To make a “Flowry” Death: Rereading Artro Islas, By Andrés Rodríguez

1. Arturo Islas, The Rain God: A Desert Tale (Palo Alto: Alexandrian Press, 1984), 142. All subsequent passages quoted from this edition are cited in parentheses in the essay.
2. With one exception: Yolanda Padilla, “Indian Mexico: The Changing Face of Indigeneity in Chicana/o Literature, 1910-1984” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000). This study contains a chapter devoted entirely to Islas’s first novel. Padilla’s webpage at one time announced a forthcoming article, “Aztecs, Aztlán, and Authenticity: The Politics of Indigenismo in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God,” that seems to cover this area as well.
3. See, e.g. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, “Sexuality, Repression, and Death in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God,” Bilingual Review 12.3 (1985): 258-61; Marta E. Sánchez, “Arturo Islas’ The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition,” American Literature 62.2 (1990): 284-304; José Saldívar, “The Hybridity of Culture in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God,” Dispositio: Revista Americana de Estudios Semioticos y Culturales 16.41 (1991): 109-19; and Antonio C. Márquez, “The Historical Imagination in Arturo Islas’s The Rain God and Migrant Souls,” MELUS 19.2 (1994): 3-16.
4. For a full discussion of this literary history, see Frederick Luis Aldama, Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 38-51. Aldama states that the “experimental content and form” of Islas’s novel, i.e. its queer Chicano protagonist and shifting narrative point of view, upset publishers as much as, if not more than, its ethnicity, which did not fall into either the farmworker or urban gang stereotype. He refers to the earlier version of The Rain God, then called “The Day of the Dead.”
5. Saldívar, 111.
6. Although the mainstream literary establishment has used and still uses “ethnic” as a label to dismiss works by non-Anglo writers, or to exploit such works and their writers as “exotic,” “alien,” “primitive,” often with the full participation of those writers, we should not be deterred by the usual misuses and abuses of “ethnic.” A serious, intelligent legitimacy has been given to this concept in order to educate society’s narrow views. Rather than feeling put out by the literary establishment over the way it uses “ethnic,” we should view the word as pertaining to a more inclusive idea or vision of humanity, and as part of a universal discipline. Indeed, ethnopoetics is the more apt and meaningful term that informs our awareness of the indigeneity of any literary work, including Islas’s novel.
7. Octavio Paz, The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 87.
8. For an enlightening discussion of the use of Indigenismo by Chicano literati during the late sixties and early seventies, see J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian Motifs: Foil and Fetish,” Confluencia 1 (1986): 18-26. Writing twenty years ago, Klor de Alva observed that “the use of Mesoamerican themes by Chicano artists is less popular today than it was a decade ago.” He argued that the critical project of Indigenismo by Chicanos was oriented more toward criticizing Anglos than “as a call to unity by an appeal to something believed to be shared by all Chicanos, an Indian past.” Islas’s novel seems to be more curious about the actual depth of that Indian past than many other works by Chicanos, then or now.
9. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 208.
10. Saldívar argues that “The Rain God mounts a counter-rhetoric against the words of idealism . . . by bringing those words into [Islas’s] Chicano narrative and bringing them to the Southwest Borderlands: freedom is rain, soul is sexual passion, the lord is the Amerindian Tlaloc.” Is death one of these words? And if so, what is its counter? Life? On which side of the dichotomy does it belong?
Basing part of his discussion on Wallace Stevens’s “influence,” Saldívar seems to imply that Islas believes the myth of the rain god is as “obsolete” as the myth of the Christian god. If this is so, then Islas’s “counter-rhetoric” has the opposite effect, giving the presentation of the rain god a compelling, vital feel. The “wet, blooming passion” that Saldívar perceives in Islas as a challenge to or inversion of “closed systems,” “hollow spiritual categories,” and “desolate Christian mythology” also suggests that pre-Columbian religion (so-called paganism) is more than a rhetorical device.
11. Márquez, 6.
12. See Sánchez, Márquez, and Roberto Cantú, “Arturo Islas,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Chicano Writers, Second Series, vol. 122, ed. Francisco A. Lomelí and Carl R. Shirley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1992), 146-54.
13. The epigraph comes from Pablo Neruda’s Las alturas de Macchu Picchu/The Heights of Macchu Picchu (section XII):
I come to speak through your dead mouths…
Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Fasten your bodies to me like magnets.
Hasten to my veins, to my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
14. Quoted in Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind, trans. Jack Emory Davis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 78.
15. Sánchez, 297.
16. This term is derived of course from ethnopoetics, which is both a field of inquiry and, more importantly, an undertaking to recover the “other,” i.e. the primitive, indigenous, oral, and poetic. See the works of anthropologist Stanley Diamond and literary critic Sherman Paul.
17. Ilan Stavans, The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 102.
18. Marta E. Sánchez states the following about readership: “The Rain God aims to create new ‘American’ readers who are aware of and self-conscious about their relationship to other cultures. It presupposes a triple audience, a Chicano bilingual and an Anglophonic, monolingual audience, that also includes non-bilingual Chicanos” (299). This provides confirmation that one is not reading an entirely different book than the one Islas wrote. For Chicano culture represents a great many things that reside in the soul or that constitute the soul’s home, one of which is the presence and power of the Indian past.
19. Sánchez, 298.
20. For an “existential” perspective of Mexican festive death rituals, see Ricardo Sánchez, “Day of the Dead Is Also about Life,” San Antonio Express-News, November 1, 1985.