Miguel López received his PH.D. in Spanish in 1996 from Stanford University. In researching his dissertation, Entelequia: Chicano timespace in the poetry of Ricardo Sánchez, he spent a lot of time with Ricardo and the Sánchez family. He's a good friend of the family and I'd like to thank him for letting me put his paper, The Pinto Poet and the Critic: Ricardo Sánchez and Postmodern Theory, on the website.

Whereas many members of the first generation of Chicano literary critics (and authors) had their academic training in the fields of Mexican and Latin American literature, influential critics of the 1980s have been affiliated with departments of English at major U.S. universities. One outcome of this has been that Chicano literature has become accessible to English monolingual students. Another is that Chicano poetry has come to be judged on a developmental scale in which the multilingual production of the Movement period has been deemed inferior to more recent, Englishlanguage poetry. Chicana poets such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga have worked to overcome this English-only bias by continuing to use a multilingual Chicano vernacular in their work. Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and the collaborative anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981) have been well-received by feminist scholars and students despite the linguistic challenges they present to Anglo readers.

In his recent study of Chicano/a autobiography, My History, Not Yours, Genaro Padilla writes of a "nostalgia for the future [which] has played a central part in our survival in this country." Padilla cites autobiographer Cherríe Moraga's observation that " [e]very oppressed group needs to imagine with the help of history and mythology a world where our oppression did not seem the pre-ordained order" (1993 239). Padilla notes that:

Much recent Chicano autobiographical narrative attempts to reconcile the dilemma between utopian desire for an "ideal past or imagined future" and the startling realities of a present in which too many of our children are the victims of drugs and barrio warfare; a present in which most of us remain day laborers, maids, service workers subsiding [sic] on minimum wages and no health insurance; a present in which immigrants are commonly exploited by agricultural and industrial corporations as well as by small businesses and individuals looking for cheap labor and childcare; a present in which less than half of our young people ever finish high school and less than 30 percent of those high school graduates ever enroll in college, with fewer than 40 percent ever completing degrees. (1993 239)

Poet Ricardo Sánchez grew up in a barrio where such conditions and worse prevailed. He was a high school dropout due to educational neglect and spent nearly a decade of his life in prison. Genaro Padilla does not mention the many Chicanos and Chicanas incarcerated in state, local and federal prison systems. However, he does note that in the 1990s more than twenty years after the "Chicano Renaissance" Chicanos remain subject to conditions of racial subordination and economic exploitation:

That handful of us who teach in American universities learn from our research and the daily information we gather that our condition in this country has not greatly changed in the last century and a half.

Ricardo Sánchez was also a university professor and in the early seventies he wrote and taught that liberation from the social conditions that many Chicanas and Chicanos experience would be achieved through continued struggle against the racism and materialism in American life:

At this moment... in the 20th Century, Chicanos are still slaving and feeling the brunt and whip of this mad-dog society. Peonage is a reality in much of the migrant stream ... we must prepare to fight our war here in the barrios, campos y valles--not in Asia. (Canto y grito mi liberación 38)

Twenty years after their publication, it may be possible to overcome some of the obstacles that have prevented a better reading of Ricardo Sánchez's major texts of the 1970s. Continued reliance on stereotyped notions of Movement poetics has marginalized Sánchez as a poet "unfettered in his opinions, extreme in his views, and sometimes undisciplined in his form." Some critics have failed to read past the scandalous aspects of the poet's life and language, his vato loco demeanor learned on the streets of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and reinforced in prison confrontations with guards and inmates. Chicano critics who were acquainted with the poet and his work wrote reviews and appreciations of Canto y grito mi liberación and Hechizospells but they have yet to undertake the extended analyses that would document the contributions of these texts to Chicano poetry.

To sort out the notoriety from the substance of Ricardo Sánchez requires a careful reading of his work. As a number of critics have pointed out, Sánchez's poetry is an extended narrative that traces his life's itinerary from the harsh barrio schools of El Paso, to state prisons in California and Texas, to his travels in Mexico, Europe and various regions of the United States. According to Nicolás Kanellos, "[o]ne of the great achievements of Sánchez['s] poetry is, in fact, the power of his autobiography to convince us that his poetry is life, that the protagonist of his verse is the real-life, flesh-and-blood Ricardo Sánchez" (1985 7). Likewise, Juan Bruce-Novoa notes that " Sánchez is one of Chicano literature's most talented creators of poetic narrative. His apparent goal is to write the literary autobiography of Ricardo Sánchez, poet-militant, writer engagé." Yet some critics, particularly those trained in the Anglo American tradition, fail to note the autobiographical aspects of Sánchez's poetry.

Like entries in a personal diary, most of the poems in Canto y grito mi liberación are prefaced by a place and date of composition. The earliest are from the beginning of the 1960s when the author was in la pinta in California's Soledad Prison. Philip D. Ortego has called these poems "the best of Pinto poetry." According to Ortego, "Sánchez revels in that rogue spirit which characterizes a rich vein of his poetry" (1977 75).

Yet, without underestimating its importance as a poetic statement by a single author, Canto y grito (1971) should be seen as a prelude to the larger and more ambitious Hechizospells (1976). At least one critic has commented on the close relationship between these autobiographical texts. Marvin A. Lewis wrote of Hechizospells that "[i]n a sense this volume is an expansion of Canto y grito mi liberación. " 1 The critic does not explain in what sense one volume is an expansion of the other, nor does he try to describe the structural relationship between the texts. He merely comments that "Sánchez is given three hundred pages in which to expand his poetic horizons" ( 1978 203).

There seems little doubt that the success and originality of Canto y grito mi liberación made possible the publication of this most complex of Sánchez's works. The poet did not waste the opportunity (nor the three hundred pages), but given the innovative nature of the work it is not surprising that Hechizospells was misread, misunderstood and on the end, neglected. Like Canto y grito, Hechizospells is the poet's critique of his own life, the Movement and a racist, fascist "Amerika". Sánchez is not the first to define these themes, of course. They existed previously in poetic form in I Am Joaquin, a landmark Chicano poem,and Canto y grito mi liberación is, in part, Sánchez's effort to establish his own poetic identity with respect to this predecessor.

Later, in Hechizospells, he is able to produce a fuller, musical sense of composition, development and resolution, while in Canto y grito this development remains at the level of a possibility which is abruptly truncated, as if the cantogrito were cut off at full voice. Hechizospells develops Sánchez's poetic ideas far beyond the thematics of I Am Joaquin.. In fact, it offers the full range of the poet's development up to that time and also his view of the future development of Chicano culture and literature.

Sánchez's autobiographical discourse allows him to scrutinize his own actions, motivations and mental states, which swing precariously from a paranoid dread of re-incarceration to a schizophrenic search for his raza identity. Both volumes blaze out their critique of pompous language, racist institutions and petty individuals, often leaving the reader stunned by the hyperbolic outpouring. Hechizospells casts down the gauntlet in no uncertain terms, yet the controversial work did not elicit the critical response that its author expected. Sánchez's friends praised it and there were a number of favorable reviews, but the work was generally ignored by the academic community. Whether in the deserts of the Southwest or in the hills of Amherst, Massachusetts, the migrant poet and raza prophet of liberación was often seen as the bearer of ill tidings and hard truths. "Pere grino soy!" he wrote in 1970:

involved y embarcado

sonambulantly journeying,

raza, to the core of being (Hechizospells 1 13)

According to Philip Ortego, "(h)is voice, like the voice in the whirlwind, beseeches us all to redeem our humanity lest we perish by the ravages of the animal instinct confronting our spiritual essence" (1973 21). At Stanford University's Casa Zapata, a Chicano-theme residence hall, his image was literally erased from a mural depicting a pantheon of Chicano heroes. And although he continued writing, celebrating la raza and attacking his adversaries, Sánchez was never "given" another opportunity to publish on the scale of Hechizospells. Characterized by one reviewer as a throwback to the 1960s the book was met by a Chicano literary community unwilling to decode its difficult, uncompromising message. Written in an idiosyncratic blend of English, Spanish and pachuco jive, Hechizospells was inaccesible to most mainstream critics and some commentators merely dismissed Sánchez's grito as a kind of childish plea or ploy for attention.

Cordelia Candelaria deals with Sánchez's work in her book-length study of Chicano poetry, but by situating it in the context of the Chicano Movement, she characterizes it as an "early phase" in the development of "a genuine Chicano poetics" (Candelaria 72). According to Candelaria's periodization, the most recent phase is the one'which exhibits "a sophistication of style and technique, an individuality in treatment of subject and theme, and a mature skill and control that signal an inevitably developed form." 2 Candelaria found that after the Chicano Renaissance, the trajectory of development of Chicano poetry was an inevitable one of progress and advancement toward a superior Chicano poetics characterized by maturity and sophistication.

However, another English professor, José Limón, believes that the opposite is true. Limón's study of Chicano poetry focuses on poems that adhere to the Chicano/Mexican corrido tradition. Following Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence, Limón holds that the Mexican border corrido of the 19th and early 20th centuries is the "master poem that, as key symbolic action, powerfully dominates and conditions the later written poetry" (Limón 1992 2). According to Limón, this "specific oral tradition, the Mexican corrido, takes a kind of primacy over written poetry" (3).

On the other hand, Limón is quite capable of reversing his field and theorizing a poetic in which " [e]ach succeeding poem manifests a more mature and sophisticated poetic relationship to the precursors and subsequently a richer political and cultural apprehension of the present" (2). This allows yet another English professor, Rafael Pérez-Torres, who subscribes to Candelaria's developmental model, to claim in his book that while Limón is concerned with historical continuity, his own study concentrates on "historical rupture" (Pérez-Torres 5).

While these critical models may be tipped in opposite directions with regard to historical development, they avow a common admiration for "sophistication" and "maturity" in poetry. This raises a question: where are these literary values to be found? In the past, in the present or in the future? In individual poets or in so-called "movements." For the purpose of our discussion, suffice it to say that both the Candelaria/ Pérez-Torres model and the Bloom/Limón construct exclude Chicano poets of the 1970s from the charmed circle of the sophisticated and mature.

For example, just as José Limón considers that the poetry of Ricardo Sánchez and Alurista falls outside of the direct line of corrido influence which interests him, so Rafael Pérez-Torres excludes Ricardo Sánchez from his notion of a "classic Chicano poetics". In addition, neither Pérez-Torres nor Candelaria are willing to confront Ricardo Sánchez's poetic discourse on its own terms as autobiography. For them, the testimonial meanings of the writing are secondary to its location within the "early phase" of Chicano poetry. For these critics, the fact that Sánchez is portraying himself as a pinto in "Reo etemo," as a barrio dweller in "Out/parole" and as a migrant worker in "migrant lament... " is not germane to the analysis of these texts. Nor can careful analysis alter the fact that, as far as these critics are concerned, this poetry has already been designated as "early" Chicano. That is why Pérez-Torres' understanding of the correlation between the timespace of la pinta and the barrio in "Out/parole" is only cursory, and why he completely fails to grasp the significance of la pinta and the migrant stream as scenes of human tragedy that function within their own moral and temporal coordinates. The critic does note a stereotypical machismo in the "testosterone-imbued view of the migrant's ... stuggle" (106), but he fails to explore the power of Sánchez's entelequia, seeing only a "vague vision of a world transformed" (107), and, "sweeping pronouncements about the overall conditions of humanity"(117). PérezTorres makes a sweeping pronouncement himself, calling Sánchez "the grandest of the pinto poets" . But he does not allow theoretical space for the tragic testimony offered through Sánchez's literature and he condescendingly places the poet's figure of la pinta at the level of melodrama (116).

Pérez-Torres, like Limón, is perfectly entitled to delineate a tradition and a canon of his own design. That is his project in his book Movements in Chicano Poetry.- Against Myths, Against Margins. However, I would argue that his overview does not linger long enough on Ricardo Sánchez's work to offer more than a restatement of previous superficial and unsubstantiated judgments. Like Marvin Lewis, he seeks a shortcut through the complexity of Sánchez's poetic universe by studying a single poem ("migrant lament...") as "typical of Sánchez's work." He does not offer the reader an understanding of how an individual poem might function within the larger concept of a work like Canto y grito mi liberación. And like Limón, he merely points out why that particular poem is not successful according to his own concept of Chicano poetry. In fact, Pérez-Torres offers us much less with respect to the poetry of Ricardo Sánchez than does Marvin Lewis, who was able to suggest a relationship between Canto y grito mi liberación and Hechizospells. Yet, Rafael Pérez-Torrbs defends his project in the following terms:

I seek to avoid a discourse of progress or teleology. Chicano poetry has not been following a trajectory, an endless revolution against itself in order to modernize and advance. The ideology behind such assumptions of endless progress contradicts the engagement with tradition and history with which so many Chicano poems deal. This poetry does not turn away from its past. On the contrary ... it retrenches itself in history, scrutinizes history, reenvisions, and-finally-rewrites history ... (7-8). Rather than excluding or denying, I argue, Chicano poetry incorporates and includes. This signals a movement toward mestizaje, toward a hybridization and crossbreeding on a cultural level that reflects the racial mestizaje which has produced the Chicano people (8).

This statement seems to repudiate Candelaria's periodization of Chicano poetry which the critic praised two pages earlier, calling it "excellent" and "useful." Here Pérez-Torres denies that Chicano poetry has left the past behind and is ascending in a linear path toward the values of modernity which, as we have seen, are maturity and sophistication. But this apparent reversal only follows the reversal that Candelaria herself performs as she executes a similarly belated effort to recover the past:

Looking back we can see that the progress of Chicano poetics was indeed forward, an advancement, but only because of the willingness of the poets to move both backwards in time and sensibility as well as to move diffusively as artists, eclectically picking up techniques from all quarters as long as they could be brought to bear on Mexican America (1986 77-8).

What criteria do these critics set forth for a mature and sophisticated Chicano poetics? On the one hand is the notion of three chronological and rather arbitrary Phases which Candelaria foregrounds in her Table of Contents and throughout her book. According to this scheme brilliant poets who founded an original poetic movement are labeled immature Phase I poets and their epigones are celebrated in Phase III as the full flowering of Chicano poetry. In the passage cited, Candelaria seems a little uncomfortable with her proposition. She seems to recognize for a brief moment, as does Pérez-Torres, that chronological time is not adequate to understand Chicano poetry and Chicano timespaces. She seems on the verge of an important breakthrough when she states that poets are willinging to "move diffusively" and to advance by going backwards. But, in fact, her thinking remains predictably spatial and chronological as she maintains the Phases of Chicano Poetry notion that Pérez-Torres will follow. Pérez-Torres himself reverts to a linear chronology when he admits that the past is in fact past:

The vision of politics and the voices used to express relationships of power have, however, changed over the years. Gone is the sense of didacticism or exhortation that marked the most forceful examples of Movimiento poetry. In its place a quieter, more personal vision of the political emerges (100).

The charge of didacticism has been one way that elites perpetuate the ignorance that exists in this country with respect to Chicanos and other minority communities as they attempt to portray their experience. Pérez-Torres himself, in yet another contradiction, concedes this point: "U.S. society has much to learn from the discredited forms of knowledge Chicano culture exemplifies" (4). As for the character of contemporary politics, I would deny that they are more personal than in the past or that a quieter view of politics is the best way to approach the current political reality of this country.

When Pérez-Torres endorses Candelaria's neo-positivist periodization, he collapses two "early phases" into one, thus further privileging the "recent and contemporary poetry" that appeared in the decade since Candelaria's study was published. Despite his promise not to do so, Pérez-Torres sets up a teleology of progress and a discourse of linear development that ascends from the "early" to the "recent," that celebrates the latter as "sophisticated" and "mature," and that dismisses the former as unsophisticated and inferior, almost completely discounting the possibility that "early" poems might be found to exhibit substancial literary merit.

Where does the critic really stand? Pérez-Torres' first position, borrowed from Candelaria, is consistent with Comtean notions of linear historical development and, as such, is not surprising and offers nothing new. What is surprising, however, and does compromise the usefulness of Pérez-Torres' study and the reliability of his conclusions, are his many contradictions, his inconsistencies and his unwillingness to defend a single argument. He applies his critical premises selectively, only when it suits his political ends to do so. One wonders if it is too much to ask of the postmodern critic that his conclusions maintain some consistency with his premises. Are principles of argument and intellectual honesty obsolete and bankrupt? Pérez-Torres does not say so but his method seems to demonstrate that very point. Unfortunately, that method displays more sophistry than sophistication, as well as a kind of disengenuous expediency that compromises his findings. Having once defended Candelaria's reactionary principle that temporal development determines literary quality, the critic might be expected to live with that position. However, neither Pérez-Torres nor Candelaria find it comfortable or necessary to do so. They simply execute a strategic switch to a more complex, non-linear approach, but only after appropriating the legacy of the Chicano poets of the 1970s with a linear model that places them in the underdeveloped past.

Still another English professor, Gary Soto, who was ambivalent about accepting the label "Chicano poet," states in an interview: "I'm thinking about Alurista, Abelardo Delgado, Sánchez, Corky González

(sic). I would never attack their poetry." Nevertheless, Soto does just that, referring to the poets in the past tense: "[s]tylistically," he says "they were archaic. I really didn't think they knew what they were doing .... Now, the poems, what can you say? They were not very well written" (Binder 1985 198).

I would argue that this cool, self-serving dismissal of a group of strong writers led by Sánchez, disguises an anxiety of influence that shaped the critical climate of the 1980s and 1990s. The mainstream perspectives of English department critics served to postpone the need by both critics and poets to come to terms with the achievements of Chicano poetry in the 1970s.

It is helpful, in these circumstances, to recall the suggestion of Genaro Padilla: that "...our cultural production has been largely ignored, dismissed, and suppressed by a mean-spirited and ethnocentrically arrogant cultural elite. Our job is to restore the full genealogy of our cultural text--autobiographical narrative included--by recovering our literary production from obscurity and suppression - - - " (1993 240). As Fredric Jameson writes in The Seeds of Time (1994) " [a]ll postmodernism theory is a telling of the future, with an imperfect deck," (xii). Jameson is somewhat belatedly comparing the soothesayer's well-worn tarot to those postmodernist readings that, according to Ricardo Sánchez, distort and suppress Chicano culture: [and I quote the poet]

Like all literatures, the genesis of Chicano literature can be traced back to our poverty stricken barrios and oppressive pinta conditions. In the main, literature has always been born within the reality of the people-folklore-and not in academia, for the academic usually winds up being the critic, not the creator. Academia is too linear and sequentially logical to create, and art is a process of flux not to be contained or constricted, ever seeking spontaneity and multiavenues for its expression. Academia shrivels up flux, boxing it to meet scheduled criteria. Academia is serious and regulated, while art is new, spontaneous, and exhilarating; professors tend to take themselves and their studies seriously, stuffily, while artists/poets tend to laugh at themselves and their creations. Driven to write and paint, one seeks to enjoy the process and not become enslaved by it (Hechizospells xvi).

In the 1980s and 1990s this poet's name and vision were associated with the failures of the Chicano Movement, no longer with the Renaissance of Chicano cultures celebrated by Philip D. Ortego. The contemporary rereading of Ricardo Sánchez's poetic texts engages a cultural experience and a literary sensibility that exist beyond the circumscribed notions of "Movement literature". By re-presenting the poet's biography, his writing attempts to mediate the claims of moral and literary authority, for in order to speak on behalf of Chicanos the poet places his life and experience before the reader, as his autobiographical discourse becomes an exploration of the social and individual self at whose center, like a grail, lies the assertion: "I AM CHICANO ... confused no longer..." (Canto y grito 153). For Chicano audiences "Ricardo Sánchez" becomes a public persona, a familiar figure that calls on them to imagine their multiple selves, to challenge linear thinking and monolingual speech, to enter multiple timespaces and hear the rich polyphony of Chicano speech. Sánchez's cantogrito is thus a cry of cultural pride and renewal in the form of testimonial/autobiographical discourse.

1 Marvin A. Lewis, "Ricardo Sánchez and the Development of Chicano Poetry," 203.

2 See Candelaria, Chicano Poetry, 137. Cited in Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano, Poetry 274 note5.