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Gringo iracundo: Roque Dalton and His Father

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Roger Atwood
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Abstract

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In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. émigré father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the context of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.

Resumen

Resumen

En prosa y poesía y a lo largo de su carrera, Roque Dalton aprovechó la historia de su padre, un emigrado estadounidense, para explorar los temas de poder, dependencia e identidad que le ocupaban a él y a otros intelectuales salvadoreños de su época. Sin embargo, fue una imagen teatral de Winnall Dalton, la de un vaquero pistolero, que varios escritores posteriormente tomaron como verídica y que pasó a ser una parte arraigada de la reputación póstuma del poeta. Pretendo demostrar que la imagen de delincuente del Lejano Oeste es falsa y que Winnall Dalton provino de una acomodada familia mexicano-estadounidense de Arizona que sufrió penurias económicas poco antes de la migración a Centroamérica del joven Winnall en 1916. Dalton hurgaba en las paradojas de su pasado —criado en un barrio obrero como hijo ilegítimo de un millonario, también marxista revolucionario pero producto del más puro capitalismo— hasta poco antes de su muerte. Las representaciones cambiantes que él mismo creó de su padre nos brindan una vista más completa y matizada de los temas de poder y la identidad en el contexto de la lucha revolucionaria que terminó acabando con su vida.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , 2011 , pp. 126 - 149
Copyright
Copyright ©2011 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Twenty-eighth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, in June 2009. I conducted the research for this article as a visiting researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Latin American Studies. I am grateful to Angelo Rivero-Santos, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Arturo Valenzuela at Georgetown for their support. I am grateful also to Erik Ching of Furman College and to the LARR editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Also, my thanks go to the Dalton family in San Salvador and Havana for granting me interviews and access to Roque Dalton's papers.

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