The Chicano Congo of Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2022
Chapter four evinces the rehabilitation of a distorted Congo in two canonical Chicano writers: Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya. The US Southwest’s plantocracy—and the importation of African labor—functions as the breeding ground for this distortion and thus excision from Africa for Chicanos; a population that would not have an obvious heritage link to Africa. Rivera conjures the expedition of Henry Morton Stanley—an imperialist slave driver in the Congo—and his rescuing of David Livingston in his poem “Searching at Leal Middle School” (1975*) Reading the Congo’s haunting in Rivera alongside the 19th century “scramble for Africa” era writings of Stanley and John Gregory Bourke—as well as memorial sites in Africa to Stanley and Livingston—reveal the ways Rivera decolonizes this imagery and memorializes a relinked Latin-Africa. By contrast, Anaya’s bildungsroman Bless Me, Última (1972) features traces of African colonial slavery. By reading witchcraft and golden carp worship the novel alludes to against those of 17th missionary Antonio Cavazzi and 20th century Congolese dramatist Sony Labou Tansi, Anaya’s story memorializes a rehabilitated African spirituality preserved today in African proverbs: the very ones preserved at a UNESCO Slave Route in Benin.
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