The Valley Estampas Del Valle

In these vignettes set in the fictional county of Belken along the Texas-Mexico border in the early to mid-twentieth century, Rolando Hinojosa sketches a landscape of Mexican Texans and Anglo Texans living side by side, in good times and bad. ñThe worldÍs a drugstore: youÍll find a little bit of just about everything, and itÍs usually on sale, too. Belken County, Texas is part of the world, and so, itÍs no different; its people are packaged in cellophane and they, too, come in all sizes, shapes and in a choice of colors.î Some are brave; others are craven. Some are sharp, and some are dull. Death calls on a regular basis in this first installment of HinojosaÍs acclaimed Klail City Death Trip Series. JehÏ Malacara was seven when his mother died and nine when his father passed. He has family, but itÍs Don VÕctor Pelàez who takes him in and makes him an integral part of the Pelàez Tent Show. When la muerte comes for Don VÕctor, JehÏ is orphaned again. Others die in bar room brawls, in a clandestine amorous tryst at the local Holiday Inn and on the street. Hinojosa paints his canvas with a montage of lifeÍs events„births, weddings, friendships and love affairs„but his brushwork all too frequently highlights the discrimination experienced by Mexican Americans. They lose their land to Anglos, are paid with rotten fruit for their labor and are refused admission to certain cafes. But life goes on. Young men go to war and old men remember their wars, whether the Mexican Revolution, World War II or the Korean War. This classic novel was originally published in the early 1970s as Estampas del Valle and in the early 1980s as The Valley. Frequently compared to William FaulknerÍs Yoknapatawpha and Gabriel GarcÕa MàrquezÍs Macondo, Rolando HinojosaÍs Klail City Death Trip Series is required reading for anyone interested in life along the Texas-Mexico border in the twentieth century.

"In these vignettes set in the fictional county of Belken along the Texas-Mexico border in the early to mid-twentieth century, Rolando Hinojosa sketches a landscape of Mexican Texans and Anglo Texans living side by side, in good times and bad"--Publisher.

The Clasicos Chicanos/Chicano Classics series is intended to ensure the long-term accessibility of deserving works of Chicano literature and culture that have become unavailable over the years or that are in imminent danger of becoming inaccessible. Each of the volumes includes an introduction contextualizing the work within Chicano literature and a bibliography of works by and about the author. The series is designed to be a vehicle that will help in the recuperation of Raza literary history and permit the continued experience and enjoyment of our literature by both present and future generations of readers. With a keen eye, a spare hand, and an underpinning of humor, Rolando Hinojosa depicts life in the Chicano Rio Grande Valley during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s -- the people and their quirks, customs and dreams. Hinojosa writes in a style that has often been compared to that of Thornton Wilder and William Faulkner: characters speak for themselves and all places have a story to tell. This is a new Spanish-language edition of the original novel in the Klail City Death Trip Series.

Klail City is the pivotal novel in HinjosaÍs continuing saga, the Klail City Death Trip Series. It is concerned with power as articulated through the disjunctive class and race relations between Texas Mexicans and Texas Anglos in the lower Rio Grande Valley. In his desire to help recreate the kaleidoscopic past, Hinojosa employs four generations of storytellers who thoroughly mesmerize the reader with their tales of tragic realism, alienation and desire. Klail City (in its Spanish version) is the winner of Latin AmericaÍs most prestigious literary award, the Casa de las Am?ricas Prize. It has been published in German and now, HinojosaÍs own English-language version is available. Rolando Hinojosa is the best known and most prolific Mexican American novelist. His works, which form a continuing, ever-evolving saga of life in the small border towns in TexasÍs lower Valley, are acclaimed for their fine sense of wit and pathos and their ability to capture the nuances of oral language.

Rolando Hinojosa, winner of the National Award for Chicano Literature (Quinto Solæ1972), the International Award for Best Spanish American Novel (Casa de las Am?ricasæ1976), is considered to be the foremost Chicano novelist. A master of satire, humor and understatement, Hinojosa has nurtured his characters through generations in the history of his fictional Rio Grande Valley town, Klail City. InæRites and Witnesses, the drama unfolds among the wealthy power-brokers whose manipulation of banking, ranching, real estate and local politics shapes the lives of real and down-to-earth inhabitants, all deftly and sensitively sketched by Hinojosa.

This dissertation engages in a critical reading of Rolando Hinojosa's early fiction in Estampas del Valle as an example of a unique border literature that highlights the multiplicity of elements that exist along the Rio Grande. By using the work of an author that has direct experience with life along the U.S.-Mexico border the aim of this study is to look at how the border region and its cultural and spatial manifestations impact on writings concerned with memory, the personal and the self. Authors such as Rolando Hinojosa live within the blessing and terrors of multiplicity; a culture that splinters and fragments into multiple perspectives, identities, voices and discourses. This analysis attempts to locate the place of the border and its people as a vital locus of enunciation in contemporary cultural and literary studies and simultaneously show how Hinojosa forged new ground in this literary publication by creating an idiosyncratic form of fragmentary writing. The unifying elements which render Hinojosa's Estampas del Valle as a novel are a particular historical period, a geographical stage, and the collective characterization of a distinct brand of Mexicans: the gente del Valle de Rio Grande. This work also examines the way in which this regional border area covering South Texas and Northern Mexico shapes his writing. My focus on Estampas del Valle, is to demonstrate the importance of this work as an individual novel, standing on its own, apart from the Klail City Death Trip Series. Estampas del Valle has been overlooked and overshadowed by the large composition of work that has become the Klail City Death Trip Series for which Hinojosa claims international recognition as a Mexican-American writer. Returning to his early writing we will explore elements of an ingrained multifarious border identity and how his early work is representative of his close ties to Mexico, Mexican literature and other Latin American forms of writing. In this study I will analyze how Hinojosa incorporates Mexican cultural and historical elements covering an array of topics from religious folk tales to the Mexican Revolution along the Rio Grande border. My aim is to provide the reader with the sense that although Hinojosa's identity and writing are dialogic, he does not choose to be Mexican or American, but internally lives his Rio Grande Valley identity. This identity consists of a border culture with close cultural and linguistic ties to northern Mexico. Hispanic theoreticians and literary critics of the border like Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar have reconfigured previous conceptualizations of the borderlands by discovering in the fluid hybridity characteristic of border population and culture an archetype with which to interpret America and even the world. Using space as a constant metaphor and agency for his writing, Rolando Hinojosa constructs an original framework for the Mexican American novel within the perspective of American regionalism and within the Mexican norteño space and imaginary. Rolando Hinojosa, who won the Quinto Sol Prize in 1972 was representative of the Quinto Sol writers who often rejected Anglo-American literary models and instead did what writers of Mexican heritage in the Southwest had done traditionally: they turned southward and did their literary apprenticeships in the works of authors such as Rulfo, Borges, and García-Márquez. In "The Evolution of Chicano Literature", Raymond Paredes writes that the new school of Chicano writers not only reaffirmed its cultural ties to the cultures of contemporary Mexico and Latin America but also rediscovered, as Mexican artists had earlier in the century, their aboriginal heritage. Just as literary and cultural critics have raised the issues of multiculturalism and identity politics, these minority writers have embraced the perplexing question of identity - of how group identities contribute to the self an essential quality, a crucial part of self-definition. Rolando Hinojosa tells the history of a community intermingled with his own. In Estampas del Valle, Rolando Hinojosa confirms that the wall or border is not the impenetrable ring of protection that creates a metaphysics of the pure, but a site of a constant crossing, of conjunction and disjunction. The threshold of unpredictable dynamics, as actual crossings collide with maps as spatial and national demarcations, demarcation becomes, in Hinojosa's work, part of a dialectics, not of confrontation, but of interaction. The crossing of one culture to another, of one language to the other and of one way of living to the next, is only possible if the boundary ceases to be so and behaves more like a permeable membrane in a living organism such as the Rio Grande Valley Border that Hinojosa highlights in this oeuvre. My analysis considers contacts and crossings across the lines and within the lines as crucial sites to investigate and generate identities and the different manners of living and leaving, of rooting and routing. As a site of representation, the Rio Grande Valley is a palimpsest of routes, histories, and images distinctly traced in Hinojosa's novel. Finally, there is the basic principle: that for many Chicanos, the political boundary between the United States and Mexico has no real significance, that it is an impertinence arbitrarily separating people of a common cultural heritage. The point is simply that the Chicano in no sense lives in isolation; culturally and physically, he receives constant reinforcement from Mexico. In this dissertation I will show how Hinojosa has mastered the vernacular of the people of the lower Rio Grande Valley that his text sounds like a metrical litany of colloquial expressions and local oral traditions. In this respect, it is not significant whether a sketch is rendered as monologue or dialogue. That Hinojosa has a keen and sensitive ear for the cadences of spoken language is illustrated by the fact that the majority of selections are recorded in the first person. But the fact is that even those selections recounted by nameless narrators share this remarkable oral quality. Once more, the importance of this study lies in calling attention to Hinojosa's earliest novel, Estampas del Valley and its contributions to border literature simultaneously breaking away from concepts that generalize border crossings. Significantly, Hinojosa demonstrates how, border location, specifically the Rio Grande Valley, becomes an intimate feature of identity and thus of the similitude between and among neighboring things; for, as Foucault explains in The Order of Things, "their edges touch, their fringes intermingle, the extremity of the one also denotes the beginning of the other. In this way, movement, influences, passions, and properties too, are communicated. So that in this hinge between two things a resemblance appears" (Foucault, 106). Estampas del Valle, Hinojosa proves, is a prime example of this composite multifaceted resemblance along the border's physical national boundaries. In addition to what has already been mentioned, my dissertation aims to examine the multiple voices and identities of the Rio Grande Valley in Estampas del Valle and their direct relationship to Mexican history, culture and heritage. The author's linguistic and literary techniques function to give this work a social realism in order to attack the political, social and economic problems of the Chicano on the border.

Welcome to Klail City, in Belken County, along the Mexico border in Texas' Rio Grande Valley. In the weeks leading up to the Democratic primary, Jehu Malacara chronicles the political rabble-rousing of Klail City's wealthiest citizens in letters to his cousin Rafe Buenrostro. Led by Arnold "Noddy" Perkins, the who's who of Belken County create a complex web of relationships. Wrangling bank loans, club memberships, and local politics, Perkins dominates the political and economic landscape of the community. When Malacara turns up missing, and the writer, P. Galindo, begins interviewing the citizens, tales of deceit and betrayal float to the surface. From Jehu's knockout girlfriend Ollie to up-and-coming socialite Becky Escobar and even to old man Perkins himself, Hinojosa offers a feast of quirky characters and misdeeds. Part epistolary, part mystery novel, the population of Klail City makes an indelible impression. With an introduction by Hinojosa scholar Manuel Martín-Rodríguez, a professor at University of California Merced, this volume combines for the first time the English and Spanish-language versions of the novel that creates a fictitious community that The New York Times compared to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo.

The first comprehensive interpretation of the work of a major figure in Chicano literature, Klaus Zilles's study of the fourteen novels in Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip series will appeal equally to the specialist, to the student, and to the interested reader of Hinojosa's intriguing and innovative "Tejano" novels. The series is dedicated to revealing the suppressed oral history of Mexican Texas and to making the reader a companion on a quest for this elusive history. Published between 1973 and 1998, the Klail City series ranges in historical time from the mid-1700s to the end of the twentieth century, attesting to 250 years of Spanish-Mexican presence in the Lower Río Grande Valley of Texas. The main body of Hinojosa's series, however, is set in fictitious Belken County, located on the U.S./Mexico border, and charts the lives of Hinojosa's two protagonists, Rafe Buenrostro and his cousin, Jehú Malacara, two men raised in the rigidly segregated world of a South Texas farming community. The Klail City series constitutes a truly "novel" approach to the novel: each installment in the cycle differs from the one before it in genre (the adult Buenrostro becomes a police detective and appears in several mystery novels), in narrative style (one novel is written entirely in verse, while another takes epistolary form), or in language (Hinojosa writes in Spanish, in English, in Chicano idiom, and in mixtures of all three). Zilles accomplishment is to provide a critical guide to the complicated fictional world that Hinojosa creates. By showing the profusion of forms and styles Hinojosa deploys, Zilles reveals the true dimensions of Hinojosa's design. "What makes Zilles so refreshing is his style. . . . He writes in a language accessible to the average reader. His work is solid, informative, thoughtful, and useful. I recommend it highly."--Juan Bruce-Novoa, Harvard University

Bilingual collection of short stories in English and Spanish about rural life in northern New Mexico.