El Salvador. Franklin appears at Jaime’s door looking for legal help to seek political asylum in the United States. The precarious life Franklin is forced to lead, spending his days hiding out from INS officials in their trademark green vans, is juxtaposed to the story Franklin tells of his life in his home country under siege by political assassinations, massacres of civilians and more. When Franklin asks Jaime what it is like to be an American citizen, Jaime baulks when he utters the adjective “nice” (182), and so subtly complicates the good life supposed of US citizenship. Sáenz’s story unveils the reality of life in the proverbial home of the free and the brave that, in fact, looks and feels only somewhat different from the vantage point of an undocumented immigrant, and too often for citizens of color as well. Sáenz deftly imbricates the justice system into the pandemic racism of the United States when Jaime recognizes the futility of his efforts to help Franklin and others like him. In this story, Sáenz also gives voice to the experience of children of war opening a psychological window to consider the complexity of experience for a portion of US Latino communities.
    David Meléndez wrote
No Flag
and won first prize for drama in 1989-90. The structure of his play draws the reader into an unexplained situation of imminent violence that is gradually understood to be motivated by ethnic and/or class strife and thus resonates the avant-gardist structure of Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. The trope of the play can be described as
in medias res
found in its dialogic tone, plot development, and scene change. This rhetorical strategy opens up the delicate subject of ethnic rage that, in this play, foments in the premeditation of violence against unspecified hegemonic powers. There are suggestions of ethnic discord that give a scant context to understand the motivation behind the terrorist plot. Ultimately, its eventual execution and