Southwest Tales in Memory of Tomás Rivera: A Contemporary Collection ed. by Alurista and Xelina Rojas-Urista (review)

268 Western American Literature Southwest Tales in Memory of Tomás Rivera: A Contemporary Collection. Edited by Alurista and Xelina Rojas-Urista. (Colorado Springs: Maize Press, 1986. 176 pages, $8.00.) When Tomás Rivera died in 1984, the Chicano community lost a respected writer, scholar, teacher, and administrator. Rivera had demonstrated to younger Hispanics that a young boy educated primarily in Spanish-speaking schools in South Texas could achieve national recognition as a writer and ultimately could attain such a prestigious rank as the Chancellor of the Uni­ versity of California at Riverside. His major work, And the Earth Did Not Part, is a collection of related stories mainly about a young Chicano boy’s perception of how traditions from Mexico persist for Mexican-Americans in North America. Most of Rivera’s tales are realistic portrayals of human events, and while they reveal the preju­ dices and other travails suffered by Chícanos, they are not propagandistic. This new collection of southwestern tales offers a mixture of types of stories in honor of Tomás Rivera, whose work, the editors note, “lives on as an example, as a path with heart.” Some of these stories are primarily propagan­ distic, others are realistic vignettes, still others are macabre. They concern such varied topics a? Magdalena Gallegos’ story of “Florence and the New Shoes” about a farmworker’s child who wants nice shoes for school; César A. Gonz ález’s “Toño” about a Mexican-American teacher in Mexico; Manuel Ramos’s “His Mother’s Image,” which combines the la llorona tale with a story of Vietnam; David Nava Monreal’s “The Weight Lifters” about literate lowriders in Los Angeles; and Alurista’s Spanish prose poem, “Abajo,” about apocalypse and friendship. Of the twenty-one tales here, one-third are written in Spanish with no translation, an editorial decision based on creative and political reasons, but one which limits the book for classroom use. As might be expected from such a collection of young writers, the work is uneven. Nonetheless, the collection is a fitting tribute to Tomás Rivera, and it is especially interesting to find such a large number of new writers working in the tradition of established Chicano writing. As Bruce-Novoa notes in his introduction, the “collection is highly representative of the themes and approaches found in the literary movement they spring from.” MARK BUSBY Texas A&M University ...