Customer Reviews

Chicano: A Novel

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This author and this book were truly amazing. One of the best books I've read. Being a Chicano myself and having grown up out west it was easy to visuallize the scenery and the characters due to the incredible descriptions of the author. He is truly a gifted writer. I am hooked on his style of writing and cannot wait till I can get my hands on his other two books and to learn all I can about this genious. Enjoy.

I read it 20 years ago when I was a VISTA volunteer working with migrant farmworkers (i.e. chicanos). The story of 3 generations of a family in California 1910-1970. You'll think about the ending for a long long time. I have for 20 years. Why hasn't this been made into a film?

In 1970, Doubleday did something that was rather unusual for a major press at the time: it published a novel by a Mexican-American author. That author, the late Richard Vasquez, was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who had toiled for a decade in writing his multigenerational family saga, "Chicano." Rayo, the wildly successful Latino imprint of HarperCollins, has reissued this landmark novel in honor of its thirty-fifth anniversary. As Ruben Martinez notes in his enlightening and provocative introduction, "Chicano" had long been out of print despite its importance within the relatively young canon of Mexican-American literature. Martinez tells us that prior to "Chicano," the only other Mexican-American novel was Jose Antonio Villareal's "Pocho" which Doubleday also published-in 1959. It was through Vasquez's daughter's efforts that Rayo has reissued this noteworthy novel.

Vasquez offers a potent and unvarnished portrayal of one family's attempt to find dignity and raise children in a land that forever feels foreign even over four generations. "Chicano" also serves as a historical document that chronicles imperfect survival in the face of often unrelenting obstacles. As Martinez notes: "Maybe in the end there is something essentially American about being Chicano." Perhaps that was Vasquez's greatest accomplishment: demonstrating that Chicanos are as American as anyone else. [The full review first appeared in The Elegant Variation.]

I read this book in high school and twice since then. I've always thought it would eventually be put into a movie. The telling of a story that so closely parallels the reality of my own experience makes for great reading. The author puts you into old Mexico and brings you to the U.S. and makes you feel every bit a part of our history through his vision.