At eleven years old, Rivera was in a car accident in Bay City, Michigan.
Rivera was born on December 22, 1935, in Crystal City, Texas, to Spanish-speaking, migrant farmworkers, Florencio and Josefa Rivera. From 1979 until his death in 1984, he was the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, the first Mexican American to hold such a position at the University of California. Rivera taught in high schools throughout the Southwest USA, and later at Sam Houston State University and the University of Texas at El Paso. This book won the first Premio Quinto Sol award. y no se lo tragó la tierra, translated into English variously as This Migrant Earth and as. However, he achieved social mobility through education-gaining a degree at Southwest Texas State University (now known as Texas State University), and later a PhD at the University of Oklahoma-and came to believe strongly in the virtues of education for Mexican Americans.Īs an author, Rivera is best remembered for his 1971 Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness novella. He was born in Texas to migrant farm workers, and had to work in the fields as a young boy. Tomás Rivera (Decem– May 16, 1984) was a Chicano author, poet, and educator. But both groups of potential readers must first put aside any misconceptions engendered by the. 316 pages, $14.95.) Both Mormon and non-Mormon readers will be pleased and challenged by what they find here: over two hundred poems and fourteen hymns (most written between 19) by sixty-nine Mormon poets. Edited by Eugene England and Dennis Clark. PATRICIA DE LA FUENTE University of Texas-Pan American Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. “Inside the Window” is of interest because it represents the only available extract of Rivera’s second novel, La casa grande del pueblo, which was cut short at the author’s premature death in 1984. “The Salamanders” introduces biblical imagery in the endless rain which floods the beet fields, while “Looking for Borges” is a complete departure from previous themes in a brief parody of the Argentine writer. The previously unpublished “The Harvest” and “Zoo Island” explore the same themes as Rivera’s novel. The other excluded story, “Eva and Daniel,” told in the same narrative style as an event which has become part of the collective memory of the community, is less successful but characteristically Rivera in its focus on the small private tragedy of a young man whose wife dies in childbirth. While it is true that Pete Fonseca is an unsavory rogue, he is a memorable creation whose evil influence, temporarily cloaked in good will, draws everyone into his net of deceit so that the final betrayal of his unsuspecting bride seems all the more heinous.
As a result of this somewhat question able editorial decision, “Pete Fonseca” was later published in several popular anthologies and became one of Rivera’s best known short stories. The editor explains that the former was excluded because the repre sentation of the protagonist “did not conform to the romanticized portrayal of the pachuco as the rebellious Chicano hero that was appearing in this forma tive period of Chicano literature” (75). Edited by and “Eva and Daniel,” were originally intended as part of. The Harvest: Short Stories by Tomás Rivera. the earth did not part (1971), which examines the experiences of migrant Chicano farmworkers as seen through the consciousness of a young boy, Rivera possessesthat rare ability in writers to convert everyday episodes in the lives of ordinary people into small masterpieces of sparse yet often lyrical prose. Well-known in the field for his popular novel. 135 pages, $8.50.) This bilingual edition of Tomás Rivera’s complete short stories, edited by Julián Olivares, is a welcome addition to the increasing number of available creative works by Mexican-American authors. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ħ4 Western American Literature The Harvest: Short Stories by Tomás Rivera.
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