The Collected Stories of Amado Muro by Amado Jesus Muro (review)

222 Western American Literature The Collected Stories of Amado Muro. By Amado Jesus Muro. (Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1979. 165 pages, $3.00.) Like the cavalry thundering to the rescue, a small press has once more published a major writer ignored by its larger counterparts. Thorp Springs Press of Austin, Texas, has collected the published fiction of Amado Muro, called by John Womack, Jr., “the funniest, brightest, most moving, accom­ plished and prolific ‘Mexican-American’ . . . a veritable Isaac Babel of the Southwest.” It is as fine a collection of short fiction as has been pub­ lished in recent years. Muro, who died in 1971, has become a minor cult figure in the South­ west. He wrote almost exclusively about men on the bum, following crops along an axis extending from Texas west on a gradually curving line into California’s Great Central Valley, or about Mexicans and MexicanAmericans on both sides of the border. Although it was as a Chicano spokesman that Muro first attracted wide-spread attention, most critics have agreed that his tales and vignettes of bindle stiffs are stronger than his stories on Chicanos; indeed, they may be the best ever written on the subject. For example, he published a series of what he called “monologues” — Muro constantly tested the limits of the short story in his work — drawn from his own personal experience on the rails and in hobo camps. Some samples: Anglo Man (Bakersfield) In the Sacramento Labor Office they asked if anyone wanted to milk rattlesnakes. One stiff asked if rattlesnakes had udders like cows. The boss man shook his head and said “You won’t do.” Anglo Man (Delano) In Stockton, I got a cup of coffee in a cafe just off the Center Street skid row. When I finished drinking it, a middle-aged waitress with marcelled hair asked if I wanted anything more. She was fat with one tooth out and she walked on the sides of her feet like a tame bear. I said, “No ma’am, that was my last dime.” I got up to go then, but she said, “Wait young man,” and brought me doughnuts and more coffee. When I thanked her, she said, “That’s all right, young man. I know how it is to be broke.” By contrast, Muro’s Mexican stories seem a bit less tight, perhaps a tad romantic, although they too are strongly-wrought. He catches the style of squalling women on a Chihuahua slum street in “Mala Torres”: “Some said they wished they had gone into a convent instead of getting married. Others disagreed. ‘Ay Madre, it’s better to undress one-horned drunkards than dress plaster saints,’ they insisted.” In another story, “Maria Tepache,” an old lady says to a drifter: “Hijole, paisanito, what spider has stung you Reviews 223 — you look sad and burdened like the woodcutter’s burro. . . . Well, I don’t blame you. When bread becomes scarce so do smiles.” In both cases, he avoids cliches, presenting his subjects frankly and humanely. One never senses him belittling even his most humble character, and for good reason. He lived their lives, riding the rails and picking crops all over the west, dwelling at other times in small Mexican villages. All this showed in his work and, just prior to his death, Edward Simmen had observed that Muro “seems to have written more good short fiction than any other young Mexican-American.” His stories were appearing with increasing frequency in anthologies and a couple of articles in scholarly journals had examined his work. Only after his death was it discovered that he had been neither young nor Chicano. Amado Jesus Muro was the nom de plume of Chester Seltzer, a middle-aged Anglo journalist who had been publishing under a masculine version of his wife’s maiden name (Amada Muro) since 1955, long before any advantage from a Spanish name accrued to a writer. There was more: he was the grandson of Charles Alden Seltzer, one of the fathers of the shoot-em-up western, the son of Louis B. Seltzer, editor of the Cleveland Press. Born in 1915, he had been raised in Ohio, but had moved to...