Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 30.09.2003 16:29

Daniel Houston-Davila, author and English professor at El Camino Community College, is a person whose mixed ancestry shows through in his writing -- specifically his new book Malinche's Children, a collection of short stories with recurring characters that chronicle 100 years in the history of Carmelas, a small Mexican-American community in Los Angeles. "I call myself a 'half-breed' and a 'mestizo' because this is what minorities have always done; we've used the names they made up to denigrate us and made them ours."

Daniel Houston-Davila's Malinche?s Children
Novel Focuses on 100 Years of Mexican-American Experience

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright ? 2003 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine ? Used by permission

Daniel Houston-Davila, author and English professor at El Camino Community College, is a person whose mixed ancestry shows through in his writing -- specifically his new book Malinche's Children, a collection of short stories with recurring characters that chronicle 100 years in the history of Carmelas, a small Mexican-American community in Los Angeles. "I call myself a 'half-breed' and a 'mestizo' because this is what minorities have always done; we've used the names they made up to denigrate us and made them ours," Houston-Davila told an audience at the independent Casa del Libro bookstore in Hillcrest September 20.

"My mother's people came from Mazatl?n during the 1910-1917 Mexican revolution," Houston-Davila explained. "They fled north across the border, and after the revolution one of my mother's brothers went back to Mexico and in some ways had a better life than any of us. My father was born in Scotland to a family of coal miners. He had 13 brothers and sisters and some of them were over 30 years old when he was born. Some of them would tart working in the mines as early as age 10 because they could fit into the smallest holes at the bottoms of the shafts. They never saw the sun except on Sundays. My grandfather had one dream: to get his boys out of the mines. First they went to Canada and then they crossed the border into the U.S. -- illegally."

According to Houston-Davila, though the stories in his book are fictional the little community of Carmelas was for real -- at least until 1994, when the ceaseless expansion of white-mainstream L.A. essentially swallowed it up. ("The four streets [that bounded it] are still there, but as you walk through you can't tell one place from another anymore," he said.) His family didn't actually live in Carmelas, but they lived close by and would go there for a taste of the Mexican culture his mother and her ?migr? relatives had left behind. "I tell people a story about an L.A. that doesn't exist anymore, where my mother actually had to look for places where people spoke Spanish -- not exactly Spanish, but a beautiful mix I've tried to play with in the book," Houston-Davila said.

Explaining why he called the book Malinche's Children -- after the often reviled Indian woman who served as Hern?n Cort?z's interpreter and mistress during his 1519-1521 conquest of Mexico for Spain -- Houston-Davila said, "I used to wonder why Malinche turned her back on her own people. As I began to look into this woman's story, I found she had been sold as a slave well before the Spaniards arrived in Mexico. When Cort?z first landed at Cozumel he asked for food and women, and the Mayans rounded up 16 slave women, including Malinche. She developed a reputation as something of a parrot, a master of tongues. She was not terrified and looked at the lay of the land, found out where the power lay and attached herself to Cort?z. She began to appeal to me as someone like my mother and her family, people who were neither here nor there" -- and, he added, her resilience and ability to adapt and make as decent a life for herself as she could under her circumstances provided a model for the similar struggles of his own ancestors.

"My story begins with men who wonder 10 months out of every year, from place to place, looking for food and work and leaving their families behind," Houston-Davila said. "At the beginning, Arnulfo Carmelas, who founds my place, realizes he's a man and he doesn't want to live like an animal. So he brings his family to his place and learns to live like a human being. Our histories are as different as the neighborhoods we grew up in, but all our ancestors wandered in the same places Malinche did. We are different from animals in that they are driven by instincts, but we have the power to make choices."

Houston-Davila recalled the culture shock felt in Carmelas by his relatives who'd grown up in Mexico. "My cousin would come from Mexico and I thought I would show him a place that was like Mexico. Certainly for me, as a little boy, when we would walk over there it felt like we were crossing the border." But when his cousin, who knew the real Mexico, visited Carmelas for the first time it didn't seem to him like Mexico at all. "I asked him how he liked my friends and he said, ' They're all a bunch of pochos, sin lingua, sin cultura y sin historia.' But I knew he was wrong, and I vowed that someday for these voiceless people I would take some of their stories and fill in the holes to create histories where there were gaps."

Basically Malinche's Children is a series of stories about the residents of Carmelas as they go through generations and experience all the social changes of the 20th century. Among the major themes of the book is the emergence of a sense of community among Mexican-Americans. At the beginning of the historical era covered in the book almost nobody in the U.S. would admit to being of Mexican descent -- if you asked them their ancestry they would reply, "Espa?ol" (Spanish) -- and there were virtually no U.S. Latinos from any other part of the Western Hemisphere besides Mexico. What's more, the Carmelans were only gradually acquainted with the mainstream U.S. culture as the electronic media, first radio and then TV, entered their lives; until then they had no contact with white America -- and it took them even longer before newspapers, radio and TV spoke to them in their own language.

"When I was little there was nothing in Spanish," Houston-Davila recalled; "no newspapers, no radio and no TV except in English. "My attempt is to look at the central interests of people who were totally isolated from the world with no TV, no radio and no cars." Houston-Davila added that one of the biggest changes in the lives of Mexican-Americans has been the rise of Spanish-language media in the U.S. -- to the point where, when he visited Mexico City in 1995, he found every TV program on the air there was already familiar to him because it was broadcast on a Spanish-language station on this side of the border.

As part of his Casa del Libro appearance Houston-Davila read a chapter called "Las Adelitas," set in 1973 at the beginning of the Chicano rights movement. "Adelita" is the name of his central character, a woman torn between the demands of her boyfriend (a young man who is working his way out of the gangs by going to college and becoming a movement activist) and her own needs; it's also drawn from the squads of women that followed their men during the Mexican revolution, carrying bullets and other supplies as the men marched. It became ironically relevant because the organization MeCHA (Movimiento estudiantil Chicano de Aztl?n), which figures prominently in the story's plot, surfaced in the California gubernatorial recall when leading Democratic candidate Cruz Bustamante, who'd been a member of MeCHA in his own college days, was savagely attacked by Republican propagandists for allegedly being part of a racist organization.

Explaining the period to his audience, Houston-Davila said, "It's 1973, and there's a strong Chicano movement on campus, a battle over what we're going to call ourselves [Chicano, Latino, Mexican-American] and an identification with everything Mexican. I read about the Mexican family, the Mexican woman, the Mexican barrio, but I didn't see my mother's family in that. I saw my father's family, the gringo with a large family, and often what they talked about was not 'Mexican' but a culture of poverty in general. My father's people were impoverished in ways my mother's never were. My stories grew out of the glorification of the Mexican woman mired in poverty."

Though Houston-Davila was a MeCHA member during his own student days, looking back he's convinced that the group was overly nationalistic and separatist -- to the point of looking suspiciously at members like himself whose skin wasn't brown enough to meet the standards of what they considered "Chicano." "We've come to create a sense in our children that nobody but a brown face can help us," he said. "We need our own but other people can help us too."

He cited controversial author Richard Rodriguez as an example of someone he feels Mexican-American intellectuals and activists should pay more attention to because physically he looks as un-white ("Indio") as could be imagined but at the same time he's challenging all the nationalist stereotypes left over from the Chicano activism of the early 1970's. "He says things nobody in the movement wants to hear," Houston-Davila said. "He says, 'My mind is open and we have to make sure that our children's minds stay open and accept all the kinds of people that can help us.'"

email: mgconlan@earthlink.net

New Novel Explores Mexican-American Identity 10.11.2003 18:24 I just wanted to make a quick comment on the article by Mark Gabrish Conlan,where he is talking about the book "Malinches Children" by Daniel Houston-Davila, I found it very interesting but I just wanted to clarify one thing he says that "the little community of Carmelas was for real at least until 1994, when the ceaseless expansion of white-mainstream L.A. essentially swallowed it up. Well I myself live in Carmelas and it yet has not been swallowed up by "the expansion of white-mainstream L.A". There is still plenty of latinos here, and the Carmelas Barrio still is to this day. I can assure that because I myself am a member of this Barrio, and although it is a little different now it's still here with plenty of Carmelas members, and I am glad I found out about the history of this Barrio. Mark Gabrish Conlan email: miguelgonzalez80@yahoo.com