Rolando Hinojosa - A Reader's Guide (Hardcover, 1st ed)

The first comprehensive interpretation of the work of a major figure in Chicano literature, Klaus Zilless study of the fourteen novels in Rolando Hinojosas Klail City Death Trip series will appeal equally to the specialist, to the student, and to the interested reader of Hinojosas intriguing and innovative Tejano novels. The series is dedicated to revealing the suppressed oral history of Mexican Texas and to making the reader a companion on a quest for this elusive history.

Published between 1973 and 1998, the Klail City series ranges in historical time from the mid-1700s to the end of the twentieth century, attesting to 250 years of Spanish-Mexican presence in the Lower Ro Grande Valley of Texas. The main body of Hinojosas series, however, is set in fictitious Belken County, located on the U.S./Mexico border, and charts the lives of Hinojosas two protagonists, Rafe Buenrostro and his cousin, Jeh Malacara, two men raised in the rigidly segregated world of a South Texas farming community. The Klail City series constitutes a truly novel approach to the novel: each installment in the cycle differs from the one before it in genre (the adult Buenrostro becomes a police detective and appears in several mystery novels), in narrative style (one novel is written entirely in verse, while another takes epistolary form), or in language (Hinojosa writes in Spanish, in English, in Chicano idiom, and in mixtures of all three).

Zilles accomplishment is to provide a critical guide to the complicated fictional world that Hinojosa creates. By showing the profusion of forms and styles Hinojosa deploys, Zilles reveals the true dimensions of Hinojosas design.

What makes Zilles so refreshing is hisstyle. . . . He writes in a language accessible to the average reader. His work is solid, informative, thoughtful, and useful. I recommend it highly.Juan Bruce-Novoa, Harvard University