It doesn’t get much more definitively Chicano for an American writer than to be born and raised in East L.A. Just that very term “East L.A.” has the ability—thanks to pop culture portrayals in the media—to conjure up images of Hispanic culture such as that which are, indeed, portrayed in the literature of Helena Maria Viramontes. Unlike a great many of the kids she grew up and attended school with in one much less “Hollywood” sections of Los Angeles, Viramontes realized the American Dream by excelling in her academic career to put her on a path to Immaculate Heart College with assistance of a scholarship which identified potentially gifted academic students hampered by the social conditions of lack of privilege afforded less gifted intellects.
Almost immediately upon graduation, Viramontes hit the ground running in pursuit of dream of a writing career and, against the odds, was rewarded swiftly for that focus and passion. “Requiem for the Poor” earned first prize in a story contest sponsored by Cal-State L.A. and facilitated acceptance into the creative writing program offered at UC-Irvine. Just four years after enrollment there, Viramontes published The Moths and Other Stories and less than five years after she was the recipient of a very prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship which allowed her to attend the Sundance Institute for a workshop given by Nobel Laureate and Latin American literature legend, Gabriel García Márquez. A decade after her short story collection appeared, Viramontes published her first novel, Under the Feet of the Jesus.
Viramontes is part of an impressive wave of feminist Chicana writers who burst onto the world’s literary stage around the same time. Viramontes, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros were all born with a year and a half of each other and all began publishing works of significance within a few years of each other. Their collective focus on issues related specifically to the Latina experience in America has been extremely influential in ways that have spread outward from literature to open up possibilities and opportunities for other women in music and film as well as journalism and politics. The full extent of the range and influence of this wave is presented in the 1996 anthology volume co-edited by Viramontes and in which her story “Miss Clairol” initially appears. Chicano Creativity and Criticism is a required text for the study of this extraordinary gifted collection of women who transformed the face of Latin American literature in the 1980’s. Along with Viramontes’ story, this volume features poetry by Lorna Dee Cervantes, scholarly criticism of the works of both Cisneros and Viramontes, and artwork by Enedina Cásarez Vásquez and Carmen Lomas Garza.
