"The Daniels: On Four Latine Authors Named Daniel" by Matthew Frye-Castillo
The other day I was scrunched into a seat at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, pleasantly chatting to a blonde woman about the Lego set she just bought for her children. We started talking about photographs, family history, and biomythography. She told me, “A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.”
I bit the edge of my bottom lip.
She wouldn’t say this to a person she read as Black or Asian or Native, which meant she read me as a White boy, plain and simple. Before I could reply, the event started, and we turned to face the stage.
I can’t really blame her for looking right through me. My assigned doppelgangers have ranged from Canelo Álvarez to Jake Lacy to Ben Shelton (I am ignoring the fact that all of these men are more attractive than me). My maternal grandfather, who had told me “We’re mostly Irish,” had the complexion of Romare Bearden (who lived as Black) or Anatole Broyard (who lived as White) and eventually lived as a White man, despite the “Negro” on his birth certificate, which I didn’t know about until 2020. I found an old letter from my abuela when she was young, telling her first husband in 1944 about a dream where she was transformed into a beautiful White woman with many children. This desire for Whiteness grew up with me every single day. It appeared in small choices that seemed to be of little consequence: when I studied French instead of Spanish or told people I was just Italian-American. White supremacy isn’t just satisfied with determining which jobs are valued or who receives a decent education; it whispers who to love and what to dream.
I wish I could tell my seatmate at The Center for Fiction that I’m Chicano with African-American heritage, and that much of my recent writing life has been about recovering family history. I wish I could tell her that I’m writing about four Latinx authors who happen to be named Daniel because I was inspired by my friend’s earrings that read “Decolonize Your Mind,” and you have to start somewhere — as the journalist Stephanie Elizondo Griest writes, “Some aspects of our identity, we inherit; others, we must pursue… How will we ever recover from colonization, but to reclaim what we can, where we can, how we can, with hopes that our culture might better reauthenticate in the next generation?” — and it’s Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15), so she’d have to hear me out.
Right?
I’d like to focus on four Latine writers who have helped me reckon with various aspects of White supremacy and whose creative forms exemplify paths toward decoloniality. Granted, this also applies to the thousands of Latinx writers represented in Latino Boom, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, Latinext; Nepantla Families; After Aztlan; Bogotá 39; Puro Chicanx; Nepantla, New Poets of Native Nations, ¡Manteca!, The Other Latin@ and many more. To give myself a small sense of stability, I decided to write about a group of short story writers I’ve started to call The Daniels: Daniel Chacón (b. 1962, Chicano), Daniel Orozco (b. 1957, Nica), Daniel Olivas (b. 1962, Chicano), and Daniel Alarcón (b. 1977, Peruvian-American). Each of these authors have a lot of published work, and they’ve already been targeted by several dissertations; at times, trying to do justice to their work has felt like shoving a dragon into a dog carrier, so I focus on only one story from their various works — the dragon’s small pinkie, if you will. These stories illume aspects of decoloniality, or the effort to “re-learn the knowledge that has been pushed aside, forgotten, buried or discredited by the forces of modernity, settler-colonialism, and racial capitalism.” The Daniels show the inextricable connection between art and politics. After reading them, it may be difficult to fail to see how art is politics, politics is art.
{Disclaimers: I do not enforce a preference between Latine/x, Latino/a, and Xicana/o/x and Chicanx/o/a. To learn about the discussion behind each of these and choose your own adventure, check out this or this or this.
These essays operate on the basic theorem that “Nations themselves are narrations…. Culture is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another” (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism). If such a suggestion perturbs you, or if you’re still refusing to touch a copy of White Fragility, you are advised to check out either of these books then circle back to these essays. Gracias and well wishes ☺ }
Part 1: Daniel Chacón
Daniel Chacón is the chair of the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas, El Paso. Since 2000, he has published four short story collections, two novels, a children’s book, and edited collections by the poet Andrés Montoya and the writer/activist José Antonio Burciaga. I love his work, especially his most recent collection Kafka in a Skirt (2019), but his stories are rarely taught in schools or universities, and you’re unlikely to run into his oeuvre outside of a niche bookstore or a writing conference. The latter is how I found Kafka and Chacón’s first collection, Chicano Chicanery (2000).
In both collections, I was struck by the joyful crassness that I recognized in my own cousins and friends, a voice and subject matter that wasn’t visible in anything I’ve previously read. Chacón presents the uneasy duality of belonging to Anglo and Spanish worlds without feeling terribly rooted in either; the shame of not knowing enough of your culture because of colonialism. Until these collections, I didn’t believe you could write short pieces so clearly inspired by Chicano life. And Chacón is very clear that he is a Chicanx writer; his stories aim to reclaim that word, which was largely seen as an insult since a Texas paper coined it in 1911 to describe seasonal laborers or “less cultured” Mexicans. Even today, Chicano can bristle some people, including less progressive Mexican-Americans who may conflate it with gangs (cholos). I know one gentleman who prefers to be called an American-Mexican!
Anyway, I kept asking myself how it was possible that I hadn’t encountered Chacón before, who is so prolific. Why, after a BA in literature and an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in publishing, had I only ever been assigned one Chicana author (Gloria Anzaldúa)? The Mexican-American authors I found in free bins were assimilationist, like Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation. I didn’t read House on Mango Street until I was 27, when I swiped it from the free bin of a laundromat.
This dearth of cultural representation in schooling systems is the subject of several of Chacón’s works, including “The Stravinsky Riots,” “The Biggest City in the World,” and “Mexican Table.” My favorite story is the charmingly titled “Fuck Shakespeare.” Set in 1984 at Fresno State, this tale follows an unnamed “Indio” protagonist as he attempts to remain neutral as a mysterious “El Escritor” graffities “Fuck Shakespeare” around campus. This act soon turns into vandalism: stabbing old copies from the Bard in the library, pouring black ink over the brand-new collected works in the bookstore, slashing the car tires of the English Chair. The narrator wants to please both sides: the White-centric English Department that assumes Shakespeare will always be central to its curriculum and that, in the words of one faculty member, this all is “a misdirected form of protest. It’s certainly not in the spirit of César Chávez, whom I met once” — and the Chicanx students who ask, “What did Shakespeare, an example of the superior white mind — what did Shakespeare do for our people, our people who struggle every day?... What is to be admired in his works, not from a gabacho perspective but from a Chicano perspective?” The narrator almost attains a happily neutral life until he meets Manuel Padilla, the president of the student club Chicanos in Law. “Make no mistake,” the narrator says. “This is a love story.”
“Fuck Shakespeare” shows the tension between accepting assimilation (in this case, white supremacy) and combating it (reclaiming “derogatory” identities like queer and Chicano). A major impetus powering the El Movimiento Chicano / Chicano Movement was refuting a curriculum that assigned exclusively White writers, operating under the quiet assumption that only Europe could produce literature of profound value. As more children of working-class Mexicans entered college, they discovered precolonial histories, including Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City), which had an estimated population of 300,000, sophisticated canal systems, sprawling aquariums and zoos, as well as schools for music, war, and dance. This rich, indigenous history was revelatory to students who were taught to feel like foreign, second-class citizens. They realized, as one popular slogan went, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Chacón overviews the origins of the Chicano Movement with scholar Jadwiga Maszewska:
In the 1960s and 70s Chicanos began to hear [about Indigenous cultures] for the very first time because they never learned this in school, nobody ever taught them. Their parents, who were immigrants, and probably didn’t make it past the third grade, were illiterate in Spanish and didn’t speak good English, were not able to teach them much about the history or the literature of the Aztecs, not much about the conquest. The Chicanos identify with the Mexica (Indigenous) because the Mexica were defeated by the Spaniards, just like the Chicano were defeated by the gabacho, the Euro-Americans. So they took out the “M-e,” and Mexicano became Chicano.”
In “Fuck Shakespeare,” the Chicano Movement is represented by the student activist group MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán). By the end, (spoiler alert!) the narrator learns that El Escritor isn’t one person, but everyone who supports the Chicano movement of centering Chicanos. To his infinite shame, the narrator learns this through a White student named Stanley Monk. “El Escritor isn’t one person,” Stanley says. “It’s the Chicanos, man. How could you not know that? I’m not a Chicano, and even I knew it.” The narrator is distraught at how distant he could become from his friends and family. He has to radically shift his thinking: is it possible to be an author (an authority) while being joined to a group? Is it possible for a work of literature to be written by “not one writer but a bunch of them, under one name.” These possibilities are at fundamental odds to the schooling he has received that has kept him from other Xicanx and himself. Near the end, the narrator is spotted by Bino, a “seventh-year sociology major,” painting “Queers hate the Bard” in a hallway. Bino tells him he knows the movement needs to do more to support queer people. By the final scene, the narrator is learning the Chicano handshake, and we have felt the stages of an entire political movement within one young man’s political awakening.
It’s notable that Chacón has retitled and edited this story for over 30 years, first as “Chicano Chicanery,” then “El Escritor,” and now as “Fuck Shakespeare.” In this final version, a crucial edit relates to the narrator’s sexual orientation. Chacón tells Ire’ne Lara Silva in The Rumpus:
I wrote that story when I was twenty-something years old, a student at Fresno State in the ‘80s. It was published by ZYZZYVA, but I left it out of every collection I have ever published, because it just didn’t seem right. The story bothered me. Then I was working on Kafka, now in my fifties, and I saw “Fuck Shakespeare” in my story graveyard, and I read it and saw immediately what was wrong. I wasn’t allowing the character to be. The character is gay, and I must have known it all along, but my personal version of toxic masculinity wouldn’t allow the character to be who he is.
Over the decades, the unnamed narrator’s love interest shifted from Lisa to Manuel. This significant revision reflects the author’s growing openness and understanding, as well as an expanding acceptance within the Chicanx movement, which historically has been patriarchal and heteronormative. In a conversation with Chacón, literary scholar Paula Cucurella reflects on similarities between an ethnic identity and a sexual identity: “One could even say that Chicano identity is not unlike gayness. Gayness and queerness is not something that you can predicate of somebody just by looking at them [sic]. Some people do perform, but not everybody does. Gayness, just like being Chicano, is self-predicated, is self-determined.” Several stories in Kafka in a Skirt support this assertion, including “The Third Reason”; “In the Closet”; and the delightfully titled “You Can’t Do that With a Goat.” It’s also critical to point out that Chicano and queer are reappropriated words — words once used to denigrate individuals that, due to the activism of the marginalized, have become sources of pride and clarity. In “Fuck Shakespeare,” Chacón demonstrates how the discovery and reclamation of these identities are nothing short of life-saving. Incorporating and owning them allows one’s life to begin.
Part 2: Daniel Olivas
I have discussed how Daniel Chacón’s “Fuck Shakespeare” decolonizes systems of schooling. I will now pick on the publishing industry. Specifically, the corporatized publishing space where 85% of editors are White and only 3% of executive roles are filled by Latinx people. These figures are so hopeless and depressing, the moves toward diversity so disingenuous, misguided and half-assed, that at times, you just have to laugh, which Daniel Olivas does frequently.
Like Chacón, Olivas is a prolific Chicano author who began publishing in 2000. A lawyer by day, Olivas has published a dozen books and is well familiar with the double standards that publishing applies (consciously or not) to writers of color: tokenism, payment disparities, editorial decisions that are far from neutral. One of his more cogent and hilarious stories about publishing is “Imprints” from his 2017 collection The King of Lighting Fixtures.
Set in a bar with a hot waiter named Jeremy making the rounds, “Imprints” is a quasi-frame story of Sandra O’Donnel (sic) telling her lawyer friend Liz about her decision to use her full name in professional settings — Sandra O’Donnel Ramirez. It’s curious that we never hear directly from Liz. Rather, Sandra’s best friend is indirectly characterized by how Sandra responds to Liz’s implied jokes and commentary. This is an unusual craft decision that likely would have been cut or questioned in a workshop (why does a frame story need to exist? Why have Liz present at all if she doesn’t talk?) I’ll address some possible reasons for this structure later on.
But first, some background on Sandra. Since she started as a literary agent some eight years ago, she’s used mother’s last name, O’Donnel, rather than her father’s last name, Ramirez. She says this is because she doesn’t want editors and publishers to see her last name and instantly think she is approaching them with a Mango Street derivative. As an agent, she doesn’t want “any baggage” to thwart a clear perception of the quality of her writers’ prose. Her professional stance is based on her experience navigating racist structures. Sandra’s phenotype is darker, like her father, and she tells Liz how a saleswoman thought she was her mother’s maid when they went out clothes shopping in celebration of her acceptance to Stanford. The saleswoman was too embarrassed by her own actions to really see Sandra as an individual. As an agent, she doesn’t want the same cloud of judgment to affect her writers.
The main (or framed) story of “Imprints” is Sandra’s recitation of her lunch with Robert, a publishing shark to whom she wants to pitch a new novel, The Courtship of María Rivera Peña (incidentally, the name of Olivas’ first novel). Now on wife three, Sandra views the “fifty-five-year-old sex manic” as a shorter Gregory Peck. Sandra appreciates Robert’s genteel ribaldry and business savvy, even if it comes with a slew of sexist and racist gestures. Having been in the business for nearly 30 years, Robert “keeps up with the times and knows how to package a property and get his imprint on board. He always sees the movie or television angle of manuscripts. Truly goddamn amazing.”
As Sandra pitches the novel, it becomes comically clear that Robert is the Old Faithful of microaggressions: he wants to shorten the title to María Peña to attract Anglo audiences; he brings up Geraldo Rivera because it reminds him of the current title; he can only compare a Chicana story to Joy Luck Club and Roots; he only feels comfortable with the term ethnic literature and never Chicano.
By the time Sandra finishes, he agrees that the novel could sell, but “I’m on a self-imposed moratorium on ethnic writers.” Sandra is shaken; this fear of tokenism is why she has obscured half of her identity since she entered publishing. Their eight-year relationship has been about finding books that sell and not caring about the author’s race. If that’s no longer true, how can the authors she loves ever receive a fair portion of the spotlight? Robert continues: “I’m getting a reputation with some people-on-high as a promoter of ethnic writers, and that’s not the rep I want. Too limiting.” Several moments pass, then he bursts out laughing. It’s true, he only cares how much money they make. He was only joking.
The casual laugh is a cruel display of power: ethnic literature is something Robert could take or leave. He can enjoy it or find it expendable. To Sandra, these stories are vital. To get them to a larger audience, she has diminished a cherished part of her background to be more palatable to White audiences. But to Robert, it’s all a joke.
Once Robert “wipes a tear from his eye because he’s been laughing so hard,” he applauds Sandra and her work. “You’ve brought me wonderful projects and almost a quarter of them are ethnic. They’ve done pretty well. And even though you’re nothin’ but a white girl, you’re my best source for that kind of work.” This is the moment of decision: will Sandra speak up and potentially isolate this figure of power, or will she accept yet another gradual erasure of her identity? For the first time in her career (at least around White men) she says that she’s half-White. “My father is Mexican. Born in Mexico. Mom’s Irish.”
Immediately, she feels an unprecedented relief. Robert takes a full twenty seconds to absorb this, then — “I see it now! That’s why you’re so beautiful in that exotic way. Not quite white, not quite ethnic.”
Sandra doesn’t react. Not that her silence matters because Robert plows forward with his own line of questioning, including why she goes by O’Donnel when she could be one of a handful of Latinx literary agents. She replies honestly: she wanted the work to be read “objectively.” Suddenly, Robert is exhausted because “it’s very strange to know someone for eight years and find out that she’s really someone different.” He agrees to read The Courtship of María Rivera Peña, and the two drift (to Sandra’s surprise) to more personal topics. Robert talks about his children and his wife, Marilyn, even his own 75,000-word novel about his German great-great-grandparents migration.
While they don’t talk much about Sandra other than her romantic life, she is surprised that being her more authentic self can give others permission to do the same. She doesn’t excuse Robert’s unthinking enactment of racist tropes, but “Imprints” suggests how a woman of color can protect herself and, as a byproduct, change publishing, even if only by a quarter (of a quarter) of a degree.
One mysterious aspect of the story remains: what to make of Olivas’ unusual decision to have Sandra narrate both the framing story (being at a bar with a friend) and the framed or main story (telling Robert she is half-White)? In a classic frame story, the narrator is not part of the main (framed) action, e.g., One Thousand and One Nights, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But “Imprints” may be called a quasi-frame story because the narrator/protagonist is part of the framing and the framed story; also, neither story continues without some interruptions from the other story, i.e., neither story takes center stage.
This is a risky move. Some readers may call foul against the author for gratuitous ambiguity. Why must we be constantly guessing what Liz is saying? The quasi-frame story also opens Sandra’s intentions to greater ambiguity. With no other character providing direct dialogue or perspective, one could read Liz’s near absence as a reflection of Sandra’s selfishness, or an inability to listen to other people’s stories. One could read Sandra as brave in insisting on the totality of her identity despite structural racism, but if you start seeing her as unreliable, you could interpret her actions as a conniving way to use her Latine identity to make a profit. Given these ambiguities, why does Olivas take this gamble?
I think the quasi-frame structure is necessary to illustrate and embody the complexities, instabilities, and powers of reclaiming a name and identity. In relaying the story of her re-naming, Sandra is in total control of the narrative. She tells the present and she tells the recent past. Throughout “Imprints,” she references her daily routines, as if she is integrating this new, expansive identity into every corner of her life. “Imprints” asks how one persists in corporate structures that only give lip service to rationality and representation. As Sandra tells Liz: “It’s not all that logical. Just look at the New York Times Bestsellers List. Does the list make sense? Case closed.” Sandra well knows that classification, race, capital and power are all inextricable. Within this dizzying system, how does one maintain sanity, poise, goodwill?
For Sandra, the key is to reclaim your name and tell your story, regardless of the time or place.
Matthew Frye-Castillo (he/him) is the author of One Headlight: a Memoir and teaches writing and literature at Lehman College.
