empty seats (“the Mexican colony, even, is not turning out as it should”), but Bernal only saw a full-house success — a proud representation of a proud people in which his readers, in turn, should take pride. “Let these poor lines go forth,” he writes in the closing poem of his book, “as a humble homage,/ full of love and admiration/ for the great artists who work/ their hearts out ‘For the Raza,/ for the Homeland, and for Art.’” This, Bernal insists, is how Mexican Los Angeles should look and how it should be understood. This is how culture ought to flow back and forth across borders. This is what Los Angeles should admire.
1 For more on this campaign, see Ted Vincent, “Black Hopes in Baja California: Black American and Mexican Cooperation, 1917-1926,” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 204-213. For a larger view of relations between Black Los Angeles and Baja California, see Josh Kun, “Tijuana and the Borders of Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 313-26.
2 “La ultima revolución en Sonora,” Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1913: 56.
3 Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Un Camino de hallazgos: poetas bajacalifornianos del siglo veinte (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1992, 1992), p. 15.
4 Trujillo Muñoz has anthologized Bernal in the canon of Baja California literature. See, for example, Entrecruzamientos. La cultura bajacaliforniana, sus autores y sus obras (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2002); Mensajeros de Heliconia. Capítulos sueltos de las letras bajacalifornianas 1832-2004 (México: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 2004); and La cultura bajacaliforniana y otros ensayos afines (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2005).
5 For more on various approaches to border and migrant modernism, see Christopher Schedler, Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and José David Saldívar, Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
6 Victor Valle, “LA’s Latina/o Phantom Nonfiction and the Technologies of Literary Secrecy,” in Latinx Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches from a Decolonial Rebellion, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo and Victor Valle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 7.
7 Nicolás Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States,” in Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography, edited by Nicolás Kanellos and Helvetia Martell (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000), p. 32. See also Ramón D. Chacón, “The Chicano Immigrant Press in Los Angeles: The Case of ‘El Heraldo de México,’ 1916-1920,” Journalism History 4, no. 2 (Summer 1977), pp. 48-50, 62-64.
8 For an excellent overview of this entertainment industry, see Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles Before World War II (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
9 Octavio Paz, “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude, translated by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 9-28.
10 This trend has been well documented by many scholars. See, for example, Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States”; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Colin Gunckel, Mexico on Main Street.
Facundo Bernal López (1883-1962)
Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz
Facundo Bernal is a man from the North. A son of Sonora, he was forced to leave his native state, and even his country, in order to escape political violence and upheaval. But Don Facundo, as his colleagues in the press would call him, was always a Sonoran at heart. He was born on October 16, 1883, in Hermosillo, the first son of Facundo Bernal Sr. and Luisa López de Bernal. His father worked for the state government, and the family’s economic situation was precarious, like that of many in Sonora in the years before the Revolution. Facundo Jr. received a secular fourth grade education from the Colegio Sonora, a public school. After the early death of Facundo Sr., the son took a government post no less dreary and miserable that the one his father had occupied. Yet he continued to educate himself with the help of his cultured mother, who ensured that no matter how difficult life was at the Bernal household, there was never a lack of books. Facundo read the poets of the Golden Age of Spanish literature — Garcilaso de la Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, and Lope de Vega — as well as the Romantics and the Latin American Modernistas, especially Rubén Darío, Gutiérrez Nájera, and Amado Nervo. This bookishness was not uncommon in Hermosillo, which was home to small but busy communities of foreign-born residents — French, North American, and English — brought to the region by the politic ups and downs of Maximilian’s empire, as well as Don Porfirio Díaz’s campaign for foreign investment. The town was close to the port of Guaymas, and was a stop on the new railroad, which brought not only raw materials, but also books, newspapers, and magazines from the interior of the country and from abroad.
This all contributed to a vibrant cultural atmosphere. Presiding over it were Manuel Campillo and Rodolfo Campodonico (1866-1926), who were troubadours of popular verse rather than champions of Latin American Modernismo, and clearly influenced Facundo’s poetic sensibility. And there was never a lack of political disputes in the town, nor a shortage of literary salons, dances, and bohemian gatherings replete with musicians and poets improvising, mano a mano, songs and poems celebrating their respective sweethearts. It’s no surprise, then, that Facundo — like his younger brother Francisco, born on October 4, 1896 — formed closer friendships with troubadours and musicians like Chito Peralta and Campodonico than they did with writers. Culture back then meant political rallies, dances, and block parties. Naturally, it found written expression most readily in journalism.
Facundo soon became an important voice in the Sonoran press, which itself became a prime mover behind the Revolution. He published teasingly erotic romantic sonnets along with articles and sarcastic verses targeting the arbitrary decisions of politicians and the greed of the mercantile class. It’s important to note that, in Sonoran society in those days, a writer was no better than any of the other locals, serving as something like a social worker, a promoter of interpersonal relationships, and an unofficial spokesperson for the community. Facundo’s writing possessed social utility, and had direct economic benefits for him personally. Consider this early poem, a parody of Manuel Acuña’s suicidal “Nocturno a Rosario,” which Facundo wrote to protest a promotion to Manager-Collector granted to the Copyist-Correspondent of Sonora’s General Treasury Office:
So. I must
inform the treasurer,
