Cronica de mis anos peores, 2d ed.
Nash, Susan Smith
The poignant and emotionally compelling poems of Tino Villanueva
reinforce the notion that marginalization and discrimination due to
racial prejudice exert long-lasting and cruelly damaging effects.
Although Cronica de mis anos peores (Chronicle of My Worst Years) is a
work of triumph and of overcoming, Villanueva does not lapse into the
sort of sentimentality which unwittingly reinforces the behavior by
tacitly suggesting that such hazing can be somehow "for one's
own good" or "all for the best." The fact that
individuals are able, by sheer force of will, to overcome the effects of
shaming and physical and emotional abuse is tantamount to miraculous.
The credit must go to the individual, and if poetry has been utilized to
express the concept of self-overcoming, then the ability of literary
production to construct new pathways of thought must be acknowledged.
Tino Villanueva was born 11 December 1941 in San Marcos, Texas. This
was not an easy time to be Hispanic, since the dominant culture was
aggressively Anglo, and, except for what could be predatorily
appropriated, the Anglo way of life was intensely hostile to the
beliefs, values, and culture of the Hispanics. Although a number of
facile explanations are possible, none quite represents the
identity-annihilating quality of the Anglo attitude toward Hispanics,
and none represents the complexity and depth of that attitude's
virulence. Villanueva's poems function as a speaking picture and a
mirror of the conditions, which he describes in "Empezando a
saber" as a lesson he had to learn - "donde aprendi a ser
menos de lo que era." However, the poems function in more ways than
as screens upon which verisimilitude is projected. They also inscribe the pain and the identity-erasure upon the consciousness and the
emotions of the reader, so that to read the childhood experiences
represented in the collection of poems is to participate in the pain and
to understand the anguish of a child caught in this situation.
Part of the impact of the poems arises from the fact that Villanueva
is able to reconstruct how a child thinks - how a child tries to make
sense of the world, what temporality means to a child. Villanueva
portrays how the moments are more immediate and forceful than for an
adult, because the adult has developed the ability to detach and to
place experience within an epistemological framework. In
"Entreactos de ira" and "Primera evocacion" the
child lives in the moment without any notion of what might happen in the
future. If this is innocence, then it is a painful state, since it is
essentially the condition of being completely out of control and at the
mercy of the psychological and physical elements.
Villanueva suggests that self-overcoming requires a keen sense of
states of being. In "En el claroscuro de los anos" he
constructs a model of memory and shows how it is spatially defined. He
concerns himself with how one might live within the mental structure
which has been produced or created over the years. At the end of the
collection the evolution of self-awareness is complete, to the point
that Villanueva is able to identify false cultural representations and
expose them.
Villanueva's careful attention to detail and the romantic
inclination to erase boundaries of identity so that external objects
function as metonymies of self reveal a certain esthetic debt to the
Iowa School. Although this is effective, the limitations are that
Villanueva's form never allows him to stop being "nice"
about the violations he has suffered. The reader begins to crave
expressions of primal rage and thick, chaotic, procreative energy.
Nevertheless, Cronica de mis anos peores is a remarkable humanitarian
contribution, and definitely worth studying.
Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma
