by Jackie Gúzmán
The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga, edited by Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón, is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time. The entries into this retrospective deserve a reading between the lines.
José Antonio Burciaga is one of the important voices of Chicano literature. Burciaga was also a muralist and creator of memorable pictorial commentary. He was a poet, a humorist, a satirist, a cartoonist and mostly a humanist. An early and frequent contributor to Hispanic Link, Burciaga died of cancer on Oct. 7, 1996.
He was unique in how he treated cultural differences and difficulties, including the inequities he revealed through humor, art, and deceptively simple prose. In this book Burciaga tells us through anecdotes his Chicano heritage and how it ripples in from Mexico. He tells about growing up between the proverbial two cultures and languages. Gladstein and Chacon address Burciaga’s importance to Chicano letters. That alone puts this book on a collector’s shelf, to visit and revisit some of his original thought in Latino literature.
Burciaga stretches that rubber band, also. With the turn of a phrase, he takes us into those creative and spiritual depths that get a rise or a laugh from us. In his essay, “What’s in a Spanish Name?” he describes the pronunciation mistakes that we would like to pretend aren’t common. How about polamas when trying to say palomas or numberos for – you get the picture. It isn’t beyond him to make fun of our everyday foibles. Very little, if anything, is so sacrosanct we ought not joke about it. There too is a quality of Burciaga. His humor and truths may sting. But they don’t injure.
The Last Supper book can make the reader laugh from beginning to end as it delves into reality and fantasy.The cartoon collection is evidence of Burciaga’s imaginative ways to characterize Chicano culture. Included is a picture of the book’s namesake mural, “Last Supper of Chicano Heroes,” a DaVinci impression,with Diego Rivera- or José Clemente Orozco-like insertions of the iconic heroe from Latino history.
Pachuco stories aren’t left out. In “Pachucos and the Taxicab Brigade,” Burciaga talks about Mexicans and Mexican-Americans targeted as gangsters. His poetry and art give the reader an unquenching look into what his work was like and why it is remembered. Left to the next generation of writers who discover Burciaga is to place his life in relation to what else was going on in the nation’s culture and the arts. What used to be Chicano morphed into Latino later, and then becomes mainstream. Transnational. Transcultural. Transcendantal,even.
(University of Arizona Press: paperback, 38 illustrations, $16.95. 208 pages.) Hispanic Link.
