Literary El Paso

Amado Muro

117 Amado Muro Amado Muro (1915-1970) is the pseudonym of writer and newspaperman Chester Seltzer. Raised in Cleveland, he was the son of Louis B. Seltzer, the influential journalist and editor of the Cleveland Press. Muro attended the University of Virginia and Kenyon College. He rode freight trains, worked in labor camps, lived in the Fruit Pickers Cothouse, Red’s Flophouse, and was, for a time, a seaman. While a newspaperman in Bexar County,Texas, during World War II, he was sentenced to prison at Lewisburg Penitentary for his objections to military service. After his release, Muro came to work at the El Paso Herald-Post and married Amada Muro, a native of Chihuahua City, Mexico, slightly changing her name for his pen name. He worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and at newspapers in Dallas, San Antonio, Wichita Falls, and Galveston, Texas; Las Cruces, New Mexico; San Diego and Bakersfield, California; and New Orleans, Louisiana. While working for a California newspaper during the Vietnam War, Muro refused to write editorials condemning the war protestors and was replaced. His stories of his travels across the United States and in the villages of Mexico, such as “Two Skid Row Sketches” and “Hungry Men,” were published in Arizona Quarterly, and “Night Train to Fort Worth” appeared in the Texas Observer. Muro’s story “María Tepache” was published in The Best American Short Stories of 1969.He is the author of The Collected Stories of Amado Muro,which is widely anthologized. He lived in the Sunset Heights neighborhood of El Paso when not riding the rails or living among farm workers, strikers, and the dispossessed. Muro died of a heart attack in front of Zamora’s News Stand on Paisano Drive in El Paso. From The Collected Stories of Amado Muro: Sunday in Little Chihuahua When I was a boy, not long up from Parral, I lived with my uncle Rodolfo Avitia, my mother Amada Avitia de Muro, and my sisters Consuelo and Dulce Nombre de Maria in the quarter called “Little Chihuahua” on the El Paso side of the Rio Grande. 118 Next door to the tenement in which we lived was a tiny café called “La Perla de Jalisco.” This café was run by Doña Antonia Olvera, a jolly and industrious woman from Guadalajara, who was known throughout the neighborhood as Toña “la tapatia,” as her townspeople are called in Mexico. Doña Antonia kept busy all day long, humming the Mexican Hat Dance while she worked. Her café specialized in dishes that were seldom found elsewhere in Little Chihuahua. Toña la tapatia served the sugar tamales that make Oaxaca mouths water. She made the delicate, wispy tortillas, the largest and thinnest in all Mexico, that are among the great prides of Sonora. When a man tired of eating the thick, freckled tortillas of flour made by Chihuahua housewives, he would go to “La Perla” for an agreeable change, secure in the knowledge that not even the tortilla factories could equal Doña Antonia’s products in fineness or texture. Then, too, Toña served café con leche just as they do in the Mexico City cafés, with each cup of coffee more than half filled with boiling milk. Where, if not to “La Perla,” would a man seeking a cup of hot champurrado, made of corn and chocolate, go on a cold winter night? And was anyone ever known to impugn the quality of the tripe which Doña Antonia put into her steaming menudo, a stew known to every border Mexican as the only sure cure for a hangover? “La Perla de Jalisco” was a neat and clean café. On each immaculate table a small dish of chile bravo could always be found, and over the front door hung a picture of Juventino Rosas, who, besides being the composer of Sobre las Olas, was a tapatio himself. At a front table Toña’s husband, Don Ignacio Olvera, sat all day long with his books of philosophy and his bullring reviews stacked up in neat piles before him. He was the president of the “José y Juan” bullfight club and also acted as border correspondent for El Redondel, a bullfight magazine published in Mexico City. For his literary service, Don Ignacio received no money at all. But he did obtain passes to the fights in Ciudad Juárez each Sunday, and the satisfaction of seeing the name “I. Olvera, correspondent” at the...