Crossing the Rio Grande: An Immigrant’s Life in the 1880s by Luis G. Gómez, and: Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in the Mexican American Southwest by Vincent Pérez

Abstract

4 3 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W in t e r 2 0 0 8 Crossing the Rio Qrande: An Immigrant’s Life in the 1880s. By Luis G. Gómez. Translated by Guadalupe Valdez Jr. Edited by Guadalupe Valdez Jr. and Thomas H. Kreneck. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 106 pages, $23.00. Remembering the Hacienda: History and Memory in the Mexican American Southwest. By Vincent Pérez. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. 251 pages, $49.95/$24.95. Reviewed by Rodrigo Lazo University of California, Irvine The ongoing historical recovery and study of writing by people of Mexican descent in the United States poses a series of methodological and critical chal­ lenges, not least of which is how to address a critic’s personal and familial rela­ tionship to the past. Rather than adopt an objective perspective that attempts to ignore personal connections, some critics over the last two decades have incorporated questions about personal investment in literary and cultural his­ tory into their academic work. Remembering the Hacienda and Crossing the Rio Grande are two excellent examples of how critics and scholars who investigate family history can simultaneously produce materials whose importance goes beyond a personal analysis. Although completely different generically, these books are the result of critical commitments to developing a connection between memory (as a personal and communal experience) and the social implications of print culture history. Crossing the Rio Grande is a translation of a Spanish-language memoir orig­ inally published by Luis G. Gómez as Mis Memorias in Rio Grande City, Texas, in 1935. Translated by Gomez’s grandson, the book recounts Gomez’s arrival in the United States and subsequent commitment to work and accumulating a fortune. As a bookkeeper and contractor, Gómez had regular contact with hundreds of laborers of Mexican descent who cleared land, built fences, and loaded rocks onto freight trains. Thus, it is not surprising that the memoir is infused with the language of finance and labor. In the following passage, Gómez discusses a job he had undertaken with his partner, Eleodoro Tamez: “As soon as our people arrived at the new camp, they began cutting wood. I had already begun the project with ten men who were added to the twenty that Tamez had brought along, giving us a total of thirty men who made nine hundred cords of wood within fifteen days for a total of $1,125 at $1.25 per cord” (70). This type of passage, while not the most dramatic, helps to provide a picture of the way the book accounts for daily labor, clearly a major driving force behind late nineteenth-century migration. By translating his grandfather’s book, Guada­ lupe Valdez Jr. reminds us of the central place of work as a determinant in immigrant narratives going back decades. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 3 9 Crossing the Rio Grande offers several incidents of the picaresque variety. A t one point, for example, Gómez jumps a freight train in a rush to collect earnings from a contract but is then tossed off and forced to make his way on foot. Gómez does not structure his memorias along a storyline, and, at times, it is unclear where he is going. A promised second volume, which presumably would complete the account, has not been located. As a historical document, Crossing the Rio Grande would appeal to anyone interested in immigrant narra­ tives, the history of the southwestern United States, and labor history. Like Valdez, Vincent Pérez is inspired by his grandfather’s experiences as an immigrant worker in the United States, but in this case the result is an aca­ demic study of the way the hacienda has emerged as cultural memory in both novels and the personal lives of Mexican Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remembering the Hacienda is a book that combines forceful literary historical analysis with Pérez’s investigation of conflicting accounts of the hacienda past in his own family. The book offers...