Border States : GROWING UP LATINO: Memoirs and Stories By Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans ; (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95 cloth, $12.95 paper; 344 pp.) : DRINK CULTURA: Chicanismo By Jose Antonio Burciaga ; (Joshua Odell Editions/Capra Press: $10.95 paper; 145 pp.)

By Luis J. Rodriguez

Feb. 28, 1993 12 AM PT

Rodriguez is an award-winning poet, journalist and critic. His latest book, "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." (Curbstone Press, 1993) is about growing up Chicano in Watts and East Los Angeles.

I wrote a poem once in which a nun asks a Mexican immigrant girl, “Who is God?” Nervous and fearful, the girl stands up and replies: “God is a string bean.”

The class erupts into an uproar. The nun gasps in horror. Armed with a ruler, she rushes up to the girl and whacks the inside of the girl’s hand. Unfortunately, it is some time before the nun realizes that the girl has said, “God is a supreme being.”

This incident, which I owe to a Los Angeles Chicana I knew, is a quintessential Latino encounter in this country. And in both “Growing Up Latino” and “Drink Cultura,” I felt its reverberations with the turn of every page.

These books embody a debate, one which Latinos carry wherever they go, and which link us even in our solitude. The debate is about our place in a country that echoes of homeland, yet is foreign. It is the gnawing “issue” of North America, a land of indigenous beckoning, colonial vestiges and technological wonder, yet impatient with both history and the future.

The books tell of cultural imprisonment, of ceaseless ambiguity, of silence and coming into language. It’s my life, and still as I read the works, I awaken to new ordeals and other nuances.

The writers in “Growing Up Latino” are some of the best in any language. They include Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, Helena Maria Viramontes, Piri Thomas, Edward Rivera, Alma Villanueva, Sandra Cisneros, Rudolfo Anaya--of Dominican, Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican and mixed descent. From the chicanesque semi-verse of Genaro Gonzalez to the assimilist ravings of Richard Rodriguez, from Pulitzer Prize-winners to virtual unknowns, each holds a piece of the puzzle called the Latino experience. Together you get the colors, the flavors, the voices and accents. Together you get a people.

Spanish words and their hybrids abound. At the same time, there is a lucid control of English, as if holding the string of a kite, not entirely rooted but soaring.

The editors wisely provide a foreword and introduction, a context in which to look at the autobiographical fiction and nonfiction pieces. The essays and stories are disparate, uneven in temper and presentation, yet appearing as just right. The works cut across political and cultural differences to say two things: 1) you can’t pigeonhole Latino writing, and 2) the debate over who we are, about being here and not here, swirls around us as an unshakable supplication.

Stavans writes in his foreword: “The future es nuestro (is ours). Rather sooner than later, this bridge across the abyss, these frontier dwellers, will prove that the Rio Grande is pure fiction, a commodity, a governmental invention. The south shall cohabit the north--Latin America in the United States.”

In “Drink Cultura: Chicanismo,” Jose Antonio Burciaga, a Stanford University Resident Fellow, artist and writer, jumps with both feet into the fray, willing to take on all comers, reconciled with his Mexican/Texas roots and his California home, with his urban pachuquismos (street slang) and academic realities, with his vibrant murals and the static page. He forthrightly declares: “Mexico never left the Southwest, it just learned English.”

In one entry, Burciaga recounts a story of a Mrs. Roth, music teacher, who told her majority-Mexican class that the lines on old Mexican faces appeared because “they didn’t open their mouths and enunciate properly when they talked.” Here Anglo culture becomes the ultimate trickster, the Coyote of ancestral lore. Burciaga knows that direct repression is only part of the story, that the subtle, looser binds often are harder to shake off.

Yet Burciaga is comfortable with the paradoxes. Without flinching, Burciaga declares that Chicanos are neither here nor there, in limbo, but dancing all the while and making of limbo an Aztec ancestral sacred ground. He understands he will please neither the “American” nor “Mexican”-- y que ! So what!

Everywhere there’s a border crossing, and Burciaga deals with the political and cultural barriers as farce: We are all Cantinflas. With wit, with a turn of a phrase, while laughing at imposed authority, in a cholo stance, a rumba in our heads, and skirting both Anglo and Hispanic traditions, it is here, in the theater of the absurd, that Latinos hold a key to their survival (Burciaga was a founder of the Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash).

There is another aspect underlying much of Burciaga’s work: Power. Once across the border or the Caribbean expanse, Latinos are told we have no history, and thus no power. Ours is mostly a relegated existence, a class relationship, which undermines any assimilation process; you cannot integrate unequals. Even if we declare ourselves as good as or better than the dominant culture, the power lies elsewhere. And power for us means one thing--control of land, expressed as direct and unfettered control of our communities, and therefore our destinies.

Land, rarely addressed, is the monkey wrench in the machinery, the bone in the throat. The question of land, of deep roots, of deserts and forests and islands, appear in a few pieces in “Growing Up Latino” and in Burciaga’s essays, particularly the one on Tiburcio Vasquez, the so-called bandit turned revolutionary turned martyr.

It’s about colonialism and Puerto Rico, about autonomy and the Southwest; it’s about whether displaced Salvadorans, Haitians and Mixteco Indians can ever go home again.

Like former slaves, tribal peoples and immigrants from shores other than these, Latinos, consciously or unconsciously, are at war with “America,” the mind set, the ghost hovering over our lives. As in war, we employ strategies, carry out reconnaissance and devise paths for achievement within the often strangling social, economic and cultural parameters of this country. Many don’t wield a gun but a pen. Some capitulate, others resist; it’s war.

Malcolm X talked about “any means necessary,” but his weapons, too, were ideas. For this he was vilified. For this he was feared--not for using a gun but for the idea that “subjects” should do what is required to free themselves from the “masters.” For the idea of a gun.

Similarly, both “Growing Up Latino” and “Drink Cultura” are inhabited by ideas. Dangerous terrain, but necessary.

“To live on the border is to live in the center,” Burciaga writes. “The center unites and separates the four directions. To live on the border unites and separates two cultures, two worlds, to be at the entrance and exit and being able to accept both. These cultures cross each other, not to assimilate but to transculturate.”

In some 30 years, Latinos in the United States have amassed a body of work that cannot be denied (despite the tired arguments that we “don’t write”). This country is our soil, our native soil; our literature is a native literature, of this land and of the world.

In “Growing Up Latino” and “Drink Cultura,” personal memory becomes the blood that flows through our history, our collective memory; it also points to how, immersed in history and conscious of the power relations, we can grasp the potency of our accumulative energy; how we can reshape this entity called the United States as Latinos explode into the next century as the most prevalent and robust cultural influence in the country.