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The Rise of Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago
Zimmerman, Marc. The Rise of Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago: Transplanting Early Roots to the Barrios and Beyond. LACASA Books and MARCH Abrazo Press, 2024. 362 pp. ISBN 9798878786218.
Marc Zimmerman’s 2024 monograph updates our understanding of Chicano literature, focusing on twentieth-century cultural production in Chicago. The book, which is divided into a preface, five parts, and an epilogue, explores the work of two of the most famous Chicana authors, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. The text also attests to the richness of this Midwestern literary corpus in its analysis of poetry and prose by a range of other noteworthy writers, including Hugo Martínez-Serros, Carlos Cortéz, Carlos Cumpián, Raúl Niño, and Luis J. Rodríguez. What unites all of these artists is their connection to Chicago. Appropriately, Zimmerman shares a hand-illustrated map of Chicago’s neighborhoods (by Jordan Sondler) in the text’s preface, which orients the audience to embark upon a literary tour through the urban hub. As Zimmerman himself avers, this book considers geography, history, and creativity – and the recurrent connections between the three – to explore artists’ efforts and struggles. Through these writers’ cultivation of an oppositional third space in Mexican Chicago and its literature, the scholar proposes, they counteract discrimination and find freedom.
The first chapter serves as an extended introduction, in which Zimmerman takes special care to acknowledge traditional conceptualizations of Chicano and Mexican-American literature as a foundation from which to articulate a vision of Chicagoan difference. A review of diverse studies (by Mario García, José Limón, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Gloria Anzaldúa, Olga Herrera, Ramón Saldivar, and Michael Innis-Jiménez) helps to outline features that distinguish Chicagoan cultural production. Latinos in Chicago do not have the same long-term history in the region that Tejanos do in Texas. Artists of Mexican heritage write from a broader Latino and working-class context, which is influenced by the work of creators of Argentine, Cuban, and Puerto Rican descent. In lieu of a borderlands fiction, their writing is frequently concerned with the industrial context. Finally, their cultural referents are distinct, often prioritizing more assertive female roles. Overall, Zimmerman proposes that a study of these Chicagoan works, which are “more fully Mexican than the Chicano literature developed elsewhere,” counters the popular understanding of Chicano literature as a homogenous body of work (14).
The remainder of the book’s first part emphasizes the value of historical contextualization for our understanding of Mexican and Chicano cultural production in Chicago. Over time, Zimmerman explains, “Chicago became a U.S. vanguard center of post-national Latino identifications,” with a Latino population that grew in response to industry demands in steel mills, the railroad and factories (23). The author clarifies that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 sparked some migration to Chicago, while the cristero rebellion of the 1920s spurred additional displacement. Currents of relocation to the urban hub correspond to the growth of distinct Mexican colonias across Chicago, which reflect regionally- and culturally-based characteristics that gradually translate into particular artistic perspectives and inclinations. Zimmerman acknowledges doubts about provenance, language, and popular value given to early twentieth-century Mexican and Chicano production in Chicago. These obstacles notwithstanding, he offers a compelling outline of artistic exploration in the first half of the 1900s, which appears in newsletters, newspapers, bulletins, and magazines, as well as verbally at bars and celebrations, in both Spanish and English. Undergirding this brief study is Zimmerman’s confirmation that it’s not until the early 1970s that Mexican and Chicano writing really gains momentum in Chicago, rapidly broiling into an explosion of activist artwork. He therefore turns his attention to Hugo Martínez-Serros’s The Last Laugh and Other Stories (1987) in the monograph’s second part as a means of understanding the Latino experience of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s.
Part Two of The Rise of Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago provides a deep look into the narrative of Martínez-Serros, a child of Mexican immigrants who was born in Chicago in 1930 and grew up in the urb’s far southside steel mill area. Zimmerman is particularly interested in Martínez-Serros’s approach to gender dynamics and highlights the author’s prioritization of strong masculine figures and negative representation of women. Another important narrative thread is the pursuit of vengeance in the face of rampant anti-Latino discrimination. Zimmerman walks us through several of Martínez-Serros’s stories, outlining the writer’s portrayal of the Chicago Mexican drive to survive, in which men must cling to sexist and patriarchal tactics in order to overcome the obstacles omnipresent in daily life in the city’s poorest industrial neighborhoods. This analysis of the anthology’s treatment of gender relations functions as a foundation to understand later literature, since they “begin to explain the world against which Chicago’s Chicana writers will subsequently be seen and would have to rebel” (59). In this narrative world, women are not to be trusted, and neither are the steel mills or the Catholic church – each of these are yet another source of prejudice and suffering.
While the book’s second part unveils the discriminatory side of life in Chicago, Part Three underscores its role as an attractive cultural hub where Chicano poets, mostly male, begin to congregate in the late 1960s. Carlos Morton, Rubén Sánchez, and Ken Serritos emerge as pioneers of this cultural movement, who pave the way for the poetry to follow in the late 1970s, written by Mexicanas and Chicanas such as Marilú Castillo, Emma Yolanda Galván, and Rina García Rocha. Connecting these six poets is their exploration of cultural interactions between Mexico and the United States, as well as, of course, their relationship with the specific Chicago setting. In this wide-ranging study, Zimmerman lifts up voices that have previously been understudied and crafts a vision of a distinctly Chicagoan manifestation of the Chicano movement’s push for solidarity. This city’s activist art is multicultural and influenced by Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Black perspectives in addition to Mexican ones. Zimmerman’s subsequent discussion of more well-known poets who surface in the 1980s (Carlos Cortéz, Carlos Cumpián, Raúl Niño, and Luis J. Rodríguez) confirms this depiction of an urban and multifaceted Chicano activism that considers both ethnically-based concerns and ones rooted in sociopolitical division.
Parts Four and Five turn to the volume’s study of its most famous Chicagoan Chicana writers, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. As Zimmerman explains, Castillo and Cisneros were both born in Chicago and began their artistic careers there, but achieved fame elsewhere. The monograph at hand offers a fascinating focus on the writers’ relationship with Chicago as a point of origin for their artistic evolution. For both women, Zimmerman argues, their Chicagoan childhood has been formative – Chicago manifests not only in their specific geographical references but also in their efforts to represent the working class and the multicultural influences in writing style. The Rise of Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago gently leads the reader across the city and time, moving from Hugo Martínez-Serros’s childhood on the southside, to Carlos Morton’s meanderings around Lincoln Park, to Ana Castillo’s youth on Taylor Street, to Sandra Cisneros’s famous fictionalization of her memories of Mango Street. Through his carefully-cultivated collection of a wide range of authors, writing styles, and moments in history, Zimmerman invites us to perceive twentieth-century Mexican and Chicano literature as an oeuvre that goes far beyond the traditional Southwestern context. Our prior understanding of Chicano literature maintains validity, but after enjoying Zimmerman’s 2024 monograph, it expands. To be Chicana/o/e/x is also to be urban, industrial, multicultural – in a word, Chicagoan.
Adrienne Erazo, Appalachian State University
No Light From Heaven
“I’m so glad I recently sat down with “No Light From Heaven,” book # 3 of your incredible opus. What a compelling story, fascinating characters, clear, unimpeded writing, first-rate dialogue, and provocative insights. A sort of Jewish/Italian response to The Sun Also Rises but I liked your wanderers ever so much more. Marlena belongs in the pantheon of truly unforgettable harridans, … in the summer of her life. (“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from {her womb?”) … My response to her was always intense, often angry, even hostile, and I couldn’t take my eye off her. Kudos! But she is only one of the many treats in store for your readers. Mazal tov on such a heady artistic achievement. I can’t wait to read more– and Lord knows, there’s more! Finally, a very interesting question as to who you were before and during that marriage. … “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! ” … I kept thinking you were trying to become “the new man,” a guy who wouldn’t mind his wife’s serial homosexual dalliances” but doing that turned out to be impossible– especially with her such a force of nature…” – Email from Dick Goldberg, Playwright and screen writer. Author of Family Business.
Romance and Heartbreak at the Dawn of the Hippie Era
By Antonio Zavala
The sexual revolution of the 1960s plays havoc with the two main characters in Marc Zimmerman’s excellent and most readable of novels, No Light From Heaven, published in 2020. Mel and Marlena meet, fall in love, live together and eventually marry as they try to make their relationship work, but Marlena’s will to power and sexual exploration send Mel into a tailspin of despair and doubt.
Beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area at a time when everything held dear and clear is challenged or debunked, this novel shows how differences in age, ethnic background, ideas, values, and sexual orientation begin to set a couple adrift from their initial hopes and ambitions. Mel begins the story as a 22 year-old Jewish American grad student, trying to become a writer; Marlena, a charismatic Italian American six years his senior and with a lesbian past, experiments with male-female love, but eventually seeks work that sets her up for extra-marital affairs usually involving women more than men.
Eventually moving from L.A. to Oregon, Mexico, and Europe, and finally to San Diego as a gateway to Mexico once again, the book anticipates its author’s future Latino focus, as it portrays the couple’s loose sense of wanderlust, their urge to travel and seek faraway places even as some of the key events and figures of the era emerge as they travel and struggle. The Cuban missile crisis, Joan Baez , Ray Charles and The Beatles. the Free Speech movement and Mariko Savio at UC-Berkley, the deaths of John Kennedy and Malcolm X are all present, even as the anti-war, civil rights and feminist movements soon begin to empower Marlena to reaffirm her core desires but leave Mel unable to cope her ever-more compulsive search for women, as the story leads to the couple’s separation and divorce.
Zimmerman stands as a post-Beat and pre-Hippie writer of talent, integrity, and courage. His book is one of his most memorable works of “memoir fiction”—one that should be reprinted and made available throughout the country to as many readers as possible.
ANTONIO ZAVALA is a journalist and writer from Chicago. He has worked for Spain’s EFE News Service. He has just completed a book of short stories titled An Old Man, in a Dry Season, Waiting for Rain and is looking for an interested publisher. For his previous published books , see the Chicago Mexican segment of this website.
Coyote’s Song: Collected Poems and Selected Art
“Carlos Cortéz surpassed the limitations imposed by class, race, nation-state, and patriarchy to become a beloved poet, artist, healer, and thinker. Most of us young Chicano revolutionaries and Indigenous wisdom seekers came to him broken, on our knees; Carlos had forged a road we rose to stand on. Carlos also represented this truth: find your own path. He was the elder of the deep soul radical way—and I was a student, fleeting perhaps, but still shaped by his uniquely powerful example.” —Luis J. Rodriguez, activist and writer, including the memoir “Always Running, La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.”
“Here is a voice that decries the alienation that comes with living in a one-sided and fixed political and economic system, pitting the common people against the natural beauty of our world, where “the motorists do not know/a flock of birds fly overhead/nor do they care.” His poignant observations of the class that does all the dirty work, from digging mines and sewers, to fighting wars waged for the rich and powerful; which makes this collection a vital piece of literature that may never be taught in most schools, but should be. All the more reason to read and share with our younger generations the art and poetry of Carlos Cortéz.” —Richard Vargas, author of “How a Civilization Begins” and “Leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel.”
Mexican and Chicano Literature in Chicago
“Mixing a keen sense of history, ethnic, regional and gender differences, as well as a feel for literary intertextualities, Zimmerman’s book both deepens and extends Latino and general comparative literary studies in ways which enrich the study of a particular locale and the written works which emerge therein and points to refigurations and transformations in the overall field of literary and cultural production. He not only relates Chicago to Southwest Chicano writing, he also points to U.S. and worldwide connections—to Luis Valdez, Tomás Rivera, Ron Arias, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrié Moraga, but also to non-Chicano U.S. writers like Emily Dickinson, James T. Farrell, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Bob Dylan, William Carlos Williams, Eugene O’Neill, John Nichols, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Loraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Then there’s Sophocles and Euripides, François Villon, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, Rhys and Nin, Brecht and Genet—along with such Latin American writers as Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez, Palés Matos, and many others. All this as Zimmermanh maintains a theory-honed focus on U.S. Mexican and Chicano history, politics, sociology and cultural studies; all this and still more in this stunning, culminating effort by a veteran award-winning writer on Latin American and Latino themes.” Guillermo Simbolov, Guatemalan Critic
Tales from the Barrio and Beyond Cuentos del Barrio y de Mas Alla
“Barrio tales is a warm-hearted collection of short stories on memory, love, and loss told with compassion, humor and wit. Moving from Puerto Rico to barrios across the US, each story is a gem that captures the sights, sounds, smells, spirit, and emotions of a community on the move from the island to the diaspora. Irma María Olmedo has a keen ear for dialogue and is an original and inventive storyteller. Anyone interested in the immigrant experience will love these stories.” Dr. Lourdes Torres, Editor, Latino Studies, Vincent de Paul Professor, Department of Latin American and LatinoStudies, DePaul University
Esta colección afectiva de historias aborda la memoria, el amor, y la pérdida, relatadas con compasión y humor. Las historias se trasladan desde Puerto Rico a los barrios de Estados Unidos, capturando los paisajes, sonidos, olores, el espíritu, y las emociones de una comunidad migrante desde la Isla hasta la diáspora. Olmedo se destaca por su habilidad al crear diálogos, y su originalidad como una cuentista inventiva. Estos cuentos son una joya que le encantarán a cualquier persona interesada en las experiencias migratorias.” Dr. Lourdes Torres, Editora, Latino Studies Journal, Vincent de Paul Professor, DePaul University