Considered a classic of Chicano literature, this 1971 novel offers impressions of a community of South Texas migrant workers who go north to pick crops after World War II. The book is not a straight narrative, but a layering of stories, anecdotes, internal thoughts, and fragmants of conversation, framed by a young boy's struggle to remember his "lost year." Several incidents are related from the viewpoint of a young boy, hurt at being expelled from an Anglo school, enraged because his family suffers poverty and illness, and confused about sin and the devil. Other members of the community are introduced as well. More... (McDougal Littell)

Teaching materials - see curriculum section for lesson materials about this book.

Critical Essays

Chicana/o Fiction from Resistance to Contestation: The Role of Creation in Ana Castillo's So Far From God.(Critical Essay)
The past two decades have given us a wealth of Chicana and Chicano literature, both because of the
exemplary work of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic literary heritage and because of the sheer boom in Chicana/o publications over the last fifteen years.
From MELUS, January 17 2001 by Ralph E. Rodriguez (at findarticles.com)

Multiculturalism and Epistemic Rupture: The Vanishing Acts of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Alfredo Vea Jr.(Critical Essay)
Whereas Tomas Rivera's ... Y no se lo trago la tierra/ ... And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and
other works which participated in an earlier historical moment forge a collective Chicano
identity, the art of Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Alfredo Vea Jr. fracture, complicate, and
interrogate notions of identity itself. From MELUS, January 17 2001 by Stacy Alaimo at (findarticles.com)