El Coyote, the Rebel Read online

  El Coyote

  THE REBEL

  Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage

  Board of Editorial Advisors

  Ramón Luis Acevedo

  Universidad de Puerto Rico

  Edna Acosta-Belén

  University at Albany, SUNY

  José F. Aranda, Jr.

  Rice University

  Antonia Castañeda

  St. Mary’s University

  Rodolfo J. Cortina

  University of Houston

  Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez

  Carnegie Mellon University

  José B. Fernández

  University of Central Florida

  Juan Flores

  Hunter College of CUNY

  Erlinda Gonzales-Berry

  Oregon State University

  Laura Gutiérrez-Witt

  University of Texas at Austin

  María Herrera-Sobek

  University of California at Santa Barbara

  Luis Leal

  University of California at Santa Barbara

  Clara Lomas

  The Colorado College

  Francisco A. Lomelí

  University of California at Santa Barbara

  Agnes Lugo-Ortiz

  Dartmouth College

  Genaro Padilla

  University of California at Berkeley

  Raymund Paredes

  University of California at Los Angeles

  Nélida Pérez

  Hunter College of CUNY

  Gerald Poyo

  St. Mary’s University

  Antonio Saborit

  Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

  Rosaura Sánchez

  University of California at San Diego

  Virginia Sánchez Korrol

  Brooklyn College of CUNY

  Charles Tatum

  University of Arizona

  Silvio Torres-Saillant

  CUNY Dominican Studies Institute

  Roberto Trujillo

  Stanford University

  El Coyote

  THE REBEL

  Luis Pérez

  Introduction by Lauro Flores

  Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage

  This volume is made possible through grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the City of Houston through The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, Harris County.

  Recovering the past, creating the future

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  Houston, Texas 77204-2174

  Cover illustration and design by Giovanni Mora

  Pérez, Luis, 1904—.

  El Coyote, the rebel : a nonfiction novel / by Luis Pérez; with an introduction by Lauro Flores.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-55885-296-4 (pbk.)

  1. Pérez, Luis, 1904 — Childhood and youth. 2. Mexican Americans — Biography. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.) — Biography. 4. San Luis Potosí (Mexico) — Biography. 5. Mexico — History — Revolution, 1910-1920 — Personal narratives. I. Title.

  E184.M5 P424 2000

  979.4‘0076872073‘0092—dc21

  00-020773

  [B]

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  © 1947 by Luis Pérez

  Reprinted by permission of

  The Estate of Luis Pérez

  Printed in the United States of America

  Introduction © 2000 by Lauro Flores

  First published in 1947 by Henry Holt and Company, New York

  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Introduction by Lauro Flores

  In Quest of an Enigma

  El Coyote

  The Girls of the Pink Feather

  The Dormant Manuscripts

  Works Cited

  Notes

  El Coyote, the Rebel

  Illustrations

  Luis Pérez, 1904-1962

  Original title page to El Coyote

  Hollywood High 1927 ROTC Band

  Luis Pérez with guitar

  Luis Pérez, 1904-1962

  Oil portrait, artist unknown

  (Courtesy Pamela Ann Phillips)

  Introduction

  “I’ve learned that fiction based on facts is a true expression of life

  and as such it has no plot, no beginning and no end.”

  —Luis Pérez, in Chávez Came Home

  LUIS PÉREZ has long remained a largely unrecognized author in Chicano literary circles. Accordingly, his first and until very recently only known book, El Coyote, the Rebel,1 also has lingered for years as an obscure title, seldom mentioned by critics and infrequently cited in literary bibliographies or other reference materials.2 Yet in 1947, when Henry Holt and Co. first released it, the book was reviewed in a number of publications, including Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Los Angeles Times, Kansas City Star, The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others.3 Without exception (at least none I have been able to locate), this initial mainstream critical greeting was positive—although in some cases, the praise was tinged with a degree of condescension. Most reviews praised the author’s good humor and underscored the story’s simplicity and charm: “Chiefly valuable for vivid, inside views of the rebels’ lives. Style exasperatingly simple” (Joseph Borome, Kirkus Reviews 15:184, March 15, 1947); “El Coyote has much charm, in a minor key, many pictures of engaging Mexican rascals and a few horrid Americans” (Lorine Pruette, Library Journal 72: 806, May 15, 1947); “His story is told in simple style” (Book Review Digest, 1947, p. 709); “His whole book is a study in understatement; and its impact, like everything really Mexican, is delayed” (Milton Bracker, The New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 8, 1947, p. 2).

  The quaintness widely attributed to the narrative was accentuated by the illustrations that appeared on the dust jacket and at the beginning of each chapter (see page ix). They had been drawn expressly for El Coyote by the renowned children’s literature author and illustrator Leo Politi4—an aspect not neglected by the reviewers either: “Mr. Perez writes simply and with a wealth of humor and good-feeling, a feeling matched admirably by Leo Politi in his many illustrations,” wrote Edith James (The New York Times, June 22, 1947, p. 24). Will Davidson said:

  “Luis Perez writes with simplicity and direct charm … . Leo Politi’s delightful illustrations fit the tone of the book exactly. It isn’t great literature at all. It is just a very warm, personal story that is most pleasant reading” (Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1947). A reviewer named Robert Leighton resorted to a gastronomical metaphor: “The Leo Politi illustrations which grace every chapter head have a rare Mexican flavor—a delicious dessert with a most satisfying meal” (Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, May 28, 1947, p. 2). This last observation is a telling commentary about a literary “dish”; as Silvia Spitta has argued, “We live and speak and write in surroundings where food is metaphorized continually … Culturally, we cannibalistically ‘consume’ or incorporate other cultures.”5 Once devoured, however, El Coyote, the Rebel and its author fell into oblivion.

  Some records erroneously suggest the existence of an earlier edition of the text, with the slightly modified title of Rebel El Coyote.6 In all likelihood, however, this mistake reflects one of the various disappointments that Pérez suffered in previous attempts to publish his writings, before and after 1947— a grief he would endure until his death in 1962 and which also appears as a minor thematic thread in one of the unpublished manuscripts he left behind.7Perhaps confident that the publication of his first book by Harper and Davies was indeed immin
ent, the author must have released that information, in good faith, for inclusion in his biographical data. A similar situation would emerge thirteen years after, when T. E. Dikty, an editor with Chicago’s Shasta Publishers, sent Pérez a telegram informing him that, while it was “a difficult manuscript upon which to make [a] publishing decision,” his next novel, Chico, had been accepted for publication.8 This arrangement with Shasta also went sour, and the writer’s second volume did not appear until almost a decade later, posthumously and under the title of The Girls of the Pink Feather.9 To my knowledge, no other critic has ever mentioned this text before; nor has it been cited in any article or listed in any bibliography.

  The first (and until now only) edition of El Coyote, the Rebel has long been out of print and unavailable to the reading public for nearly half a century. This may explain, in part, the scant critical attention it has received. On the other hand, it is also true that El Coyote, the Rebel is a hybrid text; a book halfway between novel and autobiography, as we shall discuss. This, coupled with the mystery that for many years enveloped its authorship, may have exacerbated among critics the difficulty of determining the best manner to approach its analysis.

  Title page to the original 1947 edition. Leo Politi’s line drawings, for good or ill, emphasized the “picturesque” and “naive” aspects of Pérez’s narrative.

  In 1984, for example, Luis Leal declared:

  No podemos estar seguros del origen del autor … A pesar de que el protagonista de El Coyote, Luis Pérez, lleva el nombre del autor de la novela, existe la posibilidad de que la vida del verdadero Pérez sea enteramente distinta, y hasta se podría suponer que el nombre del autor sea otro, siendo “Luis Pérez” un simple seudónimo. El enigma queda en pie. (12)

  We can not be sure about the origin of the author … Despite the fact that the protagonist of El Coyote, Luis Pérez, carries the name of the author of the novel, it is possible that the life of the true Pérez may be entirely different; and one could even suppose that the name of the author may be different, “Luis Pérez” being a simple pseudonym. The enigma remains.10

  In Quest of an Enigma

  My acquaintance with El Coyote, the Rebel began around 1980. Hoping that the author might still be alive, I made several attempts to track him down over the following decade. All inquiries proved futile. With the dearth of evidence, I too began to suspect that, as Leal had conjectured, “Luis Pérez” might be a mere pen name. My suspicions came to a peak in 1990-1991, when I spent a year at UCLA and redoubled my efforts to locate Pérez or his family. “Luis Pérez” is, of course, a very common name, especially in Los Angeles, which made the task even harder. With no assurances that he was still alive or in the area, I decided to at least try to ascertain his existence and, if possible, his identity.

  Armed with the apparently autobiographical details recorded in El Coyote, I called the offices of the Los Angeles Public Schools to inquire about any records that a Luis Pérez had graduated from Hollywood High School in 1928. I was told that no information could be released without the authorization of the concerned party: the classic Catch-22.

  The administrators of Hollywood High School suggested that I contact Mr. A. Wolfskill, president of Pérez’s graduating class; he lived in Los Angeles and still participated in alumni activities. Offhand, however, Mr. Wolfskill could remember no one named Pérez—not an encouraging sign because, he said, the annual student groups were very small and he knew almost everyone. Nonetheless, he offered to survey his yearbooks and call me back. He did so the same afternoon. He had found nothing; no pictures of Luis Pérez, and no listing of his name among those who, for whatever reason, had not been photographed for the yearbook. He had also inspected the group pictures, he told me, including those of the Spanish Club and other organizations to which Pérez might have belonged. Naturally, my curiosity (and suspicion) grew.

  Suddenly, I was struck by the observation that Leo Politi and Luis Pérez bore the same initials. Could it be that the author of El Coyote was in fact Politi himself? Besides the shared initials and Politi’s involvement in illustrating the book, other factors also seemed to indicate that possibility: their proximity in age (Pérez was born in 1904, Politi in 1908), their common place of residence (Los Angeles), and so forth. Moreover, Politi, a prolific and celebrated author and illustrator, had always shown an intense interest in Mexican and Chicano life and culture. This is abundantly demonstrated by the themes and the titles of many of his works, some of which were published in English and Spanish: Little Pancho (1938); The Mission Bell (1953); Rosa (1963); and (especially interesting because of their publication dates) Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street[Pedro, el ángel de la Calle Olvera] (1946) and Juanita (1948). Ultimately, my suppositions about Politi’s possible authorship of El Coyote turned out to be unfounded. However, the fact that Politi never responded to the letters I sent him in 1991 in care of the Los Angeles Public Library, which were never returned to me, did nothing to dispel my conjectures at that moment.11

  Near the end of my stay in Los Angeles, I decided to visit Hollywood High School. A close examination of the yearbooks kept in the school library revealed that Pérez was in fact listed among the students not pictured. His first and last names, however, were slightly altered, appearing as “Louis Perex.” This explained, perhaps, why Mr. Wolfskill had failed to locate the entry. Ironically, this change in his first name corresponds to a humorous anecdote in Pérez’s book:

  The first day in my roll-call room a boy in an army uniform spoke to me and asked, “What is your name?”

  “Luis Pérez,” I answered.

  “Louise?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s a girl’s name.”

  “No, in Spanish my name is spelled L-u-i-s, and sounds the same as the name used for the American girls.”

  “That is funny—you should change it. I will call you Louie, for short.” (150)

  Recalling another brief passage in El Coyote where the narrator says “I was assigned to the Hollywood High School ROTC band to play third trombone” (151), I then focused my attention on the pertinent group photographs. I felt extremely rewarded when, suddenly, I spotted Pérez’s name among those in the caption of a snapshot of the 1927 ROTC band (see page xiii). There he was, standing in the fourth row: a tall young man in uniform holding a trombone.

  Luis Pérez was a real person, and apparently his book was grounded on factual information—which, I thought, made it an autobiography. My task, once again, was to try to locate the author or his survivors. Back in Seattle, in 1993, I contacted a friend of mine, a lawyer whose brother-in-law, a former Los Angeles police officer, was now a private investigator in the city. By that time I had located a small item in the 1942 volume of Who’s Who in California, which further corroborated Pérez’s existence. I had not checked any materials prior to 1947 earlier because, frankly, I assumed that before the publication of his book Pérez would not have been a person “worthy of notice.” I furnished the P. I. with the information I had, which included the author’s last known address in Los Angeles (1125 N. New Hampshire), his wife’s name and date of birth, and the name of his stepdaughter’s husband (Lt. C. K. Phillips, USN). He was unable to find any leads. The neighborhood where Pérez used to live, he said, was now populated by Russian immigrants. No one knew anything about the writer.

  By the end of 1995, I was almost ready to give up. I had tried just about everything. A year earlier I had contacted the U. S. Navy in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of Lieutenant Phillips, who surely by now was retired and receiving a pension. With his initials alone and such a common last name, I was told, it would be nearly impossible to find the right person. Then, all of a sudden, I realized that the information I had been able to gather stipulated that Pérez’s wife, Amelia L. Moore, was a native of Nacogdoches, Texas, and that her father’s name was Richard A. Moore. By coincidence, one of my former graduate students, Brent Carbajal, was at that time a faculty member at Stephen F. Austin State Un
iversity, in Nacogdoches. I immediately contacted him and, after explaining the nature of my research, I asked him to see if he could find any members of the Moore family still residing in the area. A couple of hours later, Carbajal called me and said: “Your author, Luis Pérez, is buried here, in the Christian Cemetery of Nacogdoches.” With his assistance, I established communication with Mrs. Ann L. Phillips, Pérez’s stepdaughter, and with her husband, Capt. Charles K. Phillips, now retired and living in the outskirts of Nacogdoches.12

  The biographical information and other concrete data that I have been able to collect (see page xv) about Pérez come to dispel conclusively all doubts concerning the identity of the author of El Coyote, the Rebel, thereby deciphering the enigma lamented earlier by Luis Leal. In addition, the facts also prove quite valuable for the examination of his works.

  Luis Pérez was born in San Luis, Potosí, México, on August 25, 1904. One of the records indicates that he was the son of Ramón Pérez and María Pérez (née Beltrán), while a different source lists his parents as Mauricio Beltrán and María Pérez. If we assume that the pertinent anecdote related by the narrator-protagonist of El Coyote, the Rebel corresponds factually to the life experiences of the author—as indeed do most of the other incidents in the tale, as far as can be ascertained—it is clear when, and under what circumstances, he migrated to the United States. One source mentions vaguely that he was educated in the “schools of Los Angeles (Calif.) and Mexico.” What we know concretely, as stated above and as ascertained in his book, is that he graduated from Hollywood High School, in Los Angeles, California, in 1928. He attended Los Angeles City College until 1933 and, after a protracted interruption, earned a B. A. from Los Angeles State College in 1956. He married Amelia L. Moore—hence the otherwise cryptic dedication that appears in front of El Coyote, the Rebel—and, except for one stepdaughter, Ann L. Phillips (née Cox), he had no children of his own. A Republican and a member of the Lutheran church council, Pérez lived for many years in Los Angeles, where he worked as a translator, and as an instructor of Spanish and Italian at his alma mater, Los Angeles City College. Between 1959 and 1960, he also was a teacher, first in Roosevelt and then in Leuzinger High School, in Lawndale, a job he apparently held until his death. During World War II, Pérez served in the U. S. War Office of Censorship, “translating incoming and outgoing letters written in Spanish.”13 He died in Los Angeles on October 21, 1962, and his ashes are buried in the Christian Cemetery of Nacogdoches, Texas, his wife’s hometown. More revealing indeed are the autobiographical details included in his book.