Famous All Over Town by Danny Santiago

Abstract

Reviews 347 her book with the arrival of white women and the tensions caused by these “lovely, tender exotics.” Many Tender Ties documents what effects the coming of traders with their iron pots, knives, and European values had on native society, and illus­ trates the differences in the way Indian males and females responded to these changes. Indian women, for example, who welcomed metal implements, were also often more closely connected with the fur trade than were Indian men. Women served as interpreters, snowshoe and moccasin makers, and food preservers. Also, because Indian women trapped small animals and prepared their pelts, these peltries were considered their property. Consequently, much of the actual trading for pelts involved an exchange between trappers and Indian women. Many Tender Ties is a pleasure to read and a valuable asset to scholar­ ship. It has many pictures, extensive footnotes, and a substantial bibliography. Its only limitation is that Van Kirk had to rely on men’s documents to recreate the history of women. Indian women and their offspring left very few first­ hand accounts of their thoughts and feelings. This may be a part of history we will never be able to regain, but .Many Tender Ties does much to remedy the deficiencies of our present history. BILLIE WAHLSTROM Michigan Technological University Famous All Over Town. By Danny Santiago, pseud. Daniel James. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 284 pages, $14.95.) The young California writer Danny Santiago has published the novel we have awaited for years, since stories like “The Somebody” announced his presence. Now, suddenly, we learn that he never exactly existed, except in the imagination of a feisty septuagenarian Anglo writer named Daniel James. The “secret” has been revealed by John Gregory Dunne in the New York Review of Books and was hot copy even in Time. We should not allow this notoriety to obscure the novel’s achievement. Famous All Over Town remains a major work about Hispanic-American experience, even if we cannot read it exactly as we did a few months ago when we were innocent. Famous All Over Town is an extended flashback of its narrator and protagonist, Rudy Medina, Jr. He is undergoing some unnamed crisis in the present when he drives to the asphalted railroad yard which once was his old east Los Angeles neighborhood, and summons up a chunk of the past which began with his fourteenth birthday. In his imagination “trailers and chainlink went up in flames. In their place a certain saggy picket fence sprouted from the ground, a certain squeaky front porch rose up behind, and the skinny little house where I lived half my life. . . . Old Shamrock lived again and I was home.” 348 Western American Literature “Home” is in fact the key idea which this novel will explore, and it is a particularly complex knot of values for Rudy. Home is Shamrock Street, the old neighborhood, which is eaten away as the Southern Pacific acquires prop­ erty for an expansion of its yards. As the neighborhood disappears so does the neighborhood gang, which had given the skinny boy a sense of power, protec­ tion from the rival Sierras, and even his street name: Chato de Shamrock. Home is moreover the household of his parents, which is also crumbling: his sister will marry and his parents quarrel and separate. Finally, home is Mexico, which Rudy will visit for the first time. Its ugliness, beauty, and mystery, all symbolized by a cousin’s gift of an ancient fertility idol, make a difficult legacy for the troubled youth. A summary cannot capture the marvelous comedy created by Rudy’s wisecracking first-person narration and the interplay of the Medina family. Chato’s mother, his “fighting sister” Lena, and his ponderously masculine father all move into your mind and remain, refusing to leave when you close the book. I admire the misguided odyssey of the Medinas to their home village, in which Mr. Medina’s attempt to ingratiate himself with his witch­ like mother-in-law ends in his complete humiliation. Equally funny is the (earlier) scene in which the Medina family attempts to remain decorous in the presence of Rudy’s probation officer...