A Window into the Migrant World
Friday, May 12, 1995
by Andrea Otanez
At first gtance it is a depressing if elegant little novel.
A child, ravaged by thirst, takes a break from the fields to sip water from a cattle trough and is shot in the head. The farmer meant only to scare the young worker. Another boy tries to get a haircut while waiting for a movie theater to open and is told no Mexicans allowed.
A youngster is punished on the first day of school when the nurse makes him strip and then examines him for lice. The boy asks himself: Would the gabachitos, the white children, have to endure that?
Determined to give her children something besides oranges and nuts for Christmas, a mother ventures into town alone to shop only to become disoriented and faint in the noisy, unfriendly environment.
But the vignettes from Tomas Rivera's novel ...y no se lo traigo la tierra (...and the earth did not swallow him) have for the past 24 years informed, enraged and empowered. Now the book about Mexican-American migrant workers in the 1950s has been adapted to film.
"...and the earth did not swallow him" will be shown at the Tower Theatre, 876 E. 900 South, Salt Lake City, Saturday at 5 p.m. as part of the University of Utah's Chicano Awareness month, Producer Paul Espinosa, whose film credits include "The Lemon Grove incident" and "The Hunt for Pancho Villa," will attend the screening. The film was written and directed by Severo Perez, an independent Los Angeles filmmaker who has created programming for the Disney Channel, HBO and CBS.
Originally published in 1971, Rivera's novel has been identified as one of three seminal works in the Chicano literary canon, along with Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, published in 1972, and Jose Antonio Villarreal's Pocho (1959).
These three novels arguably were the most influential in setting the agenda and tone of literary chicanismo, or the Chicano woridview, during the late 1960s and 1970s, says Eduardo Elias, associate professor of languages and Chicano studies at the University of Utah.
One or all three are taught in just about any survey course of Chicano and, increasingly, American literature. All three have young male protagonists, emphasize the family, are filled with recollection and show varrying levels of protest.
"Rivera has all of it," Eflas says. The book sometimes is viewed as a collection of short stories linked by smaller vignettes like "frosting between layers of a cake," but Elias prefers to call it a novel held together loosely through the experiences of a small boy.
When the book opens, the youngster, wise and pensive for his age, cannot remember The past 12 months. From there the stories of his community - other migrant workers like him and his family who travel annually between Texas and the Midwest as the crops need attention - unfold in seemingly random sequence. In the end, the nameless boy emerges from under a house where he has hidden instead of going to school and he is renewed,
He is strengthened through the tragic, sometimes darkly ironic and unjust stories of his people and their indefatigable hope. Through them he finds identity and, perhaps most important, a purpose - that he, that they, must remedy their own destiny.
The pivotal moment comes when the young boy curses God, an absolute taboo according to his deeply religious and humble parents. He is angry as he and his siblings carry their youngest brother home from the fields after he succumbs to sunstroke. The father had suffered the same fate the day before.
Fearing the worst, the boy looks to the ground, the dirt to which the migrants are enslaved, and curses the Almighty.
For a second he saw the earth opening to devour him. Then he felt his foootsteps against the earth, compact, more solid than ever.
And the earth did not swallow tarn, just as the devil didn't chase him when he ventured out at midnight to test his mother's fearful warnings.
"I don't think Rivera is agnostic, but he is sort of criticizing the overreliance, particularly among popular religiosity, to believe everything will be taken care of," says Espinosa, a producer with KPBS-TV, San Diego.
"Rivera is saying we have to trust ourselves. Institutions - in the novel the institutions are school, churches, Catholic as well as Protestant - fail the young boy," Espinosa adds. "We have to rely on ourselves. We as individuals can take action and do things that will have an impact on our own lives."
Despite the tragedy in the novel, Espinosa says it ultimately is hopeful and significant for its historical realities.
Rivera was born of migrant parents and worked the fields as a child. He also became one of the highest-ranking Chicanos in higher education as chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. He died of a heart attack in 1984. He was 49.
"This is an important American novel that most Americans know nothing about, nor do they really know anything about the experiences described in the novel," Espinosa says.
"Most or many Americans have little direct contact with migrants, or the contact they do have is limited and doesn't really enable them to look into the world where these people live. That's what this film does - it's a window into the world of migrant workers."
And though the novel and film are set in the mid 1950s, many of the horrid conditions and heart- wrenching stories remain true today.
"You still have a very large exploitable population that does a lot of the labor that other people won't," Espinosa says.
The need to educate about migrant workers and one stratum of the Mexican-American population also informed the filmmakers' decision to film in English. "We want to reach the widest audience possible," Espinosa adds.
But film distributors couldn't always conceptualize that audience. Espinosa and Perez had "great difficulty" finding a national distributor for their film, which is backed with multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Playhouse and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
"Hollywood - and this is going to sound overly cynical - is very used to presenting stereotypical portrayals of Latinos," Espinosa says with tired exasperation. "When they get something that is so out of the ordinary or away from what they expect, they don't know what to do with it."
Kino International, a New York distributor, recently signed on but only after Espinosa and Perez spent 10 months searching.
All the while, the film was getting great responses - and awards - at festivals in the United States and abroad.
"Audiences have responded to this film and Latino audiences in particular have really embraced it, saying they'd like to see more of this kind of work."
Says Elias, a Chicano from El Paso, Texas: "For any Hispanic who reads the novel, we see ourselves in print, in literature, for one of the first times.
"Our plight is described. Or if we didn't grow up in the fields, we're made aware that a large number of the population has suffered, has lived through indignities if we have or haven't experienced discrimination ourselves.
"You almost see yourself in un espejo, a mirror."