Three writers, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava, represent different literary generations of Chicano/a authors whose fictions span the range: ...
ABSTRACT Like other ethnic authors with hyphenated self-awareness, Chicano/a authors grapple with the challenge of creating characters who negotiate with multiple identities. Whereas many of the early Chicano/a writers of the seventies emphasize ethnicity at the expense of other subjectivities, later Chicano/a authors create more complex relationships within the identity politics of the eighties and nineties. Three writers, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava, represent different literary generations of Chicano/a authors whose fictions span the range: from emphasizing ethnic awareness at the expense of sexual dignity to affirming the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality. In the first chapter, I interrogate Acosta's search for ethnic identity in two semi-autobiographical novels, written in the early seventies, that pit Acosta's namesake protagonist as ethnic hero against himself as sexual anti-hero. With aliases of "Brown Buffalo" as well as of "Zeta," Acosta searches for ethnic identity as his primary quest. Although the protagonist performs chameleon and at times even contradictory roles, nevertheless, he is in
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search of self—one defined in terms of ethnicity, or what Acosta calls Chicano consciousness. In the second chapter, I find Arturo Islas infusing his writings with Amerindian myths and symbolism during the eighties. Unlike Acosta's nationalist protagonists, Islas' characters are more post-nationalist as they are not in search of their identities. Rather, they assume a Chicano awareness, leaving Islas free to explore how that identity is complicated by other subjectivities, specifically gay possibilities. In the third chapter, I establish that writers of the nineties are much more comfortable with the interplay of various identities. Moving beyond Acosta's polarized identities and Islas' assimilated identities, Michael Nava writes murder mysteries about the American legal system that situate the protagonist in a multicultural complexity: "a gay public figure, a criminal defense lawyer and a Chicano." Whereas the centrality of culture is important to Acosta, and historical symbols and lore are central to Islas, Nava turns to law as a discourse for understanding a politics of difference, but at times, his hero is caught in the crossfire between his Chicano culture and his homosexual identity, and in the process, ethnicity conflicts with sexuality. In the fourth and final chapter, I identify three important perspectives in critiquing Chicano/a literature:
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multicultural approaches. As the first one is fixed on centrality of culture as an essential determinant in people's lives, the second mode is historically based and uses the past to illuminate and enrich the present, while the third perspective—the multicultural one—allows for maximum flexibility in shaping identity. Informed by current debates about ethnicity and sexuality within Chi-cano literary studies, feminist studies, and critical race theory, this dissertation places the authors' viewpoints and characters in their historical and cultural contexts, so as to confront and complicate the contours of identity politics.
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