1. Author Biography
2. Interview with the author
3. Advance Praise of "Mestizos Come Home!"
1. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Robert Con Davis-Undiano, Neustadt Chair and Presidential Professor of English, is Executive Director of the World Literature Today organization at the University of Oklahoma. He graduated from Cal-State, East Bay (1971) and received an M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1979) from the University of California, Davis.
He is a third generation Mexican American who publishes in Chicano Studies and literary theory and is author, co-author, or editor of many books and articles, including The Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture (1993), Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry (co-author 1992), and Criticism and Culture: The Role of Critique in Modern Literary Theory (co-author 1991). He serves as well on numerous editorial and advisory boards nationally.
At the University of Oklahoma, he has received the Rufus G. Hall Faculty Achievement Award (1993), the Kenneth E. Crook Annual Faculty Award (1994), the Sullivant Award for Perceptivity (2004), and many student-generated awards (including Outstanding Faculty of the Year) for his work with Latino students. He is editor of the Chicana & Chicana Visions of the Américas book series at the University of Oklahoma Press and is part of the leadership of the OU College of Liberal Studies and the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE). He is the director of the OU Latino Studies program and host of "Current Conversations," a radio and television program, sponsored by OU and broadcast throughout Oklahoma.
2. INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR:
How do you define the terms Mexican American and mestizo?
This question is exactly what this book is about. A Mexican American is a mixed-race person. He or she as a Mexican is a mixture of European and indigenous background, and often one of the parents of a Mexican American is European. During the Spanish Colonial period in the Americas, mestizo was one term in a range of racial categories that the Spanish promoted to keep control of all of the changes that were happening as new combinations of mixed race peoples and communities cropped up in the New World. In modern usage, mestizo has a broader meaning as any mixed-race person in the Americas.
Of greater interest is the fact that all of the racial categories that the Spanish created, and which we are heirs to, were based on a notion of race as a distinction arising from nature. The Spanish thought of race very much as we think now of different species of animals. In the way that they applied the race as a concept, there was a kind of destiny and set of limitations conveyed by the racial identity that any person is born into.
A main goal of Mestizos Come Home! is to show the modern understanding of race and the lack of any foundation for that notion in nature. Mexican American writers and artists have done incredible work to demonstrate what science now supports as the fallacy of organizing humans into different races. Science has shown that the genetic differences among people in a community are far great than those differences separating communities. Both the work of Mexican American writers and artists and modern genetic scientists have merged to undermine the notion of race as a misleading, deeply troublesome, and damaging concept to any community that applies it.
Q: What are the areas of cultural change that you cover in this book?
The book covers six areas of cultural and social change since the 1960s concerning racial identity, attitudes toward land, assumptions about popular culture, European versus Mesoamerican ideas about the human body, the creation of a “Chicano” cultural voice, and the rise of Chicano literature and Chicano Studies.
The book shows that the Mexican American community’s fostering of these changes and accomplishments has been their way of making America their “home.” The irony of this fact is that Mexicans were in the Southwest, and it was their home, long before there was a United States. In fact, mestizos have been in the Americas since the Conquest. Mestizos Come Home! focuses on the cultural and historical “amnesia” that has blocked recognition of mestizo contributions across the Americas. This “amnesia” has distorted everyone’s historical understanding of the past of the Americas and contributes in various ways to the persistent marginalization of mestizos everywhere in this hemisphere.
Another main point of this book is that the fuller recognition of “mestizo” culture in the U.S. will make America a better country by helping it finally to become the multi-cultural democracy that it has always tried to be.
Q: Who are some of the important Chicano/a literary figures and how have they contributed to sharing the Mexican American experience with a broader audience?
Mestizos Come Home! focuses on a great variety of Mexican American writers and artists from the Spanish Colonial Period through the present. Its principal focus, however, is the twentieth century with writers such as Rudolfo Gonzáles, Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, and Demetria Martínez, among many others. The book also treats many artists from the eighteen century Spanish Colonial period with special attention given to the great Miguel Cabrera. In the twentieth century, the book discusses Mexican American artists such as John Valadez, Alma López, Alex Donis, and Luis Jiménez.
Mestizos Come Home! shows how Mexican American writers and artists have helped to erase the “amnesia” about mestizo culture in the Americas, including the six areas of cultural influence (identity, land, popular culture, cultural voice, the body, and Chicano literature and Chicano Studies) that the book attends to. The Chicano Movement and Chicano Renaissance of the 1960s through the 1990s have helped to bring about the cultural “homecoming” that this book is the first to explain.
Q: What types of impact has the Mexican American community had on U.S. mainstream culture?
I contend that Mexican Americans are changing the U.S. in areas that most need to be changed in regard to attitudes about race, land, civil rights, Puritanical indulgences, communal cohesion, and the implementation of social justice. It is well documented that cultures tend to resist change in precisely the areas that are most relevant and critical to who they are. The tendency in American culture, especially over the last decade, to make Mexican Americans and Latinos the “enemy” in regard to immigration, border issues, social values, and the economy is an indicator of how important the changes are that Mexican Americans represent for the culture.
Q: How is understanding the experiences and contributions of Mexican Americans especially important today?
Mestizo communities across the Americas are already fundamental contributors to culture and society in this hemisphere. Until that contribution is acknowledged, as is now happening, everyone in the Americas will have a distorted sense of history and current culture and society. In the case of the U.S., every time a new community or group comes to the America, the country re-enacts its founding. In relation to that group, the country must re-find its love of cultural diversity in the incorporation of new people and traditions. It must rediscover the feel of liberty and freedom in the acceptance of newly forming personal relations and bonds. It must renew the meaning of democracy in the ongoing challenge of social evolution and change.
When America fails to incorporate new communities, the American idea dims and weakens, in effect, becoming the fading memory of what the founders imagined. When the country succeeds in rallying around a new community and weaves it into the national character and culture, the spirit of the founders comes alive and lives again through us as we rediscover the lasting frontier of what makes America rare and enduring as a nation.
3. ADVANCE PRAISE
FOR MESTIZOS COME HOME!:
“Mestizos Come Home! is a deeply researched, provocative, and compelling study of the ways Mexican Americans have struggled to belong to the place they come from, and to reclaim their heritage in the United States and throughout the Americas. Davis-Undiano provides us with a deep understanding of the cultural strategies and folk traditions that have sustained Mexican Americans for centuries. A must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the United States.”—NEIL FOLEY, author of "Mexicans in the Making of America"
“Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s brilliant analysis and presentation of casta paintings and what they mean to the development of New World racism are of immense importance. Mestizos Come Home! is a clarion call, reminding us of the intransigent racism mestizos have suffered over the centuries. With great understanding Davis-Undiano calls on mestizos to take pride in their mestizaje.”—RUDOLFO ANAYA, author of "Bless Me, Ultima"
“Mestizos Come Home! is a work of great intellect that shares Eduardo Galeano’s vision of a people freed of a ‘broken’ sense of history. Davis-Undiano provides a map bridging past and present, which is so essential not only to the spiritual and political empowerment of Latinos but also to anyone who wants to take that journey with us. This is a compelling read with an urgent, welcome message.”—DEMETRIA MARTINEZ, author of "Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana"
“This visionary book celebrates the social and cultural contributions Latinos and Latinas make as they forge a better future for the United States of America. A thoughtful consideration of major Mexican American artistic and literary accomplishments, it helps explain the importance of mestizo culture in forging a more equitable and inclusive national identity today. Mestizos Come Home! evaluates the significance of such major authors as Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, and Denise Chávez. It also discusses the social dimensions of lowrider culture, historical memory in Day of the Dead celebrations, the radical visual art of Alma López, and the racialized portraiture of colonial Mexican Casta paintings. Davis-Undiano’s book offers a sweepingly comprehensive vision of mestizo culture vital to the nation at a critical moment.”—RAFAEL PEREZ-TORRES, author of "Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture"
“Long a force for the study and dissemination of Chicano/a literature as teacher, scholar, and editor, Robert Con Davis-Undiano brings his erudition and his personal experience as an American of Mexican descent to the subject of Mexicans in America in a book that is at once accessible, scholarly, filled with insight, and wonderfully readable. Encompassing the history and magnitude of the contributions of Mexican people, literature, and culture to the fabric of America, Mestizos Come Home! is an important book by an important author, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune time.”—RILLA ASKEW, author of "Kind of Kin: A Novel"
Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s book is a comprehensive study of Mexican American history and culture from colonial times to the present, resulting in a historically-grounded analysis that questions the misrepresentations heaped on one of the largest U.S. ethnic populations in the United States. The book’s sweeping view ranges from the Spanish Colonial era, and the recent rethinking of this legacy by Mexican American writers, historians, and artists, to a remembrance of what American exceptionalism really stands for: not a nation ruled by a people privileged by inherited traits such as skin color (“white” over black, brown, or peoples “racially mixed”), but an open and free community inspired by democratic ideals of liberty, egalitarianism, and a unique mission to make America better. Mestizos Come Home! is the call by Mexican American writers and artists who have envisioned their cultural past and present as Americans, as a journey home, and as the promise of renewal, new beginnings, and the enrichment of the American experience. An inspiring and thoroughly researched book, Mestizos Come Home! perceptively and courageously engages major ethnic, social, and political issues facing the United States today. –ROBERTO CANTU, editor of "The Forked Juniper"
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