Literary El Paso

Arturo Islas

261 Arturo Islas Arturo Islas (1938-1991) was born in El Paso and graduated from El Paso High, earning a Sloan Scholarship to Stanford University. Although he planned to become a neurosurgeon, Islas soon realized his talent for language and literature and went on to earn a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford, becoming one of the first Chicanos in the United States to earn a doctorate in English. Islas remained to teach at Stanford, where he won the Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education in 1976, and became the university’s first tenured Chicano faculty member the same year. His first novel, The Rain God, part of a planned trilogy about three generations of a Mexican-American family much like his own, won the best fiction prize from the Border Regional Library conference in 1985 and was selected as one of three best novels by the Bay Area Reviews Association in 1984. The second novel of the trilogy was titled Migrant Souls. Interviewed in 1990, Islas characterized the reluctance of East Coast publishers to publish Chicano literature as “a willful ignorance on the part of the machines that produce the books that we read.” Islas was working on the last book of the trilogy when he died of AIDS-related complications. La Mollie and the King of Tears was published posthumously. From La Mollie and the King of Tears: Just Like Romeo and Juliet I ain’t one to give up on things too easy, but leaning there against my brother’s car with the pain shooting through my leg like one of them tracer bullets, I woulda given a lot for someone to tuck me in. It was the first time since they let me outta that V.A. loony bin that I missed it and wished I was back there chewing up pills like they was steak and sleeping my days away. I was gonna need more than Mr. Johnson’s avocado to get me home to La Mollie’s arms. I figured Tomás’d be my ticket if I could just find him in that after-hours joint up the alley. With about ten more motorcycles, 262 parked in the alley and what seemed like all the leather queers this side of New York buzzing around the door of the place, I shoulda had some clue what was going on in there, but I wasn’t thinking so clear. I headed down the alley, keeping myself together by saying the names of some of them sweet breads la Pixie used to buy at the Aracataca Bakery on the corner of Florence and Paisano Drive. There are two important buildings in every barrio, man—the church and the bakery. Whenever I felt a lotta pain, I used to say bread names like a rosary. I been doing it for what seems like forever. It always used to make the guys in the gang laugh, though some of em coulda used their own homemade mantra, all cut up after a skirmish against the Fatherless Gang. The draft took care of mosta that, though there are still forty- and fifty-year-old gang members hanging around El Chuco. Them old Ace of Spades brothers still got their heads in the same place, man. And the younger guys’ heads are all messed up with drugs. It’s just ugly. Nothing stays the same, except them Mexican sweet breads. That Aracataca baked magic. Mr. and Mrs. García got the bakery after her parents died and kept all the old recipes. They were good people. La Pixie knew the family real well so we got special treatment and free extras whenever we went there. We never could figure out which one did the baking. One day she was out helping the customers and the next we saw him. Mrs. García looked like a pharmacist in a starched white apron and her hair pulled back in a bun. He looked like a chamuco—that’s my favorite Mexican sweet bread, man, and there ain’t no English word for it. He had a thick moustache and these big dark eyes that were always gleaming like he knew some secret we all needed to get into heaven, and it was gonna come to us in the very next bite. Maybe that’s why at Christmas time he always played one of them Magi. I wish I could tell you the names of them sweet breads in...