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Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Hispanic literature? I was going to write in as many different genres within the genre of the novel as possible. Then I wrote the second novel, Klail City y sus alrededores , 9 and I added a few more characters, but I also kept some characters from the previous novel.
Many of us were in the military. The characters are a few years older, they are mature, they are ready to receive their college degrees …. Then I wrote it again in English, and it was published as well. He becomes a policeman, and his brothers remain farmers, and then it just goes on and on ….
What will she do? Finally, I decided to write it in English. With this strategy, I could follow the changes in Valley mores, as the characters discuss the divorce in an important family. I could see all those changes in the Valley and I told them in my own way—without coloring or exaggeration or playing it down. Raab: You mentioned the different genres in which you worked—this is probably why you have been categorized in so many different ways: as a postmodern writer, an ethnic writer, a local-color or regionalist writer, a satirist, etc.
Would you say that any of these labels fit? Hinojosa laughs : I imagine they do. But I do respect literary criticism. Mexican Americans of the Lower Rio Grande Valley] and the changes they had gone through, some of the good things they had done for this country and some of the things this country had not, or had, done for them.
I gave them jobs: attorneys, a judge, a mayor of the city, a state representative, a school principal, a banker, a city official, an architect. Raab: There is only one more installment to look forward to in the series? Hinojosa: I think so. And then he becomes a hitman.
Or do you see yourself as writing for a general American audience? Or maybe an international audience? Hinojosa: I keep all of them in mind. Readers is what I want. But I have no mercy. So I write for everyone. Now I receive e-mails. So, yes, I write for readers. Raab: In terms of nationality, do you consider yourself an American writer, a Mexican writer, or a cosmopolitan writer?
Raab: How do readers in Mexico and Latin America react to your work? It appeared in El Universal , a leading Mexico City newspaper, and the author was a writer himself.
And that was it. I read Klail City. That certainly never happened to me in the United States. He wanted to know what I was working on; I was very pleased.
But I also like to write about the bulk, the people I knew as a kid. Raab: In your fiction we usually meet quite a number of characters; you just mentioned the forty or so characters talking in Becky ; and there are as many about whom they talk. At odd moments their lives and activities intersect—often by chance. Why are chance meetings and chance developments so appealing to you in your fiction? Hinojosa: I guess it has to do with the brevity of life. Although many of them know each other or are related, I see an opening wedge to start my stories—or the novels, obviously, of course, made up of stories.
I always take something to write anywhere I go, and, of course, at home. I wrote my first three novels in longhand, and then computers started to come up, and one of my daughters helped me to buy one and to learn how to use it.
This helped a lot: often I need to delete a word, a line, a paragraph, a page; so a computer is handy.
Now I own a small one so that I can write anywhere. Me, if I have something to say, I can say it anywhere. Raab: I think you once said that you wrote most of We Happy Few while traveling on a freighter. Is that true? And does it help you to have some distance to the borderlands, in which your fiction is set?
As a child, I used to watch black-and-white movies like everybody else, and it was from a movie that I learned that you could go on a freighter as a passenger, and I realized that I wanted to do this. I wrote a draft of the novel during the trip, all that remained was editing. It was a thirty-five day trip—thirty-five days to myself—so of course I had to write something. And I watched the sea; saw those huge Chinese fishing nets; never did see a whale, only a tail or two, but I did see this spray from their backs.
I also took some paperbacks along—some Conrad, some Graham Greene, and it was very pleasant. They also had a pool measuring something like nine by nine, in which I swam with the crew; the Pacific is too cold for swimming, but it was fun, I had a good time, and I also wrote, and We Happy Few came out of that. Last week, a Slovenian translator said she loved the book, but that the title had been translated as Some Were Not Very Happy.
Of course she was deploring this mistranslation. I actually wrote something about her father and uncle—not in the English version of Becky , but in the Spanish one. I wrote the Spanish version later, and in it there are two Yugoslavs in the German army; one deserts, the other one is captured by the French and winds up in Vietnam—this story has some real-life sources. Raab: In We Happy Few you mention the changes that have occurred from one generation of Mexican Americans to the next in terms of higher education.
I took as my models the two four-year University of Texas branches, the one in Edinburg and the one in Brownsville. They had a woman president at each university at one time. Most of the faculty and a good portion of the administration is Mexican American.
I think I have a pretty good view of what the university is like. The faculty is the same. Raab: So is the novel a payback for the last five decades of suffering in academia? Hinojosa: In some sense, yes. I love academia otherwise. Raab: A last question: what do you want readers to take away from your books?
The majority of my readers are either Mexican American or Anglo-American. I appreciate the foreign readers, they make you feel so worldly, but mainly I want my readers to see and recognize themselves in those novels. Some Anglos are mean-hearted and prejudiced, and some are not; same thing with the Mexicans. My characters are as diverse as people are diverse.
They are good people and bad people, some are in high offices, some are out in the streets, endangering their fellow citizens. And also, whatever the Texas Anglos thought of the Texas Mexicans in the last century, they can get some answers here from someone who has no bones to pick. Not all Mexicans are thieves, not all Mexicans are lazy, but some are. Busby, Mark. Austin: University of Texas Press, Hinojosa, Rolando. Josef Raab and Martin Butler.
Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Hinojosa has also produced essays, poetry, and a detective novel titled Partners in Crime.
Hinojosa was born in Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley to a family with strong Mexican and American roots: his father fought in the Mexican Revolution while his mother maintained the family north of the border. An avid reader during childhood, Hinojosa was raised speaking Spanish until he attended junior high, where English was the primary spoken language. Like his grandmother, mother, and three of his four siblings, Hinojosa became a teacher; he has held several academic posts and has also been active in administration and consulting work.
Although he prefers to write in Spanish, Hinojosa has also translated his own books and written others in English. Hinojosa entered the literary scene with the Estampas del valle y otras obras, which was translated as Sketches of the Valley and Other Works. The four-part novel consists of loosely connected sketches, narratives, monologues, and dialogues, offering a composite picture of Chicano life in the fictitious Belken County town of Klail City, Texas.
The second section is a collection of pieces about a murder, presented through newspaper accounts, court documents, and testimonials from the defendant's relatives. Also orphaned during childhood, Rafa narrates a succession of experiences and recollections of his life. Hinojosa later rewrote Estampas del valle y otras obras in English, publishing it as The Valley in Hinojosa's aggregate portrait of the Spanish southwest continues in Klail City y sus alrededores, published in English as Klail City.
Like its predecessor, Klail City is composed of interwoven narratives, conversations, and anecdotes illustrating the town's collective life spanning fifty years.
Tatum in World Literature Today. A novel comprised of several long poems originally written in English and published in , Korean Love Songs presents protagonist Rafa Buenrostro's narration of his experiences as a soldier in the Korean War.
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