Taking the Lid Off
Nabokov, Peter
Taking the Lid Off La Raza. The Mexican Americans, by Stan Steiner. Harper & Row. 418 pp. $8.95. Sal Si Puedes. Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, by Peter Matthiessen. Random House....
...6.95...
...But there are less detectable misconceptions about the Mexican-American historical situation, current way of life, and promise of cultural contribution to America which are shared by armchair liberal and redneck alike...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic and historian...
...Its principal creative act was detailing the "Spiritual Plan of Aztlan," referring to the Aztec designation for their northern domain...
...He is not disappointed...
...The back-breaking work, the relationships with frustrated against-the-wall growers, the sense of an America thrown away to the lords of money, asphalt, and confrontation, is relieved only by the serene power of Matthiessen's central figure, Chavez, and his courageous movement towards, as the Matthiessen subtitle reads, "The New American Revolution...
...What white America has permitted itself to absorb, and to stereotype, about Mexican Americans—or La Raza, as they now proclaim themselves— is even worse...
...He has begun announcing himself as a chicano of La Raza...
...The narrative is also an original piece of consciously ecological reportage...
...This is Cesar Chavez, a man responsible for his actions...
...He reports regularly in these pages on quality paperbacks...
...There is some basic relearning necessary, say Steiner's Mexican Americans, who range from back alley urban organizers to hard bitten villagers to chicano intellectuals...
...Reviewed by Peter Nabokov White America knows next to nothing about its Mexican-American fellow citizens...
...PETER NABOKOV wrote "Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid," a first-hand report of the militant Spanish-American uprising in New Mexico in 1967...
...Today chicano youth know that education is used to perpetuate this colonialistic relationship by supporting habits of powerlessness, alienation, and negative self-image...
...Steiner studiously avoids comparative analysis of the wide variety of Mexican-American radicalism and diversely gifted figureheads he parades before the reader...
...In Matthiessen's estimation, these are felt by Chavez to be drags on his mission, the fulfillment of a humanistic vision of meaningful living which transcends color and culture...
...A consideration of both the Steiner and Matthiessen books poses the unavoidable question of whether there is time for any of us to be foremost a member of any race before becoming a member of the human race...
...The "Frito Bandito" and "Always-Late-For-The-Revolution" television crassness rises out of bedrock racism...
...Then he uses these to introduce themes which he illustrates by interweaving historical data and contemporary comments drawn from villages, barrios, and fields where he interviewed...
...Thirdly, the treatment of the Mexican American at the hands of the white expansionists has been a dual assault...
...The interconnected-ness of work, environment, and sustenance are ever present: The farm worker toils in chemical-infested earth beneath hot, glaring clouds of dust, steam, and pesticide vapor, picking contaminated fruits which will be doctored by more laboratory substances to make them appear delicious...
...Instead he welds a mosaic of set scenes...
...First, the Mexican-American people are not an immigrant population...
...attempts to introduce the New Race in all its voices, styles, and habitats...
...By avoiding the burden of telling a story, his journalistic survey also avoids the job of trying to get inside the new chicano self-assertiveness...
...We are told, but we do not see...
...Both works seem to agree, however, that in this task the chicano has arf edge...
...For many reasons, that growth transpired underground, away from the successive eyes of Spanish military, Comanche marauders, and Anglo military...
...Matthiessen has been criticized for idolizing Chavez, but I consider the criticism irrelevant...
...At issue were thirty demands which are more or less those stated by all the leaders and followers whose utterances Steiner stitches together: recognition in texts and classes of Mexican-American history and culture, bilingual and bicultural training for all school personnel, Spanish language library materials, and community control of schools...
...Most recently this tie has been consciously ceremonialized as the militant Denver chicano front, Crusade for Justice, hosted the second chicano Youth Liberation Conference...
...Matthiessen seems to make us privy to Chavez' ability to step through the painstaking details necessary to the organizer's trade, which must actually be a life rather than a profession, for it draws on total intuition and commitment and, as Matthiessen says, a sharing of "this astonishing hope of an evolution in human values...
...These present-tense vignettes are often disturbingly static and tinged with romanticism...
...372 pp...
...Being of native Indian, Mexican, and Spanish origin, the Mexican American feels the Southwest is his mother soil by law of man (the formal land grants) and nature (his tribal American ancestry...
...Economically, they have been treated as the colonized underflow of any conquering tide...
...Steiner's message is that Mexican Americans are taking it no longer...
...In the last decade the Mexican American, from the city barrio to country pueblo, has been taking the lid off his protective invisibility...
...Secondly, a goodly portion of the Mexican-American population is a northward expansion of Mexico's people and folkways, and retains a direct continuity with the southern homeland which does not recognize political boundaries...
...THE REVIEWERS WILLIAM McCANN, a free lance critic, edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...That was the crude count in 1960, and it doesn't look as if the count will be any more accurate, or less insulting, this year...
...Peter Matthiessen's Sal Si Puedes, a superbly conceived and written chronicle of Cesar Chavez' self-discovery as an organizer and his triumphant organizing of Mexican-American field workers in California, does permit us to see...
...In the profile which emerges from Matthiessen's relaxed discussions, impressions, skillful interviewing, and quietly worked descriptions, an earthy, aloof, spiritual, immediate subject takes shape...
...In March, 1968, a spontaneous walkout of 15,000 chicano high school students turned East Los Angeles upside down...
...But we are most definitely not looking at a manifestation of La Raza or machismo (chicano manliness) consciousness...
...Through a novelist's ability to sweep us into processes of human development, Matthiessen pursues the elusive Chavez, his life story, and his organizing techniques...
...He has also become insistent that the Anglo-American newcomer to his Southwest recognize his prior cultural claim...
...The 1970 census form ignores the presence of by now many more than 3.5 million members of their hybrid ancestry, language, color, and culture...
...Culturally, alienation, powerlessness, and anonymity have been the fruits of their servitude...
...Among his books are "Degas Pastels" and "Modigliani the Sculptor...
...Stan Steiner's La Raza...
...In a sense," comments Steiner, "the schools are the safest places to continue the guerrilla warfare of the cultures which began with the 'Conquest' of the Southwest...
...Ever since the Sixteenth Century Spanish settlements in the Southwest, there have been Spanish, Indian, and Mexican intermarriage and chicano community growth...
...Matthiessen can paint the soft nightmare of the remade, defoliated, poisoned California earthscape with surrealistic force...
Vol. 34 • July 1970 • No. 7
