Tomás Rivera - A compilation of stories, internal monologues, vignettes, and scraps of conversation, the novel focuses on a year in the life of a boy from a south Texas community

Tomás Rivera, Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, Ed. by Julián Olivares, Arte Publico Press, 2008.


"I tell you, God could care less about the poor. Tell me, why must we live here like this? What have we done to deserve this? You're so good and yet you suffer so much," a young boy tells his mother in Tomas Rivera's classic novel about the migrant worker experience, ...y no se lo trago la tierra / ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Outside the chicken coop that is their home, his father wails in pain from the unbearable cramps brought on by sunstroke from working in the hot fields. The young boy can't understand his parents' faith in a god that would impose such horrible suffering, poverty, and injustice on innocent people. Adapted into the award-winning film ...and the earth did not swallow him and recipient of the first award for Chicano literature, the Premio Quinto Sol, in 1970, Rivera's masterpiece recounts the experiences of a Mexican-American community through the eyes of a young boy. Forced to leave their home in search of work, they are exploited by farmers, shopkeepers, even other Mexican Americans, and the boy must forge his self identity in the face of exploitation, death and disease, constant moving, and conflicts with school officials. In Tomas Rivera: The Complete Works, editor Julian Olivares brings together the late author's entire literary production: Rivera's classic novel, translated by poet Evangelina Vigil-Pinon; his short fiction collection, The Harvest / La cosecha; and his poetry collection, The Searchers: Collected Poetry. In addition to his creative work, this volume collects Rivera's influential critical essays, including "Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature," "Chicano Literature: Fiesta of the Living," "The Great Plains as Refuge in Chicano Literature," and the previously unpublished "Critical Approaches to Chicano Literature and its Dynamic Intimacy." In his poetry and his short fiction, Rivera hauntingly writes about alienation, love and betrayal, man and nature, death and resurrection, and the search for community.





Tomás Rivera, ...y no se lo tragó la tierra / ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (English and Spanish Edition),  Arte Publico Press,  1995. [1971.]

read it at Google Books

Tomás Rivera's original Spanish-language novel plus a new translation into English by Evangelina Vigil-Piñón. ...y no se lo tragó la tierra won the first national award for Chicano literature in 1970 and has become the standard literary text for Hispanic literature classes throughout the country. It is now an award-winning, motion picture entitled And the Earth Did Not Swaloow Him.

Considered a landmark of Chicano literature, Rivera's 1971 novel tells the story of a community of migrant workers in the United States in the 1940s and '50s. A compilation of stories, internal monologues, vignettes, and scraps of conversation, the novel focuses on a year in the life of a boy from a south Texas community. The boy faces bigotry, poverty, illness, and confusion about his own history and identity, but finds strength in himself and in those around him. "By discovering who he is," writes Julián Olivares in Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works, "this adolescent becomes one with his people. Through his quest, he embodies and expresses the collective conscience and experiences of his society."
      Chicano literature scholar Nicolás Kanellos writes: "Tomás Rivera's ...y no se lo tragó la tierra is haunted by the nameless Chicano masses whose nocturnal voices reflect on the events narrated and record them into the collective memory of the Chicano. Rivera, in reproducing the Chicano social milieu, allows the reader to eavesdrop on the candid, all-knowing and unguarded conversations of the unidentified interlocutors who represent the collective subconscious of the Chicanos. We see through them how Chicanos interpret reality. For the most part, these nighttime speakers are not even circumstantially related to the plot; rather, they review for each other what they themselves have heard. It seems that they are one step from oral history and folklore, one step from immortalizing their subjects in a corrido or folktale." - www.learner.org/workshops/hslit/session4/aw/work1.html

The son of Mexican citizens who migrated to Texas in the 1920s, Tomás Rivera was born in Crystal City, Texas, in the agricultural region called the “Winter Garden.” Rivera’s parents worked as farm laborers in the 1930s and ’40s and throughout Rivera’s childhood were a part of the migrant stream that took Mexican workers from south Texas into Oklahoma and Missouri and then into the vegetable fields of Michigan and Minnesota. Rivera’s working-class background provided the basis for his writing. He too worked as a migrant farm laborer through the 1950s, even during his junior college years in Texas. On graduation from Southwest Texas State University with a degree in English, Rivera faced the realities of life in the Southwest. Unable to find work as an English teacher because he was Mexican American, he returned to Southwest Texas State to earn a master’s degree in English and administration. He then received a doctorate in Spanish literature at the University of Oklahoma in 1969. After a few years of teaching, Rivera became vice president for administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio and, later, executive vice president at the University of Texas at El Paso. At the time of his death, he was chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. ... y no se lo tragó la tierra/ And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) is a milestone in Mexican American literary history, set explicitly within the social and political contexts of the agricultural laborer’s life in the years after World War II. Winner in 1970 of the first Quinto Sol Prize for literature, the most prestigious literary award in the early years of Chicano literature, Rivera’s novel, from which the present selections are drawn, became a primary element of the new Mexican American literary history. In the original South Texas Spanish, Rivera’s prose is tight and lean, the vocabulary and syntax rigorously controlled and set within the world of the Chicano migrant farmworker. Like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Rivera’s narrative is not expository. In documenting the life of the farmworker and trying to keep its significant place in contemporary American history alive, Tierra offers a complex narrative of subjective impressions purposely disjointed from simple chronology. “The Lost Year” is the first half of the frame story that brackets the twelve sections of Rivera’s novel. The selections in the book, including the titular chapter, “...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him,” and the penultimate chapter, “When We Arrive,” depict crucial moments of dawning self-consciousness and collective solidarity. The links between the chapters follow a stream-of-consciousness thread, bereft of traditional narrative causality, relating the seasonal events in an allegorical year of the life of the anonymous migrant farmworker child. In a 1980 interview, Rivera situated his work squarely within the Mexican American’s struggle for social and political justice: "In...Tierra...I wrote about [the life of] the migrant worker in [the] ten year period [between 1945 and 1955]....I began to see that my role...would be to document that period of time, but giving it some kind of spiritual strength or spiritual history” (Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview, 1980:148). Written during the period 1967–1968, at the height of the politicization of the Chicano labor struggles and the takeover of political power in Crystal City by Mexican Americans of the radical La Raza Unida party, Rivera’s stories have a sense of political urgency. They also present the anguish of spiritual alienation and the reality of economic and social injustice. Rivera’s narrator, born into a world of absence and loss, seeks to discover his identity and to inscribe his name and that of his community in the text of history. The characters of Rivera’s stories are not the pragmatic subjects who populate the myth of American individualism, nor are they romanticized symbols of the worker engaged in a worldwide struggle. Rather, his characters are rooted in the reality of south Texas social and economic history, lived out and embodied in the form of the community of la raza (the people).

Ramón Saldívar Stanford University