The Elements of San Joaquin by Gary Soto (review)

Reviews 73 The Elements of San Joaquin. By Gary Soto. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. $2.95.) The biggest failure of many ethnic and minority-group writers is that their political viewpoints often turn them into moralizing zealots or right­ eous cultural revolutionaries. These authors tend to depict the plight of their particular groups with a fervor whose focus is essentially one-dimen­ sional. Metaphor gives way to harangue, nimbleness of thought succumbs to the straightjacket of political and racial argot. Chicano poet Gary Soto, a former fieldhand in the San Joaquin Valley, manages to avoid such short­ comings in The Elements of San Joaquin and thereby establishes that he is considerably more than just a good ethnic writer; he is a good poet. The book has already been awarded the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum, and six of the poems were reprinted in New York Times Book Review, some indications that Soto’s audience extends sig­ nificantly beyond members of his race. And while it’s true that his thirtyeight poems concern the hardships and difficulties of migrant workers, he also records their satisfactions and joys, albeit small ones. Indeed life in migrant camps does not include many of the typical middle-class amenities, but it does contain many touching moments of familial devotion. And Soto takes care to note that economic and social deprivation do not necessarily spawn moral degeneration. As he points out there are murderers, rapists, and thieves to be sure among the Chicano poor, but more importantly there are those who are able to turn their labors ino causes for celebra­ tion. Hoeing cotton or picking grapes can be a respectful act, one capable of canceling the effacing nihilism of social violence. Acts of personal gen­ erosity and kindness are as historically important to these workers as the decades of cultural and governmental neglect. An attitude of abidance, Soto knows, helps salve years of political and economic anonymity. Soto’s topics extend beyond the fields and farms into all aspects of migrant life in the valley — the charity hospitals, the barbershops, the streets and alleys — and he depicts them all in a lean, simple style. And although Soto is capable of mimicking the mannerisms of uneducated Chicanos in a straightforward, uncomplicated style, his verses are not unintellectual. His simplicity is merely a stylistic device, one appropriately suited to his seem­ ingly primitive and occasionally bucolic subjects. Consequently his meta­ phors are drawn from poverty, work, and failure, but they are nonetheless evocative, enlightening, and haunting. In describing the depression that occurs with unemployment from the autumn rains, Soto closes “Rain” with the apt observation: The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt And there will be no reason for pockets. 74 Western American Literature Consider the assailant he details in “The Underground Parking” : A man who holds fear Like the lung a spot of cancer, Waits for your wife. These images are at once likely and terrifying. But Soto’s characters, much like his metaphors, are transcendent. Imaginatively they rise above the meanness of their appearance, not as unscarred ideologues or saints or rhetoricians, but as human — frail and impoverished — whose heritage is simply and redemptively the earth. JERRY BRADLEY, New Mexico Tech American Indian Fiction. By Charles R. Larson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. 208 pages, $9.50.) Larson’s study discusses sixteen novels by fourteen authors. It does not deal with the short story (I believe no collection of stories by a single Indian author has yet been published), and limits itself rigorously to those novels written by Indian authors; thus, such novels as Laughing Boy, The Man Who Killed the Deer, and Little Big Man lie outside its scope, despite a long chapter — the second — about changing views of Pocahontas which would seem to have been better saved for another book (none of these six­ teen novels mentions Pocahontas). Within these limitations, Larson’s book is an excellent introduction to American Indian fiction. Larson sees four stages in the history of Indian fiction. The first, which he calls assimilationist, includes Chief Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods (1899), John M. Oskison’s Wild...