Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street

The lead narrative “Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street” originally appeared as a short Sunday opinion-editorial in the San Antonio Express-News but has been expanded and revised to include additional cultural and philosophical associations that the novel The Brothers Karamazov evoked on a young Latino reader. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the San Antonio Express-News for allowing me free rein to explore topics and genres outside the confines of most free-lance writers, even to subjects bordering on the phantasmagorical as those stories found in “Southwest Tales.” While the category “Profiles of Courage” (sorry John F. Kennedy, but the title was so tempting) include Fredrich Nietzsche, Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rupi Kaur, and Sigmund Freud, I do pay homage to Chicanos who have paved the way for other writers to explore beyond the borders of poetry and fiction.

I am grateful to the wonderful staff at the San Antonio Express-News, including Josh Brodesky, Robert Seltzer, O. Pimentel, and Misty Harris, an apt and capable researcher. I am also thankful to my good friend Alfredo Torres, Jr., executive copyeditor from Catch the Next, Inc., (New Haven) and Fernando E. Flores of Voces Cosmicas. Major influencers are long-time writer friend Julian S. Garcia, who organized groups of Chicano writers, poets, and artists for ViAztlan: International Journal of Letters and Arts and Maria Chavez Brummel, Yale University, whose insight, vision, and gravitas form the CTN Journal of Pedagogy and Ideas, of which I have been associated with since its inception.

And I am eternally grateful to the perspicuity and alacrity of my editor Dr. Phillip Dunshea, who saw more than an academic voice in the sample essays that form this collection. And lastly, of course, my partner, Belinda Urdiales, who read many of the articles with pencil in hand.

This collection is divided into seven sections, beginning with “Formative Beginnings” and ending with “Politics and Dystopia.” Even though I don’t fully engage in Platonic mysticism, I believe seven is a lucky number because it augurs auspicious beginnings. In this section I describe the inner influences of literature to a young reader examining and reflecting on the existential condition of his life and how strangely it parallels the conditions of other people similar to his existence. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is a good start because it is a deeply moving work that reaches the core of what it means to be human: to feel love, to express hate, to undergo sadness, all the emotional experiences rolled into one marvelous epic novel. And because of this, I made this essay the centerpiece of the collection.

But Dostoevsky is neither Chicano nor American? And yet his work speaks to deeper currents within humanity that transcend ethnicity, race, nationality, all those artificial boundaries that conspire to circumvent one’s humanity. The essays within this section cover decades of reading, learning, reflecting, questioning, and engaging life to counteract the social and political dynamisms undermining human potential. Reading is a powerful, counteractive tool to elicit change. Therefore, authoritative forces censor certain reading, limit its encouragement, and control its content. Reflecting on powerful texts is the praxis that initiates transformation.

The second section is titled “Libros locos and Sesquipedians” because reading books and loving words become ingrained in the consciousness of readers long after the book is gone. These words become the seed that germinates consciousness for activists, thinkers, and writers sprouting the praxis of change. Chicano writers experimented in those early years by copying words and sentences from admiring writers whose novels, essays, or poetry served as templates. For me, reading Cervantes, Ortega y Gasset, Camus, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Fannon, Gramsci, et al., foreground my critical thinking. The embryonic libros locos (crazy books) became the fertile ground for my turbulent associations, wounded pride, even reacting against societal rejection by political forces beyond my understanding.