The Chicano/Latino Literary Prize Read Online Free Page A

uncritical of its suppositions, the title is an ironic indication of the adversity to come. The subsequent reversal in the second half of the story is foreshadowed in the opening scene of Raúl and his best friend, Jorge. The pride Raúl feels in owning a humble dwelling foments a desire in Raúl to attain the American Dream of economic prosperity. This desire to climb the social ladder will be Raúl’s proverbial Achilles’ heel that will find Raúl, Rosa, and their son Miguel, dead at the story’s end. Thematically, “A Pastoral Tale” demonstrates how cultural assimilation can exact and deteriorate one’s sense of self. Monreal plays with the convention of the pastoral that normally romanticizes the countryside in the eyes of the jaded or cynical, yet sophisticated, urban poet. Here, the countryside and the simple life of migrant laborers ironizes the convention of the locus amoenous characteristic of the pastoral. The fragile life of the undocumented worker finds little respite in arduous manual labor or life in a shanty. Ultimately, the convention of the traditional pastoral is upset and laid bare by the perspective of Chicana/o fieldworkers and the project of assimilation. Monreal’s “A Pastoral Tale” denaturalizes and denationalizes the American countryside to expose it as a site of international movement, oppression, and containment of Mexican bodies who perform stoop labor for capitalists.
    Rubén Medina’s first-prize poetry collection of 1979-80 also concerns the plight of laborers and uses nature to reveal the true state of the human spirit. In “Danzón,” Papá’s infidelities and Mamá’s misery were like those Sundays when Papá would take the kids to play baseball before heading off tomeet up with his mistresses. Once the beautiful grass that comforted falls, now has become the visual vantage point of the depressed speaker. In Medina’s poetry, nature entices human connection and nurturance, but in the last instance, nature becomes a metaphor for human deception. The second poem “Lluvia” uses a thunderstorm to express the speaker’s tender knowing of his beloved Abuela. Thunderstorms that often disrupt daily life force the child and his grandmother indoors. In images that meld Grandma’s power to calm with the sun that will come out (39), Grandma is the figure who is able to manage the disruptive force of nature, the spirit world, and their impact on a vulnerable little boy. The third poem “Day-Off” speaks bitterly of domestic labor and the contrasts in lifestyle that forces a juxtaposition between differing economic classes. Leisure time for the worker is the possibility of being with one’s true self outside the system of labor where a graduated depth of color—be it phenotypic or cultural—often influences economic rank. On his day off, the house servant can become the artist or the fisherman, the lover of poetry, the friend, in union with the earthly delight of a cup of coffee, the bird’s song, the sweet murmur of the elderly. This weekly refuge of the true self on his day off returns in the penultimate stanza with a pledge to remember that each worker will be redeemed in the many “days off” to come. Stylistically, Medina’s poetry is narrative in tone and expressed in free verse with lengthy stanzas where nature is the allegorical prism for human relations.
    Juan Manuel Bernal’s first-prize winning poetry entry
Confesiones de un seudopoeta: digresiones de un demente
of 1980-81 opens with a self-reflexive piece called “Él y yo” that establishes two competing internal voices of the speaker. The voice addressed as “yo” is an unassuming Chicano youth who suffers from loneliness, while “él” is a sociable college student who enjoys extensive knowledge of language and literature. This duality of the speaker is played out in the body