Muerte En Una Estrella / Shooting Star (Spanish and English Edition) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1558857869 ISBN 13: 9781558857865

Publisher: Arte Publico Press, 2014

Synopsis

In this haunting novel about two young vatos, author Sergio Elizondo eulogizes Oscar Balboa and Valentin Rodriguez, who are sixteen and nineteen respectively when they are shot and killed by the police in Austin, Texas. On leave from Camp Gary, a youth training facility in nearby San Marcos, the two "strutting icons of Raza manhood worthy of a guitar ballad" are the novel's principal voices as they lie dying.
In other chapters, Oscar remembers traveling north with his parents as a young boy to pick crops and joining farm workers' protest marches. Songs of all types symphonic, orchestral and protest infuse the narrative: "We'll summon the spirit of a poet so that he can adapt our people's story through time and set it to music." Elizondo's short and tragic novel bears witness to la raza's struggles for rights, whether in the fields, the work place or on college campuses.
Originally published in Spanish and now available for the first time in English, this classic of Mexican-American literature provides insight into the Chicano civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Muerte en una estrella / Shooting Star is a profoundly disturbing and moving denunciation of bigotry and discrimination.

About this title

About the Author:

SERGIO ELIZONDO is professor emeritus at San Diego State University.
ROSAURA SÁNCHEZ and BEATRICE PITA teach at the University of California, San Diego. They are the authors of a sci-fi novel, Lunar Braceros, and the co-editors of The Squatter and the Don and Who Would Have Thought It?

Review:

Elizondo's story was "written decades ago, but [is] still fresh, in incidents from the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s. The story moves along in short chapters like arias from a number of points of view: from the narrator, from policemen, from the families of the boys. But mainly, we hear the hopesthoughts about love, about community and a future the boys will never see in the dramatic laments of the two victims]].Love has a pull stronger than that of a hundred tractors. So does this story, this musically inclined story, this rowdy story, this beautifully pathetic story that pulls us along through dreams, hopes, horror, and lament in celebration of two ordinary and at the same time heroic lives." -- Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered "Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered"

About this edition

• Publisher: Arte Publico Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1558857869
• ISBN 13: 9781558857865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 310