Rolando Hinojosa’s Klair City Death Trip Series: A Retrospective, New Directions ed. by Stephen Miller, José Pablo Villalobos (review)

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, has won such prestigious literary prizes as the Premio Quinto Sol (1973), the Premio Casa de las Américas (1976), and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award (2013). Along with Tomás Ri-vera and Rudolfo Anaya, he is one of the founders of the Chicano literary canon. In his Klair City Death Trip Series, a collection of fifteen books published between 1973 and 2006, he accurately depicts the Texas and Mexico border (his own lower Rio Grande Valley ancestors date back to the mid-1700s), crafting the fictional space of Belken County, a space often compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Márquez’s Macondo.

Editors Stephen Miller and José Pablo Villalobos divide their volume’s eleven essays into two sections. The first, “Broad Studies of the kcdts,” features essays by Joan Parmer Barnett, Nicolás Kanellos, Mark McGraw, Stephen Miller, and Alejandro Morales that focus respectively on the transformation of the Rio Grande Valley as embodied in the main characters, Rafe Buenrostro and Jehu Malacara, products of valley chicanismo, who resist adversity with education; border hybrid culture, which Kanellos calls the “Mestizo States of America” (40) and sees as the present and future of the United States; individualism as a way to succeed from adversity; Galdosian dialogue inside Hinojosa’s fiction; and the Trovador’s space, a comparison of Hinojosa’s “estampas” to ukiyo-e paintings that reflect the floating world.

The second part covers “Specialized Studies of the kcdts,” with essays by Eduardo Espina, María Herrera-Sobek, José E. Limón, María Esther Quintana Millamoto, Rogelio Sáenz, and Klaus Zilles. Issues considered include the conception of time beyond chronology—Espina writes, “we are time (which is why we have created verbal forms)” (117); geographies of trauma in the context of the Korean conflict (Hinojosa was a member of Task Force Smith, the first US Army ground unit to enter combat in Korea in 1950); a comparative analysis of Hinojosa and Larry McMurtry from the perspective of regionalism; feminine autonomy in Becky and Her Friends; sociological and demographic comparisons of Latinos and Anglos in Mercedes, Texas, Hinojosa’s and Sáenz’s hometown; and landscapes of migrants and the militarization of the border in the novel Ask a Policeman.

The book closes with an elucidating interview conducted by Stephen Miller focused on Hinojosa’s graduate school years at the University of Illinois, when “twentieth-century Mexican-American literature was in its infancy” (263). (His novel Happy Few satirizes the world of academia.) He studied with William Shoemaker, “a renowned Goldosista” (262), and in this academic environment became a writer. “I was reading like mad and that’s what writers do,” he professes (263).

This is an important essay collection for new and prior readers of Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. Editors Miller and Villalobos have assembled a robust group of voices to provide new insights into Hinojosa’s kcdts, works they consider “the most innovative and complex project of literary creation ever conceived and realized by a writer based in the United States” (x).