“The Short Way of Saying Mexicano”: Patrolling the Borders of Mario Suárez’s Fiction

Literary critics agree that Mario Suarez's fiction holds an important place in the history of Chicano/a literature. Charles Tatum argues that Suarez's colorful vignettes of postwar life in Tucson "bridge the transition between the Mexican American Period and the Contemporary Period" (244); Raymund Paredes points out that Suarez's texts cross a "watershed in Mexican-American history" (41); and in North of the Rio Grande, Suarez's stories are described as "the first literary efforts of an American of Mexican decent, writing in English, to [publish] in a prestigious U.S. journal [the Arizona Quarterly]. Indeed, they are the first works that offer a predominantly Anglo audience a compelling and realistic portrait of [the] life of the Mexican-American [sic]" (93). But aside from an occasional nod to the historical significance of Suarez's work, few critics have explored his texts in any detail. And perhaps because Suarez's interconnected stories of life in Tucson's Barrio El Hoyo, published in a variety of journals and literary magazines, have yet to be collected in one accessible volume, his work has never been discussed as an integrated corpus. (1) Instead, those scholars who have taken the time to examine Suarez's fiction have only tackled one or two of his numerous stories, and, as a result, the scholarship that does exist tends to be both preliminary and contradictory. Raymund Paredes, for example, reads Suarez as a writer who "understood that the Chicano was a group apart, now embarked on a bumpy road towards the delineation and articulation of a revised version of Mexican-American identity, [an identity that is] urban, bilingual and profoundly influenced by American popular culture" (41-42). What Paredes fails to mention in his albeit brief analysis is that Suarez's texts repeatedly censure those characters--especially the zoot-suited pachucos--who have adopted this "revised" cultural identity. In his work on the pachuco, Arturo Madrid-Barela correctly identifies "Suarez's mocking vision" of the zoot suiters, but he explains this vision vis-a-vis the author's desire to assimilate into a "white" American, middle-class culture, a desire that has been jeopardized by the pachuco's behavior and attitudes: Kid Zopilote represents the parasitic if not the mythic model of the Pachuco. At best he is simpleminded and unambitious, at worst he suffers from arrested development.... Whatever the Pachuco may have been in Tucson, Arizona, Suarez's mocking vision was perfectly attuned to the historical moment.... In Tucson, Arizona, the Mexican community rejected the Pachuco who frequented Kaiser's Shoeshine Parlor on Meyer Street and the Pastime Penny Arcade. America's Mexican middle-class, besides rebelling against being the Pachuco's butt, had learned the lesson of conformity well and were more than disposed to apply it to their own in order to assure their own second class acceptance in American white society. (48) Madrid-Barela's assimilationist reading of this single Suarez story does not, however, account for the nostalgia that patterns so many of the author's Tucson vignettes. Instead of longing for a more conformist and Americanized "middle class" life for Mexican-Americans, Suarez's vignettes lament the passing of a time when Mexican Americans were more attuned to traditional Mexican culture. Most recently, Wilson Neate uses Suarez's often-anthologized story "El Hoyo" to illustrate the subversive potentialities of minority literature. Neate's Lacanian/Bakhtinian approach designates El Hoyo a "carnivalesque space" that accommodates, rather than eschews, Otherness: "El Hoyo is a multiple and extending play of racial and cultural signifiers with no closure or left-over as it constantly takes in that Otherness or that `something more'" ("Unwelcome" 32). Although, as I'll argue later, "El Hoyo" certainly invites such a reading, one wonders whether Neate has read "Kid Zopilote" or "Las Comadres," texts which graphically illustrate how Suarez's El Hoyo polices, as well as extends, its communal boundaries from the perceived threat of gender and cultural difference. …