3/16/2023 0 Comments Zoo island tomas rivera bookI like it right here because I can think about anything I please. I wish I could talk to all of them again, but all of them together. And then, if I had great big arms, I could embrace them all. I would like to see all of the people together. Here, the boy realizes what he has been doing under the house – re-membering the past year. We never arrive.”Īfter the book’s twelve episodes, the last piece of the book, a kind of epilogue, brings us back to the unnamed narrator under the house. I really should say when we don’t arrive because that’s the real truth. Arriving and leaving, it’s the same thing because we no sooner arrive and. One speaker finally says in exasperation: “When we arrive, when we arrive, the real truth is that I’m tired of arriving. Multiple speakers speculate on what they’ll do when they get to their destination. Much like Langston Hughes’s 1951 collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred, captures the voices he hears on Harlem streets, this story weaves together snippets of conversation heard on the truck carrying the migrant workers. One of the most heart-wrenching of the stories, “When We Arrive,” describes the harrowing journey from one farm across multiple states to another farm. The children of another family wrestle with the idea that they will never receive Christmas presents.” Another is shot to death accidentally by a rancher who wants to scare the boy away from a stock tank. The boy is “wounded by the poverty of his family, whose means of support is stoop labor – picking beets, spinach, and cotton.” The Texas Monthlysays that children in the book are “particularly susceptible to tragedy”: “Two die when their ‘chicken shack’ bursts into flames while their parents are working in the fields. The rest of the book unfolds in a collage of story fragments – the bits and pieces the boy remembers from his family’s constant travel around the United States. The semi-autobiographical book opens with an unnamed narrator, the 12-year-old son of South Texas Mexican American migrant workers, crawling under a house, where he begins to recall stories from the previous year. This fragmentation is felt tangibly in the book’s unusual structure. Their lives are fragmented and fractured, as they move from place to place.” They don’t have the luxury of living a novel. It’s as if Rivera – the son of migrant workers – is saying, “Chicano migrant workers don’t have the luxury of lives lived in one place. Just as Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 book, The Country of the Pointed Firs, can be seen as an unconventionally structured novel, so, too, can Rivera’s book be seen as challenging the classic definition of a novel. Comprised of short stories and vignettes, the 70-page book could be seen as more a collage or story cycle than a novel – but I think it adapts the novel form to the rhythms and patterns of the lives lived by Chicano migrant workers in the United States. Such is the case with Rivera’s 1971 book. They allow me to expand my awareness, my knowledge, my consciousness – and when they’re done really well, they tell a great story, too. Don’t get me wrong: I know that a book can’t substitute for real, lived experience – but for me, good books are portals into other lives. Y No Se Lo Tragó La Tierra ( And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), was the first time I had a full, powerful, visceral sense of what it must be like to be a migrant worker. Simply put, is a milestone in Chicano literature that should grace the shelves of every academic and personal collection.Reading Tomás Rivera’s groundbreaking book. “Rivera was nothing less than a craftsman in the mold of Ernest Hemingway. Henry and Steinbeck in English and history classes.” - The Dallas Morning News “A book that students need to read right alongside O. His great ambition was to be a searcher, an ambition he fulfilled through his poetry, collected… by another searcher, Julián Olivares.” - Luis Leal The search was, for Rivera, the most important metaphor defining the Americas. He derived his inspiration from the migrant workers, people who search. “In his prose fiction, Tomás Rivera is an accuser in his poetry, he is a searcher. Rivera’s novel immediately established itself as a major document of Chicano social and literary history.” - Chicano Narrative represents the first milestone in Mexican-American literary history after the turbulent events of the 1960’s and sets itself explicity within the political and social contexts of the post-World War II agricultural worker’s life.
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