The Art of Mariano Azuela: Modernism in La Malhora, El Desquite, La Luciérnaga
(Constituting a significant contribution to intellectual a...)
Constituting a significant contribution to intellectual analysis of Mariano Azuela, this study and literary critique gives special attention to the Mexican novelist's more experimental works. The book identifies Mariano Azuela as the first modern Mexican novelist of the twentieth century and provides an in-depth look at the influences of the writer upon writing in Mexico as a whole.
(Voice-Haunted Journey is the first novel of a projected t...)
Voice-Haunted Journey is the first novel of a projected trilogy, a saga of five generations of a Mexican family in the United States. The action of the novel takes place in the brooding mind of Miguel Velasquez during an airplane flight across California.
Eliud Martínez is an American artist and novelist. He is the author of Voice-Haunted Journey and of two unpublished novels.
Background
Eliud Martínez was born on January 21, 1935, in Pflugerville, Texas. He is the eldest of six children of Estroberto and Maria Martinez. When he was four years old, his family moved to the Mexican barrio of East Austin, Texas, where his father worked in construction.
Education
Although Eliud's parents had little education, they encouraged Martinez and his siblings to become educated and get professional jobs, despite the barriers of class and racial segregation that restricted most people of Mexican descent.
Martinez attended a grade school where most of the children were Mexican, and recalled many years later that he was very eager to learn. Although he did not speak English when he began school, he learned quickly, and three years later, his teacher recommended that he be transferred to a better school.
Martinez attended the University of Texas at Austin for one year, majoring in studio arts, then left school and joined the Marine Corps. He served in Japan and Hawaii for nearly two years, then returned home and completed his studies at the university, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting, with a minor in art history and criticism. While at the university, he worked with Dr. Donald L. Weismann, who encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D., a goal that was considered too high for most Mexican-Americans.
He received the scholarship and went to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he studied history and criticism of Mexican art with highly regarded professors. He also studied the culture of the Nahuatl, one of the indigenous peoples of Mexico.
He moved to the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign in 1962 to accept a teaching assistantship in art history, but soon discovered that the program was too narrow and specialized to suit him. He dropped out of school and lived for a while in Chicago and then New York, living an intensely dissolute and bohemian life.
In 1969, he entered Ohio University - Athens and earned a doctorate in English and comparative literature in 1975.
During his time in Chicago and New York, Martinez remained in contact with his mentor, Dr. Weismann, writing him as often as three times a week. These letters eventually evolved into the notebooks that would become Voice-Haunted Journey. Although Martinez had achieved his goal, he was still undecided about his creative future, and began to consider writing novels. In 1972, he began teaching at the University of California at Riverside.
Martinez's old dream of writing a novel had not gone away, and when his brother Teodoro died at the age of thirty-five in 1971, the loss spurred him to begin writing Voice-Haunted Journey, described by Cantu as "a narrative constituted by the thematic threads made up of art, ancestry, and fate." In 1975, he introduced the first multi-ethnic literature course at UC Riverside, “Chicano Literature in Comparative Ethnic Perspective.” In 1980, Martinez decided to devote most of his creative energy to "autobiographical fiction," and to working on two more novels for his trilogy "The Notebooks of Miguel Velasquez," dedicated to Martinez's mentor, Dr. Weismann.
In 1985, he designed “Introduction to Race and Ethnicity,” a course that became a requirement for all students at UC Riverside. In 1991, his course “Creative Writing and Ancestry” also became a required course for majors and minors in creative writing. The stories included in this anthology were written for this class.
Martinez had also gone into art before he became a writer. Between 1963 and 1980, he had nine exhibitions of his art, including three solo shows.
Nowadays Martinez is a Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside campus.
During Martinez's period as a student, legislators in Texas were attempting to root out atheism in education by making all university faculty sign an oath that they believed in a supreme being. Martinez and his friends planned a protest against this, in which Martinez would play Christ, dressed in a white loincloth and a mesquite “crown of thorns.” His friends eventually backed out, but Martinez went ahead with the protest on his own, despite threats from administrators that he would be expelled.
Views
The controversy over the Columbus Quincentenary in 1992 led Martinez to the thought that our ancestors make us what we are. Human beings pick and select their ancestors at their own risk. He believes that we cannot do that any more than we can pick and select our mothers and fathers. It is true that some of our ancestors scorned and denied us as their progeny. It is idle to deny the ancestors whose faces we see when we contemplate our own faces in the mirror.
This is a central theme of all his writing: History has taught him that race classifications are false and unreliable. There is only one human race. The majority of human beings are people of multiple ancestries; they are not biracial or multi-racial or multi-ethnic. Increasingly in the new millenium Americans will be people of multiple ancestries.
From his mentor, Donald L. Weismann, Martinez also learned that art cannot be separated from life, and that no experience - no matter how painful, sorrowful, ill-fated, sad or tragic - is ever lost on the artist. From him he learned to appreciate artists who are visionaries, often out of step with society, eccentric, bizarre, introspective, and philosophical. Artists turn their failures and shortcomings, their guilt and remorse, into art.
Quotations:
"An introspective person, I have been keeping notebooks regularly since I was twenty-five. I used to write and receive long letters from my father, my sister, brothers, and friends; and especially from Donald L. Weisman, true maestro and friend of more than four decades. He and I still write and speak on the telephone regularly."
"A highly active memory compels me to write, to express thoughts and feelings, to respond to people and events in my life, to understand human life in its richness and varieties."
"My writing springs also from a love of family and a fascination with ancestry. I marvel at the magic of heredity, when I see a strong family resemblance across two, especially three or more generations. To me, it is a biological miracle that out of an infinite number of possible genetic configurations in a family the identical constellation of genes and chromosomes can recur and make a grandmother, her daughter and a granddaughter one and the same woman, in appearance and temperament."
"Fiction is telling truths with lies."
"Hispanic, Latino, Chicano literature - whichever term is preferred - has a long tradition in the Americas. An essay by Alejo Carpentier opened my eyes to countless parallels between Latin American literatureand our own literature by Americans of Mexican ancestry. The varieties of our Mexican experience - our contextos - in the United States are demonstratively a continuation of the Latin American experience since the Conquest. Our millenary origins antedate that event, and our Chicano, Latino, Hispanic experience is also a significant part of the American immigrant experience. Our literary expression occupies a place within our American national literature, and among the literatures of the world."
Personality
Martinez's interest in art, encouraged by his grandfather Eusebio Martinez-Ortiz, began when he was a child. His grandfather was a former cavalry soldier who had fought in the Mexican revolution. When Martinez's family visited, he would ask Martinez to draw soldiers for him. This repeated encouragement led Martinez to discover that he had a talent for art.
In his late twenties and early thirties, during the years when Martinez was a graduate student dropout, he read novels, plays, biographies, and books on many subjects, especially philosophy and historiography. He was born with a voracious curiosity and eagerness to learn. According to Martinez himself, books and people have always come into his life, happily by accident, as if some benevolent and protective spirit were watching over me.
Quotes from others about the person
"Martinez's masterful handling of narrative techniques, sophisticated characterization, and interdisciplinary breadth - with its numerous references, allusions and extended meditations on painting, film, and literature - is intellectually gratifying and a veritable quarry for literary critics who enjoy hermetic narratives." - Cantu
Connections
On December 25, 1965, Martinez married Elisse Weintraub. They have two children: Laura and Tanya Martinez.