Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas

1. “Sonny”

ONE “Sonny” Arturo Islas was born to Arturo Islas Sr. and Jovita La Farga on May 25, 1938, in El Paso, Texas. He was the first of three sons. He grew up in El Paso and spent his undergraduate and graduate student years, as well as his career as professor and writer, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He died on February 15, 1991, at his home in Palo Alto. The several very different worlds of Islas’s experience helped shape his complex personality. His early experiences as a child and adolescent in El Paso and his years as a student at Stanford University all contributed to a constantly shifting sense of self.As he recollects in a journal entry onApril 20, 1987: “I have so many selves and wear so many hats. The ‘Self’ in self esteem has nothing to do with ego, with me, with all those roles I play throughout a day. It is the self of quiet attention to what is around me and within me, a calm that has an inner eye over which I have no control.” 1 Islas’s initial experience growing up on the border of Texas and Mexico raised issues of class, race, sexuality, gender, and religion. His paternal grandmother, Crecenciana Sandoval, was in her teens when she met, fell in love with, and married the much older Jesús Islas. Both lived in Chihuahua, Mexico, but hailed from places north and south of the border : Crecenciana was from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Jesús was from Las Cruces, New Mexico. In Chihuahua, Crecenciana was working as a schoolteacher and Jesús in commerce when Mexico’s historical tides shifted—for the worse. In 1910 the Mexican Revolution, no longer an echo in the distance, closed in on their community. Islas would recollect (in one of his many collage-memories passed down through the family’s strong oral tradition) how Crecenciana and Jesús’s firstborn, Arturo Islas—“a true intellectual, man, hero, and perhaps (if all tales are true) our only poet”—was shot dead by a Federalist bullet (journal, August 2, 1959). Their son’s tragic death in his twenties spurred Crecenciana and Jesús to seek refuge in Juárez, the northern city that shared the border with El Paso. As the revolution lurched toward its end, Jesús worked his way up the political ladder and became the city treasurer, while Crecenciana continued to teach. According to family lore, as the war approached the northern territories, Pancho Villa pulled Jesús Islas aside and told him to move across the border to El Paso, or they might witness another tragic loss. They crossed the Rio Grande, from “one bloody side of the river to the other and into a land that just a few decades earlier had been Mexico” (1990b, 42). Across the border, they became the migrant souls Islas would later write about. In El Paso, four years after a second Arturo Islas was born (the parents named him to honor the memory of the first son), Jesús died. Crecenciana was left the task of raising the ten surviving children on her own—though she had help from her two sisters , who had also settled along the El Paso/Juárez border. The family survived the Mexican Revolution and settled into the social and cultural borderland that was El Paso. Crecenciana Sandoval was a feisty survivor who ruled her household with an iron fist. She worked for a dry-goods store and as a teacher. After retiring, she would dip into her pension to put food on the table. Her hard discipline taught her children the importance of education: reading, writing, arithmetic, and flu2 “ s o n n y ” ency in Spanish and English. In the end, the matriarch’s struggle paid off. The new generation of bilingual, bicultural Islas children moved swiftly through the social ranks because of their education. In Migrant Souls Islas’s narrator calls these figures (fictionalized) “border Mexicans with American citizenship” (1990b, 42). And though they bumped up against an Anglo-owned glass ceiling, the second generation’s education and bilingual fluency opened doors into careers in an El Paso world otherwise dominated by Anglos. Arturo Islas Sr. became well respected as one of four Mexican Americans in an Anglo police force, for example. Crecenciana ’s belief in education passed down the line to the third...