postmodern narratives under discussion, are embedded in the historical. For example, no mild apocalypse is the total destruction of the black neighborhood at the beginning of Sula: 'In that place, where they tore the neighborhood and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf course, there was once a neighborhood.' The Bottom's segregated history in Ohio-cut across, contested, and obliterated-is written in a single sentence whose content extends from the dialectics of underdevelopment to the glossy, postmodern projects of urban renewal. Thus the 'blackberry patches' — Morrison's imagery of nature — have to be 'uprooted' to make way for what Marx referred to as capitalism's modernization.
After describing the leveling of the Bottom, Morrison focuses on the other hurts wrought by capitalism's (late) modernizations: Shadrack's unforgettable imagined bodily deformation as a part of the posttraumatic stress disorder resulting from his World War I experience and Eva Peace's radical act of self-mutilation. Abandoned by her husband Boy Boy around 1921, Eva sets out to keep her family together and financially sound: 'Eighteen months later, she swept down from a wagon with two crutches, a new black pocketbook, and one leg.' Eva's self-mutilation allows her then to build a new life and an African American feminist architecture on 7 Carpenter Road.
As in the case of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Morrison's Sula is a signifyin[g] chronicle of lo real maravilloso with a difference, but is entirely accessible to the reader since there are no real boundaries created by difficult narrative techniques. Moreover, like the chronicles of Carpentier and García Márquez, Sula covers the Bottom's history (which seems to move in reverse), from its apocalyptic endings to its rich beginnings. The sense of de-529- reality in Sula has nothing to do with language games; it is created by events, by what Morrison says happens. We may have doubts about the probability of what happens (Eva's self-mutilations, Plum's attempt to return to his mother's womb, the plague of robins announcing Sula's return to the Bottom, and Ajax's command of yellow butterflies) but there is never any doubt about what the narrator says.
Song of Solomon — a magical travel story about returning to one's local and global roots — won a National Book Critics Circle Award and was the first African American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) to be included for selection by the Book-of-theMonth Club. As Morrison suggests, Milkman Dead has 'to pay attention to signs and landmarks' in order to discover 'the real names' and with these the author allows her black middle-class protagonist to piece together his fantastic genealogical history all the way back to Africa. 'How many dead lives and fading memories,' Morrison writes, 'were buried in and beneath the names of the places.'
Arturo Islas is fascinated in his work by the liminal United States — Mexico borderlands, a postcontemporary 'laboratory' where we can see culture of the First World imploding its postmodernist strategies into the Third World. Planned as a trilogy about the Angel family, The Rain God (1984) and Migrant Souls (1990), read collectively, are sprawling narratives, with genealogical trees as convoluted as Faulkner's and García Márquez's. Islas's last installment, however, was never completed, for the author died from complications of AIDS in February 1991.
The first novel, The Rain God, was published by Alexandrian, a small, Silicon Valley press of Palo Alto, California. Although rejected and censored by over twenty mainstream presses and editors in New York (who decide what counts as culture for the rest of the United States), The Rain God was named one of the three best novels of 1984 by the California Bay Area Reviewers' Association. Telling his story from the point of view of a Faulknerian Quentin-like narrator with a radical difference — 'I don't hate Mexicans! I don't hate Anglos! I don't hate Gays! I don't hate the Third World!' — Miguel Chico is a bookish English professor living the epistemologies of the closet in San Francisco. A two-toned narrative, written at times in the pan-American styles of James, Faulkner, Rulfo, and García Márquez, The Rain God covers three generations of Angels — from just before -530- the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) to the 1980s — who migrated north from Mexico.
Despite this large chronotope, imaginative geography, and complex genealogy, The Rain God is a high minimalist novel of subtlety and psychological nuance: 'He, Miguel Chico, was the family analyst, interested in the past for psychological, not historical, reasons. Like Mama Chona, he preferred to ignore facts in favor of motives, which were always and endlessly open to question and interpretation.' Islas's postmodern 'open text' thus offers the reader a poetic landscape that, like the borderlands themselves, is both overdetermined and profound. The narrative, too, moves in electric telenovela chapters from one family crisis to another: Miguel Chico visits the cemetery on the Day of the Dead; Mama Chona, the family matriarch, puritanically controls her family's values; Miguel Grande cannot resist the soap opera passions of Lola, his wife's best friend; Miguel Chico's uncle, Felix Angel (the Rain Dancer), is murdered in the desert by a white, homophobic soldier.
If one of the most significant features of postmodern narratives is their attempt to negotiate forms of high art with certain forms and genres of mass culture and the cultural practices of everyday life, Islas's second installment, Migrant Souls, exploits this postcontemporary impulse by bringing together the impact of the classic Puritan rhetoric upon our culture, what Clifford Geertz, among others, calls the shaping influence of religious or quasi-religious symbols of society (Book 1 is appropriately entitled 'Flight from Egypt'), with references to the 1950s through the mambo, doo-wop, Elvis, and mass cultural magazines such as Popular Romance.
More significantly, Islas reconceives in Migrant Souls literary and cultural practices. What happens, Islas asks, when American culture and literature are understood in terms of 'migration,' not immigration? How is the imagined community of the nation — to use Benedict Anderson's term — disrupted by hybrid, mestizo/a borderland subjectivities? Caught between the postcolonial border zones of past and present, Spanish and Indian cultures (Doña Marina's tamales and Miguel Chico's 'Tlaloc'), Josie Salazar and her cousin Miguel Chico attempt to cross over the borderland contradictions of their everyday lives in Del Sapo, Texas. Like Ernesto Galarza in Barrio Boy (1972), Islas in Book 1 of Migrant Souls allows us to witness the Angel -531- family's migration, north from Mexico. This change from one culture to another corresponds to the actual course of travel the founding Angel clan undertakes: 'The Rio Grande — shallow, muddy, ugly in those places where the bridges spanned it — was a constant disappointment and hardly a symbol of the promised land to families like Mama Chona's. They had not sailed across an ocean or ridden in wagons and trains across half a continent in search of a new life. They were migrant, not immigrant, souls.'
Within this simple form, however, are subsumed the postmodern themes of transformation, hybridity, and multiple subject positions — what feminist Gloria Anzaldúa in her border-defying writing Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) called the 'new mestiza/o consciousness.' If Islas's narrative had focused exclusively on this literal border-crossing story, he would have written, perhaps, a fairly conventional ethnic tale about acculturation and immigration. But he did not. Instead, Islas also examines the border zones of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. In fact, Islas's only other bordercrossing tale in Book 1 is the hilarious scene of Josie's father smuggling an illegal turkey across the United States-Mexico border (after he had made it clear that he prefers enchiladas for Thanksgiving dinner). After a humiliating border check at the International Del Sapo bridge, he treats his family to menudo and homemade tortillas.
Just as the founding Angels crossed the 'bloody river' in search of their city upon a hill, the younger Angel generation migrates to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and California. Book 2, entitled 'Feliz Navidad,' thus looks ahead to Vietnam and the Chicano Student Movement, where Miguel Chico's cousin Rudy appropriates and recodifies the term Chicano from borderland oral culture and unsettles all of the conservative Hispanic identities conferred on the Angel family by Mama Chona. More important, 'Feliz Navidad' looks ahead to the publication of Miguel Chico's first novel, Tlaloc [The Rain God]: 'Miguel Chico's novel had been written during a sabbatical leave when he decided to make fiction instead of criticize it. A modest semi-autobiographical work, it was published by a small California press that quickly went out of business. Tlaloc was an academic, if not commercial success and its author became known as an ethnic writer.' For Islas, the point is not to declare that The Rain God and Migrant Souls are postmodern ethnic texts and stop there, -532- but to show in hybrid perspectives how it was that ethnicity was invented and with what consequences.
Such nontraditional and critical views of acculturation and the polyethnic United States are readily apparent
