Quinto Sol, Chicano/a Literature, and the Long March Through Institutions

Abstract

School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are elaborated. In the winter 1970 issue of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought, the editorial board of Quinto Sol Publications announced the first annual Premio Quinto Sol competition. With details repeated in English, Spanish, and caló (Chicano/a slang) Quinto Sol promised a publication contract and $1000 prize for the “best literary work of 1970—novel, collection of short stories, book-length essay or experimental writing—written by a person of Mexican descent who is a resident of the US,” or in caló, “el mejor jale literario—novela, ensayo, cuentos, o vatosismos—escrito por vato que cantonea en el U.S.A.” (“Premio”). The advent of the Premio marked Quinto Sol's entry into what James English has termed the economy of prestige, “a vast and relational field” comprising the exchange and conversion of symbolic capital among the various arenas of contemporary culture (23). English argues that cultural prizes serve as “our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion” (10), a term denoting the transformations and exchanges of monetary, cultural, social, and symbolic capital.1 Quinto Sol aimed its marketing of the prizewinners—Tomás Rivera's … y no se lo tragó la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Part in 1971, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima in 1972, and Rolando Hinojosa's Estampas del Valle y Otras Obras in 1973—aggressively at educators. The announcement of the prizewinners in the spring 1973 issue of El Grito, for example, includes a note that “these three award-winning works will be available for Fall 1973 classes” (“Winners”). The Premio thus created a circuit of capital intraconversion whereby the cultural capital of the Quinto Sol editors and writers, conspicuously manifest in their higher education bona fides and positions as academics at various universities, became the symbolic capital of the literary prize, which Quinto Sol then rerouted into new forms of cultural capital as the prizewinners became the foundation of the Chicano/a literature syllabus in classrooms across the country.

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