Renato RosaldoThe Chasers

Abstract

Books in Review Renato Rosaldo The Chasers Durham, North Carolina. Duke University Press. 2019. 144 pages. Renato Rosaldo established himself as an ethno-poet with his groundbreaking 2013 volume The Day of Shelly’s Death, which combined poetry, ethnography, and photographs to tell the moving story of his wife’s fatal accident decades earlier in Philippine backcountry. Now he gives us a new collection , also multidisciplinary. The Chasers is a deep-reaching account, in prose poems, of the high school gang to which the poet belonged when he was a student at Tucson High from 1956 to 1959. An anthropologist as well as poet, Rosaldo describes this new book as autoethnography . Concept as well as language innovation make it as soul-wrenching as its predecessor. More club than gang, as the term is used today, the Chasers were twelve adolescent males searching for identity in a racist and classist time. Eleven were Mexican Americans, one Jewish, one from a family of migrant workers. The Chasers had their own jackets and immense pride. In a prelude, Rosaldo writes: “What I learned through participant-observation was not social description. It was personal . . . what it meant to be a Chaser, how it sustained us, how we sustained us, how they sustained me.” Itwasattheirfiftiethhighschoolreunion that the eleven surviving Chasers (one was deceased by then) reunited and “remembered what we never forgot, what we held close, the people and places we never let go . . . once we resumed, we couldn’t stop gathering , looking back, unforgetting.” Memory is many-layered in these powerful poems. The men continued to meet. The idea for this book was born. Who are these men today? The one no longer alive was a supermarket produce manager. The others worked as a field superintendent for a mechanical contractor, a marijuana smuggler, a fireman and paramedic , an artist and singer, two lawyers, an elementary school principal, a psychiatrist, a moving and storage estimator, a cultural anthropologist, and a neurologist. Two Anglo friends, also present in these pages, were a realtor and university professor. A woman close to the boys was a teacher and owns a religious store. Most have risen in life. All remain Chasers. The Chasers is composed of brief prose poems in the voices of these boys-becomemen . Their teenage identities sound through words spoken decades later. Rosaldo’s ethnographic skill and poet’s intuition are evident in the portraits he creates. Photos of each Chaser and their female ally add to the book’s multilayered feeling. RENATO ROSALDO wider audience than westerners or ecologists only. The concerns for conservation raised here are as diverse as their authors. Rancher Yvonne Martinell’s “Ranching Communities and Conservation Must Be Combined” is not so much an argument as a narrative, which insists that her family and business are part of this landscape, not separable from it. Martinell describes, as an example of ranchers’ commitment to conservation, the extra expense she pays to protect her herds from wildlife diseases. But Robert B. Keitner notes that fears of brucillosis are often used to restrict the movement of Yellowstone’s bison, and the restrictions put on that rare herd’s range pose a threat to their species’ viability. Meanwhile, John D. Varley finds wildness in Yellowstone at an entirely different scale—a biologist and field researcher with decades of experience, he studies newly discovered microfauna at the bottom of the park’s deep lakes. Reimagining a Place for the Wild deserves a place in the canon of American ecological literature alongside the likes of Muir, Leopold, and Carson. In fact, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature comes to mind immediately for comparison. Thirty years ago, McKibben lamented the end of wild places. No place on earth was left completely free of human influence; however , when contributor Jeremy Schmidt describes a wild place he cherished in childhood, his memory includes the “low, labored sound of a tractor working” in the distance. For the writers in this collection, their imagination of the wild includes its people, too. As Wendy Fisher notes in her contribution , wild places in this century must be managed if they are to survive. This reimagined wild cannot be a place where humanity has...