My Road to the Fifth Sun
1900-1978
By Juan Velasco

AS I REMEMBER IT NOW, the road to the Fifth Sun, my road, started fifteen years ago. That's when I arrived in Los Angeles from my native Spain, infused with images of California from Raymond Chandler's novels, scenes from Hollywood, and of course, my new—burning—interest, Latino literature.

What was it exactly—whose novel or poetry or essay—that drew me across the ocean to this new continent to learn a new language and start a new life? A few names I knew: Luis Valdez, Pat Mora, Gary Soto...In the work of these writers I found a tradition of intermixing, of cultural hybridity that goes back to the birth of Spanish culture and the Spanish language itself, a language of colonization derived from the conqeust by Rome of the Iberian peninsula two thousand years ago. In that conquest—never completed, still in flux—Celtic, Iberian , and Basque peoples were overrun by a new order. Moors, Jews, Rom (Gypsies), and other unassimilated groups would later add to the multicultural nature of Spanish society, sometimes fighting, sometimes co-existing peacefully. Journeying to the New World, the Spanish intermixed with Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, Arawaks, and others. These centuries of experience produced tragedy, beauty, and insight. As cultures collided and interacted, people used the power of storytelling, the power of myth, to understand each other better, to bridge, to criticize, to daydream, and to excoriate. Who, then, is better equipped to deal with America, with California and its themes of conquest, cultural domination, and multicultural coexistence, than those who come from Spanish-speaking worlds?

California's very name originated in the imagination of a storyteller: in Las sergas de Esplandión, a popular Spanish novel published in the early 1500s, Garcí Rodriguez Ordoñez de Montalvo describes a terrestrial paradise inhabited by black Amazons, an island ruled by a certain Califia, queen of "California." Early tales of California, whether told by the Spanish or Native Americans, Latinos or Euro-Americans, dwelled also in the mythic realm. In the 1880s, for example, the philosopher Josiah Royce imagined Calfornia not just as a politcal or economic or geographic entity but as a sort of island, a community of expecation, a "community of hope." And today's writers—the scientists of myth-making—continue to diagram the hopes, the dreams, and the nightmares of California's people. Reading Under the Fifth Sun, you may gain an understanding of the sometimes surprising roads that myths take, the ways cultures move from one place to another, the ways in which the past illuminates our everyday understanding of the future.

As anthologies of Latino literature proliferate, Latinos and non-Latinos alike can appreciate the breadth of history of a literary tradition once limited to a few specialists; but the unique significance of this particular anthology is that it illuminates the way the tradition has evolved her on the West Coast, presenting California Latino literature as a complex net of diverse experience created over time by history and culture.

Luis Leal, one of the founders of Latino literary criticism, has concluded that the history of Chicano literature should include "everything written before 1848 (published and in manuscript form), as it rightfully forms part of the Chicano cultural inheritance." While offering a rich array of works by such legends of Chicano literature as Alurista, Luis Valdez, and Cherríe L. Moraga, Under the FIfth Sun also includes selections that recall the very early Spanish and Latin American presence in California that Leal refers to. But Chicano literature is only la punta del iceberg. The fullness of range of Latino literature is one of the best kept secrets in the United States; Salvadorans, Chileans, Guatemalans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and others are building on the earlier HIspanic trdition to create a literary culture that can stand alongside any European or Latin American literary achievement.

The wave of Latina writers of the 1980s is represented here, and so are the works of new young writers like Michele Serros and María Amparo Escandón—women's writings that intend, as literary cirtic María Herrera-Sobek describes it, "to formulate, to conceptulatize, to freeze in a moment of poetic intensity a new vision, a new perspective." And carefully chosen texts by Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz provide us with a wonderful view of Latin American interactions with California. In all, more than a hundred writers appear here, each using language ina uniquely evocative way. The cumulative effect is powerful; a wealth of art, a diversity of voices, an explosion of truth and myth.

The myths of California have evolved—from Calafia to the gold rush to the Silicon Valley's version of the American Dream—but their evocative power hasn't changed. "California is an archetype of Royce's great community of hope," my friend Wills said to me years ago with an ambiguous wink.