Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry

“I was dismayed by my friend’s conclusion. How he coped with the problem has tremendous cultural implications. It has implications that we may call self-imposed censorship. My friend was censoring his creativity in order to fit the imposed criteria.”

With this anecdote about his friend, a Chicano poet who no longer submits poetry that incorporates Spanish, Anaya illustrates a form of self-censorship: The poet no longer embraces authentic self-expression, censoring himself to fit the pressures of the status quo. Anaya’s larger concern is that self-censorship does not only affect one person; it can affect an entire community if cultural values are lost. However, Anaya’s tone toward his friend is less condemnatory than dismayed; the self-censorship is a method of survival in a prejudiced society.

“I do not believe we should have to leave out the crucial elements of our language and culture to contribute to American literature, but unfortunately, this is a conclusion I am forced to reach.”

Anaya wants Chicano writers to express themselves as they wish. This might mean including the Spanish language or Chicano history or folklore in their work. However, the author worries that the publishing industry is forcing them to remove such cultural aspects from their writing for mainstream audiences. This quote implies the American literary canon is exclusionary, but it also highlights the publishing industry’s immeasurable influence on a culture. Literature does not enter into the canon purely on the basis of merit; the literature must first reach a wide audience, and to do this, it must be published and circulated.

“If we leave out our tortillas—and by that I mean the language, history, cultural values, and themes of our literature—the very culture we’re portraying will die.”

Anaya employs the symbol of the tortilla as a shorthand for other Mexican American cultural elements. Because these nuances are what make a culture unique, Anaya is invested in displaying them prominently in Chicano literature so that audiences better understand this group’s ways of life. Additionally, allowing Chicano voices to flourish in literature would help preserve their culture. While the essay frames literature primarily as a source of liberation, Anaya intermittently emphasizes it as a mode of preservation.

“The alternative presses of the 1960s were created to contest the status quo. The views of ethnic writers, gay and lesbian writers, and women writers had been consistently censored out of the literary canon. Most of us grew up without ever seeing our identity reflected in the books we read […]”

Anaya discusses the limits of the literary canon, which has traditionally been centered on heterosexual, white men of the middle to upper class. He advocates for the canon to include more diverse voices because it is important for young readers of marginalized groups to see themselves represented as they grow up. For this reason, Anaya praises alternative presses. This quote once again hints at the literary canon’s unacknowledged market-driven nature.

“Our literature introduced our history and heritage to American literature. There was a new rhythm, music, and cultural experience in our works and a view of an ethnic working class that performed the daily work, but was invisible to those in power.”

Chicano literature has not reached mainstream audiences to the desired extent, and Anaya hopes that continuing to share their cultural experience will have a transformative effect on the literary canon. His phrase “those in power” highlights that he views this enterprise as revolutionary.

“Censorship is fear clothed in the guise of misguided righteousness. Censorship is a tool of the powerful who don’t want to share their power.”

Censors argue that they are protecting society, especially younger audiences, from content deemed inappropriate. However, because Anaya considers his own literature perfectly appropriate, he deduces that the censorship’s true motivation is the censors’ fear of losing power. With this accusation, Anaya deepens the moral dimensions of his project: He believes the censors in question are not just restrictive—they are duplicitous.

“Every Chicano poem or story carried within it the cry of a desire for freedom and equality. That is what literature should do: liberate.”

Anaya identifies strongly as a member of the Chicano Movement and wants literature to play a role in ending discrimination. For him, all literature is political because it is liberating, and all of it has revolutionary potential. Anaya’s logic challenges censors’ insistence that Chicano literature is “too political”; if all literature is political, the censorship’s true motivation must be something else.

“Fifteen million Chicanos were clamoring at the door, insisting that the schools also belonged to us, that we had a right to our literature in the schools, and the conservative opposition in power fought back by burning our books.”

Mexican Americans and other Latino groups were subject to school segregation and constricted rights in American society; they struggled just to get in the door before they tried to have their literature in the halls as well. Anaya’s frequent use of the first-person plural—“we,” “us,” and “our”—emphasizes his roots in Chicano culture and, thus, his authority on the subject of Chicano experiences.

“The burning of my novel wasn’t an isolated example. Every Chicano community in this country has a story of murals being attacked or erased, poets banned from schools, books being inaccessible to our students because they are systematically kept out of the accepted textbook lists.”

To evince the severity of censorship, Anaya shares a personal anecdote about school board members burning his book Bless me, Ultima. However, because he does not want readers to think this was a one-time occurrence, he emphasizes that this type of discrimination happens regularly. Students are consequently unable to access important texts that might expand their minds. Alongside the publishing industry, the education system emerges as a predominant cultural gatekeeper.

“This summer a magazine from New York advertised for subscriptions. Here are quotes from their solicitation letter: ‘There is only one magazine that tells you what is right and what is wrong with our cultural life today.’ ‘Do you sometimes have the impression that our culture has fallen into the hands of the barbarians?’ And finally, ‘Are you apprehensive about what the politics of ‘multiculturalism’ is going to mean to the future of civilization?’”

Anaya gives a real-world example of the aggressive insularity in the United States: This magazine advertisement exploits a misleading, sensationalistic binary between civilization and “barbarism” in the same motion as aligning multiculturalism with “barbarism.” Anaya attempts to prove the opposite—that by embracing multiculturalism, a person becomes more knowledgeable and thus more cultured. As Anaya lists example after example of discrimination, he conveys a sense that this discrimination is ubiquitous and therefore dire.

“Censorship is un-American, but the censor keeps telling you it’s the American way.”

By creating a binary of what is American (freedom of expression) and what is not (censorship), Anaya appeals to the reader’s sense of patriotism as well as the first amendment, which argues for the freedom of speech. In short, his point is that Americans have a civic duty to promote diverse voices.

“Tortillas and poetry. They go hand in hand. Books nourish the spirit, bread nourishes our bodies.”

Anaya plays with the expression “you are what you eat” by connecting food and literature: Cuisine, like poetry, should articulate Chicano expression. For that reason, he wants Chicano poetry to preserve its cultural nuances to nourish the writer and the reader.

“Our distinct cultures nourish each of us, and as we know more and more about the art and literature of the different cultures, we become freer and freer.”

Anaya concludes by reaffirming his thesis that literature is a form of liberation and, further, that cross-cultural engagement deepens knowledge and bolsters someone’s pursuit of global citizenship. For historically oppressed groups, the notion of freedom has deep value, and Anaya believes that imaginative freedom can lead to other, more tangible types of freedom.