Acolhendo o espírito de Carnaval: o grotesco e o carnavalesco em Klail City Death Trip Series de Rolando Hinojosa

RESUMO O presente artigo diz respeito às propriedades artísticas de uma das obras básicas da literatura chicana, Klail City Death Trip Series de Rolando Hinojosa, observadas através da perspetiva da cultura do riso popular. A pesquisa baseia-se na teoria de Bakhtin sobre o carnaval e o carnavalesco. A análise revela que o riso carnavalesco afeta o sistema de imagens, permeia o sistema de personagens e molda a estrutura do discurso dos romances. O caráter duplo dos personagens cômicos, que agem como uma força destrutiva e ao mesmo tempo são portadores da verdade, engloba a cultura do riso carnavalesco. Outro meio de representação do carnavalesco e do grotesco são as máscaras que os chicanos usam. O grotesco serve de ferramenta de sobrevivência para a comunidade chicana, retratada nos romances, ajudando-os a combater o medo do inevitável.

Traditions of Mexican Corridos in Rolando Hinojosa’s “The Valley” and “Klail City”

The paper dwells on the traditions of Mexican and Mexican-American ballads called “corridos,” such as “Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” in the novels of Texas writer Rolando Hinojosa. Corrido that emerged in the XIX century and continues developing today is a unique phenomenon of Mexican and Mexican-American literature. It serves as a worthy material for understanding the problems of cultural interaction, cultural border and multiculturalism. The paper aims at defining the role of corridos in the fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa, the novels “The Valley” and “Klail City” were taken to be analyzed. It gives a brief overview of the genre development based on the key works of the top scholars who study corridos in Russia and abroad. The article also dwells on the creation of the corrido about the folk hero Gregorio Cortez. There is a hypothesis proposed to explain Hinojosa’s decision to opt for the Mexican ballads: the writer was averse to the didactic and propagandistic ideas of Chicano literature of that time which prompted him to use corridos as a means of the hidden moral. Traditional corrido motifs such as revenge, injustice and social inequality are analyzed. The article concludes that in Hinojosa’s polyphonic and fragmented novels, corrido type stories perform plot-forming and compositional functions, direct the reader’s perception.

The Bakhtinian Carnival in Chicano Novels by Rolando Hinojosa

The article discusses Rolando Hinojosa’s novels Klail City and The Valley about the 20 th century Chicano community. The analysis bears on the carnival theory by Mikhail Bakhtin. Carnivalesque images and literary devices examined in the novels create the feeling of the infinite festivity and prove the omnipresence of Bakhtinian carnival in the novelist’s early works. The fictional world of Rolando Hinojosa operates following the rules of the carnival. The life of the Chicano community is organized around the town square, where religious ceremonies are travestied and typical carnival rituals such as “the feast of fools,” election and dethroning of the King, carnival sacrifice, and “the funeral banquet” are perfomed. The analysis of Hinojosa’s novels using Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theory sheds light on the main ideas of Klail City Death Trip Series. The festive character of the bodily imagery represents the triumph of life over death, while the macabre laughter helps Chicanos to defeat their fear of death.

The Intimacies of Conflict

Though known primarily in the United States as “the forgotten war,” the Korean War was a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of US imperial endeavors as they took shape during the Cold War. The Intimacies of Conflictworks against the historical erasure of this event first by returning us to the 1950s, revealing the emotionally compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy that were staged around this event in Hollywood films and journalistic accounts. Through detailed analyses of such works, this book illuminates how the Korean War enabled the emergence of not just a military multiculturalism but also a military Orientalism and a humanitarian Orientalism: cultural logics that purported to make surgical distinctions between Asians who were allies and those who were legitimately killable. This book also demonstrates how an emergent tradition of US novels, primarily by authors of color, provides an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory, illuminating the intimacies that join and divide the histories of Asian American, African American, and Chicanx/Latinx subjects, as well as Korean and Chinese subjects. Novels by eminent US writers like Susan Choi, Chang-rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Toni Morrison and the South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong speak to the trauma experienced by civilians and combatants while also evoking an expansive web of complicity in war’s violence. Drawing together both comparative race and transnational American studies approaches, this study engages in a multifaceted ethical and political reckoning with the Korean War’s unended status.

Walking down the Borderline: Hybridity and the Modulation of the Self in Three Canonical Chicano Novels

This paper presents an analysis of three Chicano novels considered canonical, in which the concept of “hybridity” is discussed in relation with the individual: Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Última, Tomás Rivera’s …Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra, and Rolando Hinojosa’s Los Amigos de Becky. The paper proposes an additional application of “hybridity”, key concept of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, in the cultural context of the Chicano identity. The final aim is to prove, by means of the texts, the interaction between the individual and his/her context via their “hybridity” as a resulting phenomenon of a cultural multiplicity.Keywords: Chicano, novel, hybridity, individual, cultural context.Resumen:Este trabajo presenta un análisis de tres novelas de autores chicanos considerados canónicos, en el que se discute el concepto de ‘hibridación’ y su interacción con el individuo: Bless Me Última, de Rudolfo Anaya, …Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra, de Tomás Rivera y Los Amigos de Becky, de Rolando Hinojosa. Se propone una aplicación adicional de “hibridación”, concepto clave de los Estudios Culturales y Postcoloniales, en el contexto cultural de la identidad chicana. El objetivo es demostrar la interacción entre el individuo y su contexto a través de la “hibridación” como fenómeno de multiplicidad cultural.Palabras clave: Chicano, novela, hibridación, individuo, contexto cultural

Río Grande, Bravo... y sangriento: Narcotráfico, violencia y frontera en Ask a Policeman, del novelista chicano Rolando Hinojosa

En su novela policíaca Ask a Policeman (1998), un escritor chicano de prestigio como Rolando Hinojosa se adentra en el reciente subgénero de la narcoliteratura para abordar no solo la violencia y el sadismo extremos que caracterizan dicho mundo criminal, sino también cuestiones como la realidad actual de la comunidad chicana, la función que la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos desempeña hoy día, o la relación entre las comunidades hispanohablantes de ambos países.