Book Review: From the Ground Up
Dagoberto Gilb on 'Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature'
Reviewed by Belinda Acosta, Fri., June 29, 2007
Dagoberto Gilb says he's never been near a curandera. He's not a vato or a pachuco. He's never been in a gang. He's neither a militant Chicano nor a salt of the earth campesino. That sleepy, sombrero-shaded Mexican leaning against a burro? He's never seen him. His mother didn't stoically go through the day draped in a serape. In fact, he's never met a meek Mexicana in his life but might be interested, for the novelty.
Gilb is the author of four books of critically acclaimed fiction and nonfiction and is a Hemingway Foundation/PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, Novelists) Award winner. He's also Mexican-American, and he's had it with seeing the same sliver of Mexican-American images in popular culture and especially in Texana literature, at which Gilb directs unrelenting disdain regarding how Mexicans are stereotyped and how Mexican-American writers are largely ignored among it and across American letters. It's this frustration that drove him to assemble Hecho en Tejas, a hefty anthology of work created by Mexican-origin writers from the 1500s to the present that he hopes will be considered the Norton Anthology of Texas Mexican literature. Unlike the Norton Anthology, Hecho en Tejas (University of New Mexico Press, $29.95, and part of the Southwestern Writers Collection Book Series from Texas State University) cuts a wider swath. In addition to poetry and fiction, letters, photos, turn of the century corridos, and modern song lyrics are included products of expressive culture that offer snapshots of the times from which they arose. Taken together, Hecho en Tejas is a historical and cultural narrative that celebrates Texas Mexican language in all of its forms. More significantly, it shuns the stereotypes Gilb has reviled for 20 years.
"We come in different styles, voices, and shades of color," he said at a Hecho en Tejas reading in May. "People think that literature and art is something outside of themselves to be studied. People forget where art comes from, believe that it's like the soul and is found somewhere between the brain and the heart, but really, it comes from the felt part of the body, in the feet from the ground up. Art comes from people who know where they're from, who feel the land under them."
Reading Hecho en Tejas is like going through a family album or a scrapbook. It has gaps some intriguing, some maddening, some inevitable. Photographs lack cutlines, leaving the reader to draw meaning from them not an entirely wasted exercise for those who seek knowledge stored in ephemera. Documents exchanged between GI Forum President Hector P. Garcia in 1949 and President Lyndon Baines Johnson regarding Felix Longoria are enormously prescient, given the current criticism toward filmmaker Ken Burns' omission of Latinos in his upcoming World War II documentary. A World War II soldier, Longoria's remains were turned away from his hometown funeral home because of his Mexican ancestry. While Longoria was later buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery, a discussion of the enormous breadth of the Longoria incident is not offered. Gilb says this is by design.
"I didn't want [Hecho en Tejas] to be too 'teachy,'" he says. "I didn't want to overwhelm the text with bios and explanations. I do want it to be a book to be taught, but it doesn't have to be a book to teach every little thing about any individual writer.
"I assume the best in everybody. I assume that if you read something that catches your interest, you will go and find out more about the writer or the subject. It's a book you can pick up and read from anywhere. I am betting that if you read one piece, you'll read more. Not every bit of information is in Hecho, but now you can do your own research and learn more."
Hecho en Tejas is a triumph. However, anyone who venerates books will blanch at its surprisingly rough editorial edges. Typos appear throughout. Lines are missing from poems by Carmen Tafolla, Josefina Niggli, and Lalo Delgado. "The writers have been really understanding," Gilb says, adding that all known errors will be corrected in the next printing. Besides, they don't detract from Hecho en Tejas' necessity and significance.
"The publication of Hecho en Tejas is hereby a formal announcement: We have been here, we are still here," Gilb writes in his powerful introduction. "I want this book to overwhelm the ignorance and I emphasize the 'ignore' root of that word as much as its dumb or nasty connotation about Raza here in Texas, the people who settled and were settled and still remain in Texas."
Adelante.