E3W Literature | University of Texas

Américo Paredes
George Washington Gomez: A Mexicotexan Novel
Arte Publico Press, 1990
302 pages
ISBN: 1558850120
$12.95

Reviewed by Patricia Garcia

On September 29, 2006, the United States Congress approved the Secure Fence Act of 2006 (HR 6061) and authorized the Department of Homeland Security to spend 1.2 billion on a 700-mile long fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The approval of HR 6061 and various other local anti-immigration legislation signals that many Americans may feel the melting pot is overflowing. Although the topics of immigration and border instability are critical contemporary political issues, the anxiety over the permeability of the U.S.-Mexico border has long been present in the tumultuous and often violent history of the borderlands. George Washington Gomez: A Mexicotexan Novel, by Américo Paredes, adds a historical dimension to the debate by presenting an earlier narrative of borderland conflict through the actions and decisions of a young Mexican American experiencing the pressures of assimilation and violence between Anglo rinches (law officials) and wealthy landowners, and the Mexican American working class.

The novel begins several generations after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the U.S.-Mexico War and forced Mexico to surrender half of its national territory, including Texas, Nevada, Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, and portions of Colorado. Although the novel begins approximately half a century later, the Mexican inhabitants of the Texas-Mexico border had not fully adapted to their new position as American citizens. As a result, Mexican-Texans experienced the collision of warring cultures, and attempted to reconcile the resulting conflict of identities.

Paredes addresses the problem of securing a fixed identity within a culture constantly in flux through the novel’s protagonist Guálinto Gómez, who is christened George Washington Gomez at birth. In naming Gómez, Paredes creates a character destined to identify both with his American citizenship and Mexican culture. Given the name George Washington by his father, who believes that possessing the name of one the “great men” of America will ensure his success in society, the boy is raised with the name Guálinto because of his family’s inability to pronounce the name Washington.

In what Ramon Saldívar terms a “borderlands version of Du Boisian double consciousness,” Guálinto develops a “checkerboard consciousness,” where Guálinto’s multiple identities are “made up of tight little cells independent and almost entirely ignorant of each other.” Unlike contemporary Chicana/o writers like Gloria Anzaldúa, whose writings reveal that they are keenly aware that their hybrid identity is constantly under attack by American hegemonic forces, Paredes creates a character that seeks to create a singular, assimilated notion of identity through the American school system. Guálinto “secretly desire[s] to be a full-fledged, complete American without the shameful encumberment of his Mexican race.” Arguably, it is Guálinto’s path to full assimilation and the formation of an American identity, independent of any Mexican features, that most distinguishes the novel as a product of the late 1930s.

While Gualinto’s decision to assimilate may be extremely unpalatable to the modern reader, the novel does offer an alternative view. As many of his letters in the Américo Paredes Papers archive reveal, Paredes was aware that modern readers would disapprove of the novel’s ending and Guálinto’s decision to assimilate by marrying an Anglo woman; however, Paredes willingly chose to leave the novel unedited when Arte Publico decided to publish the novel in 1990. In a letter dated August 8, 1989, Paredes wrote to Nicolas Kanellos, Arte Publico editor, and firmly stated that he was offering the novel unrevised and strongly desired no editorial cuts:
In offering it for publication I thought of it as a historical document more than anything else … George Washington Gomez is being offered as a novel written a half-century ago. It would be dishonest on my part, I think, to present it in more readable fashion than it was written back then. I hope you will consent to printing the novel as it stands, warts and all.
Paredes claims that if he had edited the novel he “might have … ended the novel … with Guálinto Gomez sallying forth to fulfill his destiny as the leader of his people and the founder of the movimiento chicano.” Instead, Paredes keeps his original ending with Guálinto assimilating into Anglo culture because he “did not want [the novel] mistaken for a product of the 1980’s because then it would be seen not as a forerunner of Chicano literature but as an imitation of it.” Paredes was not coy when it came to understanding the significance of his novel. In a Whitman-esque moment, Paredes designated himself as the progenitor of Chicano literature: “I call myself a Proto-Chicano. There is no humility in that. I assumed the mantle of the ancestor, the predictor, the prophet crying in the wilderness.”

In response to the readers who found the ending a “shock and disappointment,” Paredes writes, “Texas Mexicans of the 1930’s would not have agreed with you. This was the time when members of the ‘Latin’ middle class were trying hard to assimilate, to pass as ‘white,’ to bring up their children as monolingual English speakers.” Paredes’s response underscores his request that readers understand the particular struggles and challenges faced by Mexican Americans in 1930s segregated Texas, which are often excluded from the limited experiences presented in the few works that have been anthologized; those are usually restricted to work by Chicano writers of the Civil Rights Movement. By venturing into the past and exploring a novel written in the 1930s, readers encounter both familiar and contemporary topics and an alternative account of how Mexican Americans have historically viewed their position in American society, particularly on the topic of assimilation.