“Running” and Resistance: Nihilism and Cultural Memory in Chicano Urban Narratives

Nihilism is about the expression of an undaunted yearning, desperate (violently so, perhaps even to the extreme of self-destruction), but not hopeless, meaningful in its furious revolt against a world of bewildering violence and meaningless death. Nick de Genova When I was a student, I lived and worked in East Palo Alto, California, a Latino and African-American community twenty miles south of San Francisco. I worked as an apartment manager for a real estate company that owned several buildings in the city's drug district, a two-block neighborhood known as Whisky Gulch because of its reputation, established during Prohibition, as a center of vice. For the often futile task of collecting rents from impoverished tenants and mediating arguments between them and the buildings' owners, I was provided with a rent-free apartment. While living there, I witnessed some of the conflicts and casualties of the lower-level drug trade, a business which helped some of my tenants feed their children and pay the rent. I experienced in a way that forever changed my own cultural politics the lives of people whose daily existence was mediated by the threat of violence and meaningless death, by what Nick De Genova, in an essay on Richard Wright's Native Son, has called the "constitutive violence of a social order founded upon racial subordination and effected in outright terror."(1) I once saw a man stabbed in a fight in broad daylight, another just after he had been shot in the stomach, and two dead teenage boys, members of a Latino gang, moments after they were murdered one evening by a mugger who wanted their jewelry. The police were often complicit in this violence, pushing dealers out of outlying neighborhoods into Whisky Gulch, deliberately playing one group off against another, accepting bribes from some to look the other way. Twelve young men were murdered in one year in Whisky Gulch alone. Surpassing larger cities by posting an astonishing rate of one homicide for every four hundred residents, East Palo Alto, an incorporated city with a population of 23,000, made headlines across the country as the murder capital of the United States. News film crews flooded into the neighborhood. Reporters from a television magazine program showcased the apartment buildings in Whisky Gulch in its report on the "most gang-ridden and drug-plagued city block in the country." This urban battlefield was located just a mile from the tranquil, manicured grounds of Stanford University, known to students as the "farm," where I was enrolled in a graduate program in American literature. A part of my research involved collecting and translating a set of autobiographical writings by my grandfather, Francisco Robles Perez, a former farm laborer who emigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1921. At the same time, because of my work in Whisky Gulch, I became involved in the lives of a diverse group of Mexican immigrant and Chicano/a residents. In this essay, I wish to explore a cultural space between these two worlds, not only between the academy and East Palo Alto, but between the past and present, a space spanning Mexican (American) cultural memory as reflected in my grandfather's stories and the urban Chicano/a postmodern experience as embodied by the young Mexicanos and Chicanos of Whisky Gulch.(2) I will examine this cultural space by focusing upon the theme of nihilism in two contemporary urban narratives, Luis J. Rodriguez's autobiography, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (1993) and Ronald L. Ruiz's novel, Happy Birthday Jesus (1994). Written from the perspective of young people who share much in common with the residents of Whisky Gulch, these works explicate Chicano nihilism by positioning it within the context of a racialized and carceral society that relentlessly engulfs urban minority youth with the threat of violence, imprisonment, and death.(3) Underscoring the ability of even the most alienated Chicano youth to embrace ethnic identity and pride, these writings thematize nihilism not as a pathological condition, but rather as a form of resistance to the threat of social erasure and exclusion, a resonant counterdiscourse for disenfranchised Chicanos in their struggle to overcome the dauntingly oppressive forces of postmodern urban America. …