Summary
"Written in lucid, luminous, and engaging prose. Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street is a surprising, probing, edifying tour-de-force that captures literary journalism at its quintessential best. A much-needed critical discourse on the status of literature in our changing society."
—Maria Martha Brummell, Emerita, Associate Dean, Yale University; CEO of Catch the Next, Inc. (New Haven, CT)
"In one of the piquant prose morsels that constitute Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street, Rafael Castillo, an ardent aficionado of metaphor, notes that writing is for him ‘a roller coaster to self-discovery.’ Jouncing through topics including education, punctuation, translation, digitalization, and growing up on the West Side of San Antonio, exhilarated readers will also find themselves."
—Steven G. Kellman, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Texas at San Antonio; Author of Rambling Prose, The Translingual Imagination, and Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Among Other Books
"When you open Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street, you will enter a world where imagination rules. You will not read this volume; you will inhabit it. Rafael Castillo possesses the two most important traits of a talented writer—a fierce intelligence and the grace with which to express it."
—Robert Seltzer, Former Editorial Writer for the San Antonio Express-News; Author of Amado Muro and Me: A Tale of Honesty and Deception
"Rafael Castillo takes us back to his youth growing up in San Antonio’s Westside, where books opened his world. Castillo’s beautiful, captivating words and colorful images in Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street bring to life la raza del Westside, who for too long were marginalized and left in the shadows. This is must-reading!"
—Rogelio Saenz, Peter Flawn Professor of Geography, University of Texas at San Antonio; Author of Latinos in the United States: Diversity and Change and Opinion Writer for Latino Rebels and the New York Times
"Rafael Castillo has the concentrated power of a razor-sharp miniaturist who captures the nuance and cadence of West Side San Antonio with ease and patience of one who has observed a world through ease, mystery, and grace."
—Belinda Urdiales, Novelist and Writer with Aztlan Associates; Author of The Hidden Voice
"Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Street is a compilation of essays, review, articles and op-eds that capture the life of Latinos in the Southwest with literary style and panache."
—Julian S. Garcia, Former Editor with ViAztlan: International Journal of Arts and Ideas; Author of La Fantasica Curandera
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Formative Beginnings
- Chapter 2 Libros Locos and Sesquipedians
- Chapter 3 Chicano Literature and Sueños Americanos
- Chapter 4 Profiles of Courage
- Chapter 5 The Writers’ Trade
- Chapter 6 Southwest Tales
- Chapter 7 Politics and Dystopia
- Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essays, articles, reviews, and stories in this collection span decades of writing and promoting a literary perspective often ignored by mainstream media and the eastern literary establishment, meaning, those publishing venues that often cater to middle-and-upper-class voices and representative literature. Working class literature is often ignored.
Many of the giants of American literature (Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen) came from the bowels of the working class, describing and documenting the injustices, family dramas and undemocratic episodes that laid bare the hypocrisy of American capitalism. These essays are not purely academic, but literary journalism with a narrative voice that dispatches commentary with free rein toward expression and documentation.
The writing contains dialogue and forays into the subject are blurred within the bounds of everyday factual reportage and opinion. Most essays first appeared in the San Antonio Express-News, but since been revised, updated, and expanded for this collection. The essays “Discovering a Chicano Writer,” “Fernando E. Flores,” “X-Files” and “Ways of Seeing” are published for the first time in this collection. A different version of “Flames from long Ago” appeared in 1979 in the now, defunct San Antonio Light.
←ix | x→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.
INTRODUCTION
Writing short essays from the edge can be troublesome. But I have been fortunate enough to have had a platform to express myself freely in newspapers and literary journals willing to take a chance on an academic and novice writer. The essays, short articles, reviews, and op-eds (editorial opinions) contained in this collection were done during three-decades of literary journalism and essay writing, from 1980 to 2022. All the short pieces have been updated and revised from their original versions. Since the early 1960s, the paucity of Chicano literary text production outside academia was limited to grassroots, working-class organizations who created their newsletters, newspapers, journals and revistas because they were either ignored or rejected by mainstream media. Their only alternative was to create their own newsletters, indie presses, and grassroots journals.
For the uninitiated, Chicano literature has been steadily increasing since its meager beginnings in the early 1960s. What is Chicano literature? It is basically working-class, formative writings, drama, vignettes, poetry, and fiction describing the ethnography of a large mass of people responding to coercive historical forces. All writing, in a strict sense, is historical because it documents the existence of people as they react to social and political forces at a particular time. The early sixties were a time of political turbulence and ←1 | 2→social change. Through an unfiltered lens, historians and biographers can gleam what people felt, what concerned their daily activities and what external forces were shaping their thinking. Working class perspectives are often conditioned by hegemonic forces at play through media, schooling, the arts, even representation of them in works of literature. But, always, constitutive organic intellectuals, to use a Gramscian phrase, provide a counternarrative or a revisionist perspective.
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.
Details
- Pages
- X, 140
- Publication Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433197895
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433197901
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433197888
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19771
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (April)
- Keywords
- memoir autobiography nonfiction journalism literary essays opinion-editorials articles reviews Dostoevsky on Guadalupe Streets Writings from the Edge Rafael Castillo
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2023. X, 140 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG