title:Rolando Hinojosa and theAmerican Dream Texas WritersSeries ; No. 5

author: Lee, Joyce Glover.publisher: University of North Texas Press

isbn10 | asin: 1574410237print isbn13: 9781574410235

ebook isbn13: 9780585235844

language: English

subject

Hinojosa, Rolando--Criticismand interpretation, Nationalcharacteristics, American, inliterature, Mexican Americansin literature, Success inliterature, Texas--In literature,Myth in literature.

publication date: 1997lcc: PS3558.I545Z76 1997eb

ddc: 813/.54

subject:

Hinojosa, Rolando--Criticismand interpretation, Nationalcharacteristics, American, inliterature, Mexican Americansin literature, Success inliterature, Texas--In literature,Myth in literature.

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Rolando Hinojosa and the AmericanDream

by Joyce Glover Lee

TEXAS WRITERS SERIES NUMBER 5General Editor James Ward Lee

©1997, Joyce Glover Lee

All rights reserved

Permissions:University of North Texas PressPO Box 311336Denton TX 76203-1336

First printed in 1997 in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements ofthe American National Standard for Permanence of Paper forPrinted Library Materials, Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Joyce Glover, 1954-Rolando Hinojosa and the American dream / Joyce Glover Lee.p. cm.(Texas writers series : no. 5)Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.ISBN 1-57441-023-7 (cloth : alk. paper)1. Hinojosa, RolandoCriticism and interpretation. 2. MexicanAmericans in literature. 3. Success in literature. 4. Texas

Americans in literature. 3. Success in literature. 4. TexasIn literature. 5. Myth in literature. I. Title. II. Series.PS3558.I545Z76 1997813'.54dc21 96-50027 CIP

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Dedication

In MemoriamGordon Louis Glover19211995

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1American Odyssey

2The Río Grande Valley: A Cultural Marriage

3Marking the Path: The Death Trip in Sequence

4"Lying to with Sails Set": The Trip Begins

5A Change in Direction

6The End of a Journey

7Paradise Lost and Found

Works Cited

Index

Index

Page ix

Acknowledgments

Many good friends came to my aid while I waspreparing this manuscript for publication. Theirpractical assistance and emotional support mademy work easier, and I am in their debt. Inparticular, I wish to thank Giles R. Mitchell, J. F.Kobler, and James T. F. Tanner of the UNTDepartment of English for their advice and theirinterest in this project. Don Graham of theUniversity of Texas at Austin gave me invaluablehelp by reading and criticizing the final manuscript,helping me to make it a better work than it wouldhave been otherwise. I would also like to thankJames W. Lee for his help and consideration.

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1American Odyssey

Despite the fact that most of the criticism ofRolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip Series 1may be termed "Chicano criticism," and despite thefact that much of this criticism offers significantinsight into the Death Trip, two equally significantfacts are that this body of criticism tends towardrepetition, as it builds a fence around Hinojosa'swork, claiming it primarily for a Chicano audience.2It is my hope to knock a few gaps in that fence. Iintend to look at Hinojosa's Death Trip Series fromwhat I see as a broader perspective and to placeHinojosa's work within the larger canon of thatvague, elusive body that we call "Americanliterature." In doing so, I do not intend to deny orto ignore Hinojosa's

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Mexican-American subject matter or his regionalorientation, but simply to consider them aselements of a larger construct. 3 The nine booksthat make up the Death Trip Series fit thedefinitions of the "sequence novel," a well-understood but still largely undefined group ofnovels treating a single set of characters or a singleplace or theme developed through the generationsof a specific locale. Hardy's "Wessex novels,"Trollope's "Barset novels," Anthony Powell's ADance to the Music of Time, and Faulkner's ratherlooser series, the "Yoknapatawpha novels," areexamples. The sequence novel, or to use theFrench term, the roman fleuve, allows an authorgreater range than a single novel, and it is thisextended range that helps to take Hinojosa'snovels and poems outside the confines of the RíoGrande Valley and into the broad stream ofAmerican literature.

As I see it, to give Hinojosa his due, not just as a"Mexican-American" writer or "Chicano" writer, oreven as a "Texas" writer, but instead as anAmerican writer, one must first consider the DeathTrip Series as a work that falls primarily into the

category of American fiction. Hinojosa, after all, isas much an American as he is a Texan, TexasMexican, Mexican American, Chicano, etc. At thesame time, it is not possible to be insensible toHinojosa's regionalism or his work's distinct place inregional American literature. Certainly Hinojosa is a"Texas writer," and his

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sense of place is centered in the Texas Valley, aworld in itself and a place recognizable by allTexans as a discrete community, far removed fromthe Piney Woods, the Llano Estacado, or the urbangiants of Dallas and Houston. Yet, though we giveHinojosa this very specific designationchronicler ofthe Valleyand despite those limited geographicalparameters, it is both unfair and unenlightening totreat him as a "small" writer whose compass islimited to a tiny segment of America. His DeathTrip Series should be read as we read the work ofany American regionalist, for Hinojosa's worktranscends the regional, transcends the Valley,transcends Texas, while it remains rooted in allthree.

An objective reader of the Klail City Death TripSeries cannot fail to perceive the variations playedon the American dream of success andacculturation, nor can an informed reader fail toperceive the parallels between Hinojosa's own lifeand the lives that appear in the Death Trip. Most ofHinojosa's major characters, particularly RafeBuenrostro and Jehú Malacara, are essentially hisown age and their lives mimic his own in a

remarkable manner. As children, these characters,like Hinojosa, live primarily in the "Mexican"community of their small towns. Later, they attendintegrated schools and American universities, servein the military, teach school, or enter into business.All make some spoken or unspoken deci-

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sion to succeedin the conventional American senseof the wordwithin the Anglo community. As SandraCisnéros has said of Mexican-American writers,

We're writers, but we're coming from homes where there wereno books and the radio was on. We're the first generation toget up and write a book. That makes the kind of stories andissues we write about very different, say, from the GarcíaMárquezes or the Laura Esquivels. In stories their families werefamilies with servants. We are the servants. We don't writemagical realism. Our issues are grounded in working classissues. (Austin American-Statesman, 17 September 1993, C1)

Hinojosa's experience is essentially the same asCisnéros's, and the successes of Rafe Buenrostroand Jehú Malacara mirror the success of RolandoHinojosa. As Hinojosa moved away from the worldof the barrio mexicano to take his place inacademic and literary society, so Rafe and Jehúbegin to reach beyond the barrio background andgrasp the American Dream. It is precisely theseconnections between author and protagonists thatforce Hinojosa to confront in his fiction thepervasiveness of American myth with all itsattendant ironies and contradictions.

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Hinojosa's characters, like Hinojosa himself, have asense of the past. And within the world of theDeath Trip Series the very word ''past" is imbuedwith romance, glory, and, more important,possibility: possibility lost, unlikely to be regained."Past" fuses nostalgia and melancholy with,ironically, a desperate need to act, to be in someway. However, the present-day acting and beingmay be seen as inferior to the old ways, to thepossibilities that were inherent in the past. So,along with any number of American heroes beforethem, Hinojosa's major characters are driven topropel themselves forward at the same time thatthey look backward with sadness and regret. AsRamón Saldívar has noted, Rafe and Jehú are"Janus-like" characters (Chicano Narrative 136)with the ability to look in two directions at once.There is at once a new pragmatism and a newromanticism at work; these characters arecompelled to seek a new route, but in doing so,anything and everything may be just beyond thenext bend in the roadand anything and everythingmay call back the paradise lost.

Hinojosa's characters, like many others before

them, are engaged in the ultimate quest: the questfor a new life. Once this fact is firmly established,the Death Trip Series cannot go anywhere butforward. And once the trip has begun, it becomes atrue American odyssey. 4 In fact, though I willargue that it is structured as a sequence novel, theDeath Trip

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may also be read as a type of epic poem, for thejourney made by Rafe Buenrostro and JehúMalacara is beset by one danger after another,some of them the actual physical dangers ofdeprivation and war, many of them emotional coilsin which Rafe and Jehú appear trapped by birth andcircumstance. Yet they not only overcome; theyprevail. And it is their ultimate triumph thatreassures usif at times we question what seems tobe a naively benign conclusion to such a difficultjourneythat although order may descend intochaos, surely order will gain ascendancy. Wesuspend our disbelief somewhat reluctantlybecause we know that racial intolerance,institutionalized racism, and outright contempt forethnic minorities is widespread. We alsounderstand the formidable barriers of language andeconomic circumstances. Yet Hinojosa manages toconvince us on some level that though theAmerican Dream may be gasping for air, it has notyet expired.

In the epigraph to The Valley, Hinojosa quotesMatthew Arnold's famous lines from "Stanzas fromthe Grand Chartreuse": "Born between two worlds,

one dead and one as yet unborn" (thoughsomewhat altered from Arnold's ''Wanderingbetween two worlds, one dead/The otherpowerless to be born"). This is an apt epigraph forthe first novel in a sequence entitled the Klail CityDeath Trip Series, for the world that Rafe, Jehú,and others will move into

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is as yet unborn (for them) in the 1930s and 40s.Yet the possibilityperhaps the inevitabilityof itsbirth is certain. By the 70s and 80s, that worldseems to have been birthed, but the arrival of thisnew life has signaled the death of the old one inthe process. Hinojosa chronicles the long struggle,the birth and death pangs, during the years inbetween.

As the chronicle unfolds, several manifestations ofAmerican mythology arise. The theme that sinceCooper's Leatherstocking Tales has dominated somuch of American literature emerges: the questionof community versus individuality. In Hinojosa'sfiction, this question is enlarged and complicated bythe idea of "progress" and affluence. Cooper'sLeatherstocking, a radical representation ofCooper's own fear that the Jeffersonian ideal wouldbe corrupted by commercialization, is perhaps ourfirst truly American hero, and he choosesseparateness. He presses westward, seekingfreedom from the pressures of society and thosewho espouse progress and affluence, just as HuckFinn does almost a hundred years later. But even inCooper's day, escape is problematical. At the same

time that Leatherstocking probes the westernedges of the frontier, a great mass of westeringpioneers follows close upon his heels, not treadinglightly, but seeking to exploit whatever materialriches the land may have to offer. To Cooper'sdismay, most settlers of the North Americancontinent sought an el

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Dorado rather than a democratic community basedon moral worth.

In any case, by the time Hinojosa introduces histwentieth-century heroes, the original dream hasbeen so completely perverted that aLeatherstockingor a Huck Finncannot exist even inthe imagination. In our own time, we must resortto the movie version of, say, an "E.T.," anextraterrestrial, to enable us to conceive ofanything like the radical purity of a Leatherstockingor a Huck Finn. Hinojosa's characters, unlike thehero of the film E.T., are rooted firmly in arecognizable time and place. They are merelyhuman and they are intractably caught up in anironic inversion of the American myth of thewestering pioneer. As Edwin T. Bowden observes,"The world of the old frontier is gone, and with itthe Huck Finns and the Deerslayers" (64). Thefrontier motif did not die, though; it just movedwest, underwent a few permutations, and finally, atthe present state of American history and culture, isstill sufficiently vital to appear in a ''marginal"literaw work such as the Klail City Death TripSeries. Rafe and Jehú perceive, as the Eagles' song

declares, "there is no new frontier; we have got tomake it here."

Unlike traditional characters in Americanliteratureand mythwho go forth to face and conquera natural wilderness, Hinojosa's characters findtheir wilderness in the Anglo culture that hasdominated

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the Valley since early in this century. They do notdecide or choose to face this wilderness; asMexican Americans in a dominant Anglo world, theyare born into conflict, and the challenge is imposedupon them. Though they differ in some ways fromthe traditional "seekers" in American literature,Hinojosa's characters also share similarities withthose earlier pilgrims. Hinojosa's main charactershave to find stronger weapons than "a rifle, an axe,and hoe" in order to enter and subdue thewilderness, but they are able to do so because, liketheir literary predecessors, they are exceptional inone way or another, particularly in their ability toendure (Karolides 14, 42, 247). Failure to confrontthe challenge, failure to win the battle, meansmore than just maintaining the status quo: itmeans that they become nonentities. They are notplayers, they are not even on the field. They cantake no meaningful part in the larger culture.

Traditionally, the westering pioneer often had an"old home" or even an "old world" which was moreor less intact and to which he might repair if theroad west proved too rocky or the promised landless than paradise. Hinojosa's characters have

instead a fragmenting community, a world ofchasms and abysses, a world of change. AsHinojosa says, suggesting the lack of choice theMexican American has in this matter, "whether theTexas-Mexican admits it or not, he is greatlyinfluenced by this overwhelming [italics

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mine] culture and economy" (qtd. in José DavidSaldívar, "Our Southwest" 184).

Hinojosa's use of the word "economy" is revealing,for it is the commercial culture of the Anglo worldthat must be successfully negotiated if othernegotiations are to occur. What Cooper, Jefferson,and others feared has come to pass. Americanculture and society are based upon economic ratherthan truly democratic constructs. We cannot easilyimagine Jefferson's ideal community. And, as muchas anything else, Hinojosa's characters are caughtup in the quest to attain the American Dream in themost conventional sense of that term: the goodlife, the affluent, materially comfortable life. Butthat life may have to be purchased at the cost of asatisfying spiritual or internal life.

The search for the good life that we see in theDeath Trip, at its present state of completion,endorses educational and material advantage overethnic homogeneity. Denis Donoghue calls thisoutlook "Franklinism" (12), arguing that as oneoperates under this "ism," he also experiences a"deep self-criticism for the part that goes alongwillingly enough with acquisition and greed'' (8).

Rafe and Jehú cannot be accused of greed, butthey, as well as many of the other characters, doenter into the Anglo world which exhorts one to"get ahead" and to "make good," no matter whatthe cost to one's spirit. Throughout

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much of the Series, however, Rafe and Jehú'sambivalence about and detachment from Anglo lifeand Anglo institutions reveal that at the very leastthey undergo a kind of soul-searching as they movefrom the old world to the new.

Yet Hinojosa fails to document the depths of thisexperience adequately. That his heroes feelambivalent about this "trip" they are on isinevitable; not only are they moving from one placeand time to a different place and time, they arealso moving into a form of isolation, paradoxically,just as they are moving into the larger society.Their isolation is not the traditional isolation of thelone figure on the frontier, but a psychic isolationfrom old ways and old memories, a conscioussetting aside of a part of the self. Ramón Saldívar,writing of the Mexican-American folk ballad, thecorrido, and its hero, says it

depicts a common working man put into an uncommonsituation by the power of cultural and historical forces beyondhis control. . . . the corrido's hero's individual life sequenceshave not yet become totally distinct from those of hiscommunity. ("Korean Love Songs" 136)

Hinojosa's main characters differ from the hero ofthe corrido in that they are not "common men,"

they are

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exceptionalHinojosa refers to Jehú as the"uncommon banker," and reveals Rafe's superiorcharacter through his wartime journal. Rafe andJehú do find themselves in some "uncommonsituations" over which they have little or no control.But they differ again from the hero of the corrido inthat as time passes, their life experiences becomemore clearly individual rather than communal.Because of this movement away from thecommunal culture, Rafe and Jehú necessarilyexperience a sense of loss.

Edwin T. Bowden notes that while isolation was forDeerslayer "a state to be sought," it is also likelythat "such a man and such a state never were"(64). His argument is that Deerslayer represents anideal, not an actuality, and that for human beingsortheir fictional representativesisolation cannot beforever endured. Rafe and Jehú cannot thrive in astate of isolation, and forces beyond their controlcompel them to "connect" in one way or anotherwith the powerful Anglo world. They learn how towin in the Anglo world, though they occasionallyseem like some of Henry James's young heroineswho, in their efforts to find husbands, are engaged

in a similar quest: ''Generally, James has his girlsdefeat [their] men at their own dreadful game,especially if the men are Europeans far gone incorruption, but the victorious girls are leftwondering just what it is they have won"(Donoghue 115). Hinojosa's Mexican Americans are

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often just as troubled as James's young women, forto shrink from conflict challenges their identity asAmericans, yet the very attempt to win, not tomention actual success, actual winning,necessitates some sort of denial of the ethnic self.Hinojosa uses this dilemma and all its ramificationsas one of the bases for his work. The unrelentingfact of their ethnicity is central to all his majorcharacters because it is the main stumbling block intheir quest for social and economic parity with theAnglos, but it is also their center, their rootedness.So the conflict of the Klail City Death Trip Series isboth external and internal, personal and public, andone cannot be separated from the other. Hinojosa'sessays and speeches, as well as the works thatconstitute the Death Trip itself, reveal hisunderstanding of this difficult fact.

The search for the American Dream that Hinojosaexplores falls into three definite chronologicalperiods. The first of these is the 1930s (The Valley,Klail City, and parts of Claros Varones de Belken),when the Texas Mexican community seems insular,isolated from the Anglo community, and his twomain characters, Rafe Buenrostro and Jehú

Malacara, are young boys. In the novels that lookback to the thirties, an air of nostalgia permeatesthe action. Perhaps this looking backward is notsurprising since many of the characters areessentially nineteenth-century figuresold-timepatriarchs and matriarchs, veterans

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of the Mexican Revolution, and other Valleyites whoremember the romance of war and a life devoted toa cause. In addition, because of the insularity ofthe Mexican community, people depend upon oneanother in a vital way. For example, when Jehú isorphaned, he ends up traveling quite happily withdon Victor Peláez, working in the carnival owned bydon Victor's brother. There is no suggestion ofoutsideAnglo governmentalinterference, and Jehú'srelatives are apparently happy to have Jehú caredfor by such a friend, even though don Victor is notrelated to the family.

The second chronological period occurs after WorldWar II, when change is more evident in the Valley,and Jehú and Rafe are in their young manhood. InKorean Love Songs, The Useless Servants, Ritesand Witnesses, Dear Rafe, and parts of ClarosVarones de Belken one sees very clearly theintrusion of the Anglo world and Anglo concerns.One might say that as Rafe and Jehú move intoadulthood, they must move out of the comfortableworld of Mexican culture and begin to face up toAnglo culture in almost every aspect of life. But thetransition from mejicano to Mexican American is

slow. When Jehú attends a fundraising barbecue fora Mexican-American political candidate at his Angloemployer's house, a local Anglo woman seatednear him delivers a loud monologue on "Mexicans."

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In Partners in Crime and Becky and Her Friends,which move into the 1970s, the Valley Mexicanappears to have come into his own. Jehú and Rafeare successful (one in banking, the other in lawenforcement) within the still dominant but lesspowerful Anglo establishment. In Becky, Hinojosatreats the subject of the professional Mexican-American woman in the character of Becky Escobar.With her liberation and the growth and maturationof Jehú and Rafe, Hinojosa attempts to reveal howthe assumptions of the Texas Mexican communityand race relations have changed from the 1930s tothe present.

The author's life closely mirrors the movement ofthe sequence. Rolando Hinojosa (his name appearsas Rolando Hinojosa-Smith on some of his earlierworks) was born Romeo Rolando Hinojosa inMercedes, Texas, in 1929, a product of both theTexas Mexican and Texas Anglo cultures. Hismother, an Anglo, was a descendant of settlerswho came to the Valley in 1887, a generationbefore the Missouri Pacific Railroad came there in1904 and opened it to great numbers of Anglofarmers and businessmen. Hinojosa's father was

descended from the Spanish colonists who came inthe eighteenth century to one of New Spain'snorthern provinces, Nuevo Santander, which layalong both sides of the Río Grande River.

As a boy, Hinojosa was educated in both Mexicanand American schools in Mercedes and became

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equally at home with Spanish and English. Afterbeing graduated from Mercedes High School,Hinojosa entered the army and was promoted tothe rank of sergeant before he finished his term ofservice and enrolled in the University of Texas atAustin. The Korean War interrupted his studies, andhe served in combat in Korea as a lieutenant beforereturning to Austin to complete his degree inSpanish in 1953.

From 1953 to 1956, and again from 1959 to 1961,Hinojosa taught Spanish, history, and governmentat Brownsville High School, but between 1956 and1961, he worked for a chemical company and did astint with the U. S. Civil Service Commission. In1961, he entered New Mexico Highlands Universityand took a master's degree in Spanish in 1962. Hethen began work toward a Ph.D. in Spanish at theUniversity of Illinois, graduating in 1969. His firstuniversity job was in the Foreign LanguageDepartment at Trinity University in San Antonio,where he taught from 1968 to 1970. LeavingTrinity, Hinojosa spent the next seven years atTexas A&I University in Kingsville, where he servedvariously as Chairman of Modern Languages, Dean

of Arts and Sciences, and Vice President forAcademic Affairs.

After winning the Premio Quinto Sol for his firstnovel, Estampas del valle y otras obras (1973), andthe prestigious South American Premio Casa de lasAméricas for his second, Klail City y sus alrededores

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(1976), he was cited as having produced the "BestWriting in the Humanities" by the SouthwestConference on Latin American Studies in 1982. In1977, Hinojosa accepted a post as Director ofChicano Studies and Professor of English at theUniversity of Minnesota. He remained in Minnesotauntil 1981, when he accepted a position asProfessor of English at the University of Texas atAustin. He now holds the Ellen Clayton GarwoodProfessorship in Creative Writing at the Universityof Texas.

Though Hinojosa has left the Valley, it remains hisspiritual home. In a sense the Texas Valleysymbolizes for Hinojosa what the concept of Aztlánsymbolizes for more radical Chicano writers, thoughperhaps a better way to clarify Hinojosa's view ofthe Valley is to compare it to James Joyce's view ofIreland. 5 Like Joyce, Hinojosa is an exile from hishomeland. He had to leave the Valleyand thenwrite about it as he remembered itin order tounderstand it and come to terms with it. Hinojosa'sfiction resembles Joyce's in several ways, mostnotably in structure and in the use ofautobiography. In addition, what Harry Levin says

of Joyce's fiction applies as well to Hinojosa's: Levinsays the writing "is not an act of creation but an actof evocation peculiarly saturated withreminiscences" (qtd. in Morris, "The TerritoryAhead" 343). Like Joyce's Ireland, Hinojosa's Valleyis home to a strong culture with a turbulent history,

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a history of domination and resistance. Often themajor landholdersand thus the powerbrokersare"outsiders." Also, as in Ireland, the "native" cultureof the Valley is Catholic, the outsider culture,Protestant. But deeper than these obvious parallelsis the love/hate relationship that both Joyce andHinojosa experience with their homelands. Joyce'sessential ambivalence toward Ireland is well-documented, and Hinojosa asserts that the Valleyis both "reviled and beloved" (Claros Varones deBelken 208).

Hinojosa's observations not only of the folk culturebut also of the political machinery of his fictionalBelken County reveal his ambivalence toward theentire system as well as his understanding of it.The Klail City Bank, for example, holds the power inBelken County, though those who wield the powerare a degenerate lot compared to Colonel Klail, thefounder of the family in South Texas. Hinojosaclearly took the famous Texas King Ranch as amodel for his KBC Ranch and its extendedholdingsincluding the bank. Even though the KingRanch is not in the Valley proper, the kind ofinfluence exerted by the King-Kleberg family and

the King Ranch Corporation was well-knownthroughout the small communities of the Valley.(And there is no question that Hinojosa's years atTexas A&I in Kingsville provided him with a closerlook at the influence the King Ranch had on a largeportion of South Texas.) These Anglo outsiders cor-

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rupt the vision of the Valley-as-it-was in a gloriouspast. Yet Hinojosa also shows that the gloriouspastbefore the infiltration of the Anglowas notuntroubled by greed, ignorance, and politicalmanipulation. Like Joyce, Hinojosa casts a loving ifsometimes disapproving eye on his homeland. Heis obsessed by it in all its manifestations.

That the place we know as the Texas Valley shouldcommand such attention is hardly remarkable, for ithas had a long and varied history. Its sheervividness as a geographical region lends it sufficientinterest as a literary setting, but it is the historyand culture of the various peoples who haveinhabited it that appeal to the writer's imagination.The early European movement into what is oftencalled Spanish Texas began in the sixteenthcentury with expeditions led by Cabeza de Vacaand Coronado. As Donald Chipman has noted,"Spanish settlement in Texas . . . was planned bythe King and his agents, usually with the intent ofachieving specific military, political, and spiritualobjectives" (8). But these objectives were rarely, oronly temporarily, met. The remoteness of SpanishTexas made its problems less significant to the

Spanish bureaucracy in Madrid than the troublesbetween Mexico City and Spain. "Indian problems"constituted a major part of the frontier experiencefor at least two hundred years, by which

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time Anglo settlers were crossing, legally andillegally, into Spanish Texas.

Though Spain attempted to keep out "land-hungryAnglo-Americans," Chipman argues that Spain'sgoal of keeping Spanish America safe fromoutsiders was doomed by a series of Europeanevents: "the ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte,revolution in the heartland of New Spain, and thereactionary policies of King Ferdinand VII in Spainitself" (Chipman 216). By the summer of 1821,when Mexico successfully rebelled against Spanishdomination, "Texas passed from Spanish toMexican control with scarcely a protest by itsinhabitants" (Chipman 240).

The Anglo influence grew dramatically with theadvent of Mexican independence. For example, "achanged attitude of support for the border towns'American trading links was opened up with Mexicanindependence in 1821" (Kearney 35), and furtheredas U. S. and Mexican rail systems were connected.The resulting increase in business had a significantimpact on Border culture: "The American townstook the initiative in launching farms. An urgentneed for quantities of farm workers was met by

workers from the Mexican side of the border"(Kearney 122). This fact, along with the Tejanos'loss of their landsoften lucrative ranchesby meansoften more foul than fair, and the brutality of theTexas Rangers set up much of the racial conflictthat persists in some form

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to this day. In addition, the political situation whichprevailed well into this century engendered discordwithin the Mexican-American community itself andhelped to institutionalize the paternalistic systemthat was already in place in most of the bordertowns. Texas politics, firmly in the hands of "theconservative wing of the Democratic Party in thetradition of the post-Reconstruction South.. . . penetrated down to the local level" (Kearney209).

El Paso offers a typical example of the grip partypolitics had on the Texas-Mexican border. In 1889,the Democratic Party controlled El Paso by meansof "the Ring," which "utilized all the borderlandtechniques for manipulating the Mexican vote,including paying voters, paying poll taxes, and'corralling' voters overnight in order to ensure theirvote on election day." The more assimilated aMexican American, the better his chances of beinga part of the Ring and being used as a kind ofliaison between the Anglo and the Mexican-American community (Kearney 18788). This"assimilated" Mexican American oftentimes gavethe idea of assimilation or acculturation a bad

name as far as the Mexican-American communitywas concerned.

As the twentieth century wore on, as world warshad their effect even on such a remote, rural placeas the Texas Valley, as the civil rights movementbegan to grow, the world Rolando Hinojosa writesof became

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even more varied. For all these reasons and more,Hinojosa found himself with ample material out ofwhich to create a portrait of a place, a people, anda time which are a quintessential part of theAmerican experience.

The world of the Texas Valley that RolandoHinojosa has created began appearing in stories,tales, sketches, and finally novels (first in Spanish,then in translations, and later in English). Thenature of their publication makes the chronology ofHinojosa's novels and stories hard to trace. Gapsbetween the time a work was written and itspublication, reprintings, retranslations, and thevariety of titles for essentially the same material allconfound the newcomer to the Klail City Death TripSeries. The first novel, Estampas del Valle y otrasobras, for example, was written in Spanish,translated by Gustavo Valadez and José Reyna. Itappeared in a Spanish/ English edition published byEditorial Justa Publications in 1973. In 1983,Hinojosa recreated the novel in English, and it waspublished as The Valley by Bilingual Press/EditorialBilingüe.

Perhaps none of his books has seen more

permutations than his second novel, also written inSpanish, which won the Casa de las Americas prizefor fiction in 1976. Hinojosa called the book Notas,Generaciones y Brechas. The manuscript wastranslated into English by Rosaura Sánchez andpublished

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by Justa Publications in 1977 under the titleGeneraciones y semblanzas. Another editionappeared in 1978 with additional material and adifferent translator, Fausto Avedano, under the titleGeneraciones, Notas y Brechas. Then in 1987,Hinojosa rewrote the book in English under the titleKlail City, published by Arte Público Press ofHouston.

Next Hinojosa wrote, again in English, the book ofpoems Korean Love Songs (1978). It was publishedby Editorial Justa. In 197980, he wrote ClarosVarones de Belken in Spanish, but it was notpublished until 1986, after Bilingual Press/EditorialBilingüe had Julia Cruz translate it into English.

In 1981, Mi querido Rafa was published by ArtePüblico. Hinojosa rewrote it in English as DearRafe, and, in 1985, Arte Público released the newedition. In 1982, Rites and Witnesses: A Comedywas published by Arte Público. It is in English, asare the last three novels in the series, Partners inCrime (Arte Público 1985), Becky and Her Friends(Arte Público 1990), and The Useless Servants(Arte Público 1993), set in Korea andcomplementing the material found in Korean Love

Songs.

This rather strange publishing history and themultiplicity of titles make it seem that the Klail CityDeath Trip Series comprises a large body of work.However, taken together, the novels that make upthe Series run to approximately a thousand pages.If

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one were to subtract the number of pages that arerepetitionsthe same events are often recounted intwo or three or even more of the booksthe totalnumber of pages shrinks significantly.

The repetition of events and the dates ofpublication prevent me from analyzing these worksindividually or in chronological order. 6 Such ananalysis would also be repetitious and it seems tome practically useless. I have chosen instead toexamine the series thematically and structurally,while trying to preserve some sense of its historicalchronology. In doing so, I hope to give Hinojosa hisdue, not only as a regional writer, but also as anAmerican writer, because I believe that in the KlailCity Death Trip Series Rolando Hinojosa capturesan American experience which is both culturallyenlightening and spiritually enriching.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 Hinojosa himself, and scholars and critics of hiswork, refer to his works collectively as the Klail CityDeath Trip Series. The researcher should be aware,however, that it is not a traditional series (i.e., a

planned sequence of publications by a singlepublisher), and will not have a series title listing inlibrary catalogs, online or otherwise. For thepurposes of this book, however, the authorconforms to common usage and refers to the booksas the Klail City Death Trip Series.

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2 The best recent Chicano criticism can be found inJosé David Saldívar's ''Chicano Border Narratives asCultural Critique," in Criticism in the Borderlands:Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology(Héctor Calderón and J. D. Saldívar, eds.), and inhis The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy,Cultural Critique, and Literary History. See alsoRamón Saldívar's Chicano Narrative: The Dialecticsof Difference, and Wilson Neate's "The Function ofBelken County in the Fiction of Rolando Hinojosa:The Voicing of the Chicano Experience" in AmericanReview: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art ofthe USA.

3 Two recent dissertations deal with Hinojosa's rolein the American literary canon and as an ethnicregionalist. See Jaime Armin Mejía's dissertation,"Transformations in Rolando Hinojosa's Klail CityDeath Trip Series." See also Laurence Lee McClain'sdissertation, "The Rhetoric of Regional Identity:The Politics of American Literary History" andManuel Martín-Rodríguez's 1991 dissertation, "KlailCity Death Trip de Rolando Hinojosa: La novela dellector" for a reader-response theory and speech-acttheory analysis.

4 Héctor Calderón in "Texas Border Literature:Cultural Transformations and Historical Reflectionsin the Works of Américo Paredes, RolandoHinojosa, and Gloria Anzaldúa" notes "obviouspoints of contact with Spanish historiography fromthe period of transition between the Medieval Ageand the Renaissance, with the works Generazionesy semblanzas (1450) by Fernán Pérez de Guzmánand Claros varones de Castilla (1489) by Fernandodel Pulgar. Both Spaniards are chroniclers of aworld . . . in transition, contrasting an older warriorethic with a newer concept of manhood associatedwith fame and virtuous life" Dispositio 16 (1991),1327.

5 Joan Penzenstadler notes some of the similaritiesbetween Joyce's use of Ireland and Hinojosa's useof the Valley in "La

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frontera, Aztlán, el barrio: Frontiers in ChicanoLiterature" in The Frontier Experience and theAmerican Dream.

6 See "Rolando Hinojosa-Smith" in ContemporaryAuthors: Autobiography Series for his account ofthe publishing history of his works and for abibliography.

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2The Río Grande Valley:A Cultural Marriage

Hinojosa has said that his work is informed by an"idiosyncratic vision" ("Voice of One's Own" 13).This statement helps to explain the dualisminherent in his fiction, a characteristic occasionedby his own heritage, the two cultures of the RíoGrande Valley, the tension between past andpresent, and the conflict within the Mexican-American community itself about self-identificationand assimilation. 1 He says,

the very fact of my being the issue of my Texas Mexicanfather and his Anglo Texas wife, and because of my long life inTexas, I

Page 28

have seen and lived both cultures from a firsthandexperience. . . . One language supplanted the other for awhile, but eventually they balanced each other out. Whatdeveloped from this, among other matters, was anidiosyncratic vision of the world; an awareness of differencesand similarities. ("Voice of One's Own" 13)

It is true that Hinojosa grew up "within twocultures" ("Voice of One's Own" 12). But it is theAnglo culture in which he primarily lives and works,while more and more the old Mexican culture of hisearly years is becoming a memory, largelybecauselike all rural American culturesthat culture,in its pure form, is dying out. As a high-tech, fast-paced world impinges on rural folk cultures, nomatter what the ethnic make-up, those oldercultures which only fifty or sixty years ago seemedstable begin to fragment. Hinojosa reveals throughthe Klail City Death Trip Series how necessary ithas become for the Mexican American to faceAnglo-American culture head on. He recognizesthat the Mexican American is American. As ayoungster in a neighborhood school, he rememberssinging the Mexican national anthem twice a day.However, he says, "We knew we were Mexican, butfrom this side of the river. . . . Our reality was here,and this was constantly brought home to us by

World War II

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and by worries for my two older brothers whoserved in the naval and military services of thiscountry" ("La Prensa" 127, italics mine). HéctorTorres writes of The Valley that we confront in it "acultural heritage which is at once, Mexican andAnglo" ("Discourse and Plot" 84). 2 Hinojosa saysthat to depict the dual culture of the Valleyhonestly, he had to strive to avoid ''romanticizing orsentimentalizing" the Mexican people ("Voice ofOne's Own" 14). His attempt to balance the twocultures produces in his novels a more balanced,richer vision than that of writers who dependheavily on cultural and ethnic stereotypes.

Despite Hinojosa's attempt to present both sides ofAnglo-Hispanic life in his novels, many Chicanocritics have analyzed his work from the limitedviewpoint of the politicized Chicano movement.Chicano critics of the Klail City Death Trip Seriesmost often either point out his reliance on Hispanicor Mexican forms or focus on the parts of his novelsthat describe Anglo exploitation of the Mexican.3José David Saldívar, likening Hinojosa to GarcíaMarquéz, says that the Chicano writer and critic has

an image . . . of the writer that many Anglocentric writers and

intellectuals have lostthe writer who combines the traditionalintellectual's commitment to language and image with theorganic intellectual's commit-

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ment to politics and revolution. (Dialectics xiii)

Hinojosa himself has noted that the Chicano criticas a rule is likely to work from a restrictedviewpoint and to impose restrictions on the Chicanowriter. But, he says of his work, "It isn'tdidactic. . . . Literature should not find itselfbetween walls" (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 56).Hinojosa's attempt to present a non-didactic,balanced picture of Valley life has caused somecritics to see his work as "not political enough''(Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 56). Hinojosa says, "If wehave scoundrels on the Anglo side, I'm going tobring them out. By the same token, whatscoundrels there are on the Mexicano side shouldalso be brought out" (José David Saldívar, "OurSouthwest" 184).

Hinojosa knows that "all serious literature" makesan "assessment," or "evaluation," of society, but heargues that asking a writer to produce work that is"socially and politically relevant" does not allowhim "much of a chance to be creative." He goes onto say that criticism fails when it is "totalitarian"(Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 59), and I think he woulddisagree with Marciénne Rocard's argument that

Chicano literature must be highly political:

Chicano writing is no longer centered exclusively on the selfbecause it would mean for-

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getting the minority's history and struggle for survival; itinvolves the reader and becomes a political act as it confrontshim with his cultural dilemma and awakens him to nationalconsciousness. Like all ethnic literatures, Chicano literature ismarked by tensions, that is by a dialectical process ofcontradictions and opposing elements. Chicano poetry, prosefiction, and drama are dynamized by a number of polaritiesmirroring two antithetical views of life. The basicspatial andspiritualopposition between the barrio, the guardian of traditionalvalues, and the dominant Anglo society modulates into a seriesof oppositions: the opposition between yesterday (the Mexicanpast) and today (the Anglo reality), between today (a grimpresent) and tomorrow (a hopefully better future). (34)

Ironically, Hinojosa's "better future," at least in anindividual, material sense, both for himself and hischaracters, lies within the boundaries of the Anglocommunity. Rocard's comments about the reader's"cultural dilemma" assumes that a Chicano readeris the only fit reader of Chicano literature. ButHinojosa argues against such an ethnicallyrestricted position by saying of African-Americanwriters,

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When a Black says he suffers, I see and understand. When aBlack critic tells me I don't feel, then I must tell that critic, Blackor not, that if I don't feel then that is the writer's fault. Pureand simple. (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 51)

Hinojosa understands that literatureto beliteraturemust do more than merely present apolitical or ethnic treatise. Rocard fails tocomprehend what is meant by Hinojosa's injunctionthat literature should not build walls, and suchcomments as Héctor Torres's that "Hinojosa's story-telling method itself enables Chicano readers inparticular [italics mine] to see their Chicanoheritage through the novel's plotstructure"("Discourse" 8485) suggests that only a Chicanoreader can truly feel or understand the significanceof Hinojosa's art. Again, these kinds of statementsfoster separatism at the author's expense.

Rocard speaks of "two antithetical views of life,"while Hinojosa speaks of a vision that identifiesboth similarities and differences. As to whether hiswork tries to resolve the question of "the Texas-Anglos and Texas-Mexicanos," Hinojosa answersthat he is not sure that there is an answer orresolution to the gap between the two cultures: "Itis a dialectic. It has to continue" ("Sense of Place"

18). Yet the Klail City

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Death Trip Series shows individual characters, if notwhole communities, at least bridging that gap, ifnot filling it in, most notably through education andthe passage of time.

Anglo critics, it is argued, with their limitedknowledge of Mexican forms and oral tradition, maybe tempted to focus only on similarities betweenHinojosa's work and that of "mainstream" writers.And, as Joseph Sommers has argued, separatingChicano writers from their cultural backgrounds isjust as limiting as is the political stance of manyChicano critics (32, 34). One must try, like Hinojosahimself, to attain a balance. Denying theimportance of his characters' ethnicity woulddiminish Hinojosa's work, as does the assertionthat the entire absolute value of the series rests onthe fact of racial discrimination and little else.

Despite the fact that Hinojosa accepts the label"Chicano writer," it is difficult to fit him neatly intothat politicized category. As Serge Ricard has said,"A vrai dire, il est temps de dissiper unmalentendu: Rolando Hinojosa n'est pas un écrivan'Chicano'selon les norms definies" [To be honest, itis time to dispel a misunderstanding: Rolando

Hinojosa is not a "chicano" writer, according to thedefined standards"] ("Drogue" 169). The focal pointof his work is neither political consciousness andpride in a mestizo heritage, nor is it an unblinkingacceptance of

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the American dream. Despite the fact that his maincharacters achieve the American Dream, hevaliantly attempts to keep them connected in someway to the old community. Yet a close analysis ofthe entire series reveals the steady progression ofhis major characters from the old culture towardthe new. At the center of Hinojosa's work is a senseof wonder at the ways in which human beings of allraces and cultures cope with the change that lifeinsists on. In answer to the question "What are theoutstanding qualities of Chicano literature?"Hinojosa says, "The presence of the Chicano andhis endurance," that is, his ability to withstand thechanging pressures of existence (Bruce-Novoa,"Rolando" 61). This is hardly the answer expectedof a Chicano idealogue.

For Hinojosa and other "assimilated" MexicanAmericans, one problem with the Chicanomovement in its early stages was its emphasis onan Indian heritage, the focus on the downtroddencampesino, and the movement's hesitancy aboutassimilation into Anglo-American society. But, asHinojosa has noted, "Since Nuevo Santander wasnever under the presidio system and since its

citizens did not build missions that trapped andstultified the indigenous people, the latterremained there and, in time, settled down or wereabsorbed by the colonial population" ("Texas-Mexico Border" 98). So for Hinojosa, his culture, theBorder culture, was a blended culture and had been

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for so long that any separation of the "Hispanicpast" and the "Indian past" seemed impossible. Asa result, Hinojosa has been unable to enter fullyinto the rhetoric of Chicanismo.

The Chicano movement, however, has sought totranscend the significant differences in attitudeamong Mexican Americans about such questions. Infact, the term "Chicano" has almost become anumbrella for diversity within the overall community.Sociologist Alice Reich claims a major unifyingfactor among Chicanos is that anyone who callshimself a Chicano is considered to be one, but thefact is that among people who use the word as "aterm of self-identification," it may signify a varietyof things (58). Given Hinojosa's Anglo heritage,these issues surely complicate his efforts to identifyor place himself within the Mexican-Americancommunity.

In 1969, Professor Eliu Carranza criticized those"assimilated" or acculturated Mexican Americanswho in any way "aided and abetted thepreservation of the status quo," issuing a warningto such individuals:

For those who identify strongly with the establishment, this

revolution in thought and action may prove traumatic, for it isthe establishment as it is now structured and those who wouldpreserve that power structure

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who have failed to understand the meaning and the scope ofthe Chicano movement. (1)

Radical rhetoric such as Carranza's may haveprovided the impetus for Mexican-Americanacademics and writers such as Hinojosa to enterinto the movement, at least on its academicfringes. Ironically, Carranza is part of the academicestablishment (now an altered, but certainly notrestructured establishment), and many of the mostrespected Chicano writers today are alsoacademics. Most of them seem to view successwithin the United States' university system asrepresenting the highestand most pragmaticgoal ofthe Mexican American. 4 As Alfredo G. de los Santosargues, "Mexican-American students need to beencouraged to stay in school" (115), and he goeson to lament the fact that so many Mexican-American young people do not graduate from highschool and that among those who do, many attendonly community colleges which do not preparethem for university-level work or the professions.He argues further that Mexican Americans must"continue to insist that the educational systemprovide access to social and economic mobility"(118).

This is a plea for inclusion, not in any wayseparatist, similar to the pleas of those advocatesof the poorest, most isolated children ofAppalachia. As Mario T. García says of the Chicanomovement of the

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sixties and seventies, "From some perspectives, thestrategy was radical and militant, but not un-American." He points out that the strategy worked:"It opened doors to college and universities. . . .The professional ranks of Mexican-Americansincreased like never before" (Dallas Morning News,19 Sept. 1993, A1, A20, A21).

It is most likely the liberalizing effect of a universityeducation that kept Hinojosa and others away fromthe most radical aspects of the Chicano movement.Hinojosa's distance from the Chicano cry forseparateness can be seen in his answer to therather naive question, "Has formal educationhelped or hindered you as a writer?" Hinojosaanswers,

Formal education, in my case, has been an advantage: I tendto be wary of excesses in language or direction. Literature hasso many good examples to draw from and so many bad onesto avoid. . . . Didacticism, totalitarian themes, boxed-in theses,and set propositions are intolerable and inexcusable for theserious writer of fiction and nonfiction, or of criticism for thatmatter. (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 53)

In this single statement, Hinojosa sums up hisattitude not only about literature, but also aboutthe

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demands of certain foundational elements of theChicano Movement that everything connected tothe Anglo establishment, including a traditionalliberal education, is suspect.

Though he is known as a "Chicano writer," Hinojosaclearly sees himself as a writer representing thepeculiarly Spanish, Nuevo Santander heritage of hissegment of the Río Grande Valley culture. ButChicano critic and activist Felipe de Ortego y Gasca,who claims the distinction of having fathered theChicano Renaissance, argues that the Chicanomovement

came into being not in relation to the quaint and traditionalHispanic past of the Mexican American Southwest, but in thewake of growing awareness by Mexican Americans of theirMestizo past and their socio-political status. (5)

If Felipe de Ortega y Gasca is right, then Hinojosa'spoint of view is in a sense only marginally Chicano.The Death Trip does treat the socio-political statusof the Mexican American, but as part of a largerconstruct rather than as a plea for equity. With fewexceptions, no matter what happens in the novels,no matter how badly the Mexican American isabused by the Anglo, Hinojosa's main characters

can be seen

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neither as victims nor as downtrodden individualsunable to help themselves. Perhaps it is whatHinojosa calls his strong sense of himself as a"Borderer" which is responsible for this attitude("Texas-Mexico Border" 95). As Héctor Calderónhas noted of Generaciones y Semblanzas, it "wouldnever develop a search for a Mexican or Chicanoidentity. Because of historical circumstances . . .these characters already knew who they were"(14). He argues that that is why Generaciones is"unlike other narratives of the Chicano Movement"(14), and yet Hinojosa's characters are on a questfor a new identity.

Certainly Hinojosa's "vision" is quite distinct fromthat of many other Chicano writers, includingRudolfo Anaya. 5 Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima,which has become one of the signature texts ofChicano philosophy, says that as a Chicano artist hehad to abandon the Anglo world of myth,compelling though it might be. Instead, he says, heallowed his racial consciousness to take over:

I dove into the common memory, into the dark and hiddenpast which was a lake full of treasure. The symbols Idiscovered had little to do with the symbols I knew from KingArthur's Courtthey were new symbols, symbols I did not fully

understand, but sym-

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bols which I was sure spoke of the indigenous Americanexperience. The symbols and patterns I found connected meto the past, and that past was not only my Hispanic, Catholicheritage; that past was also Indian Mexico. I did what I hadnever been taught to do at the university. I got in touch withmyself, I explored myself, and found I was a reflection of thattotality of life which had worked for eons to produce me. (115)

In fact, it is the past of ''Indian Mexico" thatsignifies the epiphany that Anaya describes, not theEuropean past of which he was already conscious.

Nowhere in Hinojosa does one find this kind ofopen, explicit acknowledgement of such aconnection to the Indian past. Hinojosa's ethosseems peripheral to the "center" that Anayadescribes as the impetus for his art, just as itultimately bears little connection to the declarationthat came out of the Chicano Youth LiberationConference of the late sixties, which concluded thatthe Chicano was originally "a second class citizenwho was exploited by the Spanish Conquistador"and that the contemporary movement has severalrelated aims:

Today the use of the term Chicano seeks to bring new dignityto Mexican Indian roots,

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to uplift and liberate the concept of the working peón andcampesino, and to introduce justice into the economicexploitation and racist attitude of the majority culture for theMexican-American. (Montenegro 15)

Hinojosa has chosen to go beyond the stated goalof the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference effort.Though he does not fail to chronicle the hardshipsof the migrant laborers, and though economic andracial exploitation are a major part of the DeathTrip Series, Hinojosa ultimately focuses on thesegment of Mexican-American culture that heknows best: the upwardly mobile, at least partlyassimilated group. As Donald Randolph hasobserved, "Neither Hinojosa nor those characterswho are presented positively in his prose seemtrapped in . . . agonies of cultural insecurity" [italicsmine] ("Death's" 40).

Another problem in making sense of the manyconnotations attached to the term "Chicano" is thatacademics like Américo Paredes and Hinojosaapparently place the heart, if not the genesis, ofthe movement not with the inhabitants of thebarrio or the migrant farm laborer, but with theupward mobility of men and women likethemselvespeople who have participated in the

"American Dream," rather than those who have notbecome assimilated at all (Reich 508). AméricoParedes, speaking of the late Tomás

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Rivera, another academic leader, says that Riverabelieved in a "community of leaders, of élitesacommunity of mejicano intellectuals serving asrallying points and leaders for the rest of us"("Nearby Places" 131). Rivera argues elsewherethat "In academia, the anxiety to have acommunity, the urge to feel, sense, and be part ofa whole was the most constant preoccupation andneed for Mexican-American students and facultyalike'' ("Mexican-American" 231). The claim hasbeen made that as early as the seventies manyMexican Americans would refer to themselves asChicano only if they had been exposed to Angloculture in the university, where differences betweenthe two groups became more evident to them(Reich 6768). Yet the trend is toward practicalassimilation, even if a philosophical separatismpersists.

Hinojosa refers to the Chicano Movement's literaryaspect, saying that although it "passed itself off asa people's literature," it is "actually a child of us,the academicians who make up one of the lastprivileged classes in our land" ("Chicano Literature"41). Again, Hinojosa's comment seems peripheral

to the inspiring rhetoric of other Chicanos, includingthe claim of El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán that "weare a bronze people with a bronze culture"(Montenegro 18). Arnulfo D. Trejo, in TheChicanos: As We See Ourselves, attempts to definethe term "Chicano":

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Chicano is the only term that . . . symbolically captures thehistorical past and signals a brighter future for the people ofAztlan. Aztlan was the homeland of the Aztecs. Its exactlocation has not yet been verified; nonetheless, ancienttraditions have placed it somewhere in the area encompassedby northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States.Wherever it may be, Aztlan became a promised land andprovided the spiritual unity needed by people in the Chicanomovement. (xvii)

This type of rhetoric increases the difficulty ofdetermining the philosophical stance of a writer likeHinojosa, who says in an interview published in1987 that the "American citizens" he is actuallywriting about live in their "native land" and have"been here since 1749'' (Ricard, "An Interview"195).

Hinojosa's comment about his Hispanic heritageandthe fact that not until the 1970s did any real pridein the mestizo past begin to surface within theMexican-American communitybrings up the difficultsubject of racial shame. Just as Anglo Americansbefore about 1970 often hid the fact of their NativeAmerican blood, and just as many today woulddeny having African-American blood, the MexicanAmerican traditionally downplayed his Indian blood

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and identified himself as essentially European,Hispanic. As one historian has expressed it, afterthe Spanish Conquest of the sixteenth century,Spanish "ethnocentrism and excessive Christianzeal reduced all things Indian to a level of shame"(Meyer and Sherman 3). At least a remnant of thisattitude lingered well into the twentieth century.(This attitude was similar as well to the Australian'sshame over his "convict" past.) Marilyn Montenegroasserts that until recent years Mexican Americansas well as Anglos used the term ''Spanish" forMexican Americans who were successful withinAnglo society and "Mexican" for those who werenot. As people made a "move from the barrio, tothe Anglo community," some passed as "OldSpanish," thereby making their way into the higherrealms of American society, a goal they couldachieve only if they did not look "Indian" (16).

This "Spanish phenomenon" may be explained bythe fact that the Mexican American (like allminorities, ethnic or otherwise) feels the pressureto conform to the dominant Anglo culture andsimultaneously the pressure of negativestereotypes of the "Mexican." As a result, he tries

to distance himself from the Mexican culture andthe term "Mexican," which has come to signify aculture seen to be alien to the dominant"American" culture. Hinojosa's characters morespecifically appear to feel that there is a

Page 45

real value in succeeding within the culturalframework of Anglo society.

This crisis of a dual identity has long existed in theMexican-American community of the Río GrandeValley, just as it did in California and other placeswhere there was a significant Hispanic population.Commenting on the racial makeup of the Valley,Hinojosa has clarified his personal position, even ifhe has avoided the issue as it has affected theinner workings of the Mexican-Americancommunity. He says that old-time Valley Mexicans,including his family, saw not only the Anglo but alsothe Mexican from the interior as "foreigners" ("ThisWriter's," 121). Hinojosa, whose father's family wasamong the original Spanish colonists, says that theborder culture of the Valley is different from otherMexican-American cultures:

For me and mine, history began in 1749 when the first[Spanish] colonists began moving onto the southern andnorthern banks of the Río Grande. That river was not yet ajurisdictional barrier and was not to be until almost one hundredyears later; but, by then, the Border had its own history, itsown culture, and its own sense of place. ("This Writer's"12122)

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Granted, this border culture was a blended culture,encompassing the Indian and the Spanish, amongwhom intermarriage had been common. But it alsobecame a blended culture by the intermarriage ofAnglo and Mexican and by the proximity of twoquite dissimilar cultures in a distinct geographicalregion. As Donald Chipman has noted, "thepopulation of Texas at the close of the eighteenthcentury reflected ethnic mobility." He cites AliciaTjorks's argument that there was "marked racialdiversification, combined with and induced by anactive biological and cultural miscegenation" (207).

George Banta, publisher of a small history of theRío Grande Valley written by Frank C. Pierce, writesof Anglos and tejanos, saying in the Preface that"at different periods in the past the country hasbeen stirred by the dramatic episodes and theconflicts growing out of the meeting of two entirelydissimilar peoples in that land of cactus andmesquite" (Texas' Last Frontier n.p.). One mightargue that the clash between the SpanishConquistadors and the forces of Moctezuma was amore momentous meeting of "entirely dissimilarpeoples" and that the internal conflict resulting

from that earlier meeting has been just as dramaticas the conflict of the Anglo and tejano. As DonaldChipman has observed, the Indian had to learn"accomodation" upon the arrival of the Spaniard orsuffer "elimination'' (206). On a smaller scale,

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the Texas Mexican of the Valley had toassimilatedespite the difficulty of doing soupon thearrival of Anglo settlers, or in essence be crushed.Like the Indian before him, the Texas Mexican hadthe misfortune of being caught in a culture whosevery nature made it vulnerable to the progressivedynamism of the invading culture. The MexicanAmerican, whether of primarily Indian or Spanishdescent, has maintained an awareness of at leastthese two identitiesa blended identityso thatbeneath the broader struggle of Mexican versusAnglo, there has been another, perhaps lessvocalized, internal racial struggle. Historian Arnoldode Léon, in writing of a similar conflict in Mexico,reveals the strength of this racial dichotomy. By themid-nineteenth century, he says, Mexicans were"searching for national regeneration":

Liberals placed the blame for the country's ills on the bane ofthe colonial past and worked for a break with that legacy.Conservatives argued that the true national character was tobe found within a traditional Spanish heritage. Although theirviews differed, both rejected Mexico's mestizo culture.("Cultural Identity" 25)

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A similar struggle emerged among the Mexican-American inhabitants of la frontera. This internalstruggle, which may have reached its height duringthe last two or three decades, is never directlydealt with in Hinojosa's work. Still, whatever hispersonal outlook may be on the subject, it is animportant one within the community that he writesabout, and the natural defensiveness and contemptthat the Mexican-American people feel for theiroppressors is certainly evident in Hinojosa's work,and may in part be explained by the fact that thetejanos know it is their Indian past that the Anglodisdains.

A further consideration of how the twentieth-century Mexican-American writer responds to thedominant culture and his own past must take intoaccount the question of language. Ameríco Paredessaid in 1983 that if Spanish disappears fromChicano literature, the middle-sized traditionencompassing the barrio and the rural LittleTraditions will become only a stage 'in a process ofassimilation' ("Nearby Places" 132). Other Chicanocritics, recognizing the multiple diversities withinthe Mexican-American community, argue that the

Spanish language is the essential unifier forChicanos and their literature.

In trying to determine what to write, and how towrite, Hinojosa says that after much soul-searching, he decided "[I would] write what I had,in Spanish, and I decided to set it on the border, inthe Valley"

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("Sense of Place" 23). In making this decision,Hinojosa was simply following the old adage,"Write what you know." But the decision to write inSpanish was a much harder decision to make thanit may seem, ensuring as it did that his audience inthe United States would be quite limited. He saysthat writing in Spanish about experiences thatwould have been lived in Spanish lends a sense oftruth that a text written in English would lack.

Nevertheless, though Hinojosa has continued to sethis novels in the Valley, he soon abandonedSpanish for English. The decision to do so wascomplicated by the desire to maintain a sense oftruth and the linguistic fidelity so important to theself-identification of ethnic cultures, and therealization that to become a recognized writer inhis native country, the United States, he mustproduce work in English. He has said, "I see myselfas a writer, and . . . I try to get published" (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 55). The reason he gives forshifting to English is that he started to write aboutexperiences that would have been lived in English;in a 1987 interview, he said, however,

yo no vivo in exilo, yo vivo en mi país. Yo prefiero escriber en

español si el ambiente que estoy describiendo es de hablahispana, pero, así que entra el mundo norteamericano, el ingléses la lengua más natural. Fíjese,

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cuando nos reunimos tres o cuatro colegus mexico-Americanosen un despagos charlamos en español, nos reimos, gastamasbromas . . . de repente se empieza a hablar de temosprofesionales y automáticamente pasamos a hablar todas eninglés. El idioma profesional, el de los negocios, el de lasdocencia, el es inglés. [I do not live in exile, I live in mycountry. I prefer to write in Spanish if the environment I'mdescribing is a Spanish-speaking one, but, when one enters theworld of the North American, English is the more naturallanguage. Actually, when three or four Mexican-Americancolleagues meet in an office, we chat in Spanish, laughing,making jokes . . . suddenly one begins to speak of professionalthings, and automatically we cross over to speak entirely inEnglish. The professional, business, and educational language isEnglish.] (Riera 14)

There is, however, evidence that this is not theonly reason for the change. As Hinojosa said in1974, American publishers are not likely to publisha novel written in Spanish, so "the Chicano writerhas been forced to write in English" ("Mexican-American" 424). Hinojosa clearly understands thepractical problems associated with writing inSpanish. He also under-

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stood that there was some stigma attached towriting in English during the early days of theChicano movement, a stigma that may not haveentirely vanished. In 1986, Marciénne Rocard saidthat "a Chicano who speaks English is trapped inthe language of the oppressor and 'dissolves intothe melting-pot'" (35); in 1987, José Limón, inarguing for bilinguilism for the Mexican Americansaid, "in the face of barbarism, we must learnEnglish" (25).

Besides concern for his audience, Hinojosa'sdecision to shift to English allowed him to recaptureexactly the tone of his original work. Recreating hisown works in English enabled him to maintaincontrol of his "voice." Despite his concerns aboutthe lack of Spanish in Chicano literature, AmerícoParedes has praised Hinojosa for rewriting his workin English and has suggested that it was a kind of"romantic nationalism" that first impelled Hinojosaand other Mexican-American writers to work inSpanish ("Nearby Places'' 134). Bruce-Novoa arguesthat language should not be a "test" of a Chicanowriter's fidelity:

We should not ask if Chicano writers are loyal or not to Spanish,

but rather, what is the language of preference. Chicano writers,like any writers, tend to use the language they control best. Ifthat happens to be English, as in

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the majority of cases, then that is the writer's native language.After all, Chicano writers are either citizens or permanentresidents of this country and have a perfect right to claim itsnative heritage. ("Cultural" 26)

Bruce-Novoa thinks that "writing itself" is mostsignificant to a creative writerbut perhaps not to"politicians or polemicists" ("Cultural" 26). BecauseHinojosa is not a politician or polemicist, he hasbeen able to choose for himself, as an artist, thelanguage in which he wishes to express his art.

In a 1988 interview, Hinojosa clarified his positionon the language issue by saying that "it's a narrowview on the part of some activitists" to assume thatif a Chicano writer uses English, then he cannotcreate a valid picture of Chicano life (Dasenbrock4). He also opens up his potential readership bysaying,

You have to trust the reader, always. I speak German, but notwell, and I read German, but not well, but I've read everythingby Heinrich Böll, and I think Leila Vennewitz, the translator,transmits to me exactly what Heinrich Böll wants transmitted. IfI were to take the extremist attitude, then I would never readhim or Günter Grass, or anybody else. (Dasenbrock 4)

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Though the issue of language is a sensitive one formany Mexican Americans, the historical reality forHispanics in this country is that to break free of thenegative aspects of the barrio, they must breakthrough the language barrier. As Hinojosa says,"This is not a Spanish-speaking country for themost part" (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 57). Hinojosashows his major characters breaking through thisbarrier, which suggests that he sees this fallingaway from the mejicano culture as a good thing forthe individual, if not for the community. But mostlikely he sees it as inevitable, given the history ofour time, demonstrating again his grasp of history'simplications for the individual human being.

In any case, Hinojosa and other assimilated,outspoken Mexican Americans, particularlyacademics, are in a unique position, one whichoften muddies the issue of whether they arelatecomers who have tried to appropriate the vigorof the Chicano movement after the fact, or whetherthey have in fact been the heartbeat of themovement. Answers are not immediately evident,but the fact remains that many assimilated MexicanAmerican writers and academics, whether they can

rightfully claim to have given birth to the Chicanomovement, have certainly fostered its literature.Whether they borrowed or created the energy ofthe movement may be a moot question, but it isalways enlightening to a student

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of Chicano literature to assess how any particularMexican-American writer fits into such a politicallycharged category.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 Hinojosa also explains his dual heritage bysaying, "Pero mi caso es aún máas complicadoporque soy Hinojosa, pero mi segundo apellido esSmith. Pertenzio a otra minoria dentro de laminoría, los que tenemos un apellido español yotro ingles." ["But my case is even morecomplicated because I am Hinojosa, but my secondname is Smith. I belong to another minority withinthe minority, those of us who have one Spanishname and another English."] Miguel Riera, "El OtroSur: Entrevista con Rolando Hinojosa."

2 Newsweek writers Jerry Adler and Tim Padgettclaim that the "Mexican American border . . . hasundergone what University of Arizona historianOscar Martinez calls 'a profound, silent integration'of its two halves." "Selena Country," Newsweek.

3 Most of the essays in the Rolando HinojosaReader fall into this category. See also Alurista's

"Cultural Nationalism and Chicano Literature" inMissions in Conflict: Essays on U.S.-MexicanRelations and Chicano Culture. See also RamónSaldívar, "A Dialectic of Difference."

4 See Alfredo G. de los Santos, "Facing the Factsabout Mexican America"; Tomás Rivera,"Statement of Personal Outlook on the Future ofAmerican Higher Education"; and RolandoHinojosa, "Tomás Rivera (19351954)."

5 Serge Ricard says "au contraire de RudolfoAnaya . . . la quête d'une identité ou l'explorationd'un passé mythique ne sont nullement despréoccupations centrales." ["Unlike Rudolfo Anaya,

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the quest for an identity or the explorations ofvanished myth are by no means Hinojosa's mainconcerns."] Ricard uses the term "identity" torefer to that sort of identity that Anaya speaks ofin A Yankee, not the sort of newly createdidentity that demands a surrender of ethnicity.("Un Art de la Survie: Chicanismo et religiondans l'oeuvre de Rolando Hinojosa.")

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3Marking the Path:The Death Trip in Sequence

Rolando Hinojosa did not begin writing fiction withthe conscious intention of producing a sequencenovel, but by the time he wrote Korean LoveSongs, "the idea of a Klail City Death Trip wasabsolutely fixed" (José David Saldívar, "OurSouthwest" 181). Hinojosa has noted how theDeath Trip Series evolved: In 1972, a brief sketchcalled "Por esas cosas que pasan" ("for those thingswhich are past/gone'') was published, after whichhe wrote "Una vida de Rafa Buenrostro" ("A life ofRafe Buenrostro"), "Vidas y milagros" ("Lives andmiracles"), and "Estampas" ("Images/Sketches").These four short pieces became Estampas del valley otras obras

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(Sketches of the Valley and Other Works). Heproduced three more short works, "Notas de KlailCity y sus Alrededores, II," ("Notes on Klail City andits Environs"), "Brechas Viejas y Nuevas'' ("TrailsOld and New"), and "Generaciones y semblanzas"("Generations and portraits/sketches"), whichultimatelyin 1987became the novel Klail City.Writing these short pieces made Hinojosa realizethe significance of history to his art, particularly thehistory of the Mexican American in the TexasValley.

That this particular chronology should mark thebeginnings of the Death Trip sequence inHinojosa's own mind is not surprising. He dealsprimarily with the concepts of continuity andchange, and their importance from both thehistorical and personal perspectives. In the earlyworks, the old ways of the past play a predominantrole. Hinojosa depicts them as the shaping forces ofthe personalities and characters of both individualsand the Mexicano community at large. Yet, asRobert Morris, one of the first critics to treat thesequence novel as a literary genre, suggests, evenin a sequence where there is a particular and

possibly overriding focus on history, "the historicalbackground is generally dominated by the fictionalforeground" (xv).

Hinojosa teeters between the two, but rarely givesway anywhere in his work to strict, explicit relianceon historical fact. For example, except for the facts

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about the Mexican Revolution, the dominance ofthe "rinches" (Texas Rangers) in the Valley duringthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,and the Korean War, the rest of the Klail City DeathTrip Series is anecdotal, fictionalized, though nodoubt much of what Hinojosa describes is arecounting of "facts," of actual events which heeither witnessed firsthand or which were part of anoral tradition during his formative years. Still,Estampas, the works that became Klail City, andparts of Claros Varones, perhaps more than anyothers, establish the motif of the "glorious past''and a coherent community, and present a picture ofcontinuity that stands in bold relief against theworld of change found in the later works. It is truethat history is significant to most writers of thesequence novel, including Hinojosa, who, inspeaking of his writing career, says, "It was amatter of luck in some ways . . . but mostly it wasthe proper historical moment; it came along, and Itook it" ("Sense of Place" 2324). Hinojosa isspeaking specifically of the early 1970s and theflowering of the Chicano movement, but he mightjust as well be speaking of the entire history of theRío Grande Valley, a history that he takes for his

subject.

The phenomenon of the sequence novel is not new,having been exploited to good effect in thenineteenth century by novelists like Balzac, Proust,Trollope, and others. In the twentieth century, theform has been

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especially popular in Britain and America. FordMadox Ford, C. S. Lewis, Doris Lessing, C. P. Snow,Anthony Powell, and John Updike have all extendedthe limits of the sequence novel. In addition to theform's popularity with serious novelists, it hasbecome one of the staples of such genre-fictionwriters as Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, DorothySayers, Rex Stout, and Ross Macdonald, whoreprise the same characters in novel after novel. 1

In America, of course, the earliest practitioner ofthe sequence novel was probably James FenimoreCooper, whose Leatherstocking Tales take the maincharacter through five adventure narratives heldtogether by Natty Bumpo's movement across aneverdisappearing frontier. Interestingly, Hinojosa'snovel sequence deals with themes similar toCooper's. Other American writers who have workedin the sequence genre include Faulkner with hisYoknapatawpha novels and John Updike with the"Rabbit" series. Even William Saroyan, in thecollection of vignettes that make up My Name isAram, creates a work with several characteristics ofthe sequence.

One common element among novelists such as

Balzac, Cooper, and Updike is that they write abouta rapidly changing world, and about individualcharacters who must confront historicalandconsequently personalchange. Cooper depicts thetransformation of the American wilderness thattook

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place during the life of his main character. He alsoreveals the transformation of America from theJeffersonian to Hamiltonian ideal, from an agrariansociety to a merchant society. Faulkner works withthe devastating change from Old South to NewSouth, and, in many ways, is lamenting the samethings that Cooper decried a hundred years earlier.Updike creates a modern middle-class hero living ina world in which change is both unrelenting andsoul-searing. Trollope, like Balzac, depicts theupheaval of the nineteenth century as he shows thechange in English society after the IndustrialRevolutionthe increasingly blurred social and classhierarchy, particularly between the wealthyindustrialist and aristocratic classes, the diminishedpower and influence of the Church, and a nostalgiafor a quiet way of life possible only in a few smallcorners of England. Ford Madox Ford chronicles thedramatic change brought about in British society byWorld War I. Doris Lessing, in Children of Violence,depicts the struggle for independence in Rhodesia.Even P. G. Wodehouse's comic series is an effort tocapture a small world that existed for a very shorttimeBertie Wooster's world could not longwithstand the pressures of the outside world, a

dynamic, sometimes terrifying world against whicheven Jeeves could not prevail.

Such preoccupation with change characterizesHinojosa's exploration of the Texas Valley in theKlail

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City Death Trip Series. As Hinojosa writes in KlailCity and several other works, "Nothing lasts ahundred years" (143). In the Río Grande Valley,more change came about during the period fromthe 1940s to the 1990s than had happened duringthe hundred years before. What Robert Morris saysabout the midtwentieth-century British sequencenovel holds true for Hinojosa's Death Trip Series.He argues that it is concerned with

the image and impact of society upon the individual; the questafter a vanishing ideal; the search for a personal modus vivendiwithin the social and political modus vivendi; the closing circle offreedom in an age constricted with varieties of determinismanadmittedly existential proposition; or, finally, the displacement ofthe glorious myths of humanity by the ogre of history. (xviii)

Even though the sequence novel was clearlyestablished in the nineteenth century, it hasbecome a major subgenre only in the twentiethbecause it is a literary form that is very muchconcerned not only with personal change, but alsowith historical change. The nineteenth centuryexperienced great upheavals resulting from thepolitical, social, and scientific revolutions of theeighteenth century, culminating in

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the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth centuryhas had to confront even more unrelenting change,beginning with World War I and continuing to thepresent time. In this century, the broad sweep ofhistory certainly provides the writer of a sequencenovel a dramatic backdrop against which to placehis characters. Unlike Eliot's Prufrock, a character ina sequence novel rarely has time for indecision ashistory presses upon him.

This pressure to act is felt by Hinojosa's Mexican-American characters; they are forced to confrontAnglo-American society first by Americanexpansionism and daily social contact, and later byWorld War II, changing attitudes, the Civil Rightsmovement, and mutual dependencies of all sorts.Hinojosa is deeply interested in this history: "I have[a penchant] for looking at society in general andmaking telling comments about it as time and thesociety change in Belken. . . . I don't think I couldever write a novel without referring to some formof history" (qtd. in José David Saldívar, "OurSouthwest," 18384). A necessary connectionbetween history and character development iscommon in the sequence novel. Robert Morris sums

up the task of the novelist who "flirts with etiology,riveting one eye on patterns of time, the other onpatterns of timelessness, while focusing both onthe causes and reasons for the individual's

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moral, aesthetic, psychological or social growth"(xiiixiv).

The novelist must at once embrace and eschewhistory and historical time if he is to capture thatpeculiar phenomenon of human experience, thetension between continuity and change. He mustuse history to demonstrate the motif of continuanceand change, but he must also rise above it if he isto produce "art" and not simply "transcribe history"(Robert Morris xv). This is precisely what Hinojosaattempts in the Klail City Death Trip Series. Thehistorical pastwhich is sometimes used explicitlybut which most often lurks on the parameters ofeventsis Hinojosa's way of "flirting with etiology,''and his belief that the same things happen todifferent people at different times in historyconfirms his awareness of change and continuance("Sense of Place" 24).

Another explanation for the "phenomenal" (RobertMorris xiv) proliferation of the sequence novel intwentieth-century fiction may simply be that thepressure of relentless change has created in thepopulation at large a desire for characters who donot disappear after one novel or one segment of a

television series. (The serial novel of thenineteenth century fulfilled the audience's desire fora continuing story, but some writers, like Dickens,did not continue their characters beyond the three-decker serial novel.)

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The popularity of the "Rocky" movies, "LethalWeapon III," and the many versions of the"Halloween" horror movies attests to our need forcontinuity, even in light entertainment. A sequenceensures continuing interest, and what happens tous when we become attached to a television seriesis the same thing that happens to us when webecome engrossed in a sequence novel: ultimately,plot is less important than a character's response towhat happens. The same is true of Hinojosa'sfiction: "My stories are not held together by theperipeteia or the plot so much as by what thepeople who populate the stories say and how theysay it, how they look at the world out and the worldin'' ("Sense of Place" 21). We reach a point atwhich we watch the television show to observe thecharacters; we are attached to them, we talk aboutthem as if they were "real" people. (This is why thevillains on soap operas are sometimes accosted onthe streets.)

Though a fine distinction exists between who doeswhat and what happens, once we feel a sense offamiliarity toward the characters, we become farless critical of the plot than we were when we first

began watching the series or reading the sequence.Once we have become attached to a character, weare willing to tolerate the slightestsometimes evensilliestplot imaginable, because our interest is nolonger deeply connected to what happens, butrather to how

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the character responds to what happens. Eventhough the sequence novel may develop characterin a strictly traditional sense, it may also, likeHinojosa's, broaden the perspective to depict ajourney which follows more or less the Jungianpattern:

The myth of psychic reintegration: the escape, the plunge, thejourney, the dangerous and saving encounters, the magicalguidance to the journey's end, and the final healing of thepersonality. (Lewis 39)

Structurally, the Death Trip Series generally followsthis order, and though it may leave us wonderingwhether the personalities involved can ever be trulyhealed, it does depict a similar quest. At the sametime it details another aspect of the Jungianpattern: "the necessary transforming shocks andsufferings, the experiments and errorsin short, theexperiencethrough which maturity and identity maybe arrived at" (Lewis 61).

The Klail City Death Trip Series illustrates all thephenomena of the sequence novel. Historically, itreveals how the twentieth century, particularly thepost-World War II period, signaled a dynamicchange in the life of the Texas Valley. Not only did

the Mexican American find himself in the position tochallenge old ways and old prejudices that hadbound him eco-

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nomically and socially for well over a hundredyears, but the Anglo also had to face up to a worldin which those who had been denied basicopportunities were now demanding them, and, inmany cases, getting them. At the same time,internal conflict, brought about by a variety offactors, characterized relationships amongmembers of the Mexican-American community. Oneof the most significant of these is the MexicanAmerican's efforts to retain his ethnic identity whileassimilating himself into the Anglo culture duringthe post-war period, a time when individualMexican Americans began to penetrate thedominant socio-economic system (Simmons 159,492, 524). This was a process not always smiledupon even by the Mexican American. There wereways and then there were ways; Hinojosa showsthe toadying Ira Escobar, who is an Anglo'shandpicked candidate for county commissioner, astaking the wrong route. Ira loses the respect ofthose who matter in the Mexican-Americancommunity, and he ultimately loses his wife Becky,who in turn begins her career the wrong way, butfinally gives up the women's club and goes intobusiness with Viola Barragán. Characters like Rafe

and Jehú at first seem to infiltrate the Anglocommunity while remaining attached to themejicano world, but later they appear to becomealmost fully assimilated within it, at least on thesurface.

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To analyze these conflicts and changes within theMexican-American community itself, Hinojosa hasto get beyond the Anglo-Mexican conflict, but inorder to present a true picture of the Valley hecannot fully ignore the racial conflict. He reveals hisability to transcend the race issue in Klail City whenhe describes the Purdys of Pinconning, Michigan,who created "a clean, well-lighted place" for themigrant workers from Texas (69); he alsotranscends the Mexican victim/Anglo victimizermentality when he describes the Leguízamons, whohired Mexican nationals to kill Rafe Buenrostro'sfather, don Jesus.

Hinojosa clearly understands that all humans arecorruptible. As Joan Penzenstadler says, "We knowthat Chicano culture and people have as manyflaws as Anglo culture and people," but much ofChicano literature, stressing the "native Americanside of the ancestry" is dealing in Indian myth,which is "by nature ethnocentric'' (160). One ofHinojosa's distinctions is that this particular myth israrely manifest in his work. To remain faithful tohistory rather than produce mere propaganda,Hinojosa has to present a myriad of views not only

on the race conflict, but also on the various otherconflicts within the Mexican culture. This necessityfor a changing point of view helps to explainHinojosa's adoption of his distinctive style; yetwhat he says about his methodthe lack of plot

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suggests that he is intuitively aware of the way inwhich a reader's interest works within a novelsequence. Here he simply reiterates the idea that,in the novel sequence, the study of a character's"perceptions and values and decisions" ("Sense ofPlace" 21) is what the reader is ultimately engagedin; hence the usefulness of recurring characters inchanging circumstances.

Hinojosa is not alone in perceiving the Death TripSeries as a sequence. He has said, "There's nonovelistic statute that says I have to end a novel inone tome or two" (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 60) andasserts that ''I'm writing a long piece of work inseveral volumes" (Ricard, "Interview" 194). José D.Saldívar argues that the Death Trip Series is"structurally . . . a multidimensional, historicalnovel" ("Klail" 49). Juan Bruce-Novoa says that

through the brief episodes, the short stories, and even thepoetry into which his works are structured, he is slowly andunconventionally creating a novel on a grand scale. The piecesare obviously interrelated, in the manner of a mosaic;eventually they will reveal the cast pattern of a tightlyinterlocked whole. ("Rolando" 50)

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Robert Morris says that critics tend to view thesequence novel in one of two ways:

For some critics the sequence novel is not really a novel at all,but a number of books loosely strung together. For others it isa novel, but at its most infirm, hobbling along, with history as akind of telescoping truth that can be lengthened and shortenedat whim should the author's fancy or imagination give out. (xvii)

One reviewer, whose attitude clearly reflects hisprejudice, asks whether all Hinojosa's material"cannot be sustained long enough to complete onefat novel on the Valley" (DuBose 16). 2

Ostensibly, everyone knows that "style, likecontent, is intimately involved with form," but "howone actually affects the other is a new and complexmatter when related to the novel sequence"(Robert Morris xviii). Hinojosa's personalunwillingness to comment on the action of hisnovels reveals his intention of leaving thecommentary to the voices that people his novels.Hinojosa is not in any way absent from his novels,for they are essentially autobiographical, but hestrives to disguise his own voice by utilizing manyvoices. As Elizabeth Hardwick says of

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Virginia Woolf's work, it is "all chorus and no plot"(136). Often, Jehú's voice seems to speak for bothhimself and Rafe, the two major yet essentiallyenigmatic characters who seem almostinterchangeable in the Klail City sequence. InKorean Love Songs and The Useless Servants, Rafeseems to speak for both himself and Jehú. Thesetwo characters apparently answer Hinojosa's needto express the duality of his vision, for they areclearly counterparts of a single, perhaps archetypal,figure engaged in a single quest to come to termswith the world around him, and they provide anelement of continuity within the sequence as awhole. Equally important to thematic continuity isthe figure of P. Galindo. It is P. Galindo who is oftenresponsible for bringing the past to life in the earlynovels. It is P. Galindo who insists onrememberingand causing others to rememberthepast, a past described for Rafe by EstebanEchevarría, who says it is "dead and gone" (ClarosVarones 206). Up through Claros Varones,Echevarría, who dies at age eighty-seven in the1950s, is the "storyteller,'' in the sense of historianor wise man, for the Mexican-American community;P. Galindo, who is somewhat younger, is the

"keeper of memories" who writes the oral historiesdown. Significantly, P. Galindo also dies at the endof Dear Rafe, in essence making way for the "new"men (who are somewhat younger than Galindo),Rafe and

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Jehú, who carry the past in their souls but whomust now shoulder the burdens of the present aswell.

One of the ways in which the writer of a sequencenovel creates continuity is to use a group ofcharacters, all of whom are more or less related interms of their social status and background and/orfamily history. A fairly smalland manageablecast ofcharacters will appear in a particular novel, withsome members of the larger group appearing inadjunct roles (perhaps only their names will bementioned). In another novel, the roles will beexchanged, and exchanged again in yet anotherwork, etc. James Fenimore Cooper, for example,takes a single hero through a series of novels inwhich he is surrounded by a core of characters thatremains mostly static (though characters may die,marry, or disappear) but in which the hero isintroduced to new characters and new situations ineach novel. Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music ofTime is another such work. Here Nicholas Jenkins,who is also the narrator, is clearly the focus of theentire sequence. From his days at school, and hisfirst observations of Widmerpool through army life,

marriage, his career as a writer, it is NicholasJenkins who provides the commentaryand theinterestfor the world Powell is creating.

Hinojosa borrows something from both of thesemethods in his Klail City Death Trip Series. Heclearly

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sees Rafe Buenrostro and Jehú Malacara as hisheroes, and they do provide the sometimes fragilethread of continuity that the sequence exhibits,though they are not really the center of the work inthe way that Nicholas Jenkins is the absolute centerof Powell's work. Nevertheless, much of whatRobert Morris says of Powell's A Dance to the Musicof Time and Nicholas Jenkins is applicable toHinojosa's Death Trip, and Morris's description ofNicholas could be a description of Jehú Malacara:

Even when "involved," Nick keeps his distance and hangs in thebackground, more concerned with what is happening aroundhim than to him. . . . [A] faithful narrator, he is no facetioushistorian. He accepts experience with no thought of forecastingits long-range significance. Nick reacts with sympathy,amusement, or mild astonishment to the things happeningaround him, for he refuses to be daunted by change and is, inthe last analysis, only fascinated by it. (124)

Unlike some characters who are caught in the past,Nick Jenkins, like Jehú

charts a course between extremes, measuring the smallestsigns or gestures against

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contemporary standards and holding fast to sensible andhumane values. From his shadowy beginnings as a narratorand his often obvious role as author-surrogate, he hasemerged into a full-blown hero; far above and beyond things,he has learned how a student of history and society shouldconfront the uses of the past and men. (125)

This description fits the young Jehú of The Valley,as well as the more mature Jehú found in parts ofThe Valley, Dear Rafe, and the concluding pages ofKlail City. When Jehú and Rafe attend theirtwentieth high school reunion, Jehú remembers thesnobbery and racial conflict of their high schooldays, but he concludes with these words, "we alllaugh about it now. And we should. And we do . . .no pain, no debt, nothing lasts a hundred years"(KC 14243). 3

Despite Hinojosa's use of recurring characters, in atleast The Valley, Klail City, and Claros Varones, theintermittent focus on Rafe and Jehú alternates withthe intrusion of the community, of a multilayeredcacophony of recurring voices, which isrepresentative of Hinojosa's multiple-exposurestyle. (Even in Dear Rafe, the community intrudesin the "reportage" section.) Hinojosa's methodfragments history and character simultaneously, in

much the same way Faulkner's work does, so that itis difficult for a reader

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ever to stand on firm ground in relation to the"story" being told or in relation to the character(frequently unidentified and sometimesunidentifiable) who is speaking.

Mark Busby has noted Faulkner's influence onHinojosa. 4 Borrowing Faulkner's phrase, Hinojosasays that he is the "sole owner and proprietor" ofBelken County ("Faulknerian Elements" 16). If asimilarity exists between Faulkner and Hinojosa, itis not that Hinojosa's work is of the samedimension as Faulkner's, but rather that they areboth American regionalists, and that their subjectmatter is similar. Faulkner's fiction relies heavily onthe presence of a disintegrating "aristocracy," justas Hinojosa's suggests that a brief, glorious pastexisted for the Spanish grandee in the TexasValley. Faulkner and Hinojosa both believe in thepossibility of an aristocracy in American culturebecause they both believe that an aristocracy didexist in the past. This belief, accurate or inaccurate,sets them apart from most other Americanregionalists. In addition, the idea of the oldMexican community as a coherent entity parallelsFaulkner's vision of the Old South as a unit,

unfragmented by war and time and change.

The difference between them lies in their attitudestoward change. Faulkner clearly disparages thedirection the New South is taking. Hinojosa, though

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he recognizes and laments the loss of the oldculture, sees change in the Valley from a broaderperspective. The term "cultural values" has becomealmost a cliché among critics of Chicano literature,and the loss of such values is routinely lamented.However, Robert Morris observes that the writer ofa novel sequence may see "decay" as creativeopportunity. He says that the "disintegration ofvalues" is a ''motif of the century," and explainsthat the novelist may view this decay differentlyfrom the professional historian or casual observer:

To the historian, such decay may emerge as a single, simplefact, as, say, the fall of an empire is a fact. The totalitiesinvolved in accounting for it, however, are never as factual oras simple as one might like them to be. The historian may seedecay as the most contributive factor of change. Thenovelist . . . knows that it is only one part of change; growth isanother, individual growth that is rarely accounted for in thehistoric process and is often lost in the indifference andinexorability of time. (125)

The growth of the individual personality whichchange necessitatesalong with the growth of the

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Mexican-American communityis a major motif inthe Death Trip. The chrysalis is shed, and alongwith it goes much that was comfortable and secure.

Despite the difference in outlook, both Faulknerand Hinojosa seem to feel the need to explain theirworlds, not just describe them; their efforts todefine and even justify their cultures are not reallysurprising in light of the essentially "un-American"nature of those cultures, as they are perceived bythe population at large. Both peoples have beencast as slow-moving, lethargicthe sharecropper ofthe South a neat counterpart to the migrantworker. Faulkner and Hinojosa go about theirexplanations in quite different ways, with quitedifferent results, but, as Mark Busby has said, theyboth realize the usefulness of the sequenceandshifting perspectivesin their effort to create an artthat can explain these regional cultures("Faulknerian" 106).

Another American whose work even more closelyparallels Hinojosa's is the Armenian-AmericanWilliam Saroyan, best known for his short fiction. Inworks such as My Name is Aram, Saroyan isstruggling to do what both Faulkner and Hinojosa

are doingexplaining an "atypical" culture to thedominant, typical one. The Armenian community inCalifornia was plagued by problems similar to thoseof the Mexican-American community in SouthTexas, such as the language barrier. Both Hinojosaand Saroyan depict

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a people who believe in their greatness and theirpast, but who find themselves second-classcitizens, reduced to menial and agricultural labor.

In addition, Hinojosa's style mirrors Saroyan's.Saroyan's rather sentimental, nostalgic world-view,as opposed to Hinojosa's ironic, sometimes almostcynical point of view, cannot obscure thesimilarities between the two writers. Saroyan'sstories seem randomly collected, exhibiting a "lackof continuity, form, or unity" (Spiller 1333). Thesevery words might be used to describe Hinojosa'swork as well, though both Saroyan and Hinojosa doprovide sufficient historical continuity, that"relentless backdrop" that Robert Morris speaks of,and the comfort of a recurring character orcharacters to give a relatively coherent form totheir fictions.

Both are concerned with an ethnic communitycaught in an identity crisis as the world changes.Hinojosa's Valley, as depicted in the early novels, isalmost a mirror of Saroyan's Armenian communityin Fresno, California, during roughly the sameperiod. Both authors are concerned with the sameproblems: how does one group live an authentic life

under the control of the dominant group? Or, to putit another way, how do the people who make up alittle tradition live in the face of an often repressive"big" tradition? The Armenians faced the problemsof a dual language and culture just as the TexasMexicans of

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the period did. In fact, Saroyan's prefatory "Note"to My Name Is Aram (a series written in the 1930sbut covering the period from 1915 to 1925) couldalmost, with a few changes, stand as the preface toHinojosa's Klail City novels. Saroyan says that thestories cover a time before the author began "toinhabit the world as a specific person" and beforehe "had forsaken his native valley for some of therest of the world. . . ." The same, of course, is trueof Hinojosa's early work. He says, "I had left theValley . . . only to return to it in my writing"("Sense of Place'' 24).

Saroyan continues,

While no character in this book is a portrait of any real personliving or dead, as the saying is, neither is any person in thisbook a creation of fiction. No member of my family will be ableto find himself in any one person in the book, but at the sametime none will be able to find himself wholly absent from anyone of them. If this is true of us, it is probably true ofeveryone else, which in the opinion of the writer is proper.(Saroyan, vii)

These comments are particularly apt in describingthe Death Trip as well as My Name Is Aram.Hinojosa, as he appears in the guise of hissurrogate authors, is a composite character. He is

not Rafe, Jehú, P.

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Galindo, etc., but all of them in one way or another.But at the same time, the Death Trip has auniversality that transcends the regional motif, sothat if these characters contain Hinojosa, then theyalso contain all the rest of us or "everyone else," asSaroyan claims.

The use of the author as character is anothersimilarity between Saroyan's sequence of storiesabout Fresno Armenians and Hinojosa's storiesabout tejanos. Saroyan says in his "Note": "As towhether or not the writer himself is AramGaroghlanian, the writer cannot very well say. Hewill, however, say that he is not, certainly, notAram Garoghlanian" (x). Hinojosa's characters Rafeand Jehú are both versions of the author himself;Hinojosa might also say that he is both, butcertainly not either Rafe Buenrostro or JehúMalacara. Saroyan's Aram and Hinojosa's Jehú/Rafesee the world in much the same waywith a visionthat is a mixture of bewilderment and uncannyobservation. These characters all have some ofHuckleberry Finn in them, for they know more aschildren than children are supposed to; yet theyknow that mysteries abound in the adult world, and

they only partially perceive that they live in a worldunder siege by the ''big tradition."

Saroyan's style is also similar to Hinojosa's,especially the little aside "as the saying is" and hisreferences to "the writer." Saroyan's Fresno andHino-

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josa's Klail are so alike that it is impossible tobelieve that Hinojosa has not read Saroyan. In the"Note," Saroyan says of his little corner of theworld:

It was, as a matter of fact, and probably still is, as good atown as any in the world for a writer to be born into, beingneither too large nor too small, too urban or too rural, tooprogressive or too backward . . . but in all these things, as wellas in all others, and in several unknown anywhere else in theworld, so delicately, so nicely, and so delightfully balanced as togive the spirit of the growing writer almost exactly the rightproportion of severity and warmth, and firmness andflexibility. . . . Consequently, the writing of this book, more thanthe writing of any of the writer's other books, has been withouteffort, strain, or any other kinds of wretchedness said to beexperienced by writers as eager, if not more eager than thiswriter to send a message down the ages, "as the saying is."(viii)

In the epigraph to The Valley, Hinojosa writes,"what follows, more likely as not, is a figment ofsomeone's imagination; the reader is asked to keepthis disclaimer in mind. For his part, the compilerstakes no

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claim of responsibility; he owns and holds thecopyright but little else." Obviously, Hinojosashares the same fey sense of humor.

If Saroyan's short stories seem at times likesketchily connected vignettes, then the "sections"of Hinojosa's novels appear just as looselyconnected. In My Name is Aram, the stories do notreally form a pattern, with Saroyan delineatingAram's growth as he moves from "a small boy" tohis adolescence, when he longs for the body-building course offered by Mr. Strongfort and whenhe drives a carLocomotive 38's Packardfor the firsttime. The presence of Aram's grandparents and theappearance of his Uncle Khosrove in both the firststory, "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse,"and the next-to-last story, ''The Poor and BurningArab," along with the figures Uncle Melik, UncleZorab, and Uncle Gyko, do lend continuity to thebook, but not enough to support the claim made onthe book jacket that the stories "achieve the unityof a novel." One might say the same of Hinojosa'snovels. For example, in Klail City, within the firsttwenty-five pages, Hinojosa includes the followingsections: "Time Marked and Time Bided," a sort of

mock-prologue; "The Tamez Family," an account ofan illegitimate pregnancy and the resultingwedding; "Echevarría Has the FloorChocheMarkham: A Cantina Monologue," in which Eche-

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varría cuts loose on the scoundrel; "DoñaSóstenes," in which Rafe recounts one ofEchevarría's finer moments; and "The Buenrostro-Leguizamón Affair," in which Rafe is told about theold feuds.

In Korean Love Songs, which, along with TheUseless Servants, is the real genesis of the KlailCity Death Trip Series, Hinojosa focuses on thepersonal, the daily flux of war, the moves, thecinemascope of changing scenes, and the ultimatepsychical detachment of the individual in the faceof rapid and often devastating change. What wesee in Korean Love Songs and The UselessServants is Rafe's account of his motley life in thearmed forces. As Robert Morris says, "the novelthat would emphasize character and theme overidea or action must never allow an incident ofhistory to exceed in scope or brilliance a character'sperception of it" (xvi). Certainly Hinojosa does notallow the war to supersede Rafe's perception of it.Instead, Rafe writes not only "what happened," anabsolute necessity in a genre such as the journal ordiary, but he also reveals what he and his fellowsoldiers felt or thought or said. The emphasis,

despite the drama of battle, is always on thehuman response.

Though Hinojosa's work does not develop characterin the usual way, he is himself more interested incharacter and theme than in plothe has openlydisavowed any faith in plot to help him fulfill his fic-

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tional aims ("Sense of Place" 21). Because KoreanLove Songs and The Useless Servants are bothessentially journals kept by Rafe during the war,what we see of the Korean War, or of war in thegeneric sense, is Rafe's personal perception of it. InKorean Love Songs, it is sometimes Rafe's voice,sometimes the voices of his comrades, sometimesvoices of the living speaking from hell. In TheUseless Servants, Rafe's voice as he loses hisinnocence, and in many ways his youth, rangesfrom bemusement to outrage to pain. Rafe'schanging tone of voice reflects the change he isundergoing and thus transforms the cold,impersonal term "war" to an immediate individualhuman experience.

Throughout the Death Trip Series it is a character'sperception of an event that strikes the significantnote for Hinojosa. As he has said of The Valley, inreference to Baldemar Cordero, who has beenaccused of stabbing Ernesto Tamez, "I wanted afirst-person perspective by Balde, and by the othercharacters as well" (J. D. Saldívar, "Our Southwest"184). The dramatic eventthe moments leading upto the murder and the murder itselfis never, to use

Robert Morris's term, "onstage."

Hinojosa relies on this technique again and again,just as Robert Morris claims the writer of the novelsequence often will. In Becky and Her Friends, thelast chronological book of the series, Hinojosatakes

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this method to its potential limit, as he allowsBecky's "friends" (a sometimes ironic term) tospeak about her actions. The events thesecharacters comment on are never dramatizedtheyhappened entirely in the past.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 See Alan Warren Friedman's Multivalence: TheMoral Quality of Form in the Modern Novel.Friedman's study contains an appendix (pp. 18597)entitled "A Galaxy of Multivolume Narration" whichcatalogs novels under subheadings like "ParticipantNarration," "Multiple Character Narration," "SeveralProtagonists," "Family/Social Chronicle,'' etc. Thiscompendium suggests that Hinojosa's Death Trip isa part of a flourishing tradition dating back toHomer.

2 Catherine Agrella, on the other hand, says Beckyalone is "a serial melodrama" (review of Becky andHer Friends, Dallas Morning News, 25 Nov. 1990,J7).

3 This is in contrast to Rafe's comment when hebegins teaching at Klail High with two of his old

classmates: "I couldn't stand them back then and Istill can't. It's better that way; takes the hypocrisyout of it" (Claros Varones 50).

4 See Mark Busby, "Faulkerian Elements in RolandoHinojosa's The Valley." This is an exellentcomparison of both content and style.

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4"Lying to with Sails Set":The Trip Begins

Rolando Hinojosa attempts a great deal in hisearliest novels, and in large part, he succeeds.Using a "vaguely elegiac" tone, he creates arealistic sense of a time, a place, and a people(Randolph, "Death's" 40). He achieves someremarkably vivid dialogue, monologue, andnarrative. He borrows from an old folk form, thecorrido, and performs some clever manipulationsupon it, revealing at the same time his reliance onmodernist techniques. Further, he shows the racismof the Río

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Grande Valley without condemning all Anglos tostereotypical treatment. 1

While Hinojosa does not reveal himself to be aradical or a political revolutionary in describing thelife of the Mexican-American community generallyand the conditions of migrant life particularly, hedoes not shrink from depicting the hardship andinjustice suffered by mejicanos. Although he depictsthem artistically, rather than ideologically, suchmaterial cannot help but be seen as "political," forit reveals the plight of the ethnic minority.

The action of Rolando Hinojosa's first books is setfor the most part in the 1930s and 1940s, althoughhe moves forward and backward in time with ease,from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. RosauraSánchez has pointed out that in the novels up toDear Rafe, Partners in Crime, and Becky and herFriends, the books of the Klail City Death Tripsequence "are narrated from the perspective of thedecade of the seventies as the narrators look backto the thirties, forties, and fifties and even beyond,to the early part of the twentieth century" (77). Inthe early works, published in the seventies,Hinojosa relies heavily on the past to help establish

a sense of place and to reveal a history whichappears more dignified, coherent, and meaningfulthan the present.

He relies on much of the same material in ClarosVarones de Belken, but the real interest of thatwork

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is that it fills in some gaps in the lives of Jehú andRafeone learns that they both enlisted in the armyand were called to service in Korea, where theyspent about thirty months; they returned to KlailCity, where Rafe did odd jobs and Jehú first taughtEnglish at Klail High (Klail City 141) and thenworked at the local bank. Then, after three years orso, they went to the University of Texas at Austin.Upon graduation, they both began teaching at KlailCity High. Ultimately, Jehú returns to the bank andRafe gets a law degree. One also learns that Rafeis a widower.

Except for the sections of Klail City that recountRafe's days in the American school and a fewscenes in Claros Varones de Belken, not until DearRafe, set after the Korean War, does Hinojosaintroduce a serious concern with racial issues. 2 Hisprimary focus in the novels about the pre-warValley here is on the community's function as astrong, unified entity, although in several sectionsof Klail City and Claros Varones de Belken, both ofwhich have a darker tone than The Valley, agenuine sense of outrage exists about the racialinequality that shapes the relationship between the

Anglos and the Mexicans. In the early installmentsof the series such overt, explicit treatment of racialinequity only occasionally dominates and is alwaystempered by the existence of a

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pre-war mejicano sense of community that is bothdiscrete and coherent.

Later, the coherence of the community is tested byoutside pressures. The Anglos prevail in the region,and the mejicanos are forced to adjust to the Angloway, or, as don Aureliano puts it, to educatethemselves in "the ways of the Romans" (Klail City39). As the Death Trip Series progresses, Hinojosatries to allow characters to move into the Angloworld without sacrificing too much that is unique totheir own heritage, a difficult if not impossiblebalance to achieve.

Rosaura Sánchez recognizes the integrity ofHinojosa's vision of the past in the Mexican-American community of the Valley as she arguesfor an "idyllic" era that lasted until the mid-twentieth century:

In these various periods the community faced threats from theoutside, from the Anglo world; but apparently it remainedlargely segregated, a world unto itself, generation aftergeneration. The Mexican Valley remained an idyllic place wherethe collective spirit reigned amidst heterogeneity. (77)

The esprit de corps that Sánchez identifies in theearly works is articulated in the first section of Klail

City,

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entitled "Time Marked and Time Bided." Thenarrator says, "Individual and communal heroismcalls for patience and forbearance. This makes for amore interesting life, by the way" (10). This idea isless visible in later works such as Claros Varones deBelken, Dear Rafe, Rites and Witnesses, Partners inCrime and Becky and Her Friends, all of whichreveal a more splintered, fragmented communityundergoing an evolution of attitude that isoccasioned by the inevitable march of time.

Sánchez argues that Hinojosa's style, which shecorrectly identifies as fragmentary and capsulistic,"decontextualizes events so that the impact ofhistory or social change on individual lives and onparticular social classes is not evident" (77). JoséDavid Saldívar also argues that the characterEchevarría, "like Faulkner's and García Márquez'scharacters" is engaged in "an ideological nostalgiafor an idyllic past where 'that Río Grande was thereto provide us with water, not as a fence to separateus one from the other.'" Saldívar is of the opinionthat "many of Hinojosa's old guard Texas Mexicanswant to stop the clock of time" (''Rolando" 50). ButHinojosa is not an ideologue, and his primary aim

in the series is to explore the impact of history andsocial change on individuals and the MexicanAmerican community; furthermore, Echevarría isdoing more than nostal-

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gically reminiscing: he is an archetypal wise manengaged in storytelling in its original senseas oralhistory.

The Death Trip Series concerns itself with historicaltime and social and individual change. The veryword "trip" in the title clearly denotes change, analteration in time and circumstance. P. Galindo inKlail City, in the section "Time Marked and TimeBided," reveals the significance of time and changeto the development of the sequence:

Well now, some of the taxpayers to be seen in Klail City haveappeared on other occasions and at other times; in times past,some have scarcely been mentioned at all, and then, ofcourse, there are those who are coming out for the first time;making their debut, as it were. (9)

Robert Morris claims in his book Continuance andChange that any sequence novel is necessarilyconcerned with change (xiii). Hinojosa, moving ashe does from past to present, delineates themovement of the major characters from that insularpre-war Mexican culture into the broader, morecomplicated world. Individual characters mustintegrate the familiar experience of the old culturewith the new experience of the Anglo culture. Theepigraph of his first novel,

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The Valley, explains what the "trip" of thesequence must accomplish when Hinojosa citesMatthew Arnold's famous lines from "Stanzas fromthe Grand Chartreuse" about being "between twoworlds.'' The "trip" of the Death Trip sequence is atrip from one culture to another; it is a bridgeat thesame time that it is a processbetween one timeperiod in history and another. 3

In the pre-war novels, Hinojosa creates a dynamic,vital community without providing vivid physicaldescriptions of either characters or setting. It is asthough Hinojosa introduced a cast of a thousand"extras" in the early works, only to see the starsemerge in the later ones. The atmosphere of theearly works is at once comic and tragic, ironic andingenuous. Hinojosa has commented on his use ofhumor and irony, saying that for a variety ofpersonal reasons, "humor creeps into my writingonce in a while, because it was the use of irony, asmany of us know, that allowed the Borderer tosurvive and maintain a certain measure of dignity"("Sense of Place" 24). Hinojosa fails to mention inthat essay that a tragic irony may also be found inhis work as he creates a multilayered atmosphere

which shifts rapidly from irony to humor to pathosto tragedy.

Though Hinojosa tries to sustain this atmospherethroughout the novels of the Klail City Death TripSeries, some of the later works lack the vitality of

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The Valley, Generaciones, and Klail City. Onereason is that the irony turns almost entirely topedestrian earnestness, particularly in Partners andBecky. Rosaura Sánchez has explained thedifference between the early works and some ofthe later ones as a result of what she sees as a"politicizing" trend in the progress of the sequence.She says the first two books (The Valley andGeneraciones y Semblanzas), deal only with"heterogeneity in the community," while the others"explore the social and class contradictions in theValley" (76). The odd man out here is ClarosVarones de Belken. Though written fairly early inthe sequencethe fourth book, after Estampas,Generaciones y Semblanzas, and Generaciones,Notas y Brechasit deals with both the earlycommunity (though much of the material isrepeated from the earlier works), and it shows Jehúand Rafe after their time in Korea and while theyare students together at the University of Texas. Soit shows both the old coherence and the increasingfragmentation of tradition in a single novel.

Despite what a number of Chicano critics say, noneof these works shows Hinojosa becoming more

political as he continues the sequence. In fact, hehas argued consistently in speeches, interviews,and essays that he does not intend to take apolitical stance. He emphasizes that "didacticism,totalitarian themes, boxed-in theses, and setpropositions are intolerable

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and inexcusable for the serious writer of fiction andnonfiction, or of criticism for that matter" (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 53). What happens in the laterworks seems less a political conversion (in thesense of a new concern for the fact ofdiscrimination) than it does a simple recognition ofchange. The move toward assimilation prevents anexclusive concern with the old community. AndHinojosa clearly sees that the passage oftimehistoryis precipitating that move towardassimilation.

I do not mean to suggest that Hinojosa is unawareof discrimination and the often untenable positionof the Mexican American, because in spite of hisfocus on a coherent community in the pre-warnovels Hinojosa does write about outsidediscrimination in these early works, such as hisdescription of the death of Ambrosia Mora, a WorldWar II veteran shot in the back by an Anglopoliceman who goes unpunished. Hinojosa knowsthat racism is a historical fact, and he does notshrink from showing it. But his novels also showthat in the post-World War II era the mejicanocommunity feels empowered and so cannot

continue to respond to racism (as well as manyother issues) in the old ways.

Nevertheless, the overall tone of the first novels,even when they deal with racism and other sorts ofhuman misery, is often one of nostalgic innocence,combined with a true zest for life in all itsmanifesta-

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tions. For example, in The Valley, the briefmonologues of Tere and Roque Malacara, Jehú'sparents, are characterized by a depth of emotionthat would not be found in a work characterizedonly by irony and humor. The voice of Tere is atonce tragic and ingenuous when she says, "Now, ifI were educated I'd be able to say this much better,wouldn't I? Finer, maybe, but the trouble is, I'm justplain tired" (13). Yet the voice is also ironic andhumorous as she comments on the perils ofworking as a housekeeper: "I mean, there's theMister and the Mister's son, and (I know what I'mtalking about) it's best to keep an eye on the Mrs.herself, you bet" (13). The pathos in her voice asshe comments on her physical condition is only fullyrevealed in the succeeding monologue of herhusband: "Tere's my wife, and I know she's tired.S'got every right to be so. We only have the boynow; Tere and I have seen to the burial of myfather-in-law and our three girls" (14).

In another telling example of Hinojosa's ability toblend humor, pathos, irony, and the frankness of a"folk" culture, Jehú and other family membersrespond to the death of his father, Roque, which

occurs two years after the death of Tere Malacara.Jehú is nine years old when Roque dies, but tellsthe story as an adult. The voice in "Lying to withSails Set," and "About Those Relatives of Mine" hassomething of the precocious and knowing yetparadoxically innocent

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child about it, even though it is "twenty-five yearsand two wars later" when Jehú speaks of theseevents (15). Ostensibly, the voice of Jehú in Ritesand Witnesses is chronologically the same voiceheard in The Valley, even though the tone in TheValley is much less sophisticated and urbane thanthe one in Rites and Witnesses.

In The Valley, Jehú remembers that his father diedone day, "just like that" (15) as he was telling Jehúa joke. This ironic juxtaposition of the joke and thedeath is typical Hinojosa, but as Jehú recounts theday, he does not seem to see the irony; instead, herather naively goes on to say that the day hisfather died was the day that "a knockabout carnytroupe" (15) arrived in his hometown ofRelampago, an important fact since Jehú ends upleaving town with the troupe. Yet Jehú's apparentinnocence of the black humor attending thecircumstance of his father's death is also typicalHinojosa. Bruce-Novoa calls this characteristic ofHinojosa's fiction "a persistent and welcomeunderstatement" (50), and here as elsewhere ithelps to sustain an emotionally rich atmospherethat is never marred by sentimentality or excess of

any kind.

Another example of Hinojosa's ability to avoidsentimentality when evoking the past is found inscenes of Aunt Chedes's "trances" in The Valley. Atthe end of the chapter "Lying to with Sails Set,"Aunt

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Chedes interrupts her ironing to perform a ritual forthe orphaned Jehú. She places her middle finger"allof it, to the hilt"in her mouth, then in a glass of coldwater, after which she makes the sign of the crossin the air and on Jehú's forehead. She tells him todrink the water without stopping as she says an"Our Father" backwards, since "today's the dayyou're to meet your new Pa" (16). Jehú's skepticalresponse is an early clue to his adult personality,though his comment is rather tongue-in-cheek:

I looked at her, but she wouldn't start until I started to drink.Standing there, mouth agape, I didn't know what to do, butjustin case'cause you never can tell, I took the glass and began todrink as she half-hummed, half-sung out: Amen, evil from usdeliver and . . . . (17)

Aunt Chedes's earnestness and Jehú's skepticismcreate the humor in the situation arising from thedeath of Jehú's father, which makes Jehú an orphanand is no laughing matter. Yet Hinojosa managesto make us smile at Jehú's circumstances. Jehú hashad the world open up before him, paradoxicallythrough the death of his father. Like Huck, he isnow a pilgrim, and he takes to the road with acarny troupe. Jehú is now living in a world ofpossibility, with the romance

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of the open road awaiting him. It is interesting tonote when considering the Janus-face of Hinojosa'smain characters that Rafe Buenrostro is alsoorphaned at an early age.

Maintaining a sense of a coherent community is nota problem for Hinojosa in The Valley or Klail City.Despite his fragmented style, there seems to be aclear ethos among the members of the community.One of Hinojosa's techniques for revealing thisspirit of community is to borrow from the folkculture a form called the corrido, a type of balladabout the struggle against oppression which LuisLeal describes as "a typical poetic form of theMexican populace." Leal says that this literary formcan be traced to what he terms the "HispanicPeriod," which lasted from colonization to 1821,and that it has served as a "primary vehicle towardself-understanding and self-definition" (23).Hinojosa has used the corrido within the largerframework of his novels as a vehicle for definingthe Mexican-American community, as well as fordocumenting social protest. By using andmanipulating his version of the corrido, Hinojosa isable to present some of the bleaker aspects of life,

such as the hardships of farm workers, and simplyman's inhumanity to man. He also uses a variationon the corrido form to reveal the significance of thesurrogate author P. Galindo to the development ofthe series. The corrido as it appears in Hinojosa'swork is not an exclusive and docu-

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mentary internal device used solely for the self-edification of the Mexican-American community, butis transformed instead into an artistic device tofurther the aims of his sequence novel.

Hinojosa uses variations of two typical subjects ofthe corrido in The Valley and Klail City. According toAmérico Paredes, the corrido, whatever its origin, isoften concerned with "a Mexican whose rights orself-respect are trampled upon by North Americanauthority" or "a group of Mexicans whose workforces them to travel deep into the United States"("The Folk Base" 13). In the first instance, revengeis a traditional motif: the hero is usually avengingthe "cruel and unjust" death of his brother "at thehands of Anglo-Americans.'' Outnumbered by TexasRangers or "rinches," the hero is viciously set upon("The Folk Base" 13). Hinojosa uses a variant ofthis motif in the account of Ambrosio Mora's death.First told in Generaciones, and also appearing inKlail City in the section entitled, "The OlderGeneration II," the story of how Mora is "shot downby Van Meers in front of the J.C. Penney indowntown Flora on a Palm Sunday afternoon" isclearly in the tradition of the corrido, yet it also

borrows from the modernist idea of the impotenthero. The narrator's account is more thanreportorial. Van Meers is acquitted, after a three-year delay of the trial, and though "there was a lotof noise and commotion" from the Mexican-American commu-

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nity, "nothing came of it" (Generaciones 148). YetAmbrosio's death is avenged, not by a brother, butby his father, who had lost yet another son in thewar:

Don Aureliano himself went out to the bandstand in the KlailCity park with a crowbar in hand. He smashed the metal plaquethat bore the names of all the Klail men who had served duringthe war, among them Ambrosio and the other son, Amador,who died in Okinawa. Don Aureliano completely demolished theplaque donated by the Ladies Auxiliary of the American Legion.The whole thing was reduced to a pile of rubbish.(Generaciones 148)

Don Aureliano's revenge is little more thansymbolic, but it does conform to the conventions ofthe corrido in that the unjust death is in one way oranother avenged, and as a sort of echo of thiscorrido, the community creates a ballad about thedeath of Ambrosio Mora. But both this symbolicrevenge and the personal revenge that donAureliano intends to have by outliving Van Meersreveal Hinojosa's modernist orientation, theattitude that the hero suffers an inability to altercircumstances or act effectively. Don Aureliano is asad and angry old man, not the young, strong heroof the traditional corrido. Unable to

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change things, he can only vent his emotions bydestroying a plaque. When he says the mejicanosare "Greeks in the land of the Romans," donAureliano recognizes that he is living in a worldwhere he has little power, and that even an act ofheroism is necessarily diminished by the absurdityof the "codes," written or unwritten, of that world(Generaciones 148). He says the Romans have tobe educated, but assumes that it cannot happen.He laments the mejicanos' loss of control over theirown lives, saying, "the day will come when la razawill live in Belken County like it did before thesebastards came here" (Generaciones 150). Ofcourse, in that earlier time, it was not called''Belken County," and, sadly, historical change isdocumented and in a sense validated by hisarticulation of those two words alone.

Still, don Aureliano is, for the narrator, a hero,suggesting a type of heroism that consists primarilyof endurance: "The sign incident happened overtwenty years ago and if la raza didn't end upeducating the Romans like the Greeks did, at leastwe thrived like grapes: in bunches." Furthermore,don Aureliano has perseverance: "He's a quarter-of-

a-century older than Van Meers, but he has all thepatience in the world and plans to attend thefuneral of his son's killer in person. . . . donAureliano will not be sent tumbling down by anybreeze nor by the years

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until he attends Van Meers' funeral. I swear to God"(Generaciones 148, 150). This modernistperception of heroism as persistence andendurance is also found in the opening sections ofKlail City, when the narrator offers a "caveat" onheroes:

One shouldn't expect to find legendary heroes here . . . thereader who looks for a hero . . . will be given short shrift. . . .No heroes, then, although the reader knows, senses, suspectsthat there are certain and definite ways of being heroic.Showing up for work (and doing it) and then putting up withwhatever fool comes bobbing along is no laughing matter. (9)

With the exception of some figures from thepastdon Julian Buenrostro, and perhaps the youngsoldier RafeHinojosa maintains this stance on thehero until Partners in Crime, in which we can takeP. Galindo's voice as the writer's own. 4 Hinojosa'sliterary stance is modernist, but in these earlyworks, he also relies on older ethnic forms andsubject matter, while throughout the series he isinfluenced by the orality of both modernist writerssuch as Joyce and of traditional Mexican-Americanstories, a fact which reveals the duality of his visionas an artist. In addi-

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tion, as Mark Busby has noted, Hinojosa andFaulkner use similar stylistic devices and relyheavily on "folklore and folk tales" ("Faulknerian"107).

In other variations on the corrido, Hinojosa furtherreveals his dualism. The death of Rafe Buenrostro'sfather, Jesés, borrows from the corrido in that it isJesés's brother Julián who avenges his death,which, like the death of the victim in the traditionalcorrido, is "cruel and unjust" (Paredes, "The FolkBase" 13). In Generaciones, we find that "Onenight, in April, when the orange trees were ready toblossom . . . someone came and killed don Jesúswhile he slept'' (22). The sound of don Julián'sapproaching horse scared the murderer away. Twomonths later, Julián discovers the names of theguilty, and then goes "into the woods on horsebackand across the Río Grande in search of his brother'skillers" (22, 24). The murder turns out to have beenthe result of a land dispute with the Leguizamónfamily:

Alejandro Leguizamón had paid two Mexican nationals to kill donJesús. They probably never had time to enjoy the moneybecause don Julián dispatched them swiftly while his horse wasstill dripping water from the Río Bravo . . . Alejandro

Leguizamón was found in the courtyard of the Sacred HeartChurch with his head bashed in. (24)

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In this variation, it would seem that Hinojosa hasforfeited his typical stance: that endurance notaction is the mark of the hero. Or perhaps he seesboth as ways of surviving, of being heroic. DonJulián certainly qualifies as a traditional hero. Inany case, Hinojosa has not abandoned his dualvision, for here we see the Mexican American to bejust as capable of evil deeds as the Anglo. It isperhaps fictional incidents such as this one thathave led Hinojosa to note that "some say [mywork] isn't politicalmaybe they mean not politicalenough. . . . Some well-meaning people fret thatAnglos may not receive a good impression of us"(Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 56, 61). As Hinojosa says,some Chicano writers won't or can't "present theverities" of Chicano life, "rural, urban, young, old,good, bad, sick, well, at home, at work, in love . . ."(Bruce-Novoa, ''Rolando" 61). Hinojosa presentsthe "verities" of life in the mejicano community ashe shows the sharp practices and murders that takeplace among Mexican Americans. In addition toHinojosa's picture of the coyotes, those Chicanoswho prey upon their own people, he depicts darkerconflicts within the Mexican-American community.One example is the murder of Ernesto Tamez, who

torments and is then killed by Baldemar Cordero atthe Aquí mi quedo cantina. "The Tamezes are apeculiar bunch of people . . . they were forever intosomething with someone, the neighbors, anybody"(The Valley

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64). That Ernesto Tamez is Mexican American, likethe scheming Lequizamóns, does not destroy forHinojosa the integrity of the Mexican-Americancommunity. Just as the same things happen todifferent people at different times in history("Sense of Place" 24), for Hinojosa the same typesof people appear within all racial groups.

Interestingly, the Tamez-Cordero incident can beseen as another variation on the corrido. Luis Lealhas written of a particular corrido as beingsignificant because it "introduces the theme ofsocial protest" (26). Though Leal writes of aparticular ballad that deals specifically with Anglo-Mexican conflict, clear parallels exist between itand the situation of Baldemar Cordero, and like thecorrido Leal speaks of, the Cordero incident canultimately be seen as a form of social protest. Thecorridista Leal mentions complains that justice hasnot been served:

Thirty-three days in jailunjustly I have sufferedbecause of a false witnessof a crime I did not commitWhen the judge handed down his sentenceit almost made me laughthe guilty one would go free

while the innocent was left to suffer. (26)

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The main point of these lines is that someone isbeing punished for a crime he did not commit. Inthe case of Baldemar Cordero, it is clear that hehas not, from the narrator's point of view,committed a "crime" in the usual sense. He hasbeen goaded into spontaneous action by therepeated taunts and tricks of Ernesto Tamez.Cordero acts without thought, without a moment'spremeditation, and with just provocation. Yet thereare witnesses to the scene; it cannot be deniedthat Cordero stabbed Tamezeven Cordero does notdeny it. But the eyewitness accounts of the incidentcannot adequately explain what happened, at leastnot sufficiently to keep Cordero from being foundguilty. (This incident is a kind of metaphor for theentire seriesevents, history, life itself cannot beadequately explained, no matter how manyversions are presented.)

An excerpt from The Klail City Enterprise-Newsreveals that Cordero was sent to Huntsville forfifteen years. The narrator clearly finds Cordero'ssentencing an absurd miscarriage of "justice" (TheValley 70). In the newspaper account of thesentencing, the syntax is garbled, the murder

victim's name is misspelled, and, most important,the reasons for the murder are neatly andincorrectly summed up in a single statement:

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Klail City. (Special). Baldemar Cordero, 30, of 169 South HidalgoStreet, drew a 15 year sentence Harrison Pehelp's 139thDistrict Court, for the to the Huntsville Judge in State Prisonmurder of Ernesto Tamez, also 30, over the affections of oneof the "hostesses" who works there. ETAOIN SHRUDLU PICKUP No appeal had been made at press time. (70)

Since this incident involves only MexicanAmericans, including Cordero's lawyer, RomeoHinojosa, the mangling of the news story can beseen as commentary on the Anglo establishment'slack of interest in the "doings" of the Mexican-American community. This fact is mentioned byRafe in The Valley:

The bald truth is that our fellow Texans across the tracks couldhardly care about what we think, say, or do. . . . Here'ssomething of what the A.T.s usually say: "Oh, it's nothing,really; just one of your usual Mexican cantina fan-dan-goes'sall. They drink a little beer, they play them rancheras on thejuke box, don't you know; and then one o' them lets out a bigsqueal, and the first thing you know, why, they's havingtheirselves a fight." (51)

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The Baldero Cordero incident, like the corrido Lealmentions, is clearly social protest. It may be thatthe trial adhered to all the technical legalities, butit is also evident that the truth has been subvertedand that justice has not been served in the case ofBaldero Cordero or the community in general.

Since the corrido lends itself particularly to socialprotest, Hinojosa uses the form a number of timesin the series, especially when depicting the plight ofthe migrant workers. Paredes describes the migrantcorrido as being about

a group of Mexicans whose work forces them to travel deepinto the United States. Always narrated in the first personplural, these corridos recount the perils of the trip, the foreigncities, and the strange things seen by the adventurers. ("TheFolk Base" 13)

In The Valley and Klail City we see variations onthis form of the corrido in a number of places(although never told in the first person plural), butmost particularly in the sections of Klail Cityentitled, "The Searchers." P. Galindo, the narrator,recounts trips with Leocadio Gavira, the owner ofthe truck named Oklahoma Fireball Express thatcarries the migrant workers north. On the first day,the truck stops in

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Rosenberg, Texas, and P. Galindo ponders thepeople and the trip they are making:

The Okla. Fireball was halfway to Texarkana that first day; thepeople, la gente, were all from Belken CountyKlail City, Bascom,Flora, and Edgertonand on their way to Benton Harbor and St.Joseph to work the Welch grape vineyards near Lake Michigan.(Klail City 62)

In the five sections that make up "The Searchers"in Klail City, P. Galindo recounts the situation of thepeople who decide to make the trip and presentstheir preparations for the trip as an integral part ofthe journey itself. He also includes conversationsthat take place between himself and Gavira. One ofthe most poignant "adventures" depicts the deathof Señor and Señora Esteban in an auto accidentand the efforts of their daughter and son-in-law toget their bodies back to Texas. When her parentsare killed en route to northern Colorado, ClaudiaRivas and her husband, Teodoro, are "on themigrant trail to Mankato, Minnesota" (Klail City 67).Once the bodies are identified, the "townpharmacist-coronerundertaker notifies the Texasdependents by phone; they then call the migrantlabor camp in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Rivascouple has stopped for the

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night" (Klail City 67). The younger coupleencounters both greedy and helpful Anglos. TheJustice of the Peace, "Old Man Fikes," takes themfor twenty dollars for the death certificates, but thepharmacist who receives the bodies is kind to theyoung people and readily agrees to let them sendhim payment later. The Rivases then set out forSedalia, Missouri, to meet up with some otherTexans, who are looking after their children. Theirlife on the road and their life in the Valley areinseparable.

Although Hinojosa's focus in the Death Tripsequence cannot be called agricultural, and he hassaid that it is naive and provincial to say thatChicano literature is inherently agricultural (Bruce-Novoa, "Rolando" 58), these sections of Klail Citydeal directly with the fact of migrant labor in theMexican-American community. And even thoughRosaura Sánchez has argued that Hinojosa rarelypresents his characters at work, but instead focuseson their personal lives, in these sections of KlailCity the characters' personal lives are shown tohinge directly on the fact of their particular type ofemployment (79). Hinojosa also shows the

immediate conditions that force some of thesefamilies into the migrant labor force:

It's August in Belken County, and the cotton pickings are slimsince the third pick's been done with. The citrus crop . . . is stillsome

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four months away; December the earliest. . . . So there'snothing to do but go Up North. Take one's chances on theroad up and back, 1500 mi., each way. A bitch. (Klail City 50)

The speaker then offers the opinion that the peoplehave no choice: "We can stay here and eat shit tillDecember" (50). The hasty preparations for the tripare recounted as voices call to one another: "Whoyou leaving your house keys with?" and "Whatabout the kids' schooling?" These questions mustbe settled, along with the problem of finding driversand fixing contracts. The workers fear that if thecontracts are not completed before they leave theywill be forced to stay up north until January andFebruary, after the orange harvest in the Valley hasalready begun (Klail City 5053).

Hinojosa freely manipulates the corrido themewhen P. Galindo identifies himself as "the writer"(Klail City 55). He says his trips with LeocadioGavira were "made in good faith" and that he"managed to pull his load" by driving, changingtires, and staying out of people's way. Theidentification of P. Galindo as "the writer," andhence with Hinojosa, provides a significantvariation on the form of the corrido. The subjectmatter is essentially in line with Paredes's

description, but the inclusion of P. Galindo'scommen-

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tary and perspective makes this story of migrantworkers more than a simple oral retelling of eventsmeant to bond members of a community together.Much of what he says is strikingly similar tostatements that Hinojosa has made elsewhere,about both himself and life in general.

Before he begins recounting the trip, Galindoexplains his reasons for going along:

The writer wanted to remember certain people and make surethat these people were remembered in writing. The writer isconvinced that he did well not to have written about the tripson the spot; he believes in Time, that leveler he spoke of. (55)

In an essay called "A Voice of One's Own," Hinojosasays of his qualifications as a writer and critic that"time will take care of that piece of business. Timeis the ultimate judge. . . . Time is also the greatleveler" ("Sense of Place" 15). Hinojosa's owncomments about why he decided to write about theValley echo these statements of P. Galindo's,particularly his statement that he wished always topresent his parents faithfully and not to write about"their mutual cultures as if they were pieces ofsome half-baked mosaic" (''Sense of Place" 14).The body of work itself suggests that he

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wants to "make sure that these people wereremembered in writing" (Klail City 55).

Even more convincing evidence that P. Galindo is"perhaps an alter ego of Hinojosa himself" (JoséDavid Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America 75),are several confessional statements made byHinojosa in various places, especially when theyare considered in the light of P. Galindo's commentsin Klail City on the sort of life he has led:

The writer worked in some very odd jobs and for some veryodd people for the first thirty years of his life. . . . In thecourse of that time, schooling of all forms and shapesinterfered as well, as did some personal events. . . . Thoseodd jobs and odder people referred to earlier caused the writerto change his style of life for a while, but this proved to betemporary. But, it was also beneficial: the writer needed thatexperience too . . . [he] now feels he's back on track, havingrecovered, ransomed perhaps, the knowledge of who he wasand where he came from. . . . the writerif he is nothingelsethinks himself quite lucky and fortunate, too, to haverecovered a part of his life that he'd almost forgotten, that hehad, insensibly, unthinkingly, turned his back on. (Klail City 57)

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In this long passage, P. Galindo reveals a greatdeal about Rolando Hinojosa. Hinojosa has said, "Itis the time of my childhood and young manhoodthat have served me well in my writing; that, and asomewhat sketchy education, [and] an interestinglyremarkable homelife" ("Sense of Place" 17). He hasalso noted that he was able to write in partbecause of luckbecause of who he is and where hecomes from, coupled with "the proper historicalmoment." The moment, he says,

came along and I took what had been there for some time,but which I had not been able to see, since I had not fullydeveloped a sense of place; I had left the Valley for theservice, for formal university training, and for a series of veryodd jobs, only to return to it in my writing. ("Sense of Place"2324)

Hinojosa further clarifies that he and P. Galindo"come from the same place" by saying that "valuesand decisions" are "inculcated by one's elders first,by one's acquaintances later on . . . [and] one'splace of origin" ("Sense of Place" 24). He speaks ofthe decision to write and then trying to decide whatto write about. What may be most important to thewriter is a kind of ''preparatory stage," experiencethat helps one write about something "when time

presents itself" ("Sense of Place" 24).

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Without straining too much, it is easy to see that P.Galindo's confession, or perhaps more properly, hismanifesto, tells the story of Hinojosa's evolution asa writer, as revealed by his comment that "What Iworked on, as far as my life was concerned, wastoward a personal voice which was to become mypublic voice" ("A Voice of One's Own" 13). Thesepersonal and public voices speak in harmonyparticularly in The Valley, Klail City, and in parts ofother novels containing reminiscences of thisperiod. Hinojosa is describing a world literallyaworld he knew intimately and of which he was anundisputed member. His persona is coherent. Heknows who he is and where he fits in, even if thespecter of racial inequality lurks just outside theperimeters of his world. This is the situation of thewell-adjusted child, and as it was with JehúMalacara and Rafe Buenrostro, so it was withRolando Hinojosa.

In spite of the racial tension which is accelerated asthe young boys move into the Anglo worldat firstinto the Anglo schoolsthey know who they are. Asthey notice the differences between the North Wardmejicanos and the South Ward mejicanos, they

reveal how they see themselves. The South Wardmejicanos, called "the dispossessed" by Jehú,"were one hell of a lot more fluent in English thanwe were" (Klail City 70), but they appear to havebeen put in

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their place and to be willing to go along with it. Asfor Rafe and the other South Ward mejicanos, they"demanded" their share. They insisted on beingtreated as equal because it was "the Americanway" (Klail City 70). They knew they were equaland demanded that others recognize it. This basicfact of their character gives them an edge in thecompetitive games that they later must play. Asthey grow older, achieving equality becomes bothmore complex and more important, because thequestion is no longer who gets good gymequipment, but who gets a "good" life. Even thedefinition of the good life become harder to pindown. As time, ''that great leveler," passes, theirworld expands, and, finally, collapses. What waswhole becomes fragmented. 5 Hinojosa's charactersface the tortuous task of trying to piece together anew world for themselves.

Hinojosa successfully treats highly political subjectsin a creative wayas an artist rather than as apropagandist. He shows the Mexican American in avariety of manifestations, mostly sympathetic, butwith an honesty and candor that often surprises. Inshort, the early novels demonstrate his integrity as

an artist and his grasp of a number of literary andfolk techniques as he depicts a coherentcommunity.6

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<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez has dealt with theshortcomings of the Mexican-American community(as in the case of Ambrosio Mora's murder, theLeguizamóns' double-dealings, Ira Escobar'swillingness to be an Anglo pawn, and themejicanos' willingness to believe the worst of Jehúwhen he leaves the bank) in "El Tema Ya Culpa EnCuatro Novelistas Chicanos."

2 Serge Ricard argues that a sense of ethnicidentity and religion help the Mexican American tosurvive and points out that Rafe and Jehú'sexperience in the American school "cruelly" pointsout the way in which they differ from the Anglos.Yet he goes on to say that the Anglo is a victim aswella victim of Hinojosa and his characters' humorand irony. Ricard also argues that Hinojosaachieves an "authentic" re-creation of the life of thepeople in "Un Art de la Survie: Chicanismo etReligion Dans L'oeuvre De Rolando Hinojosa.''

3 See Luis Leal, "History and Memory in Estampasdel Valle."

4 Hinojosa's first stories were published under thepseudonym "P. Galindo."

5 László Scholz argues that both the style of KlailCity and the community are fragmented. He saysHinojosa's style is like that of Marqúez, Borges, andothers who rebel against the "traditional, roundedforms" of the novel, and also that althoughHinojosa presents elements that have the potentialto create a unified "system" they do not do so inKlail City. He says that Klail City is neither a fullnegation nor confirmation of the life of the people."Fragmentarismo en Klail City y sus aldredores deRolando Hinojosa."

6 See Heiner Bus's "The Establishment ofCommunity in Zora Neale Hurston's The EatonvilleAnthology (1926) and Rolando Hinojosa's Estampasdel valle (1973)."

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5A Change in Direction

Between Estampas del Valle and Becky and HerFriends, the Klail City Death Trip Series moves fromlife lived in the "old" Valley to life in the "new"Valley. The tone of the novels becomes less"frenetic,'' (Randolph, "Death's" 40), and theauthor/narrator becomes more self-aware than hewas in the novels of the first period. The pre-warnovels depicted a time of stasis in the Mexicanocommunity, but the later novels show a time ofdynamic growth and change. The works of thesequence's middle period (Klail City, Korean LoveSongs, parts of Claros Varones de Belken, Rites andWitnesses, Dear Rafe, and The Useless Servants)depict alteration and upheaval in the changingworld of the early post-

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World War II period, the Korean War, and the post-Korean War period. (Later, as I argue in ChapterSix, by the time of Becky and Her Friends andPartners in Crime the world of the Valley isessentially static again.) In other words, the novelsfollow the classical pattern of movement from orderto chaos and back to order.

Despite the changes depicted during the chaoticmiddle period the tone of the series loses some ofits vitality as Hinojosa's characters move forward intime. Though still compelling, the Klail City DeathTrip Series becomes a less dynamic but morepsychological exploration as it moves from thethirties to the fifties and sixties. Korean Love Songsand The Useless Servants denote a turning point asRafe Buenrostro, stripped of all innocence andillusion, contemplates life in the Valley and thespectacle of war. Similarly Jehú Malacara isinitiated into the brutality of small-town politics andbusiness. Rites and Witnesses alternates betweenRafe in Korea and the Anglos who desire to controlJehú as they control Belken County. Dear Rafeenlarges the picture of small-town corruption, andClaros Varones de Belken fills in some gaps about

Rafe's and Jehú's lives as young men, the death ofthe "storyteller" and "wise man" EstabanEcheverría, and the fragmentation of the Mexican-American community.

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José David Saldívar's observation that "Klail Cityprojects a world of tragic realism in which theultimate entanglements of alienation and desireare so anguished as to appear almost beyondsalvation" (Dialectics 73) is an apt description ofthis entire "transitional period" in the lives ofHinojosa's major characters. Because this dilemmais also Hinojosa's dilemma, both as a privateperson and as a public figure, a writer, theautobiographical nature of the Death Trip becomesapparent. Both Jehú and Rafe go to college, servein the armed forces in Korea, and return to college.Rafe, like Hinojosa, majors in Spanish, and Jehúmajors in English. They both go beyond thebachelor's degree, though whether Jehú gets agraduate degree is never revealed. Somewherealong the way, Rafe gets a law degree. Jehú's workin the Klail City Bank reflects not only the Valley'sparochial economic and social system in thosedays, but also mirrors Hinojosa's own experiencewith the bureaucracy as an employee of the CivilService Commission. Both Rafe and Jehú teach fora time in the local high school, as Hinojosa did inBrownsville. Héctor Torres thinks it is Jehú's "fateto be an alter ego of the one presenting this

discourse on the Valley, Hinojosa himself" (88).Donald A. Randolph, in tracing the connectionbetween the character of P. Galindo and Hinojosa,asserts that ''there is a great

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deal of covert, overt or even semi-concealedautobiography in Hinojosa's works." He argues that"autobiography, both fictional and authentic, haslong persisted as a principal constituent of the mainbody of Chicano letters" and goes on to point outthe multiple similarities between don ManuelGuzman in the Death Trip Series and don Manuel G.Hinojosa, Rolando Hinojosa's father ("Death's" 39).Similarly, José David Saldívar says, ''RolandoHinojosa's reconstructed life can serve as a paralleltext of the evolution of his literary project"("Rolando" 44). And Ed García observes in a 1982review of Rites and Witnesses:

So far Hinojosa has taken his saga up through around 1960,which is about the time he finally left the Valley for graduateschool. . . . [H]is central theme is the changing Valley andessentially the Anglicization of the Mexicans. (2627)

The artistic danger that lurks just beyond theparameters of such a "fictionalized life" has beenaptly expressed by Leslie Fiedler as he commentson a tendency of the American novelist in generalto focus on "a limited world of experience, usuallyassociated with his childhood, writing the samebook over and over again until he lapses intosilence or self-parody" ("The

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Novel" 132). Nevertheless, this autobiographicalBildungsroman element is interesting in itself, for itcan give fiction a meaning and a depth it wouldotherwise lack. The idea of the Bildungsroman isendlessly fascinating because of the "fifthdimension" that it adds to a work of fiction. As M.M. Bakhtin has noted of any author's position inrelation to the work he creates, "he does hisobserving from his own unresolved and stillevolving contemporaneity" (255). Bakhtin'stheoretical stance, however, would deny anyfactual relationship (chronological or spatial)between the author and the created text:

Even had he created an autobiography or a confession of themost astonishing truthfulness, all the same he, as its creator,remains outside the world he has represented in his work. If Irelate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me,then I as the teller (or writer) of this event am already outsidethe time and space in which the event occurred. It is just asimpossible to forge an identity between myself, my own "I,"and that "I" that is the subject of my stories as it is to liftmyself up by my own hair. (256)

Bakhtin says that to "confuse the author-creator ofa work with the author as a human being" is amajor

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failing of criticism of the novel, a methodologicalweakness he calls "naive biographism" (253). Hegoes on to argue that "everything becomes animage in the literary work" and thus "is a createdthing" (256). He says that a reader usually "createsan image" of the author, but of course it must beacknowledged that the author may just as well''create an image" of himself within a fiction. This isexactly what Hinojosa is doing in the Klail CityDeath Trip Series: creating an image of himselfthrough several surrogate authors.

Though Bakhtin is correct that the "image" of the"I" (whatever person it takes) is not the author andperhaps can have no verifiable or documentablerelation to him, the created "I" can be a version ofthe author trying to move toward a personal orartistic resolution. Bakhtin notes the author'sperpetually unfinished state, and interestingly,Hinojosa says that in spite of his rich backgroundand career, he is an unfinished product ("A Voice ofOne's Own" 14). An author's use of autobiography,even altered or embellished autobiography,enables him to produce, not himself, but an imageof himself, which he may perceive to be valid and

integrated with his non-created self, that is, withthe self that exists in real time and space. Bakhtinargues that the reader's created image of theauthor may be "deep and truthful," in which case "itcan help the reader more correctly and pro-

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foundly to understand the work of the given author"(257). Similarly, the author's created image ofhimself may help him "more correctly andprofoundly" to understand himself. Hinojosa saysthat although the "original facts of one's formation"cannot be altered, "one may mythicize, adopt apersona, become an actor, restructure familyhistory" (''Sense of Place" 22). The quest for self-knowledge is a component of what Bakhtin calls"an enduring chronotope of the novel," or "themetaphor of the road, life's course" (244). And thisquest can involve the author as well as the reader.Obviously the title the Klail City Death Trip Seriesreveals his awareness of this motif in his own work.

Bakhtin's arguments are significant because theyraise the familiar yet difficult questions about lifeand art, questions about which it is easy to bedogmatic in theory, but which become hard toresolve when one is faced with something likeHinojosa's Death Trip, where the lines between factand imagination, history and fiction, reality andindividual perception are undeniably vague. JillJohnston has argued that "the quest for a story is aquest for a life," that "writing and self-creation are

synonymous" (29). What Robert Morris says ofAnthony Powell's sequence novel, A Dance to theMusic of Time, applies as well to Hinojosa's DeathTrip: "In a work that sets out to be both life andfiction, history and myth, Powell strikes a balancebetween what has really happened in the

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last fifty years and how the novelist might view itshappening" (125).

Hinojosa's Death Trip, a sequence novel, alsoexhibits characteristic features of "the reflexivenovel." In his book The Reflexive Novel, 1 MichaelBoyd says that the writer of such a fiction sees"that the relationship between reality and itsrepresentation in fictional discourse isproblematical," and in response may write a novelthat "seeks to examine the act of writing itself" (7),which is something that P. Galindo in particularseems to be engaged in. Hinojosa, in a similar vein,says of the act of writing, ''sometimes it is . . .easier than examining one's conscience" (ClarosVarones 12). Though Hinojosa is not self-consciously producing reflexive works of the sortanalyzed by Boyd, much of what Boyd says aboutJames Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkneris helpful in understanding Hinojosa's aims andmethods. His use of autobiography mirrors Joyce's.His erratic shifts in point of view can be understoodin light of Boyd's argument about Woolf's use of thesoliloquy in The Waves. And Boyd's analysis of howFaulkner actually makes use of history in Absalom,

Absalom! (though John Dos Passos's USA is just aslikely an influence) explains in part Hinojosa'sheavy reliance on "documents" such as letters,diaries, depositions, and newspaper reports inrecounting events. The similarities betweenHinojosa and these other modernists help

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not only to clarify his fiction, but also to clarify hisphilosophical and categorical "place" as aproponent of literary modernism.

Ever since Joyce and Woolf began experimentingwith the form of the novel, lesser novelists haveborrowed their techniques, sometimes becausethey lacked the technical skills to produce a"traditional" novel. The results, of course, were likethe nonrepresentational painting produced by anamateur with no knowledge of perspectivea fardifferent thing from, say, a work by Jackson Pollockor Helen Frankenthaler. One might accuse Hinojosaof the amateur painter's fault, for he does havetrouble sustaining a traditional plot, as the novelPartners in Crime shows. Louis Dubose, in a reviewof Dear Rafe, asks:

Are we being strung along for yet another novel of nouvellelength and novel, that is, innovative, narrative style? Or is itthat these narrative devices, fragments, personal letters,interviews, depositions, and sketches cannot be sustained longenough to complete one fat novel on the Valley? (16)

The fact is that Hinojosa does borrow freely fromthe typically disjointed "modernist" form of thenovel, most often quite successfully. But there ismore to

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his form than mere borrowing of modernist fictionaltechniques. The similarities between his method inKorean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, DearRafe, and Claros Varones and the work of Joyceand Woolf go beyond this disjointed form to explainsome of the problems of point of view in the DeathTrip sequence. Hinojosa presents a variety ofpoints of view in his work, ostensibly allowing anynumber of individuals to speak, and yet the "voice"and the "vision" remain consistent. In other words,as Boyd says of Woolf, the writer "fragments theself, by giving it six voices that are different and yetthe same'' (106). Though Hinojosa does notproduce novels that are "reflexive" to the extentthat Boyd says Woolf does, he is in fact doing thesame thing with his own voice, his own self.Hinojosa's own effort to forge for himself abalanced view of the Valley enables him to speaknot only as Rafe, Jehú, and P. Galindo, but alsothrough the voices of such reprobate characters asNoddy Perkins, Polín Tapia, Choche Markham, andothers.

As Boyd says, "the book itself can create acondition in which it is possible for the writer to

appear as someone [he] is not" and can serve as"an instrument for facilitating a 'natural'impersonation" (106). He further argues his pointby saying that the proof that Woolf is in fact "AVoice in Search of Six Speakers" is found "when thewriter compares the language of the

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created self to the 'real' self and finds that theymatch" (106). Hinojosa has said, "what you seehere, this professor, and what ideas I may present,is what you will see in my writings: the voicedoesn't vary" ("A Voice of One's Own" 14). Further,any reader who has heard Hinojosa speak or whohas read any of his comments on his life and workmust make the comparison Boyd speaks of. Andsuch a reader must conclude that this "matching''solves the problem of point of viewit is really aconsistent point of view filtered through the variousvoices of the "characters."

In Seduction and Betrayal, Elizabeth Hardwick saysof The Waves, "the people are not characters," inthe sense of, say, a Jane Austen character, and"there is not plot in usual sense" (136). In Woolf'snovel, as well as in Hinojosa's work, thisphenomenal absence of two of the necessaryingredients of "fiction"plot and characterrequiresthat something take their place to provideconsistency and continuity. That something, inHinojosa's case, is the voice of the author. Boyd'sargument may seem obvious: all writers speakthrough their characters. But there is more going

on here. Boyd claims that "the text of The Waves isnot about the act of self-creation through languagebut rather it is such an act" (107 emphasis inoriginal). This statement is particularly applicableto what Hinojosa is doing in the Death Tripsequence,

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and most obviously in the Korean Love Songs, TheUseless Servants, Rites and Witnesses, Dear Rafe,and much of Claros Varones de Belken.

Hinojosa is making sense of his own past andquantifying his own identity; in fact, he forges hisown identity by "documenting" and ordering hisexperience through his writing. Theautobiographical nature of the Klail City Death TripSeries insists on this interpretation. Hinojosa says,"What I worked on, as far as my life wasconcerned, was toward a personal voice which wasto become my public voice" ("A Voice of One'sOwn" 13). Jill Johnston argues that "when we writethe life, we are making it up," so that "we canendlessly move [the facts] around, make them dothings, act on them, pitch them in differentcontexts'' (29). As there is in The Waves, there is inHinojosa's work an "open acknowledgment of thepresence of a self that is neither wholly fictional norwholly real, but a 'presence,' attempting to catchitself in the act of self-creation" (Boyd 116).Though it belongs more to the early period than tothis transitional period, P. Galindo's manifesto inKlail City is the best example of this presence. In

those sections entitled The Searchers we have towonder whether it is the migrant workers or P.Galindo (and Rolando Hinojosa) who is seekingsomething, attempting to "catch" something.Rolando Hinojosa creates and continually recreateshimself as P. Galindo, Rafe Buenrostro, Jehú

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Malacara, et. al. through the creation of the KlailCity Death Trip Series. P. Galindo all but admitsthis, particularly in his insistence on calling himself"the wri" (el esc in the Spanish version). The voicesof Rafe in Korean Love Songs and The UselessServants, of Jehú in Dear Rafe, and of both inClaros Varones de Belken also reveal Hinojosa'spersonal efforts to come to terms with himself andto express that self.

Hinojosa again reveals the autobiographical natureof his works when he explains in a 1988 interviewwhy he used Spanish and then English in ClarosVarones de Belken: "The generation that I knowvery well, my generation, we were in our twentiesthen, so we still had one leg in the Spanishbackground, and an emerging leg in the Englishbackground" (Dasenbrock 3). Though P. Galindocan first be identified as Hinojosa in Klail City, thispeculiarly autobiographical element of Hinojosa'sfiction is most evident in the middle period, theperiod covering the years when Hinojosa had todecide who he was to be. He reveals hisambivalence when he says

At times, I wonder about those who choose adaptation over

true happiness in a desire to please others; and I wonder, butnot for very long, about those who ignore, and about thosewho choose to deny the existence of at least two cultures andof the complex symbi-

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otic relationship inherent in the various Texas cultures. It mustbe a strange world, this ostrich-like existence and attitude. ("AQVoice of One's Own" 14)

Despite this commentary, he himself has chosen an"adaptation" in that he is neither living the life ofthe characters depicted in the novels, nor living inthe Valley any longer, but he also has to face up tothe "symbiotic relationship" within his worlds, and itis the nature and meaning of this relationship thatshapes the Death Trip. His characters as well mustlearn to adapt as they grapple with the complexityof their world. Hinojosa's ''presence" or "self" is alsofelt in the late works, as Becky Caldwell/Escobar/Malacara is also revealed to be a version ofHinojosa. By the time of Becky, Hinojosa has inessence "finished" Jehú and Rafe, so he salvagesthe not-veryappealing Becky Escobar and turns herinto a female version of Jehú and Rafe. In Beckyand Her Friends, we see a young woman leaving anunsatisfying marriage (a good topical subject), butwe also see a young Mexican American learning tospeak Spanishreclaiming a portion of her heritage,and another reflection of Hinojosa's ambivalenceabout "adaptation."

Hinojosa's comment in The Valley that "what

follows, more likely as not, is a figment ofsomeone's imagination" reveals not so much hisconfidence in

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his creative imagination as his struggle to findorcreate if necessarya self-identity and his doubts (atfirst) about being able to do so. Is he creatinghimself? Are outside forces altering the self he istrying to create?

That Hinojosa is engaged in producing a sequencenovel is not surprising, in light of his interest inhistory (a necessary component of his self-discovery), and also because as Boyd says, it is notpossible to realize or grasp one's "self-creation,"and so, "by its very impossibility," one is driven to a"continuance of the effort" (116). Boyd alsoacknowledges that using autobiographical materialsopens up numerous possibilities:

Joyce's extensive use of autobiographical materials points notso much to a failure of the imagination as to a blurring of theboundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between imaginationand memory. A curious process of leveling sets in . . . wherebywhat did happen, what could happen, and what might yethappen all coalesce on a single fictional plane. (121, emphasisin original)

Boyd's comment about "leveling" echoes Hinojosa's(and his characters') repeated claims that time isthe greatest leveler. So autobiography, accordingto Boyd,

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is always tempered or smoothed out by time, apoint of view Hinojosa would seem to agree with."Fact" and imagination (created "facts") becomeone and the same, or at least of the same value.

Of related interest is the "blurring of boundaries"that Boyd speaks of. In discussing Faulkner'sAbsalom, Absalom! in a chapter subtitled, "Fictionas History," Boyd says that "The life that the noveldescribes is the life that it creates, and that life isno less there than the events that compose ourhistories. In fact, it is all there, in a way that eventhe most complete historical study is not" (67,emphasis in original). As R. W. B. Lewis has said ofHawthorne's "Earth's Holocaust,'' "like every goodstory, it was truer than history" (14). For Hinojosa,this recreated world tells his whole story, his truth,in a way that strict autobiography could not.

Steven Kellman, in The Self-Begetting Novel,quotes Henry Miller on the subject:

The autobiographical novel, which Emerson predicted wouldgrow in importance with time, has replaced the greatconfessions. It is not a mixture of truth and fiction, this gameof literature, but an expansion and deepening of truth. It ismore authentic, more veridical, than the diary. It is not theflimsy truth of facts which the authors of the auto-

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biographical novels offer, but the truth of emotion, reflectionand understanding, truth digested and assimilated. (117)

Hinojosa has referred to "truth, that necessaryelement" (Dear Rafe 7) in more than one place.And with his insistence on the past in all itsmanifestations, with Jehú and Rafe looking back attheir own distant and more recent pasts, with theirlistening to other voices recounting their boyhoods(as when Echevarría tells of Rafe's father's death),Hinojosa is striving to present "the truth ofemotion, reflection and understanding, truthdigested and assimilated," rather than a strictlyhistorical or autobiographical account, because theformer is capable of expressing what could havehappened, what might have happened, andpossibly what did happen, or at least a perceptionof what happened. But it is richer and fuller thanautobiography because it allows a deeperexploration of Rolando Hinojosa (in the guise ofmany characters) than does a report of whatactually happened. Hinojosa can act out a varietyof parts, to show a complete picture of himself.

Hinojosa downplays the historical forces whichcompel the assertion of his characters' identities.

The complexity of racial prejudice, war, familial andcommunal relationships figure throughout theseries, but ultimately it is the way a characterresponds to events,

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not the events themselves, which shape character.Jill Johnston says that by writing one's life, oneengages in "a political act of self-recognition," anact which requires acknowledgement of shapingforces in one's life, but which refuses to besubjugated by those forces (29). Hinojosa'sachievement lies somewhere between these twoexperiences.

Kellman's argument for the uniqueness of Americanliterature also helps to put the Death Trip inperspective. He claims that much of Americanliterature is about "the intentional creation of ahome, a nation, and a self where nothing hadexisted before" (107). The Death Trip is about thecreation of a home (metaphorically), a restingplace, and a self, created not out of "nothing," butout of an obscurity and invisibility that is causedparadoxically by an old, distinct identity that is both"beloved and reviled" (Claros Varones 208). It is anidentity of race and culture, an identity that insome way must be shed. Like Hinojosa, Rafe andJehú must come to terms with the Anglo world, andin doing so they must recreate themselves, doingaway with bits and pieces of their heritage, an

experience akin to rummaging through the atticand deciding what to keep and what to include inthe jumble sale. This is a peculiarly Americanprocess and is unlike that of older cultures in whichexperience is layered over the centuries; the

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American impulse is to strip experience away tobegin anew. 2

Kellman says that this American trait has created a"distinctive national self-consciousness," which is"not so much a pensive ego reflecting back on itselfas an ardent desire to create a self. . . .Abandoning an obsolete identity in Europe, pilgrimsof every persuasion have been acutely aware of theneed to construct another life in the wildernessacross the Atlantic" (107). By analogy, Jehú andRafe, like Hinojosa, are acutely aware that the "oldways" are becoming obsolete and that they mustconstruct another life in that "wilderness" which isthe Anglo world. To fail to do so is to fade intoobscurity, or rather to remain there, having nosignificant public persona. Kellman goes on to saythat "the [American] folk myth posits the existenceof a 'territory ahead' free of the hierarchies andconventions of Aunt Sally's civilization. Thereindividual worth and effort determine success''(108). For the Mexican American, this pervasivefolk myth is up-ended: there is no true place offreedom beyond the hierarchies and conventions;the hierarchies and conventions are the wilderness

or the frontier. Hinojosa's recognition of this mythaccounts for at least part of his ironic point of view.A social and psychic rather than physical wildernessawaits Jehú and Rafe. Though Hinojosa is an ethnicor so-

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called "marginal" writer, ostensibly removed fromthe mainstream of American fiction, he is in factwriting about one of the major issues of Americanhistory and life. Only the perspective is altered.

The Mexican-American community in the Valleyundergoes many changes in the middle novels.What was once an isolated, exploited minorityslowly begins to move into the mainstream ofAmerican life. It is the changing mejicanocommunity that Hinojosa observes so tellingly inthe Klail City Death Trip Series. A community onthe fringe, kept down and exploited, does not havethe same concerns as the dominant community. Asa result, the exploited community does notexperience a cultural or philosophic movement atthe same time as the dominant community. Withinthe United States, regionalist cultures have laggedbehind the more urban and homogenizedmainstream culture. After World War II, however,even regional cultures were dragged into theModern Age to a degree not experienced even afterWorld War I, a war that did not touch America inthe same way that it did Europe. And, according toCarl Allsup, World War I significantly restricted any

attempt by the Mexican-American community tomove into the "modern" world of democracy andeconomic equity because it "institutionalizedMexican immigration as a 'special' necessity forAmerican agriculture" (6). This fact strengthenedthe stereotype of the "Mexicans''

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(and that included Mexican Americans) as outsiderswho were essentially un-American.

But World War II changed the life of rural MexicanAmericans in a significant way. As Allsup points out,because military deferments were in the hands oflocal boards, few Mexican Americans receivedthem. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americansserved, and many were heroes. Twenty-fivepercent of the soldiers at Bataan were Mexican-American. Seventeen Mexican Americans wereawarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, themost awarded to any ethnic group (Allsup 16). Formany of these soldiers, their war experience wastheir first introduction to the outside world. Allsupnotes that "the economic, political, and socialrelationships of New Mexico and Texas did not havethe same meaning or influence in a European orPacific war zone" that they had had at home (16).People who had been told repeatedly that theywere inferior to Anglos now had reassurance forthemselves and proof for everyone else that theywere not.

But circumstances at home did not change soreadily, and the government and press together

helped to sustain the old stereotypes.Nevertheless, the Mexican-American communityhad had its eyes opened and began to feel a senseof empowerment. One returning soldier said of hiswar experience, "We were now admired, respected,and approved by all

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those around us, including most of our commandingofficers" and this respect began to be felt in thecommunity at large (Allsup 16). Allsup argues thatthe contrast between the Mexican American'sexperience in World War II and the world thatawaited him at home was the real catalyst forchange:

The contrast between these two experiences, environments,and realities would produce important and substantive changein the methods, or more significant, the attitudes by whichMexican Americans attempted to deal with their needs. . . . AChicano fighting against oppression in Germany should not haveto fight for his people in Texas. In facing the political,economic, and social inequities of American society, manyindividuals faced themselves and their own concept of whattheir country could be or wanted to be. (17)

In addition, of course, what opened up theMexicanAmerican community in the Valley was inpart what opened up the rest of rural America:improved communications, better educationalopportunities, including the GI Bill, increased use ofthe automobile and public transportation, andtelevision. If the experience of World War IIcreated a readiness for change

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and a belief in the possibility of change, then thehistorical reality of mid-twentieth-century Americanlife created the certainty of it.

What Hinojosa shows in his post-war novels is acommunity that has no choice but to enter the fray,be it eagerly or unwillingly. The complexity of thetwentieth century has penetrated even thatisolated and unique Mexican-American culture ofthe Río Grande Valley, and the Mexican Americanmust now deal head-on with issues that haveexisted for several generations, but which nowimpel him to position himself on the front line. ThatHinojosa's characters in the later novels have todeal with "contradictions," as Rosara Sánchez says,is caused not by a new political stance onHinojosa's part, but simply by his recognition of ahistorical reality (Sánchez 76).

Hinojosa deals with the issues that face theMexican-American community as the Río GrandeValley becomes less heterogeneous and morefragmented, when young men no longer assumethat they will be agricultural workers, but find theirway to college (often with the help of the GI Bill) orinfiltrate the conservative business establishments

of the Anglo. Jehú and Rafe are typically"American" in their pursuit of a new life, a lifedependent in large part on whether one makes itthrough the university, that bastion of Angloculture. The significance of a uni-

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versity education is reiterated throughout thesequence, and some of Hinojosa's most visiblecharacters after The Valley and Klail City are eitheruniversity-educated (Rafe, Jehú, Becky) or havetraveled extensively and lived outside the Valley,perhaps even in Europe (Viola Barragán). At thesame time, Hinojosa shows the Mexican American'sreluctance to entirely abandon his identity (if itwere actually possible to do so). As Miguel Léon-Portillo notes,

it is undeniable that cultural identity can persist despite multipleprocesses of change, including the assimilation of foreignelements and even the abandonment of other elements thathad belonged to the group. . . . [I]t is also clear that certainalterations and losses may seriously harm an identity. (22)

In these works, Jehú maintains his identity in avariety of ways, but most particularly by keeping ahypercritical eye on the way the Anglo communityoperates and attempts to manipulate the "upwardlymobile" Mexican American. His response to theAnglos' complicated efforts at control is oftenhumorous, but it is also always marked by aninsight that reveals his essential distrust of Anglomotives. Jehú seems willing to tolerate a certainamount of manipulation, as long as he knows it is

going on, which gives

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him a measure of control over it. His relationshipwith Noddy Perkins of the Klail City Bank is oneexample of this. And as he says in response to theAnglo woman who wonders how many MexicansNoddy Perkins invited to his party, "I think it'shealthy to hear this type of shit once in a while; it'sboth sobering and reassuring that all's not well withthe world" (Dear Rafe 21). Clearly, the new world isas yet unborn.

Rafe's role in the works of this period becomesclear only through a reading of The UselessServants. He is a ghost-like figure in the epistolarynovel Dear Rafe, never answering the letters sentby Jehúor at least we never see his replies. DearRafe seems more like a journal kept by Jehú thanany means of real communication between twopeople, yet it merits attention because of its form:the letters Jehú writes to Rafe are among the fewdocuments in the entire series that might be takenentirely as they appear, without wariness. We haveto assume that what Jehú says to Rafe is as closeto "truth" as any commentary in the series mightbe.

Most of Dear Rafe is concerned with the bank and

the political and business world of the Anglos ofKlail City, along with an occasional comment onJehú's love life. There is some humor in Jehú'saccounts of these things, but it is not the kind ofhumor found in The Valley or Klail City. There isnothing here, for instance, to compare to the BrunoCano es-

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capade in the cemetery, Aunt Chedes's attacks, orsome of Brother Imas's sermons. The letters fromJehú to Rafe lack the multiple voices that createthe dynamism of the earlier works, and even in thesecond part of the novel, the "reportage" section,the material is presented in a very tidy, orderlyway, with very little shifting in chronology, verylittle digression, very little humor.

Though the first part of Dear Rafe is an epistolarynovel, its most significant technical aspect is that itis "a work that is contained within a framing levelof narration," what Margarita Cota-Cárdenas calls arelato enmarcado (159). She points out that DonQuixote is also such a work, but she might havementioned any number of other works, includingHawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman. In Dear Rafe,Hinojosa uses his surrogate, P. Galindo, in a boldand dramatic way. His technique borders onmetafiction, for the reader is well aware of how the"author," or "the writer" P. Galindo, got the storyand how he created it. P. Galindo, dying of cancerin the William Barrett Veterans Hospital, somehow"receives'' a packet of letters written in the fairly

recent past by Jehú Malacara to his cousin RafeBuenrostro, who was convalescing there aftersurgery on his face, which was pelted by shrapnelduring his service in Korea. (That Rafe's face isphysically "altered" is clearly sym-

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bolic of the larger and just as painful alternativethat his inner "face" must undergo.) At the presenttime, Rafe is a non-practicing attorney and alieutenant in the Belken County District Attorney'soffice. 3 Jehú's whereabouts are unknown. As P.Galindo says at the conclusion of the prologue, "Asfor Jehú, there's no telling where he is, and hencethis story" (9).

Galindo's presence is felt in a number of otherworks in the sequence, for along with Rafe andJehú, he is one of the principal narrators orsurrogate authors, speaking in Hinojosa's ownvoice. Cota-Cárdenas has noted that the voices ofP. Galindo and Jehú in Dear Rafe have in common"a restrained humor" (160). Juan Bruce-Novoa hascommented on the similarity between the voice inthe work and the voice of the author himself,saying that "Hinojosa the man is the reflection ofhis work: eloquent, intelligent . . . ironic,sometimes sharp and critical, but with the constantgood humor of a man who knows human nature"("Rolando'' 51). In Dear Rafe, P. Galindo says thathe feels "all bases" are not covered in Part I (theletters), so in Part II he "intends to add a shading

of his own once in a while, but always on the sideof truth, that necessary element" (Dear Rafe 7). InPart II, P. Galindo interviews his "informants" aboutthe reasons for Jehú's flight from Klail City. The onething that becomes clear from the dialogues andmonologues in this part of the novel is that Jehúhas an elusive

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personality like Rafe's. What follows is a"Penultimate Note" from P. Galindo on having tochoose a stopping point (he has more material)and then a sort of summary entitled, "Brass Tacksare Best; They Last Longer," in which P. Galindomuses over the "evidence" presented in the firsttwo parts of the novel. Here he affirms that thoughmost of the mejicanos in Klail City believe Jehú lefttown under a cloud, they do not know what he issupposed to have done. Galindo then recounts thevarious versions of the "truth" that he has heardand concludes by saying that people usually havetheir way ''when it comes to interesting stories thatdo not coincide with evident truth" (133).

Dear Rafe presents a clear picture of the ways inwhich the Texas Valley is slowly beginning tochange. Jehú himself, as a sort of Everyman, isrepresentative of that change. He feels theresistance to it, but he also perceives itsinevitability. In addition, he is "lost"; he has not yetfound a suitable or comfortable way to respond tothese changing times. He is adrift, hard to pindown, just as Rafe is ephemeral and distant, justanother number in a hospital ward, waiting. The

circumstances Rafe and Jehú are in at the end ofDear Rafeone confined, a sort of prisoner within aninstitution, and the other lost, both literally andfigurativelysymbolize the trauma involved inassimilation and the difficulty of establishing a new

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identity. In fact, at this point, their situations reflectwhat Juan Bruce-Novoa has said of the Chicano,that they are "victims lost in and condemned bytheir geographical happenstance" ("Chicanos" 57).Yet Hinojosa does not allow his characters toremain lost or to be condemned by the accident ofbirth, and both these characters re-emerge asstrong figures later in the series. But before thathappens, they are both tested: Jehú is forced to beboth a participant and an observer of small-towndrama unfolding, as the haves and the have-notscome face to face on shifting ground, just as Rafenot only participates in but also observes thedrama of war in Korean Love Songs and TheUseless Servants.

To give an account of Rafe's Korean War service,Hinojosa relies on two books. The one in verse,Korean Love Songs, wasuntil the publication of TheUseless Servants in 1993the pivotal volume in hisseries. The poems of Korean Love Songs are similarto the dialogues and monologues of the novels,while The Useless Servants is a more detailedaccount in the form of a diary and is far superior asa work of art. Unfortunately, Arte Publíco Press

omitted six crucial pages from The UselessServants when it was published in hardback. JaimeArmin Mejía published the missing pages and anexplanation of them in Southwestern AmericanLiterature ("Breaking" 16). These "found" pagesfunction almost as a kind of

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epiphany for Rafe as he recognizes fully the truenature of war and its impact upon human beings.These pages, directed to the psychiatrist Dr.Perlman, are a torrent of emotion that flowsdirectly from Rafe's experience and his recognitionof the fact that he and most of his fellow soldiersare nothing more than children, trapped in the darkand nightmarish world that Matthew Arnold soeloquently describes in "Stanzas from the GrandChartreuse""Wandering between two worlds, onedead/The other powerless to be born."

When he was first trying to decide how to deal withRafe's experience in the Korean War, Hinojosa readthe British poets who wrote about World War I. Hesays that he eventually "got the idea that maybe[he] should use poetry to render something asbrutal as war" (José David Saldívar, "OurSouthwest" 181). And according to DonaldRandolph, Hinojosa wrote to him in 1984 that"Careful rereading . . . of Blunden, Brooke, IsaacRosenberg, Graves' Goodbye and Sassoon's proseand poetry (and some Jarrell and Shapiro) were ofinestimable assistance. The Bible, of course, isnever far away, as are not, too, the classics"

("Eroticism" 219). Nevertheless, Hinojosa isprimarily a fiction writer, not a poet. The result ofhis effort is less poetry than it is a series ofvignettes, but overall the book is an effectivemetaphor for the entire Death Trip sequence: justas Rafe will never be the same after his warexperience, the world of

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the Río Grande Valley in the second half of thetwentieth century can never be like the world thatexisted until then. There is now a turn in the road.

With the 1993 publication of The Useless Servants,Hinojosa both complicates and clarifies thecharacter of Rafe Buenrostro and, by extension, theDeath Trip Series as a whole. It is in The UselessServants that Rafe becomes a fully developedcharacter in a way not allowed to him in KoreanLove Songs, thus illuminating and expanding hisrole in the other novels and creating a newperspective from which to view the series itself. Notonly do we see Rafe revealed in a much moreintimate way than in any of the earlier novels, butalso, as Mejía asserts, the battle scenes provide"experiences forming a fuller characterdevelopment for Rafe" ("Breaking the Silence" 96).4 We also see Rafe's Korean War experience withcomplete lucidity for the first time; as a result, it isfinally possible to assess the full effect of such acatastrophic experience as war on the individualcharacter and its reverberations on the Mexican-American community itself. Even more than the"vignettes" found in the poems of the earlier

Korean Love Songs, the detailed accounts of war inRafe's diary bring his experience into relief whenviewed against the backdrop of his life at home, hislife in the Valleythe life depicted so vividly in TheValley, Klail City, and parts of Claros Varones deBelken.

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Though only marginally "literary"(with references toRafe's reading, college, Catholic school)The UselessServants does reveal the young Rafe to be aliterary type who clearly has some ambition towrite and some talent for it. Interestingly, it isHinojosa who turns out to be the writer. It is alsointeresting to see a picture of a young RolandoHinojosa in his service uniform on the book jacket.The last we see of Rafe, he is a homicide detectivein Belken County rather than a writer.Nevertheless, it is Rafe's acute observations andsensitive descriptions of events that bring TheUseless Servants to life. The triteness of the phrase"all the usual horrors of war" is displaced by adefinite sense of reality. Hinojosa, through Rafe'sjournal, brings us face to face with war. ThoughRafe writes of the folks back home as having "noidea what goes on out there, what happens to us,what we see and do," The Useless Servantssupplies the gruesome facts (167).

It is all there: the physical discomfort, the bad food,the uncertainty, the fear, the confusion, and thechaos, the boredom and the routine, the blood, thestench, and death. And of course the irony, which

for Hinojosa's characters always serves as a releasevalve. Yet in Servants, the irony is often secondaryto, or even absent from, Rafe's account of hiswartime life. Some horrors, it seems, cannot beshrugged off, and sometimes Rafe cannot hidebehind an ironic facade.

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In his distress over the slaughter of refugees whoare trying to cross a bridge that had been ordereddestroyed, for instance, Rafe recounts the eventdispassionately at first:

And then, the bridge was destroyed. Blown up. Hundreds on it:kids, families, animals. Joey and I turned our backs to avoidseeing the bodies. The bridge was blown up in all kinds ofpieces. A roar, a geyser of water and who knows what elsewent up in the air. All the time, our vehicles revving the motors,but we could still hear the screaming and crying. (35)

Later Rafe and his fellow soldiers try to explain tothemselves why such a thing could happen; anofricer tells them that it's too bad they had to seecivilians killed, but he promises them that they willsee worse. This incident recurs in Rafe's memoryagain and again, and his last comment on the daythe bridge is destroyed is "For all the talk, there'snothing the army can do about what one thinks,and one does think, and remember" (37). Otheratrocities occur: U.S. soldiers are captured andtortured before being executed; British soldiers arekilled by friendly fire as the U.S. Air Force isconfused about targets and geography; a"massacre" occurs that reminds one sol-

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dier of all the pictures he's seen of Gettysburg; afavorite officer commits suicide. Yet the explosionof the bridge is Rafe's true initiation into thesenselessness of war.

Despite Rafe's acknowledgement of the horror andfutility of war, he remains strong. His sense ofhimself and his pride in his performance are evidentthroughout the book, and early on he writes that heknows why he couldn't turn and run from a battle,no matter how frightened he might be. It is inRafe's sense of himself, his rootedness, thatHinojosa's regionalism surfaces in Servants:

I know why I didn't run. Joey, Charlie, and I were all born inKlail City, TX. We enlisted together, and how would it look if Iran? Everybody back home would know of it. I'd die first beforeI'd face that. (27)

These lines reveal Rafe's valid fear of being killed inbattle, along with his youthful fear of beingridiculed, and somewhere in between the two lieshis sense of duty and obligation, not just to himself,but to his fellow soldiers, his country, and morespecifically to the folks "back home," an obligationto represent them well. Later when he is in thehospital in Tokyo, he tries to explain himself to the

psychiatrist Dr. Perlman:

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I explained that we were different; that that part of Texas ishome, our home. We're not like the rest of the guys in theUnited States, and many of them talk about moving toCalifornia, wherever. We can't, and we don't want to either.That some of us leave for a while, but that we have to comeback. Home. And so on. (167)

In this entry he reflects on a world that isdisintegrating, but Rafe doesn't realize that justyet. He doesn't realize just how much or in whatways this war will change him either. Hinojosa'stitle, The Useless Servants, taken from Luke 17:10,suggests that Rafe must do more than is normallyrequired: "Well, will we then be like the uselessservants who did nothing more than that which wascommanded of us?" (184). Rafe, it seems, didmore, winning two Purple Hearts (the first of whichhe sees ironically as "payment" for a woundthesecond he "earned") and a Bronze Star. Yet hismost significant action may have been the writinghe did, his effort to immortalize those with whomhe fought and to delineate the human face ofbattle. That some of the journals are "lost" isimmaterial, for that does not mean that they aredestroyed or that they will never be read byanyone.

The regional motif, along with its primary subtext,the race issue, surfaces from time to time, in

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the character of Captain Bracken, the Texas Anglowho is, as Joey says, "To the manner born" (152);in Rafe's comment that if someone had "ever gonethrough rank racial discrimination in Texas, then hecould talk to me about brotherhood" (151); in thecharacter of Donald Trujillo, who won't speakSpanish. Charlie and Joey scoff at Trujillo'sstatement that his people came from Spain. Theyask him "if those were the Spaniards that landed inVirginia and then trekked across the South untildelivered safely and soundly to the Promised Land"(41). Yet these incidents and comments, along withRafe's sense of place and history, cannot dispel thefact that Rafe sees everyoneincluding the enemyand civiliansas being in it together. He finallycomes to terms even with Bracken and says,"Captain Bracken showed up again two days ago.We talked, and I felt I've no resentments aboutanything, and I doubt I'll ever be angry at anyoneanymore" (168). In an echo of lines from othernovels in the series, Frazier says to Rafe, ''No battlelasts a hundred years" (126).

Rafe's comments are not surprising, given the kindsof experience he has endured. Anger and

resentment seem out of place in the face of war.Rafe reveals his emotions in entry after entry. Insome ways, The Useless Servants serves as avehicle by which Hinojosa can develop Rafe'scharacter in much the same way that Dear Rafegives us our best glimpse

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of Jehú Malacara. In the Chapter "Hoengsong,"Rafe writes,

On the first day of the death count, I got off the two-and-a-half ton truck at the assembly point and threw up. Tried acigarette and got the dry heaves immediately afterward. . . .Done in, I climbed in the back of a covered weapons carrier,had a good cry, and that brought some peace. (135)

Later in the same chapter, he writes, "I'll never getused to any of this," (135) and "I'm scared to talkto the guys about Hoengsong; I'm trying to forgetthe dead, but it isn't working out. Please, God,don't let me go crazy" (139).

In addition to the obvious usefulness of theseentriesinsight into Rafe's character, vividdescription of the battlefield, etc.is the insight wegain from his double-edged cry of "I'm trying toforget the dead," for Rafe in later years mustforget, or at least put aside, these dead, just as heultimately must put aside a dead past. As he movesfrom the middle of the twentieth century towardthe end of it, he must come to terms with loss of allsorts. On the killing fields of Korea he beginslearning how to deal with such loss.

Though less intensely personal than The Useless

Servants, Korean Love Songs operates as well froma

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broad and a narrow perspective. Because it is setoutside the actual community of the Valley,Hinojosa is able to speak to issues of war withoutgetting bogged down in the Mexican/Angloquestion, although there is no doubt that he isaware of the hypocrisy inherent in a system thatasks "second-class citizens" to give their lives fortheir country. Hinojosa's criticism of the system,however, is aimed at both the inherent horrors ofwar and issues of race and class, and of course ispartly shaped by his awareness of his ethnicity andhow it has affected his life thus far.

Korean Love Songs, like The Useless Servants,takes into account Rafe's awareness of racial slursand racial ignorance, as in the poem entitled, "TheEighth Army at the Chongchon." General Walton H.(Johnny) Walker tells the troops, "We should notassume that (the) / Chinese Communists arecommitted in force./After all, a lot of Mexicans livein Texas" (11). He also deals with the issue of raceand ethnicity in "Nagoya Station,'' "BriefEncounter," and "Up Before the Board." Thesepoems are about Sonny Ruiz, who fills in his ownmissing-in-action papers and then walks away to a

new life in Japan. "Not long after, cards started toarrive from Nagoya and signed / By Mr. KazuoFusaro who, in another life, / Had lived as DavidRuiz in Klail City" (43). When Rafe asks him abouthome, he answers, "This is home, Rafe. Why shouldI go back?" Rafe realizes he cannot answer:

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"He has me there. Why, indeed?" (44). RamónSaldívar argues that for Rafe to assert himself as anindividual he must "regain that preseparatistexpression which has been the legacy of hispeople" (Chicano Narrative 145). If by this, Saldívarmeans that in order to forge an identity Rafe mustgo backward in time and back to a culture which,though once intact, is no longer, then Rafe has animpossible journey before him, for none of us, nomatter what our past or our history, can regress insuch a way. Though Rafe may attempt just such ajourney, though he may desire such a destination,even were it possible, he would not find at hisjourney's end that "preseparatist collectiveexpression" which, like the idea of a Deerslayer, isa dream, an ideal.

Here again, Rafe is not really aware of the sort ofloss that is coming or the magnitude of the changesthat are occurring; Sonny perhaps sees the past asalready dead, or perhaps chooses to defect ratherthan face battles back home after the war is over.Rafe, however, and others like him, will face thosebattles which will be in many ways as harsh as theones found in wartime. As Ramón Saldívar notes,

"Rafe chooses not to turn against his Americanhome" (Chicano Narrative 146). Sonny pulls off hisdefection because Rafe, considered by the Board ofInquiry to be "a good man" helps him:

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You see, I'm what's considered to be"A good man." In their view,One who won't cry, carp, complain, cower, or crap in his pants.A good man. Yessir. One of the best.And so, I lie. (49)

Rafe's response is existentialist, as is his"explanation" of why he is lying after swearing totell the truth on "a Government Issued bible":

If you're a well-fed monkWho's tired of womanizing, and who's hap pened to hit on the idea thatNo man is an island,well and good.But Tina Ruiz [Sonny's mother] needs some thing to eat and to live on. (49)

Rafe lies not only for Sonny's sake, but also forSonny's widowed mother back home in Klail City.Rafe's ironic reference to Donne shows that hedoes not see Sonny's defection or "death" asdiminishing himself in the least, which is in directcontrast to his own explanation as to why he couldnot "run." It's a practical rather than a philosophicalmatter here, whereas in The Useless Servants it isclearly the opposite.

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Even though Hinojosa treats the issue of race fromtime to time, it is difficult to read Korean LoveSongs as a border ballad, a corrido, as RámonSaldívar does in a Marxist interpretation of the book(R. Saldívar, "Korean," 143). More accurate is thefact that Rafe and all the other soldiers are pawnsof the vast military machine. As Serge Ricard hasnoted, Hinojosa makes this clear when "BostonJohn" wonders "what he is doing hee-ah" ("RolandoHinojosa" 155). The war machine cares little forthem as individuals no matter what their race,although Rafe's situation is touched by a higherirony: he is a secondclass citizen at home. Saldívardoes, however, perceive the work as a metaphorfor change: He says that it ''is about South Texasand Mexican-American life in a moment of crucialself-definition" ("Korean" 147). Saldívar is right inthat Korean Love Songsand The UselessServantssignal a change in the life of the individualcharacter, Rafe Buenrostro, and in the historicalfacts that shaped the life of the Mexican-Americancommunity during that period following World WarII when ideas of Mexican-American liberation beganto grow. It signals a change in time, a concept ofgreat interest to Hinojosa throughout the Death

Trip sequence.

Korean Love Songs and The Useless Servants aresomething of an anomaly in the body of Hinojosa's

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work; they differ markedly from the other booksbecause they are set outside the Valley and lackthe numerous voices of most of the other works. Asa result, the presence of the community is not felt,really for the first time. Even after Hinojosa returnsto the Valley and uses voices from the communityagain, the force of the community seemsfragmented. Korean Love Songs and The UselessServants signal a change, a different outlook, in theDeath Trip Series, a more insistent focus on theindividual rather than on the whole community. Themajor characters rise out of and above thecommunity as the sequence progresses. WhatRamón Saldívar says of the Death Trip Series as awhole, that the "novels create less a history ofindividual subjects and unique personalities than ahistory of the collective social life" (ChicanoNarratives 141) is more accurate of The Valley andKlail City than it is of Dear Rafe, Rites andWitnesses, Korean Love Songs, or The UselessServants.

P. Galindo, in Klail City, describes his efforts asbeing "the reconstruction of an old house thatneeds saving, holding on to; one begins with a bit

of work here and there, a bit of retouching, and alldone carefully, lovingly, almost" (55). These linesvery neatly describe Hinojosa's method ofreconstructing the world of the Río Grande Valley inthe pre-World War II years, but they do not seemas clearly applicable to the later works, especiallythose of the final period,

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Partners and Becky. It is possible to argue thathistorical change in large measure dictates thischange in tone, which precipitates a loss ofdramatic energy.

This change in tone is evident even in Rites andWitnesses, the other novel of this period, whichmore closely follows the format of the earlierworks. Rites is the most technically interesting ofthese three works, with Hinojosa relying on shiftingscenes, chronology, points of view. He shifts from aMolly Bloomlike monologue delivered by Sammie JoPerkins to a scene from the war in Korea in whichone of Rafe's buddies goes hysterical (much likescenes from Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End inwhich Christopher Tietjens can't remember names),or from a dialogue between Jehú and NoddyPerkins to an unidentified narrator's commentary,or to an interior monologue by Polín Tapia, allwithout any transition. These techniques arefamiliar mainstays of the earlier works, andHinojosa uses them more or less successfully here,but they somehow fail to create worlds of fullnessand vitality like those found in The Valley and KlailCity, perhaps because those earlier worlds no

longer exist.

Claros Varones de Belken, written about 197980but not published until 1986, contains Rafe'srecounting of his and Jehú's time together at theUniversity of Texassome three years after theyreturned from Korea. Rafe recounts some of theexperiences

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he had returning to civilian life, doing odd jobsbefore going off to the university, and then Jehútells of their time spent teaching at Klail City HighSchool and their twentieth class reunion. (Some ofthis appears earlier in Klail City.) P. Galindorecounts a few stories, the most notable being theaffair of Rita Loera and Moisés Guevara, and herhusband Ignacio's humiliation of both of them. Inaddition, P. Galindo announces that EstebanEchevarría (about eighty-seven) has decided to die.(It is about 195960.) And finally, Echevarría himselfspeaks, summing up the history of the oldcommunity, or to use Arnold's term, that "deadworld": he says that the old life is "dead and gone,dead and forgotten" (206). He concedes that it isnot entirely the fault of the Anglo: "There werewholesale sellouts among our people" (206), butwhatever the reasons, he tells Rafe, "you're ayoung man who lives among the old and who liveswith their old memories" (208). And yet, Echevarríais proud that ''the Valley's coming along" now, thatso many of the young people are becoming "u-ni-ver-si-ty gra-duates," which "has a ring to it" (218).So even though Echeverría's day is over, heanticipates the dawn of a new one. That new day is

the problem Hinojosa tries to deal with in the finaltwo (chronological) novels of the series.

The works of the middle periodKorean Love Songs,The Useless Servants, Claros Varones de Bel-

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ken, Rites and Witnesses, and Dear Rafepiecetogether a bridge between the old and the new. Aworld only hinted at in the earlier works of TheValley and Klail City becomes the focus of theselater works. This is a world of change and yet it isfar removed from the world of Partners in Crimeand Becky and Her Friends, where it would seemthat racial discrimination has all but disappeared,young Mexican-American women may challengetraditional female roles, and university degrees arethe order of the day. In the world of Rites andWitnesses, change is slow to come to the Valley,and resistance is on every side. The Angloresistance is not surprising, but the MexicanAmerican has to learn to adapt to change also. Thetrauma of change is felt both communally andindividually, as relations between the twocommunities become more varied. Stock answersno longer suffice, and new ways of dealing with oneanother must be found.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry discusses this aspect ofHinojosa's fiction in "Estampas del Valle: From

Costumbrismo to Self-Reflecting Literature."

2 See Mark Bushy, "The Significance of the Frontierin Contemporaw American Fiction." This is anenlightening essay on the power of frontiermythology in twentieth-century American literature.

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3 The chronology is confused, partly because whenHinojosa translated Mi querido Rafa as Dear Rafe,he made Rafe a nonpracticing attorney and policedetective in Belken County. He mentions this in theopening of Dear Rafe and in a couple of Jehú'sletters to him. None of this is mentioned in Miquerido Rafa. Possibly Hinojosa made thesechanges because Partners in Crime, like Dear Rafe,was published in 1985, and he wished to establisha new persona for the crime novel.

4 J. A. Mejía, in "Breaking the Silence" commentsthat Hinojosa's separate language renditions of thesame narrative are different, as one languageedition will include narrative information not foundin the other language edition. Thus, Mejía believes,both language editions have to be read in order toobtain a comprehensive contextual and intertextualinterpretation of what are ultimately the sameserial narratives. Many critics and reviewers ofHinojosa's serial texts, says Mejía, have committedserious interpretative errors because they failed toread different renditions of the same serialnarrative.

This charge is both pedantic and unfounded, if

only for the reason that Hinojosa himself haschosen to recreate his early Spanish-languageworks in English since at least 1978, and haswritten his most recent novels in English. Thatsimple fact proves that he has made an effort toproduce a coherent body of work in English,largely because he realizes that his potentialaudience is for the most part English-speaking. Itwould surely prove to be an interesting studyinthe way that, say, a study of all the drafts ofUlysses would be interestingto see a completetextual comparison of those works that werewritten in both English and Spanish, but to arguethat this is the only way to appreciate the DeathTrip Series is to belittle Hinojosa's efforts.

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6The End of a Journey

Partners in Crime and Becky and Her Friends marka significant change in the Klail City Death Tripsequence. Ostensibly, these two works are meantto continue Hinojosa's exploration of his majorsubject: the evolving world of the Texas Valley astwo cultures seek a new coexistence, and moreparticularly, the quest of Rafe Buenrostro and JehúMalacara to create new identities for themselves,to establish themselves within the Anglocommunity. In these two novels, curiously,Hinojosa manipulates yet another permutation ofthe American myth. As Nicholas Karolides hasnoted, one manifestation (and there are manyother contradictory and overlapping ones) of theAmerican frontier mythol-

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ogy is "the conflict between the wilderness idealand the cult of progress as represented by theculture of civilized society" (11). One form that thisconflict takes is "the frontiersman against thesettler," and "a free, wandering life versusmarriage, responsibility, settling down'' (11). In asense, despite Rafe's success within the Angloestablishment, he does live "a free, wandering life"and his workhis daily lifedeals with a world ofviolence and crime that lies outside the "culture ofcivilized society." Jehú, the alter ego, works for theKlail City Bank, marries, and takes on theupbringing of Becky's two children. In short, he"settles down."

Whether the divergent paths taken by these twocharacters is yet another expression of whatHinojosa calls his "dual vision" or merely aconvenience of plot is not clear. What is clear isthat the Klail City Death Trip Series is shaped in avariety of ways by the pervasiveness of Americanmyth. Nevertheless, the sequence breaks down inthese two novels, in large part because ofHinojosa's decision to include a work of detectivefiction, Partners in Crime, which seems rather

cavalierly inserted into a novel sequence that hasbeen moving forward in a more or less dramaticallycoherent way. In Partners in Crime, Hinojosa leavesbehind many of his familiar themes and charactersto branch out into another fictional genrethat of thepolice detective and his trials within the

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strange and violent criminal subculture. Newcharacters, new subject, new themes: an admirableattempt on the part of an author seeking to test hiscreative abilities, but by linking this novel to afictional world whose parameters have alreadybeen clearly established, Hinojosa explodes thoseparameters and leaves the reader somewhatconfused about the author's aims. With Partners, hefails to achieve continuity of any sort. 1 Though heis not producing the kind of sequence that dependson an absolutely strict chronology, in Partners hecuts nearly irrevocably the tenuous thread ofcontinuity that holds the individual novels together.Only the presence of Jehú and Rafe sustains it.

Despite the many differences between the earlynovels of the Klail City Death Trip Series andPartners in Crime, Hinojosa attempts to establish alink between them, primarily in the characters ofRafe Buenrostro, who is the central figure inPartners, and Jehú Malacara, who plays animportant though small part in the plot. These twofigures have functioned as the majorcharactersalthough often offstagein all of theprevious novels. And yet they do not belong to this

world of detective fiction: they seem out of place,lacking the community that has supported them, atleast partially, in all of the earlier works, and whichHinojosa attempts to retrieve in Becky. Jehú ismore himself, more recognizable, than is Rafe,

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who seems to have become another characterentirely, except perhaps for a few flashbacks ofmemory to the war in Korea, his conversations withJehú and his sexual interludes with Sammie JoPerkins, with whom he has had a long-runningaffair.

The focus of the Klail City Death Trip Series shiftsaltogether in Partners in spite of the presence ofRafe and Jehú. Hinojosa simply gives up the questmotif, suggesting that a resolution has beenachieved. And apparentlyfrom the author's point ofviewit has, and not only for these particularcharacters, because Rafe and Jehú's progress,though mirroring Hinojosa's, has also served as akind of Everyman's journey for the wholecommunity. In Partners, Hinojosa suggests that thecommunity has achieved resolution, but in doing sohe loses control of the sequence.

In addition, Hinojosa almost entirely abandons theissues that inform the rest of the sequence: theproblems of the ethnic community, the past; theeccentricities of various lives give way to a "modernsociety" where crime flourishes and violence isbarely contained. And yet life looks pretty rosy

overall in Partners. The novel offers no realresolution to the doubt and cynicism that troubleRafe and Jehú in works such as Korean Love Songs,The Useless Servants, Claros Varones de Belken,Rites and Witnesses, and Dear Rafe. Like thehistorical change that provides the impetus forchange in these transitional

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novels, in Partners and Becky, Hinojosa proposesthat the civil rights movement has created realequality and that Jehú's, Rafe's, and Becky'seducations have solved most of their problems,including questions of self-identity. Hinojosa hassaid that in Partners in Crime he is "coming upmore and more to, say, 1972" (Dasenbrock 4), butboth Becky and Partners have a decidedly eightiesflavor to them.

There is no real evidence anywhere that thesecharacters should be so settled, so happy. Whenwe last saw Jehú and Rafe, they seemed afloat,troubled. Though Rafe is little more than a shadowin Dear Rafe, we do discover there that he is stillbothered by the injury he received in the KoreanWar and he is still somehow isolated, a loner. Hisconfinement in the William Barrett VeteransHospital is a metaphor for his state of mind, anoutlook shaped not only by the Mexican-Americancondition, but also by his experiences of war. Jehúat the end of Dear Rafe is lost, literally, in that noone in the community knows where he has gone,and he offers no explanation. The gloom of KoreanLove Songs and The Useless Servants, Echevarría's

lament for the old, almost-forgotten stories, thewry and acute observations of Rites and Witnesses,and the sinister aspects of Dear Rafe are glossedover by the upbeat and cheerful mood of bothPartners in Crime and Becky and Her Friends.

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Chronologically the last novel of the sequence,Becky and Her Friends also suggests that all is wellin the Valley now. As in Partners, self-determination is a fully attainable goal. 2 Most ofHinojosa's charactersand certainly the maincharactersno longer have to worry about theconditions of migrant life or overt racism. Theadmirable characters now could be any Americananywhere who has "made it." In fact, there is rarelyeven a small hint that some of the old problems ofthe community might still exist today, apparentlybecause Hinojosa's characters now are a part of theAnglo community, much more so than they werejust a few years before.3 Ed García says thatHinojosa's "strongest criticism" and "broadestridicule" are aimed at ''those Mexicans who long forAnglo success," but García fails to see that althoughHinojosa criticizes the likes of Uncle Tom-ish PolinTapia and the toadying Ira Escobarand all whoallow themselves to be manipulated by thecontrolling powers of Belken Countyhe has onlypraise for the upwardly mobile superior types likeRafe, Jehú, Becky, and Viola Barragún. If thesecharacters harbor a desire to beat the Anglo at hisown game, the ultimate outcome of their victory is

that they take one giant step into Anglo territory.Hinojosa has abandoned la raza to a large extent,focusing instead on a few "superior" individualswho have moved into the Anglo middle class. WhatHinojosa attempts in Part-

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ners in Crime and Becky brings to mind thecomments of Alexis de Tocqueville:

As social conditions become more equal, the number ofpersons increases who, although they are neither rich norpowerful enough to exercise any great influence over theirfellows, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficienteducation and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owenothing to any man; they acquire the habit of alwaysconsidering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt toimagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget hisancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates hiscontemporaries from him; it throws him back forever uponhimself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirelywithin the solitude of his own heart. (105106)

The phrase "it throws him back forever uponhimself alone" is an apt description of whathappens to Rafe and Jehú as they experience theprocess of assimilation, yet Hinojosa all but ignoresthe depths of this traumatic experience, this deathtrip. What he promises in Dear Rafe is never fullydelivered. Somewhere

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between Dear Rafe and Becky, there is a missingnovel. Until that novel is written, the series will notbe complete. This particularly difficult facet of theacculturation processits isolationcannot be denied.Just as the westering frontiersman removed himselffrom a world that was at least familiar to undergohis great adventure, so must the Mexican Americanwho participates fully in "American" societyrelinquish much of his familiar ethnic culture. WhatHinojosa fails to document thoroughly is the deeppsychological trauma that must attend this process.

In addition, there is little to no integration of thehaves and have-nots among the Mexican Americansin these two works. Brother Imás, Bruno Cano, andotherseven Echevarría who is remembered fondlyand respectfullybelong to another world. They donot fit into the world of Partners and Becky, eventhough some lip service is paid to the evils of socialclimbing (Becky's forays into the women's clubs ofKlail, the "club wife" of a police officer, etc.).

The Mexican community is now fragmented,divided in a way that it was not in The Valley andKlail City. Though Hinojosa even in the early worksplays fair with the Anglo, still the conditions of life

for most Mexican Americans are painfully clear. IsHinojosa now suggesting that all is really and trulywell for the Mexican Americans in Belken County? Ifso, he is deliberately laying aside the thing thatgives the

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early fiction its powerthe full picture of a way oflife. There is a blandness to the concerns and theworld of these two novels; the atmospheresuggests the yuppie culture that pervaded theeighties, an ambience seen in other contemporarywriters and in many popular movies. Partners andBecky are often grimly sincere. As Hinojosa'scharacters come forward in time, they becomemore earnest, with that kind of earnestnessrequired of the upwardly mobile as they move fromone social class to another. In many ways the fungoes out of them. It is as though Huck has decidedto marry Becky Thatcher and bring up respectablechildren.

Hinojosa does attempt to reclaim his old subjects,his old characters, and his old community in Beckyand Her Friends, but he has difficulty re-establishing the sense of community and sense ofcontinuity that characterize the early novels, in partbecause of the intrusion of Partners in Crime intothe series, but primarily because of the change intone. Since the sequence ostensibly is to be apicture of the world of Belken County, Texas, fromabout 1920 to the present, one expects the

community to play as vital a role in the later novelsas it does in the earlier ones. But it does not. Andthe reason it does not is that as it turns out, thesequence ultimately is about the author and hisnegotiation of the complex world of the Anglo morethan it is about the community as a whole. The in-

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tense focus on Rafe and Jehú in the secondchronological period (Korean Love Songs, TheUseless Servants, Claros Varones, Rites andWitnesses, and Dear Rafe) confirms theautobiographical nature of the series, and finally inPartners and Becky, with the author's own place inthe Anglo world assured, it becomes difficult forHinojosa to depict further struggles in his maincharacters. He himself has left the Valley and theold community, and no matter how keenly he mayfeel that loss, he cannot truly return. As ThomasWolfe warned, "You can't go home again." Hinojosahas become "established," along with Rafe andJehú, within the American middle class.

Hinojosa treats the character of Becky as he doesthat of Jehú and Rafe. Becky, like Jehú, "theuncommon banker" (Partners in Crime 155), andRafe, the lawyer turned policeman, has manytalents, though they remain hidden until she throwsoff her life with Ira Escobar. Becky has apparentlynever felt much overt discrimination. Yet she hassuffered sexual discrimination: under her mother'sthumb, she has married the obtuse Ira. Theimplication is that she could have chosen quite well

for herself, had she been allowed to, and she doeswhen she chooses Jehú. So the potential is there,and it is revealed by her relationship with Jehú andher business relationship with Viola Barragán, thebusiness paragon, the practical, sensible,unsentimental female. 4

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Hinojosa likes so-called "masculine" qualities inwomenBecky doesn't cry or get emotional abouther divorce, has a "good head for business," isunsentimental about sex and apparently everythingelse. All this makes getting what you want easy, asit apparently is for Viola and Becky. And if theydon't get what they want immediately, they'llsimply make a plan. Life is simple. Becky, like Jehú,Rafe, and P. Galindo before her, is a surrogate forthe author. She too is on a quest. She is strugglingto throw off an old identity, an old stereotype (thesubmissive Mexican wife and daughter), and she isstruggling (and succeeds in the space of one book)to make it in the Anglo world. Like Hinojosa, Beckyhas an Anglo parent, Catarino Caldwell, who has"mexicanized'' himself. Still, the Anglo influence isthere. Like Hinojosa, Becky does not look"Mexican." She is tall and has green eyes. And shegrows up with an Anglo name. Much is made of herlooks, as early as Dear Rafe, when Jehú speaks ofher in his letters. Hinojosa's gender bias isevidenced by his emphasis on female characters'appearances, an emphasis not apparent in hisdescriptions of male characters. In at least this onedetail Hinojosa's clumsiness at trying to deal with

feminist issues is evident.

The feminist stance articulated by Becky providesHinojosa with an opportunity to pick up his oldsubject of the shedding of one tradition in favor ofan-

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other. He has already achieved resolution with hismale characters, and in doing so he has lost hissubject. He tries to return to it with Becky. Just asJehú and Rafe had to shed much of theirtraditionally ethnic personas to develop a new wayof living in the world, Becky has to shed much ofthe traditionally feminine in order to forge a newidentity. Unfortunately, the feminist rhetoricprevalent throughout the novel weakens Hinojosa'sefforts and makes the book sound like a tract ofsome sort, at least in those sections that actuallyconcern themselves with Becky's new self.Ironically, once Hinojosa's characters, particularlyJehú, Rafe, and Becky, gain a new identity withinthe Anglo community structure, they lose theirdistinct outlinesthey become generic, losingpersonality and definition.

A conspicuous absence of conflict between the twoValley cultures is evident in both Partners andBecky. Rafe and his Anglo colleagues are the verypicture of "cop buddies" and their relationship ischaracterized by genial male humor, not racialtension. 5 Another way in which we know that therace situation is "corrected" is that in Partners, Sam

Dorson, a member of the Homicide Squad, goes tothe Klail City Bank for a car loan: the person whomust approve his application is a mejicano: JehúMalacara. Likewise, Becky is judged by Anglo andmejicano alike because of her "modern" ways andher decision to divorce Ira Escobar

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to marry Jehú, with whom she had an earlier affair.She is not troubled by race relations any more thanJehú now is, even though that issue was of definiteimportance in the six works of the previous period.

In addition to a loss of focus, these two novels aremarred by a moralism that is not characteristic ofthe other works in the sequence. This moralism isless troubling in Partners in Crime because it is atypical feature of the mystery novel. But in Beckyand Her Friends it becomes oppressive. Becky lacksany real dramatic development, and in theinterviews that are actually about Becky themessage is essentially repetitiveone is either for oragainst Becky and the "liberation" of the Mexican-American woman (at least young, college-educated, pretty ones like Becky and/or gutsy,aggressive, handsome ones like Viola Barragán).

Becky seems like an afterthought within thecontext of the overall sequence: women's liberationis here now and things in America are changing forwomen, even minority women. To give a completepicture of the changing world of the Río GrandeValley, Hinojosa needs to deal with this issue, butsomehow Becky falls short. Hinojosa seems to be

paying a kind of lip service to the idea of theindependent woman. Perhaps it fails because thereare so few Beckys in that part of the world. Perhapshe has tried to transfer successful women fromacademia to the Valley, but they

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do not move well. The novel is ostensibly aboutBecky and her decision to leave a marriageorchestrated by her mother to a man who is atoady for the powerful Anglo banker, NoddyPerkins. (Ironically, Perkins is also the employer ofJehú Malacara, whom Becky marries after herdivorce.)

According to Lionel Villa, Elvira Caldwell, Becky'smother, expended a great deal of energy arrangingthe marriage between her daughter and IraEscobar primarily because she wanted the familyconnection to the Leguizamôn clan. So Becky's lifeis manipulated first by her own mother; after she ismarried, her life is run by her husband's employer,Noddy Perkins. Villa claims in the first interview inBecky that besides "politicking for her husband,"Becky is used as "a prop, visible here and there,but a prop" (21). She is granted "unanimousmembership" in all the local women's clubs andhobnobs with the social élite of Klail City. Finally,she realizes that it all has very little to do with her,but a lot to do with her husband's position. At somepoint shortly before her thirty-fifth birthday, shesees herself as a kept woman and as the tool of a

nasty political and social system. According to heruncle, at that moment she sees that "having todepend on someone else for a living, to depend onsomeone else for anything, to be nothing but akept-though-married woman was not the way tolive. She saw what being independent meant" (23).

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Hinojosa's insistence on the liberation of BeckyCaldwell Escobar Malacara ultimately weakens thenovel in that no proof exists that Becky reallybecomes independent, if it is even possible never"to depend on someone else for anything" (23). Forone thing, she comes into an inheritance when sheturns thirty-five. Even though the potency of thisfact is diluted by her uncle's disclaimer that it's "notmuch" and that a trust has to be established for herchildren in order to keep the inheritance out of thecommunity property settlement, Becky is alsoawarded in the divorce settlement the house shehad shared with Ira and part of his pension. Shedoes take a job with Viola Barragán, who "steppedin to help Becky, help her with a little boost, tomake her independent. Her own person" (21). Violadoes this so that Becky can be, as Villa says,"economically independent" (20). And then Beckymarries Jehú. All of this suggests that any young,college-educated mother of two can become "herown person'' if she has some money, a friend tooffer her a challenging career, and perhaps a newhusband, who is "a good man" with "a pair on himthat clang when he walks" (17). Except for theemotional turmoiland even that is downplayed as

Becky rearranges her life with "no crying, nohiccups, no shortness of breath, and no raising ofthe voice" (22)Becky seems to get on with it verynicely. For

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Becky, things have a way of working outto thepoint of incredibility.

The idea of using a female character to depict thechanges of the last thirty years or so within theMexican-American community is a good one, orwould be if the character were believable. To haveBecky "cut loose from Ira" while simultaneously"cutting the umbilical cord" from her mother is bynow a fairly standard variation on a themefictionwritten by women has been dealing with this sortof thing for at least two decades: Mary Gordon'sFinal Payments (1978), with its Catholicundertones, is a good comparison, but by theseventeenth century at least this was a concern ofeducated women. In a more contemporary setting,the late 1950s, Doris Lessing in "To RoomNineteen'' approaches the question of how womencan be their "own persons." Marilyn French's TheWomen's Room is one of the best-known popularfictions to tackle this subject, and Becky's concerns,as we are "informed" of them, are very similar tothose of unnumbered other fictional heroines. InBecky's case the umbilical cord leads directly backto her mother, but in most feminist fiction, the

umbilical cord is truly symbolic, representing therestrictions (biological and social) on the female'sattempts at personal freedom. Becky, however, isunlike most such females in that she approachesher situation without

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much soul-searching, untroubled by doubt,marching blindly, it seems, into a new life.

This is perhaps where Becky is revealed to be anautomaton of the author's creation rather than abelievable or even particularly sympatheticcharacter. But Becky finally fails simply because sheis not a clearly delineated or realized character. Asa tool of the author, she does not have the strengthto carry the burden of symbol that he places onher. She remains a fuzzy outline. Alana Northcuttpoints out that "the sharp-edged portrait of Beckypainted in the letters of Dear Rafe is hard toreconcile with her new image" (12). Hinojosa,however, puts Becky on a special plane. That shegoes to work for Viola Barragán, Hinojosa'sprototype for the liberated woman, is made toseem an earth-shattering event, but actually it ishard to see the divorced Becky's motivation to workas being much different from that of Inez Paredes'sin Partners or even the female bank tellers in ill-fitting uniforms so pathetically described in thesame novel.

The point is that it is hard to see what is supposedto be special about Becky, except that she is a

surrogate figureshe even repeats Hinojosa's exactwords as she tries to explain her new life: "Time's agreat leveller" (156). Much more than the characterof Police Lieutenant Rafe Buenrostro in Partners, or

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the characters of Rafe and Jehú in the rest of thenovels, she is more a vehicle than a character. Sheseems to exist primarily to allow Hinojosa afictional representation of himself, and secondarily,to express what he perceives to be the views of thecontemporary Mexican-American community on theissues of divorce and "women's liberation," issuesthat seem dated in the current economic climate.

In his effort to reclaim his sequence novelafter theaberration of Partners in CrimeHinojosa takes upthe female quest for a new identity, which ishistorically significant but may be out of his reachartistically. In Becky, he falls back on a fictionaltechnique that served him well in such works asKlail City, Claros Varones, Rites and Witnesses, andthe reportage section of Dear Rafe. In fact, Beckymost resembles in form the second section of DearRafe, the one in which all the speculation aboutJehú's absconding from the bank and from Klail Cityby various members of the community takes place.But by the time of the interviews in Becky, themuch-respected P. Galindo is dead, and theinterviewer in this novel remains enigmatic andunnamed, identified only as "the listener," a

nephew of Lucas Barrón (el Chorreao). WhatHinojosa hopes to achieve by the omission of nameand personality in this case is not clear, though hemost likely is trying to keep any element ofdidacticism out of the vignettes. He curiously failsto do

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so, and ultimately the commentary is more aboutthe community than about Becky and what she isreally like. And Becky herself is allowed not quitesix pages in which to explain herself, even thoughthe narrator says she "should speak for herself"(155).

This sort of diffuse treatment of the community asa whole is similar to what Hinojosa does in TheValley, but here there is no real drama. Not eventhe interest of past action is recalled. Most of theinformation about particular characters hasappeared elsewhere, in some form or another, orelse the interviewee just talks about himself, as inthe case of Emilio Tamez, as he recounts hisversion of the breakup of his own marriage. This isnot to say that some interesting summing up of thecommunity, its past, present, and future, does notoccur in Becky, but using Becky as a sort of catalystfor this dialogue of social history is ineffective as adramatic device. As a novel, the work falls flat.

Though time has passed and conditions in theValley have changed for the Mexican American aswell as the Anglo, things are not as rosy asHinojosa would have them seem in Partners in

Crime and Becky. Also, these works make it seemthat once the race struggle is settled, as it appearsto be for these upwardly mobile characters at least,the mejicano is not a particularly interestingcharacter. Most likely Hinojosa does not intend tocreate this effect, but he does, probably

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because he has now lost the emotional wellspringof his work. At this point in his own life, Hinojosasurely has a much harder time identifying with theaverage, non-university-educated Mexicanos thanwith mainstream Americans. As Charles Tatumsays, Rafe and Jehú "have left their moorings in theMexican community to become professionals. . . .They move comfortably in and out of the worlddominated by Anglo capital and political power"(470). As Hinojosa personally achieved resolutionto his own struggle, he no longer had a significantsubject and was so far removed from the life of theValley that he was no longer able to depict the fulldiversity of the contemporary community. Thisultimately is the failure of the Klail City Death TripSeries as a work of fiction. The sense of urgencyand dramatic intensity dies as the edge is taken offhis main characters. Rafe is almost unrecognizable,and Jehú is practically invisible.

Once Hinojosa no longer feels the tension andconflict caused by the struggle to prove himself, thenovels themselves are marred by a lack of tensionand conflictand ultimately a lack of control andpurpose. In the novels set before the seventies

Hinojosa seems to have a clearer sense of hisartistic aims and firmer control of his fiction. It maybe that memory has refined experience in thesenovels, making it more coherent and meaningful. InPartners and

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Becky, he obviously sees the march of time andprogress and attempts to delineate its ramificationsfor the world he knew as a child and young man,but these novels lack the depth of emotion of thoseearly works, particularly The Valley and Klail City. Itmay be that history itself has robbed Hinojosa ofhis subject. As his own life and career progresseswithin the bureaucracy of the American universitysystem, the ethnic flavor of his work fades. As hispersonal quest to forge a new identity comes to asuccessful end, the dramatic tension of the series isdissipated. Relying heavily on autobiography mayadd something to a fiction, but for Hinojosa, usinghis own experience and history as the cornerstoneof his work finally proves that despite hisexcellences, he is unable to do with his life whatJames Joyce did.

Hinojosa is at his best when depicting the life ofthe Texas Valley from the 1930s through the 1950sor 1960s, but in this most recent period, he seemsto be at a distance from the community. Partnerscould be set anywhere that a drug racket mightflourish, and in Becky, the people who discuss herwith the anonymous narrator treat the narrator like

an outsider, a guest, rather than one of them.Nothing could be more substantively different fromP. Galindo's interviews about Jehú at the end ofDear Rafe, in spite of the similarity of form. Mostsignificant is the fact that Rafe and Jehú do notseem truly representative

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of the contemporary Mexican-American community,a fact in keeping with the autobiographical natureof these characters, but, in addition, in Partnersand even in Becky the Mexican-Americancommunity is mostly absent. A few voices supplantthe many.

The stories of the old timers are gone, and onemight think that the mejicano in the Río GrandeValley has entered a brave new world, where thepast is either forgotten or suppressed. For asequence that overall is so concerned (as Hinojosahas said) to stick to the facts, to be honest andtruthful, these two works do not give a completepicture of contemporary life in the Valley. If,however, the sequence is essentiallyautobiographical, then Hinojosa is being true andhonest in showing the upscale, contemporary sortof lives Jehú, Rafe, and Becky are enjoying in theTexas Valley of the seventies and eighties. Whenan Anglo colleague invites Jehú over for a beer,Jehú responds by saying, "I'll bring some Riesling,"to which the friend answers, "Riesling? Now you'retalking. See you sevenish, buddy" (Partners 58).

For whatever reason, there is a lack of intimacy

between the author and his material in Partners inCrime and Becky and Her Friends. Hinojosa placeshis characters in the Valley, but he is not there.Hinojosa has said that he wished to give anaccount of the Valley that he knows, and he seemsto be on firm ground in all but these two novels.The distinc-

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tive regional flavor of works such as The Valley,Klail City, and Rites and Witnesses is absent fromPartners and Becky. Their concerns are notuniquely connected to the life of the Río GrandeValley of Texas. Hinojosa tries to sustain aregionalist atmosphere in Partners by shatteringPeter Hauer's misconceptions about Mexico andMexicans, among other things, but this effort is apoor substitute for the vivid picture of the daily lifeof a community that is found in the earlier books.

Partners in Crime is really the more ambitious ofthe two works, and examining its weaknessesreveals the collapse of Hinojosa's fictional world aswell as the failure of the novel itself as an exampleof genre fiction. The Rafe of Partners is notrecognizable as the Rafe who went to the NorthWard public school and endured the racialdiscrimination of Anglo teachers. Nor is herecognizable as the Rafe who recounts standing ina cantina listening to Echevarría tell the story of hisfather's death. Nor does he seem to have anysignificant scars from the horrific experiencedetailed earlier in Korean Love Songs and TheUseless Servants.

If Hinojosa had not created a couple of convenientscenes in Partners to remind us of Rafe's tour ofduty during the Korean War, we might easily forgetthat earlier youthful angst, bravado, and sensitivity,so cheerful and well-adjusted is this new Rafe.Rafe's

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reaction to the gory sight of the men shot to piecesat the Kum-Bak Bar is that of someone who hashad to get used to such thingsand we know Rafelearned to do so in Korea because a few chaptersearlier, as Rafe remembers the death of his wife,he recalls briefly "what the dying had been like inKorea" (110). When he sees how upset IreneParedes is at the scene of the crime, he tells herthat it is possible to get used to such things (120),but later thinks to himself that she will never beable entirely to forget "a fingernail attached to anindex finger floating in a schooner of red beer,"something Rafe knows "from hands-on experience"(19394).

This Rafe is pretty hard-boiled when it comes toblood and guts, but otherwise he is thestereotypical detective and the practical butunderstanding lover of Sammie Jo Perkins, who ismarried to the homosexual Sidney. The enigmaticand elusive Rafe who receives Jehú's epistles inDear Rafe now seems entirely accessible. In spiteof any peculiaritiesa certain secrecy about hisprivate life, for exampleRafe is a stock character ina mystery novel. The anger that he may have felt

as a mejicano boy and the trials of his youngmanhood have ostensibly been tempered by timeand the evolving attitudes of Valley Anglos andMexican Americans.

The subtitle alone of Partners throws off the orderand chronology of the Death Trip sequence. Call-

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ing it "a Rafe Buenrostro Mystery" suggests thatothers have already been written and that stillmore are to follow. No further adventures of RafeBuenrostro have followed, but Hinojosa has saidthat there will be a second mystery in the series(José David Saldívar, "Our Southwest" 183). IfPartners were the first Hinojosa novel a readerwere to encounter, he would think he wasdiscovering a sequence of mystery novels. Hewould also be confused if he previously had read Miquerido Rafa rather than Dear Rafe because whenHinojosa reworked Mi querido Rafa as Dear Rafe,he added to the Preface the information that whenRafe was in William Barrett Veterans Hospital, hewas already a non-practicing attorney and alieutenant of detectives in the District Attorney'soffice in Belken County. This is never explained inany of the novels, but in Partners in Crimealsopublished in 1985Rafe is once again depicted as anattorney and a detective. Hinojosa thus skews thepattern of the Death Trip sequence as far as form isconcerned, just as Rafe's new demeanor skews thepattern of character development in the earlierworks. Rafe goes from being a major character in aserious sequence novel to being a figure in a

detective fiction that purports to be one of many.

Rafe is a figure of some distinction in Partners. Heis the main character, and he is patterned after thesuperior detectives of any number of murder

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mystery sequences: he is somehow extraordinary.He is like Hillerman's shaman Jim Chee, P. D.James's poet Detective Chief Inspector AdamDalgliesh, Dorothy Sayers's intellectual marvel LordPeter Wimsey, or Agatha Christie's eccentric geniusHercule Poirot. Though Rafe is not superstitious oropenly religious like Chee, though he is only a poetat heart and not literally like Dalgliesh, though hemust rely on procedure and hard work to solvecases and not on a miraculous innate intuition likeWimsey, though he is an ''ordinary guy" rather thanan eccentric like Poirot, he is clearly cast in thetradition of these renowned detectives, rather thanin the hard-boiled tradition of Raymond Chandler.Rafe is somewhat genteel.

Rafe and his kind are élites among their colleagues,and they are usually shown to their best advantageby the unwitting observations of lesser mortals. InRafe's case, this revelation comes in a rather stiltedconversation with young detective Peter Hauer.Rafe reveals that he is a literate, well-read, well-rounded man by defending his friend Sam Dorsonwhen Hauer suggests that Dorson's gruff mannermight be caused by his jealousy of those on the

force, himself included, who have college degrees.Peter's degree is from Trinity University in SanAntonio (where Hinojosa taught from 1968 to1970), but when Rafe tells him that Sam has adegree from

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Northwestern, "a good school," Peter does notknow in which state it is located. When Rafe tellshim it is in Evanston, by the lake, Peter reveals hisignorance once again by asking, "What lake?" (86).And it gets worse. The more uninformed Peterappears, the better Rafe looks. Though Rafe isdefending Sam Dorson, it is clearly Hinojosa'sintent to show the superiority of Rafe Buenrostro.

The truly revealing part of the dialogue is worthrepeating: Rafe says that Sam "reads history,""likes music," and ''reads The New York Times."Sam also "knows about plays, but he prefersoperettas." Sam "quotes poetry," and, Rafe says,he "reads Housman, Hardy, Synge." Peter, ofcourse, asks, "Who are they"? (86). Rafe, whoattended another "good school," the University ofTexas at Austin, just laughs. Here Hinojosa comesclose to what Henry James called "the platitude ofstatement" (Blackmur xi). Even though anomniscient narrator does not reveal these factsabout Sam Dorson's education, this contrived andartificial-sounding dialogue is not "representational"in the sense that James uses the term: one isaware that Hinojosa, the artist behind the scenes,

is commenting not only about the tendency tostereotype policemen, but more important, that heis making an obvious statement about RafeBuenrostro's tastes and intellect, and taking a shotat what he sees as the not-so-good schools inTexas.

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James believed that "in art what is merely stated isnot presented, what is not presented is not vivid,what is not vivid is not represented, and what isnot represented is not art" (Blackmur xi). Perhapsto demand Jamesian skill and technique in adetective fiction is absurd, but the fact remains thatin most of the earlier novels, Hinojosa achieves"representation" most of the time. In this particularscene between Rafe and Peter Hauer, Hinojosamight have foregone the banal dialogue in whichRafe really comes off looking like a snob. Thisexchange between Rafe and Peter is more akin towhat Virginia Woolf called "the dreary business ofgetting from lunch to dinner" than it is to the vividrepresentations of life in The Valley, Klail City, Ritesand Witnesses, and others.

But Hinojosa is following a cliché of the genre. Theyoung Peter Hauer is a slightly dim, or at leastmisguided, rookie who must be watched. He is alsosomething of a prude, wincing at normal manlycursing and a teenager's admission that he "shotthe finger" at a reckless driver (147). Hauer mustalso be given his comeuppance, and if it does notcome naturally, then it must be arranged. Hauer,

continually referred to as "Young Mr. Hauer," issent on various missions designed to humble him.For example, Chapter Nineteen is entitled, "CaptainLisandro Gómez Solís and a day in the life of youngMr. Hauer." Hauer is sent to Barrones to pick upsome copies of finger-

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prints and a photograph. As Sam Dorson says, "Hecan pick up some education and no small amountof humility while he's there" (133). Hauer's earlierquestioning of Rafe about Sam Dorson's educationhas clearly been discussed with Solís. When Hauerarrives in Solís's office, he is disconcerted by Solís'sapparent ability to read his mind, but he is leftnearly speechless when Solís pushes his frameduniversity diploma from the University of Illinois(the institution which awarded a Ph.D in Spanish toHinojosa) across the desk to Hauer. Hinojosa'sintention here is clearto make a statement aboutAmerican perceptions of the Mexican, and to setHauer up once again as a foil to the wise men,particularly Rafe, Dorson, and Solís.

The failure of the plot of Partners in Crime is inmany ways caused by Hinojosa's attempt to fit inall of the clichés of the contemporary murdermystery, which is as much a novel of manners asanything else. Hinojosa attempted a kind of novelof manners in Rites and Witnesses, and there hewas more successful because he was not imitative,as he is in Partners. And of course, since Rafe is themain character, many of the clichéslike that of the

superior detectiverevolve around him. The superiordetective often has a painful past of some sort.Adam Dalgliesh's wife and young son were killed inan automobile crash. Rafe Buenrostro lost hisyoung wife, Conchita, by

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drowning. Lord Peter Wimsey suffered shellshock inWorld War I. Rafe Buenrostro saw action in theKorean War. Even Hercule Poirot has knownhardship as a Belgian refugee. Living in Englandproves to be a trial, and Poirot is always referred toas a "foreign" gentleman. Rafeat least in the earliernovelshas known what it means to be an outsider.

The superior male detective, though he may beattractive to women, usually lacks a wife and is inno hurry to find one. (He is similar to the cowboyfigure in this regard.) Again, Adam Dalgliesh andHercule Poirot are good examples, though thereare many others. Those detectives who do havewives are generallylike Rafepolice detectives, whocannot easily team up with their wives to solvemysteries. Having lost his wife of one year, Rafe isnow involved with a married woman; theirrelationship is never developed beyond theobligatory, but tasteful, sexual encounters. Itseems unlikely that Rafe and Sammie Jo will eversettle down to the predictable routine of marriedlife. That she is married enables Rafe to remainfree. That Sammie Jo's husband is a homosexualrelieves Hinojosa from having to justify Rafe's

involvement with her.

It has long been understood that the mystery novelis essentially moralistic in that right must triumph,and the superior detective is like a knight on aquestseeking truth and good over evil. It would

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not do for such a detective to be a wife stealer or awomanizer in the James Bond tradition. ThoughSammie Jo's husband Sidney's homosexuality isrevealed in an earlier novel and is not createdspecifically for Partners, Hinojosa understands thebenefit of using Sammie Jo as Rafe's lover ratherthan, say, having Rafe have an affair with the wifeof Sam Dorson. If Rafe is to be effective as the heroof the type of mystery Hinojosa is trying to write,he must remain above moral censure, a fact thatHinojosa bows to again in the scene in whichGómez Solís reveals that his menMexicannationalshave made an arrest in Texas. Rafe saysto his friend and colleague Solís, who is "building acase" for the Klail City detectives, "You realize wehave to report the illegal arrest, don't you?" (186).No hard feelings result: Rafe is a man of integrityand Solís knows it. He knows when he mentionsthe arrest what Rafe's response will be.

Hinojosa has clearly abandoned manyif not mostofhis earlier subjects and themes in this novel,subjects and themes that he fails to recapture inBecky and Her Friends. With the publication ofthese two works, Hinojosa's characters come to the

end of their journey.

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<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1 See also Juan Bruce-Novoa's argument thatPartners fits into the series in "Who's Killing Whomin Belken County."

2 Becky's "Chicana consciousness" is offered as anexplanation for the incongruity of Becky in theDeath Trip Series by Bryce Milligan in "PluggingAway at the Truth."

3 Serge Ricard says that the earlier ethnic divisionsare now "toned down" and that the Valleyites areall "Texan" first who "discreetly" nurture their smalldifferences'' ("Drogue Sans Frontiére," 16977).

4 Hinojosa says Viola Barragán "seems to be thestrongest woman character that I have," in JoséDavid Saldívar's "Our Southwest: An Interview withRolando Hinojosa."

5 Rafe, Dorson, and Solís exhibit some of the whiteman/dark man phenomenon that Leslie Fiedlerdescribes in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, HuckHoney!" Though I fail to see any incipienthomoerotic tendencies in this triangle, the

relationship between Rafe and Dorson in particularis strangely reminiscent of that of Natty Bumpo andChingachgook, Huck and Jim, and Ishmael andQueequeg, though the roles are not static.

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7Paradise Lost and Found

In many ways, the novels and poems of RolandoHinojosa reflect the actualities of life for themejicano in Texas, and his depiction of thesegregation of the barrios, the second-classcitizenship, the enforced ethnicity, account for theregionalism in his Death Trip. As the historianArnoldo de Léon says, "Segregation in Texas andthe rest of the nation prolonged a Mexicanethnicity" for the Mexican American. But de Léongoes on to demonstrate that although therepressive Anglo culture was the primary cause ofthe separate status of the Mexican American, otherfactors within the Mexican-

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American community were also at work. A stronglink between Mexico and Mexican Americansexisted well into this century, including thecontinued "activities of the Mexican consuls inTexas" during 19301945, newspapers from Mexico,and shared holidays such as Cinco de Mayo andDiez y Seis de Septiembre. Movie theaters in SouthTexas featured Mexican matinee idols. All of thesefacts, along with a shared language, helped to keepthe Mexican American from recognizing thepossibility of a different life (de Léon, Mexican-Americans 99).

Like de Léon, Rolando Hinojosa sees themultifaceted nature of the Mexican American'sstruggle for first-class citizenship. His Death TripSeries reveals both the insularity of the Mexican-American community and its yearning towardconnections with the larger society. No stranger toracial discrimination, Hinojosa also understands thepower of the familiar, comfortable ethnic identity.As he moves his narrative along from the world ofthe Texas Valley in the 1930s through the 1970s,he reveals the difficulty not only of moving forwardthrough the slowly weakening walls of racial

discrimination, but also of leaving behind much ofwhat constituted a distinct ethnic identity. As aresult, the Klail City Death Trip Series is shaped inlarge degree by the concepts of gain and loss, lossand compensation. In fact, the series as a wholeargues for the inescapable fact that gain and

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loss are inseparable components not only ofhistory, but also of every human life. Hinojosa'sphilosophical stance on this facet of humanexperience is the wise but practical position thatone can only accept the inevitable with as muchgrace and humor as possible.

Despite a sometimes shattered chronology andunevenly developed characters, the series is drivenby this sense of the inevitable. Hinojosa'scharacters are on a road that carries them to theirdestiny. While bypassing in large part the politicalactivism of the 1960s and El Movimiento, Hinojosamoves his characters into the Anglo enclaves of lawenforcement, banking, and business. In doing so,he represents only a small portion of the Mexican-American population: in 1970, sixty to seventypercent of Mexican-American male workers"functioned in unskilled and semiskilledoccupations." Most were poor, especially thecampesinos, whose children, like those of southernsharecroppers before them, had little chance ofeducation (de Léon, Mexican-Americans 12223).Yet it is hard to be overly critical of Hinojosa'sfailure to treat the full community in his later

novels, although the early works do give acomplete picture of a whole community. As theseries progresses, Hinojosa turns his eye almostexclusively on the middle-class Mexican American.And of course by the time Hinojosa was writing inearnest in the mid-1970s, the radical-

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ism of the Chicano movement had waned. As deLéon says,

In the end the changing times made the movimiento seemanachronistic. Its militant rhetoric and tactics seemed passé.Many of the Movement's aims became institutionalized as well.(Mexican-Americans 132)

Along with this fact, another is perhaps even moreimportant to the focus of the Death Trip Series:"The syncretization of cultures . . . has notproduced a 'typical Tejano' nor is the 'world ofTejanos one of two cultural polarities'" (de Léon,Mexican-Americans 144). Though Hinojosa himselfand other Mexican-American academics haveargued for the idea of a "cultural polarity" or acultural dialectic, de Léon says that a large numberof Tejanos have undergone an experience that"resembles the classic pattern of immigrationaccommodation" (Mexican-Americans 144). Evenwithout documented evidence, any reader ofHinojosa's Death Trip Series could discern thesebasic truths about the Mexican-Americancommunity.

So if Hinojosa does not appear especially radical orovertly political, he nevertheless treats a significant

element of the Mexican-American experience,giving us insight into what may be only lessdramatic rather than less authentic. Felipe deOrtega y Gasca

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says the Chicano writer must "praise the people,identify the enemy, and promote the revolution"(17). Hinojosa, however, praises only some of thepeopleand some of them are Anglo. He sees theenemy as he truly isoften Anglo, but sometimesmejicano. The revolution he promotes is primarilyan education revolutiona revolution not ofseparatism, but of inclusion. He wants the MexicanAmerican to join his "enemy" as much as beat him.This point of view itself removes any potentialelement of pure radicalism from the Death TripSeries.

Lacking true revolution and radicalism, the DeathTrip Series ultimately reveals itself as yet anothervariation on the themes of the American frontierand the American Dream. Its significance inAmerican letters may rest as much on that fact ason its depiction of a regional culture, for no matterhow diverse the body of American literatureappears, each of its components, each piece of itsliterature, must come to terms with the sameforces of myth: those peculiarly American mythswhich for better or worse have been so interrelatedwith American politics and culture and even

geography since the early days of the Republic.Hinojosa acknowledges that this is the truth whenhe says that

Chicano literature . . . has its roots in Mexican literature, andMexican-American writ-

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ers have their roots in Mexico. . . . Roots, however, are not tobe confused with the trunk of the tree itself or with thebranches that spring from it. For, despite the Mexicaninfluences, the Mexican-American writer lives in and is deeplyinfluenced by his life in the United States. To date, the oneprevalent theme in Mexican-American writing is the Chicano'slife in his native land, the United States. ("Mexican-AmericanLiterature" 423)

The intense relationship between American politicsand policy and American literatureboth shapers andreflectors of mythis noted by critic Denis Donoghuein Reading America:

The academic pursuit of themes in American Studies can't beneutral or disinterested. You think you are talking about anAmerican novel, but before you are well begun, you findyourself reflecting on the exercise of power in the world. Thisdoesn't happen when you talk about Ulysses. (4)

Donoghue calls America one of the few countries inthe world which had "a sense of a particulardestiny" from the beginning. Therefore, the "originand its aftermath must be peculiarly tense. . . . Allit can do in

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the meantime is live up to that destiny or renounceit" (56). Hinojosa's characters suffer from thenecessity of living up to and renouncing theirparticular destinies, and in this they are connectedto all fictional heroes who must choose one way oflife over another. Of course, the American myth hasmany manifestations: the New Eden, the new worldand new identity, the great democracy, thewilderness/frontier, the aristocracy of worth, thearistocracy of wealth, and isolation and inclusion.The list goes on. Still the myth endures: it issufficiently powerful to withstand myriadfragmentations. American literature and Americanminds are preoccupied with this myth, and nomatter what their points of view, they cannotescape its existence or its force.

Hinojosa's Death Trip presents another perspectiveon American myth, a perspective that finally helpsus to see Hinojosa as more "American" and less"Chicano." R. W. B. Lewis's observations on theAmerican novelist express the dilemma in whichHinojosa and his characters find themselves:

The solitary hero and the alien tribe; "the simple genuine selfagainst the whole world"this is still the given for the Americannovelist. The variable is this: the novelist's sense of the initial

tensionwhatever it is confronting, or whether it is poten-

Page 202

tially tragic; whether the tribe promises love, or whether itpromises death. (111)

Hinojosa vacillates, and rightly so, for the journeyhis characters make is potentially tragicand yetultimately comforting; in a sense, the "alien tribe"promises both love and death, love in the sense ofa kind of acceptance and security, but a death ofthe old self. Still, despite such wrenchingcircumstances, Hinojosa puts his faith in whatLeslie Fiedler calls the "chief effective religion" ofmodern Americaoptimism ("Novel and America"135). Partly as a result of this outlook, the seriesultimately celebrates educational and materialadvantage over ethnic homogeneity. Hinojosa'sacceptance of this phenomenon may reflect hisawareness of the perversion of the AmericanDream; nevertheless, in twentieth-century America,there is no alternative, except in a spiritual sense.One cannot truly escape to the wilderness becausethere is no wilderness there. Neither can one fighthis way through the wilderness and enter a newEden, at least not literally; for Hinojosa's charactersthe Anglo world stands as metaphor for the oldAmerican idea of "wilderness." For them, the Edenof economic, social, and political parity is at the

same time a wilderness composed of racialdiscrimination and other more subtle psychologicalbarriers. One cannot simply stay put or retreat fromthis struggle because

Page 203

another powerful component of American myth isalso at work: the necessity of creating a newidentity in a new world. As Wright Morris says ofthe American writer,

The true territory ahead is what he must imagine for himself.He will recognize it by its strangeness, the lonely pilgrimagethrough which he attained it, and through the window of hisfiction he will breathe the air of his brave new world. (365)

Each of these aspects of American myth contains itsown dialectic. One strives both toward and against.As a consequence, the dramatic tension of the KlailCity Death Trip Series comes from an elementalambivalence about the loss of the old identity andthe shaping of a new one. The often wrenchingtransformation of the minority into a being who is,for all practical purposes, one of the majority is thecentral issue for Rolando Hinojosa and his fictionalworld. All but the novels Partners in Crime andBecky and Her Friends depict a world that is eitherdead or dying; this is the world that Hinojosa andhis characters have left behind, both literally andfiguratively. It is only a memory, a sketch, aportrait. Yet we come to see that no alternativeexists, and we cannot really fault Hinojosa for thenew tempo of life found in

Page 204

Partners and Becky. As Richard Howard has said ofJames Wright,

We must not succumb to the temptation of despising a poet'screated world because he has desisted from it; indeed it israther our obligation, when a convention has been effected andanother covenant vouchsafed, to trace connections, to showthe Old Adam lurking about the confines of the New Jerusalem.(567)

In the end, the Death Trip is optimistic, even oddlyromantic. Despite the awesome barriers, Hinojosa'sheroes make it to the other side. A change inpsychosocial-political-economic geography createsa new world and a new identity. This change ispeculiarly American, brought on by what seems attimes the almost demonic character of democracy,as it is described by Henry James, Sr., in aquotation R. W. B. Lewis uses as epigraph to achapter of The American Adam entitled ''The CaseAgainst the Past":

Democracy . . . is revolutionary, not formative. It is born ofdenial. It comes into existence in the way of denyingestablished institutions. Its office is rather to destroy the

Page 205

old works, than fully to reveal the new. (Lewis 13)

The painfulness and the enduring sense of lossengendered by such a "revolution" is made evidentby the Klail City Death Trip Series, and yet theirony of Hinojosa's title becomes double-edged bythe end of the series, with as much emphasis onthe destination as on what is left behind. What isnewly created stands in opposition to what hasbeen destroyed. Yet Hinojosa seems eager toagree with Wordsworth that in spite of what is lost,"Other gifts / Have followed; for such loss, I wouldbelieve / Abundant recompense."

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Index

A

Allsup, Carl, 136-38

American Dream, 10, 13, 33-34, 41, 202;

in literature, 6, 9, 120, 121-22, 134, 200-201, 203

Anaya, Rudolfo, 30

Anglo culture, 8-9, 20, 28, 44, 66, 171, 173

Arnold, Matthew, 6, 91, 146

Arte Público Press, 23, 145-46

autobiographical elements, 4-5, 15-17, 79, 101,111-14, 117, 119-22, 124, 129, 132-33, 171, 179-80

Avedano, Fausto, 23

B

Bakhtin, M. M., 121-23

Banta, George, 46

Becky and Her Friends, 15, 23, 83-84, 89, 92, 159,163-193, 203

Bildungsroman, 121

Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 22, 23

Bless Me, Ultima (Anaya), 39-40

Bowden, Edwin T., 8, 12

Boyd, Michael, 124, 126, 131-32

Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 51-52, 68, 95, 143, 144

Busby, Mark, 74, 76, 102

C

Calderón, Héctor, 39

Carranza, Eliu, 35-36

characters, 5, 10;

Buenrostro, Rafe, 3-6, 10-15, 66, 70, 72, 73, 84,87, 118, 129, 141, 146-56, 165, 185-93;

Echevarría, Esteban, 70, 80-81, 89-90, 160;

Escobar, Becky, 15, 66, 130, 164, 172-79;

Galindo, P., 70, 90, 97, 101, 107-108, 110-14,

128, 142, 143, 160, 180;

Malacara, Jehú, 3-6, 1015, 66, 70, 72, 73, 87,94-95, 118, 140-41, 144, 164, 165

Chicano, 43, 145;

critics, 2930, 48, 75, 92;

literature, 1, 29-31, 48, 51-54, 103, 109, 199-200;

movement, 34-38, 51, 197-98

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Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, 40-41

The Chicanos: As We See Ourselves (Trejo), 42-43

Chipman, Donald, 19-20, 46

Cisnéros, Sandra, 4

civil rights movement, 21-22, 34-35

Claros Varones de Belken, 13, 14, 23, 70, 73, 86-87, 89, 92, 118, 129, 159

Continuance and Change (Morris), 90

continuity and change, 57, 59, 60-61, 63, 70-72,74, 83, 89-90, 92, 117-18, 138-39, 144, 155, 165,168, 181, 203, 204

Cooper, James Fenimore, 7-8, 59-60, 71

corrido, 11-12, 85, 97-110, 157

Cota-Cárdenas, Margarita, 142, 143

Cruz, Julia, 23

D

A Dance to the Music of Time (Powell), 71, 123-24

Dear Rafe, 14, 23, 70, 73, 87, 89, 118, 141, 144-46, 158, 167

Donoghue, Denis, 10, 200

E

Editorial Justa Publications, 22, 23

El Paso, Texas, 21

Estampas del Valle y otras obras. See Valley, The

F

Faulkner, William, 59, 60, 73-74, 76, 124, 132

Fiedler, Leslie, 120, 202

folklore, 18, 102, 135

Ford, Ford Madox, 60

frontier motif, 8-9, 163-64

G

García, Ed, 120, 168

García, Mario T. 36-37

Generaciones y semblanzas. See Klail City

HHardwick, Elizabeth, 69-70, 127

heroes, 11, 72-73, 100-101, 103, 204

Hinojosa, Rolando, 2-3, 15-17, 35, 69, 91, 92-93,129-30, 182, 196;

awards of, 16-17, 22;

books of, 22-24, 160-61;

characters of, 10-15, 62, 64, 66, 70-73, 79, 82,83, 109, 118, 128, 141-43, 145, 164, 197;

education of, 15-16;

method of, 67, 73, 94, 117-18, 125-26, 158-

Page 219

61, 164, 170, 171, 180, 202;

on education, 37, 139-40, 167;

on literature, 30, 31-32, 37-38, 42, 68, 103, 107;

point of view, 67, 94-95, 126, 127, 135;

subject matter of, 22, 27-28, 33-34, 41, 48-50,57-58, 82, 86, 87, 163, 174

Howard, Richard, 204

I

Ireland, 17-18

isolation, 11-12

J

James, Henry, 12, 189-90

Johnston, Jill, 123, 128, 134

Joyce, James, 17, 101, 124, 131

Justa Publications, 23

K

Karolides, Nicholas, 163Kellman, Steven, 132, 134, 135

King Ranch, 18

Klail City, 13, 22-23, 39, 57, 73, 81-82, 87, 88-89,90, 92, 98, 101, 107, 128, 158

Klail City Death Trip Series, 1, 22-24, 33, 56-57,124, 201;

chronology of, 13-15, 57, 82, 86, 183;

conflict in, 13, 87-88, 203;

history in, 57-58, 61, 63, 118, 131, 157, 167, 183

Korean Love Songs, 14, 23, 56, 70, 82, 83, 118,145, 154-58, 167

L

language, 48-50, 52-53

Leal, Luis, 97

Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 7-8, 59

Léon, Arnoldo de, 47, 195

Léon-Portillo, Miguel, 140

Lessing, Doris, 59, 60, 178

Levin, Harry, 17

Lewis, R. W. B., 132, 201, 204

Limón, José, 51

M

Marquéz, García, 29

Mejía, Jaime Armin, 145

Mexican-Americans, and academics, 36, 41-42, 53,182, 198;

and Anglo conflict, 66-67, 87, 93, 98, 104, 106,107, 140-41, 160, 168, 195-96;

assimilation, 169, 170;

community, 9-10, 13, 21, 27, 28-29, 35, 45-46,66-67, 76, 87, 135, 136, 147, 157, 166, 181;

women, 175-80

Mexico, 20

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Mi querido Rafa. See Dear Rafe

Miller, Henry, 132

Montenegro, Marilyn, 44

moralism, 175, 192

Morris, Robert, 57, 61, 62-63, 69, 75, 82, 90, 123

Morris, Wright, 203

movies, 64

My Name is Aram (Saroyan), 76, 81

mystery novel, 175

N

Northcutt, Alana, 179

Notas, Generacíones y Brechas. See Klail City

O

Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de, 38, 198-99

P

Paredes, Américo, 41-42, 48, 51, 98, 107, 110

Partners in Crime, 15, 23, 89, 92, 101, 159, 163,164-193, 203

Penzenstadler, Joan, 67

Pierce, Frank C., 46

plot, 64, 67-68, 82, 125

political issues, 18-19, 30-48, 86, 92, 103, 115,180, 195, 197, 198

Powell, Anthony, 71, 123-24

R

racial issues, 6, 9-10, 14-15, 19, 20-21, 33, 47-48,136-37;

in novels, 66-67, 85-86, 87-89, 93, 98-99, 114,151-52, 153-54, 160, 181, 191, 195-96

Randolph, Donald, 41, 119-20, 146

Reading America (Donoghue), 200

The Reflexive Novel (Boyd), 124

regionalism, 2-3, 76, 151, 199

Reich, Alice, 35

Reyna, José, 22Ricard, Serge, 33

Rio Grande valley, 17-18, 27-28, 45-49, 58, 61, 85-86, 120, 138-39, 147, 184

Rites and Witnesses: A Comedy, 14, 23, 89, 118,120, 158, 159, 167

Rivera, Tomas, 41-42

Rocard, Marciénne, 30-31, 32, 51

S

Saldívar, José David, 29, 68, 89, 119, 120

Saldívar, Ramón, 5, 11, 155, 157, 158

Sánchez, Rosaura, 22, 86, 88, 89, 92, 109, 139