"The short way of saying Mexicano": patrolling the borders of Mario Suarez's fiction.

Literary critics agree that Mario Suarez's fiction holds an important place in the history of Chicano/a literature. Charles Tatum argues that Suarez's colorful vignettes of postwar life in Tucson "bridge the transition between the Mexican American Period and the Contemporary Period" (244); Raymund Paredes points out that Suarez's texts cross a "watershed in Mexican-American history" (41); and in North of the Rio Grande, Suarez's 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 the first works that offer a predominantly Anglo audience a compelling and realistic portrait of [the] life of the Mexican-American [sic]" (93). But aside from an occasional nod to the historical significance of Suarez's work, few critics have explored his texts in any detail. And perhaps because Suarez's interconnected stories of life in Tucson's Barrio El 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 the time to examine Suarez's fiction have only tackled one or two of his numerous stories, and, as a result, the scholarship that does exist tends to be both preliminary and contradictory.

Raymund Paredes, for example, reads Suarez as a writer who "understood that the Chicano was a group apart, now embarked on a bumpy road towards the delineation and articulation of a revised 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 Suarez's texts repeatedly censure those characters--especially the zoot-suited pachucos--who have adopted this "revised" cultural identity.

In his work on the pachuco, Arturo Madrid-Barela correctly identifies "Suarez's mocking vision" of the zoot suiters, but he explains this vision vis-a-vis the author's desire to assimilate into a "white" American, middle-class culture, a desire that has been jeopardized by the pachuco's behavior and attitudes:

   Kid Zopilote represents the parasitic if not the mythic model of the
   Pachuco. At best he is simpleminded and unambitious, at worst he suffers
   from arrested development.... Whatever the Pachuco may have been in Tucson,
   Arizona, Suarez's mocking vision was perfectly attuned to the historical
   moment.... In Tucson, Arizona, the Mexican community rejected the Pachuco
   who frequented Kaiser's Shoeshine Parlor on Meyer Street and the Pastime
   Penny Arcade. America's Mexican middle-class, besides rebelling against
   being the Pachuco's butt, had learned the lesson of conformity well and
   were more than disposed to apply it to their own in order to assure their
   own second class acceptance in American white society. (48)

Madrid-Barela's assimilationist reading of this single Suarez story does not, however, account for the nostalgia that patterns so many of the author's Tucson vignettes. Instead of longing for a more conformist and Americanized "middle class" life for Mexican-Americans, Suarez's vignettes lament the passing of a time when Mexican Americans were more attuned to traditional Mexican culture.

Most recently, Wilson Neate uses Suarez's often-anthologized story "El Hoyo" to illustrate the subversive potentialities of minority literature. Neate's Lacanian/Bakhtinian approach designates El 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 Hoyo" certainly invites such a reading, one wonders whether Neate has read "Kid Zopilote" or "Las Comadres," texts which graphically illustrate how Suarez's El Hoyo polices, as well as extends, its communal boundaries from the perceived threat of gender and cultural difference.

If we read Suarez's fiction in its entirety, what emerges from his fascinating stories of life in an urban Chicano community is not simply the sense of an author anticipating a hybridized, limitless communal space (Neate) nor the resignation of an assimilationist lamenting his exclusion from the American middle class (Madrid-Barela): rather, Suarez's fiction is also motivated by a relentless nostalgia that attempts to preserve Barrio El Hoyo from the influence and incursion of US "popular" and capitalist cultures, cultures that threaten to disrupt the community's patriarchal, linguistic, and cultural codes. Suarez's work reminds us that our readings of Chicano/a literature are themselves informed and biased by certain expectations: that Chicano/a writers, for example, will be either assimilationists or proponents of a hybridized and oppositional subject position. Such expectations can blind us to another vital Chicano/a response to postwar conditions, a response we take for granted in the literature of more dominant, hegemonic cultures: a nostalgic, conservative mode of discourse that mourns the changes that have beset a privileged and traditional communal space. (2) I will proceed, then, by addressing two central questions: (1) what is it that holds Suarez's community of El Hoyo together, and (2) what is the nature of the threat that jeopardizes and penetrates the borders of this space?

Holding Against the Other: The Maestros of Suarez's Fiction

In "El Hoyo" Suarez populates Tucson's barrio with "chicanos," a disparate assemblage of Mexico's "spiritual sons" who come together to form a rich and cohesive community. "While the term chicano," Suarez informs us,

   is the short way of saying Mexicano, it is the long way of referring to
   everybody. Pablo Gutierrez married the Chinese grocer's daughter and
   acquired a store; his sons are chicanos. So are the sons of Killer Jones
   who threw a fight in Harlem and fled to El Hoyo to marry Cristina Mendez.
   And so are all of them--the assortment of harlequins, bandits, oppressors,
   oppressed, gentlemen, and bums who came from Old Mexico to work for the
   Southern Pacific, pick cotton, clerk, labor, sing, and go on relief. (94)

As William Anthony Nericcio comments, "Mario Suarez suggests eloquently that ... we must acknowledge the fundamental role which heterogeneity and difference play in charting, characterizing and mythologizing our Mexican-American identity" (182); or, as Neate avers, "Suarez proposes Chicanismo as a renewed paradigmatic identity of difference and as a metaphor for a wider inter-subjective community founded upon miscegenation and mutual participation. In El Hoyo, identity always exceeds the boundary of the racial group" ("Unwelcome" 30).

Nevertheless, the "mutual participation" and "heterogeneity" that characterizes Suarez's El Hoyo is not, as Neate would argue, limitless: the community is not always taking "in that Otherness" from outside its borders. Suarez's El Hoyo also establishes its own cultural and gender differences: "If one is born with the habit of acquiring bills," Suarez tells us, "El Hoyo is where the bill collectors are less likely to find you. If one has acquired the habit of listening to Senor Perea's Mexican Hour in the wee hours of the morning with the radio on at dull blast, El Hoyo is where you are less likely to be reported to the authorities" (94-95). Here Suarez fashions a space that derives its coherence and its boundaries from a prescribed liminality: El Hoyo is a marginal space precisely because it is not central, because it lies outside the reach of the "authorities" and beyond the "bill collectors" who police the flow of capital for Tucson's economy.

Instead of a "limitless" communal space of endless adaptation and accommodation, Suarez's El Hoyo is marked by a nostalgic longing for an ever-distant past. In "Maestria," another of Suarez's Tucson vignettes, Barrio El Hoyo is fashioned as an ideal, mythical space that existed before its "spiritual sons of Mexico" and their cultural and linguistic codes were dissipated among the barrios of Los Angeles, a "humble" space of "simplicity" that is always diminishing and disappearing:

   Each year [the maestros] hear their sons talk English with a rapidly
   disappearing accent, that accent which one early accustomed only to Spanish
   never fails to have. Each year the maestros notice that their sons' Spanish
   loses fluency. But perhaps it is natural. The maestros themselves seem to
   forget about bulls and bull-fighters, about guitars and other things....
   They hear instead more about the difference between one baseball swing and
   another. Yes, perhaps it in only natural. (373)

Even in 1947, when "El Hoyo" was first published, this "rapidly disappearing" space was a memory, altered forever by a war in which Suarez himself participated. (3) As Thomas E. Sheridan's history of Tucson's Mexican-American population, Los Tucsonenses, points out, "By the end of the 1930s, many changes had occurred in the Mexican community of Tucson. The great Spanish-language theaters like Teatro Carmen were dead. Popular dance halls like ... Carillo's Gardens were just a memory, buried underneath the adobe of Barrio El Hoyo" (235).

I am not suggesting that, as the alternative meaning of "hoyo" ("tomb") might imply, El Hoyo is "wasting away as the town is presented as a space of refuse, a landfill" (Neate, "Unwelcome" 29); rather, the "hole" that "El Hoyo" seems most indebted to is the gap between Suarez's postwar present and a mythic, communal past, the nostalgic vacuum between what Neate calls "that space of pre-national jouissance" ("Unwelcome" 31) and the moment of its postwar articulation in language. It is the repetition, the rearticulation, of the gap between El Hoyo's postwar reality and its "prenational" past that generates the nostalgia emblematic of Suarez's work. Such nostalgia, argues Sheridan, constituted a survival strategy for "the families struggling to survive [in the barrios]" (237):

   Neighborhoods like ... El Hoyo offered them both identity and security,
   protecting them against some of the most overt manifestations of
   subordination or discrimination. The barrios also gave Mexicans a chance to
   recreate portions of the cultural and geographic landscapes they had known
   in Sonora or rural Arizona. Within barrio boundaries, Spanish was spoken
   and traditional religious beliefs were respected. Extensive networks of
   family members and compadres also were available nearby.... In short, the
   barrios allowed Mexicans to work in Tucson yet live in a world of Sonoran
   touchstones and close kin. (253)

Suarez builds his El Hoyo on these same "Sonoran touchstones."

In the 1970s, during the height of El Movimiento, Suarez rewrote "El Hoyo." By refashioning the nostalgia of the text, Suarez revised his story to accommodate the spirit of Chicanismo. In place of "Jorge Casillas, a gunner flying B-24's over Germany, [who came back to El Hoyo] to compose boleros" (95), the 1973 version of "El Hoyo" in Salinas and Faderman's From the Barrio substituted "Felipe Sanchez back from the wars after killing a score of Vietnamese" (102). The politicization of the text was further underscored by Suarez's elimination of the passage, quoted above, in which the author lists the "spiritual sons of Mexico," the "oppressors, oppressed, gentlemen and bums." In place of these carnivalesque citizens (who perhaps, in 1973, added too much local color to the scene), Suarez transforms the "Mexican girls" who work behind the counters into "chicanas" (102) and expands his definition of Chicano identity: "While the term Chicano is the short way of saying Mexicano, it is not restricted to the paisanos who came from old Mexico with the territory or the last famine to work for the railroad, labor, sing, and go on relief. Chicano is the easy way of referring to everybody" (101). Here Suarez repopulates El Hoyo with characters more familiar to Chicanos in 1973, both distancing their ties to "Old Mexico" and reconnecting them to contemporary political events such as the Viet Nam War.

Suarez even extends the "capirotada" metaphor, a metaphor that associates "chicanos" with a dish of disparate and flavorful "leftovers," beyond the borders of El Hoyo. The 1947 version of "El Hoyo" concludes by comparing "chicanos" with the "capirotada," which can be "fixed in a thousand ways and served on a thousand tables" (96), whereas the 1973 version concludes as follows: "While being divided from within and from without, like the capirotada, they remain chicanos" (102). The implication here is that Chicanos are "divided" by forces outside of, as well as inside, El Hoyo, forces that El Movimiento brought to the attention of the public in the 1970s. The result of all these changes is to modernize, not to eradicate, the nostalgia of "El Hoyo's" communal space (post-World War II Tucson becomes post-Viet Nam War Tucson): El Hoyo's "pre-national" past continues to take center stage in Suarez's examination of the forces that threaten to disrupt contemporary Chicano communal space.

For Suarez, it is the "maestro" who epitomizes and governs this communal space:

   During the hard times of Mexico's last revolution many maestros left Mexico
   with their families with the idea of temporarily making a living north of
   the Rio Grande. But the revolution lasted for such a long time that when it
   finally came to an end the maestros, now with larger families, remained
   here in spite of it.... Some left for the increasing number of factory jobs
   in California. But some enjoying their long independence and believing that
   it is better to be a poor lord than a rich servant, kept their little
   establishments open....

      But if there were men in the world who worried about their work after
   being through for the day, as far as the maestro was concerned they
   deserved to die young. ("Maestria" 369)

"Senor Garza" is one of Suarez's most memorable "maestros." Garza's Barber Shop is something "more than razors, scissors, and hair. It is where men, disgruntled at the vice of the rest of the world, come to air their views" (97). The barber shop is thus a traditional, masculine space, isolated from Garza's wife (97) and women in general ("women are thoroughly insulted although their necessity is emphasized" [99]), and unresponsive to the demands of the postwar economy: "Garza's Barber Shop has been known ... to stay closed for a week" (97), and "Garza.... Owner of Garza's Barber Shop. But the shop will never own Garza" (102). Although "Maestria" speaks of maestros who have left El Hoyo for "factory jobs in California," there is little doubt that Suarez privileges the maestro who, like Garza, resists the temptation of the California economy and stays close to the "Sonoran touchstones" of his community. Indeed, Garza refuses to leave his Mexican identity behind, taking off "for the afternoon to Nogales" or, in "Cuco Goes to a Party," "thinking [about] organizing a bullfight at the edge of the Santa Cruz river" (105).

Garza's cultural identity is fluid enough to accommodate his heterogeneous clientele (97); nevertheless, the space of his barber shop, and the cultural identity he valorizes, is far from unbounded, and the text of "Senor Garza" establishes the borders of this space in contradistinction to other cultural spaces (the domestic realm of women and wives, the mechanics of the postwar US economy). Garza's "maestria," his status as a "maestro," is directly related to his fixity within the space of El Hoyo. Because Garza is rooted in the community, he provides an "authentic" ground, a touchstone, from which Suarez can investigate the evils of postwar life in Barrio El Hoyo:

   Garza has seen ... women go unfaithful. He has seen them get spiritually
   lost in trying to keep up materially with the people next door. He has seen
   them go bankrupt buying gabardine to make up for their lack of style. Their
   hair had cooties but smelled of aqua-rosa. The edges of their underwear
   were frilled even though they wore new suits. (101)

Instead of a limitless cultural space and an endlessly fluid Chicano/a identity, Suarez's nostalgic texts yearn for fixed communal boundaries and established cultural identities: El Hoyo's "maestros" lament the loss of a world in which surface appearances reflect stable and essential interior realities.

In "Southside Run," Suarez introduces us to another maestro, Pete Echeverria, a driver whose bus route brings together chicanos from every corner of El Hoyo. Echeverria's space appears, at first glance, to expand and deterritorialize the limits of El Hoyo. Pete possesses a mobile masculinity, a gaze that readily acknowledges the "giggling waitresses," "pretty daughter[s]," and "pouting little lips" of his passengers. His mobility is juxtaposed with the "ex-would-be Romeos, their wives, in-laws, and kids piled high" into "cars with sputtering motors" that Pete's bus passes on the road (363). Nevertheless, "Southside Run" fixes, as well as mobilizes, communal space.

At the center of "Southside Run" is a tale about a "rich Chinese land baron who went from restaurant to restaurant, from dumping area to dumping area, and collected scraps for his hundred pigs" (364). This man, who lived on "an immense land closure," was isolated, both geographically and economically, from the community and, as a result, when "he fell ill.... his weak cries could not be heard above the snorts and oinks of the pigs. So when the pigs got hungry they ate his bony carcass, pigtail and all. His ancestral philosophy had never told him of a chicano adage which says, `It is no crime to be a pig, only to be snouty'" (364-65). Here again the space of the "chicano" is implicitly fashioned outside of another ("snouty") discourse, the "ancestral philosophy" of the old man, whose difference opposes the fixed communal values, the sameness, of El Hoyo.

For the narrator of "Southside Run," the old man has strayed too far from the safe boundaries of the community and, as a result, has isolated and endangered himself. (4) Pete, however, makes "a `U' mm" when he reaches the outskirts of the community and returns to the center of El Hoyo. Like Garza's ability to sense the inauthentic "aqua-rosa" exteriors of those who try "to keep up materially with the people next door," Pete's "maestria" also equips him with an eye for the essential:

   The houses on San Juan are set apart. They are constructed within the
   limited architecture provided by scant savings and loans which leave very
   little for the intent of Spanishizing them, Mexicanizing them,
   Colonializing them, or Puebloizing them. They are simply houses with
   sometimes plastered but usually unplastered exteriors.... Houses in which
   family history is well recorded in scratched walls and faded spots where
   the jelly left by small hands was unwisely washed off with wet rags. (365)

There are no facades in this story's El Hoyo. The decorations, the scratches on the walls that you see are real, material reminders of individual histories, not false pretensions to fashionable architectural designs.

"Loco-Chu" is Suarez's most unlikely maestro. Although the reader might expect this vagabond with "decaying bits of food hanging between his decaying teeth and purplish gums" to occupy an abject position within El Hoyo (111), Suarez locates Loco-Chu firmly within the boundaries of communal space. Like Senor Garza, Loco-Chu is not bound by capitalism: he acquires money, but does not value it for its worth within the US economy: "Loco-Chu will accept dimes and even pennies but his passion is nickels" (109). Rather, he sees money as a means to an end, hence his passion for nickels which, at the close of "Loco-Chu," is explained by his love for music: "It is at the Canton [Cafe] that Chu spends all the nickels that people give him. He puts them, one by one, into the fancily lighted juke box.... The music, of whatever kind it may be, is singularly Loco-Chu's" (111). Indeed, Locu-Chu doesn't need money to survive; the community takes care of him, and although his body at times threatens to extend its borders into abjected space ("Chu eats, leaving food all over the floor and all over the counter" [110]), it soon restores its clean and proper boundaries when Loco-Chu "emerges with a bucket of hot water and a mop and goes to work" (110). His participation in the community even extends to directing its traffic at "busy corners" (110). Loco-Chu is, then, very much part of the community, a maestro who does not let work or money get in the way of his enjoyment of life.

Despite the community's acceptance of Loco-Chu, it is his story that also makes the reader aware of El Hoyo's abjected others, specifically the zoot suiters who even Loco-Chu "cusses at the top of his voice [while they sit] along the window sill like crows on a telephone wire. He tells them of their canine ancestry" (110). Although Neate argues that "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'" (emphasis mine; "Unwelcome" 32), Suarez's fiction is never that easy to define: like any communal space or cultural identity, El Hoyo must define itself in contradistinction to "Otherness" and, as a result, it must also abject and expel "leftovers" in order to police its boundaries. Loco-Chu's difference is, then, embraced by El Hoyo: he helps to further delineate the boundaries of communal space by naming other "Others" who pose a more serious threat to the community.

Penetration and Protection: El Hoyo's Border Patrol

The pachucos who, in "Loco-Chu," sit "along the window sill like crows on a telephone wire" become "zopilotes" in "Kid Zopilote":

   They sat on the sill and conversed until very late at night.... They
   shouted from one side of the street to the other when they saw a friend or
   enemy, their only other action being that of bringing up cigarettes to the
   lips, letting the smoke out through the nose, and spitting on the sidewalk
   through the side of the mouth, leaving big yellow green splotches on the
   cement. (114)

Pepe Garcia is nicknamed "Kid Zopilote" when he comes "back from [a summer in] California a cursed pachuco. A no-good zoot suiter" (113). Suarez's representation of the "spitting" pachuco utilizes the abject metaphor of the "zopilote," the buzzard, in order to expel pachucismo from El Hoyo's communal boundaries: "When the damned zopilotes eat, they only eat what has been previously eaten. Sometimes they almost choke and consequently they puke. But always there is another zopilote who comes up from behind and eats the puke of the first. Then they look for a tree. When they ease themselves on the poor tree, the tree dies" (115). Suarez's pachucos are both infected and contagious: everything related to Pepe Garcia is considered polluted according to the community; even his girlfriends become "Kiddas Zopilotas" as a result of their proximity to Garcia. But what is it about the pachuco that threatens the community of El Hoyo?

Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino and John Tagg, responding to Octavio Paz's famous critique of the pachuco's "sheer negative impulse" and "tangle of contradictions," argue that "desertion from both Mexican and American cultures and insubordinate difference were, for wartime superpatriots, the marks of the pachuco's treason" (558). "For those who wore the Zoot Suit," they continue,

   it was not a question of discovering beneath the structures of domination
   an innate individual and collective identity that could be safeguarded and
   cultivated until the political moment destined for its emergence. Pachuco
   culture was a survival strategy not of purity, of saying less, but rather
   of saying more, of saying too much, with the wrong accent and intonation,
   of mixing the metaphors, making illegal crossings, and continually
   transforming language so that its effects might never be wholly assimilable
   to an essential ethnicity. (132)

For Sanchez-Tranquilino and Tagg, the zoot suit threatens communal identity: it ungrounds the notion of fixed cultural markers and refuses to conform to the established boundaries of communal and cultural space. Writing about Tucson's attitudes toward pachucismo in the 1940s, Thomas E. Sheridan notes that "most members of the Mexican middle class despised the pachuco" (246): "At their most radical, they reflected a disturbing change in the barrios" (245). Given the maestros' disdain for the shifting values and appearances of postwar Tucson, it is not surprising that Kid Zopilote and the proliferating meanings of his calo are expelled from the boundaries of El Hoyo.

Whereas the space of Garza's barber shop is portrayed as a vibrant cornerstone of the community, pachuco space is represented as isolated and infected. Suarez even anticipates the narcopolemics of the "War on Drugs" when his pachucos become insatiable addicts who need their fix from the "stranger" at Kaiser's Shoeshine:

   Every day new boys came and asked for the stranger ... with the free
   cigarettes. In time he no longer gave them. He sold them. And the guys who
   bought them were affected in many ways. Talero Fernandez crept on the floor
   like a dog. Chico Sanchez went up and down Meyer Street challenging
   everybody. Gaston Fuentes opened the fly of his pants and wet the sidewalk.
   (116)

Here the pachucos break the clean and proper borders of communal space with their addicted/infected bodies and their fluid language. To the "spiritual sons of Mexico," the pachucos (and their "stranger") represent the threat from Los Angeles, the possibility that their communal space--and their control of that space--will be undermined and infected by another discourse that proliferates, rather than polices, cultural identities and that, therefore, ungrounds the notion of an "innate individual and collective identity that [can] be safeguarded and cultivated" (Sanchez-Tranquilino and Tagg 132). Suarez's fiction controls the threat of the pachuco by forcing Kid Zopilote and his friends to get their hair cut as punishment for their participation in a zoot suit riot: (5) "Their drapes and pleated pants were [also] cut with scissors. They crept home along alleys, like shorn dogs with their tails between their legs, lest people should see them" (117).

The pachuco is not the only threat to El Hoyo's communal borders. In "Cuco Goes to a Party," Suarez provides us with a metaphor for US-Mexico relations, and he uses this metaphor to suggest that the space of El Hoyo is being disconnected from its Mexican roots and threatened with contamination. Orchestrated by the maestro Senor Garza, Cuco and Procuna perform a mock bullfight in the bar of the Royal Inn. During this wonderfully vivid scene, Cuco sings the praises of a famous Mexican bullfighter, Armillita:

   Is he any good? You ask me. Is he any good? Why--he is the maestro [of]
   maestros.... I saw him perform in the Mexico City arena. He was
   magnificent. Each time the bull passed by his body it seemed that the great
   Armillita would end up on the horns of the bull. Yet he was as much at ease
   in the midst of it all as we are here, drinking beer. (104-05)

Cuco here extends the metaphor of the bullfight to the bar in El Hoyo. If the bull is read as the potential threat of US contamination and assimilation--a reading supported by an earlier description of a bullfighter who collides with the bull in "a mass of enraged animal and embroidered silk" only to emerge "alive" but "shaken" (104)--Suarez here uses Armillita to map the ideal relationship between US space and the communal space occupied by El Hoyo's "spiritual sons of Mexico." El Hoyo's "chicanos" are "much at ease" with the dangers that encroach upon and threaten their community; they are able to elide and defeat the bull(y). Nevertheless, when the scene rapidly degenerates into drunken revelry, and when, as a result, Cuco is estranged from his wife and forced to leave El Hoyo, we sense that something is wrong: the aficionado of bullfighting is expelled from his community of "maestros."

We find out, however, that it is not Cuco's wife, Emilia, who causes Cuco's estrangement. Rather, it is Emilia's brothers who nag Cuco and who are responsible for his expulsion from El Hoyo:

   One night Cuco Martinez decided not to go home right away. Every night he
   hurried home from work because his two brothers-in-law did it and thought
   it right. The brothers-in-law believed that if a man got up very early in
   the morning and cooked his breakfast, it was right .... The brothers-in-law
   also believed that if a man worried about the price of household needs and
   discussed them with the wife, it was right. Maybe it was right. But only to
   his two brothers-in-law. (102)

Here, once again, the communal space of El Hoyo is set up in contradistinction to another discourse: the beliefs of the "brothers-in-law" who threaten (and, with their expulsion of Cuco, succeed) to disrupt the masculine space of the maestros and replace it with a more gender-equal, domesticated space in which a man and "the wife" can discuss financial matters together. Senor Garza, of course, manages to escape from his wife to his barber shop, but with the brothers-in-law Cuco has met his match. The loss of Cuco reveals a nostalgia for a less complicated patriarchal community insulated from the socioeconomic changes taking place in postwar Tucson.

"Las Comadres" is Suarez's most troubling story. Although the subject matter of the vignette is women's space within El Hoyo, something that Suarez's other stories skirt around, this space, as the opening words of "Las Comadres" remind us, will be prescribed and policed by El Hoyo's "compadres":

   Whenever two chicanos find that they have many things in common they often
   end up baptizing each others children and becoming compadres .... If they
   drink together it means they constantly seek each others company, share the
   most intimate of secrets, and even cry over their beers, at least until
   they become cosigners. All this automatically makes their wives comadres.
   (38)

"Las Comadres" begins and ends with the "automatic" and unconscious privileging of male, homosocial desire over the "talk" and "gossip" of El Hoyo's comadres, the kind of privilege that is being lost and lamented in "Cuco Goes to a Party." The story centers around Anastacia, "a stout comadre," and her husband, Lazarillo, who frequently gives Anastacia "one of her beatings" (38). In the same way that the El Hoyo of "Cuco Goes to a Party" is undergoing significant changes, so too the communal space of "Las Comadres" is feeling the "repercussions" of "Hitler's march" and "the ensueing trickle, then river, of money which found its way to El Hoyo via the air base, increased railroad activity, an aircraft plant and ultimately allotment checks [so that] even the spirit of comadreada underwent a change" (38).

Like the changes represented by the discourse of Cuco's "brothers-in law," the transformation of the workplace and the concomitant increase in economic opportunities for El Hoyo's women constitute another threat to masculine space in "Las Comadres." As anthropologist Carlos Velez-Ibanez notes in Border Visions, the war redefined the position of women within Tucson's economy:

   It is [ironic] that in 1942 in Tucson, where many Mexican railroad workers
   left for war, Mexican women were hired in some positions that paid better
   than laying tracks. From carrying out maintenance duties to firing up
   locomotive engines, these "Susanas del SP"--the Mexican version of "Rosie
   the Riveter"--took the first important steps in breaking down some of the
   "color" occupational barriers on the railroad, as well as in the struggle
   against sexual harassment in general. They successfully had men fired for
   sexual harassment and may have been among the first women in the United
   States to do so. (119)

These changes in the position of women vis-a-vis the ostensibly "masculine" spaces of labor and wage earning help to contextualize "Las Comadres."

While estranged from El Hoyo, Anastacia's "Otherness" manifests itself in precisely the same way that Suarez describes the dangerously wealthy new women of El Hoyo who turn "their faces and put their noses in the air when they chanced on one another in the street" (38): she becomes a "snouty" resident of a "fashionable apartment" and "a lousy housewife" 38). Suarez's El Hoyo is reluctant to grant such economic and legal powers to its comadres, and, although Anastacia decides to leave El Hoyo and her abusive husband, the vignette concludes by reprivileging and restoring masculine communal space when Lola persuades Anastacia to return to her house and to her husband.

   Our comadre Anastacia, lying in bed with a pair of black eyes and her hair
   disheveled, bubbled on her pillow. As she heard her comadre Lola's Nacho
   start his serenade a few windows away, Anastacia breathed deeply of El
   Hoyo's cool summer air and sighed dreamily. Then she gently scratched her
   own Lazarillo's shoulder and asked, "Are you awake, my love?" (40)

Instead of expanding into a limitless space that "constantly takes in ... Otherness" (Neate, "Unwelcome" 32), El Hoyo polices its borders, retrieves its wayward citizens, so that now when Anastacia is beaten, rather than extricating herself from the community and threatening the borders of its masculine space, she reinforces the communal patterns of male dominance and desire.

One hopes that Suarez's intentions in "Las Comadres" were to critique the interpersonal relationships fostered by El Hoyo's patriarchal codes, but the text itself offers no alternative or autonomous space for women either within or outside of the community: Anastacia is either battered or "snouty," and the only difference between the beginning and the end of the story is that she learns to see her beatings as a happy and necessary corollary, like Nacho's insatiable serenading of Lola, of life in El Hoyo. Even the illustration that accompanies Suarez's story in Con Safos, published in an edition of the journal that lists Suarez as fiction editor, downplays the violence enacted upon Anastacia's body (see figure 1). The illustration registers the threat of male violence in the form of Lola's two boys who wield slingshots and wooden sticks.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Recent work in border studies and postcolonial theory suggests that the notion of a hybrid (and necessarily oppositional) mestizo identity--such as Neate's definition of "Chicanismo as a renewed paradigmatic identity of difference ... founded upon miscegenation and mutual participation" ("Unwelcome" 31)--often blinds critics to the historical and material particularities of subaltern space. (6) Drawing on Homi Bhabha's celebrated notion of the inherent subversiveness and ambivalence of the subaltern subject position, scholars of minority and postcolonial literatures have been quick to apply poststructural theories of discourse to explicate the literary production of subaltern spaces. (7) "From our vantage point in the twentieth century," argue Hector Calderon and Jose David Saldivar,

   we can posit that [this oppositional subaltern] perspective must have
   emerged in the borderlands in mid-nineteenth century when
   Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, or mestizos began to project for themselves a
   positive, yet also critical, rendering of their bilingual and bicultural
   experience as a resistive measure against Anglo-American economic
   domination and ideological hegemony. (4)

To be sure, Suarez's complex representations of Barrio El Hoyo reconstitute "the ethnic other ... as the germ, or kernel, of a revitalized intersubjective community" (Neate, Tolerating 100); and as such, these representations subvert and resist "the designation of [this] ethnic group as a remainder" (Neate, Tolerating 100). But, as I have argued, it is a mistake to make Suarez's El Hoyo into a limitless and carnivalesque space of subaltern resistance and ambivalence.

As critics engaged in reconstructing the Chicano/a literary heritage, at the same time that we acknowledge (like Neate, Paredes, and Nericcio) the expansive fluidity of El Hoyo that unsettles and deterritorializes certain cultural and racial differences within the boundaries of its communal space, we should note how Suarez's texts reterritorialize these boundaries at a key moment in the history of Tucson's Mexican-American community. Instead of hybrid, borderless, and "pre-national" Chicano/a subjects, El Hoyo is populated with "maestros" whose patriarchal gazes mourn the loss of definitive national, cultural, and gender differences.

Notes

I want to thank Daniel Cooper Alarcon, James E. Turner, and the University of Arizona Library's Special Collections for their help with this essay.

(1.) Daniel Cooper Alarcon and I are currently working on a project to collect and publish together all of Suarez's fiction.

(2.) Padilla and Wiley have also discussed the functions of nostalgia in Mexican-American literary production.

(3.) After his discharge from the United States Navy, Suarez started to write his vignettes while studying at the University of Arizona.

(4.) Suarez's "The Migrant," a rare story set outside El Hoyo, also warns of the dangers of leaving the community. Once Teofilo Vargas leaves his home for the California cotton fields, he dooms himself, according to the text, to the life of a migrant. The story suggests that the adage he uses to explain his poor table manners is unfortunately all too true: "Once a farm worker, always a farm worker" (18).

(5.) The high school riot that Kid Zopilote is involved in would have reminded readers of the infamous 1943 zoot suit riots in Los Angeles. These riots, and the 1942 "Sleepy Lagoon" murder case that helped precipitate the violence, are the topic of Luis Valdez's 1978 play and 1981 film, Zoot Suit.

(6.) For critical discussions concerning the shortcomings of poststructural approaches to postcolonial theory, see Ahmad, Dirlik, and Parry. In short, these scholars warn that any approach to literature and culture that applies a globalized theory of colonialism is ill-equipped to analyze the specific historical and material particularities of postcolonial space.

(7.) See Bhabha for an introduction to his theories of ambivalence and mimicry.

Works Cited

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Calderon, Hector, and Jose David Saldivar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Identity, and Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Dirlik, Arif. "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism." Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328-56.

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Klor De Alva, J. Jorge. "The Postcolonialization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of `Colonialism,' `Postcolonialism,' and Mestizaje.'" After Colonialism.' Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Ed. Gyan Prakash. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. 241-78.

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--. Tolerating Ambiguity: Ethnicity and Community in Chicano/a Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

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James D. Lilley has published essays, reviews, and interviews in Southern Quarterly, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, and Mississippi Review. He is editor of Cormac McCarthy: New Directions (U of New Mexico P, forthcoming 2002). Lilley is currently working on a dissertation at Princeton University that explores how the racial politics of the emerging US nation influenced, and were influenced by, the development of American Gothic Literature.