Malinche's Children - Hardcover

Houston-Davila, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578065216 ISBN 13: 9781578065219

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi, 2003

Synopsis

When Arnulfo Carmelas saves the life of his patron's son, he gains the right to bring his wife from Mexico. The barrio of Carmelas is born, a village on a patch of difficult, southern California farmland.

Malinche's Children is a chronicle of this small Mexican-American hamlet, from its formation in 1900 by Mexican farmworkers yearning to end their wanderings to its troubled rise one hundred years later when their descendants live uneasily between two worlds.

Malinche was Hernán Cortés's Indian lover and translator, the ambassador who helped the Spaniards fashion an Indian alliance to crush the Aztecs. An Aztec by birth, she was sold as a slave and fastened her star to Cortés when the opportunity shone.

For the children of Carmelas, she is a monster their mothers claim will eat them in the night if they are restless after bedtime, a punitive spirit kept in clay jars. But for them she becomes as well a genius at languages and opportunities, the mother of a mestizo nation.

Isolated from white California by lineage and language, Malinche's children are at the same time cut off from their own homeland, Mexico. They struggle with change in the barrio and beyond as they move from invisibility to claim a place, to find a voice, and to name themselves.

From beneath two mulberry trees, the village takes root and spreads its dirt streets that shift like rivers, lined by shacks. The stories follow the progress over the course of the twentieth century, tracing its characters' dreams, triumphs, failures, and loves. Through wars and drought and racial tension, the inhabitants of Carmelas discover cars and television while at the same time keeping an increasingly tenuous grasp on old tradition, and watching as the town's children move away and never return.

Daniel Houston-Davila is professor of English and English as a Second Language at El Camino Community College, in Torrance, Cal. His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Chiricu, and Sulphur River Literary Review.

Visit the author's website at http://www.houston-davila.com/.

About this title

Book Description

A novel in stories chronicling the rise of a Chicano barrio in California

From Publishers Weekly

Houston-Davila traces the 20th-century evolution of a southern California village from a Mexican enclave to a genuine, full-blown community in his poignant debut, which is structured as a series of interlocking short stories in which the author introduces different Mexican characters via a variety of intriguing conceits. He starts with the community's founder, describing the journey of Arnulfo Carmelas in "Taking Root-1900" as he becomes a successful farm worker and builds the tiny community that will someday bear his name. Other engaging characters include a woman named La Luna, who becomes the village healer in "La Luna-1910" before turning over the reins to Contemplacion Guerra in a subsequent story entitled "Contemplaci¢n-1953." The focal point of the modern stories is Sammy Archuleta, a bright, precocious boy who struggles to make it through college after earning a scholarship in "Price Tags-1966" and then goes on to become a writer who must confront his own infidelity in the title story, which closes the collection in 1994. The unconventional structure works for the most part, although the less successful stories inhibit the flow of the narrative. Overall, though, the linked tales are a solid vehicle for Houston-Davila to introduce his varied cast and cover a significant array of ethnic issues in the process. This collection comes with a few literary warts, but it establishes Houston-Davila as a solid writer with some interesting things to say about the Hispanic immigration experience.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1578065216
• ISBN 13: 9781578065219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 354