El Indio Jesus (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series) [Hardcover]

Gilberto Chavez Ballejos (Author), Shirley Hill Witt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2003 | Series: American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series (Book 35)

El Indio Jesus, a mixed-blood Chicano/Indian/Coyote, is a hustler and philosopher who follows his vision, always challenging the sacred and the acceptable. He devises business schemes, including the Right On Time Company and the Fly By Night Company, which he establishes for the unemployed and undocumented borderlanders who excel in lost or "illegitimate" art forms such as tile-making, lowrider automobile creation, and graffiti wall artistry. Jesus becomes entangled in adventures, many of his own design, that lead him to increasingly complicated and dangerous situations.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Politically savvy, sociologically on the mark, witty and tragic by turns, this multiethnic novel chronicles a week in the life of a Chicano/Indian/Coyote Robin Hood. "El Indio Jes#s," as the man is called, cruises his unnamed border town in his caro troquita, a VW Beetle he turns into a pick-up truck, hiring himself out to do repair work and organizing his fellow drifters, mostly undocumented immigrants. As he crisscrosses the district, he meets up with a succession of people whose stories make up the bulk of the novel. El Chuy Jim?nez, a builder with an amazing creative streak, is seduced from El Indio's fly-by-night construction business, the Right On Time Company, by a beautiful blonde who symbolizes the corrupting attractions of the Caucasian, or gabacho, world. Another of El Indio's friends, Miguel Olson, is burned to death in a car outside a bar, leading El Indio to muse on the life of the "Chicano Swede," as Olson was known. The longest episode involves El Indio's daring plan to ferry a young muralist and his grandmother into the U.S., with the help of an Anglo priest. The book is rife with expos?s of the bureaucratic catch-22s that beset the poor, as when a rent receipt is required to get food stamps. But the slumlords are renting property already sold to the urban renewal program and are unable to provide legal rent receipts. El Indio Jes#s is a maverick genius who can circumvent almost every aspect of such byzantine systems. Unfortunately, he seems unable to keep from being arrested for lacking the proper automobile papers. Though Ballejos and Witt speechify in places, they otherwise offer up a stinging, eloquent critique of a hypocritical world determined to beat down those who fail to buy into the system.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Less than a novel per se, this work is more a series of loosely connected episodes tied together by the presence (direct or indirect) of the eponymous hero, who moves in and out of the lives of his Chicano acquaintances like a ubiquitous spirit. The work focuses on a typical week in Jes#s's life, with each self-contained episode featuring no more than a perfunctory central intrigue. These vignettes offer typical Chicano scenarios in the American Southwest; we are shown in great detail changes in the lives of the characters but don't get to know them as real people. Any attempts to cultivate multicultural awareness backfire, since the stereotypes of both Anglos and Chicanos are equally derisive. Equally distracting is the authors' desultory sermonizing on politics and social issues to the extent that the narration seems to be the vehicle for the proselytizing rather than the other way around. Recommended only for Chicano collections.DLawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806132302
• ISBN-13: 978-0806132303
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,100,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant novel illuminates the grafitero experience, February 19, 2005

By 

Vin Smith "Novelist" (Yreka, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: El Indio Jesus: A Novel (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series) (Paperback)

A most powerful, gripping, moving experience. El Indio Jesus gently takes the reader into dark places of the human condition, but sheds the light of reason, logic, cultural realities, and the kind of truth that embraces love at its core. Simply put, El Indio Jesus is a masterpiece.