The American continent is divided into two large regions as different as night and day: the English-speaking North America and the Spanish-speaking South America. The contiguity of both regions has made travel between territories accessible and common. However, many of those from the south has sought to live in the north permanently, raise their family there and find better-paying jobs. Many have defied the odds to cross the borders and begin a new life on the other side.

From these passionate and courageous people sprang a crop of notable Hispanic Americans whose achievements have made Hispanic culture a prominent one among the "melting pot" of cultures and races that is the United States of America.

Photo: c. Michael Mouchette, courtesy University of New Mexico Press

Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya, a native of New Mexico, where he was born in 1937, is considered one of the premier Chicano American writers. He is best known for a trilogy of novels published during the 1970s -- Bless Me, Ultima (1972), which won the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol national Chicano literary award; Heart of Aztlan (1976); and Tortuga (1979). All three works focus on growing up as a Hispanic American in U.S. society.

Many of Anaya's works are about faith and the loss of faith. His writing is rich in symbolism, poetry, and spiritualism as he explores the mystery of life and his cultural heritage. His novels include The Legend of La Llorona (1984); Lord of the Dawn (1987); and Albuquerque (1992), for which he received the PEN-West Fiction Award; Zia Sammer and Jalamanta (1995); and Rio Grande Fall (1996).

His most current work is My Land Sings: Stories from the Rio Grande (1999). In addition to his novels and short stories, Anaya has written plays, poems, children's books and works of nonfiction. He is currently a professor of English at the University of New Mexico.

Ana (Hernandez del) Castillo
Website: http://www.anacastillo.com/ac/index.htm

Ana (Hernandez del) Castillo, a highly-respected Chicana poet, novelist, and essayist, has been called one of the most original voices in Chicana and contemporary American feminist literature. Her work often considers how gender and sexuality intersect with racism and cultural conflict.

Her first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986), an American Book Award winner, explores the changing role of Hispanic women in the United States and Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s. So Far From God (1993), her most popular novel, focus on the complex lives and relationships of Latino women. Castillo's poetry collections, Women Are Not Roses (1984), and My Father Was a Toltec (1988), explore the lives and gender roles of Latinas in the Hispanic community.

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), examines the situation of women of color in the United States. Over the years, Castillo has broadened her work to include musical performance.

Sandra Cisneros

Mexican American writer of fiction Sandra Cisneros ignited a cultural controversy in 1997 when she painted her historic San Antonio, Texas, house neon purple in violation of the city's historic preservation code -- claiming the bright color as a key part of her Mexican heritage.

The incident mirrors her most well-known work and National Book Award winner, The House on Mango Street (1984), in which she writes, "One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from." Cisneros, born in Chicago in 1954, draws heavily upon her childhood experiences and ethnic heritage in her writing -- addressing poverty, cultural suppression, self-identity and gender roles in her fiction and poetry.

Although Cisneros is noted primarily for Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), her poetry, which includes Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987), and Loose Woman (1994) has also received considerable attention.

Cristina Garcia
Salem Press Profile: https://salempress.com/Store/samples/
notable_latino_writers/notable_latino_writers_cristina.htm

Cristina Garcia was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1958 and fled the Castro regime to New York City with her family when she was two. In 1990 she left her job as a reporter and correspondent for Time magazine to explore the issues of her Cuban heritage and her childhood in fiction. She has written two critically acclaimed books chronicling what it means to be Cuban American.

The first, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), focuses on three generations of maternally-related Cuban women, each living her life differently as a result of the Cuban revolution. The San Francisco Chronicle called it "evocative and lush...a rich and haunting narrative." Her second, The Aguero Sisters (1997), glimpses two middle-aged siblings -- one an electrician in Havana, the other a salesperson in New York City. It, too, received glowing reviews and won her a new and increasingly devoted readership.

As one critic has noted, Garcia "has opened a portal to Cuba -- where readers enter a world of history, culture, love, yearning, and loss."

Oscar Hijuelos

Award-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos, born in 1951 in New York City, calls upon his Cuban American heritage in writing fictional works that have won him both critical and popular acclaim.

His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), tells of a Cuban American family's difficulties adjusting to life in the United States during 1940s. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), moved him to the first rank of American novelists in portraying two brothers who leave their native Cuba and to seek their fortunes as singers in New York City in the early 1950s, at the outset of the television era, as the Latino musical craze erupts.

Hijuelos' 1993 novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, takes a different tack, focusing on the female members of a Cuban-Irish family living in Pennsylvania. The author's heritage was only a minor theme in Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), a tender tale of a foundling, that was greeted by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "a life-affirming novel, a worthy successor to Dickens."

However, his most recent story, Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) returns to those roots as it tells the story of a humble Cuban American from the late 1940s to the present. Hijuelos is most noted for the skilled contrasts he draws between Cuban and American life, his rich descriptions of everyday existence in Cuba, and his capacity for incorporating elements of magical realism into his novels.

"I am Joaquin"

By Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales

I am Joaquin,
Lost in a world of confusion,
Caught up in a whirl of a gringo society,
Confused by the rules, Scorned by attitudes,
Suppressed by manipulations, And destroyed by modern society.
My fathers have lost the economic battle and won the struggle of cultural survival.
And now! I must choose between the paradox of
Victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger
Or


to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis,
sterilization of the soul, and a full stomach.
YES,
I have come a long way to nowhere, Unwillingly dragged by that
monstrous, technical industrial giant called
Progress and Anglo success...
I look at myself. I watch my brothers.
I shed tears of sorrow.
I sow seeds of hate.
I withdraw to the safety within the
Circle of life...
MY OWN PEOPLE


I am Cuauhtemoc,
Proud and Noble Leader of men, King of an empire,
civilized beyond the dreams of the Gachupin Cortez,
Who also is the blood, the image of myself.


I am the Maya Prince.
I am Netzahualcoyotl,
Great leader of the Chichimecas.
I am the sword and flame of Cortez the despot.
And


I am the Eagle and Serpent of the Aztec civilization.
I owned the land as far as the eye could see under the crown of Spain,
and I toiled on my earth and gave my Indian sweat and blood for the Spanish master,
Who ruled with tyranny over man and beast and all that he could trample
But...


THE GROUND WAS MINE.
I was both tyrant and slave.
As Christian church took its place in God's good name,
to take and use my Virgin strength and Trusting faith,
The priests both good and bad, took
But
gave a lasting truth that
Spaniard, Indian, Mestizo
Were all God's children
And from these words grew men who prayed and fought
for their own worth as human beings, for that
GOLDEN MOMENT
Of
FREEDOM.


I was part in blood and spirit of that courageous village priest
Hidalgo in the year eighteen hundred and ten
who rang the bell of independence
and gave out that lasting cry:
El Grito de Dolores,
"Que mueran los Gachupines y que viva la Virgin de Guadalupe"
I sentenced him who was me.
I excommunicated him my blood.
I drove him from the Pulpit to lead a bloody revolution for him and me I killed him.
His head, which is mine and all of those who have conic this way,
I placed on that fortress wall to wall for Independence.
Morelos!
Matamoros!
Guerrero!
All Compañeros in the act,
STOOD AGAINST THAT WALL OF INFAMY
to feel the hot gouge of lead which my hands made.
I died with them... I lived with them I lived to see our country free.
Free from Spanish rule in eighteen -hundred- twenty-one.
Mexico was Free
The crown was gone
but


all his parasites remained and ruled and taught with gun and flame and mystic power.
I worked, I sweated, I bled, I prayed and
waited silently for life to again commence.
I fought and died for Don Benito Juarez Guardian of the Constitution.
I was him on clusty roads on barren land
as he protected his archives as Moses did his sacraments.
He held his Mexico in his hand on
the most desolate and remote ground
which was his country And this Giant
Little Zapotec gave not one palm's breadth
of his country's land to Kings or Monarchs or Presidents
of foreign powers.


I am Joaquin.
I rode with Pancho Villa, crude and warm.
A tornado at full strength, nourished and inspired by the passion and the fire of all his earth, people.
I am Emillano Zapata.
"This Land This Earth Is OURS"
The Villages
The Mountains
The Streams
belong to Zapatistas.
Our life
Or yours is the only trade for soft brown earth and maiz.
All of which is our reward, A creed that formed a constitution for all who dare live free!
"This land is ours... Father, I give it back to you.
Mexico must be free..."
I ride with Revolutionists
against myself.
I am Rural Course and brutal,
I am the mountain Indian, superior over all.
The thundering hoof beats are my horses.
The chattering of machine guns'
are death to all of me:
Yaqui
Tarahumara
Chamula
Zapotec
Mestizo
Español


I have been the Bloody Revolution,
The Victor,
The Vanquished,
I have killed and been killed.
I am despots Diaz and Huerta and the apostle of democracy
Francisco Madero.
I am the black shawled faithful women who die with me
or live depending on the time and place.
I am faithful, humble, Juan Diego, the Virgen de Guadalupe,
Tonatzin, Aztec Goddess too.


I rode the mountains of San Joaquin. I rode as far East and North as the Rocky Mountains
And all men feared the guns of Joaquin Murrietta.
I killed those men who dared to steal my mine,
who raped and Killed my Love my Wife
Then
I Killed to stay alive.
I was Alfego. Baca, living my nine lives fully.
I was the Espinoza brothers of the Valle de San Luis.
All, were added to the number of heads that in the name of civilization
were placed on the wall of independence.
Heads of brave men who died for cause or principle.
Good or Bad.
Hidalgo! Zapata!
Murrietta! Espinozas!
are but a few.
They dared to face The force of tyranny of men who rule
by farce and hypocrisy I stand here looking back, and now I see the present
and still I arn the campesino I am the fat political coyote
I, of the same name,
Joaquin.



In a country that has wiped out AIl my history, stiffled all my pride.
In a country that has placed a different weight of indignity upon my age old burdened back.
Inferiority is the new load...
The Indian has endured and still emerged the winner,
The Mestizo must yet overcome, and the Gachupin will just ignore.
I look at myself and see part of me who rejects my father and my mother
and dissolves into the melting pot to disappear in shame.
I sometimes sell my brother out and reclaim him
for my own when society, gives me token leadership
in society's own name.


I am Joaquin, who bleeds in many ways.
The altars of Moctezuma I stained a bloody red.
My back of Indian Slavery
was stripped crimson from the whips of masters who would lose their blood so pure when Revolution made them pay Standing against the walls of Retribution, Blood...
Has flowed from me on every battlefield
between Campesino, Hacendado Slave and Master and Revolution.
I jumped from the tower of Chapultepec into the sea of fame;
My country's flag my burial shroud;
With Los Niños, whose pride and courage
could not surrender with indignity their country's flag... in their land.


To strangers now I bleed in some smelly cell from club.
or gun. or tyranny.
I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger
cut my face and eyes, as I fight my way from stinking Barrios
to the glamour of the Ring and lights of fame or mutilated sorrow.
My blood runs pure on the ice caked
hills of the Alaskan Isles, on the corpse strewn beach of Normandy,
the foreign land of Korea and now Viet Nam.


Here I stand
before the Court of Justice Guilty for all the glory of my Raza to be sentenced to despair.
Here I stand Poor in money Arrogant with pride
Bold with Machismo Rich in courage and Wealthy in spirit and faith
My knees are caked with mud.
My hands calloused from the hoe.
I have made the Anglo rich yet Equality is but a word, the Treaty of Hidalgo has been broken
and is but another treacherous promise. My land is lost
and stolen,
My culture has been raped, lengthen
the line at the welfare door and fill the jails with crime.
These then are the rewards this society has For sons of Chiefs
and Kings and bloody Revolutionists.
Who gave a foreign people all their skills and ingenuity
to pave the way with Brains and Blood
for those hordes of Gold starved Strangers
Who changed our language and plagiarized our deeds
as feats of valor of their own. They frowned upon our way of life
and took what they could use.
Our Art
Our Literature
Our music,
they ignored so they left the real things of value and grabbed at their own
destruction by their Greed and Avarice
They overlooked that cleansing fountain of nature and brotherhood
Which is Joaquin.
The art of our great señors Diego Rivera
Siqueiros Orozco is but another act of revolution for the Salvation of mankind.
Mariachi music, the heart and soul of the people of the earth,
the life of child, and the happiness of love
The Corridos tell the tales of life and death, of tradition,
Legends old and new, of Joy of passion and sorrow of the people:



who I am.
I am in the eyes of woman, sheltered beneath
her shawl of black, deep and sorrowful eyes,
That bear the pain of sons long buried or dying, Dead
on the battlefield or on the barbwire of social strife.
Her rosary she prays and fingers
endlessly like the family working down a row of beets to turn around and work and work
There is no end.
Her eyes a mirror of all the warmth and all the love for me,
And I am her And she is me.
We face life together in sorrow.
anger, joy, faith and wishful thoughts.
I shed tears of anguish as I see my children disappear behind the shroud of mediocrity
never to look back to remember me.


I am Joaquin.
I must fight And win this struggle for my sons,
and they must know from me Who I am.
Part of the blood that runs deep in me
Could not be vanquished by the Moors
I defeated them after five hundred years,
and I endured.
The part of blood that is mine
has labored endlessly five-hundred years under the heel of lustful Europeans
I am still here!


I have endured in the rugged mountains of our country
I have survived the toils and slavery, of the fields.
I have existed in the barrios of the city,
in the suburbs of bigotry, in the mines of social snobbery,
in the prisons of dejection, in the muck of exploitation
and in the fierce heat of racial hatred.
And now the trumpet sounds,
The music of the people stirs the
Revolution, Like a sleeping giant it slowly rears its head
to the sound of Tramping feet Clamouring voices Marlachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a better life
And in all the fertile farm lands, the barren plains,
the mountain villages, smoke smeared cities



We start to MOVE.
La Raza!
Mejicano!
Español!
Latino!
Hispano!
Chicano!
or whatever I call myself,
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
and
Sing the same
I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquin
The odds are great but my spirit is strong
My faith unbreakable
My blood is pure
I am Aztec Prince and Christian Christ

I SHALL ENDURE!

Source: "I am Joaquin" by "Corky" Gonzales

Hispanic American Literature

Literature has always been seen by both readers, critics and writers as a reflection of one's culture, beliefs and personal truths - a medium for expressing one's manifesto of sorts on how life and society has shaped one's humanity. Hispanic American literature serves as a mirror or rather a lens providing an honest look into what it means to be a person of Latin American origin living in the United States.

Hispanic American literature reflects not only the contemporary Latin American experience but also a centuries old ancestry harking back to each writer's country of origin. Events of times past were passed on to younger generations in story form, making these memories as personal as for the one who experienced them. Each story contributes a piece of the puzzle of the future Hispanic American writer's persona - his values, personal truths, and beliefs.

A point in departure, however, is the way these stories are told by Hispanic American authors. The use of English, instead of Spanish as tradition demanded, creates a bridge for Hispanic American literature to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Virgil Suarez in "HISPANIC AMERICAN LITERATURE: DIVERGENCE AND COMMONALITY" has described Hispanic American literature as "rich, diverse, constantly growing, blending the history that infuses it with a impassioned feeling of contemporaneity." These are the same qualities that readers and critics of Hispanic American literature found appealing.

In referring to Hispanic American literature, definitions are important. In this context, we are speaking about the literature written in English, and which mainly concerns itself with life in the United States. An early classic of this type is exemplified by the publication in 1959 of Jose Antonio Villareal's Pocho, a novel about a youth whose parents migrate to the United States from Mexico, in Depression-era America, to better their lives.

Hispanic American literature contains, within its tent, writings from different countries and cultures. Villareal represents one of the major Hispanic groups to contribute -- Mexican Americans. (A word of definition is in order. Mexican Americans are distinguished from Chicanos in that the former feel more of a national identity with Mexico; Chicanos, on the other hand, are more culturally allied with the United States and particularly with Native Americans.) To a great extent, their literary tradition owes a debt to the corridos, the popular ballads of the mid-19th century that recounted heroic exploits. These corridos were also precursors to Chicano poetry of the 20th century, laying the foundation for a poetics that fuses the oral and the written, music and word. In the corrido we begin to see the mixing of the Spanish with the English, thus creating a new language with which to express a new reality.

Despite the use of English and the widening appeal of Hispanic American literature, there are still some very real issues and problems facing Hispanic American writers in terms of finding outlets and venues for their work. Although more work is produced each year by major publishing houses, most of the interesting and engaging literature comes from small, independent presses that rely upon U.S. Government, private and university grants. Literary journals and reviews have always been an outlet for Hispanic American voices, and some of the best work comes from these sources. Progressively, Hispanic American authors are being courted by the publishing establishment because of the recognition associated with the nation's most prestigious literary awards -- the Before Columbus Foundation Award, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

For a more in-depth discussion of Hispanic American literature, its history and development, read Virgil Suarez's article "HISPANIC AMERICAN LITERATURE: DIVERGENCE AND COMMONALITY".