Alex and the Hobo: A Chicano Life and Story

CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSION

CHAPTER 9 CONCLUSION Alex Martínez is an authentic hero that Joe Taylor carved out of his culture and his experience at a particular point in San Luis Valley history . Alex is a boy with a deep conscience who lost his innocence as he learned about sin and corruption in his community. He faced a complicated moral dilemma as he worried about his family, struggled with guilt, and tried to figure out what was right and wrong. At a crucial moment, he realized that he had to act to save his friend. Alex, moved by the sight of his brutally beaten friend, whom he knew was innocent, suddenly knew that his loyalty to Milo had to mean something if he were to be a man. Alex is among the brave men and women in literature, at “any time and in any country,”1 who have taken risks for an ideal or a principle. Alex took a risk because that is the way his parents wanted him to be raised, and that is the way the Church wanted him to be raised. Joe Taylor had in mind his own churchgoing mother, who taught him about sin, and his cobbler father, who on many occasions confronted the corrupt officials in his community. Joe Taylor wove his concepts of sin and corruption, which are part of his culture, into his story from his position in his social structure.2 He wrote as a man, as the son of a cobbler, and as a worker in Antonito’s class- and ethnically stratified world. Joe Taylor explained how his ideas of sin and corruption developed as he moved from the world of his mother to that of his father. He recalled the different ways that his parents contributed to his moral education. His mother taught him about sin while giving him love and comfort, and his father taught him about corruption. However , he also recalled how the moral education he received at his 162 CONCLUSION mother’s knee meshed with what he learned in his father’s zapatería. Beatriz Mondragón and Anastacio Taylor encouraged him to have a big heart, both by example and through stories. In Alex and the Hobo, Beatriz Mondragón’s alter ego gave food to the tramp in El Rito as well as being generous within her family. And Anastacio Taylor, Joe Taylor recalled, gave fish to anyone in the town who wanted it. The cultural legacies from his parents include folktales he still holds in his memory, albeit changed to incorporate lessons he learned much later. From his mother, he heard “The Gift of the Little People,” which dramatizes the value of having a big heart. From his father, he heard “Juan Chililí Pícaro,” which taught him to be a man of his word and to avoid playing the rich man’s game. Anastacio Taylor may have told “Juan Chililí” with an “independent” and perhaps “insubordinate” view of his community, reminiscent of artisans in the early English labor movement.3 Anastacio Taylor was heroic in standing up to corruption, but he owned no land, he possessed very little money, and he had to send his children out to work in the fields.4 While working in those fields, Joe Taylor lost some of his innocence as he learned about sex, drinking , and stealing. He also ran into contractors who exploited their workers by paying them by the row or the half-sack, whichever was to their advantage. He still thinks of their exploitation as corruption and sin. From his position as a farmworker, he developed the seeds of a class consciousness that germinated during his union years, when he worked for the perlite plant south of town. His awareness came later on, and he was moved to create an authentic hero by drawing on his culture. After reading Bless Me, Última, he realized that he too could carve fiction out of his historical memory. At the time Joe Taylor created Alex Martínez, the Mexicanos of the San Luis Valley had been experiencing Anglo-Saxon domination for more than a century. Joe Taylor revealed his opposition to hegemony when, in Alex and the Hobo, he contrasted his authentic hero to the cardboard heroes in the Hollywood Westerns of his youth. The Hollywood cowboy was the North American counterpart to the Mexican macho, that man who was full of bravado and who first appeared in Mexican ballads of the revolutionary period. The cowboy of...