ISLAS, Arturo

ISLAS, Arturo (b. 24 May 1938; d. 15 February 1991), writer.

A gay Chicano from a working-class family, Islas wrote, with subtlety and humor, three novels that deal with his class background, ethnic/racial identity, and sexuality, as well as the physical handicaps that marked his life: polio in childhood and a colostomy in 1969. Born in El Paso, Texas, Islas grew up in this border and bilingual city. After graduating from high school in 1956, he left the desert for the San Francisco Bay area and Stanford University, where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and where in 1970 he became a faculty member. In the 1970s, Islas broke up with his longtime lover, Jay Spears, and then learned in 1985 that Spears was in the hospital with AIDS. The two reconciled before Spears died at the end of 1986. Five years later, Islas also died of complications from AIDS.

Attention is often drawn to the semiautobiographical character of Islas's work as a fictional composite of his own experience and place of birth. In many ways, his fiction is a reflexive and cathartic endeavor to deal with issues of class, racism, and homophobia within the Chicano/a community.

The desert landscape of El Paso, surrounded by stark brown mountains and aromatic sagebrush, is constructed repeatedly in Islas's fiction through characters that are never fully able to break free from their roots and upbringing. The desert is a space of repression (social and sexual) and hypocrisy, a space that keeps pulling back those who escape. Education-as-escape and the compelling desert serve as antagonistic forces that frame his three novels: The Rain God (1984), Migrant Souls (1990), and La Mollie and the King of Tears: A Novel, published posthumously (1996). Islas was working on a fourth novel, American Dreams and Fantasies, when he died.

Although identifying as a gay Chicano, Islas did not focus exclusively on the queer experience in his work. In fact, sexuality is not the principal identity or problematic in these narratives, except in one short segment of the section "Rain Dancer" in The Rain God, in which we witness the violent death of Felix Angel at the hands of a young soldier who resists the older man's advances. The sexuality of the main character, Miguel Chico, is in the background of both The Rain God and Migrant Souls; in these novels, being gay serves as one more concealed difference in a family of many secrets and lies. In the third novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears, the narrator searches briefly for his brother at an S/M gay bar in San Francisco, but again, sexuality is simply one more cultural difference among many.

The Rain God and Migrant Souls deal with three generations of the Angel family, their class status and class pretensions, their religious beliefs and fanaticism, their racial bigotry, and various family "sins," all elements that affect family relations and cause friction between generations, giving rise in the process to a series of family resentments. Miguel Chico's return to Del Sapo (El Paso) from the Bay Area after his colostomy initiates the process of dismantling the family façade and uncovering painful secrets for the reader.

Both novels narrate the migration of the Angel family to the Texas desert from Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. The first novel focuses on the widowed matriarch, Mama Chona, and her children, the first generation in the United States. To create a sense of family, Mama Chona constructs a mythic aristocratic Spanish ancestry that leads her to disdain darker family members, servants, and in-laws, especially if they are anticlerical or atheist. A false sense of superiority and a strict sense of authority serve to mask the social anxieties and antagonisms of this first Angel generation. Migrant Souls deals with the rebellious second generation of Angel women and the tensions in Miguel Chico's life as he stands apart from, yet is drawn to, the family. Domestic spaces predominate in both novels; here family members, primarily women, deal with conflictive family or partner relations, murder, suicide, infidelity, disloyalty, illness, and death.

The third novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears, provides the first-person narration of Louie Mendoza, a forty-year-old saxophonist from El Paso, who sits in the waiting area of the emergency room in a San Francisco hospital and narrates his entire life and concerns to a sociolinguist researcher while he waits to hear if his lover, Mollie, is going to survive a serious accident. In the process, Louie reconstructs his life in El Paso, in Korea, in a veterans hospital, in Los Angeles, and in San Francisco, where he plays with a band in a night club. Louie is a rather unusual and humorous character, a gifted musician with only a high school diploma, who shifts with ease between colloquial and standard English, quotes from Shakespeare's plays, and philosophizes on the human condition. Like Islas's other novels, La Mollie focuses on the complexity of interpersonal relations, especially on difficult interactions between people of different ethnic and class backgrounds.

Bibliography

Burciaga, José Antonio. "A Conversation with Arturo Islas." Stanford Humanities Review 2, nos. 2–3 (spring 1992): 158–166.

Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. Palo Alto, Calif.: Alexandrian Press, 1984.

——. Migrant Souls. New York: Morrow, 1990.

——. American Dreams and Fantasies. Unpublished manuscript. Excerpts published in Stanford Humanities Review 2, nos. 2–3 (spring 1992): 169–189.

——. La Mollie and the King of Tears. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Saldívar, José David. "The Hybridity of Culture in Arturo Islas's The Rain God. " Dispositio: Revista Americana de Estudios Comparados y Culturales/American Journal of Comparative and Cultural Studies 16, no. 41 (1991): 109–119.

Sánchez, Marta. "Arturo Islas' The Rain God: An Alternative Tradition." American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 284–304.

Sánchez, Rosaura. "Ideological Discourses in Arturo Islas's The Rain God. " In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Edited by Hector Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Skenazy, Paul. Afterword to La Mollie and the King of Tears by Arturo Islas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Rosaura Sánchez