Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
(b. 1929)
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, son of a Mexican American
father and an Anglo-American mother, is a product of the Mexican-U.S. border’s
cultural synthesis. He grew up in the southern Rio Grande valley of Texas,
where Spanish and English still compete for dominance. His paternal family
roots in Texas go back to the 1740s, predating the U.S. annexation by a
century. Justifiably, there is no sense of immigration in him, but rather one
of legitimate ownership and belonging. After serving in the Korean conflict and
then completing a doctorate in Spanish literature, he held several teaching
assignments, including Chairman of Chicano Studies at Minnesota. In the early
1980s he switched academic departments to become a professor of English and
Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.
Hinojosa’s
books form a multi-volumed story that, through the life of two cousins, relates
the history of a fictional South Texas county of Belkin. His main preoccupation
is the survival of what he calls Texas-Mexican Border Culture despite constant
repression by the economically dominant Anglo-Texans in league with some
traitorous Mexican Americans. History itself becomes a battleground for
conflicting versions of the past, and the Tex-Mex communal oral tradition is
revealed as more reliable than the official written texts, the latter being
controlled by the Anglo-American colonizers, who manipulate historical records,
as they do the legal and academic systems, to assure a favorable status quo.
His work resembles a vast detective novel, with social protest overtones, in
which the neglected truth of Texas history is sought through the fragmented
memories of numerous witnesses. The villains and criminals are the invaders and
their stooges, the Texas Rangers. The original Mexican inhabitants are the
plaintiffs; and the narrator, who constantly cedes the word to others, is like
an investigative reporter gathering evidence to slowly piece together into an
indictment of oppression.
Concern
for the oral tradition explains both Hinojosa’s conversational tone and the
constant intercalations of documents, testimony, and transcriptions of oral
memoirs. Writing must remain faithful to the people it reflects and to their
traditional form of expression, the spoken word. His texts engage the dominant
culture’s repressive writing, juxtaposing it to oral versions. Hence, the
framing newspaper notes that not only persist in repeating what the oral
evidence disproves, but reveal, through the errata, the written media’s callous
indifference to Chicanos. This conflict between the written and the oral, as
well as the need to make writing embody suppressed traditions, is a key to
understanding not only Chicano writing, but that of many marginal groups as
they begin to produce a literature.
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