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Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, author of such classic Chicano texts as The Klail City Death Trip Series (which includes The Valley, Mi Querido Raja, Partners in Crime, and Becky and Her Friends) has recently published his latest novel, We Happy Few, which takes a look at the world of academia through the lens of Chicano experience. Widely credited as one of the founders of modern Chicano letters, his work has had and continues to have an enormous impact on the shape and direction of Chicano literature. A professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, he has mentored a generation of Latino writers and has written incisive literary criticism. Along with Tomás Rivera, Ernesto Galarza, and Rudolfo Anaya, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith pioneered the field of Mexican-American letters.
Manuel Luis Martinez: As a writer who has devoted much of his creative energy to rendering the Texas valley, its locale, people, politics, and history, accurately and in depth, one might surmise that you believe that it is important for the Chicano/a writer to focus on the local. However, in recent years, critics such as José David Saldívar and Frederick Aldama have suggested a post-ethnic focus that moves "beyond" the local to something that has been labeled Nuestra America, arguing that ethnicity and nationalism need to be understood as contested and hybrid identities. Is it even possible to write a "Chicano" novel anymore? Is there a need for the "Chicano" novel? If so, why?
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith: I focused on the local because I know the Valley's history, its ethos, anthropology and what goes with that field: food, dress, language, and culture which involves a wide range of material. I didn't have to use my imagination to describe the place. What happens in The Valley, though, can and does happen anywhere. A writer may write locally (Twain: Finn, Faulkner: Oxford, Roth: the Atlantic Seaboard) but the place matters as a starting point, what actions the characters take are commonplace, which, to me, is another word for universal.
The phrase Nuestra America is usually attributed to José Martí, but Simon Bolivar said it first. What matters, though, is that one writes without deforming what one has, believes, and holds. Chicano literature is nothing more and nothing less than American Literature; that...