BOOKS / Gregg Barrios : Zadie Smith's 'NW' Speaks in the Polygot of the Streets

Zadie Smith's latest novel, NW,
speaks in the polygot of the streets

Smith never identifies the color of her characters -- well, not unless they are white.

By Gregg Barrios / Critical Mass / February 27, 2013

"Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, springs and cavern, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day." -- Peter Ackroyd, Underground London

[NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith (2012: Penguin Press); Hardback; 416 pp; $26.95.]

Zadie Smith's 2012 novel NW was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. Rag Blog contributor Gregg Barrios is on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. 

Welcome to London’s NW -- home turf to Zadie Smith’s fictional wellspring. It’s the place where many of her earlier characters still reside -- from Archie Jones, Irie, and Alsana from White Teeth to Howard Belsey’s dad from On Beauty and Alex-Li Tandem from Autograph Man.

NW introduces a new cast of characters -- Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan -- all in their mid-30s, and with multi-racial roots -- this is a Smith novel after all -- and who grew up in the fictional council estate (housing project) of Caldwell.

Smith’s tells their stories with precise details and rich characterization, vividly capturing their individual personalities by utilizing a writing style suited to each. The opening chapter finds Leah daydreaming in a backyard hammock:

The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line -- write it out on the back of a magazine. In a hammock in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.

Her reverie comes crashing when the doorbell rings and a strange woman with a hard luck story asks for money. Through Smith’s deft descriptions, it is evident that the women are as different as night and day despite living in the same NW postal code. How Smith forges connections between them and the other denizens in da hood is part of what NW grapples with.

It isn’t for naught that the chapter is called “The Visitation.” It echoes the Biblical Mary visiting her older, barren cousin Elizabeth to announce her pregnancy and then to learn that her cousin is also in a family way. Throughout the novel, Leah will struggle with not wanting to have a child and with her denial that she may already be pregnant (“Blue cross on a white stick, clear, definite”).

Smith has acknowledged the influence of Forester’s Howards End on her novel On Beauty, and that the inspiration for NW comes from the novelist Virginia Woolf. Some critics have written that since Leah is part Irish, her narrative emulates a Joycean style. I prefer to consider that the NW postal zone is more akin to Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County and his novel As I Lay Dying. Both employ stream of consciousness technique, multiple narrators and varying chapter lengths and voices. One section will have quotation marks, while another will do without the punctuation. NW speaks in the polyglot of the street and in slogans and the TV news sound bites of dinner parties.

In the novel’s first section, Leah works for a charity trust and her husband Michel, a French-African, is a hairdresser. They rent and have a dog Olive. Leah doesn’t want children, but Michel does. When they attend a posh party given by Leah’s lifelong friend Natalie, we learn the different roads they’ve taken. Natalie nee Keisha Blake has moved up in the world. She is a barrister who is happily married to an Italian-Trinidadian; they have two children.

At the party, Natalie appropriates Leah’s story about the woman who bilked her. Later Leah and Michel spot a man thought to be the grifter’s partner. A street row ensued, and Olive was repeatedly kicked. Natalie turns it into a bad after-dinner joke. (“- And then did you just both go your separate ways? ‘Thank you, I’ve been your potential murderer now I must be off...’”

Natalie is novel’s central character. She tells her story in “The Host,” a series of short, numbered (185) chapters. In the initial entry, “These red pigtails,” Keisha saves Leah from drowning by pulling her out of a city pool by her red pigtails. (Think Renoir’s "Boudu Saved From Drowning.")

There is a wonderful list (in # 6) of the girl’s middle school likes and dislikes. Keisha: Cameo, Culture Club, Bob Marley, world peace in South Africa. Leah: Madonna, Culture Club, Thompson Twins, no bombs. Oh, they list one another as their best friend. And to an unknown question, they both answer “Deaf.”

Smith never identifies the color of her characters -- well, not unless they are white. A subtle dig at how other-than-whites are described in more traditional novels. In a telling short entry, Smith succinctly describes Keisha’s mindset growing up in a white world:

18. Sony Walkman (borrowed). That Keisha should be able to hear the Rebel MC in her ears was a kind of miracle and modern ecstasy, and yet there was very little space in the day for anything like ecstasy or abandon or even simple laziness, for whatever you did in life you have to do it twice as well as they did ‘just to break even, a troubling belief held simultaneously by Keisha Blake’s mother and her Uncle Jeffery, know to be “gifted” but also beyond the pale.

Keisha reinvents herself as Natalie and escapes from the Caldwell projects. But as the novel progresses, Smith seems to be asking -- But at what a cost? Natalie’s entry 179: “Aphorism. What a difficult thing a gift is for a woman! She’ll punish herself for receiving it.” Natalie will do the same thing with her gift (an oblique reference to the late Amy Winehouse).

Zadie Smith.

Enter Felix in the section titled “The Guest.” Felix is a native of the Caldwell projects. His story is told in a traditional narrative style. Neither Leah nor Natalie knows him, but they will by the novel’s end. This chapter chronicles Felix’s last day alive. It begins as he delivers a book to his father that his new lady friend Grace has bought for him.

The book is a photographic record of Garvey House, an actual hostel for troubled youth in northeast London where Felix and his siblings grew up with their Black revolutionary parents. Felix then takes a walk through the old neighborhood on his way to buy a used car for the repair shop where he works part time.

This section contains some of Smith finest writing and could well stand alone outside the novel’s frame, but it is also integral to it. I kept hoping Smith would speak through Felix (with his parents' activist past and his dream of becoming a filmmaker) of the recent London Riots and British film hit Ill Manor – that speak of the disenfranchisement of today’s multiracial Brit youth.

Some readers may see the 32-year old Felix as a sacrificial lamb, a Christ-like figure hinted in the book’s religious-tinged chapter titles, “Visitation,” “Host,” “The Crossing.” (The thrust of the narrative here resembles the Stations of the Cross.) A few hours before his death, his pays a visit to Annie, his older, former lover intent on ending their relationship since he has found Grace (pun intended):

Felix what is this pathological need of yours to be the good guy? It’s very dull. Frankly, you were more fun when you were my dealer. You don’t have to save my life. Or anybody’s life. We’re all fine. We don’t need you to ride on a white horse. You’re nobody’s savior.

Hours later, he lays dying at a bus stop, the victim of a blotched robbery and assault, his life unreeling in jump-cut not unlike Belmondo’s end in Breathless: “Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K.”

Natalie becomes addicted to an online hook-up website where “she was what everyone was looking for.” Her Cinderella story turns Grimm after her husband discovers her sexual addiction. She finds herself down and out on the London underworld in “a big T-shirt, leggings, and a pair of filthy red slippers, like a junkie.”

A former classmate Nathan Bogle, a drug-dealer and perhaps a pimp for the woman who rang Leah’s doorbell, recognizes her. At first, they enjoy rediscovering their mutual past. She tells him how Leah was in love with him. “She’d never admit it but the man she ended up marrying -- he looks like you.” Nathan isn’t having any of it.

Oh Nathan ‘member this, ‘member that -- truthfully Keisha I don’t remember. I’ve burned the whole business out of my brain. Different life. No use to me. I don’t live in them towers no more. I’m on the streets now, different attitude. Survival. That’s it. Survival. That’s all there is.

Nathan is ultimately the dark messenger not the message -- all the while singing, “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).”

The final section is a return to “The Visitation.” Carnival is in full swing. Leah and Natalie reestablish their on-again, off-again friendship. When Natalie enters Leah’s backyard carrying her dog Spike, she greets them: “Look at you, mother and child. Look at you. You look like the fucking Madonna.”

Smith wrote NW during her pregnancy, so it isn’t surprising that her characters both male and female have bringing children into the world on their mind. All throughout NW, its characters constantly talk about wanting or not wanting children, of mothers that abandon their kids, of irresponsible fathers that procreate but avoid responsibility, and of a loony who sings, “If I ruled the world. I’d free all my sons.”

Reading NW evokes memories of that series of British documentaries from 7UP to 56 UP (most directed by Michael Apted). Starting at age seven, a group of children from different socio-economic classes were filmed every seven years to see how they and their friends and families changed over the years and if socio-economic variables predetermined their future. Smith in NW (30 something) accomplishes the same in one majestic swoop. Imagine that!

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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Gregg Barrios : Cantinflas 101 in San Antonio

Dia de los Muertos altar honors the memory of Cantinflas at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
Catinflas 101:
Don Mario's silent empire

Known for his 'little tramp' outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican 'peladito,' an everyman.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / November 5, 2012

SAN ANTONIO -- On a recent afternoon in San Antonio’s Market Square, a German tourist asked one of the vendors for a uniquely Mexican souvenir. After pointing to a plethora of Aztec calendars and rebozos, the vendor produced a ceramic Cantinflas.

“Es muy mexicano, es único,” she said. Behind her, a display shelf held dozens of Cantinflas figures depicting roles that had made the actor famous. A short legend was inscribed below the figure of Cantinflas as a doctor: “I’ll cure you of whatever ails you.” The tone in español is almost picaresque.

The tourist asked if the shopkeeper had statues of other national heroes.

“Solamente Benito Juárez y la virgen de Guadalupe,” she replied.

The German took the Cantinflas.

This year marks the 101st anniversary of the beloved comic’s birth, and appropriately the San Antonio Public Library, KLRN and the San Antonio Public Library Foundation celebrated Latino Heritage Month with a long overdue Cantinflas retrospective. In addition to an exhibit of film posters and photos that span his life and times, local library branches screened the lion’s share of his 50-plus films.

Known for his “little tramp” outfit of patched, baggy pants, rope belt, tattered vest, straw hat, and a slim mustache, Cantinflas personified the Mexican “peladito,” an everyman. His use of convoluted, hilarious wordplay was later aped by Abbott and Costello in their “Who’s on First?” routine, and on TV by Professor Erwin Corey, an Anglo legacy that hints at the impact this Mexican comic genius had on Spanish-speaking audiences around the world.

Film purists still insist that Hollywood’s golden age of comedy ended with the talkies. And although Spanish-speaking audiences enjoyed the slapstick comics of Hollywood, their interest waned as movies began to speak in English. That’s when the Mexican film industry took off.

Its most successful star was Mario Moreno, aka Cantinflas. His slight build was perfect for the screen, and fame came quickly, starting with Está es mi tierra (This is My Country) in 1937. His most famous films dealt with the everyday life of a penniless vagabond, el peladito -- not unlike Chaplin’s Little Tramp-- who wore his pants lower than even today's hip-hop standards might allow.

Both comics had worked in the circus and vaudeville and began their film careers in one-reel comedies. After a Los Angeles screening of Cantinflas’ Ni sangre ni arena (Neither Blood Nor Sand), Chaplin called Cantinflas the best living comic in the world. That film’s daring and hilarious bullfighting sequences are especially impressive because Moreno, an amateur bullfighter, did his own stunts.

But Cantinflas was so much more than a physical comedian. There was a method to the madness of his Spanish-language double entendres and verbal nonsense. He befuddled and jabbed at politicians, diplomats, lawmen, and the wealthy in his films. His brand of humor spread like wildfire, so much so that the Real Academia Española added the verb cantinflear -- to speak in a nonsensical manner -- to the dictionary.

The golden age of Mexican cinema began in 1936 and lasted more than 30 years. Latino families made weekly treks to el cine and a new Cantinflas film was often the reason. San Antonians of a certain age still remember when the small comic occasionally appeared at the Alameda theater along with such stars as Jorge Negrete, María Félix, Gloria Marín, Pedro Infante, Dolores Del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, and Tito Guízar.

By the 1950s the era of great Hollywood comics had faded, but Hollywood came courting the populist and popular Cantinflas. His role as Passepartout, David Niven’s valet in Around the World in 80 Days, remains the one high point in the 1956 Best Picture Oscar-winner. Cantinflas also won a Golden Globe for best motion picture actor in a comedy/musical for his role -- beating out Yul Brynner and Marlon Brando.

But when Hollywood attempted to cash in on Moreno’s newfound fame by casting him in as the lead in 1960‘s Pepe, the film bombed. Jorge Camara, vice president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which sponsors the Golden Globes, says the reason for its failure is simple.

“In Around the World in 80 Days, Cantinflas was able to use his physical comedy, something he didn't do in his followup film, Pepe,” Camara said by email. “His genius and one of his greatest talents was the comic way he used (or misused) the Spanish language to fit his character and his situations. That ability, unfortunately, did not translate into English.”

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980, many downtown movie palaces were programming Spanish-language films to meet the demand of recently arrived immigrants. The new waves of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua had one thing in common: Cantinflas. Most had grown up watching his comedies. He not only was a first-class film star, but also a cultural hero to his countless fans, especially the working class who identified with el peladito.

Cantinflas lookalike at San Antonio retrospective. Photo by Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog.
But the end was near. The Mexican film industry was beginning to churn out substandard films filled with gratuitous nudity and blue humor.

Writer Sandra Cisneros has kept a ceramic figure of el peladito in her bathroom for nearly 20 years. “Isn’t it from the street that all fashion and pop culture ultimately comes from?” Cisneros asked.

Every time I see someone walking down the street with their pants falling off, I think, mira, hay va Cantinflas. El peladito was ahead of his time for showing his calzones and dragging his pants down to his hips like hip-hop kids do.

Cantinflas is a cultural icon like la virgen de Guadalupe. You have to have an image of the Virgen and Cantinflas whether or not you’re Catholic or have seen his films. They are omnipresent in Chicano culture and in some ways the antithesis of themselves because each one in a sense is god: the Guadalupe is the compassionate face of god, while Cantinflas is a symbol just like the Virgen of the oppressed. For a few moments, he makes you laugh, and if that isn’t God I don’t know what is

For a mural at the Teatro de los Insurgentes in Mexico City, Diego Rivera painted Cantinflas as a Christ figure with an image of the Virgin on his clothing -- a latterday Juan Diego. The mural drew outrage and was later modified and the Guadalupe removed. Today it depicts Cantinflas taking money from the rich and redistributing it to the poor. In real life, Moreno was a co-founder and president of the Mexican actor’s union, ANDA, and funded La Casa del Actor, a haven for needy film industry workers.

Herbert Siguenza, a founding member of the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, considers Cantinflas a muse and a hero. Siguenza wrote a one-man show that pays tribute to Moreno, commissioned by Houston’s Alley Theater. Part biography, part comic sketches, his Cantinflas! illustrates el peladito’s influence on comedy today and introduces the character to a new generation that perhaps only knows the him from the animated children’s Cantinflas Show on Spanish-language TV.

“There is a new generation, a second generation of young Latinos growing up, and these kids don’t know who Cantinflas is,” Siguenza said in a recent phone interview. “They know who Will Smith and Jim Carrey are, but I wanted to show them that we also have a comic hero; we have someone who was as big as Charlie Chaplin. And we should remember that. He was one of the first crossover stars that we had.” Still, Siguenza admits it's a hard sell to English-only audiences. “The verbal antics aren’t transferable. It’s like trying to translate Groucho in Chinese.”

In 1983, on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, I interviewed Don Mario in Mexico City two years after what was to be his final film, El Barrendero (The Street Sweeper), which at the time had made more money at the box office than any other Mexican film. He was still upbeat about his art, and expressed a desire to have el peladito cross the border into California to join César Chávez’s farmworkers and perform with Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino.

He spoke of his screen counterpart in the third person:

Cantinflas has changed because he is part of the world, part of the people. We all change. The little guy isn’t the same one from 30 or 40 years ago. He has the same ingenuity, but he is better prepared than he was before to deal with life. He may see the same problems of years ago occur again today, but he sees them from a different perspective. Cantinflas has changed but he still carries the essence of being part of the common people. The clothes he wore before aren’t worn anymore, so he doesn’t wear them, but he’s the same guy underneath. That won’t ever change.

Later, watching his penultimate film, El Patrullero 777 (Patrolman 777), I saw what he meant. His comic style of cantinfleando had morphed into the everyday doublespeak of politicians everywhere. In the film, Moreno portrays a patrolman, but he still sports his signature bigotito, his thin mustache. When his commanding officer asks why he no longer wears his pants low, he retorts: "Todo a subido” (“Everything’s gone up”).

Yet the old Cantinflas, more the social reformer than the social satirist, makes an appearance at the end of the film. In a speech that contains little of el peladito’s double talk, he laments the loss of trust and dignity in public officials in a speech in front of a building named for former Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, under whose orders hundreds of university students were killed during the 1968 protests in Mexico City.

Cantinflas then lifts his gloved hand, echoing a moment during the 1968 Summer Olympics -- also held in Mexico City -- when African-American medalists raised clenched fists in a human-rights salute. By that time, I was in tears.

This article was published at Plaza de Armas and was crossposted to The Rag Blog.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

• A clip from Cantinflas’ 1940 film Ahí está el detalle (There’s the Rub) with English subtitles, can be seen here.

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Gregg Barrios : An Appreciation of Judith Crist

Judith Crist passed away at the age of 90 in Manhattan on Aug. 7, 2012. Photo by Gabe Palacio / Getty Images. Inset below: Crist in 1967. Photo from AP.
An appreciation:
Pioneering film critic
Judith Crist (1922-2012)

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2012

“To be a critic, you have to have maybe three percent education, five percent intelligence, two percent style, and 90 percent gall and egomania...” -- Judith Crist

She was from another era.

It was an age before cable, Sundance, video stores, and the Internet. For those of us coming of age, it was a heady time. Films were an international language of expression -- the rise of the French new wave, post-neorealism, the underground film and independent film. Movies were considered the lively, seventh art.

The new generation of filmmakers brought brave, new, and vital work to the screen. Universities had film clubs and a nearby art film house. One could see X-rated porn in a legit movie theater. It was the time before Hollywood lost the will and the courage to make movies that really mattered. It was also a time when inquiring minds read film reviews and criticism and took it seriously.

It wasn’t the phalanx of male film critics that fueled the rise of the new American film criticism -- it was Judith Crist who paved the way.

Crist, who died August 7, was the first woman film critic for a daily newspaper and, almost at the same time, the film reviewer for TV’s Today program on NBC. Soon after, she was writing for TV Guide and New York magazine. Each week her reviews were either the kiss of death for exhibitors or a boost in that week’s box office. And while one doesn’t want to overestimate her power, at one point she was reaching over two million readers and scores more of TV viewers on a weekly basis. It drove the suits at the studios into apoplexy.

Critic Roger Ebert has credited Crist for making film criticism both lively and serious -- and by extension, film buffs sought out other critics like Pauline Kael at The New Yorker, Andrew Sarris at the Village Voice and Dwight MacDonald in Esquire. The new era of film reviewing brought readers to consult these critics before and after a night at the movies. Film posters often carried their quotes above the film title.

Crist knew how to pinpoint a film’s strengths and weaknesses, whether she was writing a 500-word or a 25-word or less review. My favorite example of this: Crist’s review of Tora! Tora! Tora! She succinctly wrote: “Bora! Bora! Bora!” When she reviewed The Sound of Music, the first sentence of her review said it all: “If you have diabetes, stay away from this movie.”

After decimating the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton version of Cleopatra, she became the scourge of Hollywood, which banned her from advance screenings and tried to remove film advertising from the Herald Tribune. Director Otto Preminger called her, “Judas Crist.”

Crist was flexible and generous enough to change her mind about a film after initially giving a negative review or reviewing a genre film that wasn’t likely to play well in Middle America.

After she panned 1967′s Casino Royale, the film’s screenwriter Woody Allen sent her his original script. She saw that it had been ripped to shreds and little remained of what he had written. She told him he was right. They became friends over the years, with Allen asking Crist to play a part in his film Stardust Memories.

She initially didn’t review the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night since her TV audience wouldn’t consider a teen film. However, after her young son raved about it, Crist attended an afternoon showing and loved it. She told her editor she was leading her segment with a review of the Beatles film.

Not one to shy from controversy, Crist reviewed the 1973 pornographic film Devil in Miss Jones for the Herald Tribune. She wrote that the star Georgina Spelvin “touched the emotions,” adding “for those whose taste it is, I say leave it lay.” Devil went on to earn $15 million in box office gross, making it one of the most successful films of 1973 right behind Paper Moon and Live and Let Die.

When she interviewed Federico Fellini, he invited her for coffee. She asked what made his brand of filmmaking different than Michelangelo Antonioni, the other celebrated Italian director. She later related that Fellini took a quarter on the table and said that Antonioni would look at the quarter and continue to gaze at it, and try to imagine what was on the other side.

Fellini then took the quarter in his hand, flipped it, looked at both sides, and bit it to see if it was real. He then added, “That is how I approach filmmaking.” Crist used that story over the years with her creative writing classes at Columbia University, where she continued to teach until February of this year.

I met Crist twice. The first was at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. I headed the student film society Cinema 40. By then Crist had already cemented her reputation as the first woman film critic at a daily newspaper and the first film woman reviewer on television.

She told us some wonderful stories of her experiences in doing TV and print film criticism. She asked us why we in Central Texas were so knowledgeable to the new burgeoning art and independent film explosion. We responded that we invited a number of filmmakers, films, and critics because there was an enthusiasm for it. She applauded the idea.

Some 30 years later, I attended one of Crist’s film festival weekends at Tarrytown, New York. I felt transported back to my college days when we felt so passionate about films. She had over the years brought almost every major or rising filmmaker to her film seminars to discuss, debate, sleep, and party films. (Allen used her events as a template for his Stardust Memories.)

When asked how she would like to be remembered, she acknowledged that her validation by Dorothy Parker, her lifelong writing role model, was as rewarding as anything she hoped to achieve. Then, speaking in the third person about herself, she said: “She was a very good journalistic critic in her time. And by the way, she was the first woman on network television to review movies.”

Modesty aside, Judith, you did much more. You raised the bar several notches. Film studies and criticism are flourishing in no small part due to your pioneering spirit. Your critical eye tempered with an ability to cut through the hype and approach film criticism on its entertainment and artistic value for the movie-going public is sorely absent in the writing of many of today’s wannabe film critics. We salute you and owe you a debt of gratitude. You were an American original.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. This article was first published at the San Antonio Current. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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Gregg Barrios : The Charmed Life of Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron. Image from Indiewire.
Eat, love, and kvetch:
Nora Ephron's charmed life

As much as she kvetches, she never whines. Her unique ability to take any pain in her life and turn it into a satiric essay or a romantic film script and have the last laugh is rare.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2012

Nora Ephron lived a charmed life. Her parents were film writers, and she attended Wellesley. But again, she carved her own career single-handedly at a time when there were few bankable women directors in Hollywood (Penny Marshall and Barbra Streisand come to mind).

Her foray into film began as a scriptwriter when she decided to take a stab at writing a script for the film version of All the President’s Men with her then-husband Carl Bernstein, the book’s co-author. Their draft never made it to the screen, but the experience left Ephron smitten with screenwriting -- something she said she’d never do because her parents had been script writers.

My first exposure to Ephron’s work came in 1983 with a book (Heartburn) and a movie (Silkwood). While Silkwood was her first collaboration with Mike Nichols (I consider Ephron to be Elaine May’s long-lost soul sister separated at birth), it was the book that had me reading non-stop. Heartburn was a poisoned dart aimed at then husband Bernstein’s cheating that led to an acrimonious divorce. Its opening lines typify her later style.

The first day I did not think it was funny. I didn’t think it was funny the third day either, but I managed to make a little joke about it. "The most unfair thing about this whole business is that I can’t even date."

She can’t date because, like the real life Ephron, she is seven months pregnant when she discovers her husband’s infidelity. As much as she kvetches, she never whines. Her unique ability to take any pain in her life and turn it into a satiric essay or a romantic film script and have the last laugh is rare.

At heart, Ephron loved the old Hollywood films with dashing leading men and ladies. She uses that interest in her early successful films that paired Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, by reimagining old Hollywood classics. That was the best thing about her film work. She took You’ve Got Mail from Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and made it work 50 years later for audiences and at the box office.

Her Sleepless in Seattle was also a Hollywood remake of An Affair to Remember. Only instead of the tragic ending, the couple reunites at the top of the Empire State Building. When asked what makes a director good, she said, “The best directors love actors.”

Interestingly, her directed films focused on courtship and divorce -- not marriage. For Ephron, the real drama wasn’t in the day-to-day boredom of marriage. Yet the 50-year marriage of Julia Child and her husband found its way to the center of her last film, Julie & Julia. Had Ephron mellowed or had her 20-year plus marriage to writer Nicholas Pileggi given her the relationship of her life? As she wrote in a six-word biography, “Secret to life, marry an Italian.”

Her one-liners on everything from death to the purpose of life appeared in her collected essays that were witty as they were acerbic. A latter-day Dorothy Parker or a female Woody Allen are some of the descriptions of her essay writing -- especially in her last pieces for The New Yorker.

Her short, satiric film critiques of recent literary/film hits are among my favorite Ephron gems. In “The Girl with the Umlaut,” she takes aim at Steig Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and spoofs his style in a laugh out loud manner. In “No, But We Saw the Movie,” she takes on Carmac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men as her clueless narrator confuses Javier Bardem for Benicio Del Toro.

Food and cooking have always been a part of Ephron’s DNA. Heartburn is filled with recipes -- perhaps a template for Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. In When Harry Met Sally, the film’s iconic line (“I’ll have what she’s having”) takes place in a restaurant, and a fellow journalist contends the famous fake orgasm scene channels Jack Lemmon’s allergy scene at a diner in the Gene Saks’ movie version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.

In her collection, I Remember Nothing, she takes some pointed barbs at aging, and lists all the things she will miss and others that she won’t miss after she’s passed on. She lists Nathan's hot dogs and bacon among the foods she’ll miss. And while some see Ephron as the quintessential Jewish yenta, she once said, “You can never have too much butter -- that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it.”

When I saw her and sister Delia’s play off-Broadway in March, Love, Loss and What I Wore, I laughed myself silly (“Any American woman under 40 who says she’s never dressed as Madonna is either lying or Amish”) and then some when she described their play as “The Vagina Monologues without the vagina.”

Best of all, her sage entreaty to a graduating class at Wellesley: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

Nora, I miss you already. Reconsider.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His play I-DJ premieres in July at Overtime's Gregg Barrios Theater in San Antonio. This article was first published at the San Antonio Current. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Gregg Barrios : Patti Smith's 'Banga'

The wait is over:
Patti Smith's 'Banga'

The title cut is a meditation on Pontius Pilate's dog Banga in Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel, The Master and Margarita.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2012

Patti Smith fans' eight-year wait is over -- Banga is a bold return to the musical style and lyricism that made earlier Smith efforts praiseworthy.

Banga opens with the cinematic voyage of "Amerigo" (Vespucci, from whom America gets its name) to an Edenic new world. On this cut, the richness and delivery of Smith's incantatory voice shines brightly. The pop charm of "April Fools" will have you humming to Patti's vocals and tapping to Tom Verlaine's guitar work. "Come, be my April fool, we'll break all the rules." Eat your heart out, Jimmy Iovine.

The title cut is a meditation on Pontius Pilate's dog Banga in Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel, The Master and Margarita. It speaks of canine loyalty. "Night is a mongrel -- believe or explode," Smith howls, as son Jackson provides the barking. However, "This is the Girl," written for Amy Winehouse, scores with its girl group doo-wop a la the Shangri-Las. Perfect.

The 10-minute epic "Constantine's Dream," perhaps the best art-rock composition by an American artist this year, evokes the narratives of Horses and Easter. In its dream within a dream, Smith, like a howling St. Joan of Arc on a steed, calls out, "All is art -- all is future!"

The world doesn't end with a bang on Banga but with a haunting and unfettered version of Neil Young's elegiac "After the Gold Rush." A perfect touch to the most satisfying comeback album of the year.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His play I-DJ premieres in July at Overtime's Gregg Barrios Theater in San Antonio. This review was first published at the San Antonio Current. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Gregg Barrios : 'Melancholia' Is von Trier's Final Refrain

Melancholia:
Von Trier's final refrain

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2011

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. – REM

A crescendo of superlatives: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with the most incredible cinematic prelude since Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The eight-minute scene encapsulates the film succinctly and symbolically: Birds’ fall from the sky, electric sparks fly from a woman’s hands. Horses melt into the landscape, and a planet once hidden behind the sun heads stealthily toward Earth as Wagner’s majestic Tristan und Isolde soars on the film’s soundtrack.

Cinema’s bad boy has returned. Two years ago, his controversial Antichrist, with its graphic scenes of sex and mutilation, created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival. How could he not be invited back?

Melancholia is divided into two parts, each titled after the two sisters the film centers on: Justine (an amazing Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Part one begins with a newly married Justine and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) arriving late for their wedding reception at the country villa of Claire and her husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland). The party is in full swing as friends, family, and employers are introduced through conversations, toasts, and erratic behavior.

But we quickly glean things are not what they seem from Justine and Claire’s divorced parents -- Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) and Dexter (John Hurt) -- each a piece of work. When John informs Gaby that her daughter is about to cut the cake, she retorts: “When Justine took her first poop, I wasn't there. When she had sex for the first time, I wasn't there, either. So, please, spare me your fucking rituals.”

A zany Hurt entertains two young women with his drunken antics, pretending to steal spoons from the banquet table. Incensed, John asks Claire, “Is everyone in your family stark raving mad?”

And is it any wonder that Gaby and Dexter's daughter Justine is just as eccentric? She takes a nude moonlight stroll and has sex with a complete stranger on the villa’s golf course before the wedding cake has been cut. We learn that Justine is a manic-depressive and unable to cope with her demons or control her behavior. Dunst is amazingly good in this role that won her the best actress award at Cannes this year. (Gainsbourg won for Antichrist in 2009).

When the groom protests, “It didn’t turn out like I thought it would,” Justine taunts: “What did you expect?” All this is played out with a comic wink and a nod to Luis Buñuel’s dinner party in The Exterminating Angel and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut Christmas party.

Part two, "Claire," is set several months later. In the interim, the now visible planet has veered closer to Earth than expected. Or has it? Claire, John, and their son Leo (Cameron Spurr) react differently to the suspense. John, an overbearing dilettante and amateur astrologer, is convinced the Melancholia will miss earth, but will provide a grand spectacle of immense beauty as it passes by. Still, he has gone into the village for emergency provisions and medication in case the unthinkable occurs.

Claire Googles doomsday scenarios. Their son has created a wire gauge to measure if the planet is approaching or retreating. Cut off from civilization in their isolated villa, replete with all the inspiration and reassurance the arts (Millais' Ophelia and Breugel’s The Land of Cockaigne are referenced) and science can offer, these will nonetheless provide little solace as the rogue planet enters its collision course with Earth.

It is to the villa that Justine returns in a near catatonic state, unable to care for herself. But the impending event has a profound effect on her. She begins to regain her strength and spout warnings like a latter-day Cassandra: “Life is only on Earth… and not for long.” She teaches her sister and her nephew to accept the cataclysmic event.

Melancholia is part science fiction, part meditation on our final days on earth. There are no generic newscasts or newspaper alerts of the impending disaster (think M. Night Shyamalan's The Village); this is a fable, not a docudrama. It isn’t so much about outer space as it is inner space. This is an apocalyptic movie without the trappings we come to expect of the genre. Instead, Von Trier gives us genuine human emotion and strength in the eye of annihilation.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. This article was first published at Plaza de Armas. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Gregg Barrios : 'Incendies' is Scorching Odyssey of Death, Rebirth

Lubna Azabal in Incendies. Courtesy of eOne Films.
Denis Villeneuve's Incendies:
A scorching odyssey of death and rebirth

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / June 28, 2011

[Incendies. Written and directed by Denis Villeneuve; Featuring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, and Rémy Girard.]

The opening sequence in Incendies is a stunning piece of poetic filmmaking: A desert in the Middle East framed in the window of a barracks where a dozen young Muslim conscripts readied for combat are having their heads shaved. Radiohead’s haunting “You and Whose Army?” quietly plays as the camera zooms in on a child soldier who refuses to blink.

Quick cut to modern day Montreal. A lawyer is reading the last will and testament of Nawal Marwan (Azabal) to her adult children twins Jeanne and Simon. They learn that their late mother wants them to deliver a letter to their father and their brother. This surprises both since their father has been long dead and they never knew they had another sibling.

Nawal also states that she wants to be buried “naked, face down, away from the world.” No name or epitaph on a gravestone because she did not keep her promises in life. However, once the letters are delivered, she can rest in peace in the knowledge of what she was never able to tell her children alive.

While this set-up might strike some viewers as shop-worn, it is the stuff that makes Shakespearean drama, grand opera and Greek tragedy lasting forms of storytelling.

Incendies (nominated for a best foreign film Oscar last year) tells a tale of lost children, fathers and sons, and mothers who hold those secrets at a great cost. Director Villeneuve renders his film in an almost epic scale. Its mash-up (section titles, pop anthems, and non-chronological structure) echo Olivier Assayas’ Carlos or Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. Still Villeneuve weaves his riveting tale alternating past with present to a fever pitch.

Their quest leads them -- Jeanne willingly, Simon reluctantly -- to a fictional Middle East country (modeled after Lebanon and their long civil war between Muslims and Christians).

The film parallels their search with the mother’s life: as a teen, the Christian-born Nawal has a romance with a young Muslim. Pregnant, she is forced to give up her child as a foundling but not before a midwife tattoos the child’s heel. The child’s mother vows to find him at whatever cost.

Nawal (Azabal’s dramatic portrayal is pitch perfect) is a raging life force whose devastating ordeals and star-crossed fate are constantly shifting as she too learns more about herself. As her story unfolds, I dare you to watch without blinking.

It is said that the cry of the mythical phoenix after having its nest reduced to ashes is that of a beautiful song. Ditto Nawal. When she is incarcerated, the inmates and guards call her “The Woman Who Sings.”

Incendies retells that age-old song of songs with beauty and grace.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. This article was also published in the San Antonio Current. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog

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Gregg Barrios : The Risqué Business of Texas' Most Famous Stripper

In the late '50s, Candy Barr was the toast of the Dallas burlesque circuit.
Risqué Business:
The complicated life of Candy Barr,
Texas' most famous stripper

By Gregg Barrios / The Texas Observer / January 21, 2011

How times have changed. These days, the term burlesque conjures the safest kind of sexiness, a retro-flirty striptease that’s tame enough for hipster bars, dates, and even a family-friendly Hollywood blockbuster staring Christina Aguilera as a small-town girl who makes it on the big-city burlesque stage.

In this narrative, vintage burlesque was a quaint fad that helped pre-feminist-era women express their vibrant sexuality in a society that wanted to cover it up. And the heroes are women like Candy Barr, Texas’ most famous burlesque dancer.

But women like Barr paid a price that’s hard to fathom these days. In the early ’50s, women were expected to settle down and raise a family. Candy Barr bucked all that: She strapped on some pasties and a couple of six-shooters and took to the stage.

It wasn’t an easy life, and Barr had a much more complex and multifaceted view of herself than the official accounts would lead you to believe. I knew Candy Barr, and Christina Aguilera, you are no Candy Barr.

I’m from Victoria; Candy was born and raised in nearby Edna. It was in our daily paper, the Victoria Advocate, where I first read about Juanita Dale Slusher and her larger-than-life exploits as Candy Barr. But when she died in Victoria of pneumonia on Dec. 30, 2005, the Advocate failed to print an obituary. Even in death, her persona was too dangerous to pay tribute to.

Juanita Dale Slusher (aka Candy Barr) in 1984. Photo from the Gregg Barrios Archive.
I first met Candy Barr in 1984 while on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. She was living in Brownwood at the time. Her lakeside cottage had an emblazoned, burnished sign: “Fort Dulce.” The gated property with its tall wooden fence was to “keep the crazies away.” The modest cottage was filled with bric-a-brac. There were no photos of her younger, famous self. A picture of Jesus hung on her bedroom wall.

Juanita Dale Slusher was born on July 6, 1935 (in her words, “a delayed firecracker”), in the tiny town of Edna. Her hardscrabble childhood was scarred by sexual abuse by a neighbor and babysitter. Her mother died when she was seven, and her father Doc Slusher remarried. Her stepmother proved a piece of work.

“I’m Juanita Dale Slusher,” she told me. “I didn’t like ‘Wan-eat-ah’ because they never pronounced it right in school. I never heard the beauty of ‘Juanita’ with its Spanish inflection. And growing up with the stigma of poor white trash, I went along hearing that my daddy was a bad man, and I grew up associating me with the thing that meant bad, too.”

Her stepmother would make her father beat her if she asked for new shoes, if she sprinkled too much water on her dress when she was ironing it. “I couldn’t take it anymore, and when I was 14, I ran away wearing the only dress I had that wasn’t a complete rag,” she said. “I walked off my father’s farm early one morning and headed for town.”

She made her way to Dallas, found work as a waitress, and saved enough money for her own room in a boarding house. She bought a new pair of shoes. “I carried the shoes to bed with me the night I got them and slept with them in my arms.”

In an account in a men’s magazine, Slusher recounted that in 1951 she was down and out after the arrest of her first husband, a crook named Billy Joe Dabbs. Only 16, she heard about a way to make some quick money.

I went to the address a friend gave me. The man behind the desk looked me over. He told me I had a great figure. Then he explained he wanted me to act in a risqué film. Then he opened his wallet and counted a bunch of ten-dollar bills. He counted them out on the desk before me, one by one. The purse I clutched in my hands contained exactly seven cents. I made the film.

The dinner I ate that day was the first decent meal I’d had in weeks. It was warm inside me. Only when my hunger was gone could I think straight. But I was still too young to understand fully just what I had done. I’m still sick with shame over what I did, but when you’re (young) and all alone and your insides are crying for food, you can’t always figure out right from wrong.

It might have simply been her 15 minutes of fame and notoriety, but instead it transformed battered Juanita into devil-may-care icon Candy Barr. Later in life, Slusher would say she did the film because she was drugged. Whatever the case, the film became a hit at frat houses, Elks and Moose lodges, and private servicemen clubs. It was the most popular of all the underground blue movies. Once the word was out, Dallas nightclub owner and promoter Abe Weinstein hired the underage teen for $85 a week to headline his Colony Club as Candy Barr, her blue movie name.

"Delayed firecracker": Candy Barr publicity shot.
On stage, Candy Barr was among the best -- a whirling dervish dancing to the beat of Artie Shaw’s spooky “Nightmare” or segueing into a sensual slow-mo tease set to a jazzy “Autumn Leaves.” She recalled, “Dancing was my greatest pleasure. It was my world. I danced a picture. I just lived it up there, and whatever I was painting came across -- charcoals, oils, or pen-and-inks.”

Slusher played the tease, but she didn’t let men control her. The plot of her porn debut revolves around her refusal to provide fellatio on demand. And when Candy’s estranged second husband, Troy Phillips, tried to break down her door and rape her, she shot him. Phillips survived and Slusher was cleared of all charges.

“The last thing in the world I wanted was notoriety,” Barr said. “The shooting brought it to me, and I was worried that it might hurt my career. Being cleared, however, did me good. People came out of curiosity to see the girl who shot her husband to defend herself.”

In 1957, while Barr was the toast of the Dallas burlesque circuit, she had an opportunity to break out in a new direction as an actress. The director of a little Dallas theater group in dire financial straits approached her to star in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? in the role of Rita Marlowe, which fellow Texan Jayne Mansfield had played on Broadway. Barr agreed. The production became the hottest ticket in town and saved the theater.

But conservative Dallas blue-bloods were not about to have Candy Barr become a respectable actress. They encouraged the Dallas police to set her up with a small amount of marijuana -- or so her lawyer later argued in court. During the prosecutor’s closing argument, he told the jury: “She may be cute, but under the evidence, she’s soiled and dirty.”

Slusher was found guilty of possession and sentenced to 15 years in the state penitentiary. While the case was being appealed, L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen, a co-founder of Las Vegas’ Flamingo Hotel, put up her bail, and they moved in together. Slusher starred in what was billed as the “biggest strip show in the world,” at the Largo in Los Angeles. 20th Century Fox hired Barr to teach Joan Collins how to “dance” for a film role as a stripper.

But two years later, on January 14, 1959, Slusher’s appeal was turned down and her life in the fast lane ended. She was sent to Goree, then a women’s prison in Huntsville, to serve her sentence. Prison life changed Barr. She was pregnant when she entered Goree and had a miscarriage. She was medicated with Thorazine, which she later became addicted to. She spent most of her free time in the library and taking education courses. She was assigned to work with the night sewing crew.

It was then that Slusher began to read Emily Dickinson, saying she identified with her “loneliness.” She wrote more than 50 poems in prison that would later become a collection. Here’s the title poem:

A Gentle Mind ... Confused
Hate the world that strikes you down,
A warped lesson quickly learned.
Rebellion, a universal sound,
Nobody cares no one’s concerned.
Fatigued by unyielding strife,
Self-pity consoles the abused,
And the bludgeoning of daily life,

Leaves a gentle mind ... confused.

Slusher was paroled on April Fool’s Day 1963 after serving three-and-a-half years. She went back to Dallas to return to her profession as a stripper, although she kept writing in her spare time. “It was then that Jack Ruby called me and said he wanted to hire me to dance in his Carousel Club,” she said. “Actually, due to parole stipulations, the only thing I could do was raise animals for profit. Jack came down to Edna to help me out. He brought me a pair of dachshund breeding dogs out of his litter.”

A few months later, Jack Ruby would be bigger news than Candy Barr. And 12 hours after Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI showed up. They interrogated Slusher as she was making Thanksgiving dinner.

The FBI thought Ruby told me names, places and people, which he didn’t. What they didn’t realize is I don’t believe in the propaganda they put out. I don’t believe the CIA killed Kennedy; I don’t believe Jack Ruby was aware of a plot to kill Kennedy; and I don’t believe Lee Harvey killed John Kennedy. That is what I don’t believe. I can’t really tell you what I do believe since that would be my opinion which could be as incorrect as all their theories.

Slusher later said the same to the Warren Commission under oath. In 1967, Gov. John Connally called.

He told me he was proud of my testimony before that commission, and as of that day, I was pardoned. I never knew why he did that unless he studied the case and knew it was an injustice whether I was a victim or not.

She briefly returned to the strip circuit in Las Vegas and at the Colony Club in Dallas. But in the late ’60s she came back to Texas for good, to care for her dying father in Brownwood. It was there I met Slusher, as she lived in seclusion at “Fort Dulce.”

Juanita Dale Slusher (Candy Barr) and Gregg Barrios in 1984. Photo from Gregg Barrios Archive.
Even in middle age, Slusher continued to reinvent herself. She joined an organized prayer group. And for a time she was also a live-in caregiver for an elderly Czech woman in Moulton. Slusher reflected on how the public continued to view her alter ego:

People will always see Candy Barr as 23. They really can’t associate me as I am today because that’s the only time she was here. I am not that personality any longer. And I pity those out there who only have memories to live on or a faded career. I have an edge over all of them.

I told her that I was writing a play about her complicated and conflicted life the last time we spoke, Hard Candy: The Life and Times of a Texas Bad Girl. Four different actresses portray her at different times in her life: the young runaway, the famous showgirl, the prison poet, and the reflective recluse, conversing with one another.

She thought about it, then said, “Well, good luck, buddy.”

On this fifth anniversary of her death, I still remember her humor and ability to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. “When I have a bad day, I walk to my room and talk to my buddy, the Chief, up there on the wall.”

Then, addressing a picture of Jesus in her bedroom, she said: “I didn’t do too good today, did I? And I may not do too good tomorrow either, but I’m aware of that. It doesn’t mean I failed, it’s just I couldn’t handle a few of your jokes today.”

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His book of new poetry La Causa was published this year. His play Hard Candy will premiere later this year. A version of this article was first published in The Texas Observer.]

Click the graphic above to visit WFMU radio's "Beware of the Blog" Web site.
Listen to The Ballad of Candy Barr" by George McCoy at WFMU:
The underage teen headlined Dallas' Colony Club for $85 a week.
Candy Barr in vintage dance video:

Candy Barr Tribute ~ 60's Greatest Exotic Dancer Vidéo TheRR9 sélectionnée dans Musique

Projected poster for Hard Candy, Gregg Barrios' play to be formally announced in 2011.
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VERSE / Gregg Barrios : Free Ramsey Now!

1972 campaign poster for Ramsey Muniz, Raza Unida candidate for governor of Texas.


FREE RAMSEY NOW!

By Gregg Barrios

When all is said and done
when you and I are dead,
your legend will remain
a true Chicano son.

It never was just us
it was you, me y todos
who believed our time
had come - and it had.

But politics is a fickle
whore who knocks on
every door for a quick
trip around the whirl.

You were the poster
boy for el movimiento
madres y palomilla all
voted La Raza Unida.

Ramsey for Governor
de Tejas was the rally
and the cry until they
put a spell on you.

We stood in disbelief
the gutless cynics
said you betrayed us
by not fighting back.

But where were we
when you received
a life sentence for
drug-trafficking?

Free Peltier, simón que sí.
Free Angela, right on, bro.
Free Ramsey Muñiz, and
the silence is deafening.

No solidarity or support
from those whose road
you paved, now elected
judges, mayors y mas.

Watching them on TV,
I wonder how and why
they lost their raza roots,
cut their native tongue.

I remembered the exiled
brothers Flores Magón
true architects and heroes
de la Revolución jailed.

A century later, you
occupy the same cell
at Leavenworth for a life
sentence of confinement.

We don’t know how to
honor our leaders alive
only after they’re dead
and buried en el olvido.

I saw a documentary on
PBS today a clip of your
vibrant face did express
real strength and grace.

Your voice had been erased
as if truth could cause riots
or upheaval in the realization
of how much we left undone.

When all is said and done
when you and I are dead,
your legend will remain
a true Chicano son.

-- Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog
Posted December 15, 2010


Ramsey Muniz arrives at Nueces County Jail in handcuffs, December 28, 1976.
Ramsey Muniz was a Chicano activist, a civil rights attorney, and twice the Raza Unida Party candidate for governor of Texas, receiving six percent of the vote in 1972. Famed attorney Dick DeGuerin said Muniz "changed the face of politics in Texas. He gave power of inclusion to Hispanic Americans." Muniz was convicted in 1976 on drug charges resulting from a controversial sting operation carried out by the DEA, and in 1994 was given life without parole after a third drug conviction.

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. Gregg is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His new book of poetry, in which this poem is included, is La Causa (Hansen, 2010).]

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BOOKS / Gregg Barrios : David Montejano's 'Quixote's Soldiers'

Up from the barrio:
A Chicano son of San Antonio
Reflects on El Movimiento

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2010

See video of Gregg Barrios' interview with David Montejano, Below.

[Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, by David Montejano (University of Texas Press, 360 pp., $24.95, paperback).]

SAN ANTONIO -- In Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981, author and educator David Montejano posits that San Antonio local history provides a microscopic look at the Chicano civil-rights movement and the social change it forged.

In the book’s preface he declares: “As a San Antonio native, my narrative explanation has a certain autobiographical quality to it.” Montejano grew up in “a West Side subdivision built in the 1950s, in the Edgewood District, one of the poorest in the state and later made famous by its successful challenge of the state’s educational financing schema. My neighborhood was a poor working class surrounded by poorer neighbors on three sides.”

Still, Montejano’s parents made the decision to send him to Catholic school since it provided a better education. He attended Central Catholic High in the mid-1960s along with George and Willie Velásquez and Ernie Cortés, all of whom later played important roles in the movimiento. While future San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros also attended the Catholic high school, Montejano considers Cisneros a beneficiary but not part of the Chicano movement.

The seeds of Montejano’s activism were planted early on: “The Brothers [of Mary] taught a humanistic philosophy of brotherhood that later became liberation theology.” He was drawn to those teachings with their attention to poverty and social inequality.

His freshman year at then South Texas State University in San Marcos proved important to the young man’s education: He witnessed a clash between a Mexican service-station attendant who had refused to put gas in a car of drunken cowboys and how it was effectively defused. Later, when a caravan of striking farmworkers came through the small college town, Montejano joined them.

He transferred to the UT Austin campus where he became involved in the counterculture, anti-war, and black civil-rights movements and helped collect petitions to get La Raza Unida Party on the state ballot. His activism led to his arrest during a student protest in Austin against service-station owner Don Weedon.

Montejano is now a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of the award-winning Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1936-1986, and the editor of Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century.

Unlike many academic books steeped in jargon, Quixote’s Soldiers is a fascinating look into the making and undoing of el movimento chicano and more specifically traces “some parts and tactics to its history of the Chicano movement in San Antonio.”

Juan Guajardo (foreground) and other Brown Berets leading a march against police brutality, San Antonio, November 20, 1971. Photo from San Antonio Light Collection / UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures / San Antonio Current.

We spoke to Montejano during a brief visit upon the publication of Quixote’s Soldiers.

In the first part of Quixote, you point out how San Antonio’s gang problem in the 1960s wasn’t helped by how it was viewed by the authorities.

There was a real gang problem, but it was exacerbated by the perception by authorities that all the working- and lower-class youth in the barrios were gang members. This included the social scientists that would come from the outside to study the youth. They would come in with this assumption that was an oversimplification and false. But there were gangs and conflicts that were passed on from generation to generation. But when I talk about self-identified gangs, I’m speaking of a very small number, perhaps 10 percent.

Your account of how Mexican-American student activists [many from St. Mary’s University] along with politicized gang social workers mobilized disenfranchised barrio youth is fascinating. And yet organizations like [the Mexican American Youth Organization] and [the Mexican American Unity Council] quickly faced opposition from the Anglo and Mexican-American political elite.

The MAYO leadership and the batos locos of the barrio hanging out truly influenced one another. But once Henry B. shuts down places like [the alternative] La Universidad del Barrios, these young college kids get involved in politics. Symbolic politics. The batos were geared to addressing local issues: police brutality, drug trafficking. If they had remained together who knows how this could have developed.

Where do the Brown Berets fit in the movimiento? I remember there were some Wild West types in the Berets and a few informants as well.

Wild West Side types. The first part of the book deals with barrio youth and gang warfare and how they become involved in the movement and eventually form the Brown Berets. The [academic] literature places little emphasis on the barrio or the batos locos that formed the Berets. The first confederation of the Berets in San Antonio is based on the old gang boundaries and identities.

Did Saul Alinsky’s community-organizing strategy have a bigger influence on MAYO and MAUC than the Mexican Revolution?

The Mexican revolution provided the symbols and the songs [laughs] and the color, but without question, Saul Alinsky. And, of course, the Black Power movement.

Why did the rhetoric turn to the confrontational “Kill the Gringo!”?

Jose Angel Gutiérrez, Nacho Perez, Mario Compean, [and] Norman Guerrero all believed that the only way you could wake up our people was through this confrontational, provocative language. There was an image that we were a passive people, the sleeping giant. Estos batos were going to wake up the sleeping giant through their rhetoric. This scared the hell out of the political establishment -- the Anglo and Mexican-American elite.

You devote several chapters to Henry B. Gonzalez [influential San Antonio politician who served in Congress, 1961-1999], who viewed the Raza movement as racist. Still he was also considered a hero for his liberal stance on issues. Why this division? Was this old crab trying to keep the others down? Political posturing?

That’s a good question. I wrestled with that. Henry B. would say it was out of principle. He opposed any politics based on ethnicity. He thought it was equivalent to corruption. His adversaries believed it was based on his alliance with the [Good Government League], that Henry B. had turned his back on the people who had helped elect him. And so that’s the basis for a lot of animosity between Henry, Albert Peña, Joe Bernal, and others. So was it just principle or was it just money? Was it patrón politics we’re talking about? I’ll let the reader figure that out.

Did the strong showing of Mario Compean [the Committee for Barrio Betterment candidate for mayor in 1969] against GGL incumbent Walter McAllister spark the notion that we could elect our own candidates and create a political party like Raza Unida?

I definitely believe that. It is not just my belief but that of others that I have interviewed -- the fact that CBB was able to place second without any money and just campaigning in the barrios, using mimeograph machines, going to the quinceañeras, clearly a low-budget affair. And they clearly won against the GGL in the West Side. And not by tiny margins; there were some substantial margins. This results in Mario Compean declaring himself Mayor of the West Side.

I was a teacher at Lanier High School at the time. I saw the sense of pride and identity in my students, not only in having Latino teachers, but in the rise of a Chicano renaissance in the arts. While your book centers on the political aspects of the movimiento, I believe both go hand in hand; all art in a sense is political.

It’s true, I do in passing mention the teatros, the art, the flourishing of literature. And the identity formation. Now we are Chicanos, Chicanas. That’s a new vocabulary. A new identity. And all of that is buttressed by this cultural renaissance. There is no question about that.

Was José Angel Gutiérrez’s strategy of building the Raza Unida Party county by county instead of running candidates in state elections ultimately the road that should have been taken?

In hindsight it would have been the better alternative. At the time we wanted everything and we wanted it now.

But were we prepared to accept the responsibilities that come with those victories?

We were young. We were 20-something. We were naive. We didn’t know a lot of these things, we just wanted someone elected. And in many cases we didn’t know what to do afterward. We had no plan other than that it might lead to some sort of liberation.

What is the lasting legacy of the Chicano movement?

Certainly the opening up of universities in the creation of Chicano Studies, because that is where we get our history, our art and literature. And in San Antonio, the establishment of UTSA might be considered a logro for us. The changing from at-large electoral politics to single-member districts was a very important change. The building of our political and community capacity by grassroots organizations -- COPS and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.

Bless Willie [Velásquez] and Ernie [Cortés].

They increased the political capacity of these barrios and the result of all that in tangible, concrete results are parks, housing, flood control, drainage. Those are some of the accomplishments. And I think besides the election of Henry Cisneros in 1981 that symbolizes the changes.

The other major change is the emergence of Chicanas in leadership positions. I mean visible leadership, no longer being in the supportive background but now being upfront, leading the organizations, holding the press conferences, running for office. That to me is an important change.

U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, D-TX, during campaign for U.S. Senate, 1961. Photo by Grey Villet / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

A few wrong turns

In one of Quixote’s Soldiers’ most interesting and bound to be controversial chapters, Montejano focuses on three individuals as examples of failed leadership. Fred Gómez Carrasco, Ramsey Muñiz, and Henry B. Gonzalez dominated media coverage in Texas in the 1970s -- representing a “Mexican” voice or presence to the larger public.

Montejano writes that some may question his selection of these three men as arbitrary and unreasonable:

The first was a convicted killed and drug dealer, the second a fallen political star, and the last a respected liberal congressman. [F]or better or worse, they represented different paths leading up and away from barrio poverty and isolation.

Fred Gómez Carrasco, the chivalrous drug "don," had been a major heroin supplier for the barrios and ghettos of San Antonio and other points in Texas. Despite the romanticization of his life as a narco-traficante, Carrasco must be remembered as the genius organizer behind a drug operation that tranquilized and criminalized countless barrio and ghetto youths. In short, Carrasco played a critical part in undermining the Chicano movement in the poor, working-class barrios. Yet his last-minute political testaments, given before his staged death, suggests there could have been a different path.

Ramsey Muñiz, athletic star, charismatic leader, and two-time gubernatorial candidate for the Raza Unida Party, stumbled and then self-destructed, taking along with him the fortunes of the party. What happened? [Muñiz was charged with conspiracy to smuggle drugs from Mexico to Alabama.] Yes, it was a setup by the authorities, but how could Muñiz have walked into it? Was the temptation so great? Was it hubris? Ten years after serving time for his first two convictions, Muñiz was arrested and convicted on a third drug charge. As a result, Muñiz has been permanently incarcerated. The loss is irrevocable. What remains is a memory of those inspiring years when Muñiz moved 200,000 voters to believe in a "united people.”

Henry B. Gonzalez, an American of Spanish surnamed descent who held an idealistic "color-blind" view of the world was so upset with the Chicano ethnic demands that he actively opposed the Chicano movement. He was successful in defunding MAYO, forcing MALDEF to move from San Antonio, and restricting MAUC activities. Was it principle that moved his opposition, personal pique at movement rhetoric, or simply interest in maintaining political control? Gonzalez has been charged with undermining the Chicano movement, yet that responsibility must be partitioned among many.

Montejano concludes:

Perhaps this does lead to a judgmental question after all. Can we judge which path was the most flawed? [W]hich is worse, a flawed journey, a flawed decision or a flawed vision?

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His new book of poetry, La Causa, appears in September and his play I-DJ premieres in October. Gregg wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. This article was also published in the San Antonio Current.]

• Find Quixote's Soldiers by David Montejano on Amazon.com.

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