El Coyote, the Rebel Page 2
El Coyote
In one of the first critical references to Pérez’s work, Juan Rodríguez makes a brief mention of El Coyote, the Rebel, citing it as “autobiography.” Luis Leal, on the other hand, in what is ostensibly the only published article (besides my own) fully devoted to Pérez to date, has referred to this book as a “pre-Chicano forgotten novel” and, deals with the text as a work of fiction. Comparing the biographical data of the author with the accounts he incorporates in his book, however, it is clear that his story is in fact a lightly fictionalized autobiography or, vice versa, a deeply autobiographical novel.
Pérez’s musical talents were undiminished by his partially missing right-hand ring finger—a distinguishing mark noted in his U.S. citizenship papers—and explained in Chapter 12 of El Coyote, the Rebel.
(Courtesy Pamela Ann Phillips)
Both Rodríguez and Leal concur in their assessment of El Coyote, the Rebel as an important piece in the Chicano cultural puzzle, one eminently representative of the Mexican-American experience and literary expression of the 1940s—a crucial period of synthesis when previous prose fiction trends crystallized and “began to take a clearly Chicano form,” says Rodríguez (71). Leal affirms that the content of El Coyote, the Rebel is “without a doubt [set in] a Chicano ambience” (12) and adds that this “is a novel that merits to be included in the history of Chicano narrative. It precedes other novels with similar themes and structure, like Pocho and Macho” (13).14
Using direct, first-person narration and a linear development of the plot, the story of El Coyote is organized into thirty-nine chapters and spans roughly twenty-five years in the life of Luis Pérez, the protagonist and, purportedly, also the author of the story. Opening in San Luis Potosí, the protagonist’s birthplace, on August 25, 1909, during the celebration of young Luis’ fifth birthday, the work proceeds to recount a long series of adventures which carry young Pérez through various points of Mexico and the United States and finally concludes in Los Angeles, California, apparently on Wednesday, December 12, 1934, at the very moment he succeeds in securing his U. S. citizenship. The chronology becomes a bit hazy toward the end and, thus, it is permissible to speculate that Pérez may have deliberately blurred it to endow the events of the last date, which corresponds to the festivity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with a symbolic value, a narrative stratagem that he seems to employ elsewhere in the book.
As Luis Leal has observed, Pérez frames El Coyote, the Rebel within a structure that largely conforms to the paradigm of the picaresque genre. For Leal, in fact, “The most interesting feature of this work … is not so much the autobiographical information as the elaboration of the countless picaresque adventures of the hero” (12).
An orphan since birth, Luisito (little Luis) is first put under the care of his maternal grandfather and later in the custody of one of his uncles, Miguel Pérez, who arrives at San Luis Potosí from Douglas, Arizona, shortly after young Luis’ fifth birthday party. While the orphanage of the character seems to be an authentic element in the biography of the writer, it nonetheless contributes to the immediate location of the story in close proximity to the sphere of the picaresque. This impression is further reinforced by the romantic and suspect genealogy that the narrator attributes himself through the account referred to him by his grandfather: “Little Luis, your mother’s name was María. She was an honest, kind and beautiful Spanish-Aztec woman… . Your papá was a young French nobleman” (2).
This is one of those few points where the tale seems to deviate from the facts since, according to one of the records, the last name of both Luis’ maternal grandfather and uncle should evidently be Beltrán, not Pérez. Of course, it is conceivable that the biographical documentation may be inaccurate, as it is often the case in situations like this.15 In any case, the tension between oral tradition and written history, which is also an important ingredient of the book, enters the scene here.
The first action we see the young orphan perform—stealing a piece of cactus candy—also contributes to endowing the narration with a picaresque tenor that will only increase through the development of the subsequent episodes. It is also this innocent and playful act which triggers the initial speech of the grandfather about Luis’ parents, thereby leading him to establish the central motif that will become the clarion call for all the actions of the protagonist throughout the entire book: education as the vehicle for individual advancement. “Little Luis, [your uncle Miguel] will be here sometime soon. I intend to have him take you back with him to the United States. I will ask him to give you a good education for my sake, your sake, and for the sake of the Holy Church” (3). A few pages later, the old man’s subsequent request to his son Miguel continues this same topic: “Miguel, I want you to take little Luis to the United States and see what you can do for him,” to which Miguel, following suit, responds, “I’ll take him with me […] I will promise, and swear by the Mexican saints, that we will give Luis the best education we possibly can!” (8).
Later, Luis himself will appropriate this subject and use it as the beacon that guides his actions and all his dealings with the numerous characters he will meet. For example, when he is about to be discharged from the rebel army into which he was recruited three years earlier, at the age of ten, he is interrogated by General Contreras about his reasons for wishing to leave the army, to which he responds by expressing his desire to go “some place where I may be able to go to a school and educate myself” (105). When the General asks him where he would go, Luis predictably answers: “To the United States, my General” (105). Two similar exchanges will take place later, already in the United States, first between Luis and his friend Don Juan, in Douglas, Arizona, when the boy tells his friend: “I would like to get a job somewhere, save money and go to school” (107) and later when he tells Miss Magdalene Smith: “My greatest desire is to save my money and go to a school somewhere. I want to learn something, and I want to do useful things” (134). The conclusion of the story, and evidently the very outcome of the author’s life, corroborates the centrality of this theme.
In conformity with the decision made by his relatives, young Luis abandons his grandfather’s home and leaves with his uncle and aunt. The night before his departure, however, his grandfather lectures young Luisito and compels him to promise that he will never forget him or his native land: “Mexico was destined by the gods to be a great country for us Mexicans” (8), states the grandfather. After the child pledges to obey his request, the old man, in a highly symbolic act, proceeds to relate the story of the Aztecs’ search for the promised land in compliance with the mandates of their gods, the founding of Tenochtitlan, their capital city, and the origins of Mexico’s name and national emblem. It is almost as if this is the rite of preparation that will enable Luis to undertake the journey that will ultimately lead him to a new land and a different culture.16 The book itself, El Coyote, the Rebel, seems to be offered by the narrator as proof that he has kept his oath of memory and devotion to his grandfather and to his native country. In the voice of various characters, similar passages related to Mexico’s official and popular history (Hidalgo and the War of Independence, El Cinco de Mayo, Pancho Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico, etc.) are intertwined in the narrative at strategic points of the book.
Luis’ orphanage as a result of his mother’s death at childbirth and his French father’s forced abandonment (after he is recalled home by his country) places him first under the guardianship of his grandfather, an old and charming but somewhat ineffectual man. Subsequently Luis falls under the tutelage of a cold and indifferent uncle and a sadistic aunt whose heartlessness and violence are a metaphor for the indifference and brutality of the cruel government, which earlier accused Luis’ father of being a spy in order to confiscate the properties and money he had left for the child’s education, “leaving the family and me to live from hand to mouth” (2), complains the abuelo. This prevailing social situation resulted in the chaos and destruction that engulfed the revolut
ionary and fratricidal Mexico of that historical moment.
This is the life and psychological scheme that comes to trigger the displacement of Luis Pérez northward and which nurtures his future good disposition to settle in a new country and to assimilate into a new culture. The episodes that come between his flight from his uncle and aunt and his definitive transplantation to the United States, and which cover his adventures as a child-soldier in the Mexican revolution (1910-1917) as well as his initial and temporary visits to Arizona, make the bulk of the story and serve various purposes. One such purpose is further illustration of the anarchy and chaos that reigned in Mexico during the armed phase of the Revolution; another is the development of the humorous, picaresque traits and trajectory of the protagonist.
Pérez’s ironic treatment of the blinding confusion that prevailed during the civil war in México is well illustrated in humorous anecdotes recounted in Chapter 9, shortly after he has been recruited into the Contreras battalion when he is barely eleven years old. “Since there was nothing to do but to fight for my country and kill or get killed, I kept digging my trench. At last the bugler blew the call to fire […] and finally the soldiers started shooting aimlessly” (37). The company commander puts his hand on the shoulder of the frightened boy and tells him to balance himself and load his weapon:
“Shoot!” he commanded.
“At what, Captain?”
“No importa, shoot!”
[…]
Soon after we stopped firing, a messenger came running with the news that we had won the battle for freedom. All the soldiers were wild with joy, shouting, cheering and shooting at a few stray birds which were flying over their heads or at any object which served as a target (37-38).
Young Luis, like the rest of his comrades, is just an innocent pawn caught up in a vicious game he scarcely understands. He and his companions have little or no idea about the reasons behind the slaughter in which they were compelled to participate.
Although Pérez’s childhood involvement in the armed strife may be true, not all the elements recorded in his account are factual.17 For example, he claims he was part of the seventh battalion, led by General Contreras, which, he says, fought against the forces of General Morales:
While the rebel army was recuperating in Hermosillo from the first battle, two self-appointed generals, Contreras and Morales, started quarreling as to who should become the governor of the state of Sonora. These two men, who were fighting for one common cause, divided the army in half, thus creating two revolutionary parties, one called the Contreristas; the other, the Moralistas (45).
The existence of General Morales, and of the Moralistas, is indeed ascertained in the historical records about the revolutionary activities in Sonora.18 It is dubious, though, whether the Morales chronicled in history books and the one we find in El Coyote are the same. On the other hand, my research failed to produce any information about any significant leader named Contreras. I did locate, however, an interesting historical anecdote that comes to beckon the hallucinatory dimensions of the reality lived by Pérez and his contemporaries, one of those magical-realistic tales that often overflow reality itself and which makes Pérez’s accounting of the revolution less fantastic or metaphorical than it appears to be at first sight:
Había en la ciudad de Ures [Sonora] un músico llamado Manuel D. Contreras, que llegó por el año de 1908 (?) formando parte de la banda militar del 22 batallón. Allí cumplió su tiempo de servicio, y determinó quedarse para dar clases de música […] Al culminar el desbarajuste maytorenista, el ex soldado federal se sintió invadido de un desbordante y fervoroso sentimiento constitucionalista, y se levantó en armas. ¿Contra quién? Era lo de menos (500-501).19
There was in the city of Ures a musician by the name of Manuel D. Contreras, who arrived around 1908 (?) as a member of the military band of the 22nd battalion. He completed his tour of duty there and then decided to stay and give music classes […] During the high tide of the maytorenista melee, the ex-federal soldier was overtaken by an arresting and fervent constitutionalist sentiment, and rose up in arms. Against who? That didn’t matter (500-501).
I wonder if Pérez had any knowledge about the musician mentioned in this account. Probably not. Regardless, it is doubtful that the Morales and Contreras mentioned in El Coyote may correspond to actual historical figures. Rather, it is my belief that Pérez was attempting to portray here, in a thinly veiled manner, the nonfictional strife between Sonora’s strongmen Maytorena and Calles. Their last-name initials, “C” and “M,” certainly hint at this.20
It is interesting to observe that, while in Ernesto Galarza’s life story Barrio Boy it is clearly the precariousness and uncertainty of life in revolutionary Mexico that forces the young protagonist and his family to leave for the United States, in Pérez’s case one important factor of this equation (besides the constant quest for education already referred above) will be the demand for Mexican labor that prevailed in the United States during World War I: “They need workers because the American Government is recruiting all the able-bodied young men for the army” (108), says don Juan to his young visitor in Douglas, Arizona.
Although he had previously made several sporadic incursions into the United States, it will be only at the end of 1918, in Chapter 31, that Luis officially enters the country, via Nogales, Arizona, as part of a group of temporary Mexican laborers. The official who examines Luis at the immigration office at Nogales tells him: “Young man, let it be known that you are entering the United States of America to pick cotton and to work as a farm hand for the term of one year. At the end of a year you shall return to Mexico. This is in accordance with the laws adopted by the Department of Labor of the United States” (129). This episode in Pérez’s life corresponds accurately to the historical events of that epoch.21 As M. Reisler has documented in his study, “Between 1918 and 1921 [the Arizona Cotton Growers’ Association] imported more than 30,000 Mexicans who entered the country under suspended immigration restrictions”(37). From the Mexican perspective, Aguilar Camín has noted the fiscal and economic crisis that jolted Sonora around that time, and which triggered a serious demographic and financial displacement:
A principios de 1916, Sonora era un territorio como no había sido desde las épocas de Gándara, setenta u ochenta años antes: pueblos enteros habían emigrado o estaban en ruinas, los capitales habían huido, los valles antes fértiles vivían en la zozobra y el abandono, la escasez de cereales era crónica, el comercio especulaba ayudado por la misma escasez y por el desastre de la moneda constitucionalista de curso forzoso cuya depreciación se multiplicaba en los estados fronterizos por la proximidad del dólar (424).
In early 1916, Sonora was a land as it had not been since the time of Gándara, seventy or eighty years earlier: entire villages had emigrated or were in ruins, capital had fled, the formerly fertile valleys languished in anxiety and neglect, the scarcity of grain was a chronic malady, merchants engaged in wanton speculation, aided by that scarcity and the disaster engendered by the forced use of the constitutionalist currency, whose depreciation was aggravated in the border states due to the proximity of the dollar.
Luis is clearly part of that exodus. He does work picking cotton and then, in Glendale, Arizona, herding sheep. But, like many, he does not return to Mexico. In 1920, he is evangelized by a Protestant missionary, baptized in the new faith, and sent to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to attend school. After a two-year stint in the Christian school at Albuquerque, Magdalene Smith, the missionary who brought him into her faith, urges Luis to move to Los Angeles, California, to enroll in a seminary, with the aim of becoming a minister. He arrives in Los Angeles on September 13, 1922, and spends a year in the seminary. There he falls in love with Caroline Olson, a “blue-eyed missionary” ten years his elder, a controversial romance which leads to trouble and results in Luis’ departure from the institution in 1924.
Later that year, on September 16, the protagonist meets a sympathetic Spanish teacher who counsels
him and helps him to enroll in Hollywood High School. There, as we have seen before, Luis becomes “Louis” or “Louie,” joins the ROTC, and plays third trombone in the band. He graduates in June, 1928 and then continues his education in Los Angeles City College, until 1933, events which are all congruent with the actual biography of the author as ascertained in our research.
Given on one hand its plot and theme, a recounting of the travails of a Mexican-born protagonist who migrates to the United States seeking a better lot, and on the other hand its picaresque bent and the obvious factors associated with this genre (such as the highly autobiographical content, the utilization of humor and irony as fundamental ingredients of the discourse, and its deliberate social critique), El Coyote, the Rebel can be properly situated in the narrative line of Daniel Venegas’s Las aventuras de don Chipote, o, Cuando los pericos mamen (1928) and Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971). Formally, it is unquestionably closer to the latter. The journey of the hero in Venegas’ book results in disillusionment—i.e., in the negation of the myth of the United States as the land of plenty and opportunity, the conflict being resolved with the return of the protagonist to Mexico—as Nicolás Kanellos has noted in his introduction to that novel. In Pérez’s and Galarza’s stories, on the other hand, the main characters ultimately choose to remain in the United States and prepare to fully immerse themselves into a process of acculturation that, in fact, they have already initiated.22