Travel, Autoethnography, and Oppositional Consciousness in Juan Felipe Herrera’s Mayan Drifter

Abstract

The prolific poet, essayist, and dramatist Juan Felipe Herrera belongs to a generation of writers who came of age during or in the aftermath of Civil Rights Chicano activism (late 1960s and early 1970s) and adopted an indigenista (indigenist) aesthetics as a strategy of cultural affirmation and opposition to the Anglo mainstream. Herrera straddles generations in that, although the indigenous continues to be a major concern in his work, he has gradually grown out of the claim of a Chicano identity linked to an indigenous past and has become critical with the romantic emphasis on pre-Columbian roots of previous movimiento (Chicano movement) days. He is now one of the main voices of a “post-movement” literature produced during and after the 1980s that does not hold up cultural nationalism and often focuses on the place of Mexican Americans in a trans-American context. These authors continue to claim the label “Chicano” as an act of commitment to the struggle for social justice and understand the present, the past, and the future of Mexican Americans and Latinos in the United States in the wider frameworks of U.S.-Mexican relations and U.S.-Latin American relations.² The limited scholarly work on Herrera’s writings may be due to his unconventional approach to chicanismo (chicano nationalism) or perhaps to the unconventional elements of his poetics and artistic practice outlined by Lauro Flores: the difficulty to catalog him as an artist; the syncretism of artistic forms; the constant questioning of the limits imposed by literary classification; and the frequent mixture in his works of the strange and the everyday, the primitive and the modern, and the mythical and the real (Flores 1990, 172–179).³

I use the word “Chicano” with irony too. Here I claim it again; it is a half-step between Ladino¹ and Indian, a jump start from apathy into commitment.

(Juan Felipe Herrera, Mayan Drifter).