Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry

Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya’s essay “Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” was first published in Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints in 1993, amid several ongoing national conversations. The country had just celebrated the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, and different cultural groups throughout the country were questioning their representation within the larger, dominant culture. While representation is a major aspect in the essay, the context of Columbus is implicit. More explicit is the theme of censorship, a question Anaya raised in response to recent events: the international censorship and banning of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988), and the 1990 battle between right-wing censors and the National Endowment for the Arts. The latter conflict involved new restrictions on grantees that impacted their freedom of expression. The essay examines different types of censorship and their causes before commenting more broadly on the United States’ attempt to embrace its diversity.

This guide uses the reprint in the 2009 compilation The Essays by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Anaya begins by comparing himself to notable author Salman Rushdie. Like Rushdie, Anaya grew up in a household that placed great respect in storytelling and, specifically, books. As a child, Anaya felt a ravenous desire for literature, and he remembers visiting his town’s small library and wanting to read every last book on the shelves. Even at that young age, he consciously felt that the books were nourishment for his soul—and he still feels this way. Throughout the essay, he suggests that books can offer liberation by opening the mind to new perspectives. Therefore, to learn to read “is to start down the road to liberation” (68). If reading is a pathway to freedom, then Anaya is concerned about the country’s recent trends of interdicting certain books. This restriction, Anaya declares, is a form of censorship.

Anaya then discusses a friend of his, a Chicano poet, as an example of self-imposed censorship. The poet prefers to write in English with some Spanish, but when he applies for fellowships, such as from the National Endowment for the Arts, he feels disadvantaged because the committee does not understand Spanish. Therefore, he believes himself discounted for writing with his authentic voice. He now submits weaker, English-only poems with the hope of receiving the grant. Anaya laments that his friend must do this and believes that his friend censors himself to fit the status quo. After all, the fact that Chicano writing often incorporates Spanish and street talk is one of its most salient characteristics. To remove these cultural elements is akin to removing the “tortillas” from Chicano poetry (hence the title of the essay), and Anaya expresses his frustration that the monolingual judges have neither the sensitivities nor comprehension to most past their cultural bias.

In fact, the judges represent the national norm that “does not want to bother reading [Chicano writing]” (69). Anaya criticizes the publishing industry in general and how its endorsements sustain a status quo wherein the same cultural groups remain in power. For example, Anaya argues that the industry promotes monolingualism, the literary canon, and universal readership while rejecting cultural diversity as “too political”—a label Anaya finds disingenuous because all literature is political, and all literature challenges the status quo. However, because Chicano literature inherently affirms the Chicano culture’s right to exist, that message appears threatening to the white censors who want only white cultures to hold influence in the world. The famous Chicano poem “I Am Joaquín” (1967) by Rodolfo Gonzales is a testament to the liberating, revolutionary power of literature. The poem inspired a generation of Chicano activists.

While Chicano literature has the power to liberate, it cannot do so when its themes are determined by non-Chicano publishers. Anaya has seen this play out on a personal level: A major publisher invited him to submit a work for a middle school reader but then told him the book was prohibited from including religious elements or being “magical” or “mysterious.” More serious still is the fact that his book Bless me, Ultima was banned (and burned) by school board members in his native state of New Mexico. The school told Anaya the ban was due to his book’s use of profanity, but he believes their actual motive was rooted in racism.

While Anaya points to these personal examples, he is quick to show that the censorship of Chicano cultural production has been widespread. Therefore, there remains a struggle for artistic freedom. The final example is a magazine advertisement that portrayed multiculturalism as a threat to American civilization, exploiting an outdated binary of “civilized” and “barbarian.” The advertisement read, “Do you sometimes have the impression that our culture has fallen into the hands of the barbarians? […] Are you apprehensive about what the politics of ‘multiculturalism’ is going to mean to the future of civilization?” (72). According to the ad’s implicit logic, to challenge the status quo through diversity is to “barbarically” attack the very pillars of democracy. Anaya points out the contradiction in this notion, for if the United States is built on democracy, then diverse perspectives are American, whereas censorship is not. Yet this very democracy has been called into question at the time of the essay’s publication: Right-wing interest groups, some of the same that influence the publishing industry, lobbied to place restrictions on grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, thus limiting artistic freedom. Anaya believes this event signals a societal trend of censorship.

To conclude, Anaya returns to the analogy between food and literature. Both are sources of nourishment, the latter serving as such for the spirit. He argues that if Americans can enjoy culturally diverse food and travel to different countries, then they should be able to enjoy the literature of different groups as well. It’s illogical to draw the line at literary expression while affirming other cultural markers, such as cuisine. With this notion, Anaya calls for an end to censorship and an embrace of the country’s multicultural reality.