Anthologies without borders

According to an old folk tradition that has been embraced by contemporary activists, the world is continually destroyed and re-created, and each world is signaled by the rising of a new sun. “We live in a new era -- the era of the Fifth Sun,” explains Juan Velasco in his foreword to “Under the Fifth Sun,” an anthology of Latino writing. “[T]he concept of the Fifth Sun embraces the rebirth of the conquered people, a new era of peace and social justice, a gathering of cultures in search of a better future in modern-day America.”

These lofty and laudable aspirations, however, are not always realized in the memoirs, essays, poems, songs and scripts that are collected in “Under the Fifth Sun.” Even when we are invited to ponder the words of a traditional ballad known as a corrido, for example, it is a sense of dislocation and despair that rings out: The song tells the tale of a man who comes from Mexico to America and tries to drive off the loneliness of his empty house with music from a radio:

After three-quarters of an hour they sing us some fox-trot,

Then they announce the lady who makes good tepache.

Other subjects follow, illustrating the bargains

That they will make to the dead if they buy good coffins.

“Under the Fifth Sun” is an ambitious and even audacious enterprise, an effort to encompass traditions and experiences so rich and so diverse that they defy generalization. More than 100 writers are collected here, and their roots can be traced to Spain and Mexico, Central America and South America, and to the indigenous people who were here when the Spanish-speaking conquistadors first arrived. Even those who come from just across the border -- and who came here only yesterday -- cannot be described in simple terms.

“There are many Mexicos,” insists Luis Alberto Urrea in an excerpt from his 1993 memoir, “Across the Wire.” “[T]here are also many Mexican borders.”

Among the contributors to “Under the Fifth Sun” are a few famous names from various fields of endeavor -- Isabel Allende, Joan Baez, Cesar Chavez, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Marichal, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Luis J. Rodriguez and Richard Rodriguez -- as well as a few that have been rescued from the obscurity of historical archives.

Vicente Perez Rosales, who reached the gold fields of California from La Paz in 1849, describes how his fellow countrymen coped with “the ill will of the Yankee rabble against the sons of other nations” in the place that he calls “the new Babylon.”

“[T]he Chilean, who might be submissive in his own country ... did not behave that way abroad,” he confides to his journal. “A Chilean would face up to a loaded pistol at his chest if he had his hand on the haft of his knife.”

The liveliest moments are provided by short bursts of poetry and prose from contemporary Latino writers and activists who are hot-wired into the global culture of California. The phantasmagorical poetry of Gina Valdes, who was born in Los Angeles and spent her childhood on both sides of the border, invokes Aladdin and Ali Baba, Darth Vader and the Lone Ranger, Salvador Dali and the Cheshire Cat, and much else besides:

El Santo wrestles Batman

La Llorona howls

Chaplin and Cantinflas waddle up a hill ....

Victor Hernandez-Cruz was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York, but the prose-poem that he contributes describes a pilgrimage from Watsonville, Calif., to Tijuana by a convoy of 20 lowriders in cars that “run on perfume and music,” whose steering wheels are fashioned out of lengths of welded chain (“silver chains, industrial chains, smoking chains”) and whose experience of the road is both religious and sexual: “[T]heir common language is their closeness to the ground, they want to kiss the earth, they want to penetrate the many disguises of their mama land, have we been in touch with you, are we rubbing you right ....”

If there is a single thread that can be teased out of the vast tapestry of Latino culture, it is the struggle to define an identity that is not based on purity of blood or culture. Sometimes the point is made in artful and oblique ways, as in an excerpt from “Zoot Suit” by Luis Valdez (“escape through the barrio streets of your mind / through a neighborhood of memories / all chuckhole lined / and the love / and the pain / as fine as wine ... “). And sometimes it is made bluntly, as in the title of a poem by Lorna Dee Cervantes: “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races.”

Nor is the struggle confined to those who are Latinos and Latinas. In an excerpt from “Warrior for Gringostroika,” for example, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, an artist and critic who was raised in Mexico City and came to the United States in 1978, tries to make sense of what he calls “the trans-, inter- and multicultural processes that are at the core of our contemporary border experience,” and he challenges all of his readers to let go of their illusions about what constitutes the “dominant culture” in the United States.

“Today, if there is a dominant culture, it is border culture,” he insists. “And those who still haven’t crossed a border will do it very soon.”

Long before a word of Spanish was spoken in the New World, of course, the dominant culture was the one that belonged to the original Californians. That’s the focus of “The Dirt Is Red Here,” a collection of work by contemporary artists and poets who are descended from the various tribes of California and who are fighting against what poet Wendy Rose calls “Indian invisibility.”

Like “Under the Fifth Sun,” purity has no place here. “The colonizer and the colonized meet in my blood,” observes Rose, whose ancestors include Europeans and Native Americans of the Miwok and Hopi tribes. And not every work of art in the collection is tightly focused on tribal culture. A poem by Janice Gould titled “Snow,” for example, is far more concerned with her sexual identity than her Native American heritage.

Even “Grass Valley,” the poem by Stephen Meadows that provides the title of the book, conjures up a haunting scene that would not alert us to his Ohlone ancestry if we encountered it outside this book:

... the room smells of matches

her husband is dying

she splits up the wood

in her bathrobe

morning by morning

releasing the days.

At certain moments, however, the fusion of words and images, American culture and Native American culture, strikes a powerful spark. “Maybe They Couldn’t Make the Shoe Fit the Foot” by Linda Noel, for example, is a wry poem about a failed effort to shoe the residents of a rancheria “[w]ho had never before worn whiteman shoes.” It is presented with a photograph of George Blake’s “Dude Boot,” an elegant assemblage fashioned out of elk antler, silver and black leather that shows how footwear can function as a cultural icon.

“[T]he very act of writing, painting, weaving, sewing or sculpting creates a sense of belonging,” explains editor Margaret Dubin, “a sense of ownership of their culture, its landscape and symbols.” *