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Assimilation and Its Discontents: Richard Rodriguez, Danny Santiago, and Arturo Islas
John Alba Cutler, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
November 30, 2006

While the early 1980s might be known for important breakthroughs in Chicana literature—including the publication in 1981 of This Bridge Called My Back and in 1984 of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street—the decade following the Chicano movement also saw a serious reconsideration of Chicano masculinity, one that dovetailed with a recapitulation of old arguments over assimilation and nationalism.  Arturo Islas, an associate professor at Stanford frustrated by the continued rejection of his novel manuscript, had a unique vantage point on the conversation about Chicano identity.  As the San Francisco Chronicle’s default reviewer of Latino literature, he published negative reviews of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1981) and Danny Santiago’s Famous All Over Town (1983), both enormously successful works with conflicted relationships to Chicano authenticity and masculinity.  When Islas finally found a local publisher for his novel The Rain God in 1984, he thus entered a network of Chicano textuality fraught with threats of inauthenticity and cultural prostitution.  But despite both Islas’s and The Rain God’s unconventional expressions of Chicano masculinity, the novel has become firmly ensconced within the emerging canon of Chicano literature, while the other two books are either held up as controversial points of challenge or languish in oblivion.  Islas’s reception into the canon of Chicano literature presents a touchstone for the shifting construction of Chicano ethnicity, one that has everything to do with the force of violence and injury the novel presents, and the availability of the author (in the wake of his tragic death) for cultural surrogation.  The Rain God thus marks the potential and limits of Chicano critical studies of masculinity.