Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings

By Estela Portillo Trambley

178 Pages

Originally Published by  Tonatiuh International,

1975 (First Edition)*

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

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 One of the most historic books in the canon of Hispanic-American literature, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings is iconic on several fronts. It was:

• the first collection of short stories written by an American Latina that was published in the United States;
• the first book written by an American Latina to win an important national literary award (Quinto Sol Award, 1972);
• the first book written by a woman to win the Quinto Sol Award;
• one of the first books published in English by a Latina in modern American literature, coming on the heels of Nicholasa Mohr’s pioneer novel, Nilda (1974).

The breadth of Portillo Trambley’s literary output—novels, drama, poetry, and nonfiction in addition to short fiction—contributed significantly to the evolution of Hispanic-American literature until her death in 1998 at the age of 62.

Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings includes nine short stories and the title piece, which is a novella. Although most of the stories are set in the southwestern United States, Portillo Trambley effectively uses international backdrops to elucidate some characters’ struggles and mindsets—ranging from Paris in “The Paris Gown,” to Spain in “Duende,” Vietnam in “Recast,” Germany in “The Secret Room,” and Mexico in various stories. This strategy imbues her writings with an eclectic flavor that makes her characters even more universal.

Often referred to as a feminist, Portillo Trambley created strong women whose resilience and resourcefulness emanated from their premiums on family, self-knowledge, community, and love. Her female cast is wide-ranging, but their lives are all circumscribed by a male-dominated society and unyielding tradition. Breaking free of restrictions requires Portillo Trambley’s women to buck tradition, to invent and reinvent themselves in their own image, and—sometimes—even to commit crime.

There is the aristocratic Clotilde Romero in “The Paris Gown,” who sacrifices her reputation in her last-ditch effort to evade an arranged marriage and thus win her freedom; Nan Fletcher in “Pilgrimage,” whose husband deserts her for a younger woman, and who now, through the religious piety of her housekeeper Cuca, must find her own peace in the world; Marusha, the alienated Spanish gypsy in “Duende,” whose family emigrated to America for a better life but whose poverty cuts through her soul as she seeks financial and career success in vain; Lela, the pagan healer in “The Burning,” whose ministerings to the village people were gifts of love that were ultimately rejected in ideological ignorance; and Lupe, an obese, unattractive young woman in “Rain of Scorpions,” who leads life to the fullest despite unfulfilled fantasies and who embodies selflessness and wisdom.

The boldest rebel against male oppression appears in the last short story of the book, “If It Weren’t for the Honeysuckle,” set in an isolated Mexican village. Beatriz, “a slender, small woman,” juxtaposes her abiding gentleness with a deliberateness that shocks. At the age of fourteen, she ran away with Robles, an abusive, middle-aged drunkard whom she knew was married and had children. But Beatriz was a virtual slave in her own home, cleaning and washing for nine demanding brothers, and saw an opportunity to establish her own life apart from men by becoming Robles’ lover, a traveling vegetable vendor who was often absent. A hard worker, Beatriz built her home with her own hands and even took in another of Robles’ mistresses. Beatriz’ tolerance of Robles’ abusiveness reached its limits, however, when he left a young, ailing girl with Beatriz one day and planned to ravage her upon his return a couple of weeks hence. Beatriz’ protectiveness toward the girl and her hatred of Robles’ violence toward women fused with her knowledge of gardening to conjure a plan that stopped Robles dead in his tracks.

Though Robles is Portillo Trambley’s most unsavory male in this book, there are others: Clotilde’s autocratic father in “The Paris Gown,” a man who cares more for social aggrandizement than for his daughter’s happiness; the Ayala brothers in “The Trees,” who give in to carnal pleasure, jealousy, and greed, thereby destroying the proud family heritage their father had built for them; Manolo, a New York actor who denigrates other struggling actors in his quest to become a star, and who loses more than his integrity in “Recast”;  and Chucho, an alcoholic wastrel in “Pay the Criers,” who steals and squanders his dead mother-in-law’s money intended for her funeral, then tries to belatedly make amends.

Yet Portillo Trambley, who strove to “discover…the miracle of people and a world,” as she wrote on the back cover of her book, saw beauty and goodness in men’s souls as she did in women’s. The most touching, sympathetic males in her book are not oppressive and rigid. In “The Secret Room,” Julius (Julio) Otto Vass Schleifer, a German heir in Mexico, reflects upon his deceased father’s fascination with Hitler and the “master race,” and realizes that there are greater things in life—such as social justice and true love—than one’s own culture and wealth,. In “Duende,” the gypsy immigrant Triano is widely known in his impoverished neighborhood as “a good listener…who melted well into life…[and] mended things and people.” His greatest unhappiness is his little sister’s lack of joy in life. Everything Triano does is aimed at helping her; his illiterate, devoted mother; and the struggling women he sees all around.

But Portillo Trambley saves her best for last: the title novella, in which brave, ordinary people, young and old, male and female, join forces to fight a greedy corporation’s destruction of their community and their people through unbridled pollution and deception. The male heroes in this novella—a war veteran named Fito who lost a leg in Vietnam; Papa At, who is Smeltertown’s resident sage and patriarch; and the twelve-year-old Miguel, an insightful boy who loves to learn and help others—ultimately meld their demands for justice, their pride in their Indian heritage, and their determination to solve their problems in a touching manner that forges a deeper level of community and peace in their daily lives.

Portillo Trambley is highly poetic in her writing. Her incisive observations of people and of life itself are so profound and so elegantly stated, one could write a small book of quoted excerpts from this work. She delves into the souls of her characters and helps us feel  their suffering. She expresses her recurrent themes—especially the preciousness of freedom, the importance of orderliness in life, and the diminution of women by a male society—in a cadence reminiscent of verse and great speeches, replete with alliteration, repetition, metaphors, and imagery.

For example, the author states: “It had been decreed long ago by man-made laws that living things were not equal. It had been decreed that women should be possessions, slaves, pawns in the hands of men with ways of beasts. It had been decreed that women were to be walloped effigies to burn upon the altars of men.” (p. 106) This elevates her prose to heavenly heights at many points in her book. Yet this quality is sometimes intertwined with the shortcomings of her work as well.

One criticism that has been leveled against the early work of Portillo Trambley, especially Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings, is that it is sometimes heavy-handed with preaching, that she editorializes rather than lets the story tell itself. This is a valid critique of her book. In addition, sometimes her descriptions, striving for poetic impact, are convoluted and thus not as effective as they might be were they streamlined and direct. For example: “A convex reflection of mood, the older woman was a human focal point against the subjectivity of artistic experience in meaningful arrangement around the room.” (p. 2) Stated simply: the woman was surrounded by beautiful pieces of well-placed art.

But experience shows us that the “firsts” of anything important are not as developed as they will eventually be. Portillo Trambley’s pioneering literature broke ground and glass ceilings. It gave voice to women authors where no woman’s voice was prevalent. It portrayed a unique culture that had been largely invisible on the literary stage. The testament to Portillo Trambley’s artistry came in her evolution, as all writers ideally grow and evolve. In the re-issue of Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (see footnote below), Portillo Trambley’s refined critical eye caused her to replace a handful of the original stories with new ones and caused her to inject substantive changes to characters and themes in the original stories she kept. She had grown immensely as an author, but this should not diminish the validity and beauty of her early work.

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*   A testament to the importance of this book is its 15^th anniversary re-issue by Bilingual Press in 1993. Portillo Trambley revised the book extensively and re-titled it Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories. Fans and scholars are thus able to compare the two versions of the book to better appreciate the evolution of the author’s long, distinguished career.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

Nilda, by Nicholasa Mohr

Arte Público Press: 2011

248 ppg.

Originally published by Harper & Row: 1974

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

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Nicholasa Mohr (b. 1938) has been described as the most prolific and renowned Puerto Rican-American novelist. Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, Mohr represents the “Nuyorican” writers (“New York Puerto Ricans”), a group that first rose to national prominence for their considerable talents in the 20th century and who continue to attract readers today.

Since Puerto Ricans officially became American citizens in 1917, Mohr’s antecedents, though strongly tied to their island culture, were not immigrants, but migrants rather, in the often-alien, unwelcoming American city. Mohr grew up in the 1940’s, with World War II a gauzy backdrop, and suffered the proverbial slings and arrows of prejudice and discrimination.

That Nicholasa Mohr became a published writer when she did is a stroke of luck for Hispanic-American literature. As a young woman, she was first and foremost a visual artist. By chance, her art agent once asked her to write 50 pages of childhood reminiscences for a possible book project. Although he subsequently rejected this writing in a humiliating critique, she shared this small manuscript with a chief editor who had solicited her artwork for someone else’s book. Mohr’s illustrations for that book were turned down, but the editor liked the 50 pages of reminiscences and contracted Mohr to write a novel based on those. Mohr completed the novel, NILDA, that same year. The rest, as they say, is history.

With the well-received publication of NILDA in 1974, Mohr cemented her place in American literature. She was one of the earliest Hispanic-Americans to publish her writings in English in the United States and one of the first to write a young adult book in English. Mainstream America at that time had little interest in publications about Latino people. But Nicholasa Mohr’s book successfully crossed the divide. Since 1974, she has been the most productive and most renowned Nuyorican novelist, earning numerous major awards and publishing in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, novellas, and nonfiction. Her influence in other authors’ development has been significant, not just through her 10 published books, but also through her workshops and university teaching.

NILDA recounts the life of a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx from 1941 through 1945, as seen through the central consciousness viewpoint of the only daughter in the family and the youngest child, Nilda. Her family is poor, large, and as diverse in personality and outlook as her neighborhood. But these nine people, with their varying degrees of dysfunction and tension, are the source of stability and love that enable Nilda to navigate her childhood intact. She, as well as other Puerto Ricans, regularly encounters naked racism and marginalization, often at the hands of authority figures who should, paradoxically, be protecting and nurturing her: neighborhood policemen, nuns and priests at a Catholic summer camp, her teachers at school, and social service workers allegedly providing economic assistance for struggling families like hers. Worse, these perpetrators of racism are seemingly oblivious to their cutting words and actions. After policemen abuse her kind-hearted neighbor, Nilda notes that these cops “loomed larger and more powerful than all the other people in her life.”

The novel begins when Nilda is 10 years old and ends when she is 14. In this span of time, World War II begins and ends. Also, Nilda finds and loses religion; loses her stepfather; learns that her beloved brother Jimmy has impregnated and abandoned a young woman who is then sheltered by Nilda’s mother; helps care for her mentally unbalanced aunt; witnesses a policeman falsely accuse her friend of a crime and almost beat him to death; and endures other calamities that would have destroyed a lesser child. Through it all, Nilda is alternately petulant and carefree, defiant and obedient, aloof and moved to tears, frightened and resolute. Her best friend becomes pregnant and drops out of school. But Nilda exhibits the resilience of her mother and moves forward despite the biggest loss of all.

The Ramirez family is the broad backdrop of this narrative. Nilda’s mother, Lydia, is the matriarchal rock, an interminable font of patience, practicality, and initiative. She shepherds her family through quarrels, sickness, and despair and somehow manages to keep food on the table and consejos always flowing. Her strength comes from a deep religiosity that she tries to impart to her children, especially to Nilda, and from an almost martyr-like acceptance of her hard life. Her dreams are pinned on her children, especially her daughter, whom she constantly exhorts to study hard and make something of herself.

Nilda is tugged between her mother’s spirituality and her stepfather Emilio’s communistic, nihilistic rejection of faith. The parents’ polarity symbolizes the contradictions in the family members themselves: There is Jimmy—handsome, dashing, and utterly charming—yet embroiled with drugs and thugs and breaking his mother’s heart. There is Victor, the scholar and gentleman most suited for success, who is first to enlist in war and dash his mother’s dreams. There is Aunt Delia—old, deaf, and caustic—whose obsession with ghoulish newspaper reports is trumped by her vulnerability, which engenders the family’s loyalty to her. In a poignant scene toward the end of the book, we learn that Nilda’s mother, whose devotion to her family was the engine that drove her life, had deep regrets that embodied the most heart-wrenching contradiction of all.

People are the main ingredient of storytelling. People drive the plots and themes and embody the heart and soul of the structure we call literature. When people as literary characters are authentic and speak to us in voices we recognize, in voices that resonate with our own experiences, the written piece is successful. And if these characters engage in self-examination and reflection and share their insights with us, thus expanding our own self-knowledge as they reveal their own…well, the literature soars and takes us up with it.

Perhaps because NILDA is a young adult novel, or perhaps because it is a debut novel, it falls short in the latter criterion of excellence. Although the child Nilda is sympathetic and authentic, she rarely engages in reflection, even as a teenager, and this renders her less multi-dimensional than she could have been. The central consciousness viewpoint of the book does not allow us to enter the minds of the other characters, but Nilda’s thoughts could have been explored further.
Literary critics of ethnic-minority works have pointed out that early writers often focus on their personal minority experiences, which often include prejudice and various levels of cultural and racial oppression. It is the evolution of these authors’ art that eventually expands their creativity outward, to broader, more universal themes.

NILDA, as a pioneering novel, captures the unique cultural experiences of New York’s Puerto Ricans in the 1940’s and therefore secures a solid place in the history of our literature as such. It still resonates decades later because its cultural depictions of family, love, individual pride, and resilience in the face of hardship still matter.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression:
Egalitarian Systemic Models for Social Change

By Dr. Armando Navarro

2012, Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Reviewed  Dr. José Calderon

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The book “Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression: Egalitarian Systemic Models for Social Change” is a testament to Armando Navarro’s forty-four years of activism, thirty-seven years of teaching, and a lifetime of seeking alternatives to the historical inequities of U. S. capitalism.  Navarro has always sought ways to connect his academic research and teaching to practical organizing and he does it well in this thoughtful discourse.

This book is timely. All people, regardless of their political persuasion, are facing the realities of the crisis of Capitalism and Navarro gets at the historical and structural reasons for this crisis.  The historical aspect of the book looks at the consistent contradictions of a system that is based on profit above everything else and details how the U. S. has been through 48 recessions when there were downturns in the Gross Development Product, periods of overproduction, loss of jobs, and lowering of quality of life. Navarro observes that this was often done through colonization and using the markets of other countries that were under the control of the U. S. to ease the internal domestic crisis and to get production going again.

A compelling aspect of Narvarro’s narrative is that he distinguishes between a recession and depression, He is consistent in documenting the cyclical nature of these economic crises as being rooted in an economic structure whose primary interests are focused on profit and not on the well-being of the majority of people nationally and globally.  The structure itself is held responsible for a melt-down of financial institutions and millions of workers hurled into unemployment, poverty, hunger and homelessness.

Armando’s book details how the present global economic crisis is steadily eroding the U. S.’s historical hegemony and how the second great depression in the United States is driving a global capitalist and economic crisis.

Background: before and after World War II, the U. S. remained top dog and could get out of its recessions through passing on the crisis to other nations.  Armando’s book relates how “right after World War II, capitalism went from welfare capitalism (which had begun with FDR’s New Deal in 1933) to the rise of neoliberal capitalism (particularly with the election of  Ronald Reagan) who replaced Keynes’s thinking with a flexible market strategy that implemented tighter global economic links through privatization  (transferring ownership of business from the public sector ( the government) to the private sector (business) and advancing market deregulation reforms  as a means to generate competition, efficiency, and growth.”

But today, Navarro shows us, not every country is accepting neoliberalism and that globalization includes many nations now developing their own economies, on the one hand, while tied interdependently to a world capitalist economy on the other.  Here, Armando’s book looks at some examples of “the winds of socialist change in Latin America” such as that led by Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution.

The issue of planning in the interests of the majority is a key issue for Navarro. The character of monopoly capitalism is that it has the highest level of planning in individual corporations that do everything competitively to reap the most profits.  However, there is a lack of planning on a national and international level and, as Armando’s book proposes, rather than a culture of collectivity dominating to use the earth’s resources to solve the many problems threatening our survival, there is a culture of greed and selfishness in the forefront.

What Armando and I have in common, flowing from the calls for structural change in this book, is the proposition that “the crisis is creating an opportunity to transform U. S. capitalism into a benevolent, humane, egalitarian, socially and economically just democratic system.”  We concur that there is a need to advance a dialogue on the contradictions inherent in the system of capitalism, deepen research on the new local and global economic models that are emerging, and promote the growth of a movement based on the creation of transformative structural models of equity.

This movement, part of what Armando is proposing in his book, is one that is based on rethinking the nature of ownership and rethinking the definition of “growth” as a basis for gauging whether there is progress.  We need more study, innovation, and implementation: how to build examples of “systemic change,” where the resources are used for a new type of growth that is rooted in creating a better quality of life for all.  This can include worker-owned companies, cooperatives, and social enterprises that use the people’s resources for serving just and equitable community-building goals. There is a need to build a new movement that is collective and based on challenging the undemocratic policies bred by the character of the old systemic structure.

As an example, in the state of California, community-based coalitions have challenged the federal government’s immigration enforcement policies by organizing and passing legislation allowing undocumented students, not only to go to college, but to receive financial aid.  In the city of Pomona, a coalition of pro-immigrant organizations, Pomona Habla, changed city council policies that discriminated against undocumented immigrants and were part of a larger movement resulting in the passage of a statewide bill allowing anyone stopped at a checkpoint without a driver’s license to have someone come and pick up their car.  This will kill the millions of dollars being made by the tow truck and impoundment companies.

The governor, as a result of these movements, also signed a bill that called for “neither California nor any of its cities, counties, or special districts require an employer to use E-Verify as a condition of receiving a government contract, applying for or maintaining a business license, or as a penalty for violating licensing o other similar laws.”

These same coalitions are gathering signatures now to enact a new law that gives qualified undocumented immigrants who pay state income taxes the option to enter a program whose participants will gain relief from federal enforcement and whose labor will be decriminalized.

Armando’s book is a stand out. It gives us the structural and historical roots of this economic crisis, and also provides a longer-term vision of what our global world can begin to look like and what type of “transformational leadership” it will take locally and nationally to make it a reality.  It is a compelling contribution to the dialogue going on about the problems in the economic systems that we know today, Capitalist, Socialist, and Social Democratic, with the outlook that there is a need for new theories and new models that can pave the way for a new economy.

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“Bless Me, Ultima” by Rudolfo Anaya

First published 1972

Reviewed by Luís Torres

March 8, 2012

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Jesús Treviño, the man behind the curtain at Latinopia, had a solid idea. Why not take another look at some of the books that have become classics in Chicano literature? (I regularly write contemporary book reviews for a number of newspapers.) I thought Treviño’s idea was an excellent one and I agreed to be part of a team to take on the challenge. We thought it would be a good idea to begin with arguably the most storied Chicano novel of all time. We are talking, of course, about Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark novel “Bless Me, Ultima.”

First published by a small publishing house back in 1972 it has since sold nearly a half-a-million copies. It has satisfied readers, both Latino and non-Latino, with its impeccable storytelling and its universal analysis of the threshold between innocence and understanding, between wonder and awareness, between the power of the spirit and the presumed rationality of the intellect. It is about the power of myth and legacy. Now published and distributed by a mainstream publishing house, it is still enthralling readers. It has won the praise of critics and captured the hearts of readers in the United States and beyond. And deservedly so.

It is still captivating readers and winning critical praise. This year Anaya will be awarded the Robert Kirsch Prize for literature by the Los Angeles Times, an award recognizing lifetime achievement.

Reading the novel again recently was like encountering an old friend. Can it be that I first read it more than forty years ago? Has time raced that quickly? “Bless Me, Ultima” has become an iconic tapestry of Chicano literature, and it has inspired an entire generation of Latino fiction writers. Upon reading it again, it becomes clear why that is so.

The novel “holds up.” And then some. When we read a book that’s beautiful or somehow moves us, we are

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

participating in a process. We bring something to the book, based on our experiences and our perspectives. You are not the same person who read the book forty years ago, and so you imbue the experience with your own memories, recollections and, one hopes, insights into the world around us. And the book, if superbly written, isn’t exactly the same book either. It is certainly moored in the craftsmanship and thoughtfulness that made it compelling in the first place. Fundamentally, the book hasn’t changed, but we have. But, in a sense, the book has “evolved” as you, the reader, have evolved. Reading it again recently was an extremely satisfying experience. (In fact, I read “Bless Me, Ultima” a second time about twenty years ago when I was nearing the age of forty and it stood out not only as a wonderful work of art but as a reflection of my own life and frame of reference.) The third time was quite a charm.

For readers who were born during the Bill Clinton administration, maybe a note or two about the social-cultural cauldron that existed in Aztlán in the early 1970s when the book was first embraced by readers is in order. It was published at a time when college students were eagerly reading books such as Carlos Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan.” A complex but marvelous experiment in writing and thinking. Was it anthropology? Was it pure fiction? Did it really matter? It stirred questions in us about the nature of reality. What really is? What isn’t? How the hell can we genuinely distinguish between them?

It was part of a cultural and spiritual quest that captivated many of us young Chicanos, most of whom were the first in their family to go to college and have the comparative luxury to indulge in such questioning. So, “Bless Me, Ultima” tugged at some of those same questions, but in a format and context wholly different from Castañeda’s “Teachings of Don Juan” and his subsequent books exploring those issues.

Original Art by Dennis Martinez

“Bless Me, Ultima” tells an engaging story of a Chicanito’s coming of age. It tells it in a context that is familiar and yet a bit mysterious to us all. Young Antonio wonders if understanding must come only at the loss of innocence. In his own way he ponders the sources of good and evil. He wonders about his place in the immediate world around him and in the larger universe. And it’s all told magically.

There’s a cast of characters including  a benign and powerful curandera, town locas perceived to be brujas, drunkards, priests and prostitutes. And there’s no end of page-turning violence and action. A good story is a good story. And “Bless Me, Ultima” is certainly that, but it is much more. It’s an exploration into tradition versus contemporary reality. An exploration of the lessons of history and the unforeseen potential of the future. It’s an exploration of love and trust and meaning. It takes place in rural New Mexico, a place where the life of the wild, beguiling llano contrasts with the stolid life of the domestic farm. That is its specific geographic and temporal context. But its tale is transcendent; it is universal.

When the novel opens we meet six-year-old Antonio who is on the cusp of a process, despite his young age, of seeking to understand the world around him. As we’ll soon discover, he is torn between several seeming extremes. His father is a descendant of vaqueros of the llano who are crafted from a culture of independence and wanderlust. His mother is from generations of people of the earth, farmers who are linked to the seasons and the bounty that comes their way from being custodians of the nourished and fertile land. Antonio is also somewhat torn between two separate spiritual ways of being: there is the European Catholic church that gives sustenance to his mother and there is the broad and mysterious spiritual perspective that is shown to him by his paternal grandmother, Ultima.

Which side is he on? Which paths should he follow?

Ultima, a curandera who heals people because of her connection to an indigenous way of being and understanding, comes to live with Antonio’s family when the novel begins. Gradually she teaches Antonio about “good and evil” from a perspective quite different from that of his mother’s Christian god. But to Ultima, all things can work in harmony, if one’s heart is open. Antonio’s mother wants him to grow up to be a Catholic priest. Ultima suggests that he will be “a man of learning.”

We follow Antonio as he begins to make his way, trying to understand the world.

Antonio sees darkness and violence all around him. Among other things he sees a man being killed. He tries to reconcile all of this, wondering how a beneficent god can allow such things. Ultima becomes his teacher and his protector. But Ultima herself eventually faces a very serious danger and Antonio tries to protect her.

It is a riveting, sensitively told tale. And, as I say, it still holds up – on many levels. As it happens, I recently also reread Harper Lee’s phenomenal “To Kill A Mockingbird” after first reading it thirty years ago or so. Like “Ultima,” it decidedly “holds up.” And, now that I’m a bit of an anciano, there was more to it than there was before. The book hadn’t changed; I had. I believe – at least I hope – that my own growth and my own experiences made the book resonate differently and more meaningfully than it had before. It’s because of the solid work that it is, a work that allows our experiences to reflect the characters, thoughts and experiences in the book. That’s what outstanding writing is about. And that’s definitely the case with “Bless Me, Ultima.” It’s a delight to read for the first time and a new, fulfilling challenge with every time you revisit it.

On the fortieth anniversary of its initial publication it remains a stellar literary achievement. But it’s also a sign of our political times that the misguided book burners masquerading as legislators and school officials of Arizona have taken it upon themselves to ban “Bless Me, Ultima” as somehow subversive and politically dangerous. Yeah, a lot has happened in our culture since I first read this marvelous book so many years ago.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from

Pasadena, California, is at work on a

book that examines the 1968 East  Los

Angeles high school student walkouts.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul
by Oscar Hijuelos

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com.

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Oscar Hijuelos, acclaimed Cuban-American author of eight books, wrote Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) as a prequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1986). In the prequel, Hijuelos gives readers the back story of the supremely beautiful woman who broke musician Nestor Castillo’s heart in The Mambo Kings.  And what a back story it is!

The book covers 45 years, starting with Maria in Cuba at the age of 17 and ending with her in Miami, Florida, at the age of 62. In this span, we see the pre-Castro island nation in all its glory, beauty, and seediness. We learn about the decline of life for Cubans once Castro assumed power, and we follow Maria and her toddler daughter, Teresita, when they emigrate to America with hundreds of others and struggle to build a new life.

Author, Oscar Hijuelos

In this span, Hijuelos lays the seeds for his themes and slowly unwraps each one like gifts we anticipate but also dread: the fleeting nature and complexity of love, even true love; the losses and suffering that even the good endure; the seeming indifference and cruelty of God; the importance of memory in our lives; and the essential role of family.

Beautiful Maria Garcia y Sifuentes is a 17-year-old naïve, illiterate country girl living in extreme poverty in a tiny village in western Cuba. Her two brothers, teenaged sister, and beloved mother have one by one died untimely deaths, leaving her broken-hearted and alone with her sometimes-abusive, sometimes-tender father. In 1947, Maria decides that she must seek her independence and leaves the only world she’s ever known to travel to Havana, a bustling, frightening city filled with goodness, coarseness, and evil. She becomes a dancer in a rundown nightclub and alone must navigate the dangers and temptations of the city’s night life.

Her gift—extreme beauty of face and body that draws barrages of attention—is likewise a curse. She tires of men trying to seduce her, trying to impose their coarseness upon her, and wonders if it’s possible to find a good man who can love her for more than beauty. She appreciates her gifts, however, and uses them to advance her career, rising to be the featured dancer in the club and working as a model.

Virginal Maria eventually takes up with an older man, Ignacio, who has a shady reputation as a small-time gangster but who is generous with his attention and money and provides her with respectability and stability. Like her father, however, he sometimes beats and denigrates her; and Maria decides to leave him. During a violent argument with Ignacio, she meets Nestor Castillo, a poetic, soulful, handsome musician who rescues her from Ignacio’s rage. Nestor’s humility and saintliness, as well as his physical beauty, immediately appeal to Maria; and she and Nestor soon become lovers. Their passion is intense and endless, depicted by the author in highly graphic, explicit detail.

Nestor, for all his talents in and out of bed, is poor and simple. His gifts—besides the anatomical ones well-documented by Hijuelos—lie in his songwriting and his undying commitment to Maria. But Maria, accustomed to luxury after living with Ignacio, can only imagine a life of poverty if she marries Nestor, who proposes to her repeatedly, each time being rebuffed. Although enamored of Nestor sexually, she is not sure she truly loves him, plus her financial comfort trumps life with Nestor. She thus returns to Ignacio, and the broken-hearted Nestor eventually leaves with his older brother, Cesar Castillo, for New York to start a new life. (The Mambo Kings depicts the brothers’ lives from this point forward.)

Maria takes pride in her rise from poverty and learns to read and write. As the years pass, her father, her last surviving family member, dies. Maria feels the loss of this last link with family very deeply. She also misses Nestor and realizes that she made a mistake in rejecting him. He writes her wistful letters of undying love, and reminds her of a song he’s perfecting in her honor: “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” Regarding Ignacio, she discovers several secret affairs. Each loss oozes a layer of hardness on Maria’s soul. Once devout, she now questions God and mocks him. She realizes that even love is “ephemeral and useless….like air.” The sweet, soft-hearted girl has become taciturn, critical, and jaded.

Maria comes to believe that having her own child will bring her happiness, and she wants Nestor to be the father. Although she learns that Nestor is now married and has two children, she believes Nestor still loves her, since he’s been writing letters to her since his departure to New York. She travels to New York to reunite with him and, hopefully, to be impregnated by him. Despite great qualms, Nestor agrees to meet Maria secretly and proceeds to ravage her like in old times. What happens after this secret reunion changes their lives forever and leads to great tragedy for both of them.

Hijuelos’ book is beautifully poetic in language and insights. He writes in a conversational style, filled with Cuban dialect, slang, and code-switching (alternating between English and Spanish), which makes his writing full of color and authenticity. Hijuelos creates memorable characters who are imperfect, who fill us with admiration and with revulsion. We can admire the tender-hearted Maria, but we can’t admire the young woman who chose money over love, or who, at the age of 50 and 60, is vain and largely unemotional. Nestor’s modesty as a young Cuban fills our hearts with respect, but his sexual foray as a married man shows his weakness. Still, these characters are human, and we can relate to them and learn from them.

Hijuelos has been criticized in the past for filling his books with too much sex, oftentimes in crude depictions. In this book, he can indeed be faulted for this. Although some sex scenes are described in evocative, literary language, the book could easily be reduced by dozens of pages with the elimination of redundant erotica that sometimes seems gratuitous. Hijueolos can also be faulted for his relentless repetition of “beautiful” throughout the book, and his descriptions of Maria’s beauty so oversaturated to the point of caricature. Again, this book could have been slimmer and still have been convincing.

No book is perfect. The importance of Beautiful Maria of My Soul  is the author’s deft, unique treatment of how loss and unrequited love cut mercilessly into the human spirit; but also of how extremely humanizing family connectedness is, and how time and memories can mellow us out, if we remain open to possibilities, and we can find love in the most unexpected places. Hijuelos’ book expertly convinces us of this.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com.

“Before the End, After the Beginning”
Written by Dagoberto Gilb
Published by Grove Press
195 Pages
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Reviewed by Luís Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

You would think a collection of short stories imbued with meditations on mortality and the fragile nature of human existence itself would be ponderous and moribund. But that is certainly not the case with the latest book by celebrated writer Dagoberto Gilb. He deftly explores such issues through the perspectives of intriguing, complex characters and masterful sculpting with words. And there is subtle humor and sly wordplay as well, all adding up to a satisfying and heartwarming experience for the reader.

Gilb’s new book is an engaging and thought-provoking collection of short stories titled “Before the End, After the Beginning.” It’s a pity the short story, in the view of many, is a dying art form. This collection is a lively counterpoint to that assertion. Here’s a recommendation: turn of the TV tonight, settle into a comfortable chair and spend a pleasurable evening with this little treasure trove of a book.

Los Angeles-born Dagoberto Gilb is a prolific writer who has won the accolades of critics for more than twenty years. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking novel “The Magic of Blood.” It has been regarded as a landmark of Chicano literature. But it is much more than that. It transcends any pigeonholing of genre. It is an example of fine literature – period.

His new book was created under somewhat unusual circumstances. About two years ago Gilb was knocked for a loop when he suffered a debilitating stroke. Dogged persistence helped him gradually recover. And the stories in this collection were crafted during the process of his recovery. That process informs some of these stories, sometimes overtly and sometimes a bit more subtly.

Dagboberto Gilb at La Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

The collection begins with a story titled “Please, Thank You.” It is told from the point of view of a young man in the hospital, feeling like a fish out of water. The character wakes up and finds he’s survived some severe medical trauma. He has trouble focusing. He has trouble remembering. He’s uncertain about the tactile world around him. He struggles as he tries to get his mind and his body to work in unison. And the tale is told in a style that befits the confused perspective of someone undergoing such an ordeal. It is all written in lower-case, with sparse and inconsistent punctuation. Again, a style that reflects the perspective of the character as he tries to make sense of his surroundings and sense of his own identity and personal history.
Gilb is quite the wordsmith. When he is at his best as a sculptor with words, he invites comparison to the lofty, magical prose of Salman Rushdie, among the most masterful of wordsmiths.

Another story in Gilb’s new collection weaves a tale of a man who goes to Mexico, seemingly with the intention of living out his final days. The gradual degeneration of his memory and ability to navigate the world around him evoke essential questions about who we are and what makes us what we are. Heady stuff. But woven in beautifully literate and accessible fashion. It is typical of the stories in this fine collection from one of this country’s most emerging innovative writers.
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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas

Reviewed by Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D.

www.ThelmaReyna.com .

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Two milestone events regarding the vaunted Puerto-Rican American author, Piri Thomas, occurred recently: He passed away last month in Northern California at the age of 83; and his iconic memoir, Down These Mean Streets, celebrated its 44th birthday. Though the first event breaks our hearts, and the second uplifts us, both attest to the longevity of Thomas’ artistry and influence and the wonderful luck our society has had in having Piri Thomas in our midst for all these years.

He died an icon, a proverbial legend in his own time. When Mean Streets was published in 1967, Thomas was one of the first modern-day Latinos to publish a book in English. He followed this break-out with two novels, a collection of short stories, and many poems, which he termed “wordsongs” and performed in varied venues all over the world. Yet it’s Mean Streets, which has been continuously in print, that cemented Thomas’ reputation as a literary tour de force and which readers most associate with Piri Thomas.

The book’s enduring fame is strongly warranted. One reviewer calls it “three books in one”: a coming-of-age saga chronicling the tragedies, crimes, and entanglements in Thomas’ life; an examination of the identity crisis many disadvantaged, mixed heritage youths undergo; and a story showing readers the bristling underside of Piri’s six years in the infamous Sing-Sing Prison of New York. Yet the author expertly weaves these separate themes together in his fast-paced, brutally authentic recreation of his difficult life growing up poor, half-Black, half-Puerto Rican, in an era of entrenched racism uglier than it now is.

The book begins in 1941, shortly before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into World War II. To 12-year-old Piri in New York’s Harlem during the “Great Hunger called Depression,” the big “rumble” means that his father now has a decent job in an airplane factory. Otherwise: “Life in the streets didn’t change much. The bitter cold was followed by the sticky heat….War or peace—what difference did it really make?” Indeed, there is no distinction between Piri’s world before and after the great rumble, because his wars with his family, peers, racism, violence, drugs, crime, and society in general are just beginning and will disrupt his world for decades to come.

Author, Piri Thomas

Piri is a dark-skinned child in a bi-racial family where, other than his Black father, everyone is light-skinned and can pass for White. He frequently clashes with his father, who treats him with less love and harsher physical discipline than Piri’s four younger siblings receive. Convinced that his father doesn’t truly love him because of his darkness, Piri seeks solace in the streets, where he navigates the unwritten laws of survival in the barrio: Prove yourself to be tough. Survive beatings at the hands of racist kids and rival gang members. Fight back hard. Don’t rat out enemies, and be “cool.” Above all, be loyal to your friends, going with the flow, “playing it smooth.” He emphasizes: “Never punk out.”

So by the time Piri is 16, he belongs to a gang, beats up rivals, uses drugs, slugs a teacher, engages in homosexuality, and robs a store: all in the name of group loyalty. When his parents move the family to Long Island for “better opportunities,” Piri is reviled by racist schoolmates, and he drops out of school to return to Harlem, often living on the streets. It breaks his mother’s heart, but Piri yearns for the security of the old neighborhood. His life of crime in Harlem, filled as it is with hunger, poverty, drug addiction, and isolation from family, is nonetheless tied to camaraderie, to unconditional acceptance, and is a siren’s song Piri cannot resist. He states: “All for the feeling of belonging, for the price of being called ‘one of us.’ Isn’t there a better way to make the scene and be accepted on the street without having to go through hell?”

Piri undertakes a double-layered odyssey to discover who and what he is. On the one hand, it’s a physical journey that takes him, as a teenager, through the Deep South, around the world with the Merchant Marines, and back and forth between Harlem and Long Island. Outside of Harlem, he faces discrimination almost everywhere he goes. It seems that Piri seeks a place that will prove his worldview wrong, that he wants proof that his skin color does not determine his value as a human being. Unfortunately, in these journeys, Piri does not find such a place.

On another layer, his odyssey is highly personal and emotional as he struggles to believe that he is loved fully in his own family. He tries to reconcile his affection for his family with his bitterness toward their “whiteness.” It’s an eternal battle in his heart. His utter devotion to his mother opposes his antipathy toward his father, whom he sees as having rejected his own Black heritage with lies about his lineage. Piri’s hatred of Whites is profound, but this creates immense conflict. He says: “It was like hating Momma for the color she was and Poppa for the color he wasn’t.” He also states: “It ain’t just that I don’t wanna be what I’m supposed to be, it’s just that I’m fightin’ me and the whole goddamn world at the same time.” It’s one of the book’s great ironies that, as Piri struggles to win full acceptance from his family, he rejects them and ostracizes himself.

An armed robbery in which Piri shoots a police officer and is almost shot to death lands him in prison, where, with time, he finally finds himself—through carefully choosing his con friends, studying every major religion, attending classes, and eventually turning to writing. “Every day,” the author writes, “brought a painful awareness of the sweetness of being free and the horror of prison’s years going down the toilet bowl.” He sought “a release from the overpowering hatred against a society that makes canaries out of human beings.” In a heart-wrenching reflection, he adds: “I wanted to tell somebody I wanted to be somebody.” The peace and release he ultimately finds are an apt denouement to his evolution.

Down These Mean Streets is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of one man’s decline and renascence. Piri Thomas’ rat-a-tat-tat dialogue injects a sensual immediacy that grabs the reader and doesn’t loosen up. The economical descriptions of the people, good and bad, who cross Piri’s path and fill his life are true-to-life. But the greatest treasures between the book covers are Thomas’ thoughtful, lyrical passages that underscore his renown as a poet. When Piri most doubts himself, when he most fervently fishes in his mind for answers to his fears, when he most reflects upon his learnings in prison—and his realization that, as he says, “Nothing is run the same, nothing stays the same. You can’t make yesterday come back today”—the author’s poetic words soar through the air and lend a gentle, almost spiritual layer to his book.

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Thelma T. Reyna, Ph.D. is author of The Heavens Weep for Us and Other Stories (2009, Outskirts Press), which has won four national awards. Her short stories, poems, essays, book reviews, and other non-fiction have been published in literary and academic journals, literature textbooks, anthologies, blogs, and regional media off and on since the 1970’s. Her first poetry chapbook, Breath & Bone (Finishing Line Press, 2011) was a semi-finalist in a national poetry chapbook competition. Dr. Reyna is an adjunct professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her website is www.ThelmaReyna.com .

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California”

by Carlos Manuel Salomon

University of Oklahoma Press

223 pages

Luis Torres luis.r.torres@charter.net (626) 577-5664 March 10, 2011

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Have you ever visited the stately and ornate Pico House near Olvera Street, in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall? Ever wondered what went on in that building and how it got its name? A new book about Pio Pico, the last governor of California during the Mexican era will inform you and will give you a fascinating glimpse into the early history of California, a time when it went from being part of Mexico to becoming the 31st state in the United States of America.

“Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California” by Carlos Manuel Salomon uses the intriguing and often quixotic life of Pio de Jesús Pico as a thread for revealing remarkable historical, political and cultural trends that marked California’s often rocky transition from Mexican to United States sovereignty. It is a tale of military heroism, political maneuvering, far reaching real estate shenanigans and efforts to overcome prejudice and injustice. All the tale needs is a comely heroine or a rescued damsel in distress. But it is history, not fiction. And it is a briskly-told tale in the hands of Salomon who has devoted years of study and painstaking research to the life of Pio Pico who was born in 1801 and died 1894.

Pio Pico was twice the governor of California during the Mexican era. He at times was a rebel leader of a militia. He was an astute politician. He was a rancher with vast tracts of property, including his beloved Whittier Ranchito. He was an aggressive, yet sometimes naive, businessman who built and ran the elegant, bustling hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which now bears his name and is a meticulously restored historical landmark — the Pico House.

Pio Pico first became governor of California in 1831 after he was among the leaders of a revolt against the incumbent Mexican governor. That popular rebellion swept him into office for the first time. During his second term as governor, in 1845 he “fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States,” according to Salomon. It is Pico’s role in the transition of California that is particularly noteworthy historically.

Gov. Pio Pico and Wife

Relying on sources in both English and Spanish, Salomon chronicles the achievements that made Pico an extremely rich man and patriarch as well as the miscalculations that ultimately led to his political and financial downfall. Pico lost his huge Ranchito Whittier when he lost a series of lawsuits originally filed by adversarial investors and businessmen. In his old age he was left penniless.

Salomon concludes that Pico’s losses in court resulted from demonstrably false testimony and legal underhandedness. Something other Californios (original Mexican settlers) encountered in the transition. “But along the way, Pico also made some unwise business transactions and his ultimate demise was more associated with corrupt and cunning individuals who conspired to destroy the old governor than a systematic process aimed at destroying all Californios,” he writes in “Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California.” Pico died a pauper, but when he was at the top of his game, he had been undeniably been a wealthy and influential force in California.

California, of course, had long been a territory of New Spain and then of Mexico. Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, a time when a young Pio Pico was making his way as a young man in southern California. Twenty-five years later Mexico and the United States (which was caught up in the intoxicating jingoistic wave of “Manifest Destiny”) went to war. When the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) was over, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory to the United States. California was perhaps the biggest prize.

Pio Pico was governor at that time and although he and other “Californios” failed in their efforts to forestall the acquisition of California by the “gringos,” he became, for the most part, a force of peaceful reconciliation in the years of the transition. Salomon writes, “Pico was able to continue investing in real estate well into the 1870s and his survival as an important economic force following the U.S.-Mexican War, his centrality in the politics of early California, and his place among Californios help illuminate the larger political, economic and racial transformation taking place in nineteenth-century California.”

Pio Pico was of African and mestizo heritage, as were many of the settlers in early California. He worked to mitigate some of the harsh policies and practices that subjugated the indigenous population, including Gabrielinos, or Tongvas as they called themselves. His own life was a reflection of the changes — both good and bad — that occurred in the transition from Mexican to American rule in California, as Salomon ably demonstrates.

The book is fundamentally the life story of an interesting and historically significant individual. However, Salomon generally uses Pico as the vehicle for looking at the events of his era. One book can’t cover every issue, of course, but the book might have been enhanced with a closer look at the role the church, the military and the state played in subjugating the indigenous populations of California. Pio Pico was, after all, an eyewitness to that phenomenon. And it is an important, if painful, chapter of early California history.

You might want to consider these historical threads next time you visit the stately Pico House in downtown Los Angeles.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

“The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940″
University of Arizona Press
(www.uapress.arizona.edu)
Roberto Chao Romero

Reviewed by Luis Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net

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The first “illegal immigrants” to cross into the United States from Mexico weren’t Mexicans. They were Chinese. A new book by a professor of Chicano studies at UCLA reveals that and other salient and startling anecdotes about borderland history.

In “The Chinese in Mexico 1882-1940” Robert Chao Romero examines a little known realm of United States-Mexico social history. It’s a safe bet that very few Americans know about the rich, intriguing (and sometimes unsettling) story of Mexican Chinese.

It is a social history that is joined at the hip with the story of Chinese Americans. There was a substantial wave of immigration from China to Mexico in the late nineteenth century. The social and cultural consequences of that wave of immigration still reverberate in Mexico and the United States today. As a minor, benign example of that, ever wonder why the best Chinese restaurants in North America are arguably not in San Francisco but in Mexicali? It’s one remnant of a long legacy of a borderland phenomenon of Chinese immigration and transplanted culture.

There are parallels between the way Chinese immigrants were treated in the United States and the way they were treated in Mexico. And there are historical parallels between the way Chinese — as newcomers — were treated and the way in which many Mexican newcomers to the United States were treated. Often, it is an unpleasant story. But it is part of our collective experience. And the Chinese in the U.S. and in Mexico have endured, owing to their perseverance, resourcefulness and strong sense of community.

The Chinese in the United States, of course, provided valuable service in building the transcontinental railroad. The Chinese were encouraged to come here for their cheap labor. There were organized commercial recruitment campaigns, championed by the governments of both the United States and China. But anti-Chinese resentment soon built to a crescendo in the late 1880s. Finally the U.S. sought to ban all Chinese immigration when it passed the nefarious Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It made it illegal for Chinese to come to the United States.

But the turmoil and landlessness in such regions as Guangdong (Canton) still forced Chinese immigrants to seek new opportunities outside China. So, many shifted their target from California to Mexico. Streams of immigrants poured into Mexico, beginning in 1882.

Some immigrants intended to seek their fortunes in Mexico, but many used the passage to Mexico as a stop on their clandestine way into the United States. Romero argues that those Chinese, who paid smugglers to get them into the United States and used a variety of sophisticated ruses to enter the U.S., became the first “illegal immigrants” making their way into this country.

Romero writes, “Unknown to most people, the Chinese were the first ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Mexico, and they created the first organized system of human smuggling from Mexico to the United States. As part of their efforts to circumvent the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Laws, Chinese immigrants created a vast transnational smuggling business that involved agents and collaborators in China, Mexico, Cuba and various cities throughout the United States.”

History repeats itself as today we see Mexican undocumented immigrants determined to make their way across the border, often at great risk to their lives.

And history repeats itself in the manner in which anti-Chinese sentiment lead to violent persecution of Chinese — in both Mexico and the United States.

Throughout their history in the Americas, Chinese immigrants were victims of virulent racism and violent attacks. It is a shameful part of Los Angeles history that saw lynchings and wanton murders of Chinese. The most egregious example of that is the infamous Los Angeles massacre of October 24, 1871.

As quoted in Jean Pfaelzer’s seminal book “Driven Out,” the “Alta California” newspaper of the period printed this account: “Twelve hours ago…fifteen staring corpses hung ghastly in the moonlight, while seven or eight others, mutilated, torn and crushed, lay in our streets, all of them Chinamen.”

Actually, when the tally was complete, it was revealed that seventeen Chinese were lynched and two others were knifed to death on the night of October 24, 1871. Pfaelzer writes: “Their mangled bodies were found hanging from a wooden awning over a carriage shop, from the sides of two prairie schooners parked around the corner, from a gutter spout, and from a beam across the wide gate of a lumberyard. One of the victims wore no trousers and a finger had been severed from his left hand.”

A hostile lynch mob attacked the residents of L.A.’s Chinatown, which was then located where Union Station stands today. It was the culmination of growing anti-Chinese hysteria. The Chinese were accused of spreading crime and disease. They were accused of “taking our jobs” and of unfair competition in business.

Familiar accusations aimed at Mexicans by Anglos in the years to come.

But anti-Chinese bigotry reared its ugly head not only in the United States, but in Mexico as well. Romero documents the pernicious case of the Torreon Massacre of 1911 in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. As in the United States, racist hatred of the Chinese was growing. Romero writes, “The most horrendous incident of Mexican subaltern violence perpetrated against Chinese immigrants during the early revolutionary years took place in the city of Torreon, Coahuila, on May 14 and 15, 1911.”

More than 300 Chinese were summarily and brutally murdered by soldiers of the Mexican revolution. Their only “crime” was that they were Chinese. With meticulous research, Romero unearths documents and contemporaneous accounts that name names and provide gruesome details. Romero writes, “The massacre of Torreon was the worst act of violence committed against any Chinese diasporic community of the Americas during the twentieth century.”

All part of a legacy of xenophobia and intolerance.

Not a pretty picture, of course. But it is part of our collective history. And it is something we should know about and bear in mind to help us keep contemporary issues of immigration and “otherness” in perspective.

One significant difference between the Chinese experience in Mexico and in the United States involves intermarriage. Eventually in Mexico many Chinese men married Mexican women. Families of “chino/mexicanos” thrive in Mexico today. By contrast, because of strictly enforced anti-miscegenation laws, mixed race marriages were almost non-existent in the U.S.

Robert Chao Romero ably provides the documented evidence of the treatment of Chinese immigrants. His prose doesn’t have the flair of others who have written memorable social histories, such as Jean Pfaelzer and the unparalleled storyteller Simon Winchester, who makes social history come alive with his finely tuned narrative touches. Yet,“The Chinese in Mexico” provides us with a valuable look into relatively unknown, and significant, chapters of our borderland history.

It is an important milestone in the field, and could serve as a catalyst for further study and illumination about the Chinese in the Americas.

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles”
Published by Dokument Press (Stockholm, Sweden)
by Francois Chastanet and Howard Gribble

Review written by Luís Torres
luis.r.torres@charter.net
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Chicano Graffiti: Is it Art or is it Vandalism?

It might surprise you to learn that Western Europeans, particularly Scandinavians,  are captivated and intrigued by Mexican American contemporary culture, everything from art to music — and a lot in between. It could be argued that sophisticated Swedes and intellectually inquisitive Frenchmen (and women) know more about Chicano culture than your average American.

Given that, it might not be too surprising to learn that the latest book to investigate a particular aspect of Mexican American gritty urban culture is produced not by an American mainstream publisher, but by a respected publishing house in, of all places, Sweden. Dokument Press has just published a fascinating and beautifully rendered book titled “Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles.” And it is worth digging into. For several reasons.

Mention the word “graffiti” and you’re likely to get immediate, strident response to the term. “It’s vandalism, plain and simple,” many will proclaim. Some, with a faint voice, tinged with a bit of awkward rationalization, will offer a strained and tortured explanation that it is somehow rebellious urban art that should be accorded at least a modicum of cultural legitimacy.

Graffiti may be both, however contradictory that may first appear. Those who produced “Cholo Writing: Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles” focus their energies and their analysis on a very specific and particular type of graffiti. And they make no bones about calling it graffiti. Graffiti (the singular form of the word is graffito) is the Latin word that describes any markings on a public wall. Some form of graffiti has been around since the days of ancient Rome. But the authors of the book don’t regard Chicano wall-writing as vandalism nor a public nuisance. They regard it as an expression of cultural identity with deep, deep literary, political, cultural and historical roots. No kidding.

The creators of the book are photographers Francois Chastanet of France and Howard Gribble, a California native son. Their photographs — shot over a 30 year period in Southern California — and their long, detailed narratives about what they shot and what it means are accompanied by an analysis provided by Los Angeles-based Chounard-trained artist Chaz Bojórquez. Bojorquez writes: “Los Angeles may have the longest history of street writing in the world. Before the invention of spray cans, most L.A. graffiti was painted with paint and a brush, and the young men who lived by the Los Angeles River would use sticks and paint with the tar seeping from the ground. Those tar tags still exist today and trace our graffiti history back to the 1940s.”

Chicano graffiti, or placas, have been a mainstay in Southern California, from East L.A. to the San Gabriel Valley, for a long time.

Chastanet and Gribble trace the roots of “cholo” writing back much farther than the post-World War II era. The identity issues revealed in cholo graffiti are linked to Aztec and post-Spanish conquest Mexican imagery, they assert. And they argue that the “black letter” design of the type of calligraphy written on the walls by Los Angeles gang members can be traced to the 17th century “type face” that was prevalent in England and Germany until it was supplanted by what we now regard as “Roman” type. Black letter type, with it’s stark but “fancy” bold lines and sweeping flourishes became the characteristic style of cholo graffiti. (It has now been largely supplanted by  the kind of sweeping, colorful balloon shaped mini murals first developed by New York street artists in the 1970s and 1980s who used the exteriors of subway cars as their canvas and by “taggers” who just use stylized, highly individualized, initials or a street moniker.)

Chastanet and Gribble emphasize that cholo graffiti sprang up in Southern California as a way for street gangs to mark their territory. It was rudimentary at first, but then evolved into a system of refined craftsmanship and a code of rules strictly adhered to. The word “cholo” has evolved over many years. It generally refers to someone who appears to be a street gang member.  The writings of cholos on the walls of East L.A. and other parts of Southern California are captured in both black and white and color photographs.

The photographs that are the core of the book are remarkable. And what is remarkable about the book overall is that the images of graffiti are the catalyst for a sweeping exposition of the social and political history of Mexican Americans. Chastanet and Gribble generally succeed in illuminating these issues through the phenomenon of cholo writing. Yet, the book bogs down when the narrative veers from accessible historiography into a questionable sociology-tinged explication of “what all this means.” A bit too academic.

Yet, on balance, it’s a readable, visually engaging book that will let you know a bit more about urban Chicanos than you probably knew. And, whether you regard it as art of a public nuisance (or perhaps both), it’s worth learning about.

But I can’t help but recall the chuckle-producing graffito I saw spray painted on an L.A. wall back in the 1970s, during the height of the vibrant Chicano movement.  Some poor guy who was either in quite a hurry or who was not the winner of his local spelling bee attempted to write: “Chicano Power.” However, he wrote instead:“Chicano Powre.”

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Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.

“Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion”

By Gregory Boyle

Published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, Inc.

212 pages

Reviewed by Luis R. Torres

luis.r.torres@charter.net

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A warning: it will be difficult for you to read this book and keep a dry eye.

In this remarkable book Gregory Boyle, the “barrio priest of East L.A.,” relates the story of a young “homie” who has died on the emergency room operating table. He was caught in the crossfire of perennial street gang warfare. His name was Manny. His body was a virtual mural of gang tattoos. At his bedside, the family has agreed to have the young man’s organs donated.

“As the two nurses wheel Manny to surgery for the harvesting of his organs, one nurse turns to the other and shakes her head in disgust, no doubt eyeing Manny’s tattoos,” Boyle writes. As it happens, days before he was shot, Manny had taken a big step toward a better life. He had enrolled in community college. He was cut down before he ever attended his first class.

Boyle had rushed to his side at the hospital, embracing family members as they wept. He recalls what was said by the nurses. One nurse, evidently disgusted by the tattooed corpse of what she perceived to be a worthless gangbanger, tells the other: “I mean, who would want this monster’s heart?” The other nurse reacts to that angrily. “How dare you call this kid a monster? Didn’t you see his family, his friends? He was 19 years old for God’s sakes. He belonged to somebody. Shame on you.’” He belonged to somebody.

Boyle, a Catholic priest who has been working with street gang members in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, makes it clear that all of the homies he encounters belong to somebody. Indeed, he argues that we all belong to each other. It is, he suggests, how Jesus would view it. Boyle is, after all, a priest.

Early in this narrative Boyle, who established Homeboy Industries and related nonprofit businesses with the motto “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job,” explains what this missal-sized book is NOT. It is not a detailed chronicle of the work he and supporters have done to help gang members turn their lives around and find positive alternatives to drugs and violence. This little book is about Boyle’s personal experiences in becoming one with the gang members, the outcasts of society, those young men and women who are feared and, most of all, misunderstood, by the general community.

It’s not too big a stretch to characterize Greg Boyle among the “vatos” as the equivalent of Mother Teresa among the outcasts of Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta).

This book is an intimate memoir. It is a collection of stories — homilies, really — about using empathy, compassion and — yes, love — to confront the issue of street gangs and the lives that are affected by the phenomenon. It is a little gem of a book, both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

The title of the book comes from something a homie once said to Boyle after the priest talked to him about honor and bravery . “Damn, I’m gonna tattoo that on my heart,” the young man told him.

For more than 20 years he has lived and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with street gang members. He began his work as a rookie priest at Dolores Mission in “the projects” just east of downtown L.A. He describes it as “the poorest parish in the Los Angeles archdiocese.” Eventually he founded Homeboy Industries. With its bakery, job placement agency and tattoo removal arm, Homeboy tries to help gang members with a job and a chance appreciate their inherent worth as human beings. Boyle suggests a little self esteem goes a long way.

Boyle writes with stark frankness and honesty about his mistakes in initially trying to “serve” the poor. Muddled and ultimately fruitless gestures to negotiate “peace treaties” between rival gangs were ill-conceived and doomed to failure. He learned that you don’t “serve” the down-and-out. You become one with them. This is done, he says, in the spirit of the genuine teachings, and example, of Jesus Christ. He has learned, he writes, about the essential ingredients of compassion, empathy and a transcendent dimension of kinship.

Regarding such kinship, he writes: “We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop.” Some might say that’s nice and pretty in theory, but not practical in the “real world.” Boyle would disagree.

Boyle’s book is treasure trove of anecdotes and reminiscences about his life among the homies of the Aliso Village and Pico Gardens housing projects of Boyle Heights. We are introduced to a number of memorable characters.

There is the malopropping homie who tells Boyle, “Hey, I hear your cancer is in intermission.” There is Chico who confesses he’s fed up with gang violence and the dead end path he’s on. Chico wants to learn about computers. Boyle gets him a job at a company that patiently teaches Chico about computers and the Internet. He seems on his way, when he is cut down by a driveby bullet. And there’s the story of Speedy.

After years of dodging bullets, Speedy musters the strength and wherewithal to turn his back on the gangs, move away from the projects, get a solid job and get married. He has two kids now and plans for them to go to college. His biggest kick is taking them to Barnes and Noble on Sundays. The word “future” now has genuine meaning.

When he stops in to see Father Boyle, the priest tells him, “You’ve got a good life.” He answers, “Yeah, I do.” And for the two of them, Boyle writes, “The tears arrive now in their fullness, unencumbered and welcome, even.”

Those who have followed Father Greg Boyle’s work over the years won’t be surprised by the warmth, humor and essential humanity of his stories. But readers might be surprised by how artfully written this book happens to be.

He is often asked if he is “successful” in the work he does. Boyle writes: “Naturally, I find myself heartened by Mother Teresa’s take: ‘We are not called to be successful, but faithful.’ This distinction is helpful for me as I barricade myself against the daily dread of setback.”

He has buried nearly 200 homies

A warning. It will be difficult to read this book with dry eyes.

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Luis Torres is a journalist and writer who lives in Pasadena, California. He is the author of a forthcoming book on Chicano educational reformers.

“Blowout: Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice”

By Mario T. Garcia and Sal Castro

University of North Carolina Press

324 pages

By Luis Torres

luis.r.torres@charter.net

Celebrated high school teacher Sal Castro was at the epicenter of the turbulent beginnings of the Chicano Movement for civil rights and social justice. He was the key organizer and provocateur of the now storied East Los Angeles high school walkouts of 1968. And now he tells the inside story of those days and examines what’s wrong with the public schools today in a new book titled “Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice,” co-written with UC Santa Barbara history professor Mario Garcia. It provides a valuable look at a pivotal chapter of Southern California history, a series of events and attitudes that ultimately reverberated throughout the country.

In the book Castro asserts: “The blowouts… represented the start of the urban Chicano Movement and Los Angeles represented the political capital of the Movement. “

The Chicano walkouts, or “blowouts” as they are also referred to, occurred at a time of tremendous social upheaval and political turbulence. It was a time of grass-roots activism, fueled by opposition to the unpopular war in Vietnam and the aftershocks of the Black civil rights movement.

Students at Lincoln, Garfield, Roosevelt and Wilson brought the schools to a standstill by walking out of the classrooms. The students boldly issued a set of “demands” to the L.A. School Board. Fundamentally, they claimed the schools were failing Mexican American students and they sought comprehensive reform.

The social activism, the galvanized sense of solidarity in the Mexican American community and the changes in public policy that eventually came about marked a significant new direction for Chicanos in Los Angeles and, through a kind of political osmosis, throughout the country.

The events of that fateful March of 1968 were featured in an HBO drama a few years ago. Although produced by individuals quite familiar with those events, the film, unfortunately, bore little resemblance to reality. Compressing time and creating composite characters is clearly necessary in order to tell a story on film. The story has to be told in a manner that’s brief, compact and succinct. Understood. But a film that purports to be drawn from “real events” and is presumably “a true story” shouldn’t veer into a realm of fiction that more resembles fantasy than truth. Castro smiles a Cheshire Cat grin when recalling the liberties the film took with his story.

Today Castro laments the fact that public education for people on the periphery of society hasn’t improved enough since those heady days of the walkouts some 43 years ago.  His reasonable suggestion for improvements in the public schools hinges on having smaller classes. No more than 20 students per teacher. It would make a huge, positive difference he asserts. He writes that California schools attempted that for elementary grades a few years ago, but gave up on the idea because of severe budget cutbacks.

“The concept was good, but to reach this goal you needed to have more teachers, and the state didn’t provide enough money to do this,” he writes. He adds, “Everyone wants positive educational results, but no one wants to pay for this.” Scoffing at critics he regards as shortsighted, Castro writes, “We’re not spending enough for education. All developed countries spend much more per capita for education than we do.” He concedes he’s swimming against the current political tide but he insists, “There must be a gargantuan effort to get taxpayers to accept larger taxes for education.” Tough sell. Ultimately, “Blowout!” provides intriguing insights into the history of L.A.’s public schools and its current problems.

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(Luis Torres, a journalist and writer from Pasadena, California, is at work on a book that examines the 1968 East Los Angeles high school student walkouts.)

BOOK REVIEW

“Randy Lopez Goes Home”

By Rudolfo Anaya

University of Oklahoma Press

157 pages

Reviewed by Luís Torres

luis.r.torres@charter.net

(Eds Note: “Rudolfo” is correct)

Veteran writer Rudolfo Anaya has written a little gem of a novel that takes readers on a magical allegorical journey that artfully explores the Big Questions of who we are, where did we come from, what is our essence as human beings and where are we going. And it’s done in a manner that isn’t at all ponderous, given the weightiness of the issues, but is done with warmth, humor and deliciously bittersweet storytelling. It is his twenty-first book, but it is likely to be regarded as his ultimate, triumphal tour de force.

The just published book is “Randy Lopez Goes Home.” It is a compact, complex and thoroughly engaging treasure of a novel. With eloquent simplicity it tells the tale of a man from a tiny, bucolic village in the mountains of New Mexico who is on a journey, his ultimate quest really. It is part fable, part spiritual meditation, part parable. And a thoroughly enjoyable read throughout. It is a triumph of elegant storytelling. And brimming with wickedly funny plays on words and literary nods to everything from telenovelas to Greek mythology, to the Bible and to today’s headline-screaming tabloids. It is a playful yet thought-provoking mélange of literary tradition and popular politics and culture. It’s an ambitious effort, but Anaya pulls it off seamlessly and to great effect.

It’s a delight.

Anaya, who is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking novel of Chicano life titled “Bless Me Ultima,” has seemingly summoned all of his skill, experience and wit in order to craft this masterfully written little book. “Bless Me Ultima” brought him fame and literary credibility. It has become the Chicano equivalent of Alex Haley’s “Roots” to many Chicanos. But to call Anaya a “Chicano writer” is a bit like calling Faulkner a “white writer.” Anaya’s work, particularly as evidenced in this marvelous new novel, is irrefutably transcendent.

It is the story of Randy, who, despite what Thomas Wolfe warned, is attempting to go home again. But where is home? Is it merely the tiny town of Agua Bendita where he was born and lived with loving parents and compassionate neighbors long ago? Or is “home” something more metaphorically difficult to reach? More difficult to define. Along the way Randy meets quixotic and sometimes-surreal characters who offer veiled directions about how to “get home.” They are fantastical, allegorical figures who sometimes seem ghost-like, but are also very much flesh-and-bones. Randy has a number of head-scratching encounters as he heads toward some sort of destination.

And the reader begins to scratch his or her head as well. Is Randy “real”? Is he alive? Is he in a place between “here” and “there”? What is “here” after all? It’s a metaphysical quest that Anaya invents and probes in the most entertaining and satisfying fashion. Layer–by-layer storytelling at its best.

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Luís Torres, is a journalist and writer in Pasadena, California. He is at work on a biography of educational reformer Vahac Mardirosian.