Community as Protagonist in John Nichols' "The Milagro Beanfield War"

Abstract

That John Nichols' major concerns as a novelist are overwhelmingly social is obvious to any reader; he even tells us, in the Author's Note prefixed to Nirvana Blues, that his editor has angrily denounced me as a 'Stalinoid' (ii). His political and social beliefs as manifested in the novels will be embraced or rejected by his readers depending on their own political and social beliefs. more interesting issue is how his primarily social intent affects the novels as novels. In Milagro Beanfield War, the best, I think, of the three novels in his New Mexico Trilogy, Nichols draws upon possibilities inherent in the genre to write a social novel different from most other socially oriented American novels. central conflict in this novel is between two cultures, two ways of life, two views of reality: the Anglo and the Chicano.1 Rather than focus on a single protagonist, a hero, he develops a collective central figure: the real protagonist of Milagro Beanfield War is the Chicano community of the town of Milagro. In creating this protagonist, Nichols not only examines particular social changes but also offers, implicitly, a theory about the nature and processes of such social change. opening epigraph of Milagro What's that little half-pint son of a bitch want to cause so much trouble engages immediately an important issue that Nichols needs to deal with in such an unusual novel: how do we account for and reconcile individually motivated actions on the one hand and collective movements on the other. As we ask what motivates Joe Mondragon to illegally irrigate his dead father's abandoned beanfield, we are also led to another, larger question: what enables the impoverished, weak, unorganized Chicano community of Milagro to confront and temporarily defeat the rich, powerful, organized Anglo establishment. In answering these two questions, we must examine the relationship between individual and social group as it is established in the novel; in that relationship we find both Nichols' theory of social change and his artistic achievement. Early reviews of Milagro praised it for its entertainment value, but only one, by Frederick Busch, took it seriously as a novel. In his review, Busch makes several astute observations, but because of the ways in which he applies these observations to the novel, he condemns it for what seem to me wrong reasons. First, he observes that The novel is not Joe's story, or that of anyone else (53). He is right, of