Literary critics agree that Mario fiction holds an important place in of Chicano/a literature. Charles Tatum argues that colorful vignettes of postwar life in Tucson bridge transition between Mexican American and Contemporary Period (244); Raymund Paredes points out that texts cross a watershed in Mexican-American history (41); and in North of Rio Grande, stories are described as the first literary efforts of an American of Mexican decent, writing in English, to [publish] in a prestigious U.S. journal [the Arizona Quarterly]. Indeed, they are first works that offer a predominantly Anglo audience a compelling and realistic portrait of [the] life of Mexican-American [sic] (93). But aside from an occasional nod to historical significance of work, few critics have explored his texts in any detail. And perhaps because interconnected stories of life in Tucson's Barrio Hoyo, published in a variety of journals and literary magazines, have yet to be collected in one accessible volume, his work has never been discussed as an integrated corpus. (1) Instead, those scholars who have taken time to examine fiction have only tackled one or two of his numerous stories, and, as a result, scholarship that does exist tends to be both preliminary and contradictory. Raymund Paredes, for example, reads Suarez as a writer who understood that Chicano was a group apart, now embarked on a bumpy road towards delineation and articulation of a version of Mexican-American identity, [an identity that is] urban, bilingual and profoundly influenced by American popular culture (41-42). What Paredes fails to mention in his albeit brief analysis is that texts repeatedly censure those characters--especially zoot-suited pachucos--who have adopted this revised cultural identity. In his work on pachuco, Arturo Madrid-Barela correctly identifies Suarez's mocking of zoot suiters, but he explains this vision vis-a-vis author's desire to assimilate into a American, middle-class culture, a desire that has been jeopardized by pachuco's behavior and attitudes: represents parasitic if not mythic model of Pachuco. At best he is simpleminded and unambitious, at worst he suffers from arrested development.... Whatever Pachuco may have been in Tucson, Arizona, mocking vision was perfectly attuned to historical moment.... In Tucson, Arizona, Mexican community rejected Pachuco who frequented Kaiser's Shoeshine Parlor on Meyer Street and Pastime Penny Arcade. America's Mexican middle-class, besides rebelling against being Pachuco's butt, had learned lesson of conformity well and were more than disposed to apply it to their own in order to assure their own second acceptance in American white society. (48) Madrid-Barela's assimilationist reading of this single Suarez story does not, however, account for nostalgia that patterns so many of author's Tucson vignettes. Instead of longing for a more conformist and Americanized middle class life for Mexican-Americans, vignettes lament passing of a time when Mexican Americans were more attuned to traditional Mexican culture. Most recently, Wilson Neate uses often-anthologized story El to illustrate subversive potentialities of minority literature. Neate's Lacanian/Bakhtinian approach designates Hoyo a carnivalesque space that accommodates, rather than eschews, Otherness: El Hoyo is a multiple and extending play of racial and cultural signifiers with no closure or left-over as it constantly takes in that Otherness or that `something more' (Unwelcome 32). Although, as I'll argue later, El certainly invites such a reading, one wonders whether Neate has read Kid Zopilote or Las Comadres, texts which graphically illustrate how Hoyo polices, as well as extends, its communal boundaries from perceived threat of gender and cultural difference. …
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Aug 1, 2011
Linda B Hall 
Open Access