El Coyote, the Rebel Page 3
For Pérez, this acculturation trajectory has clearly begun when, in the penultimate chapter of El Coyote, he meets a newly arrived Mexican man, Pablo Calderón, and cannot help but be shocked by the latter’s “atrocious” and “broken” English. Luis’ growing discomfort in the face of his compatriot’s newly discovered otherness is further underscored when he remarks how Pablo “continued murdering the King’s English and misusing personal pronouns” (160). In the epilogue of the book, as a sort of finale to the oath of allegiance ceremony which formally transforms him into a U. S. citizen, Pérez concludes his story with a highly symbolic scene which seems to emphasize that he is definitively on the path to assimilation:
When I stepped out of the building I happened to glance to the right, and high on top of the steel mast the flag of my newly adopted country proudly waved with the breeze. As I beheld it, I stood motionless in a gesture of reverence. Then, after performing a military salute, I walked fast to the parking lot, got into my car, and drove to the bus station to meet Dolores (164).
Yet it must be noted that as he is walking out of the courthouse, Luis meets “a jovial, fat, colored guard,” who pats him on his shoulder and says: “Congratulations, mistah, now you is an American citizen. Yeah, suh—you is one of us” (164). The operative word here is us. His previous experiences— first with Mr. Benson, the exploitative grower who pays him the net sum of ten dollars for his labor picking cotton for nearly a year and a half, and later with the jealous Mr. Mingles and other hypocritical types—have taught Luis that this is a society in which he does not operate on an equal footing. Who is, then, the us implied in the guard’s remark?
This notwithstanding, at the end of the novel all seems to indicate that Pérez—now on his way to meet his girlfriend, Dolores Ramírez—will soon marry her and that the tale will conclude with a happy ending. The last sentence of the novel is explicit on this score: “On my way to the station I said to myself, ‘if Dolores will say “yes” to my question, that will be the climax of a perfect today, and the beginning of a new tomorrow.’” Pérez’s decision to depart from the facts and to suggest the marriage of the protagonist to a Mexican woman—when in fact the author married an Anglo-American—is an interesting element that on one hand reinforces the fictional character of the book and, on the other hand, obviously bears additional implications for a sociological analysis of the discourse in the text.23
The Girls of the Pink Feather
In Chapter 24, one of the middle and apparently less important sections of El Coyote, Captain Bojorques takes his young orderly Luis to La Casa del Amor (The House of Love), a brothel in Agua Prieta, Sonora, in northern Mexico.
Despite the humorous incidents—which include a bar brawl, lots of screaming, and the Madame’s grabbing Luis by the collar and hurling him out onto the sidewalk (one more of the picaresque misadventures that abound in the book)—this episode would not be particularly important were it not for the fact that it seems to be the kernel from which Pérez’s second book would germinate.
Diametrically opposed to the quaint presentation of his first book, Pérez’s second novel, The Girls of the Pink Feather, was marketed as part of an “adult reading” series linked only by very suggestive titles and published by Carousel Books, an obscure outlet in North Hollywood.24 This book appeared posthumously, in 1963. Evidently, Pérez conducted the negotiations and final arrangements for its publication on his deathbed.25
While no dates are given, the story appears to be set in contemporary times. It opens in Reno, Nevada, with three characters who (we will learn later) are incidental and almost peripheral to the main plot of the story: Art Chandler, an organized crime figure; Helen, a prostitute targeted for assassination; and Charles “The Avenging Angel” Cooke, the hitman charged with eliminating her. In a story lacking entirely in verisimilitude, and presented much in the style of a minor Hollywood or television mystery, “Angel” Cooke, after a couple of brief sexual encounters with Helen, suddenly falls in love with her and helps her to escape to Guaymas, Mexico. Thus, in the first two chapters these two characters move from Reno to Carson City to Tonopah to Las Vegas and, implicitly, to Arizona and then to El Paso, Texas. The attentive reader will notice that, despite the gratuitous sex scenes inserted here (which never really verge on the pornographic), there is present a naive but deliberate tinge of romanticism.
It is in Chapter 3, however, that the true story begins. The protagonist will be Chico, “the affable foundling … discovered during one of the freak Guaymas flash floods” (29) and raised by Juan and Margarita Mendoza, the owners and administrators of the Pink Feather, a colorful brothel in the Mexican port of Guaymas, Sonora. This initial scene, reminiscent of Chapter 24 of El Coyote, the Rebel, is set on the birthday of the young protagonist who, like his literary predecessor, will rapidly develop into a sort of pícaro figure charged with performing a variety of menial chores for his adoptive parents and the resident prostitutes of The Pink Feather.
Trained as a skilled swimmer by Juan Mendoza de León, his adoptive father, Chico becomes a hero when he rescues a girl from drowning: Linda Williams, a rich, blonde, and blue-eyed American. Naturally, Linda becomes the object of Chico’s innocent desire. When the girl’s wealthy and generous father decides to reward Chico’s heroic deed and informs the Mendozas, through a lawyer who represents him, that “The boy may ask whatever he wished within—” Chico rushes to respond eagerly “I want the girl!” (91). Advised by José Rodríguez de la Cuchara de Plata,26 the lawyer, that his request must remain within reason and that “possession” of the girl is out of the question, affable Chico smiles and says, “If I can’t have the girl, can I study to become a médico?” (91).
The rest of the story is fairly predictable. Chico attends the Red Fox Academy at Nogales, Arizona, where he confronts the proverbial negative attitudes toward Mexicans. This notwithstanding, he ultimately succeeds in proving his intelligence, his individual superiority, and his capacity for cultural adaptability: “Chico was making many friends at school. The strange customs of the American people no longer bewildered him. In fact, if he hadn’t been so homesick for his parents, and his dream girl, Linda, he could have been very happy in the United States” (103). After a short interval, during which he returns to Guaymas to attend his adoptive mother’s death at childbirth, Chico is offered a job in The Red Fly, a restaurant owned by Miguel Villanueva, due mainly to his perfect command of the English language. Villanueva’s brother, Tomás, turns out to be a physician living in Los Angeles, California. With Villanueva’s help and the last portion of the Williams’ reward, Chico is able to attend the University of Southern California (USC) and work toward the completion of his undergraduate degree.
In the concluding six chapters, time is greatly telescoped and the actions pile up in dizzying fashion. Upon the death of Margarita Mendoza, Chico is adopted by Helen (the prostitute of the novel’s opening scenes), now the accountant for the Pink Feather (and the new madame of the brothel), and her new husband, Doctor Howard, a colorful, self-expatriated physician from Texas. Juan, after a bout with depression due to Margarita’s death, recovers and marries “the widow Calderón.” And Chico himself, assuming the role of matchmaker, arranges the marriage of Dolores Pacheco, a reformed prostitute formerly intent on seducing him, to Miguel Villanueva.
In one of the many seemingly capricious twists of the story, Chico’s infatuation with Linda Williams is inexplicably discarded. Instead, he quickly falls in love with Celia Contreras, a character abruptly introduced toward the end of the story.27 Chico, however, is confronted with the necessity of leaving her behind, as he has to move to Mexico City, where he has been admitted into medical school. A group of bandits headed by “The Scorpion,” which has appeared sporadically throughout the tale, is reintroduced to aid in the fabrication of a happy ending for the story. Chico, in another heroic act, wounds and captures The Scorpion, and helps to kill the rest of the band, thereby winning the reward money that will allow him to accompl
ish his dream of transforming the Pink Feather into a clinic, the Mama Margarita Clinica [sic], to serve the poor people of Guaymas. Naturally, both Drs. Villanueva and Howard will be part of the project, as Chico will too once he secures his medical degree in Mexico City.
In the final act of the novel, a truly fantastic twist, a rooster Juan has been grooming for years wins a prize and the money will allow Chico to take Celia with him to Mexico City: “Chico, with this money, you can be a student and have a wife. You needn’t be separated from Celia” (160). The happy ending is polished to perfection.
Paradoxically, what begins as a sleazy “adults-only” story unexpectedly turns into a highly moralizing and idealized tale in which justice prevails. Virtue and individual industry triumph over social marginality and determinism; prostitutes reform, marry, and form happy families; alcoholics recover; bandits and other social leeches are killed or put in jail; and the metamorphosis of brothel into clinic is under way. Near the end, when don José, the lawyer, tells Chico, “You are a very fortunate young man blessed by the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl,” the protagonist responds with this oration: “My success in becoming a doctor will be due to a constant inner voice which urges me to go on. My turbulent past, the rosy dreams of my future, the fickleness of human nature, the suffering of the downtrodden, and the bleak surroundings and poverty of my country inspire me to push forward despite my many disappointments!” (153) Clearly, this is not an autobiographical novel. Yet the discourse encapsulated in this harangue articulates in a very coherent and powerful manner Pérez’s humanitarian concerns and sense of individual motivation. The character’s resolute stance in dealing with life’s vicissitudes, his energetic protestations against social obstacles and deterministic views, all mirror the elevated confidence, the sense of accomplishment, and the self-esteem of the writer himself.
The same optimistic outlook exhibited in El Coyote, the Rebel, which doubtless characterized the vigorous personality of the author, is also found in The Girls of the Pink Feather. Unfortunately, the latter work is substantially unaccomplished and inferior to the first. Besides numerous typographical and other errors that attest to the carelessness of the publication, unresolved technical and structural problems detract considerably from any value the novel might have otherwise. One could speculate, as I initially did, that the project was rushed and did not have the appropriate chance to mature enough, for its weaknesses are many and very apparent. Yet Pérez had been negotiating its publication since at least early 1954, as attested by the telegram cited above (see Note 6), and as also reported in the Los Angeles State College Times on April 9 of that same year: “Luis Perez, State College’s soldier of fortune student, has just had his second novel accepted for publication. It’s called Chico, and Shasta Publishing House of Chicago has placed it on their list for publication next winter.” Interestingly, we also discover in the same notice that “The novel was a product of State’s Pacific Coast Writer’s Conference, held for the first time last summer under the directorship of Professor Frederick Shroyer of the division of language arts.” In other words, Pérez must have received professional advice during the preparation of the manuscript—a fact that renders the deficiencies of The Girls of the Pink Feather even more puzzling. It is very likely that the schizophrenia embodied by the book, which oscillates between roman noir and fairy tale, may be the result of a clumsy publisher’s intervention28 that attempted to make the novel fit into the mold of the “adult reading” series of which it was marketed to be part. Notably, the synopsis of the story included in the article ignores completely the first part of the book: “Chico is the story of a little boy who is brought up in a house of prostitution in Mexico, grows up to become a doctor, and returns to convert the brothel into a hospital.”
The Dormant Manuscripts
My contact with Pérez’s family proved invaluable. In my first telephone conversation, I immediately found out that he had published The Girls of the Pink Feather; I also learned that his wife had kept a trunk with a variety of materials including photographs, newspaper clippings, and every review of El Coyote ever published. In addition, I discovered that Pérez was an assiduous writer who had been working on a number of manuscripts before his death, including an elaborate project known by his relatives as The Twilight of the Gods, a historical novel based on the life of Hernán Cortés and intended to span three volumes.29 To date, we have been able to locate two manuscripts with the same title and similar subtitles: The Conquering God: Based on the Life of Hernán Cortés (338 pp.), a novel about the conquest of México narrated in the first person, purportedly by Cortés himself; and The Conquering God: Historical Novel Based on the Life of Hernán Cortés (309 pp.), which is told in the voice of Rodrigo de Pelayo, one of Cortés’ soldiers. Like Chico/The Girls of the Pink Feather, these works exhibit Pérez’s penchant for a continued exploration of his Mexican past—both immediate and more distant epochs. Using a mixture of fact and fiction, of historical and idealized elements, the author seemed intent on maintaining those vital links to his origins.
Some newspaper articles and other records suggest that Pérez may have worked, and even developed in some measure, other book projects. But no vestiges of them have yet been found. Commenting on the then-recent publication of El Coyote, Margaret Lovell noted in the Los Angeles Collegian,“Luis has just finished his second book and is working on a third. The second one concerns the Mexican nationalists [nationals?] who came to work in the United States during the war, and the third tells what the Mexican thinks of American tourists.” (May 27, 1947) Lovell’s latter reference seems to allude to Chico; the former may have been a project that Pérez discarded at some point. However, the same work also seems to be the focus of a commentary published seven years later:
The indefatigable Luis is taking no siesta from writing, however, as he is hard at work on a third book, Country Without Tortillas, the saga of the braceros who crossed the border during World War II to help sustain our defense effort by working in the fields and factories of the southwest (Los Angeles State College Times, April 9, 1954).
The braceros theme falls within the parameters of the immigration experience and still connects Pérez to his past, to his Mexican roots. There is, however, another unpublished manuscript in which the exploration of the Chicano experience proper becomes the central matter. This thematic evolution was perhaps symptomatic of a transformation in the author’s social concerns. Chávez Came Home (226 pp.) is the romantic and at times humorous tale of Frank Chávez, a Mexican American from Los Angeles who enlists in the army, takes part in World War II, and then returns home only to face the confiscation of his native community’s lands by “the righteous members of the ‘Housing Administration’ of the City of the Angels” in conjunction with “the city fathers” (i). The site of Frank’s birth, the notorious Chávez Ravine, is described by the narrator as “a happy little valley where the children were able to laugh and play at will, unmolested, while the adults went about enjoying their chosen occupations, minding their own and their neighbors’ business without getting in trouble” (i) until the Los Angeles Housing Administration becomes “alarmed” at the sad condition of the “run-down, termite infested, weather-beaten, squalid shanties” in which “the careless people of the happy hidden hamlet” lived. Purporting a false concern, the authorities determine to expropriate the site with the idea of building “an orderly, dignified, well managed, low-rent public-housing project to serve those who were cleaner than the present occupants of the happy little canyon … without taking into consideration the sentiments and emotions of the families of the pleasant community” (i). The project, however falls through and the city management instead sells “the repossessed land to a private baseball impresario to build a colossal monument to a the American sport, so that the inhabitants of other communities may come, for a fee, and hear someone shout, ‘Strike one!’” (ii).
In the words of the narrator: “The deal with the city and the baseball impresario became a political
embroilment, causing the arrest of Frank Chávez, the son of one of the Mexican-American property owners, who refused to retreat peacefully from his inherited plot of land” (ii).
During one night in jail “Frank had a chance to mentally review his turbulent past, and muster his wits in order to defend himself when the ‘Black Friday’s eviction rift’ trial came about” (ii). This novel, then, is a retrospective view of the events preceding the denouement of the Chávez Ravine case, including Frank’s past: his shattered love affair with Conchita Campos, his childhood sweetheart; his heroic participation in the war, during which he finds a dead French woman and her surviving baby girl, Suzette, among the ruins of a bombed building; his romantic pursuit and eventual marriage to Jeanette, Suzette’s aunt and only remaining relative. As occurs regularly in Pérez’s writings, history, politics, and romance intertwine in this manuscript. An interesting aspect of this novel, as a work left in progress, is that it contains at least three possible endings. Perhaps one day at least some of Pérez’s manuscripts will become available to the general reading public.
More than half a century after its birth, El Coyote, the Rebel reemerges under the auspices of the Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project. No longer an enigma, Luis Pérez’s life story and narrative work are available to readers and critics. Clearly, they enhance our understanding of Chicano literary history and aid us in our efforts to chart the evolution and transformation of the literature produced by writers of Mexican origin in this country. His works shed light on the the social and cultural experiences of an entire generation of Mexican Americans who lived and worked at a unique historical juncture—a generation that still awaits further study.
Lauro H. Flores
University of Washington
April, 2000
Works Cited
Aguilar Camín, Héctor. La frontera nómada: Sonora y la Revolución Mexicana (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1977).