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Justice is love correcting that which would work against love ...
Standing beside love is always justice.
(Martin Luther King, Jr.; 5 December 1955, Holt Street Baptist Church)
Introduction
Just as more than 200 years of history of the United States intertwines colonization and immigration into a mosaic cemented by forces of capitalism, a theme of race lies just below the surface as a subtext in each century. In the Southwestern United States, race denotes a social structure of internal colonialism that discriminates against immigrants and residents of Mexican ancestry. This study juxtaposes the identity struggle of the young male protagonist in Américo Paredes' 1993 George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Gómez ) with the ubiquitous journey of self-discovery of a nameless 9-year-old boy in Tomás Rivera's 1992 ... y no se lo tragó la tierra ( ... And the Earth Did Not Devour Him ) (Earth ).1 Although the region of South Texas is central to the narrative development of each story, Gómez portrays Guálinto's struggle to form an identity in the first decades of the twentieth century. Paredes' historical revision of this era underscores the political and social vulnerability generated by conflict between the Texas Rangers and the Seditionists as well as the economic insecurity of the Depression. In contrast, the child protagonist of Earth confronts political and socio-economic issues experienced by TexasMexican migrant workers during the late 1940s and the early 1950s during the Korean War (Leal, 1989, 82).
Despite the similarity of the battles these young boys encounter over suffering and injustice in their community, state-mandated assimilation programs result in the dissolution of Guálinto Gómez' Mexican American identity. Contrary to the wishes of his family and friends, Guálinto's adult choices embrace middle America's Anglo mythology privileging individual values founded on a "politics of consent" (Gutiérrez-Jones, 1995, 105) and "passing" as white (Saldívar, 2006, 124). That Gómez critiques paradigms based on consent may be seen by the frequency with which either implied or explicit "contractual agreements" appear in the narrative. Unlike the linear progression of the "agreements" that form Guálinto's personality, Earth 's circular narrative is structurally separated into 14 narrative vignettes linked by 13 "symbolic epigraphs" (Alurista, 1981, 30), which end with the child's embrace of Tejano...