1. Satire: An Introduction

Satire is frequently associated with ancient Roman writers. For many scholars the works of Lucilius, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Seneca, among others, stand as the initiators and models of the genre. The term satire is also identified with a number of English authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Defoe. Thus, while research on the Roman and English art of satire has grown considerably, especially during the last fifíy years, it is a genre rarely considered when studying other traditions or periods. Yet, the term satire has generally had two distinct connotations: it is employed in a restricted sense to discuss specific texts—usually referring to the Roman and English models—or else it is broadly applied to a wide range of expressions.1 Because this inconsistent practice involves a variety of generic discourses, defining satire and distinguishing it from other rhetorical conventions has remained an elusive if not a debatable subject.2

In spite of the many difficulties posed by the study of satire—particularly its resistance to fit into a neat definition—the attempts to identify it have enriched our knowledge of the genre.3 Most of us can agree, for example, with Samuel Johnson's assessment of satire as an attack against someone or something considered to merit opposition. Likewise, few can object to the observation that the target of satiric attack is likely to be a fictional entity whose historical reality may or may not be apparent.4 It is also generally accepted that satire exists along a continuum that extends from one extreme of invective to another of the comic or, as Northrop Frye suggests, that satire maintains an equilibrium between tragedy and comedy. Indeed, as Robert C. Elliott has pointed out, there exists great variability within the corpus of satire:

No strict definition can encompass the complexity of a word that signifies, on one hand, a kind of literature—as when one speaks of the satires of the Roman poet Horace or calls the American novelist Nathan[ael]

2 Chicano Satire

West's A Cool Million a satire—and, on the other, a mocking spirit or tone that manifests itself in many literary genres but can also enter into almost any kind of human communication. Wherever wit is employed to expose something foolish or vicious to criticism, there satire exists, whether it be in song or sermon, in painting or political debate, on television or in the movies. in this sense satire is everywhere. ("Satire" 182)

In the Western tradition, satire is associated with a number of stereotyped figures who are customarily subjected to hostility, humor, or else indifference. These negative figures may ultimately be traced to marginal groups or individuals who are frequently subjected to censure or abuse. Characteristics attributed to the marginal naturally are considered a normative deviation and stand in opposition to the ideal principles and behavior upheld by a dominant group. Thus, stigmatized members of a social group may be subjected to the antagonism or even the hatred of majorities who feel threatened, as occurred in Germany to the Jews, the Gypsies, and the handicapped during World War II. But a more common response toward the marginal, when not perceived as an immediate threat to the established notions of power and prestige, is censure, ridicule, or indifference. Such tensions create conditions that enable satire to prosper. Satire has, therefore, a direct relationship to social history. It is a genre that—along with others to which it is closely allied: comedy, humor, jest, parody, wit, irony, and so forth—includes a variety of rhetorical devices designed to represent the marginal.

In the ridicule made of foreigners and their alien traits such as language, customs, and values, there lies an implicit reaffirmation of the linguistic, social, and ethical standards of a dominant group. This quality of marginality, however, is not confined to individuals recognized as distinctively extraneous to a group. The whore and the cuckold, for example, are figures that contrast markedly with the dignified stance of the faithful couple—a model embodying the ideals of love and marriage in a given social order. A parallel function underlies such figures as the madman, the sinner, the fool, the delinquent, the miser, the coward, and the cripple, negative characters who have positive counterparts in the portrayal of the ruler, the saint, the sage, the citizen, the patron, the hero, and the athlete. The Hegemonic Spectrum is a fragmentary, conceptual version of those values and figures that represent the norm and its deviations. It is a framework that explains the mutual dependency that exists between normative and deviant qualities.

On the extreme left of the Hegemonic Spectrum is a list of negative values that represent basic threats to human existence. These general abstractions convey the idea of exclusion, dispossession, and

death, hence generally are associated with alienation or nonbeing. On the extreme right are their opposites, depicting life-oriented principles of harmony or being.5 These two extremes arise from the concrete experience of a people and represent the standards by which individuals and groups measure the meaning and significance of their lives.6 Social groups recognize both of these categories metaphorically through fictional figures that personify the ideal (normative) and the negative (marginal), also identified as the subject and the other, and listed respectively as the second and third columns.7 The historical axis-located as a middle column-depicts actual experience, serving as a mediation between harmony and alienation and their respective personifications as fictional figures.8 Implicit in the ideal figures are their unfavorable counterparts and, conversely, the representation of the negative involves their positive contraries. That is, these fictional figures are in a dialectical relationship: one cannot exist or be mentioned without overtly or tacitly acknowledging the presence and influence of a logical opposite. But it must be noted that these negative and positive figures are

4 Chicano Satire

not depicted solely according to the basic outline suggested in the Hegemonic Spectrum. The Characters of Theophrastus, for instance, demonstrates how the personification of single values can only produce what E. M. Forster (67) has called "flat" or "two-dimensional people." Thus, the hero is likely to be portrayed as a courageous individual who also possesses strength, knowledge, and sexual integration and who might be represented as a ruler, an athlete, a sage, or a blending of these roles and their characteristics. The coward, for example, may show fear as well as reflect ignorance, destitution, infirmity, and sexual disintegration while adopting the personalities and traits of the madman, the sinner, and the delinquent. Therefore, even though each of these figures may be associated with a predominant attribute—positive or negative—its personification is likely to borrow from various other kindred qualities.9

These figures are intelligible only within particular cultural contexts, since their significance is evident only in relation to the specific conventions of a group.10 This grounding in history explains the evolution of fictional figures. The marginal, for instance, may be identified at various times with the barbarian, the demonic, the mentally ill, or an exponent of a false philosophy, religion, or political belief. At various historical periods, the concept of wisdom has been depicted according to the principles established by art, science, or economics. Similarly, as Joseph Campbell (391) has demonstrated, the figure of the ideal man may appear as a hunter, a warrior, or a soldier. In contemporary times the hero is often depicted as a spy, a detective, or a space traveler, lonely figures that must pursue individual quests within inhospitable and threatening worlds.

The Hegemonic Spectrum, however, includes a few representative categories and figures that have become conventional in Western tradition. A comprehensive schema would require a discussion of all the possible values and figures that cultural groups have devised to stand for the norms and their corresponding deviant doubles. Indeed, religions, tribes, regional and ethnic groups, nations, professions, classes, fraternal organizations, and any other social groupings, formal and informal, that appeal to their members' solidarity will deploy figures that represent the norms in opposition to their marginal parallels. For present purposes, however, this paradigm may suffice as an illustration of the dialectical relationship that exists between the negative and the positive values of a group.

The Hegemonic Spectrum provides a conceptual framework that can help us understand some fundamental differences between satire and comedy—the way in which each genre offers a distinct treat-

An Introduction 5

ment of the marginal—and the assumptions held by their authors and audiences. In comedy those who are marginal are subjected to ridicule or abuse, but this debasement serves principally to amuse by reinforcing established norms, given that comic figures, as inoffensive beings, do not challenge the values and symbols of the status quo. The satiric attack, in contrast, has a primary purpose to ridicule and invalidate the normative principles and interpretations upheld by victims who are portrayed with scorn. Consequently, the satirist frequently is perceived as a subversive whose art represents an opposing, incompatible, and overwhelming evaluative norm that challenges the legitimacy of cherished normative values and figures." The history of literary culture includes many satirists who have been censured, punished, exiled, and even murdered for ridiculing the beliefs and attributes of powerful figures or groups.

The satiric attack, however, may be concealed through dissembling techniques, as modern students of satire have discovered. For instance, an author may adopt the persona of an unreliable narrator whose dramatic function is to discredit the voice of the first-person narrator. Yet another difference between the two genres is that comedy does not place in doubt the group's hegemony, while satire does cast such doubt. Indeed, satire's repertoire includes figures who are treated or perceived in marginal terms, but who represent a rival norm.12 Since the abstract values shown in the Hegemonic Spectrum are intangibles in the sense that they serve as general conceptions common to all human existence (the notions of order, knowledge, wealth, chaos, ignorance, fear, destitution, and the like, only acquire meaning when rendered within the conventions of a particular cultural group), it follows then that historically the normative figures that evolve from emergent cultures will displace those that represent a declining or weaker hegemony.13 Satire is also present when rival groups appeal to the loyalty of members who must decide upon the validity of opposing value systems.14 The evolution of satire is thus a fine register of cultural change and a record of the ingenuity of groups to gain ascendancy over normative space.

The presence of this normative-deviant polarity may open possibilities in the analysis of the discourse of "the subject" as well as in the reexamination, or recovery, of discourses ("the other") that have been (are) customarily silenced, ignored, or discredited-for example, those of alternative gender, ethnic, racial, or class persuasions. From this polar opposition may be drawn a number of important implications

6 Chicano Satire

1. Human conduct is characterized by a continuous attempt to acquire, preserve, or deny normative privilege.

2. The subject and the other are concepts that fundamentally discriminate what is personal, familiar, or understandable from what is alien, strange, or unknown.

3. The other is largely an imaginary creation of the subject to represent an antithetical (generally negative) image of ideal values and practices.

4. The subject cannot exist without the other and vice versa.

5. The subject creates elaborate principles, procedures, and systems—that is, ideologies, laws, and institutions—that serve to justify and enforce the validity of norms and to discredit, oppose, or silence the deviations associated with the other.

6. Norms and deviations are abstractions that only acquire meaning when encoded within the distinctive cultural conventions of specific groups in particular historical circumstances.

7. Literary texts, conventions, and authors (also teachers, critics, and theoreticians) are instrumental in the affirmation or rejection of normative paradigms.

In the discussion that follows, I assume that Chicano cultural history is inscribed in the satiric discourse of Chicano literary texts." This discourse, as we shall see, is an in-group response to the distinctive perspectives derived from historical experience. That is, since a significant period of Chicano history has existed within the confines of two intersecting and frequently conflictive cultural domains—the Mexican and the Anglo-American normative models—Chicano satirists have expressed diverse attitudes toward these conditions.16

The Varieties of the Chicano Experience

Cultural variation among Chicanos is of fundamental importance. The Spanish-speaking population who until the nineteenth century inhabited what is now the southwestern United States shared a great many similarities with other colonial groups throughout Spanish America. The role of this group in establishing the foundations of Chicano culture, however, has yet to be properly acknowledged.17 The constant immigration to the United States from Mexico since the second half of the past century has provided another significant cultural current. This immigrant influence—consisting mostly of workers and their families from rural areas in central and northern Mexico—was particularly prominent during the Mexican Revolu-

An Introduction 7

tion (1910-1920) and the Bracero Program (1942-1947). Beginning during World War I, but especially after World War II, a cultural variant emerged whose objectives included active participation in Anglo-American sociocultural life. Identified as Mexican American, this group entered the public sphere along with other ethnic groups from various national origins and with similarly constructed names: that is, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and so forth. While still maintaining a strong Mexican cultural identity, Mexican Americans gained entry into many areas of American economic, political, and cultural life that until 1940 had rarely included Spanish-surnamed Americans.

In the 1960s there arose among the people of Mexican descent in the United States a heightened sense of their historical existence.18 This experience, until then absorbed largely within a familial or interfamilial focus, during this decade began to be formulated as a discourse that transcended the limits of the immediate community and soon became unified under the in-group term Chicano. During this period, and as an artistic consequence of this new perspective, Chicano creative writers helped to forge a vital literary movement, and a new generation of authors emerged who felt encouraged to express themes and viewpoints that until then were considered unworthy of artistic representation.19 The climate in which this name was adopted has provided it with its political connotations.20 Finally, a more recent cultural perspective—often associated with the term Hispanic—has been used to include the Post-1970s emerging urban middle-class professionals who, as had some of their Mexican American predecessors, have sought total integration into diverse areas of the American cultural mainstream (Treviño 71).

Although these various Chicano cultural groupings have appeared at distinct historical periods, frequent overlappings occur. It is thus plausible, for example, for a family to include members with contrasting cultural features: that is, a woman imbued with a colonial cultural perspective married to a Mexican immigrant whose children identify themselves, their experiences, or aspirations as either Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, or Hispanic. Indeed, all these cultural or historical currents discussed ought not to be considered rigidly nor in isolation from each other. Many other cultural complexities could be found. In the communities of Mexican origin in the Midwest, for example, an immigrant population predominates, whereas in areas along the Mexican border an active biculturalism erases the sharp distinctions among the various cultural currents. Additional or alternative distinctions could certainly be drawn based on gender, class, age, racial makeup, regional origin,

8 Chicano Satire

economics, or a combination of these as well as other characteristics. In actual practice a people's culture is best perceived as an uneven continuum with detours, gaps, and, as is generally observed when discussing cultural taxonomy, with frequent blending, exceptions, and incidence of ambivalence.

A cursory examination of Chicano texts reveals how cultural diversity is intimately linked to contrasting historical perspectives and the emergence of literary themes. For example, in a novel published in San Francisco in 1885 (The Squatter and the Don, written by María Amparo Ruiz Burton under the pseudonym C. Loyal), the presence of an external, alien, Anglo world overpowering the familiarity and comfort of Mexican culture is central. This response is portrayed by a member of the Spanish-speaking elite who lost their privileged status after the United States occupied the Californian territories during the nineteenth century. Ruiz Burton's work is important insofar as it voices some significant historical events surrounding the lives of the native inhabitants known as Californios.

In contrast to Ruiz Burton's criticism stands Leo Carrillo's The California I Love (1961), a nostalgic reconstruction of the author's family past when caballeros and señoritas presumably led a genteel life, singing and dancing while upholding admirable ancestral virtues. Carrillo's pride is founded on his descent from Californian founding families, a social and cultural legacy that enhances his life and provides him with dignity in an Anglo-American world. Thus, Carrillo's perspective is a variant Mexican American testimony of the colonial and postcolonial experience, filtered through family memoirs. His autobiography illustrates the pride felt by a Spanish-speaking Californian whose lineage allegedly posits him in a superior social and cultural status. Both Ruiz Burton and Carrillo lament the loss of property and social standing and look with nostalgia toward the past.

A markedly different response is offered by Texan Chicanos who deeply resented the abuses Anglo-Texans perpetrated on their communities. Such feelings appear in ballads such as "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (1901), studied by Américo Paredes in "With His Pistol in His Hand." The dilemma posed by Gregorio Cortez is essentially an ethical one and may be stated as follows: violence is totally justified whenever an individual acts to defend self and family in an interethnic conflict and under a system devoid of due process. To his contemporary Tejanos (Mexican Texans), the figure of Cortez soon became a symbol of their conflictive history during the previous fifíy years. Because his figure embodied many deeply felt issues among Chicanos, his heroic exploits transcended an

An Introduction 9

immediate audience, and his ballad continues to be sung today throughout the United States and northern Mexico.

Another literary example is provided by J. Humberto Robles in his play Los desarraigados (1962). In this drama an older Mexican immigrant couple who reside in the United States suffer exploitation and homesickness as they helplessly watch the self-defeat of their children, who grow up amid moral decadence. The protagonist in the play is a rebellious upper middle-class young woman from Mexico City who reconverts into a dutiful daughter and becomes fully appreciative of the superior cultural values of Mexican society, after observing the plight of her Mexican immigrant hosts in the United States. Her decision to return to Mexico solves her immediate personal conflict, but this denouement has larger significance, since it involves a comparison between the moral values of Mexico and those of the United States. The message of the play is that Chicano problems are self-inflicted and would cease to exist upon their return to Mexico, where there still is morality, family integrity, and the possibility of achieving a fulfilling life.

A contrasting perspective is provided by Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory (1982). In this autobiographical account, Rodriguez asserts his Americanism by pointing out every possible social and cultural element that no longer identifies him as a Mexican. Drawing from his individual experience, Rodriguez portrays himself as a cultural martyr whose assimilation has led to alienation from his parents, his studies, and his cultural roots. This loss, however, is a necessary step for his evolution as a sophisticated urban intellectual. Rodriguez's basic tenet is that total Chicano assimilation into Anglo-American life represents the only viable alternative for the children of Mexican immigrants.

The texts of Robles and Rodriguez do not allow for the existence of a Chicano historical perspective that deviates from a strict notion of what is genuinely Mexican or American.21 The implicit claim in both works is that Chicanos must adhere to "legitimate" cultural norms. Theirs are the views held in the cultural mainstream of Mexico and of the United States, where Chicanos have been portrayed as anomalies suffering alienation either from Mexican culture or else as the result of a deficient assimilation into Anglo-American cultural patterns. It is not surprising, therefore, that upon their publication, Los desarraigados and Hunger were respectively given the immediate and enthusiastic support of influential and sympathetic circles.22

Undoubtedly, both Mexican and Anglo-American influence have been important in the shaping of Chicano culture. In spite of their

10 Chicano Satire

presence for several generations before the arrival of Anglo-Americans in the territories that are now the United States, prior to World War II the status of Chicanos remained as that of aliens or "Mexicans." Indeed, during this period Chicano cultural identity and community life remained relatively isolated and unknown to outsiders and was closely aligned to Mexico.23 Yet, the demographic changes that have occurred since the first quarter of the twentieth century have brought many Chicanos into a wide range of Anglo-American sociocultural areas. One key factor in the interpretation of Chicano culture, therefore, lies in recognizing the various strategies that Chicanos have devised for over a hundred and fifíy years in blending, adapting, reformulating, accepting or rejecting, one set of cultural values or the other.

The Anglo-American impact on this northernmost Mexican, or southernmost American, population during the nineteenth century is a revealing indicator of the role the United States has played toward its Spanish-speaking continental neighbors. From this perspective the cultural history of Chicanos is, in many important ways , a microcosm of the relationship between Latin America and the United States. The roots of Anglo-American antagonism toward Spaniards, Mexicans—and, by implication, other Latin Americans has been the subject of an excellent study by Raymund Paredes, who summarizes his findings as follows: "When Americans began actually to encounter Mexicans in Texas, Santa Fe, and other Mexican territories after 1821, their initial responses were conditioned primarily by the traditions of hispanophobia and anti-Catholicism.... Other 19th-century responses to Mexicans reveal the same process: old images received new justifications and lived on. Some are with us still" ("The Origins" 158).24

But for Chicanos the disdain of Mexicans can also represent a conflictive issue. At a time (1913) when the Mexican Revolution caused alarm in the United States and American intervention seemed an imminent possibility, the New Mexican Elfego Baca ironically pointed out:

Sobre todo al tiempo de que hubiera intervención los Hispano-Americanos en los Estados Unidos vendríamos a quedar más mal que a la presente estamos, porque en México no nos quieren por agringados y en los Estados Unidos tampoco porque llevamos el nombre Mexicano.... Este es el juego de la correa, si la ensarta pierde y si no también. (Cited in "Los Mexicanos")

[So, if there is to be an invasion, we Hispano-Americans in the United States would be worse off than we are now because they do not want us in Mexico, since we have acculturated ("gringoized") to the Anglo,

An Introduction 11

and neither are we accepted in the United States because we are Mexicans.... This is like the game of the strap, you lose whether you put it in or not.]

Baca's attitude anticipates by many decades the critical perspective that surfaced among Chicano groups during the 1960s. He thus acknowledges the inadequate conditions of his people: "más mal que a la presente estamos" (worse than we are now), while calling for a united front to recognize their cultural distance from Mexico as well as differences with Anglo-Americans. This is a reference to the complex history of Chicanos and to the variety of perspectives that inform their responses. His allusion to Mexico and the United States is also a recognition of a double cultural influence: the former provides an in-group perspective, while the latter represents an outside world that must be conquered at an individual level.21 This intertwined evaluating process must precede any discussion in the history of Chicano discourse and requires observing the shift from a Mexican-oriented cultural base to an Anglo-American frame of reference.26

Chicano Comic and Satiric Figures

An early observer of Anglo-American influence on Mexican communities was the Mexican Lieutenant José María Sánchez, who during the years 1828 and 1829 served as a member of the Comisión de Limites en la Frontera con Texas (Commission to Oversee the Border Limits with Texas). In his diary of his travel to the United States-Mexican border region, Lieutenant Sánchez described a Mexican group who showed signs of cultural assimilation:

The Mexicans that live here are very humble people, and perhaps their intentions are good, but because of their education and environment they are ignorant not only of the customs of our great cities, but even of the occurrences of our Revolution, excepting a few persons who have heard about them. Accustomed to the continued trade with the North Americans, they have adopted their customs and habits, and one may say truly that they are not Mexicans except by birth, for they even speak Spanish with marked incorrectness. (283)

Implicit in this commentary is a sense of alienation toward Chicanos that is still found today among many observers from Mexico. In thus excluding them as cultural peers, Lieutenant Sánchez fails to realize that an Anglo-American observer during this period would consider the group as Mexican. Indeed, the population at Nacogdoches described by Sánchez was subjected to continuous abuse during

12 Chicano Satire

the same period, and ten years later, in 1838, according to Arnoldo De León, "many Mexicans were killed or expelled" from the region (They Called Them Greasers 78).

Sánchez' observation, however, does not yet carry the derogatory tone employed two decades later toward the Mexican women who befriended the North American soldiers who invaded Mexico during the war of 1848 and 1849. In his memoirs Antonio García Cubas recalls a popular song of the period, "La pasadita," where the behavior of these women is ridiculed:

Ya las Margaritas
hablan el Inglés
les dicen: me quieres
y responden: yes.
mi entende de monis mucho güeno está. (443)

["Today Margaritas
speak English
they are told: Do you love me?
and they say: yes.
Me understand about moneys is much good."]

This song reveals several aspects that will eventually play a significant role in the figure of the pocho. The parody made of the peasant dialect, with an evident Indian influence: "mucho güeno está" (is much good) reflects the social position of these women, accused by García Cubas as being "meretrices de ínfima calidad" (the lowest type of prostitutes). In the song it is implied that only dishonorable Mexican women would establish relations with the invading enemy soldiers and, then, certainly guided by questionable values. This accusation is synthesized in linguistic terms through the mockery of their awkward imitation of English: "mi entende de monis" (me understand about moneys). The pocho often will be associated with this linguistic and cultural stigma, and his portrayal may also involve the representation of dishonesty in contrast to the virtues implicit in the observance of traditional Mexican norms.27

An important aspect of this song, and a customary feature in Mexican culture, is the parody of the dialects spoken by peasants and Indians. This is conventional in Western culture whereby the rustic is deemed inferior to the urban inhabitant, and characteristics of the fool are attributed to rural behavior.28 There are many antecedents of this practice in literary history. Thus, in the fifíeenth century, Juan de la Encina employed the Sayagüés dialect in order to achieve a humorous effect in his theatrical representations. Later,

An Introduction 13

other Spanish authors of comedy and drama portrayed the rustic as a comic figure—first as a villano, or villager, and then as a courtly gracioso—whose linguistic lapses into dialectal forms or grammatical "mistakes" served to release dramatic tension. In the New World, too, colonial writers-including Fernán González de Eslava (15 34-1601?), Mateo Rosas de Oquendo (1559?-?), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), and Eusebio Vela (1688-1737)-introduced the expressions of native dialects and dialectal Spanish in their portrayal of comic types.29 This convention is also evident in the first Mexican novel, which appeared as a newspaper serial in 1816, El periquillo sarniento, where the picaresque protagonist, Perico, describes his encounter in jail with a naive rustic who seeks his help.

-Pues ha de saber usted que me llamo Cemeterio Coscojales.

-Eleuterio, dirá usted—Le respondi—, o Emeterio, porque Cemeterio no es nombre de santo.

-Una cosa ansi me Ilamo (Fernández de Lizardi 206)

["You should know that my name is Cemeterio Coscoiales."

"You mean Eleuterio," I answered him, "or Emeterio, because Cemeterio is not a saint's name."

"Something like that is my name. . .

Here the comic note consists in suggesting that the rustic does not know his own name and, consequently, has a confused sense of identity. This foolishness leads him to mispronounce Cemeterio-a nonexisting name that resembles the word cementerio (cemetery) instead of the probable Emeterio or Eleuterio, as would correspond within the tradition of naming children after the saints commemorated on their birthdays,

On another occasion Perico accidentally bumps into a peddler of pottery who berates him for destroying his merchandise:

Un diablo se volvió luego que se sintió lastimado de mi mano, y entre mexicano y castellano me dijo:

-Tlacatecotl, mal diablo, Lacrón jijo de un dimoño; ahora lo veremos quien es cada cual. (266)

[He turned against me, like a devil, and feeling the hurt I had caused him, said, speaking half Castilian and half Mexican: "Tlacatecotl, devil, thief son of a demon; we'll now see who is who."]

In this scene the helpless rage of the humble seller who is incapable of expressing himself in Standard Spanish is depicted as ridiculous.30 Thus, we see that in New Spain the prototype of the peninsular rustic underwent a metamorphosis, evolving into the figure of a peasant mestizo or an Indian.

14 Chicano Satire

A significant example of this attitude toward the Mexican rural classes was present during the latter part of the nineteenth century in the attack Guillermo Prieto directed against Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, pointing out the latter's Indian ancestry and the incongruity this represented to his role as promoter of a French intervention in Mexico:

Amo quinequi, Juan Pamuceno,
no te lo plantas el Majestá,
que no es el propio manto y corona,
que to huarache, que to huacal. (17 1)

[Amo quinequi, Juan Pamuceno,
don't place yourself as aristocrat
'cause it ain't proper the cloak and crown
as is your sandals and your crate.]

In this stanza the parody of an Indian who speaks an awkward dialect is employed to remind Almonte of his inappropriate aspirations to establish a native aristocracy around a French court in a Mexican empire. Thus, the figure of Almonte is debased by his association with the symbols of Mexican unskilled workers—sandals and portable crates (huarache and huacal)—contrasted to those of the French nobility he favored: cloak and crown (manto and corona). Because the aristocratic norm is reversed on him, Almonte is portrayed as a satirized figure, incapable of truly attaining the qualities of a European (aristocratic = French) due to his inherently marginal attributes (plebeian = mestizo/Indian).

In this case a normative principle represented by Prieto and the Mexican intelligentsia defeats the party of the French interventionists, turning the comic representation of Almonte into punitive satire. Although Juan Nepomuceno Almonte was the son of José María Morelos y Pavón, one of the leaders of Mexican independence, had a brilliant military and diplomatic record, and possessed a refined culture and education, he is reminded that his racial background confines him to a marginal social and cultural status. Having Prieto, a patriot, defend the Mexican cause by satirizing Almonte's Indian origins, reveals the extent to which the nineteenth-century liberal Mexican intelligentsia felt intimidated by European norms and embarrassed by the presence of Indian populations. The irony of Prieto's satiric attack is that it occurs during a nationalistic period in Mexican history and half a century after the declaration of independence from Spain.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Mexican authors parodied dialectal forms as a comic technique in the description of popular

An Introduction 15

types who frequently mixed Nahuatl with Spanish. Although this practice is common in many Mexican genres—including normal discourse—the theater was a particularly suitable medium for this kind of verbal play, often involving satire.31 Behind these verbal games lies the tendency toward the establishment of a cultural hegemony whose parameters have traditionally been dictated from Mexico City. These comic figures, however, were not always drawn from Mexican reality; often they were directly adapted from Spain. At the beginning of this century, Luis G. Urbina described how these peninsular borrowings took place:

Se necesita ver bien para imitar bien. Los "aguadores" y "léperos" de nuestras revistas son interpretados con maestría entre nosotros; están al alcance de la observación de los artistas.... En cambio, en las piezas de marcado sabor español, en las costumbres populares madrileñas, vemos casi siempre torpeza y vacilación en alguno que otro cómico que no ha ido a España, y que por lo mismo no puede darse exacta cuenta del tipo, y adornarlo y bordarlo como quisiera, y como el autor to ha concebido. (55)

[You have to see precisely in order to imitate accurately. The "watercarriers" and "picaresque Mexican figures" of our revues are interpreted masterfully among us, they are within the reach of the artists.... But in the pieces of marked Spanish flavor, in the popular customs from Madrid, we generally see awkwardness and insecurity among some of the comics who have not gone to Spain and cannot, therefore, understand the type and provide it with the required style, the way the author has conceived it.]

The adaptation of popular types taken from Mexican daily life also took place in the regional theater of Yucatan in the years 1907 through 1926. During this period a number of dramatic representations portraying popular characters were made in zarzuelas (Spanish musical comedies), sainetes and entremeses (one-act farces), and diáogos (dialogues). The creations of this regional theater from southern Mexico included stereotyped figures such as the Turk, the Arab, the Chinese, the policeman, and the Indian and his young peasant girl, who employed a regional dialect as well as bilingual expressions (Magaña Esquivel 17). While in the popular theater of Yucatan some of these figures, especially the mestizo and the Indian, at first portrayed dignified characters, later on their function was circumscribed to comic or marginal roles.

Another example of the satirizing attitude toward figures representative of the rural culture appears in a manuscript belonging to a theatrical company active in Texas at the beginning of the present century. In a play entitled Tenorio en solfa—borrowing a scene from a zarzuela, or popular musical comedy ("Chin Chun Chan")—a rus-

16 Chicano Satire

tic husband-and-wife team demonstrate their amazement, as well as their coarseness, upon their arrival in Mexico City.32 As was customary in this type of comic portrayal, its humor was based on the incongruity between the rural values of the couple and their reactions upon encountering the modern culture of the city. A Mexican revue of the same period, "Las musas del pais" (The national muses), includes a similar scene. In its dialogue the town of Xochimilco (a rural suburb of Mexico City at the time) is identified with the speakers' dialect. A comparison of both of these scripts allows us to trace the process of adaptation of these rural figures into what will later characterize the pocho and its feminine counterpart, the pocha. The attitudes shown by the two couples in the dialogues reveal distinctive audience expectations: in the text from Mexico City, in addition to obvious references to local imagery, the Anglo-Americans are mentioned in the role of tourists; while in the Texan (border) manuscript the verbal play assumes a certain familiarity with spoken English (silki: silk; jotell: hotel). in both dialogues, however, the use of English is portrayed as a foreign language that provokes a comic eff ect.

[El] Si son de pura silqui como disen los gringos....

[Ella] A que tú tan pato pa que pidistis dos camas, olle se dise jotell.

[He: But they are of pure silky, as the gringos call them....

She: Oh, you are so stupid, why did you ask for two beds, listen you say HHHotel.] ([from Texas] Villalongin, Tenorio en solfa)

[Chema] ¿Los gringos?

[Cleta] Crioque si. Esos siñores que parecian unos guamúchiles tiernos

[Chema] ¡Ah! Pos esos meros son. Esos que lo decian "chichiscrais" y ponian el patota onde podian.

[Chema: The gringos? Cleta: I think so. Those guys that looked like the tender guamuchil tree.

Chema: Yea, they are the ones. They used to say "jesuschrist" and would put their big feet wherever they could.] ([from Mexico City] Maria y Campos, "Las musas del pais" 147).

The Texan manuscript (Tenorio en solfa) includes characters that parallel or anticipate the figure of the pocho. At an early stage in the description of this process of cultural adaptation, the references to the conflicts experienced by the Spanish-speaking population in the United States played a secondary or minimal role. Later the pocho and pocha came to portray negative figures whose comic behavior

An Introduction 17

served as an index of deviation from authentic or dignified Mexican cultural patterns.

These representations of non-European comic figures have profound implications for the formation of the cultural paradigm not only in Mexico but in the rest of the continent as well. It reveals the presence of conflictive normative values whereby Latin American national hegemonies based their values on Eurocentric aesthetics that practically relegated the majority of the native populations and, consequently, their cultural expressions—to a status of marginality.33 Thus, underlying the employment of indigenous expressions, regionalisms, and archaisms, as in the examples we have seen, lie the class conflicts caused by the racial and cultural mix that occurred during the colonial period. These examples among the mestizo and Creole groups of Mexico reveal the existence of controlling mechanisms that bar the social mobility of individuals with peasant or Indian racial and cultural traits. Thus, anyone identified with such background and who attempts to transgress the class barriers of this stratified society can expect to be automatically rebuffed. Satire is an effective and telling sign of how these mechanisms of cultural control operate, not only as instruments designed for the protection of the groups who maintain social and economic ascendancy but also as in-group devices that are internalized among the marginal.

The pocho

The term pocho appears as a publicly recognized label in Chicano books, newspapers, theatrical revues, and songs during the 1920s. Its usage assumes a tacit understanding of its meaning by a wide audience, thus suggesting its probable employment at an informal level for some time before.34 Most of the evidence we have from this period is found in the immigrant press that flourished in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.35 An early use of the term pocho appears associated with Californians whose cultural traits were judged to be heavily influenced by Anglo-American language and life-style. But it also was applied to individuals of Mexican rural origin who awkwardly imitated Anglo-American linguistic conventions. Arnold R. Rojas, discussing the language of Californians in the nineteenth century, suggests that the word may be of Indian origin: "About the only Indian word (said to be derived from the Yaqui—and that is debatable) is pochi or, lopped off or bob-tailed. A bob-tailed horse was called 'El Mocho' by Californians, and 'EI Po-

18 Chicano Satire

cho' by Sonorans. Californians became 'pochos' or 'pochis' when Alta California was severed from Mexico" (20).36

In his Cuentos Californianos, published around 1922, Adolfo R. Carrillo (1865-1926) refers to the connotations of pocho, implying that the term was perceived then as a noun conveying distinct cultural characteristics (cited in Leal, Aztlán y México 112). In a description of the customers at a restaurant, Carrillo reveals that the word was used to identify a linguistic deviation from the norm: "[Ahí] se oyen todos los idiomas habidos y por haber, desde el gutural de los germanos, hasta el barbárico castellano que estropean los pochos Californianos." (There you may hear all the languages that may exist, from the guttural German, to the barbaric Castilian mishandled by the Californian pochos). A fuller treatment of pocho is found in the columns entitled "Crónicas diabólicas" by Jorge Ulica (Julio G. Arce) published in the newspaper Hispano América in San Francisco between 1916 and 1926. Thus, for example, in "Do You Speak pocho?" "Los parladores de Spanish," and "No hay que hablar en pocho," Ulica satirizes the naive immigrant of rural origin who mixes Anglicisms with dialectal expressions and awkwardly adopts the customs of Anglo-Americans:

El pocho se está extendiendo de una manera alarmante. Me refiero al dialecto que hablan muchos de los "spanish" que vienen a California y que es un revoltijo, cada día más enredado, de palabras españolas, vocablos ingleses, expresiones populares y terrible "slang."

De seguir las cosas así, va a ser necesario fundar una Academia y publicar un diccionario español-pocho, a fin de entendernos con los nuestros. (Crónicas diabólicas 153)

[pocho is disseminating in a manner that causes alarm. I am referring to the dialect spoken by many of the "Spanish" that arrive in California and which consists of a mixture, every day more confusing, of Spanish words, English vocabulary, popular expressions, and awful "slang."

Should things continue like this, it will become necessary to open a school and to publish a Spanish-pocho dictionary in order to communicate with our own people.]

The term pocho, however, was more than a linguistic marker. It usually helped identify individuals of Mexican descent acculturated to Anglo-American ways and unable to express themselves according to the normative expectations of formal Spanish or to interact socially within Mexican groups. Speakers, therefore, employed the term in a wide range of usages. At one end of this semantic spectrum, it could simply acknowledge cultural differences, without pronounced animosity. This usage is evident in a song recorded in

An Introduction 19

1929, where the singer laments a flood that has brought misery both to "the Mexican and the pocho: "

El martes, 13 de marzo del novecientos veintiocho es una fecha de luto pal mexicano y pal pocho. ("Inundación of California")

[Tuesday, the thirteenth of March of nineteen hundred and twenty-eight is a day of mourning for the Mexican and the pocho.]

Another sense of the term, and decidedly satiric, is applied when vilifying individuals considered traitors to their own people and culture, ridiculing their adoption of Anglo-American traits.31 This latter usage is readily apparent in a comic dialogue, recorded phonographically in 1937 ("La payasa: The Female Clown"), in which a Mexican male debates and ultimately defeats a pocha. The dialogue is a dispute involving gender, class, and Mexican nationality and opposing Anglo-American attitudes and customs. It is a contest in which the attacks of the male are centered on the female's pretense to pass as an American but who fails in her awkward attempts to conceal her Mexican origins:

Si por querer ser rubia a la fuerza piensa que la toman por gringa, lo que hace es ponerse en ridículo.... (E]s pura raza renegada. De las de que porque aquí compran trajes en abonos fáciles se creen la divina ganchuda, y ni hablar su idioma quieren ... dió el primer peso de enganche y por el resto la andan buscando. Porque usted es de las que dice que cuesta menos cambiar de casa que pagar la renta.

[If wishing to be a blonde, by any means necessary, leads you to believe others will think you are a gringa, you are just making a fool of yourself.... You are the kind who betrays her own people. (You are of the kind) who buys new dresses on credit, believing themselves to be superior and then won't even speak their mother tongue.... you gave the first installment (on the merchandise) and now they are looking for you to pay the rest. You are the kind who believe it is easier to move away than to pay the rent.]

Throughout this debate a number of Mexican normative values are posed as superior to the false images available in American social, economic, and cultural life. The pocha is thus portrayed as someone who has traded one system of values for another without being able either to enter successfully into her adopted world or to erase her identification with the one she is abandoning. She is also

20 Chicano Satire

accused of not being economically responsible, since it is unlikely that her clothes or rent are paid frequently, if at all—a veiled attack on the liberality of the American credit system that permits the adoption of a false class identity. The pocha is also stigmatized for adopting practices employed by American women, such as the use of hair dyes that permit them to become instant blonds. Her feminine beauty is thus claimed to be inherently false and, consequently, a distortion of the idealized figure of the beloved. In judging her under these norms, the male claims her as a compatriot, but his satirical description also carries a marked defensiveness toward the values he attacks, hence thwarting the comic effect. When this dialogue was recorded (1937)—a time of great economic difficulty due to the Great Depression and the forced repatriation of many Mexican immigrants—Chicanos were secure enough to resist these attempts to portray them comically. This dialogue is of interest because it demonstrates how violent antagonism or extreme bitterness on the part of an author transforms playful humor—usually associated in the portrayal of the comic figure of pochos—into invective. The dialogue is thus an illustration of how an author, feeling frustrated, may turn a comic target—perhaps inadvertently—into an object of satire.

Among Chicanos the comic or satirical usage of the term pocho may reflect the relationship between the speaker and the individual thus labeled. For example, at an intimate or familiar level an immigrant mother may address a daughter, affectionately, and somewhat teasingly with the diminutive pochita. Yet pocho may convey a derogatory meaning when employed toward a rival or an enemy. The term acquired yet a new sense in the novel pocho by José Antonio Villarreal. Richard Rubio, Villarreal's hero-protagonist, portrays his ambivalence between upholding traditional Mexican cultural values and adopting the ways of the Anglo-American world in which he grows up. For Villarreal the word pocho is an in-group term used to describe the Chicano experience and is devoid of negative connotations, and in this sense his usage anticipates the role the term Chicano would acquire in the 1960s.31 Because this work initiated a reassessment of Chicano historical reality that culminated during the 1960s and 1970s, scholars in Chicano studies rescued Villarreal's pocho from oblivion and held it as a forerunner of the modern Chicano novel.,39

The pachuco

The pachuco figure has been traced to a group of Chicano youths, living in El Paso in the early 1930s, whose language was heavily

An Introduction 21

influenced by caló, the jargon of the Mexican underworld (Barker 191). According to this account, a court issued a judgment expelling a group of these youngsters from the city, some of whom opted to go to Los Angeles, where their influence spread and their elaborate dress, the zoot suit, along with their language, became a pachuco trademark .40 But it was during the 1940s that the presence of pachucos became noticeable in practically every Chicano community as well as in Mexico.41

The community's feelings toward these individuals were often manifested through humor, and their language and unconventional behavior were frequently parodied. The depiction of the pachuco as a comic figure eventually became conventionalized to a few distinguishing features: an argot, a stylized zoot suit, and an unconventional behavior. Like the pocho, this figure became identified with individuals who violated the social and linguistic norms of Mexico and the United States. Unlike the pocho, however, the pachuco could also be a delinquent, an aspect that would be emphasized by his detractors. In addition, the pachuco was portrayed as a marginal urban inhabitant whose transgressions deformed the conventions of the Mexican working class.

In tracing the origins of the pachuco, Carlos Escudero, a journalist writing for La Prensa (San Antonio) in 1943, found a direct link between this new cultural expression and a figure that had existed in Mexico:

La manifestación de lo que algunos sociólogos ya llaman un fenómeno social tiene explicación relativamente sencilla. Los tipos del chaquetón son degeneración del gomoso, el petimetre, el pisaverde, el fifí de la capital Mexicana. ("El 'zoot suit` I)

[The expression of what some sociologists have already called a social phenomenon has a relatively simple explanation. Those individuals using the long coat are a deformation of the gomoso, petrimetre, pisaverde, and fifí (figures) from Mexico City.]

This observation, which suggests a direct relationship between the pachuco and the variants associated with the figure of the fifí, merits consideration. References to the fifí as a conventional figure are found throughout the literary and popular culture of Mexico during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Antonio Garcia Cubas in his El libro de mis recuerdos mentions some of the synonyms employed to identify this figure:

Los jóvenes a quienes se daban los diversos nombres de pisaverdes, currutacos, mequetrefes, dandys, petimetres, catrines y muy popular de ro-

22 Chicano Satire

tos, vasta nomenclatura reducida hoy al nombre genérico de lagartijos, parábanse en las puertas y atrios de los templos para ver entrar y salir a las damas, en general, y cada cual, al objeto de su amor, en particular. (247)42

[The young people who received various names pisaverdes, currutacos, mequetrefes, dandys, petimetres, catrines, and rotos, multiple labels reduced nowadays to the generic lagartijos (lizards) would stand by the doors and atriums of the churches in order to see the entrance and exit of the ladies, in general, and each one, in particular, their object of love.]

Luis González; Obregón, for his part, describes the petimetres from the beginning of the nineteenth century in what bears a distant resemblance to the exaggerated description of the zoot suiters some one hundred and thirty years later:

Los currutacos o petimetres en 1810 corrían parejos con las supradichas madamas [currutacas], por su calzado extravagante que a veces parecía lanceta y a veces barco veneciano; las medias detenidas con hebillas, a fin de no descubrir la falta de calzones; los pantalones cortos o largos, les nacían en los sobacos; las camisas o camisolitas, muy almidonadas y encarrujadas; los chupines, colgados de dijes; y los casacones o fraques, llegábanles hasta el tobillo, muy abotonados al pecho, pero tan angostos por la parte de atrás. (119)

[The currutacos or petrimetres in 1810 were similar to the above-mentioned ladies (currutacas) because of their extravagant shoes which sometimes seemed a lancet, sometimes a Venetian boat; the stockings were held by buckles in order not to reveal the lack of underwear; the pants were short or long, and began in the armpits; the shirts or small blouses, quite starched and gathered; the underjacket full of hanging trinkets; and the overcoats would reach all the way to the ankle, quite buttoned to the chest, but so narrow in the back.]

A survival of this tradition is the fifí of the latter part of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. It must be pointed out that the fifí is a Spanish descendant of the dandy, a figure that emerged in England in the eighteenth century and that had a profound influence in European culture.43 A broadside printed in 1918 by the editorial house of Vanegas Arroyo portrays the fifí in comic terms that coincide with those figures that later became known as the pachucos:

Los unos sin camisa
Los otros sin comer.
Son los dandies
Fifís de actualidad
Terrible plaga

An Introduction 23

Que ha infestado A toda la ciudad.
Con One Step
Con exitación [sic]
Y el danzón
A muchas niñas
Han robado el corazón. ("Los fifís")

[Some without shirt some without food
The dandies
present-day fifís
are a plague that has infested the whole city.

With One Step
and excitement
and the danzón (type of dance)
they have robbed the heart
of many girls.]

A number of these qualities described are relevant to understanding the response pachucos were later accorded. The figure of the fifí, like that of the pachuco, is of a young man who shows a marked preference for new fashions in attire and dancing styles.44 As flawed imitators of social etiquette, the fifís might be considered as minor social nuisances, hence comic figures, who presented no real threat to the established norms. The pachucos also were represented humorously, but became the objects of satire whenever perceived as a social menace. In both cases their image as fashionable urbanites is portrayed as hollow due to a poverty that bars them from successfully adopting the social roles vested on upper-class men.

The figure of the fifí was similar to its Anglo-American counterpart, the jellybean, another descendant of the dandy. The response of the Chicano community toward both fifís and jellybeans was often accompanied by a denunciation of their poor manners and their disruption of moral standards. In 1923 a news item in La Prensa (San Antonio) links both figures and commends the authorities during a campaign launched against them: "Magnifica es la campaña contra los 'fifis."' (The campaign against the fifís is great.)

Son estos [fifís o jellybeans] individuos viciosos y atrevidos que careciendo de dignidad personal muchas veces juzgan que todo el mundo carece también de ella y así se dedican a la triste labor de importunar a cuanta mujer joven encuentran por las calles, invitándolas a "raids" y diciéndoles impudicias sin fijarse ni reparar en que se trate de señoras o señoritas honorables....

Para la estrecha mente de estos individuos no hay mujeres dignas y a

24 Chicano Satire

todas las tratan como si todas fueran de la calaña de "f1appers" que desafortunadamente abundan en la población. (I)

[These (fifís or jellybeans) are vice-ridden and shameless individuals who, lacking personal dignity, assume that everyone else is the same; they spend their time bothering every young woman whom they find in the streets, inviting them for "raids" and making indecent commentaries, not caring whether they are addressing honorable single or married ladies....

In the narrow minds of these individuals, there are no respectable women, and they treat all as "flappers," of whom, unfortunately, there are many in this town.]

pachucos were not often seen sympathetically by communities of rural extraction who distrusted urban inhabitants and ridiculed the fashions and life-styles of the city. An example of this attitude appears in the song "El rancho," recorded in 1926, where the superiority of rural ways is assumed, and its mockery of urban folk foreshadows the treatment later accorded to pachucos.

Por aquí todos con chico sacote de atrás abierto hasta por aquí; cuánto más valiera con chaqueta de hombre como en el rancho donde yo nací.

[Around here everybody wears huge coats with the back split up to here; it'd be better a man's jacket, just as it is used in the ranch where I was born .]45

Twenty years later this trend will emerge as the zoot suit and become distinctly associated with pachucos. But urban Chicanos who held deep respect for the etiquette of the bourgeoisie could only respond with disdain to the appearance of working-class youths distorting the business suit. This is an attitude that appears in a detailed description of the pachuco suit made in the early 1940s by one of the writers of La Prensa (San Antonio):

Visten un chaquetón de más de unas 37 pulgadas de largo, con tres botones de los cuales se usan los dos de arriba, hombros bien acolchados, cintura recogida: 26 pulgadas de ancho de la pierna a la altura de la rodilla, pero solamente 14 en el puño o valenciana del pantalón. El pantalón visto de sur a norte llega por lo general hasta cerca de las axilas del bolsillo, pero del reloj cuelga una cadena que llega hasta las rodillas. (Escudero I)

[They wear a jacket that is over 37-inches long, with three buttons of which only two are used, the shoulders are heavily padded, the waist is tight: the legs are 26-inches wide, but the pant cuffs measure only

An Introduction 25

14 inches. The pants, seen from north to south, generally go almost to the armpit, but from the watch hangs a chain that reaches to the knees.]

Such a grotesque description of the pachuco suit is intended to convey a deformation of its normative counterpart, the business suit. In the description from La Prensa, this impression is achieved by either gross exaggeration or else by minimizing the measurements of various parts of the suit. Irony is conveyed by the pejorative chaquetón (jacket), and distance is maintained through the playful geographic reference "visto de sur a norte" (seen from north to south). The result is of mock seriousness whereby the reader is given a detailed explanation of the suit in terms resembling those of a professional tailor, but with sufficient clues to warn the reader that a fraudulent description is in progress. Yet the bourgeois norm symbolized by the business suit is never debased, suggesting that for the readers of La Prensa the fashions of urban clothing were symbols of prestige.46

The life-style of the pachucos seems to have been widespread. There are testimonies that this fashion also appeared among black Americans and Filipinos.41 A similar trend appeared among the marginal Argentines who danced the tango and among Cubans known as chucheros. The description of the chuchero is of interest, since it resembles that of the pachuco, suggesting that the phenomenon represents an urban counterculture of working-class origins. The chuchero had the following characteristics: he was of humble origins, smoked marijuana, wore a wide-brimmed hat, and wore two-colored shoes made with goat skin, according to the tenets of his African religious leanings. His pants were narrow, especially at the cuffs, wide in the waist, and reached up to the chest. From the pants hung a long chain which the chuchero continuously swung. The coat reached almost to the knees and was square in the shoulders which were padded in an exaggerated fashion, making him look athletic. He wore his hair long on the sides and combed it constantly (Sánchez-Boudy 10).

Perhaps the most influential source in the popularization of the pachuco beyond the Chicano communities was the Mexican comic Germán Valdés, "Tin Tan." In his film El mariachi desconocido (1953), for example, "Tin Tan" demonstrates the close identification that exists between the figures of the pocho and the pachuco. His role is based on recurrent switches between these two figures—a change that occurs whenever he receives a blow to the head, causing a profound change in his personality. In his early portrayal of the pachuco, "Tin Tan" emphasized language and clothing as central

26 Chicano Satire

to the figure. He thus represented the pachuco as an anti-hero of humble origins who led an unconventional existence. His comic depictions helped solidify the notion of social marginality and questionable behavior as fundamental traits of the pachuco. But the comedian appears to have exhausted this figure, since at a later stage in his career he abandoned almost all traces of his initial pachuco features.

The existence of the pachucos as violent figures became particularly noticeable beyond the confines of the Chicano communities during World War II, when Anglo-American sailors had violent confrontations with Mexican youths, identified in English-language newspapers as "zoot suiters." In his perceptive study of these riots, Mauricio Mazón points out the polarized situation this confrontation created inside and outside the Chicano communities:

So intense and pervasive was the imagery of destruction during the riots that it was difficult for the press, law enforcement officials, and even some of the participants to distinguish between symbolic and physical actions. The predominant view was of several hundred gangs of zoot-suiters unleashed from the barrio and bent on destroying the life of the city. Within the Mexican-American community a similar view prevailed, except that the threat was perceived in terms of gangs of servicemen (and in some cases policemen) who were randomly roving the streets hunting for zoot-suiters. (Mazón 11.2)

Thus, the role of the pachuco becomes ambivalently associated with images of urban juvenile delinquents prone to violence or else as the victims of racial paranoia. Mazón describes how the figure of the pachuco was interpreted in negative terms within the American mainstream during a period of national emergency when: "Fantasies of martial prowess, of physically cleansing the country of undesirable elements, and of annihilating zoot-suiters could do much to alleviate ambivalent feelings about war and to assuage moods of dissatisfaction and ennui" (Mazón 5 2).

The image of pachucos as social undesirables is also evident in the views expressed by Mexicans. in his introductory essay to El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz refers to them as portraying "un dandismo grotesco y de una conducta anárquica" (a grotesque dandyism and a anarchistic behavior) explaining their existence as a desperate response: "No han encontrado más respuesta a la hostilidad ambiente que esta exagerada afirmación de su personalida" (They have not found other response to the hostility of their environment than the exaggerated affirmation of their personalities) (13-14). As an outsider who observed pachucos during a short stay

An Introduction 27

in Los Angeles, Paz measures them according to Mexican norms and concludes, "Queramos o no, estos seres son mexicanos, uno de los extremos a que puede llegar el mexicano" (Whether we like it or not, these human beings are Mexican, one of the extremes the Mexican may reach). In his characterization of the pachuco, Paz suggests that the loss of Mexican culture has brought on an irrational or disorderly system of values that has produced this figure:

Cuando se habla con ellos [los mexicanos de Los Angeles] se advierte que su sensibilidad se parece a la del péndulo, un péndulo que ha perdido la razón y que oscila con violencia y compás. Este estado de espiritu—o de ausencia de espiritu—ha engendrado lo que se ha dado en llamar el "pachuco. " (13)

[When one speaks with them (Mexicans in Los Angeles), it is noticeable that their sensibility seems like a pendulum, a pendulum that has no reason and oscillates violently like a compass. This state of the spirit—or lack of spirit—has generated what has been called the pachuco.]

In Laberinto the pachucos are no longer comic figures: "El pachuco es un clown impasible y siniestro, que no intenta hacer reir y que procura aterrorizar" (The pachuco is an impassive and sinister clown, who does not intend to produce laughter but who tries to terrorize) (15). It is perhaps no coincidence that, in this renowned study of Mexican culture, the pachuco occupies the first chapter and that this "extreme" would represent a threat to Mexican culture. During the postrevolutionary and postwar years, an emerging Mexican middle class was in the process of consolidating an official version of Mexican culture, and the presence of Chicanos in the United States represented a "shameful" reminder of a history (1848) and a class (braceros) that did not serve them well in their aspirations as a developing Western nation. Paz is a spokesman for this class.48

From an in-group perspective, Mexican Americans would express a similar view toward pachucos. For the returning veterans—armed with pride in their decorated war heroes, their military services' loans and scholarships, and newly acquired skills that enabled them to obtain jobs away from farms and barrios—the presence of pachucos was a bitter reminder of a past they felt had been left behind. Thus, Manuel Servín derided the pachucos for their un-Mexican behavior and their outlandish dress and blamed them for projecting a group image of "lawlessness, cowardice, and disloyalty," lamenting the effect this blot caused on the Chicano, communities' image, undermining "the hard-earned reputation of pre-war Mexicans": "As

28 Chicano Satire

a result, the heroic service of the Mexican-Americans in the Philippines as well as the outstanding bravery of the proportionally numerous Medal of Honor winners were ignored by the North American whites and blacks" (168).

This response, blaming the zoot suiters for the discredit they brought on the positive image of Mexicans, was predictable from those sectors of the communities—that is, immigrants and Mexican Americans—that had struggled to solve community problems exclusively in terms of Mexican or Anglo-American cultural strategies.49 Mazón points. out that as a result the "zoot-suiters were rendered ahistorical, anomalous, having no place in the past or future of either Mexico or the United States" and that "the only legitimate scholarly recourse was to discredit barrio youth" (Mazón 116 -117).

Although the views toward the pachucos had been polarized within and outside the Chicano community—as had been the case with the pochos—it is evident that some observers could already assess their existence beyond an either/or normative focus. Thus, the organization of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in support of the youths accused in the "zoot suit murders" represented, in the words of its chairman, Carey McWilliams, "the first well-organized and widely supported effort in Southern California to bring the case of the Mexican, or the citizen of Mexican descent, to the attention of all the peoples of the area" (Endore 3). This was also a view that signaled the possibility of researching the Chicano experience as an expression of firmly rooted social and historical conditions. These efforts may be seen as important antecedents to the model that eventually emerged during the 1960s. In this latter conception, Chicanos would be a principal focus rather than solely incidental or ancillary phenomena deforming normative hegemonic values.

It is not coincidental that two prominent figures in Chicano culture, the pocho and the pachuco, became the subject of special attention in the 1960s. Both figures have represented symbolic aspects of the Chicano experience and, during this period of critical introspection, were subjected to a radical revaluation. Although the meaning of the term pocho has had diverse connotations over the years, its primary meaning is of an individual of Mexican descent who resides in the United States, belongs to the working class, is of rural background, and whose language and customs show a marked degree of Anglo-American cultural influence.50 The meaning of the term pachuco, on the other hand, is more specific, since it conveys a style of dress, the use of underworld slang, and an unorthodox

An Introduction 29

stance toward the norms both within and without the Chicano community.51

As in the case of other nomenclature used in relation to Chicanos, the meaning of the terms pocho and pachuco—which also function as subgroup nicknames—depends on a variety of factors that may include the intent of the speaker, the identity of the addressee, and the context in which it is used. From the perspective of many Anglo-Americans, both of these figures became stereotypical for all Chicanos, while in Mexico pochos and pachucos were perceived as a distortion of the norms of Mexican culture and hence subjected to censure. In this sense both may be considered as related figures.

For many Mexicans the pachuco represented the crystallization of the pocho, i.e., a Mexican born in the United States; alien to both cultures; fluent in neither Spanish nor English; a specialist in Caló, the argot of lumpen elements—an ideal subject for ethnocentric apologies or chauvinistic attacks. in Mexico the pachuco was perceived as a caricature of the American, while in the United States the pachuco was proof of Mexican degeneracy. (Mazón 5)

Within Chicano communities, however, these figures were easily identifiable and judged—sympathetically by some, harshly by others. Many community members were familiar with cultural borrowing and were thus not offended by the use of Anglicisms, the blending of conventions, or the wearing of the zoot suit. in other sectors of the community, however, pochos and pachucos represented a deformation of traditional norms: some saw them as comic figures, while others considered them an embarrassment. Since Chicano acculturation runs along a continuum that extends from a Mexican to an Anglo-American extreme, the degree of pochismo or pachuquismo was variable and could be perceived from a wide range of perspectives.

Although the term pachuco shares characteristics with the label pocho, a significant difference between the two rests in the restricted meaning of the former and the general applicability of the latter. In other words, although both expressions may be used as exclusionary labels—capable of conveying a range of meanings of varied affective connotations—pachuco has also an in-group, or subgroup, meaning. As in the case of any other social affiliation, pachucos maintain a set of hierarchical codes that determine prestige and ascendancy, a sense of pride in the characteristics associated with the group, as well as a certain disdain for those extraneous to their membership (Barker 191). Yet a fundamental distinction exists between the sociological and historical reality of these two figures and

30 Chicano Satire

their folkloric or literary characterizations.52 It is this latter aspect, the representational dimensions of the pocho and the pachuco as comic and satirical figures within the confines of the communities of Mexican descent in the United States, that has been relevant to our present purpose.