What is ethnic literature?

I didn't always want to do ethnic literature. For most of my academic career, I've been focused on the American Renaissance writers and print culture, fascinated by their attempts to shape American thinking and how new mass print production was to the country. It wasn't really an issue-I wasn't disinterested in race and ethnicity; I just was more focused on other things at the time and most ethnic lit classes at my school were geared towards contemporary literature. Then I took a Chicanx lit class and we read The Squatter and the Don and The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena, the former published in the late nineteenth century and the latter at the turn of the century. The stories themselves weren't so impressive (the Mena is definitely worth reading, but the Ruiz de Burton is a rough time), but I was fascinated by the political history surrounding the recovery of both texts. The Squatter and the Don, about the complicated landscape of race and land rights during California's annexation, was autobiographical-Ruiz de Burton herself was embroiled in a long court battle to retain her husband's land after he died. Mena, though a successful writer during her time, published under her husband's name (Chambers) and so, for a long time, was denied being labeled an ethnic writer and then further marginalized for stories that weren't "political." I then realized that there was more. It just had never occurred to me that, in the 2000's, we would still have to "recover" texts and argue that they were deserving of study.

Reading Kirsten Silva Gruesz's article reminded me of the complicated history of ethnic lit, especially when periodized. There's a tendency (as I've proven) to think that ethnic lit doesn't start until the mid-20th-century because POC just weren't writing or were not allowed to publish or whatever. Frank Chin et al. once argued that Chinese Americans have no literacy legacy because the first Chinese who came to America did so by force and thus, hated their time in America so much that they burned their journals, letters, etc and tossed them into the sea, believing that at least those ashes could make it back to their home country. When Gruesz discusses the types of texts included in the Norton anthology, mostly nonfiction, but not revolutionary texts or texts "inspired by the 1846-8 war with Mexico, which had world-shaping effects on California and Texas," you can see this instinctual protection of a white supremacist American canon (339). I don't mean it's a conscious neo-Nazi promoting move, but there is a troubling lack of attention towards racial issues other than slavery during the 19th century.

Gruesz provides a sharp contrast to the treatment of "Latino literature" with African American literature: "periodizing the African American past was crucial, almost sacral, to the project; the anthology aimed not only to stake a black presence far back in the nation's colonial prehistory but also to put pressure on the default period markers of mainstream American literature" (337). African American literature is predicated on reminding America that black people have been influential in its "inception" (so to speak) and it also critiques periodization itself. Yet, as we can see in the quote I used in the previous paragraph, there isn't the same impulse for Latinx or Asian American literature that people have with African American or even Native American literature. Sui Sin Far, a prolific and "out" Chinese author (she's only 1/4 Chinese, but published under a Chinese name) and Maria de Ruiz Burton aren't taught, even though their stories revolve around California's formation. Why don't we want to "legitimize" these ethnic groups, argue for their presence in the deep time of our literary canon? It's weird, right? It definitely feels like we don't want to admit that there was any more racial violence after Native genocide and African American slavery, even though there was.

Gruesz' other insights about the trouble with Latinx lit in that it's hemispheric, but we like to focus on Latin America, that the anthology is driven by class perception (this is what middle-class Latinx want to read or whatever), and that its multiple languages trouble their inclusion in the canon also resonates with Asian diaspora etc. Many want to reject the ethnic literature category and labeling separate canons, not wanting to be reduced to a "minority," but they seem to implicitly accept canonicity in general. I don't know how to get rid of the canon or if it can be done at all. But, I do know that my future projects are geared towards recovering more ethnic experiences in the 19th century so we can gain a fuller knowledge, a more thick description, of the time and the country.

P.S. There's an archive here at Davis about the South Asian presence in 19th cent California!