Читать книгу A Stab in the Dark - Facundo Bernal - Страница 8

“Defending What’s Rightly Ours”:

An Introduction to Facundo Bernal’s

Forgotten Masterpiece of

Los Angeles Literature

Josh Kun

IN 1923, a syndicate of African-American investors from Los Angeles and a team of mayors and local civic and business leaders in Northern Mexico decided that Baja California needed a “Negro Sanitarium.” The proposed health spa was a tourist pitch under the banner of interracial brotherhood, and it required cross-border buy-in.

In Los Angeles, Charlotta Bass, the publisher of the pioneering African-American newspaper The California Eagle, did her part to fundraise, as did Agustín Haro y Tamariz, editor of La Prensa, the city’s first Spanish-language weekly. The Louisiana jazz legend Kid Ory, summering in Los Angeles, played a benefit show in Exposition Park. And down at the border in Calexico, the poet and journalist Facundo Bernal hustled donations at a rate of 50 cents for each brick in the sanitarium’s walls; he had been living in the growing border community since leaving Los Angeles five years earlier.1 Bernal was originally from Sonora, but by 1923 he had become a key figure in Southern California-Baja California life and letters and a member of a bilingual and multicultural network of writers, artists, entrepreneurs, and politicians who took L.A.’s ties to Mexico seriously. The volume you hold in your hands, Palos de Ciego — his first and only book — was published in Los Angeles that same year. It consists of poems that originally ran in the pages of La Prensa, poems that, like Bernal himself, moved back and forth between the cultural and political worlds of Los Angeles and Northern Mexico. It was a time, before fences, walls, and the Border Patrol, when the border only existed to be crossed.

Bernal first crossed it in 1913, on his way to East Los Angeles. As an outspoken journalist in his hometown of Hermosillo, Bernal was a relentless critic of local politicians struggling for power in the thick of the Mexican Revolution. He received a number of death threats and, after one stint in jail, was promised a lifetime of imprisonment if he didn’t leave the country. He came to L.A. on the run, a journalist in exile, and his byline soon appeared in the Los Angeles Times (attached to a feature on the revolution in Sonora2) and on the pages of some of the city’s most important Spanish-language periodicals: El Heraldo de México, El Eco de Mexico, and La Prensa. Writing didn’t pay all the bills, so after a brief stint in a factory packing tomatoes, he also began working at his brother’s clothing store, Casa Bernal Hermanos, selling bespoke suits. Bernal spent four years in the city, immersing himself in its thriving and rapidly expanding community of Mexican immigrants; he followed local news and politics as closely as he followed developments back home in Sonora. Even when he left to open another branch of the family’s business in the Mexican border town of Mexicali, Los Angeles remained central to his writing.

In 1921, Bernal began publishing a series of poems in La Prensa — a paper that declared itself to be “por la patria y por la raza” (for the Mexican nation and the Mexican race) — under the pseudonym of “Míster Blind.” The paper’s “new collaborator” and his poems “about current politics and events” were announced in a bold text box on the paper’s front page. Bernal’s weekly verse chronicles, which could be as satirical and smug as they were sincere and culturally flag-waving, appeared alongside advertisements for a Mexican pastelería on Spring Street, a funeral home on Figueroa, a Chinese herbalist on Alameda, an “American” dentist on Main Street, the Commercial National Bank on Spring, and El Progreso restaurant on Main — which offered “platillos netamente Mexicanos” (truly Mexican dishes) but was owned and run by Chinese immigrants, the Quon Chong Company.

By the time Bernal compiled his poems into a book, they had already established him as a trusted cross-border tribune and recorder, a leading authority on Mexican life both in Los Angeles and in Mexicali and Sonora. In fact, according to Mexican author and literary scholar Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Palos de Ciego was a pioneering expression of a regional identity, of “a way of life, of a merger of beliefs and customs, of a historical stage of development and consolidation of Mexico’s northern border, which is to say, of border society — call it Sonoran, Chicano, or Baja Californian.”3 Or call it, for that matter, Angeleno.

WHERE DOES the literature of Los Angeles begin? Palos de Ciego is one of the first books of poems about the city, and yet it is nowhere to be found in accounts of L.A. literary history. Although it followed Horace Bell’s Reminiscences of a Ranger: Early Times in Southern California (1881) — thought to be first book printed in Los Angeles — and a number of other celebrated works such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), Palos de Ciego appeared years before L.A. really burst onto the literary scene in 1939, with the publication of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep. It also just preceded works with which it had much in common: Japanese immigrant novelist Shoson Nagahara’s Lament in the Night (1925) and The Tale of Osato (1925-26) — the latter of which was, like Palos, originally serialized in an L.A. paper, the Japanese daily Rafu Shimpo; Arna Bontemps’s 1931 novel of Black Los Angeles, God Sends Sunday; and the very first novel of Mexican-American life in Los Angeles, Las Aventuras de Don Chipote, o Cuando los pericos mamen (1928, translated in 2000 as The Adventures of Don Chipote, or, When Parrots Breast-Feed) by the Mexican journalist, playwright, and novelist Daniel Venegas.

Raised in Guadalajara, Venegas arrived in L.A. in 1924 and his novel, released by the publishing arm of El Heraldo de México, has long been considered the starting point of the city’s Chicano literature and the first book to employ early forms of “Spanglish.” Palos de Ciego checked the same boxes five years earlier. One explanation for the book’s lack of visibility is that it barely circulated in the 1920s. A warehouse flood destroyed many of the original copies. Yet even after Trujillo Muñoz excavated it for re-publication in Baja California in 1989, Palos is still mostly regarded as a milestone of poesía urbana (urban poetry) in the literature of Northern Mexico.4 Bernal’s significance extends far north of the border as well. He is one of transnational border modernism’s greatest literary interpreters.

During the period chronicled in Palos, the greater U.S.-Mexico borderland was in the midst of a modernizing boom.5 Beyond the growth of U.S. railroad and mining industries, border tourism was on the rise and the first border radio stations were broadcasting north and south of the line. A community of artists, writers, journalists, and musicians were seeking to make sense of a cross-border ecology and culture that were still less than half a century old, and Bernal was an important voice in that effort. The fact that Palos was published in Los Angeles, and that its cross-border content begins and ends in L.A., testifies to the city’s direct connection to the history of transnational border modernism. Unfortunately, that connection has been largely lost in tellings of L.A. literary history. In a recent re-evaluation of the Latinx roots of L.A. literature, Victor Valle takes literary historians and anthologists to task for turning Latinx non-fiction writers into literary ghosts: “The [L.A.] canon’s lingering reluctance to account for narratives that deliberately undermine or ignore the fixities of national borders thus ensures the invisibility of the serpentine routes through which Latina/o non-fiction writers invent their urban ‘native’ identities.”6 The same could be said for generically challenging works like Palos de Ciego, which blend non-fiction with fiction, poetry with journalism, etc. — works that define their own forms of “radical cosmopolitanism” rooted in the migrant, cross-border experiences of early 20th-century Los Angeles.

THE LOS ANGELES sections of Palos de Ciego give us a detailed, vibrant account of a city in the midst of an immigrant transformation. Between 1910 and 1930, close to a million Mexican immigrants fled the political upheavals of the Mexican Revolution and settled in the U.S., seeking freedom and work in the booming industries of the Southwest. Los Angeles, which was rapidly expanding its industrial base and fast becoming a capital of leisure and entertainment, was the most popular destination. In 1920, the Mexican population of Los Angeles reached 30,000; by 1930, it more than tripled. Among the Mexican newcomers was “an entrepreneurial class of refugees,” as Nicolás Kanellos has written, who were instrumental in shaping a circle of industries — journalism, entertainment, and commerce — that actively promoted the interests of “México de afuera” (Mexico beyond Mexico).7 The paper in which Palos de Ciego first appeared, La Prensa, was just one of a series of influential but short-lived Spanish-language newspapers that had been covering Mexican Los Angeles since 1851. There had already been La Estrella de Los Ángeles, El Clamor Público, and La Crónica, and when Bernal was writing as “Míster Blind,” La Gaceta de los Estados Unidos (founded in 1917) and El Heraldo de México (founded in 1915) were covering similar beats — beats that, in 1926, would be taken over by La Opinión, still the largest Spanish-language paper in the country.

Bernal’s Los Angeles poems — written at the end of the Mexican Revolution and at the start of Prohibition — were mostly inspired by and addressed to the city’s growing Mexican population, fellow “foreigners / living in Yankee-landia.” His lines are populated by Mexican politicians, generals, and actors, by labor unions and corrupt landlords. Palos occupies multiple geographies at once — Los Angeles, Mexicali, Sonora — and Bernal explores just how much each place influences the others. He shows, for instance, how the Volstead Act’s drying up of California (and wetting up of Baja) impacted border tourist economies and U.S. stereotypes of Mexican culture. He imagines a “Letter Sent from Mexico to Los Angeles, Calif.” and a “Letter Sent from Los Angeles to Mexico.” In the former, a man in Jauja, Michoacán, learns about his L.A. bank going bankrupt by reading La Prensa; in the latter, his compadre reveals that his heart breaks with longing for Mexico. He is stuck in Los Angeles, “lurching in place.”

Bernal’s L.A. poems move across the city, riding streetcars to Venice Beach and other seaside resorts and dancehalls, but also up and down Broadway, Main, New High, and Alameda, the downtown avenues of Mexican business and culture, which were home to many film and vaudeville (or variedades) theaters, whose productions also find their way into his verse.8 He writes about the sunshine of “the beautiful Angelo-polis,” but also of its violent noir — including a “crimson wave of crime” against women that leaves a “gruesome tableau” in its wake: “dirty chunks” of flesh “slicked with blood,/ and splattered/ with brain matter.”

Bernal also castigates “Bad Mexicans,” who’ve assimilated too quickly the mores of Yankee-landia, and in so doing anticipates Octavio Paz’s now infamous critique of Mexicans in Los Angeles as orphans stuck in limbo between cultures and languages.9 Like Paz, Bernal sees the city’s potential to diminish Mexican identity and encourage the rise of the pocho, a deorgatory term for Mexicans in the U.S who are seen to have abandoned their native culture. In “Raking up the Past,” he dedicates “a few ‘stabs’/ to the people of my Raza/ who leave Mexico, and when they’ve/ barely set foot in Yankee-landia,/ forget their Spanish/ and disown their Homeland.” He is particularly hard on Mexican women who he believes have fallen from grace under the spell of L.A.’s charms, donning short skirts, dancing the hula, chewing gum, and speaking only “in the language of Byron.” He takes more stabs in “Pochos,” targeting “those from back home/ who land here, observe things,/ and never imitate what’s good,/ but only what’s terrible.” He berates their bilingualisms but, ironically, does a great service by committing to the page some of the very first instances of Spanglish in Los Angeles writing: “sun-ah-va-gún,” “What su mara?,” “gud taim,” and “Cheeses Cries.” And so he becomes, despite himself, the forerunner of El Piporro, Cheech & Chong, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Don Cheto.

Bernal’s excoriations of Gringofied Mexicans were part of a larger battle to defend Mexican culture and Mexican people in “México de afuera” generally, and in the often especially hostile spaces of Southern California specifically. The first poem in the book aligns Bernal’s own exilic patriotism with that of La Prensa itself, lauding the paper’s pages for exuding “Mexicanismo” and always supporting “THE HOMELAND AND ITS PEOPLE!” Bernal was just one of many Mexican journalists, publishers, business owners, and civic leaders in the Los Angeles outpost working to invent, support, and market an authentic and uniform vision of conservative Mexican identity. His poems were consistently “on message” with the reporting and editorials of La Prensa and El Heraldo: don’t be tempted by Yankee-landia — stay Catholic, stay moral, and speak Spanish.10

Although he is critical of “Bad Mexicans,” Bernal’s allegiance to his homeland and his people mostly takes the form of protest poems “defending what’s rightly ours” and railing against injustices suffered by immigrants. In “Raking Up The Past,” he lifts his lance (as he puts it) against “Jewish grifters and/ wholesale jewelry merchants,” shady employment agencies and professional lodges, and anyone else with plans to “exploit our Raza.” Up and down the Mexican main drag in “Short Films,” Bernal meets only a rogue’s gallery of “merciless” anti-Mexican “swindlers:” lying tailors, wily watch salesmen, and deceitful haberdashers.

He dedicates one poem, “Let’s Save Our Brother from the Hangman,” to Aureliano (Aurelio) Pompa, an immigrant laborer from Bernal’s home state in Sonora, who came to Los Angeles “seeking work in/ this Babylon,” his head full of “pipe dreams.” What Pompa receives instead is constant physical abuse and harassment from his Anglo carpenter foreman. After shooting the foreman in self-defense, Pompa is arrested, tried, and sentenced to execution. Bernal uses his poem to raise funds and try to prevent the hanging: “LET US ALL HELP/ AURELIANO POMPA.” But the effort is in vain. Besides finding its way into Bernal’s poem, Pompa’s story became the plot of one of the very first commercially recorded corridos (Mexican border ballads) in the United States. Set in Los Angeles and recorded in New York in 1924, “Vida, Proceso, y Muerte de Aurelio Pompa” (“The Life, Trial, and Death of Aurelio Pompa”) was subsequently sold as a phonographic disc to Mexican laborers across the United States. “Tell my race not to come here,” the song went. “For here they will suffer/ There is no pity here.”

That suffering, that lack of pity, is one of the great themes of this collection. In one poem, “Mexico in Caricature,” Bernal reviews a play staged at a theater on Broadway that portrayed the border crossing from Mexicali into Calexico, a crossing that, by 1923, the poet knew all too well. Bernal was outraged by the play’s depictions of Mexicans as sombrero-wearing and rifle-toting bandits: “If I could have set off/ an explosion, both playwright/ and protagonist would have/ been blown to smithereens.” He calls for a boycott of the theater for “denigrat[ing] what is ours” and darkening “honor of a free people/ deserving all due respect/ from the largest, most cultured/ country in the Universe.”

Palos de Ciego ends on a more proactive and laudatory note. After a series of poems about Mexicali (baseball! heat!), Bernal returns to downtown Los Angeles for a June 1923 performance of a variety show titled “Mexico Auténtico.” The show ran for three weeks and featured an all-star lineup of singers and dancers from Mexico City’s national theater, including character actor Ernesto Finance, dancer Rafael Diaz, opera singer Isabel Zenteno (Bernal liked how she “makes us feel, to our cores,/ the national ballads”), and singer and dancer Nelly Fernández (“Nelly, graceful Nelly”). The review of the show in the Los Angeles Times focused on the auditorium’s empty seats (“the Mexican colony, even, is not turning out as it should”), but Bernal only saw a full-house success — a proud representation of a proud people in which his readers, in turn, should take pride. “Let these poor lines go forth,” he writes in the closing poem of his book, “as a humble homage,/ full of love and admiration/ for the great artists who work/ their hearts out ‘For the Raza,/ for the Homeland, and for Art.’” This, Bernal insists, is how Mexican Los Angeles should look and how it should be understood. This is how culture ought to flow back and forth across borders. This is what Los Angeles should admire.

1 For more on this campaign, see Ted Vincent, “Black Hopes in Baja California: Black American and Mexican Cooperation, 1917-1926,” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 204-213. For a larger view of relations between Black Los Angeles and Baja California, see Josh Kun, “Tijuana and the Borders of Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 313-26.

2 “La ultima revolución en Sonora,” Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1913: 56.

3 Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Un Camino de hallazgos: poetas bajacalifornianos del siglo veinte (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1992, 1992), p. 15.

4 Trujillo Muñoz has anthologized Bernal in the canon of Baja California literature. See, for example, Entrecruzamientos. La cultura bajacaliforniana, sus autores y sus obras (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002); Mensajeros de Heliconia. Capítulos sueltos de las letras bajacalifornianas 1832-2004 (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2004); and La cultura bajacaliforniana y otros ensayos afines (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2005).

5 For more on various approaches to border and migrant modernism, see Christopher Schedler, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).

6 Victor Valle, “LA’s Latina/o Phantom Nonfiction and the Technologies of Literary Secrecy,” in Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 7.

7 Nicolás Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States,” in Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography, edited by Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000), p. 32. See also Ramón D. Chacón, “The Chicano Immigrant Press in Los Angeles: The Case of ‘El Heraldo de México,’ 1916-1920,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 48-50, 62-64.

8 For an excellent overview of this entertainment industry, see Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles Before World War II (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

9 Octavio Paz, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 9-28.

10 This trend has been well documented by many scholars. See, for example, Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States”; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street.