Alex and the Hobo: A Chicano Life and Story

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Alex and the Hobo is a work of fiction about a nine-year-old boy’s loss of innocence and transition to manhood. The author, José Inez “Joe” Taylor, created the story out of his own coming-of-age in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The tale is set in 1942 in Antonito, a small railroad town in the valley’s southwestern corner. Alex Martínez loses his innocence as he befriends a mysterious hobo and learns about evil in his community. This book presents Alex and the Hobo and describes how the author wrote his story out of his experience.1 Joe Taylor turned to writing in the 1990’s after a lifetime as a farmworker, a union man, a roofer, a construction worker, a heavyequipment operator, a jailer and sheriff’s dispatcher, and a Chicano activist in his community. His body, like his story, is inscribed with his experience: he lost a finger in a sawmill accident; he has no cartilage in his left knee from an old football injury; his arm trembles from a pinched nerve; he has chronic back pain from when he fell from a truck.2 Alex and the Hobo is one of the many works of fiction that he wrote and stored in dust-filled boxes in his backyard shed. He showed his manuscripts to Carole Counihan and me a few years after we settled in his community for a long-term fieldwork project in anthropology. Joe Taylor explained why he wrote by referring first to his deep connection to the San Luis Valley. I’ve lived in this valley and I’ve slept, I’ve eaten, I’ve seen the harsh winters and the bad springs and the years of drought and the dust storm that flew over. He explained that he had read and heard a lot about the Anglo-Saxon pioneers but very little about the Mexicanos who inhabited the valley before them. The pioneers came in the wagons, but the mountains were already 1 named, the rivers were already named, the families that helped them out were Mexican families so that tells you they were already here way before them. He remarked that many have come into the valley and written about their own or others’ experiences, and he had experiences of his own to write about. He mentioned the time he cut off his finger in a sawmill accident the year he graduated from high school. I cut my finger off at ten o’clock in the morning. They didn’t attend to me in the hospital until about nine-thirty, ten o’clock that night. I had it wrapped and everything, and they did give me a shot in between. But that’s how long it took from the time I had my finger cut off until the time the doctor attended to it and finished amputating it. On the basis of our many hours of conversation, I think he made several points by recounting this event: he suffered great pain as a worker; he was invisible to his Anglo-Saxon employer and the doctor for what seemed like a very long period of time, and he was invisible because he was a Mexicano from a humble family. He wrote Alex and the Hobo and other stories to be seen and heard.3 On many occasions, he referred to the relative position of the Spanish speakers from the south and the Anglo-Saxon pioneers from the east. Manifest Destiny was the battle cry of the Anglo when he was pioneering or supposedly pioneering the West. “We dominate. The Indians have no rights. The Mexicans have no rights. We have the rights.” The “Mexicans” to whom he refers are the Spanish speakers like himself whose ancestors settled along the banks of Culebra Creek and the Conejos River in the Upper Rio Grande basin during the early 1850’s.4 He used the word “Mexican” deliberately to draw attention to the prejudicial attitude of Anglo-Saxons toward the Spanish-speaking residents of the San Luis Valley. “Mexicanos” is the preferred term for the descendents of the settlers of the Culebra Creek and the Conejos Rivers communities. A reader unfamiliar with the San Luis Valley may find the difference between “Mexicans” and “Mexicanos” difficult to grasp because, after all, “Mexicans” is the English translation of the Spanish word “Mexicanos.” However, the negative connotation of “Mexicans” developed from the way the Spanish-speaking residents heard...