Diamond Tierra
by Steven G. Kellman
IN 1971, WHEN ...y no se lo trago la tierra was published,
Tejano fiction came of age. A loosely linked sequence of 14 sketches, the book records the
arduous coming-of-age experienced by a 12-year-old surrogate for the author, Tomas Rivera.
Born in Crystal City to a family of migrant farmworkers, Rivera spent his childhood
following the harvest from the Texas borderlands to the upper Midwest. He went on to
cultivate other fields. Though his fictional alter ego aspires to be a radio operator,
Rivera earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma and served on the faculty of
University of Texas campuses at San Antonio and El Paso. At the time of his sudden death
in 1984, at age 49, Rivera was the most widely admired Chicano author and, as chancellor
of the University of California at Riverside, the highest ranking Hispanic in American
education.
Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Isaac Babel's Odessa
Tales, Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time and James Joyce's Dubliners,
Rivera's narrative cycle documents the emergence of a proto-artist who derives his
identity from integrating the fragments of time and place. The time is 1952, and the place
is south Texas, with recurrent excursions to southern Minnesota when the sugar beets are
ripe. It is the bittersweet record of how, by keeping his eyes wide open, a sensitive boy
developed the vision behind ... y no se lo trago la tierra.
In ... and the earth did not swallow him, the film adaptation
of Rivera's book, young Marcos Gonzalez (Jose Alcala) is not so much the protagonist as a
pliant sensibility. A unifying device for disparate threads of plot, he is a witness to
murder, theft, suicide, bigotry, fraud, adultery, illness, poverty and love. "No me
olvides," pleads the inscription over the entrance to the Mexican cemetery in Crystal
City, and Marcos forgets nothing, registering all the shocks of a harsh childhood,
hoarding them as capital for future art. Using Marcos as narrator, writer-director Severo
Perez, a San Antonian trans-planted to Los Angeles, effectively translates Rivera's
discrete prose poems into a coherent drama.
A hit at festivals in the United States and Europe, ...and the
earth did not swallow him still seeks a theatrical distributor. Meanwhile, it is
scheduled to he screened on December 7 in Austin's Hogg Auditorium and December 8 and 9 in
San Antonio's Guadalupe Theater.
"I couldn't remember why I stayed away from school that
morning." says Marcos in the voice over that begins ... and the earth did no
swallow him. Hiding beneath the floorboards of a neighbor's house when he should be
in class, Marcos might not recall what led him to play hooky, but little else eludes his
recollection. Memory is the mother of the Muses, and it is the organizing principle of
Perez's film, in which most of the incidents are summoned in flashback -- even flashbacks
within flashbacks. One of the most striking episodes -- the youthful romance of Ramon and
Juanita that ends in desperate jealousy and electrocution -- is told through a corrido
that Marcos remembers performed at a dance by Bartolo (Daniel Valdez), the wandering poet
who sets his words to music and sells the songs for a quarter each.
MURDER IS MORE profitable, and Marcos is forced to be an accessory to one when his parents
leave him in Minnesota so that he can stay in school while they move on to work another
farm. He lodges with Don Cleto (Sam Viahos) and Dona Rosa (Lupe Ontiveros), a crude couple
whose food is putrid and housekeeping shabby. Though his room and board have been paid,
they force their young guest into servitude. After Rosa robs and kills a man she has lured
into her bed, Marcos is compelled to bury' the body. With no support from the parish
priest, who is off on a visit to Spain, or from the local school, whose principal finds it
easiest to expel the newcomer because he is Mexican, Marcos must develop his own inner
resources.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Playhouse
and Texas Committee for the Humanities, among others, the production lacked the financial
resources for vast panoramas of orange groves and aerial choreographies of potato pickers.
Instead of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, Marco Rodriguez and Rose Portillo were hired to
play Marcos' father and mother. Joaquin and Florentina. The result is a story told close
to the ground--la tierra--that both torments and sustains the movie's humble
characters. Except for shots of Marcos sprawling in a Minnesota graveyard and gazing at
the clouds, Perez avoids cloying reverence for precocious sensitivity. He does not
sentimentalize the lives of his working poor, nor does he patronize, except when
portraying the movie's non-Latinos, who are invariably condescending toward brown-skinned
laborers. Not everyone is as overtly racist as the chubby schoolboy who tells Marcos that
he hates Mexicans or as the orchard foreman who shoots a young worker so thirsty he stops
to drink from a ditch. The others, like the earnest farmer who pleads with the Gonzalez
family to spend two weeks living in his chicken coop or the fatuous missionary who, while
blundering through fractured Spanish, is oblivious to the fact that her audience speaks
fluent English, might mean well. But, regardless of the intentions that pave the road
between Crystal City and Albert Lea, Marcos experiences it as hell.
When his beloved older brother Julian is reported missing in action in
Korea, Marcos' mother is frantic. A curandera assures her that there is nothing
to worry about: "He'll be home in a month." But, when months accumulate without
the soldier's return, the seer proves to have been as reliable as a peddler who promises
to enlarge and frame their only photograph of Julian and then disappears with a $25
payment. Florentina Gonzalez stays up nights weeping and praying, pleading with God to
restore her son. In the family's cramped quarters, Marcos cannot help but hear. He slips
out at midnight, intent on confronting Satan by the light of the lull moon. He calls to
the devil, but the archfiend is absent. "There was nothing," reports Marcos, who
is more distressed by emptiness than evil. "God doesn't care about us," he dares
to tell his pious mother.
It is a colossal act of sacrilege, yet the boy does not suffer divine
retribution. The film's title and signature theme derive from Marcos' realization of
existential loneliness and freedom: "the earth hadn't opened up and swallowed
me." He is left atop this migrant earth, la tierra, to reap what he can from
its fertile soil.