Criticism: The Chicano-Latino Short Story

“The Chicano-Latino Short Story,” in The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story (Ramón Saldívar)

Author, Americo Paredes, short story “The Gringo”, from Hummon and the Beans and Other Stories, is a vignette of historical romance set in the opening days of the US Mexican war the story displays the portrayal of discrimination and racism along the border and pits cultures against each other. The protagonist, Ignacio is Mexican, but has fair skin and blue eyes, resulting in the advantage of white passing in the representational space of the border, the complexity of dress style, speech, gestures, cultural habits, and skin color overlap to construct ambiguous identity for the sign of contradiction, the Mexican Gringo.

Author Thomas Rivera’s, short story, “And The Earth Did Not Part”, display the reality of mid century farm labors lives written at the height of politician and the Chicano labor drug, and the formation of the United farm workers union in the late 1960s, Rivera’s stories are charged with a political urgency to counteract the reality of economic exploration, and social Injustice. In each of the 12 stories we see glimpses of the world class and racial oppression. Rivera stories are symbolic acts of social resistance.

Author Sandra Cisneros’s, “Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories”, gives perspective to see how the concern for political and social history and the themes of identity, and the forms of critique that Chicano fiction typically takes can be displayed with a critique of gender, ideologies and traditional, gender rules, Cisneros shed lights that sometimes constraining the identity for purpose can be brought upon by family and life companions. She also shows stories of Chicano Latino male dominance and female submission transform into stories about strong woman and resistance.