The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize Read Online Free

accustomed to its sociological incarceration to contemplate an escape. Technically, Herrera experiments with the theatrical in the future and imperative tenses, with verses directed to “tú” or “you,” which work in “launching a vascular electricity” in order to “decipher the impossible” (25). In Brechtian fashion, Herrera highlights the formulaic devices of Western poetry when he includes the citational norm of the backslash to indicate verse in his drama and in some of his poems. Many of Herrera’s poems such as “B Street Second Floor Mural / 14x14,” “5x25 Mundo Mexicano Mural,” and “Portrait of Woman in Long Black Dress/Aurelia” of which the first is included here, are ekphrastic, using paintings as the subject matter of poetry. These poems create an intense yet scant narrative line to the paintings Herrera contemplates, and, like his antitheater, the poems tend to view humans as solitary units compelled by the power of nature to commune. Yet, the subject and object are not able to recognize or find solace in their connection. They remain immune. Other poems like “Green,” “Dudo las luces,” and “La furia de las abejas” (the first included), combine dissonant images of the pressures of contemporary life. Here, people of color punctuate the cityscape as a bodily site of the grossest objectification while, ironically, colored people come to represent the possibility of salvation. In Herrera’s poetry, the reader perceives the influence in style and intent of Federico García Lorca and Antonin Artaud. Like Lorca’s
Poeta en Nueva York
in Herrera’s poetry there is a surreal dynamic that removes the Western subject from its central position to focus on its tangential relation to others. Influenced by Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” Herrera reveals global capitalism as a myopic form of oppression that mutates the cosmic order of things into a chaos of isolation and perversion.
    The acclaimed writer Helena María Viramontes won first prize in 1978-79 for “Birthday,” the short story of Alice, a young woman undergoing an abortion. Her mental anguish is lyrically presented as the story explores the social inscription of maternity on women as vessels of reproduction in opposition to the sentient, sexual woman that Alice knows herself to be. Ultimately, “Birthday” makes abortion the ironic process through which Alicerebirths herself. Along with the burden of making such a difficult choice, Alice also enjoys the newly discovered power that comes from determining her life’s path. Viramontes presents sections that stylistically follow a stream of consciousness interspersed with third-person omniscient narration without remarking these transitions. These fluctuations become more complex with the temporal changes from past conversations to the present where Alice awaits an abortion in the clinic. Typographically, the story varies between the conventional presentation of text to sections written primarily in lower case with little punctuation, randomly adhering to standard English grammar. The structure of the story graphically manifests the conflict and emotional instability of the protagonist. “Birthday” was later revised and included in Viramontes’s well-known short story collection
The Moths and Other Stories
(1985) and demonstrates her early interest in feminist issues as well as her unique ability with language.
    Through the figure of the agricultural field worker, the theme of global capitalism is also explored in David Nava Monreal’s 1979-80 first-prize novel, “A Pastoral Tale.” The story follows the lives of Rosa Ramírez and Raúl Nava, a young couple who begins their courtship in the fields as migrant workers, and then during their married life, ascend to the middle class. While the first half of the story sets the stage for a tale seemingly