Ritual Process and the Family in the Chicano Novel

Abstract

In an autobiographical article entitled Going Home Again: The American Scholarship Boy, Richard Rodriguez made a provocative observation about novel. He speculated that the novel ... is not a form capable . . . of being true to basic sense of communal life that typifies culture. Rodriguez argues that novel is best capable of depicting a solitary existence against a large social background. Thus, he argues, Chicano novelists nearly always fail to capture breathtakingly rich family life of most Chicanos and instead often describe only individual in transit between Mexican and American cultures.' This speculative opinion would probably be negligible were it not for fact that it appeared in The American Scholar and an anthology of rhetoric.2 Thus, like his recent media-acclaimed autobiography, it is more accessible to American literary and academic mainstream than more informed opinions, which often appear in less widely circulated publications. While this opinion, first published in 1974, may be accurate in describing some novels, most notably Jose Antonio Villareal's Pocho, it seems to have been written with no acknowledgement of fact that Tomas Rivera's Y no se lo trago la tierra and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima had been in circulation since 1971. Both of these novels show