The Valley Estampas Del Valle

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.

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. “The world’s a drugstore: you’ll find a little bit of just about everything, and it’s usually on sale, too. Belken County, Texas is part of the world, and so, it’s no different; its people are packaged in cellophane and they, too, come in all sizes, shapes and in a choice of colors.” Some are brave; others are craven. Some are sharp, and some are dull. Death calls on a regular basis in this first installment of Hinojosa’s acclaimed Klail City Death Trip Series. Jehú Malacara was seven when his mother died and nine when his father passed. He has family, but it’s Don Víctor Peláez who takes him in and makes him an integral part of the Peláez Tent Show. When la muerte comes for Don Víctor, Jehú 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 life’s 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. Rolando Hinojosa’s Klail City Death Trip Series is required reading for anyone interested in life along the Texas-Mexico border in the twentieth century.

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

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. "The world's a drugstore: you'll find a little bit of just about everything, and it's usually on sale, too. Belken County, Texas is part of the world, and so, it's no different; its people are packaged in cellophane and they, too, come in all sizes, shapes and in a choice of colors." Some are brave; others are craven. Some are sharp, and some are dull. Death calls on a regular basis in this first installment of Hinojosa's acclaimed Klail City Death Trip Series. Jehú Malacara was seven when his mother died and nine when his father passed. He has family, but it's Don Víctor Peláez who takes him in and makes him an integral part of the Peláez Tent Show. When la muerte comes for Don Víctor, Jehú 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 life's 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 Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo, Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trip Series is required reading for anyone interested in life along the Texas-Mexico border in the twentieth century.

"The book explores how border subjects have been created and disputed in cultural narratives of the Texas-Mexico border, comparing and analyzing Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo literary representations of the border"--Provided by publisher.

Provides short biographies of Latino American writers and journalists and information on their works.

Joining the current debates in American literary history, José David Saldívar offers a challenging new perspective on what constitutes not only the canon in American literature, but also the notion of America itself. His aim is the articulation of a fresh, transgeographical conception of American culture, one more responsive to the geographical ties and political crosscurrents of the hemisphere than to narrow national ideologies. Saldívar pursues this goal through an array of oppositional critical and creative practices. He analyzes a range of North American writers of color (Rolando Hinojosa, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arturo Islas, Ntozake Shange, and others) and Latin American authors (José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Gabriel García Márquez, and others), whose work forms a radical critique of the dominant culture, its politics, and its restrictive modes of expression. By doing so, Saldívar opens the traditional American canon to a dialog with other voices, not just the voices of national minorities, but those of regional cultures different from the prevalent anglocentric model. The Dialectics of Our America, in its project to expand the “canon” and define a pan-American literary tradition, will make a critical difference in ongoing attempts to reconceptualize American literary history.