Good-Bye Revolution—Hello Cultural Mystique: Quinto Sol Publications and Chicano Literary Nationalism

Abstract

The year 1970 marked presentation of First Annual Premio Quinto Sol Literary Award to Tomas Rivera, an associate professor of Spanish at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas. Sponsored by Quinto Sol Publications, a recently established independent Chicano press in Berkeley, Premio Quinto Sol represented first literary prize promoted nationally for best fictional work authored by a Mexican American. The award and publication in 1971 of Rivera's y no se lo trago la tierra / ... and earth did not part as a bilingual edition marked a watershed moment for Quinto Sol and Chicano Movement, one that followed on heels of Quinto Sol's 1967 founding of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought, first national academic and literary Mexican American journal in United States, and its 1969 release of El espejo--The Mirror, first anthology of Mexican American literature. The efforts of Quinto Sol had a powerful impact on El Movimiento's attempts to mold a national Mexican American culture and community through production and dissemination of a critical discourse, literature, and art labeled exclusively Chicano. The institutional claims, editorial decisions, and sympathies of Quinto Sol, along with literature and art it popularized within Chicano Movement, played a leading and influential role in establishing what Michael Denning terms a formation. For Denning, who follows Raymond Williams in applying concept, a cultural formation comprises a and an aesthetic ideology, with former signifying the infrastructure of any cultural initiative, while latter represents the conscious and unconscious ways of valuing that a cultural formation develops and inculcates, its 'aesthetic,' its sense of what is good, true, and beautiful, which is rarely straightforward and uncomplicated (202). By mid1970s, cultural politics and ideology prompted by Chicano Movement radicalism expanded to include several independent publishing outlets and numerous national newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals, not to mention institution of Chicano Studies and Ethnic Studies programs on college and university campuses across California and Southwest. Quinto Sol and intellectuals, artists, and writers associated with it proved vital to this historical, political, and cultural process. The texts distributed by Quinto Sol from 1967 to 1974 stand as earliest and perhaps most influential scholarly and literary works of Chicano Movement participants struggling to forge an autonomous and self-sustained intellectual and creative space for development and self-definition of Chicano community. Shortly after receiving El Premio Quinto Sol, Rivera confessed that contest and award revelo entonces que nosotros los chicanos teniamos vida que buscaba forma [revealed to me that we Chicanos had life in search of form] (Chicano 5). Life in search of form, an account of Chicano literature to which Rivera would continually return, draws attention to significance of printed word in formation of a Chicano collective identity and self-knowledge. Likewise, Rivera, who worked closely with Quinto Sol throughout early 1970s, underscores El Movimiento's outlook on necessity and key function of unbiased artistic and academic venues for publication. For editors of Quinto Sol, fight for self-determination, self-government, equality, justice, and political autonomy--rooted in what Lorena Oropeza describes as a transition from politics of supplication to politics of confrontation (49) that occurred during Vietnam War era-had to be waged not solely in fields, on streets, and in barrios, but also in intellectual and literary circles of Academy and publishing industry. Universities, colleges, and mainstream presses discriminated against Mexican American communities through exclusionary policies and prohibitive practices as well as through production and distribution of scholarship and creative fiction that promulgated racist ideologies, stereotypes, and images. …